Chaucer Doth Tweet

Thursday

This is to alert you to a delightful Chaucer parody account entitled Chaucer Doth Tweet. In addition to its wit, I love how it’s very much in the spirit of Chaucer, one of England’s great humorists. It takes me back to the day when I would have my students read, and sometimes recite, the opening lines of Canterbury Tales in the original.

It also serves the serious purpose to reminding us that the English literature of the Middle Ages is worth reading and returning to. In fact, it introduces itself to us with a mission statement along these lines:

Studyinge the literatures of the past ys not antiquarian distractioun, nor ys it implicit praise of what ys studied; ynstead, critical studye of past literatures ys vital for seekinge more just, equitable, capacious, and hopeful futures. The presente ys just one part of progress.

Now for the fun stuff. Since Halloween is coming up, this tweet has been circulating:

Thei did the Mash! Thei did the Monstere Mash.
The Monstere Mash: beholde, sepulchral smasshe!
Thei did the Mash, and it kaughte on moost fast –
Hark, heare the Mash! Forsooth, the Monstere Mash!

Many kids will be dressed up as this superhero:

Spydere Man, Spydere Man
Doth al things a spydere kan
Sondry webbes he kan weaven
Thieves lyke flyes he kan cacchen
Lo! anon cometh Spydere Man

And then there’s this tweet in praise of Friday:

Ich thynke but litel of a Mondaye bleake
Tuesdaye grey and
Wednesdaye eke
Thursdaye Ich care nat for thee
Yet Fridaye Ich am yn love
 
Mondaye thou mayst fall awaye
Tuesdaye, Wednesdaye,
myne herte breake
No mirthe ys founde upon Thursdaye
Yet Fridaye Ich am yn love

There’s a wonderful summation of Homeric epics:

What thei do nat telle yow about Homeric epic ys that lyke thirtye to fortye percent of the texte ys just about various people makinge grilled meat dishes and setting out appetizers.

I conclude with the account’s parody of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now”:

Rowes and flowes of seraph hair
And sugarid castles yn the ayre
And feathir valleyes everichwher
Ich thoughte on cloudes that waye

Yet now thei do but block the sonne
Thei rayne and snowe on everichon
So manye things Ich wolde have done
But cloudes did block the waye

Chyk it oute. Thou wilte thanke mae.

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My Upcoming Ljubljana Lectures

Hogarth, The Lecture

Wednesday

For the month of November, Julia and I will be in Slovenia, where we have spent some of our happiest years. I received a teaching Fulbright to the University of Ljubljana in 1987-88 (when Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia) and another in 1994-95, not long after Slovenia had broken away. I will be connecting with former colleagues and students and contributing multiple lectures to a Shakespeare class and a post-colonial literature class. I will also give single lectures in an early British Literature class, a Canadian literature class, a literary theory class and perhaps others.

In other words, I will be in my comfort zone.

I’ll report in future posts on how things are going, but I use today’s essay to set forth the texts I plan to teach.

For Shakespeare, I’ve been told I can pick from seven plays for three classes, those being King Lear, Merchant of Venice, Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Winter’s Tale, and Taming of the Shrew. Which would you choose?

I can squeeze some extra plays in there if I teach two in a class, so I’m considering that—although not for King Lear as that deserves an entire class to itself (if not more). Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew are an intriguing pairing since both pose such challenges for modern audiences, what with the anti-Semitism expressed in the one and the sexism expressed in the other (but not, I would argue, by Shakespeare). Romeo and Juliet is a real temptation because of the seething sex and violence at its core, multiplied by adolescence. And then I’d love to give over a full class to The Tempest, which touches on issues of colonialism, alchemy, magic, and art.

In short, I still haven’t made up my mind.

I’m clearer about the seven classes I will teach in the Anglophone/ Post-Colonial Literature class. Here are the topics and works:

British Colonialism – Ryder Haggard’s She, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books and Kim, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Post-Colonialist Literary Theory – Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

Nigerian Literature – Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

Indian Literature I – Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Three Years, Eight Months, and 28 Nights

Indian Literature II – Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

South African Literature – J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; short story by Nadine Gordimer

Jamaican Literature – Marlon James, Red Wolf, Black Leopard

In other words, I’ll start with how Britains saw both the romance and the horror of empire; move on to Fanon’s famous call for the colonized to fight back—and to write back; examine Achebe’s attack on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, how he validates Fanon, and how members of the Nigerian disaspora (Adichie is Nigerian-American) are rediscovering their roots; look at how two Indian authors negotiate their colonial past (and also their own Muslim/Hindu/Syrian Christian pasts); survey how two white South African authors negotiate apartheid; and conclude with how a Jamaican author uses fantasy to explore his violent society.  

