Sane-Washing Vance and Mac the Knife

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2024
William Hogarth, scene from Beggar’s Opera

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Tuesday

By now we’re all becoming aware of the neologism “sane-washing,” which the corporate media has been doing with Donald Trump and which Todd Beeton of The Conversation says is starting to happen with J.D. Vance as well. While the word may be new, however, the phenomenon is not. In fact, it’s the central joke in John Gay’s 18th century musical comedy The Beggar’s Opera.

“Sane-washing,” the Urban Dictionary tells us, involves “attempting to downplay a person’s or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public.” As problematic as it is to sane-wash Donald Trump, however, it may be even more dangerous to do so with Vance given (1) his extreme positions on a variety of issues and (2) the very real possibility that he would rise to the presidency in a second Trump term and more competently carry out such an agenda. There are rightwing billionaires who, confident that Trump won’t survive a second term, are salivating at the prospect of President Vance.

Or as Bill Kristol of The Bulwark puts it, Trump’s selection of Vance

cemented the fact that a Trump second term [will] be a Project 2025 and America First endeavor [and] the somewhat incoherent, anti-liberal and anti-democratic impulses of early Trumpism [will turn] into a far more purposeful and full-blown American authoritarianism.

Vance worked on sane-washing both Trump and himself in his debate with Tim Walz last week. Beeton first points out how he sane-washed Trump:

When Vance said, for example, that Trump governed on “common sense wisdom” as president, or when he suggested Trump somehow saved Obamacare “in a bipartisan way,” or when he claimed that Trump “Peacefully gave over power” in 2021, Vance was gaslighting the American people on behalf of his running mate, all with a straight face. It was quite a performance.

But Vance’s major accomplishment, Beeton believes, was how he sane-washed himself:

Through his slick debate club demeanor, his nods toward moderation and civility, and his bizarre portrayal of himself as seemingly almost pro-choice, Vance was communicating to voters that he’s really not that weird. Forget all that stuff you heard about him, he’s actually Team Normal. 

Vance must sane-wash himself to hide both his ties to authoritarian billionaires and to white Christian nationalists (there’s considerable overlap). Beeton points out that Vance spent this past weekend at a Christian revival event run by Lance Wallnau, who is thought to have coined the phrase “Seven Mountains Mandate.” The goal is to put Christians in control of seven spheres of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government. In short, to turn us into an anti-democratic theocracy.

“Seven Mountains Mandate” is a project of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), led by the evangelical Wallnau and others, but it also has buy-in from members of the radical Catholic Opus Dei society, which boasts such members as Leonard Leo (largely responsible for stacking and cultivating the Supreme Court) and Kevin Roberts, author of Project 2025. That radical Evangelicals and radical Catholics would be finding common cause at this juncture seems strange, but perhaps it’s a pragmatic alliance in the service of ending American pluralism. Vance, who has written a forward to Roberts’s forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, is himself a radical Catholic and may be attending the NAR conference to help cement the alliance.

Matthew Taylor, author and religious scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies who has researched the NAR, calls Vance’s appearance at the event an “endorsement of one of the worst, most conspiratorial, Christian supremacist spectacles in the country.” In other words, Vance is in dire need of sane-washing both his relationship with Wallnau and with Project 2025.

Sane-washing is used to comic effect in Beggar’s Opera. The major joke running through Gay’s satiric romp, which Bertolt Brecht would later rewrite as Three Penny Opera, is that the upper class is no different than the criminal underclass; they just make crime look, well, sane and respectable. At one point the Peachams–who make their living fencing stolen goods and, when the moment is right, turning in their employees for the reward money—are discussing murder. When Mrs. Peacham remarks to her husband that it’s fortunate none of their pickpockets has recently killed anyone, her husband shrugs it off:

Peacham. What a dickens is the woman always a whimpring about murder for? No gentleman is ever look’d upon the worse for killing a man in his own defense; and if business cannot be carried on without it, what would you have a gentleman do?

Mrs. Peacham. If I am in the wrong, my dear, you must excuse me, for nobody can help the frailty of an over-scrupulous conscience.

Peacham. Murder is as fashionable a crime as a man can be guilty of. How many fine gentlemen have we in Newgate every year, purely upon that article! 

