The Tongue: A Restless, Poison-Filled Evil

By Robin Bates | Published: September 21, 2024
George Wotherspoon, Gossip

Sunday

Last Sunday we heard a wonderful passage from the Epistle of James about the danger of the tongue. The brother of Jesus (or so tradition identifies him) is at his metaphorical best as he talks about how the tongue has the potential to set one’s entire life on fire and “is itself set on fire by hell.”

Given the rhetoric we are seeing in the current presidential campaign, some of it leading to dozens of bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, it is a timely observation. In today’s post I pair the passage with “Scandal,” a poem by the Canadian poet Jean Blewitt (1872-1934)

First, here’s James (3:3-12):

When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? My brothers and sisters, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.

In short, clean up your act so that only fresh water flows from your lips.

I’m thinking that Blewitt may be channeling the James passage in her own lyric. After all, she too sees hell as the originator of verbal poison. The tragedy, she says, is that such liars may be half believed. Heaven has lent us the breath to speak, so to use it to reflect badly on some white soul is reprehensible.

James would agree.

Scandal
By Jean Blewett

He does the devil’s basest work, no less,
Who deals in calumnies—who throws the mire
On snowy robes whose hem he dare not press
His foul lips to. The pity of it! Liar,
Yet half believed by such as deem the good
Or evil but the outcome of a mood.
That one who, with the breath lent him by Heaven,
Speaks words that on some white soul do reflect,
Is lost to decency, and should be driven
Outside the pale of honest men’s respect.
O slanderer, hell’s imps must say of you:
“He does the work we are ashamed to do!”

Additional thought: This is something that may interest only me, but I have a sense that Sir Philip Sidney, to whom I devote a chapter in my book, may be channeling James when he talks about the power of poetry to do both good and bad:

Nay, truly, though I yield that poesy may not only be abused, but that being abused, by the reason of his sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other army of words, yet shall it be so far from concluding, that the abuse shall give reproach to the abused, that, contrariwise, it is a good reason, that whatsoever being abused, doth most harm, being rightly used (and upon the right use each thing receives his title) doth most good.  Do we not see skill of physic, the best rampire to our often-assaulted bodies, being abused, teach poison, the most violent destroyer?  Doth not knowledge of law, whose end is to even and right all things, being abused, grow the crooked fosterer of horrible injuries?  Doth not (to go in the highest) God’s word abused breed heresy, and His name abused become blasphemy?… With a sword thou mayest kill thy father, and with a sword thou mayest defend thy prince and country… (Defence of Poesie, 1580)

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Idaho Libraries & “My Brilliant Friend”

By Robin Bates | Published: September 19, 2024
State-mandated sign in an Idaho library

Friday

Last month retired Idaho teacher Glenda Funk alerted me to the restrictions that have been imposed on public libraries in that state. Thanks to House Bill 710, passed by the legislature, libraries can now be fined if they don’t respond to patrons objecting to this or that book. As Idaho Education News reports,

The new law establishes a statewide policy for reviewing materials that could be considered “harmful” to minors, including items with sexual content, nudity or homosexuality.

If a patron challenges an item, library officials have 60 days to remove or relocate it, after which the patron can file a lawsuit. A library that violates the law faces a mandatory $250 fine.

The impact varies depending on the size of the library. While, for large libraries, the focus “remains mostly on policy and interpretation,” for small libraries there’s no room to relocate books. In Donnelly Library, for instance, director Sherry Scheline reports that they have had to report all of the library’s materials as “adult” items. As a result, parents must sign waivers for their children to spend time there. The waiver offers three options:

The first option allows parents to waive their HB 710 rights to allow their child to check out materials without a parent present. “I understand the librarians have not been afforded the opportunity to review every item in their inventory, and therefore are not responsible for the content of items that my child may check out,” the waiver reads. “I affirm that my signature on this clause permits my child to circulate materials that may or may not have adult themes.”

A second option allows children to be at the library without a parent present, but requires parental permission for the child to check out materials.

A third option requires children to have a parent with them in the library at all times.

I haven’t read any updates on how the waiver system has worked, but as I was reading the article I was put in mind of an episode in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, an Italian novel about two smart girls growing up in working class Naples.

