Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Trump’s Charges

By Robin Bates | Published: March 22, 2023

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Thursday

I’ve just completed another Faulkner novel and, as with Absalom, Absalom!, I find myself emerging from what feels like a hallucinatory nightmare. Sanctuary also seems particularly relevant for our current moment as we await word on whether Donald Trump will be indicted for his myriad alleged crimes, which include (I have to list them to get them clear in my mind) inciting an insurrection, pressuring lawmakers to change votes, assaulting a woman, stealing classified documents, defrauding the IRS, and paying hush money to a porn star to win an election. And yet, if Sanctuary is any guide, he could well get away with all of it.

That’s because Faulkner’s novel is about a great miscarriage of justice, in which an innocent man is found guilty of murder while the murderer—who also rapes a woman with a corncob and then kidnaps her and keeps her in a brothel as a sex slave—goes free. Part of Faulkner’s power resides in the way that everyone seems to exist in the grip of an inexorable machine that destroys them, along with any ideals about justice and fair play. Faulkner is where optimism goes to die.

For instance, when Horace Benbow assures his innocent client, Lee Goodwin, that he will go free, he fails to figure in corrupt behind-the-scenes dealmaking and the rape victim perjuring herself by fingering Goodwin, not her abductor. Then, as if to accentuate the injustice of it all, Goodwin is burned alive by a lynch mob, which is horrified by the corncob rape. The scene is one of gothic horror:

He ran into the throng, into the circle which had formed about a blazing mass in the middle of the lot. From one side of the circle came the screams of the man about whom the coal oil can had exploded, but from the central mass of fire there came no sound at all. It was now indistinguishable, the flames whirling in long and thunderous plumes from a white-hot mass out of which there defined themselves faintly the ends of a few posts and planks. Horace ran among them; they were holding him, but he did not know it; they were talking, but he could not hear the voices.

“It’s his lawyer.”

“Here’s the man that defended him. That tried to get him clear.”

“Put him in, too. There’s enough left to burn a lawyer.”

“Do to the lawyer what we did to him. What he did to her. Only we never used a cob. We made him wish we had used a cob.”

Horace couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear the man who had got burned screaming. He couldn’t hear the fire, though it still swirled upward unabated, as though it were living upon itself, and soundless: a voice of fury like in a dream, roaring silently out of a peaceful void.

I don’t know how many times over the past six years I’ve experienced Horace’s hope for justice, only to see Trump, time after time, escape accountability. Faulkner’s view of the world now seems truer to life, which may be one reason I’m drawn to it. Yoknapatawpha County justice seems closer to the justice system which saw Trump’s attorney general throw out the hush money charges against him, even though Trump fixer Michael Cohen went to jail for delivering the check. And the system that allowed this same attorney general to cover up evidence of the Trump campaign’s contact with Russia during the 2016 campaign and the presidential pardon system where Trump could pardon those associates took the rap for him. And, of course, the system where Congressional Republicans found Trump not guilty of (1) extorting a foreign leader to sling mud at his major rival and (2) inciting crowds to attack Congress.

Nor have violations of fair and impartial justice ended there. Currently we’re seeing Georgia Republican legislators drafting legislation that would allow them to fire any prosecutor bringing cases they don’t like, including Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis indicting Trump for pressuring Georgia officials to change vote totals. (We’ve all heard the tape of him doing so.) And we’re seeing Congressional House Republicans overstep jurisdictional boundaries to threaten New York Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for reviving at the state level the case that Trump’s attorney general quashed at the federal.

It’s so much simpler in Sanctuary, where it appears that the murderer’s lawyer has to do no more than pressure the woman to deliver false testimony. And then for her judge father to swoop in and, under a pretense of sensitivity, remove her from the court before she can be cross-examined.

Perhaps my current Faulkner fling has something to do with my own faltering idealism. In the past, my pessimism has also drawn me to the works of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, who have been undoubtedly influenced by Faulkner. In fact one sees the outlines of Sanctuary’s murderer in O’Connor’s Misfit (in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”) and McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh (in No Country for Old Men). And indeed, when Faulkner writes a more cheerful book, as he did with The Reivers, I find myself put off. Faulkner described this novel as “a Golden Book of Yoknapatawpha County,” referring to the cheap children’s books once sold in grocery stores. Compared to the author’s previous books, it’s an apt description and consequently disappointing.