The play widens its satiric lens in Peacham’s opening song:

Through all the employments of life
Each neighbor abuses his brother;
Whore and rogue they call husband and wife:
All professions be-rogue one another:
The priest calls the lawyer a cheat,
The lawyer be-knaves the divine:
And the statesman, because he’s so great,
Thinks his trade as honest as mine.

Peacham is especially hard on lawyers, whom he lambastes in another bouncy song:

A Fox may steal your Hens, Sir,
A Whore your Health and Pence, Sir,
Your Daughter rob your Chest, Sir,
Your Wife may steal your Rest, Sir.
A Thief your Goods and Plate.

But this is all but picking,
With Rest, Pence, Chest and Chicken;
It ever was decreed, sir,
If lawyer’s hand is fee’d, Sir,
He steals your whole estate.

To which Peacham then adds, “The lawyers are bitter enemies to those in our way. They don’t care that anybody should get a clandestine livelihood but themselves.”

As I watched Vance’s smooth presentation at the debate—between his gaslighting and his effortless lying, it was a tour-de-force—I thought of Gay’s first mention of Mac the Knife, the colorful highwayman at the center of the play. Mac has borrowed money from the Peachams, which he repays with bad checks:

Peacham. Was Captain Macheath here this morning, for the banknotes he left with you last week?

Mrs. Peacham. Yes, my dear; and though the bank hath stopt payment, he was so cheerful and so agreeable! Sure there is not a finer gentleman upon the road than the captain! 

“Upon the road” refers to highway robbery. But sure, there is not a finer presidential ticket than Trump and Vance.

Further thought: I’ve compared Trump to Mac the Knife several times in the past (for instance, here) over how both manage to escape accountability time and again. On the steps of the gallows, the highwayman is saved by a royal reprieve, specially ordered up (in a meta-fictional moment) by the opera’s beggar author so that his play won’t have an unhappy ending. Much of the fun of the play lies in Mac’s escapes.

Of course, Mac never has the power to pardon himself, a power Trump will undoubtedly exercise if he is returned to office.

The other difference between Mac and Trump is that only one of them is a good-natured, open-hearted thief. The other is just a thief.

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J.D. Vance Is No Barbara Kingsolver

By Robin Bates | Published: October 7, 2024

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Monday

Here’s a tidbit of literary history I’ve just picked up. Apparently Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Demon Copperhead is in part a response to J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Asked about Vance’s book in an interview with The Guardian, Kingsolver said,

I can tell you that Appalachian people felt betrayed by that book a long time before he became a Republican politician. I’ll begin by saying: anyone is entitled to write a memoir. That’s his story, fine. But for him to say that his story explains all of us – I say, no, I resent that, because it’s very condescending. There’s this subtext all the way through it that suggests we’re in a boat that’s sinking because we’re lazy, unambitious and uncreative, which I resent.

Kingsolver knows whereof she speaks, having been raised in Appalachia herself. If Hillbilly Elegy was well received, she believes, it’s because “it simply confirmed well-worn stereotypes”:

I’ve dealt with this condescension, this anti-hillbilly bigotry for a lot of my life I didn’t realize it was a problem until I left Kentucky and went to [Indiana’s Depauw University] and people made fun of my accent, and said things like: ‘Look at you, you’re wearing shoes, ha ha!’” [Pause] “You know, it’s more insidious than that. Even as a writer, I feel like my whole life until Demon Copperhead I was snubbed because I’m rural, I’m from this place that’s considered backward. I’m quite used to it. But [Vance’s book] really made a lot of us angry that this became the explanation for us.”

She adds that her neighbors saw through Vance immediately: “The hollowness, the fact that he isn’t really one of us.” In his book, she says, “There was no analysis, and no compassion. It was just: if I can survive, anyone can survive.”

And indeed, Vance was not “one of us.” According to Professor Lennard J. Davis, Vances engages in “poornography,” which is writers who are not poor themselves conducting literary sightseeing tours through poverty:

Vance himself was never actually impoverished. His family never had to worry about money; his grandfather, grandmother and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in Middletown, Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “owned stock in Armco and had a lucrative pension.”