Raffaello (Lina) Cerullo is an extraordinary student–she’s the “brilliant friend”–but must abandon formal schooling early in order to work in her family’s shoe repair shop. Narrator Elena Greco is slightly more fortunate in that she can continue on, and she proceeds to take top honors in her classes. But she too is saddened by her limited prospects (her mother wants her to become a secretary, her father wants her to work in city hall) and escapes into the library. And whereas once she and Lina shared everything about what they were learning in school, this has come to an end:

In my spare time I didn’t go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazi Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. Sometimes I felt a strong need to go and see Lila at the shop and talk to her about the characters I liked best, sentences I had learned by heart, but then I let it go: she would say something mean; she would start talking about the plans she was making with Rino, shoes, shoe factory, money, and I would slowly feel that the novels I read were pointless and that my life was bleak, along with the future, and what I would become: a fat pimply salesclerk in the stationery store across from the parish church, an old maid employee of the local government, sooner or later cross-eyed and lame.

Elena receives a shock, however, when she receives an invitation to a special event honoring “the most assiduous” library patrons, as determined by the library records:

The small ceremony began. The winners were: first Raffaella Cerullo, second Fernando Cerullo, third Nunzia Cerullo, fourth Rino Cerullo, fifth Elena Greco, that is, me.

Realizing that Lina has been using the library to educate herself, forging the names of her (non-reading) family to get more books, Elena has to suffocate her giggles:

Still feeling that laughter in my eyes, and with an unexpected sense of well-being, after the teacher has asked repeatedly and in vain if anyone from the Cerullo family was in the room, he called me, fifth on the list, to receive my prize. Praising me generously, Ferraro gave me Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome. I thanked him and asked, in a whisper, “May I also take the prizes for the Cerullo family, so I can deliver them?”

Libraries open us to worlds upon worlds, a space of freedom for curious children. Idaho politicians regard this as a threat.

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6 Impossible Trump Lies before Breakfast

By Robin Bates | Published: September 18, 2024
Tenniel, Alice and the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass

Thursday

I came across a good use of Alice through the Looking-Glass yesterday. Looking at how Donald Trump continues to obsess over his debate performance against Kamala Harris, Stephen Robinson of Public Notice observes,

Supporting Trump is like taking up permanent residence in Lewis Carroll’s storybook Wonderland where you must believe nine impossible things before breakfast, no matter if they contradict each other.

I should note that it’s six, not nine impossible things that Alice is challenged to believe before breakfast, and the episode occurs in the Looking-Glass world, not in Wonderland. Nevertheless, Robinson’s point still holds. There are any number of instances where we see Trump supporters called upon to perform comparable mental gymnastics.

Robinson focuses on Trump’s post-debate narrative, noting that it is “barely coherent”:

He claims the ABC moderators conspired with the Harris campaign to rig it against him, but he also insists he won. He’s gone as far as to compare himself to a prizefighter who scored a resounding knockout.

In Carroll’s novel, the comment about believing six impossible things occurs in an hallucinatory conversation that Alice has with the White Queen. The Queen is explaining how things occur in reverse in Looking-Glass world, including results preceding causal actions. The conversation then turns to how old each of them is:

“Now I’ll give you something to believe,” [said the Queen]. “I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Trump supporters have now had nine years of practice—more if they were following his career before he entered presidential politics—so perhaps six is underestimating their capacity.

In any event, here are six impossible things that Trump challenged his followers to believe in the debate:

–In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.

–I have been a leader on fertilization, IVF. 

–But her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay. 

–Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue [abortion] to be brought back to the states where the people could vote. 

–People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. 

–Do you know that crime in Venezuela and crime in countries all over the world is way down? You know why? Because they’ve taken their criminals off the street and they’ve given them to her to put into our country. … Millions of people let in. And all over the world crime is down. All over the world except here. Crime here is up and through the roof. 

If you find these claims outrageous, however, here’s one that surpasses them all. Trump delivered it at an April 9, 2021 rally:

I’ve got to be the cleanest, I think I’m the most honest human being, perhaps, that God has ever created.

When it comes to believing impossible things, the White Queen is a rookie compared to Trump’s ardent fans.