Pulled in as I am by Faulkner’s fatalism, I need a counterweight, which I find in the novels of Toni Morrison, even though she too has been influenced by the Mississippi author and employs some of the same gothic themes. But there’s a significant difference. With Faulkner (and O’Connor and McCarthy), I detect a disillusion with America’s founding ideals–their sense of tragedy appears to stem from America’s failure to live up to its promise–whereas Morrison’s Black characters know America too well to ever have had any illusions. They have their own battles between hope and despair, of course, but if they can find their way to some kind of transcendent hope in the end—I’m particularly thinking of Milkman in Song of Solomon and Sethe in Beloved—it’s because they have a firmer foundation for doing so. They’ve seen the worst America can do and have developed survival skills that the protagonists of the White novels lack.

So where does that leave us with prospective indictments of Trump? While we should continue to insist on justice—because without justice we are at the mercy of authoritarian rule—we should not despair if the courts fail to save us from our former president. Instead, we’ve just got to keep fighting, regardless of judicial outcomes. African Americans have learned the hard way not to put all their hopes in the court system and neither should we Whites. Faulknerian fatalism, compelling though it may be, is an indulgence we cannot afford.

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Some in GOP Love Child Labor

By Robin Bates | Published: March 21, 2023
Illus. from David Copperfield

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Wednesday

Red states appear to be in a vigorous race to the bottom when it comes to human rights. After writing last week about Florida book bans, and yesterday about Tennessee drag show bans, today I turn my attention to Arkansas loosening child labor protections. According to The Washington Post, the new law eliminates requirements for the state to verify the age of children younger than 16 before they can take a job. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) apparently believes the provision has been “burdensome and obsolete.”

This, of course, is from the same party that wants to eliminate free lunches for poor kids and food stamps for impoverished families.

I’ve been recently alerted to the issue of child labor by Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperfield, where the protagonist finds himself, at 10, harvesting and stripping tobacco in his foster home. Before turning to the novel and to an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem, however, let’s first look at why current protection laws remain important.

According to the Post article, regulators have discovered hundreds of violations of existing laws in the country’s meatpacking plants. For instance, the Labor Department fined Packers Sanitation Services, a subcontractor for meatpacking plants, $1.5 million in February “for illegally hiring children, some of whom sustained chemical burns after working with caustic cleaning agents.” Yet despite such stories, the article observes, other red states are following suit. Currently Iowa is considering a bill that “would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work certain jobs in meatpacking plants and would shield businesses from civil liability if a youth worker is sickened, injured or killed on the job.”

Kingsolver’s feisty protagonist doesn’t hold back in describing Crickson, the tobacco farmer that gets both state money and free labor for taking in foster kids. As in the meat packing plants during the Trump administration, existing child protection laws can be flaunted because the system lacks oversight. Demon tries to alert his social worker, but she is only concerned with whether he is being physically abused:

Had Crickson ever hit me, she asked. Answer: no, I myself had not been struck. [The other kids have been.] And that was that. Miss Barks was sorry, but Tommy and Swap-Out weren’t on her. Usually all kids in a home are from one foster company, but Crickson was an emergency-type place, and Tommy and Swap-Out belonged to a different foster company that Miss Barks didn’t work with. So fostering was done by companies, and we, as [Demon’s abusive stepfather] would say, were Product. Rotating and merchandising foster boys at more than fifty customer accounts. Live and learn.

We get an in-depth look at the hardships involved with tobacco farming. Demon says that now, whenever he sees a picturesque tobacco crop, he thinks, “There lies a field that eats men and children alive.” If you are a kid on a farm, he adds, the real dog days occur not in August but

in September and October. Tobacco work: suckering, topping, cutting, hanging, stripping. All my life I’d heard farm kids talking about this, even in the lower grades, missing school at cutting time. Some got to work on farms other than their own, and get paid for it….Now I would be one of the working kids.

For a while, Demon keeps his head by thinking about his soon-to-be-born sibling (Demon’s mother is in rehab, which is why he has been stashed on the farm). But that lasts for only so long:

I had a list going in my head that fall, of what all I would tell my little brother one day. But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back.

What follows is an excruciating description of tending a tobacco crop, which of course is even worse if you’re a 10-year-old boy doing what is effectively slave labor for a stranger. Demon Copperfield echoes David Copperfield, and one thinks of David working in the bottle factory. But David at least gets paid, and a closer parallel would be Oliver Twist, who is apprenticed out to an undertaker. Nor was Dickens the only author to excoriate child labor.

In “The Cry of the Children,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning asks, “Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,” comparing the children to young lambs bleating in the meadows, young birds chirping in the nest, young fawns playing with the shadows and young flowers blowing toward the west. They are weeping, she writes, “in the playtime of the others,/ In the country of the free.”