Davis points out that Vance introduced himself at Yale as “a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia,” and then used his mother’s addiction to painkillers to cement his credentials. As Davis puts it, “In the book, Vance searches for an explanation for his traumatic relationship with his mother, before hitting on the perfect explanation: His mother’s addiction was a consequence of the fact that her parents were “hillbillies.” 

One gets a far deeper grasp of the culture by reading Prodigal Summer, Flight Behavior, and Demon Copperhead, all of which are set in Appalachia and the last of which does a deep dive into the problem of opioids. There the protagonist, after being bounced from one abusive foster home to another, finally finds (he thinks) stability in the home of a football coach, who sees his potential—but who then introduces him to painkillers after an injury threatens to sideline him. From there he is plunged into the netherworld of addiction and barely manages to escape. He does so, not by pulling himself up by his bootstraps, as Vance recommends, but through the support of others. Demon gets his life back in order after attending a rehab center, where he draws on his artistic skills to write a graphic novel about the history of the Appalachian people.

I’ve taught Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior as well as The Bean Trees and all refute Vance’s characterization of people as shiftless and looking for a government handout. Although having said that, I can think of one character in Flight Behavior who does get handouts, even as he trashes the federal government. “Who do you think sends you your disability checks,” the sassy narrator shoots back at him after one of his anti-government rants. “Santa Claus?”

Tellingly, this character sounds like J.D. Vance, who in fact has had his own Santa Claus: rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel set him up as a venture capitalist and then financed his senate campaign. His hillbilly act is just a grift.

Read Kingsolver if you want the genuine article.

Relevant passage from Demon Copperhead: I imagine Kingsolver directing the following Demon observation to Vance’s putdown of hillbillies:

There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.”

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And Took from Thence a Rib

By Robin Bates | Published: October 5, 2024
Creation of Eve (marble relief, Orvieto Cathedral)

Sunday

I’d never noticed before the similarities between the rib episode from Genesis (today’s Old Testament reading) and Plato’s allegory of how desire came to be. In The Symposium, a drunk Alcibiades tells a story to capture the nature of sexual longing. In his recounting, human beings were once complete in themselves, having two heads, four arms, and four legs. The gods, fearing that this perfection would make them independent, split them in half—with the effect that the two halves, yearning for their lost completeness, spend all their time searching for the other rather than competing with the gods.

Before the great divide, there were men, women, and androgynes. After, men spend all their time searching for their missing man half, the women for their missing woman half, and androgynes for their missing member of the opposite sex half. Thus was desire born, both same sex and opposite sex desire.

The Greek story is a bit more egalitarian than the Genesis story since men and women are raised to the same plane (although they weren’t in actual Greek society). It also regards homosexual desire as natural, which was fine with Socrates and Plato.

As an aside, I note that I see Alcibiades’s allegory at the core of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, where two twins are separated by a lightning bolt (which splits their ship in half). The play goes on to explore various desires, including a man who desires female characteristics (Orsino), two women who desire male characteristics (Viola, Olivia), a man who desires a man (Antonio), and a woman who desires a woman (Olivia, although she thinks Viola is a man).

But back to the Adam and Eve story, which goes as follows:

The Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.”

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:18-24)

In Milton’s version of the story in Paradise Lost, it appears to be not God but Adam who thinks that “it is not good that the man should be alone” (although we learn later that this was God’s plan all along). Not wanting to be critical of God’s apparent plan that he remain single, Adam asks for a helpmate in the most diplomatic way possible. After God asks Adam why he isn’t satisfied with having been given dominion over all creation, Adam replies,

Let not my words offend thee, Heavenly Power;
My Maker, be propitious while I speak.
. . .  Of fellowship I speak
Such as I seek, fit to participate
All rational delight: wherein the brute
Cannot be human consort:  They rejoice
Each with their kind, lion with lioness;
So fitly them in pairs thou hast combined:
Much less can bird with beast, or fish with fowl
So well converse, nor with the ox the ape;
Worse then can man with beast, and least of all.

God, Milton tells us, is not displeased at the request but, like a good teacher, tests Adam a little further until finally telling him he has been in favor of the idea all along; he just wanted Adam to reason it out:

                      I, ere thou spakest,
Knew it not good for Man to be alone;
And no such company as then thou sawest
Intended thee; for trial only brought,
To see how thou couldest judge of fit and meet:
What next I bring shall please thee, be assured,
Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,
Thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire.