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Bunyan on Fiction vs. Lying

By Robin Bates | Published: September 17, 2024
John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress

Wednesday

Albert Camus has written, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth,” and the assertion has become a truism amongst numerous novelists, including Neil Gaiman and Abraham Verghese. Therefore, it was startling to hear the Republican candidate for vice-president making a similar claim in a CNN interview the other day:

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.

So to get this straight, it’s okay if J.D. Vance lies because otherwise the lying media will continue to spin the news for the Democratic candidate. He lies to offset their lies.

To be sure, Vance didn’t mention any specific lies that his own lies were supposed to counteract. Harris has certainly not been guilty of anything like his blood libel that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating their neighbor’s pets. This libel has led to 33 bomb threats, cancellation of a town festival, and the closing of city offices, schools, the hospital, and other venues. Someone may yet get hurt or killed.

And it appears that we are going to see increasing numbers of false stories as we careen towards the November election. Apparently Russian troll farms, momentarily thrown for a loss when Joe Biden exited the race, are now fully dedicated to creating stories about Harris, including a fabricated interview (courtesy of AI) of someone accusing her of having hit her with a car. Expect much more.

If lying has become the go-to strategy for Trump-Vance and their allies, perhaps literature lovers should stop quoting Camus quite so blithely. Fiction, after all, is not a lie but an artistic contract into which we enter. For a short while, we suspend our disbelief. I like the way that Lewis Carroll presents the process in Through the Looking-Glass:

And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favorite phrase “Let’s pretend.” She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before—all because Alice had begun with “Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens;” and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say, “Well, you can be one of them then, and I’ll be all the rest.” And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone.”

Unlike Vance’s lie, however, Alice’s pretending and Camus’s story creation do not demonize vulnerable populations. They are not intended to be believed.

No sooner do I say this, however, than I recall that there are novels written with precisely this intent. In my recent book I do a deep dive into Jean Raspail’s Camp of Saints and Thomas Dixon’s The Klansman, which D.W. Griffith turned into Birth of a Nation. Both have served to stir up toxic racism.

So fiction, like lying, is a powerful force, one that can be used for good or for ill. It is not only Alice’s sister who is suspicious of fictional pretending. One of my favorite instances of someone grappling with this issue is the Puritan John Bunyan, who got very defensive over the fact that he had written Pilgrim’s Progress. In a poem that serves as the allegory’s preface, he reports attacks on his work and offers his defense.

Once one of England’s most popular works, Pilgrim’s Progress tells the story of Christian’s laborious journey to the Celestial City. Along the way, he gets bogged down in the Slough of Despond, sidetracked by merchants in Vanity Fair, and lured from the Straight and Narrow Path by Mr. Worldly Wiseman. While it sounds unobjectionable from a Christian viewpoint, certain of Bunyan’s fellow Puritans complained that, because the book is indirect, made-up, and insubstantial, it is contrary to the will of God.

Here’s Bunyan using Camus’s defense as he engages with these naysayers:

Why, what’s the matter? “It is dark.” What though?
“But it is feigned.” What of that? I trow?
Some men, by feigned words, as dark as mine,
Make truth to spangle and its rays to shine.

But they want solidness.” Speak, man, thy mind.
“They drown the weak; metaphors make us blind.”

At this point in the poem, Bunyan feels the need to defend metaphors and other figures of speech. His defense is that the Bible is full of them:

Solidity, indeed, becomes the pen
Of him that writeth things divine to men;
But must I needs want solidness, because
By metaphors I speak? Were not God’s laws,
His gospel laws, in olden times held forth
By types, shadows, and metaphors? 

In fact, Bunyan points out, the prophets, Christ, and Christ’s apostles all used metaphors, allegories, and parables. With them, the Bible can “turn our darkest nights to days”:

The prophets used much by metaphors
To set forth truth; yea, who so considers Christ,
his apostles too, shall plainly see,
That truths to this day in such mantles be.

Am I afraid to say, that holy writ,
Which for its style and phrase puts down all wit,
Is everywhere so full of all these things–
Dark figures, allegories? Yet there springs
From that same book that luster, and those rays
Of light, that turn our darkest nights to days.

To be sure, Bunyan must acknowledge that St. Paul, writing to Timothy, warned him against “profane and old wives’ fables.” I’m pretty sure that the passage from the First Epistle to Timothy (4:7-8) was directed against Bunyan himself by his critics. But he counters that Paul didn’t forbid the use of parables:

Sound words, I know, Timothy is to use,
And old wives’ fables he is to refuse;
But yet grave Paul him nowhere did forbid
The use of parables; in which lay hid
That gold, those pearls, and precious stones that were
Worth digging for, and that with greatest care.