You can read the poem in its entirety here. The final two stanzas sum up Browning’s horror and indignation. “The child’s sob curseth deeper in the silence,” she writes, “than the strong man in his wrath”:

And well may the children weep before you;
      They are weary ere they run;
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
      Which is brighter than the sun:
They know the grief of man, without its wisdom
   They sink in the despair, without its calm —
Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom, —
   Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm, —
Are worn, as if with age, yet unretrievingly
      No dear remembrance keep,—
Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly:
      Let them weep! let them weep!

They look up, with their pale and sunken faces,
      And their look is dread to see
For they think you see their angels in their places,
      With eyes meant for Deity;—
“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,
   Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart, —
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
   And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O our tyrants,
      And your purple shews your path;
But the child’s sob curseth deeper in the silence
      Than the strong man in his wrath!”

It took a lot of hard work, from activists, lawmakers, and others, to insure that children get a childhood, with literature playing an important role. Now forces in the GOP want to return us to “the good old days.”

We should all be weeping. And standing strong in opposition.

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Will Drag Show Bans Extend to the Bard?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 20, 2023
Stubbs, Carter as Viola, Olivia in Twelfth Night

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Tuesday

A few weeks ago I saw people on social media debating which state had the most unhinged legislature. While Arizona came in first and Wisconsin second, my own state of Tennessee placed third. And that was before our state legislature passed a bill outlawing “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest.”

Critics have pointed out that there are already bills against public displays of obscenity—few people have problems with this—but the new Tennessee bill appears designed to elide the two, implying that men dressing up as women and women dressing up as men are, automatically, prurient.

This leads me to wonder whether Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies are in danger. Will high school productions of Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Merchant of Venice be banned for “grooming” young people?

And indeed, what the plays do is what drag shows do, which is explore gender by playing with it. I’ve repurposed here a past post on Twelfth Night to make clear the nature of this exploring.

My reading of the lightning strike that splits the ship that carries twins Viola and Sebastian, separating them, is Shakespeare’s way of conveying how we internalize social labels early on. Kids don’t naturally accept gender labels but, at a certain age, they find those labels thrust upon them. A lightning strike out of the blue, as it were. Shakespeare, who understood human beings as well as anyone ever has, realized that we are more complex than a simple gender binary. Society doesn’t like us acknowledging this, however, which is why he had to couch his observations in a comedy.

Twelfth Night captures the complexity of gender, showing men exploring their female side and women exploring their male side. Furthermore, there’s a man (Antonio) who falls in love with another man and a woman (Olivia) who falls in love with another woman (although in Olivia’s case she thinks Viola is actually a man).

In Count Orsino we have a man discovering he has a female side and mimicking what he believes to be female behavior. Commanding his musicians to play sweet music (“If music be the food of love, play on”), Orsino lounges around refining his sensibilities. In doing so, he so unnerves his servants that one advocates a deer hunt to restore him to his manhood:

Curio: Will you go hunt, my lord?
Duke Orsino: What, Curio?
Curio: The hart.
Orsino: Why, so I do, the noblest that I have:
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn’d into a hart;
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E’er since pursue me.

Orsino is thrilled when Viola, disguised as Cesario, enters his household. What a relief to find another effeminate man!

And what about Viola. Whether or not she wants to transition, she certainly enjoys the freedom that comes with being a man. For the first time in her life, she can roam freely and have open and frank conversations with a member of the opposite sex. Although Billy Crystal in the movie When Harry Met Sally informs Meg Ryan that men and women can’t be friends, Viola reveals that there is a way. The woman just needs to pass herself off as a guy, at which point she can become a man’s BFF.

The reverse is also true. Although Orsino may be tongue-tied around Olivia—or at least, he uses emissaries rather than approaching her directly—he has no such difficulties around Viola. He can unburden his heart to Viola as he never could to his male attendant Curio. In fact, at the end of the play when he discovers Viola is really a woman, he requests that she retain her male name and remain a man for just a little longer:

Cesario, come;
For so you shall be, while you are a man…

Viola’s gender fluidity opens up Olivia as well as Orsino. I believe it is Viola’s newly discovered freedom that draws Olivia to her: what Olivia really longs for—and falls in love with—is more Viola’s mobility than Viola herself. Olivia knows she doesn’t like being worshipped by Orsino–it’s as though he has stuck her on a pedestal–and her own internalized sense of how she’s supposed to behave as a woman makes her feel trapped: she believes she must be so super refined as to mourn her dead brother for seven years. She’s also supposed to just sit and listen when emissaries approach her with marriage proposals.