He then proceeds to perform a local anesthetics operation in which Adam is aware of what is going on as it happens (and so is able to report on it):

Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell
Of fancy, my internal sight; by which,
Abstract as in a trance, methought I saw,
Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape
Still glorious before whom awake I stood:
Who stooping opened my left side, and took
From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm,
And life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound,
But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed:

Adam also gets to watch what God does with his rib:

The rib he formed and fashioned with his hands;
Under his forming hands a creature grew,                         
Man-like, but different sex; so lovely fair,
That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained
And in her looks; which from that time infused
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her air inspired
The spirit of love and amorous delight.

Then comes the desire of which Plato writes:

She disappeared, and left me dark; I waked
To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure…  

This being the Garden of Eden, however, there are only seconds between desire and fulfillment. Or as John Wilmot, making use of a lewd pun, puts it in his poem “The Fall,”

Naked beneath cool Shades they lay,
Enjoyment waited on desire;
Each member did their wills obey:
Nor could a wish set pleasure higher.

Here’s Milton:

When out of hope, behold her, not far off,
Such as I saw her in my dream, adorned
With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow
To make her amiable:  On she came,
Led by her heavenly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice; nor uninformed
Of nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites:
Grace was in all her steps, Heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love.

Unable to remain silent, Adam bursts into a hymn of thankfulness and praise:

This turn hath made amends; thou hast fulfilled
Thy words, Creator bounteous and benign,
Giver of all things fair! but fairest this
Of all thy gifts! nor enviest.  I now see
Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, myself
Before me:  Woman is her name; of Man
Extracted: for this cause he shall forego
Father and mother, and to his wife adhere;
And they shall be one flesh, one heart, one soul.

Feminists point out (legitimately in my view) that the rib story is a means for men to regain primacy over women in the critical issue of giving birth: it was first men who birthed women, we are informed, not the other way around. Milton, while he creates an extraordinary three-dimensional character in his Eve, is nonetheless somewhat guilty here. At one point in Book IV he says, in a passage that always makes my students cringe,

Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem’d;
For contemplation hee and valor form’d,
For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,
Hee for God only, shee for God in him…

It’s worth noting that this is not the only version of creation to be found in Genesis, and the other is a bit more egalitarian:

So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

But for all its patriarchal faults, there’s some fabulous love poetry going on in Paradise Lost. The Puritan Milton, one might say, was no puritan. Milton’s articulation—”bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, myself before me”—captures for me how Julia and I have become, after all these years and despite our undoubted singularity, a single being. Milton’s body imagery captures this unity.

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Jack London Predicted January 6

By Robin Bates | Published: October 4, 2024

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Friday

Over at the website Literary Hub, author Ken McGoogan describes Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel as “one of the most prescient dystopian works ever written.” In it he describes how the governing party, even after losing an election, refuses to leave office:

The incumbents refused to get out. It was very simple. They merely charged illegality in the elections and wrapped up the whole situation in the interminable red tape of the law. The Democrats were powerless. The courts were in the hands of their enemies.

McGoogan then admits to having changed the word “Democrats”—in the novel it appears as “Grangers”—but the rest of the passage is quoted verbatim.

News of the book is especially timely given Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recently released indictment–updated in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity decision–which lays out in more detail than we’ve previously seen the the many different ways Donald Trump attempted to remain in power. By immunizing Trump for all “official acts,” the Supreme Court forced Smith to limit his case to “unofficial acts.” While overthrowing the government shouldn’t be regarded as an official act, the Supreme Court will make the final determination, and it has been, if not in Trump’s hands, then at least leaning heavily in his favor.

For the record, here’s an excerpt from Smith’s charges:

When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “targeted states”). … The through-line of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.

McGoogan provides the following summary of London’s novel:

The story covers the period from 1912 to 1932 and treats the evolution of the powerful “Oligarchs” in the US into the ruling dictatorship of the Iron Heel. The Oligarchy comprises a few massive and growing “trusts” run by individuals who have become obscenely rich and powerful by squeezing small and middle-sized businesses into capitulation. The contemporary reader cannot help but think of the top 1 percent of Americans, billionaires said to control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth—though some say that figure is much higher.