Bunyan draws again on the gold image to summarize his point:

My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold
The truth, as cabinets enclose the gold.

Suspicion of fiction goes back as far as Plato, who saw it as twice removed from reality (it is an imitation of an imitation of the eternal forms that exist in the mind of God). The Puritans were particularly critical of anything that got in the way of plain speaking, and our culture hasn’t broken free of their suspicion of imaginative play.

But such play is not the same thing as Trump and Vance’s outright lying. They are not interested in the deep truth revealed by our great novels.

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Pushing Back against Cultural Genocide

By Robin Bates | Published: September 16, 2024
Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan

Tuesday

Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, authoritarianism expert and Ukraine advocate, alerted me to the continuing importance of poetry in that country’s battle against Russia’s genocidal intentions. After all, as he points out, genocide

is not only about killing people, but about eliminating a culture, making it untenable by destroying the institutions that transmit it.  Thus Russia burns books, steals museum artifacts, and bombs archives, libraries, and publishing houses.  Russia deliberately destroyed the publishing houses in Kharkiv, including where one of my own books was being printed. 

To achieve this end, Vladimir Putin appears to be willing to pour out the blood of his armies like water (to quote Queen Jadis in C.S. Lewis’s Magician’s Nephew). Snyder says that what Putin wants, as his missiles target civilians and civilian architecture in the northern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, is “to instill a certain view of life.  Nothing good ever happens. Be afraid at all times.  Undertake nothing new yourselves.  Give up.”

It may be true, as Irish poet Seamus Heaney once observed, that “no lyric has ever stopped a tank,” but poetry can push back against cultural genocide. It is therefore heartening that Ukrainian writers, including writers serving in the armed forces, have been productive. Snyder mentions the “extraordinary” Karkhiv poet and novelist, Serhiy Zhadan, whom I highlight today.  In “Take Only What Is Most Important,” Zhadan captures the refugee experience:

Take Only What Is Most Important
By Serhiy Zhadan
Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

Take only what is most important. Take the letters.
Take only what you can carry.
Take the icons and the embroidery, take the silver,
Take the wooden crucifix and the golden replicas.

Take some bread, the vegetables from the garden, then leave.
We will never return again.
We will never see our city again.
Take the letters, all of them, every last piece of bad news.

We will never see our corner store again.
We will never drink from that dry well again.
We will never see familiar faces again.
We are refugees. We’ll run all night.

We will run past fields of sunflowers.
We will run from dogs, rest with cows.
We’ll scoop up water with our bare hands,
sit waiting in camps, annoying the dragons of war.

You will not return and friends will never come back.
There will be no smoky kitchens, no usual jobs,
There will be no dreamy lights in sleepy towns,
no green valleys, no suburban wastelands.

The sun will be a smudge on the window of a cheap train,
rushing past cholera pits covered with lime.
There will be blood on women’s heels,
tired guards on borderlands covered with snow,

a postman with empty bags shot down,
a priest with a hapless smile hung by his ribs,
the quiet of a cemetery, the noise of a command post,
and unedited lists of the dead,

so long that there won’t be enough time
to check them for your own name.

The name on that list may be you, Zhadan tells his readers–which is another way of saying that we Ukrainians are all in this together. It’s a sentiment like that expressed by John Donne: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

By naming their plight, Zhadan gives people a sense of unified identity. They need not give in to solitary despair.

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Unexpected Book Bans

By Robin Bates | Published: September 15, 2024
Page boys at Cincinnati Public Library (1923)

Monday

I recently came across an article in The Week about “27 of America’s most unexpectedly banned books.” “Unexpectedly” is a particularly apt adverb since, for many of the books, one would be hard-pressed to anticipate the objections.

That being said, however, I think many works of quality challenge readers to think outside of conventional boundaries—which means that there are few works of literature that won’t offend someone somewhere.

The article looks at censorship figures of the 2023-24 year. Apparently in the first half of that year, banning campaigns

eclipsed the entirety of the previous school year, according to the latest from the American Library Association. In the first six months of this school year, 4,349 books were banned, leading to more bans in fall 2023 than in the whole 2022-2023 school year. 