When she encounters Viola/Cesario, however, other possibilities open up. She doesn’t have to remain a pedestal object.

Olivia may not know that Viola is actually a woman, but I think somewhere deep inside she senses that Viola represents a path for her. If Cesario/Viola can imagine herself courting someone with the famous “willow cabin speech,” then Olivia can as well. Here’s Viola fantasizing about doing what a man does (i.e., court a woman):

[I would]
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!

Sure enough, after encountering this different way of being, Olivia is behaving like a man by chasing after Cesario/Viola. In the end, she hustles Sebastian off to the altar.

And what about Sebastian? If Viola has a male side, Sebastian has a female side. Here he is describing his readiness to shed tears:

I am yet so near the manners of my mother, that upon the least occasion more mine eyes will tell tales of me.

When Olivia, thinking Sebastian is Cesario/Viola, proposes marriage, Sebastian readily assents. In other words, traditional gender roles have been turned upside down. I note that the same was occurring in English politics of the time, with a woman reigning as monarch.

So far I have just talked about women discovering that they have a male side and men discovering that they have a female side. This is not the same as sexual attraction for one’s own sex. But the play offers that too in the figure of a gay man, Antonio, who clearly has sexual longings for Sebastian. “My desire, more sharp than filed steel, did spur me forth,” he explains to his love object in explaining why he has been following him.

All we need now to capture all possibilities is a woman with lesbian longings. And maybe we have that in Olivia falling in love with Viola.

Shakespeare understood that humans are far more fluid when it comes to gender than conservative America acknowledges. This is what drew people to Shakespeare’s comedies and what attracts them to drag shows. For that matter, it’s what caused Tennessee governor Bill Lee, who just signed the anti-drag show bill, to dress up as a girl once when he was in high school. It was all in fun, I imagine him saying, but that’s the point: in plays and cross-dressing movies and drag shows and Mardi Gras and other special occasions, we play around with identities that otherwise are hidden. If we could all acknowledge this, life would be so much easier.

Unfortunately, there are censorious Malvolios—Olivia’s puritanical steward—that take offense, sometimes resorting to terror tactics to threaten and attack gender play. Given the psychological dynamics of projection, this probably means that they are fighting to repress the female within themselves (or in the case of women, the male). I’m waiting for Florida’s Moms for Liberty to object to school libraries carrying Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies. And maybe Othello as well since it shows systemic racism at work.

As both Freud and Jung have demonstrated, when we push under parts of ourselves that we consider shameful—say, sensitivity in males, assertiveness in females—they return as monsters, what Freud called “the return of the repressed.” I am willing to predict that the loudest voices opposing drag shows come from people who are drawn to, and ashamed of, repressed gender longings. The more repressed they are, the more prurient the drag shows appear to them.

I’m also pretty sure that Gov. Lee will never explain what prompted his adolescent self to dress up as a girl. Maybe if he read Shakespeare he’d understand, but now the political incentives dictate that he condemn rather than understand.

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Weeping for Ukraine’s Lost Children

By Robin Bates | Published: March 19, 2023

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Monday

Last week the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and his Orwellian titled “commissioner for children’s rights,” accusing them of “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of 10,000 children from occupied areas of Ukraine. According to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Ukrainian officials are investigating more than 16,000 incidents of forced removal, which is a war crime. As I thought of the country losing its children, the image of the heartbroken sea captain in Moby Dick came to mind. Like Ukraine with Putin, Captain Gardiner finds himself pitted against a monomaniac.

The kidnapping of Ukraine’s children is part of Russia’s genocidal mission with regard to the country, a campaign that so far that has seen rape, torture, mass executions, and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. According to a Washington Post article that cites Kremlin sources, Maria Lvova-Belova, the “children’s rights” commissioner, “has worked with colleagues to hand dozens of children from Donetsk over to Russian families and coordinate the transfer of children in orphanages in Donetsk and Luhansk, in occupied eastern Ukraine, to the custody of Russian citizens.” Lvova-Belova, described as a “religiously devout mother of 22 children who openly advocates stripping children of their Ukrainian identities,” has adopted an orphaned teenage boy from Mariupol herself. In a self-revealing and chilling comment, she apparently has informed people that the boy “had to change his Ukrainian ways.”

In Moby Dick, the captain of the Rachel has lost his boy overboard and begs Ahab to help him search for him.  Despite his pleas, which are seconded by the Pequod’s crew, Ahab stands “like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.” Speaking “in a voice that prolongingly molded every word,” he declares,

Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.