McGoogan points out that the novel appeared three decades before Upton Sinclair’s It Can’t Happen Here, which lays out a similar scenario, and he observes that George Orwell was a fan. As Orwell saw it, Iron Heel is “a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism.” Whereas many socialists (Jack London was a socialist) used to believe that the working class would eventually displace the capitalist class, Orwell saw in London a hard-nosed realist who realized that the capitalist class would counterattack with maximum force before letting that happen. McGoogan notes that “neither London nor Orwell would be surprised to see Donald Trump and far-right Republicans manning the barricades for the billionaire class.”

We can only hope that London’s other prediction is wrong. Once the Oligarchy in The Iron Heel seizes power, it holds on to it for three centuries.

London’s insightfulness about rightwing brutality, Orwell added, comes from the fact that he himself was tough, having experienced the rigors of the fishing industry and the Alaska gold rush. “With his love of violence and physical strength, his belief in ‘natural aristocracy’, his animal-worship and exaltation of the primitive,” the British author wrote, “he had in him what one might fairly call a Fascist strain.”

In other words, he knew fascism when he saw it, having himself traveled to the dark side. Then he came back to warn us.

This article on London is excerpted from McGoogan’s Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship. According to the book’s description, in addition to London Shadows of Tyranny references Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Sinclair Lewis, and Philip Roth, all authors of dystopian novels envisioning democracy’s collapse. The last ten years, sadly, have given us ample reason to go back and read or reread their works.

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Judge Invokes Handmaid’s Tale in Ruling

By Robin Bates | Published: October 2, 2024
Fiennes and Moss as Commander and Handmaid

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Thursday

In an immensely clarifying ruling, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney invoked Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale when he declared that Georgia’s six-week abortion ban violates the state constitution. Henceforth, he wrote, abortions would be allowable up until the 22nd week of pregnancy, which is a return to the Roe v. Wade standard.

His ruling could well be overturned by the Georgia Supreme Court, but in the meantime let’s celebrate a judge for citing a work of literature to make his case.

In her article on the ruling, Washington Post’s Praveena Somasundaram notes that six weeks is “the earliest that fetal cardiac electrical activity can be detected and before many people know they are pregnant.” McBurney wrote, “Whether one couches it as liberty or privacy (or even equal protection), this dispute is fundamentally about the extent of a woman’s right to control what happens to and within her body.”

Asserting that the Georgia constitution allows people to make their own decisions about everything from tattoos and piercings to elective and essential medical procedures, McBurney said that women’s “liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability.” Then comes the Atwood allusion:

“It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

In Atwood’s novel, of course, the primary job of healthy women is, in fact, to serve as incubators. When the Canadian author wrote her novel in 1985, she was observing how women had had their rights stripped from them in Iran and was also drawing on what had occurred with Black women during American slavery.

I’m not sure, however, that even Atwood could have foreseen that America would one day see a GOP vice-presidential candidate railing against “childless cat ladies,” proposing that voting power should be withdrawn from (and taxes raised on) people who don’t have children, and calling for the Department of Justice to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act, which forbids abortion medication to be shipped through the mail. We’re just now learning of women who have died as a result of the Dobbs decision, including the Georgia woman who was refused emergency care for unexpelled fetal tissue by doctors who feared incurring Georgia 10-year-prison penalty. Meanwhile, Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of pregnant people (including the right to abortion) has documented 210 cases of women being charged for pregnancy-related conduct in the 12 months following Dobbs. Also, Project 2025 and various red state legislators have proposed a range of further extreme measures, including tracking menstrual cycles, forbidding crossing state lines to have abortions, subpoenaing the medical records of women who have so traveled, locking up anyone who assists a woman in getting an abortion, and administering the death penalty for various abortion infractions. These measures would have been unimaginable before Dobbs.

But that’s what great authors do: they imagine. Atwood has long paid close attention to toxic misogyny within Evangelical and rightwing Catholic movements—and within various fundamentalist religions worldwide—so has proven to be more clear-eyed on these matters than the rest of us.

And because she has, the world has a vital narrative framework through which to understand what we are experiencing, just as it has had 1984, Brave New World, and Zamiatin’s We to understand authoritarian movements; Atwood’s Oryk and Crake series to understand the perils of climate change and unregulated corporatism; and other works of what Atwood calls “speculative fiction” to understand other momentous changes.