I’ve written in the past about the banning of Rowling’s Harry Potter books and Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” so won’t touch on those. Here are the other books mentioned in the article that caught me by surprise:

–Edgar Rice Burroughs’sTarzan was banned in 1961 because there was “no evidence that Tarzan and Jane had married before they started cohabiting in the treetops.”

–the article believes that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was banned because (as a 1969 column in Ladies Home Journal opined), the book was “psychologically damaging for 3- and 4-year-olds.”  Actually, I think certain people were unwilling to acknowledge child anger. The genius of Sendak’s book, I believe, is that it provides kids a healthy outlet for their tumultuous feelings—and also gives them a way to move past those feelings and reconcile with their parents.

–The banning of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, on the other hand, is just weird. According to The Week, it was deemed by a parents group in Kansas to be the work of the devil because it has two talking animals, with the result that it was subsequently barred from classrooms. The group’s central complaint was that “humans are the highest level of God’s creation, as shown by the fact we’re ‘the only creatures that can communicate vocally. Showing lower life forms with human abilities is sacrilegious and disrespectful to God.’”

But if one is going to ban books with animals that can talk with humans (or spell like humans), there go the Freddy the Pig books, the Narnia Books, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, the Paddington books, Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass books, and on and on and on.

–Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach was “banned in Wisconsin in 1999 because of concerns the spider licking its lips could be interpreted as sexual.”

–Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was “banned from shelves because its titular character is, well, a spy. Some schools blocked Louise Fitzhugh’s book from shelves when it came out in the 1960s because of concerns that the 11-year-old child’s penchant for peeping on her neighbors, jotting down her brutally honest observations, and being generally disagreeable could negatively influence kids by setting a bad example.”

I wonder, however, if it is less Harriet’s disagreeable nature that offended censors and more her (possible) lesbian leanings. Perhaps adult readers sensed this. Queer teens certainly did, which helps explain why they were drawn to Harriet.

–And here’s a banned book that, in my recently released Better Living through Literature, I predicted could happen–only to discover that it already has happened. In 1996 schools in Merrimack, New Hampshire pulled Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, determining that its “jolly cross-dressing and fake-same-sex romance” violated the district’s ‘prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction.’” As I write in my book,

Although Shakespeare generally flies under the radar of conservative parents (with the exception of a Florida school district that banned Romeo and Juliet), that’s in part because many teachers fail to unleash his full potential to challenge various assumptions. If they did, the Bard might well join Morrison on banned book lists.

Imagine Twelfth Night: or What You Will (1601-02) being taught in such a way as to foreground its strong gender identity themes, which fascinate young people struggling to make sense of who they are. In the comedy, we encounter a man who discovers he has an inner woman, a woman who discovers she has an inner man, two men who are attracted to other men, and a woman who is attracted to another woman. Count Orsino gets to marry someone he once thought was a man; Lady Olivia makes overtures to another woman (although technically she thinks he’s a man); Viola, under the flimsiest of pretexts, passes herself off as a man; and Orsino for a time mimics behavior that he regards as feminine. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, Shakespeare knew that we are more complex than the gender labels foisted upon us by tradition, and he found an artistic vehicle to explore our complexity. If teachers did more to advertise the play as a chance to explore gender identity, inviting students to explore their feelings about each of these characters, they could well generate new excitement amongst students, including some who would otherwise groan over a Shakespeare reading assignment. 

–With the rise (thanks to encouragement from Donald Trump) of white supremacy and neo-fascism, I’m thinking that the real reason for banning the graphic novel version of Diary of Anne Frank and Art Spiegelman’s Maus might be more nefarious than the fact that there are naked statues in the one and a picture of a naked woman (a Holocaust victim) in the second. Could there be Holocaust denial at work, just as there has been an attempt to erase African American history from certain southern schools? And if the seeds of fascism have been present in the culture for a while, maybe that’s why the Alabama State Textbook Committee wanted to reject Diary of Anne Frank in 1983, decreeing it to be “a real downer.”

A central thesis of Better Living through Literature is that great literature is constantly threatening to shake the foundations of this belief or that system, so we need never be surprised when people target it. What may be more surprising is how long it has taken certain censors to get around to banning certain books. Some speculate that the pandemic, when parents saw up close what their children were learning, may provide some explanation.