To capture the full tragedy of Gardiner’s loss, Melville has invoked the slaughter of the innocents episode from Matthew’s gospel (2:16-18):

Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted,
Because they are no more.”

Gardiner’s fruitless search is similarly pitiable:

But by [the ship’s] still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.

Ahab’s mad and inhumane quest eventually brings destruction upon his crew, his ship, and himself. Putin’s mad quest may be on course to do the same. In the meantime, Ukraine weeps.

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The God of Love My Shepherd Is

By Robin Bates | Published: March 18, 2023
Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, The Shepherd David

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Spiritual Sunday

Today in church we get to read together the 23rd psalm, which is to say, Old Testament poetry of the highest order. I remember my sophomore English teacher having us memorize it at the Sewanee Military Academy and it has resonated with me ever since.

I share it today—the King James version—along with a George Herbert poem that it inspired. Here’s the psalm:

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

I like this Carol Romen’s exploration of the poem’s imagery in a Guardian article. As she sees it, there are two dominant metaphors, one pastoral, the other military:

The pastoral one concludes in verse four, when the speaker is conducted through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, helped by the shepherd’s rod and staff. After that, imperial and somewhat militaristic symbolism replaces pastoral. The shepherd becomes the King – describing the course of David’s own career – and the concerns are no longer earthly and pastoral but eschatological. Notice the abrupt change from third person “he” to vocative “thou” in the middle of verse four, the point at which the speaker is most in need of comfort. In the slow-gathering crescendo of that verse, the double possessive (“the valley of the shadow of…”), normally so clumsy-sounding in English, plays a major role. The stroke of genius, though, is in four words: “my cup runneth over”. As for verse six, perhaps the Tyndale version [as opposed to the King James version] is more artistically satisfying, as well as more heart-felt: by giving us “thy loving-kindness and mercy” for a generalized “goodness and mercy,” the pastoral imagery of the opening, in all its quiet tenderness, is evoked once more.

Herbert certainly focuses more on the pastoral than on the military elements of the psalm. As always with the poet, the real foe is himself and his doubts. If he can but continue to have faith in God’s “sweet and wondrous love,” however, all will be well.

The God of love my Shepherd is,
and he that doth me feed;
while he is mine and I am his,
what can I want or need?

He leads me to the tender grass,
where I both feed and rest;
then to the streams that gently pass,
in both I have the best.

Or if I stray, he doth convert,
and bring my mind in frame,
and all this not for my desert,
but for his holy Name.

Yea, in death’s shady black abode
well may I walk, not fear;
for thou art with me, and thy rod
to guide, thy staff to bear.

Surely thy sweet and wondrous love
shall measure all my days;
and as it never shall remove,
so neither shall my praise.

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Donne: Better to be Woke Than Asleep

By Robin Bates | Published: March 16, 2023
The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus

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Friday

Obsessed as it is with fighting culture wars, MAGA’s new boogeyman is “wokeness.” Although rightwing Republicans have difficulty defining it, it seems to operate the way that the “political correctness” charge used to. If you’re sensitive to the needs of certain marginalized populations—especially to the needs of people of color and the LGBTQ community—you’re woke.

But that’s just me trying to figure out GOP objections. Often when asked, right-wingers have difficulty explaining the concept, leading Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu to tweet, “Since Republicans are unable to define woke, I’m going to offer a definition: “Being a good neighbor and not a jerk.” In other words, we all should see being awake as a good thing.

John Donne certainly thinks it is in “Good Morrow.”  There we see a lover talking about having been asleep previously and now awaking into a glorious new reality. It appears that the two lovers have spent the night together (also the situation in Donne’s “Sun Rising”), with the man marveling at their bond. Were we not babies before, he asks, before moving on to the asleep/awake theme:

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

The seven sleepers story involves seven Christian youths who hid in a cave around AD 250 to escape Roman persecution, only to fall asleep and awake 300 years later, somewhat like Rip Van Winkle. Upon emerging, they were astounded to discover that everyone around them was Christian. The story goes that they reported to the bishop about their miracle story and then died praising God.

Donne is somewhat irreverent in his handling of the seven sleepers, imagining them snoring (or snorting), but he’s on board with what must have been their amazement upon awaking. A world with the Christian message accepted by all would have been beyond their wildest dreams. Likewise, whatever dreams Donne’s speaker has had of his beloved are but pale imitations of the flesh and blood version before him:

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

Seeking to find words for the world he has awoken to, the speaker taps into the excitement generated by the exploratory voyages of his age. Discover his love, he says, is like discovering a new world. It’s an image that Donne also uses in “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” where he refers to his beloved as “Oh my America, my new found land.” Only here, he goes one step further: who needs to go anywhere when he has all the world he needs right before him?