Of these works, Handmaid’s Tale stands out for its further incarnation as a hit television series and a graphic novel. The series, meanwhile, has provided protesters with an instantly recognizable and powerful iconography: women wearing the red robes and white bonnets of Atwood’s handmaids. If authoritarian governments disempower its people by isolating dissidents, Handmaid’s Tale brings them together.

 To be sure, state legislatures and rightwing school boards are doing their part by banning both the graphic novel and the novel itself from various libraries, but people are still finding their way to Atwood’s articulation.

 Ray Bradbury, who understood the power of novels, once imagined a society that banned reading altogether, one in which fire departments are paid to set fires (to burn books) rather than to put them out. As we watch the ever-growing lists of books that people want to see banned—and examine their reasons for the bans—we come to see that few works of lit are safe. In my book Better Living through Literature I talk about how Anna Karenina bolstered a Somali political prisoner, Little Women helped a kidnapped Pakistani girl hold on to her sense of self, various Shakespeare plays inspired the prisoners in South Africa’s notorious Robben Island Prison (including Nelson Mandela), and Pride and Prejudice came to the aid of Iranian women thrown out of universities. The list of books that readers have used to resist oppression goes on and on and is never-ending.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said the other night that J.D. Vance is espousing a political philosophy that wants to destroy anything that conservatives can’t control. She was focused on how he wants to punish universities and independent-minded corporations, but she could have included the imagining that poems and stories set in motion. Few things are more uncontrollable than that.

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Rosh Hashanah: Running into a New Year

By Robin Bates | Published: October 1, 2024
Picasso, Two Women Running on the Beach

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Wednesday – Rosh Hashanah

As I was searching for a poem for Judaism’s celebration of its new year, which begins today, I came across a wonderful selection of appropriate lyrics assembled by one Rebekah Lowin.  Lowin has not limited herself to Jewish poets as she shares lyrics capturing the freshness of leaving behind the past and beginning again.

The poem I’ve chosen I’ve shared once before on this occasion. In “i am running into a new year,” Lucille Clifton appears to be referring to her 46th birthday. A birthday, like a new year, is an opportunity to look back over one’s life and take stock. Thus, the poem is very much in the spirit of the High Holy Days, when sins of the past year are acknowledged and released.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, however, give observers a yearly opportunity to review the past twelve months whereas Clifton sounds like she’s had certain things on her mind for at least 30 years. These appear to involve excessive self-criticism and broken promises to herself.

Still, better late than never to move past such self-harm. Here’s the poem:

i am running into a new year
by Lucille Clifton

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

What is she loving and leaving? Perhaps some of the self-limiting myths she has lived with for decades, myths that are so bound up with her sense of herself that it feels like a betrayal to let them go. They catch in her hair “like strong fingers.”

The joy expressed in the poem gives us hope that Clifton really will break free this time. May observers this coming week experience that same exhilarating sense of renewal.

Past Posts about the High Holy Days

–Alicia Ostriker – Poems for Judaism’s High Holy Days
–Marge Piercy – The Light You Seek Hides in Your Belly
–Grace Schulman May God’s Love Be Taught at Last in Jerusalem
—Rachel Barenblat–Rosh Hashanah: How to Keep It New
—Enid Shomer–How Rosh Hashanah Is Like Swimming
—Marge Piercy–Let My Words Turn into Sparks
—Yehuda Amichai–Theoretically, a Season for Everything
—Emma Lazarus–High above the Flood and Fire Ye Held the Scroll
—Kadya Molodowsky–Blowing for Hope in the Face of Darkness
—Alicia Ostriker–Entering the Days of Awe
—Muriel Ruykeyser and Denise Levertov: Rosh Hashanah – A Stirring of Wonder
—Marge Piercy: Rosh Hashanah – Weave Real Connections
—Lucille Clifton: On 9-11 Firemen Ascended Jacob’s Ladder
—Rashani: Blowing for Hope in the Face of Darkness
—A Ninth Century Prayer for Yom Kippur
—Adrienne Rich’s Yom Kippur Thoughts about Conflict 
—Jane Kenyon: Thirsting of Disordered Souls
—Rashani: Out of Darkness, Sanctified into Being 
–Stanley Kunitz: Live in the Layers, Not on the Litter 
—Philip Schultz: Believe in the Utter Sweetness of Your Life  

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Advice for Climate Prophets

By Robin Bates | Published: September 30, 2024
Helene damage in Appalachian North Carolina

Note: I will be traveling over the next couple of days so blog posts will be appearing at irregular times. By Wednesday Julia and I will be settled down in Slovenia, where I have a six-week stint teaching at the University of Ljubljana. More on that in future posts.