Then again, the cause may lie in how Trumpism has encouraged reactionary bullies to go after teachers and schools. If education is about preparing students for a new and constantly changing world, then anyone who wants us to return to the past is going to be automatically threatened by works that train us to think deeply and critically.

The lesson here is never be complacent or take reading for granted. People have had to fight for literature throughout history, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think we are automatically exempt.

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Finding Sanctuary within the Self

By Robin Bates | Published: September 14, 2024
Sara Teasdale

Sunday

I’m fascinated by Sara Teasdale’s “The Sanctuary,” largely because of the way it invokes, in ten simple lines, a compelling vision of inner peace. And then there’s its concluding punchline, which seems to invert how we normally think of things. It feels Buddhist in the calm way it imagines us interacting with our tumultuous, sorrow-filled world:

The Sanctuary
By Sara Teasdale

If I could keep my innermost Me
Fearless, aloof and free
Of the least breath of love or hate,
And not disconsolate
At the sick load of sorrow laid on men;
If I could keep a sanctuary there
Free even of prayer,
If I could do this, then,
With quiet candor as I grew more wise
I could look even at God with grave forgiving eyes.

Rather than being a plaything of strong emotions or feeling weighed down by the sorrows of the world, the poet look to become more wise. It so happens that this desire lines up with one of today’s Old Testament liturgy readings. The passage from Book of Wisdom (a.k.a. The Wisdom of Solomon) itself reads as a poem:

For wisdom is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.

Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God, and prophets;
for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.

She is more beautiful than the sun,
and excels every constellation of the stars.
Compared with the light she is found to be superior,
for it is succeeded by the night,
but against wisdom evil does not prevail.

She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
and she orders all things well. (Wisdom 7:26–8:1)

If God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom, why does Teasdale reject prayer (which is how we talk with God) or say that she can “look even at God with grave forgiving eyes.” I suspect she is actually rejecting how we use prayer to get things God to blame things on. The Biblical passage seems closer to what she has in mind as she contends that Wisdom passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God. If we feel that God has wronged us and needs forgiveness, that’s okay with God because God is the spirit of forgiveness. God wants us to step into that Wisdom that “is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars.” Different people will get there in different ways.

After all, as Dante informs us at the conclusion of Paradiso, we are rolled ever onward by the Love that moves the sun and other stars.

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Laughter in the Presidential Campaign

By Robin Bates | Published: September 12, 2024
Hogarth, The Laughing Audience

Friday

Having long been interested in literary humor—I actually prefer Shakespeare’s comedies to his tragedies—I today apply my knowledge to election jokes and to the phenomenon of laughter. Last month GOP V-P nominee J.D. Vance “joked” that Kamala Harris’s interview with CNN’s Dana Bash was like the meltdown suffered 17 years ago by a Miss Teen America contestant. In response to the Harris interview, Vance posted a clip of 18-year-old Caitlin “Caite” Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA, freezing up. To this he added the comment, ““BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.”

When told that Upton had been traumatized by the incident to such extent that she considered suicide, Vance refused to apologize or take back his “joke.” Instead, he doubled down, complaining that “politics has gotten way too lame” and “way too boring” and that “you can have some fun while making a good argument to the American people about how you’re going to improve their lives.” He also said,

I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke, but I wish the best for Caitlin. I hope that she’s doing well. And again, what I’d say is, one bad moment shouldn’t define anybody, and the best way to deal with this stuff is to laugh at ourselves.

When I used to teach “Couples Comedy in the British Restoration and 18th Century,” I would have the students read different theories of comedy. The most applicable to Vance’s joke is Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), who saw comedy as a blood sport.  Some people laugh, he wrote, when they apprehend “some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.” He observed that these individuals, who are “conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves,” laugh at “the imperfections of other men” in order “to keep themselves in their own favor.”

In other words, people often laugh at others when they are insecure, using humor to bolster their egos. Laughter gives them a way to feel superior.