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

Looking into his lover’s eyes, he sees the reflection of his own image, just as she sees hers in his. And because they are so perfectly balanced (he’s using an image from alchemy here), there can be no declining. They have found eternal heaven in the here and now:

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

Returning to the present, think of the woke among us as looking at others and seeing in them their full humanity. That is how we can have a harmonious world.

By contrast, those who embrace hemispheric division will find the world divided into sharp north and declining west, which leads to slackening and death. These are the ones who watch one another out of fear. Suckled on the childish pleasures of grievance politics, they snort away in their sleep.

Back when I taught college classes, I often told my students that the tragedy experienced by racists is that they deny themselves the richness that comes with befriending people unlike ourselves. There are worlds on worlds out there that we can discover without ever leaving our communities.

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A Poem for March Madness

By Robin Bates | Published: March 15, 2023

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Thursday

Commercialized though March Madness has become, it’s useful to recall that almost none of the college players we will be watching over the upcoming days and weeks will enter the professional ranks. Think of them rather as kids who fell in love with the game and who play it with youthful enthusiasm. It is that side of the game that is captured by the Yusef Komunyakaa poem that I share with you today.

If you want to rediscover the true spirit of basketball, the poet tells us, check out America’s backyards and playgrounds. While trouble may lie around many of these kids, slapping them like a blackjack slaps an open palm, the game reveals “moves we didn’t know we had.”

I am particularly moved by Komunyakaa’s reference to a boy who, when his mother died, “played nonstop all day, so hard/ Our backboard splintered.” When my 21-year-old son Justin died, his younger brother Toby played continuous basketball in our driveway. I will always be grateful for the way that the mothers of Toby’s three best friends pulled their sons out of school that week so that they could play with him. For a 16-year-old, it was a powerful way of dealing with grief.

Slam, Dunk, & Hook
By Yusef Komunyakaa

Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury’s
Insignia on our sneakers,
We outmaneuvered to footwork
Of bad angels. Nothing but a hot
Swish of strings like silk
Ten feet out. In the roundhouse
Labyrinth our bodies
Created, we could almost
Last forever, poised in midair
Like storybook sea monsters.
A high note hung there
A long second. Off
The rim. We’d corkscrew
Up & dunk balls that exploded
The skullcap of hope & good
Intention.  Lanky, all hands
& feet…sprung rhythm.
We were metaphysical when girls
Cheered on the sidelines.
Tangled up in a falling,
Muscles were a bright motor
Double-flashing to the metal hoop
Nailed to our oak.
When Sonny Boy’s mama died
He played nonstop all day, so hard
Our backboard splintered.
Glistening with sweat,
We rolled the ball off
Our fingertips. Trouble
Was there slapping a blackjack
Against an open palm.
Dribble, drive to the inside,
& glide like a sparrow hawk.
Lay ups. Fast breaks.
We had moves we didn’t know
We had. Our bodies spun
On swivels of bone & faith,
Through a lyric slipknot
Of joy, & we knew we were
Beautiful & dangerous.

From Yusef Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2001)

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Paris, Trump, and Accountability

By Robin Bates | Published: March 14, 2023
Cesare Dandini, Abduction of Helen of Troy

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Wednesday

My faculty reading group, especially our current moderator John Reishman, has given me a new take on Homer’s Iliad: Priam, I now realize, is largely responsible for the ruinous war his city faces because he can’t or won’t deny his self-indulgent and narcissistic son Paris. As we discussed Troy’s king, I couldn’t help but think of how the Republican Party has gone off the rails because it similarly can’t stand up to Donald Trump.

And like Trump, Paris seems to pay no price for his self-absorption. Though he violates the fundamental law of hospitality—we could say that he grabs his host’s wife by the p****y—he finds ways to shrug off any responsibility for the disaster he has brought about. When his brother Hektor chastises him for his behavior, notice how easily he deflects the blow.

First, here’s Hektor expressing a wish that multiple Republicans have had regarding their party’s de facto leader:

Evil Paris, beautiful, woman-crazy, cajoling
better had you never been born, or killed unwedded.
Truly I could have wished it so; it would be far better
than to have you with us to our shame, for others to sneer at….
Were you like this that time when in sea-wandering vessels
assembling oarsmen to help you you sailed over the water,
and mixed with the outlanders, and carried away a fair woman
from a remote land, whose lord’s kin were spearmen and fighters,
to your father a big sorrow, and your city, and all your people,
to yourself a thing shameful but bringing joy to the enemy?