Tuesday

Watching the devastating impact of Hurricane Helene on Swannanoa, North Carolina—the town was literally swept away—is our most recent reminder of the havoc that lies in store for us as the world heats up. While Donald Trump and Project 2025 claim that climate change is a hoax—and propose measures that will make it even worse—Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina are witnesses to the latest instance of what happens when the Gulf of Mexico becomes abnormally warm. And this, as the world knows to its sorrow, is only one of the extreme weather events that we humans have unleashed upon ourselves with our excessive hydrocarbons.

As climate scientists—“mad-eyed from stating the obvious” (to quote from the poem I share today)—search for ways to communicate the horrors that are in store for us, poet Richard Wilbur has some advice. To be sure, “Advice to a Prophet” is speaking of nuclear annihilation rather than climate change, but the poem’s advice still holds.

As Wilbur sees it, warning about “weapons, their force and range,/ The long numbers that rocket the mind” doesn’t effectively communicate the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Wilbur observes that, in the face of such language, our “slow, unreckoning hearts” may be “left behind, unable to fear what is too strange.” Perhaps the same happens when climate scientists warn about glacier melt or sea level rise.

Instead, Wilbur says, our doomsday prophets should speak of “the world’s own change.” After all, we know what it’s like to see the world being degraded before our eyes. “Though we cannot conceive/Of an undreamt thing,” the poet notes, “we know to our cost/ How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,/ How the view alters.”

As I watch television footage of trees being swept away in the deluge, I think of Wilbur’s jack-pine losing “its knuckled grip on the cold ledge.” And while the hurricane-maddened rivers aren’t killing all the “gliding trout” the way a nuclear blast would, they have been claiming other victims. When Wilbur asks whether we will understand what it means to be “lofty and long standing/ When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close,” I think of those other trees that climate change is killing, whether through insects migrating north or (in the tropics) through dehydration.

Here’s the poem:

Advice to a Prophet
By Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters.  We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling.  What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Xanthus, incidentally, is the mythical river that rose up in horror from all the Trojan bodies that Achilles, in his wrath, was casting into it. As its waves attempted to drown the Greek warrior, the Greek god Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, sent down holy fire, forcing the river to retreat. In other words, it’s a powerful image to use by a poet warning of nuclear Armageddon. It also works well to capture how modern technology is upsetting the natural order.

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Trump as Washed-Up Salesman?

By Robin Bates | Published: September 29, 2024
Jack Lemmon as Shel Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross

Monday

Here’s a heartening observation for those worried sick about Donald Trump being returned to power. Ryan Teague Beckwith of MSNBC’s newsletter puts the ex-president in the same category as two literary washed-up salesmen, observing, “There’s nothing sadder than an aging salesman trying to close one last deal.”

The salesmen he mentions are Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman and Shelly Levene of Glengarry Glen Ross, and he also throws “poor ol’ Gil“ from The Simpsons into the mix.

The scenes he has in mind are Loman “desperately trying to get that desk job” and Levene “pleading with his office manager for ‘the good leads.’” Beckwith writes that Trump has lately been reaching “new peaks of sweaty salesmanship on the campaign trail as he seeks to turn around a race that he appears to believe he could lose”:

Trump’s campaign has reached the “But wait, there’s more!” phase of the infomercial, as he has recently tossed off promises to abolish taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security; make in-vitro fertilization free to patients; cap credit card interest rates; cut car insurance rates and restore the state and local tax deduction in addition to the campaign agenda he already outlined.

Here are passages of Loman and Levene pleading. Loman has just learned that he is being “let go” by his old boss’s son after having given his life to the company. As you read them, imagine Loman and Levene as Trump pleading with an American public that has become weary of his shenanigans and that is beginning to walk out of his rallies:

Willie: I’m talking about your father! There were promises made across this desk! You mustn’t tell me you’ve got people to see — I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance! You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit! (After a pause.) Now pay attention. Your father — in 1928 I had a big year. I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions.