One instance of such laughter that haunts me to this day is Donald Trump mimicking reporter Serge Kovaleski during the 2016 campaign. Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital condition affecting the joints called arthrogryposis, had disputed Trump’s false claims that thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated the 9-11 attacks. Trump reported that he confronted the reporter, getting him to back down. “Now the poor guy, you gotta see this guy,” Trump told a rally crowd as he pantomimed Kovalesky, stuttering and flailing his arms around. While he later claimed he didn’t know about the reporter’s condition, it was still classic bully behavior. I had a clear picture of what Trump must have been like as a teenager.

Vance’s joke is not so egregious but it is related. He finds it funny that a contestant would freeze up—most of us would feel sorry for the teenager—and by applying the clip to Harris, he gets to feel look down at both women.

Cruel humor seems to be a thing in the GOP. Since Trump amplified the blood libel that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets—a claim that echoes Nazi antisemitic propaganda (although The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Der Stũrmer reported Jews sacrificing Christian children rather than cats and dogs)—the Arizona GOP has been posting billboards playing off the Chick-fil-A ad campaign where cows try to steer consumers towards chicken and away from beef. In this case, however, the message, using the distinctive Chick-Fil-A script, reads, “Eat less kittens. Vote Republican.”

The humor relies on demonizing a vulnerable population. In so doing, it violates one of Jonathan Swift’s central precepts about comic satire, which is that you should never hit down, only up.

Another GOP joke, which Trump shared on social media, shows a picture of Hilary Clinton and Harris together, along with the caption, “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” Harris, it is implied, owes her success to once having once had a relationship with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.

Now, I grant that hardball humor has always been a part of politics. Some have pointed out that what we find funny depends on whose ox is being gored. As Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” But humor that aims to assert dominance is always problematic.

In my course, I would counterpose Hobbes’s theory with that of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who saw comedy as a means of establishing community. It’s the difference between laughing at and laughing with, between aggressive laughter and empathetic laughter. Kamala Harris’s laughter is empathetic whereas Donald Trump doesn’t so much laugh as sneer. When I see Trump curl his lips as he goes after one of his targets, I think of a line from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones describing the villain Blifil:

“I see, sir, now,” said Blifil, with one of those grinning sneers with which the devil marks his best beloved…

In case you’re interested, I see Hobbesian laughter more at work in the comedies written during the late 17th century Restoration period, by such playwrights as William Wycherley, George Farquhar, and Aphra Behn and poet John Wilmot. Their rambunctious plays feature predatory rakes whom hypocritical society can barely contain. From there my Couples Comedy class would shift to the softer and more sentimental works of the 18th century. Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Tom Jones, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals, Fanny Burney’s Evelina, and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility are Shaftesburian rather than Hobbesian.

One reason people have been falling in love with Kamala Harris’s laughter is because it’s such a reprieve from Trump’s angry performance art. Her laughter opens its arms to include others, not beat them down.  

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Harris’s Use of Goneril Tactics

By Robin Bates | Published: September 11, 2024
Trump-Harris in the 2024 Presidential Debate

Thursday

There haven’t been many times when I’ve seen such a public beatdown as that administered by Kamala Harris Tuesday night in the presidential debate. What the Democratic nominee did to Donald Trump reminded me of Goneril and Regan taking apart King Lear.

There are limitations to the parallel of course. While I’ve compared Trump to Lear multiple times in the past (links to some of those posts appear at the end of this essay), the situation here is very different. After all, Trump did not step down voluntarily from the throne, nor is Harris a resentful inheritor using her newly-gained power to settle decades of stored-up grudges. Harris, in short, is no Goneril or Regan (although Trump probably experienced her as such in the course of the debate).

That being noted, however, by the end of the debate Harris—like Lear’s daughters—had turned her antagonist into a sputtering toddler, throwing out wild accusations to hurt her as he was being hurt. The result was, as David Corn noted in a Mother Jones article, the vice-president made Trump appear “small, vindictive, mean-spirited, and old.” I half expected him, once the debate had ended, to flee the scene and start ranting in a rainstorm, a metaphor for his inner turmoil.

To recap the play, Lear, seeking to retire from kingship without surrendering any of its perks, has divided it between the two daughters who tell him what he wants to hear while disinheriting the daughter who tells him what he needs to hear. Then, expecting to be treated as though he were still king, he and 100 retainers essentially move into Goneril’s basement apartment and start partying it up.