To be sure, Paris is unlike Trump in that he acknowledges some wrongdoing, but he has Trump’s knack for wriggling out of any responsibility. Professor Reishman said that Paris’s response reminds him of those students who, oh so easily, assure him that will submit their essays on time, even though they haven’t started them:

Hektor, seeing you have scolded me rightly, not beyond measure–
still, your heart forever is weariless, like an axe-blade
driven by a man’s strength through the timber, one who, well skilled,
hews a piece for a ship, driven on by the force of a man’s strength:
such is the heart in your breast, unshakable: yet do not
bring up against me the sweet favors of golden Aphrodite.
Never to be cast away are the gifts of the gods, magnificent,
which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them.

Paris here frames his brother here as an unimaginative drudge. Why be a boring hewer of wood—why be a responsible citizen—when the gods throw a beautiful woman in your path? Paris would have thrived in our own celebrity culture.

To his credit, Paris actually shows up to fight Menelaus in hand-to-hand combat to end the war. He’s not like Trump promising an alternative to Obamacare or promising to share his taxes with the public or promising to get Mexico to pay for his wall or, or, or… But like Trump, Paris manages to wriggle out of situations where his opponents have him dead to rights: when Menelaus is about to slay him, Aphrodite swoops in and carries him off. And to be honest, divine assistance sometimes seems the best explanation for how Trump, time and again, escapes paying for his misdeeds.

But Paris wouldn’t be able to get away with his shenanigans without his paternal enabler,  just as Trump would not be running for reelection if Republican senators had found him guilty of extorting Ukraine’s president to smear his likely political opponent or of inciting the January 6 insurrection. Instead, they let him off the hook, which means that he continues to be a thorn in their side.

In Book VII we hear “Antenor the thoughtful” voicing sentiments previously expressed by Hektor. Think of him as another responsible Republican standing up to Trump:

Trojans and Dardanians and companions in arms: hear me
while I speak forth what the heart within my breast urges.
Come then: let us give back Helen of Argos and all her possessions
to the sons of Atreus to take away, seeing now we fight with
our true pledges made into lies; and I see no good thing’s
accomplishment for us in the end, unless we do this.”

Paris doesn’t bother to counter-argue, essentially telling the assembled Trojans that he’ll do what he wants, Troy be damned. His speech is all about “me” and “I”:

Antenor, these things that you argue please me no longer.
Your mind knows how to contrive a saying better than this one.
But if in all seriousness this is your true argument; then
it is the very gods who ruined the brain within you.
I will speak out before the Trojans, breakers of horses.
I refuse, straight out. I will not give back the woman.

Then, to soften his refusal, he promises to return the gifts he got from Menelaus and to add some extra:

But of the possessions I carried away to our house from Argos
I am willing to give all back, and to add to these from my own goods.

One would hope that Paris’s promises are more reliable than Trump’s promises to pay his lawyers. Paris doesn’t even have to sacrifice this much, however, because Priam acts as though he hasn’t heard Antenor’s proposal. The most blame he ascribes to Paris is to refer to him as he “for whose sake this strife has arisen.” (There’s none of Hektor’s “better had you never been born” here.) He tells his messenger to go to the Greeks with Paris’s word (the part about the possessions, not about never giving back Helen) and–implicitly acknowledging that such an unserious proposal will go nowhere—adds the “solid message” that a momentary truce should be called so that both sides “can burn the bodies of our dead.”

When one is surrounded by enablers who don’t firmly insist upon the sacred laws of hospitality or the peaceful transition of power, then all hell breaks loose. Many people suffer.

Further thought: As I have been accused, by one conservative acquaintance, of Trump Derangement Syndrome, let me expand my scope here: I think the GOP began its downward slide with Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. His irresponsible flouting of Congressional norms transformed Congress from a collegial body where members found ways to work together to a perpetual food fight. Trump just took Gingrich’s tactics to a new level, and he has spawned imitators (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Loui Gohmert, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis), who similarly eschew governing for performance art.

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Did Pullman Predict U.S. Book Bans?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 13, 2023
A Florida school library emptied of books

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Tuesday

As I noted last week, rereading Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust series has been an unnerving experience. Pullman is targeting Christian fascism, and while the rise of the religious right has not taken America into fascism yet, there are plenty of people who want to go there. Chief amongst these appears to be Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who Fox and others are declaring to be Trump’s heir apparent and who is burnishing his Trumpist credentials by going after women who want abortions, voters of color, the LGBTQ community, state colleges and universities, reporters, and social media users who criticize him. Also, of particular interest to this blog, he has declared war on books his supporters don’t like, along with the teachers and librarians who share them with students.