I’m sure the class will evolve once I start my series of lectures. But this is what I’m envisioning so far.

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Manskinner Boris & Putin’s Terror Tactics

Vladimir Putin

Tuesday

As Ukrainian forces liberate more villages and cities from the Russians, they continue to encounter mass graves and reports of torture, which takes my mind to Boris the Manskinner, from Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A Stalinist agent battling the Japanese during World War II and after, Boris is one of the most frightening literary villains I have ever encountered. Like Putin, he uses terror as a weapon to ensure submission.

Before you read further, however, a warning: today’s post is not for the faint of heart.

We hear about Boris from Lieutenant Mamiya, who first witnesses the Russian’s brutality while on a scouting mission in Russia-controlled Mongolia during the war. Later, he encounters Boris again when interned in a Russian prison camp. During the first encounter, he watches Boris order one of his fellow Japanese comrades to be slowly skinned alive. He himself is thrown down a dry well and barely manages to escape alive.

Boris works for Lavrentiy Beria, an actual person who headed Stalin’s secret police and was a serial rapist and killer. For a while, all goes well for Beria and Boris, although they have to scramble after the war is over:

Stalin and Beria had to cook up their internal-conspiracy theory, covering up their own responsibility for having failed to predict the Nazi invasion in order their positions of leadership. A lot of people died for nothing while being cruelly tortured. Boris and his man were said to have skinned at least five people, then, and rumor had it that he proudly displayed the skiins on the walls of his office.

Ultimately, Boris is himself imprisoned for having tortured and killed the nephew of a high ranking Communist official. We learn that he “killed the man with torture, poking hot irons into every opening—ears, nostrils, rectum, penis, whatever.” Thanks to Beria, Boris is not hanged but rather sent to the same prison camp holding Mamiya. Given his fearsome reputation, Boris manages to seize control, after which he conducts a reign of strategic terror. One of Mamiya’s friends fills him in on Boris:

According to Nikolai (who was becoming increasingly reluctant to talk about anything), several Russians he knew had simply disappeared in the night. Officially, they were listed as missing or having been involved in accidents, but there was no doubt they had been “taken care of” by Boris’s henchmen. People’s lives were now in danger if they failed to follow Boris’s orders or if they merely failed to please him. A few men tried to complain directly to Party Central about the abuses going on in camp, but that was the last anyone ever saw of them. “I heard they even killed a little kid—a seven-year-old—to keep his parents in line. Beat him to death while they watched,” Nikolai whispered to me, pale-faced.

Speaking of kids, UNICEF estimated in August that close to 1000 Ukrainian children have died or been injured since the February invasion. And while shelling is probably responsible for most of these deaths, there are documented instances of children being raped and killed by Russian forces.

I don’t want to typecast all Russians here, and they are far from alone in committing war crimes. Murakami has a scene of a Japanese war crime (a Chinese prisoner is beaten to death with a baseball bat), and the United States has its own share of stories. The difference with Putin’s forces, however, is that barbaric cruelty appears to be a deliberate strategy, as opposed to an aberration. At the very least, we try and sentence American war criminals in the U.S. Armed Forces (including the man that Donald Trump praised and pardoned), whereas it appears that Russia encourages its soldiers to commit atrocities.

Boris the Manskinner, in other words, would feel right at home in the current conflict.

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The Bard Cited in DeSantis Smackdown

Branaugh as Henry V delivering Agincourt speech

Monday

A Florida judge has quoted Shakespeare while throwing out a case reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. In case you haven’t been paying attention, GOP governor Ron DeSantis has been trying to set himself up as Donald Trump’s successor with a series of authoritarian stunts. One of these involved arresting various African American ex-convicts for fraudulently voting, even after the state of Florida had told them it was okay to vote.

In videos taken of the arrests, both the police and the arrestees are confused by the charges. As in the days of segregation, however, the actual goal of the arrests is to frighten other African Americans from voting. Oh, and to garner DeSantis points with white supremacists, who don’t believe that Blacks should be voting in the first place.

The judge reasoned that DeSantis’s prosecutor had overstepped his jurisdictional bounds. Or, as he put it at one point, “His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings.”