She, in response, begins to systematically strip him of his dignity. First, she instructs her steward Oswald to disrespect him. Then she starts working on him herself: she begs him to reduce the number of retainers while at the same time noting that the request could morph into a command: she has the power to take, to “disquantity” or reduce, the number of his followers. Then, she hits his sore spot, essentially telling him that he should act his age. Instead of carousing with young rowdies, he should befriend companions who are suitable to his time of life.

In short, she makes him feel old, which is one of his deepest fears:

Be then desired,
By her that else will take the thing she begs,
A little to disquantity your train,
And the remainders that shall still depend
To be such men as may besort your age,
Which know themselves and you.

If her intent is to trigger her father into flying into a rage and walking out, she succeeds. First, however, Lear launches into a brutal misogynistic attack, which is what men will often do when threatened by a woman: he curses Goneril, saying that he hopes her womb will dry up. One can’t imagine a nastier attack:

Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful.
Into her womb convey sterility.
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honor her. 

As Harris has begun to overtake Trump in the polls, he too has turned to sexist attacks, just as he did with Hillary Clinton, Meghan Kelly, and other powerful women. His lowest blow came when he shared a tweet that Harris has “spent her whole damn life down on her knees.” The reference is to a relationship she had many years ago with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, which Harris’s rightwing enemies say is the reason for her rise. Some have worn sweatshirts with the derisive logo, “Joe and the Ho.”

If the purpose of Goneril’s remarks is to drive Lear away, they are successful as he storms off to her sister. Regan, however, is equally adept at triggering her father and tells him that she agrees with her sister that he is old and should behave accordingly:

O sir, you are old.
Nature in you stands on the very verge
 Of his confine. You should be ruled and led
 By some discretion that discerns your state
 Better than you yourself. 

Between them, the sisters succeed in stripping Lear of every one of his companions, who are important to his identity as a former king. Perhaps it’s as if a president stepped in and took away his predecessor’s security detail in the most humiliating way possible. When Regan insists that Lear reduce his retinue to 25, he turns back to Goneril, who has initially seemed agreeable to having 50. Then the following happens:

LEAR [to Goneril]: I’ll go with thee.
 Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty,
And thou art twice her love.
GONERIL: Hear me, my lord.
What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
REGAN   What need one?

This tag team humiliation in the end has Trump behaving like a little child issuing impotent threats:

No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth! You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.

For his turn, Trump’s go-to temper tantrum involved the world criminals streaming into America to commit crimes, Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, World War III, America trashed, etc.

The difference between Harris and Goneril and Regan is that she is not operating in a monarchy  or a dysfunctional family. She has no reason to cater to an old man’s tyranny. Indeed, by exposing him as a narcissistic tyrant with no impulse control, she is doing us all a favor. The public can see one of the presidential candidates for what he really is.

Political scientist John Stoehr of Editorial Board notes that Harris has done what no one else has proved capable of doing: she has exposed Trump’s ego as glass that can be shattered. Like Goneril and Regan depriving Lear of the followers who are critical to his self-worth, Harris has taken away Trump’s “ability to dominate and control, and to create a spectacle in the process.” Take those away, Stoehr says, and there’s nothing left:

She controlled the man who is said to be uncontrollable. She tamed him. She neutered him. They say he’s a bull in a china shop? Well, last night was nutting season. And she did all this by telling the truth, addressing the American people directly with appeals to democracy, decency, and the rule of law, and using his own insults against him.

She called him weak.

She called him confused and boring.

She suggested he was old.

Most painful of all, for Trump, she seemed to pity him.

Even if Trump manages to win the election, Stoehr contends, he will never recover from this blow.

In Lear’s case, being brought low has a redemptive turn. For the first time in his selfish, lonely life he learns what love is. Tragic though the play is, there is this amazing breakthrough.

I don’t know if Trump is capable of such a discovery. But if Lear is any indication, it will only occur if he suffers a reversal of fortune. If, instead, he is reelected president, expect more of the same.

Previous Posts Comparing Trump to King Lear
Trump’s Love Test Resembles Lear’s
Lear, Trump Rage against Their Enemies
Lear Also Doesn’t Step Down Gracefully
Trump and Lear without Their Fans
Trump as Low Rent Lear, the GOP as Hollow Men
Corruption Starts at the Top
Lear, Trump, and the Hell of Loneliness

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