Headlines from the past two months capture what’s going on in this last area: “Florida’s School Book Bans Have Teachers “Walking On Eggshells” (Buzzfeed); “New Training Tells Florida School Librarians Which Books Are Off-Limits” (Treasure Coast Palm); and “Hide your books to avoid felony charges, Fla. schools tell teachers” (Washington Post). As Buzzfeed reported,

Though the law, HB 1467, went into effect in July 2022, it wasn’t until January that the Florida Department of Education published training on the new law, leaving many schools in limbo for months, uncertain how to proceed. HB 1467 allows parents, or even any resident of the county, to lodge objections to course material, and right-wing organizations are already taking advantage: One group, Moms For Liberty, has lobbied for more than 150 books to be removed from Florida school libraries, including The Color Purple, The Handmaid’s Tale, and many others that deal with race and LGBTQ issues.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, explained how the books are to be vetted. If you see echoes of 1984 in Florida’s plans to have people specially retrained to “properly” determine which books are desirable, you’re not alone:

House Bill 1467, which took effect as law in July, mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and “suited to student needs.” Books must be approved by a qualified school media specialist, who must undergo a state retraining on book collection. The Education Department did not publish that training until January, leaving school librarians across Florida unable to order books for more than a year.

And then there’s an older law that puts teeth into the new one:

The new law comes atop an older one that makes distributing “harmful materials” to minors, including obscene and pornographic materials, a third-degree felony — meaning that a teacher could face up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine, a spokeswoman from the Florida Department of Education said Tuesday. She suggested violating House Bill 1467 might yield “penalties against” an educator’s teaching certificate.

And:

[B]ecause of uncertainties around enforcement and around what titles might become outlawed, school officials have warned teachers that their classroom libraries may expose them to the stiffest punishments.

DeSantis, meanwhile, is doing the classic authoritarian two-step, claiming he wants no more than to keep students safe, even while being so vague about what “safe” means as to leave plenty of room for interpretation amongst rightwing groups. Check out these remarks from a recent press conference:

Earlier Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis weighed in on the issue during a news conference in Vero Beach. He said he was unfamiliar with the local book challenges, but said it’s important to have age-appropriate restrictions in school libraries.

“No one’s saying ban anything,” DeSantis said. 

Books dealing with critical race theory — an academic curriculum that examines the intersection of race, law and equity — also should be reviewed because of the way some content is presented, DeSantis said. 

“We want robust education,” he said. “We’re not going to spend tax dollars to have kids hate our country. Not on our watch.”

In Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, the first work in the Book of Dust trilogy, there’s an organization that sounds like a cross between 1984 and Moms for Liberty, the citizens group that is targeting books, teachers, and librarians. Called the League of St. Alexander after a child convert who ratted out his pagan parents, the organization goes into schools, provides badges to those kids who join, and then encourages them to inform on their teachers. Like Moms for Liberty, every success they register fuels their bloodlust. Here’s the consequence in one school, which has just seen the headmaster sacked and imprisoned for standing up to the League:

Malcolm’s headmaster, Mr. Willis, was still away on Monday, and on Tuesday Mr. Hawkins, the deputy head, announced that Mr. Willis wouldn’t be coming back, and that he would be in charge himself from then on. There was an intake of breath from the pupils. They all knew the reason: Mr. Willis had defied the League of St. Alexander, and now he was being punished. It gave the badge wearers a giddy sense of power. By themselves they had unseated the authority of a headmaster. No teacher was safe now.

And:

[T]here was a sort of swagger among the badge wearers. It was rumored that in one of the older classes, the Scripture teacher had been telling them about the miracles in the Bible and explaining how some of them could be interpreted realistically…One of the boys had challenged him and warned him to be careful and held up his badge, and the teacher had backed down and said that he was only telling them that as an example of a wicked lie, and the Bible was right…

One effect of Florida’s laws is that some teachers have begun to self-censor. The same is happening in Pullman’s novel:

Other teachers fell into line as well. They taught less vigorously and told fewer stories, lessons became duller and more careful, and yet this seemed to be what the badge wearers wanted. The effect was as if each teacher was being examined by a fierce inspector, and each lesson became an ordeal in which not the pupils but the teachers were being tested.

It remains to see how many Florida teachers will be actually fired. There have only been a handful so far. But if the law intimidates, it will work as intended. As teachers empty their classrooms of books (or, in some cases, cover them over), definite messages are being sent: authoritarian forces, not the teachers and librarians, are dictating what is best for Florida’s students.

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