DeSantis explained that his prosecutor had to step in, despite jurisdictional boundaries, because local prosecutors were “loath” to make the arrests. Once the prosecutor did so, however, he opened himself up to a judicial slap down. And, as it turned out, to a comparison with Shakespeare’s Henry V.

A eulogy to Henry V opens the first of the three Henry VI plays. Henry V, victor of Agincourt, has just died, leading Gloucester, Lord Protector of the young successor, to deliver these words:

England ne’er had a king until his time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command:
His brandish’d sword did blind men with his beams:
His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings;
His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire,
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.
What should I say? his deeds exceed all speech:
He ne’er lift up his hand but conquered.

Given that Gloucester is praising Henry V, the Florida judge’s use of the passage seems misapplied. After all, he is criticizing the state prosecutor for spreading his arms, not praising him. Indeed, I suspect that DeSantis would love for these words to be applied to him, especially “His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire,/ More dazzled and drove back his enemies” and “his deeds exceed all speech:/ He ne’er lift up his hand but conquered.”

In the judge’s defense, however, Goucester’s words can be read as a critique if looked at from an historical perspective: Henry V spread his arms too wide in his attempt to take over France, and his son and successor Henry VI—thanks in part to Joan of Arc—would lose everything his father gained. Shakespeare was well aware of this.

So think of it this way: Gov. DeSantis and his minions are charging into areas where they have no business, whether by setting up a sketchy anti-election fraud unit (when there’s virtually no election fraud in Florida), imposing a prominent GOP politician as the University of Florida’s president, duping and then flying Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, and other semi-fascist moves. One wonders whether, like Henry V, he’ll win temporary victories, only to lose the war. Or as Shakespeare himself puts it at the conclusion of Henry V, although Henry arranged to get his son “crown’d King of France and England,” subsequent mismanagement made it so that “they lost France and made his England bleed.”

Instead of spreading dragon wings, how about just working on being a good governor?

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Thinned Back to Bare Wood

Andrew Wyeth, Pennsylvania Landscape

Spiritual Sunday

A few weeks ago my friend Sue Schmidt alerted me to this exquisite “Autumn” poem by Jane Hirshfield. In it, she compares trees stripped of their leaves to a beloved icon that has been kissed so many times that it has darkened. In this case, however, the kiss is delivered by the wind and the gold flakes that once covered the icon are the falling leaves:

Autumn
By Jane Hirshfield

Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens—
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.

I love the idea that the icon is not diminished, even though it is “thinned back to bare wood.” The reverence of those delivering the kisses render the picture even more holy. The sentiment reminds me of the central theme of Margery Williams Bianco’s The Velveteen Rabbit. In it, a stuffed toy learns what it means to become “Real”:

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

And:

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

As Hirshfield sees it, the trees are not so much stripped as taken down to their essence. Two Sundays ago I quoted Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” but what he sees as tragedy, Hirshfield regards as spiritual growth.

As I grow old (I’m 71), I see the wind as the march of time, which strips us down to our fundamentals. Though much is lost, at this age I am better able to distinguish between what is important and what is peripheral.

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Trees Don Their Fall Finery

Fall foliage in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains

Friday

Fall colors continue to explode in Appalachian Tennessee, leading me to this understated poem by Emily Dickinson. Given that Dickinson was famous for not following fashion—she wore only white dresses and was known locally as “the nun of Amherst”—one figures she must be deeply moved indeed by autumn foliage to “put a trinket on”:

The morns are meeker than they were – 
The nuts are getting brown –
The berry’s cheek is plumper –
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf –
The field a scarlet gown –
Lest I sh’d be old-fashioned 
I’ll put a trinket on. 

Actually, the view of Dickinson as a dainty old maid has long been exploded, at least when it comes to her internal life. After all, she wrote such poems as “My life stood like a loaded gun” and “Wild nights!” Still, externally she maintained an ascetic appearance, meaning that jewelry would have represented a passionate response.

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Irresponsible Coal Companies

Before them, at their very feet, was the brink of a black ragged chasm hidden by the thick grass.–Dickens, Hard Times 

Thursday

I haven’t written about the environment recently so I report today on an article about irresponsible coal companies. My English professor son Toby Wilson-Bates alerted me to it and then, very smartly, linked it with Charles Dickens’s Hard Times.