HOWARD (impatiently): Now, Willy, you never averaged…

WILLY (banging his hand on the desk): I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in the year of 1928! And your father came to me — or rather, I was in the office here — it was right over this desk — and he put his hand on my shoulder…

HOWARD (getting up): You’ll have to excuse me, Willy, I gotta see some people. Pull yourself together.

And here’s Levene begging for precious leads on houses in an upscale development. He’s talking to his supervisor in a Chinese restaurant:

LEVENE John…John…John.  Okay.  John. John.  Look: (pause) The Glengarry Highland’s leads, you’re sending Roma out.  Fine. He’s a good man.  We know what he is.  He’s fine.  All I’m saying, you look at the board, he’s throwing…wait, wait, wait, he’s throwing them away, he’s throwing the leads away.  All that I’m saying, that you’re wasting leads. I don’t want to tell you your job. All that I’m saying, things get set, I know they do, you get a certain mindset… A guy gets a reputation.  We know how this…all I’m saying, put a closer on the job. There’s more than one man for the… Put a…wait a second, put a proven man out…and you watch, now wait a second–and you watch your dollar volumes…You start closing them for fifty ‘stead of twenty- five…you put a closer on the…

WILLIAMSON Shelly, you blew the last…

LEVENE No.  John.  No.  Let’s wait, let’s back up here, I did…will you please?  Wait a second.  Please.  I didn’t “blow” them.  No.  I didn’t “blow” them.  No.  One kicked out, one I closed…

WILLIAMSON …you didn’t close…

LEVENE …I, if you’d listen to me. Please.  I closed the cocksucker. His ex, John, his ex, I didn’t know he was married…he, the judge invalidated the…

The desperation of both men anticipates their demise. Loman commits suicide while Levene is caught stealing the precious leads and faces possible jail time. If Trump’s current desperation turns out to be well-founded, the second prospect awaits him as well.

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David’s Sweet Laudation of the Lord

By Robin Bates | Published: September 28, 2024
Rembrandt, David Playing the Harp before Saul

Sunday

The other day I was thumbing through Harold Bloom’s anthology American Religious Poetry and came across an Anthony Hecht poem that caught my fancy. “Saul and David” refers to the episode in 1 Samuel 16 where Saul is haunted by an evil spirit and assuaged by David’s lyre playing:

Now the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil[a] spirit from the Lord tormented him. Saul’s attendants said to him, “See, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. Let our lord command his servants here to search for someone who can play the lyre. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes on you, and you will feel better.”

So Saul said to his attendants, “Find someone who plays well and bring him to me.” One of the servants answered, “I have seen a son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the lyre. He is a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well and is a fine-looking man. And the Lord is with him.”

Then Saul sent messengers to Jesse and said, “Send me your son David, who is with the sheep.” So Jesse took a donkey loaded with bread, a skin of wine and a young goat and sent them with his son David to Saul….Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.

Here’s the poem:

Saul and David
By Anthony Hecht

It was a villainous spirit, snub-nosed, foul
Of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent,
That squatted within him wheresoever he went
          And possessed the soul of Saul.

There was no peace on pillow or on throne.
In dreams the toothless, dwarfed, and squinny-eyed
Started a joyful rumor that he had died
          Unfriended and alone.

The doctors were confounded. In his distress, he
Put aside arrogant ways and condescended
To seek among the flocks where they were tended
          By the youngest son of Jesse,

A shepherd boy, but goodly to look upon,
Unnoticed but God-favored, sturdy of limb
As Michelangelo later imagined him,
          Comely even in his frown.

Shall a mere shepherd provide the cure of kings?
Heaven itself delights in ironies such
As this, in which a boy’s fingers would touch
          Pythagorean strings

And by a modal artistry assemble
The very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired
Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord,
          And make Saul cease to tremble.

Pythagoras is the supposed inventor of musical harmony who believed that music reflects the divine order of the stars. As Yeats references the philosopher in “Among School Children,”

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard…

In this case, the “sweet laudation of the Lord” is the psalms, which “make Saul cease to tremble.” Such is the power of art.

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