The article, “The Coal Is Gone but the Mess Remains,” is both discouraging and unsurprising. According to Bloomberg reporters Josh Saul, Zachary R. Mider and Dave Mistich, coal companies have found various ways to wriggle out of their commitment to restore land that they’ve destroyed, leaving behind blighted landscapes and ruined homeowners. Their escape hatches include creative use of bankruptcy laws and the unloading of land parcels to smaller and less profitable companies. Often costs which the coal companies should have paid, including pensions and medical bills (especially for black lung) are shifted to American taxpayers. Clean-up that was supposed to happen never happens.

Which brings us to Dickens. There we see coal companies that, despite locking the city of Coketown in a perpetual “shroud…which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays,” find various ways to escape regulation. Their most potent weapon is the threat they will go out of business, which they wield the way Vladimir Putin wields the threat of nuclear strikes. I’ve posted on this in the past, but because the passage captures so accurately present-day corporate whining, here it is again:

Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made.  Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before.  They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke.  Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there.  It took the form of a threat.  Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’  This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.

And then, with the savage sarcasm for which he is famous, Dickens provides reassurance:

However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it.  So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

The passage Toby had in mind, however, is what happens to abandoned mines. The answer: they are just, well, abandoned, with no regard for public safety. As a result, miner Stephen Blackpool—who is hurrying back to Coketown to restore his good name—falls down the appropriately named Hell Shaft. Because the entrance is hidden in the grass, Hell Shaft also almost claims the two women who have gone looking for him.

Before Stephen passes away, however, he delivers a monologue about all the deaths that Hell Shaft has caused—first as an active mine and then as one that is “let alone”:

‘I ha’ fell into th’ pit, my dear, as have cost wi’in the knowledge o’ old fok now livin, hundreds and hundreds o’ men’s lives—fathers, sons, brothers, dear to thousands an’ thousands, an’ keeping ’em fro’ want and hunger.  I ha’ fell into a pit that ha’ been wi’ th’ Firedamp crueller than battle.  I ha’ read on ’t in the public petition, as onny one may read, fro’ the men that works in pits, in which they ha’ pray’n and pray’n the lawmakers for Christ’s sake not to let their work be murder to ’em, but to spare ’em for th’ wives and children that they loves as well as gentlefok loves theirs.  When it were in work, it killed wi’out need; when ’tis let alone, it kills wi’out need.  See how we die an’ no need, one way an’ another—in a muddle—every day!’

Blackpool, being a saintly soul, doesn’t blame anyone. As Dickens puts it, he expresses these sentiments “without any anger against anyone.  Merely as the truth.” But Dickens is angry and so are the authors of the Bloomberg article. The truth about how the abandoned mines continue to disrupt the lives of West Virginia residents is shocking.

Or perhaps not shocking since few people in positions of power these days appear to be held accountable for their actions. That is certainly the case with many coal mine owners. John Stoehr, who writes a daily essay for Editorial Board, recently observed that the phrase “everyone is equal before the law” is not, and has never been, America’s reality.

Instead, he says, we must see it as an aspiration, which is not nothing. Novels like Hard Times and articles like the Bloomberg piece are driven by that aspiration.

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How Media Would Spin Macbeth

Wednesday

Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri periodically hits her column out of the park, and she did so again recently when lashing the mainstream media for going soft on GOP extremism. In her introduction to the piece, she set forth two ways that news organizations approach politics. Although they sometimes “write headlines and tweets that describe events in a straightforward way,” too often they don’t:

At other times, for instance when describing Kanye West’s threat to “go death con 3 on Jewish people” as “alleged anti-semitic remarks,” or an incident where a police officer kills someone as an “officer-involved shooting,” they use another, alternative style that makes it very difficult to tell what has actually happened.

Petri then proceeds to imagine how this second approach would have handled Macbeth’s bloody rise to power. She sets the tone with an imagined headline:

King Duncan Perishes in Macbeth-involved Incident

What follows is in the same vein:

Shortly before the king’s demise, Thane of Cawdor Macbeth and his wife came under attack for alleged anti-Duncan remarks about “murther” and the need to “stop up the access and passage to remorse.” Critics of the Macbeths, known for their fiery, controversial rhetoric, linked these remarks to Duncan’s death hours later in Macbeth’s castle; others noted that it was a sign of creeping censorship to want to stop Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth from saying exactly what was on their mind.

Margaret Sullivan, former media columnist for the Washington Post, penned a recent column discussing how journalism must start reporting political news in a new way. As Sullivan observes that, during the rise of Donald Trump,

Too many times, we acted as his stenographers or megaphones. Too often, we failed to refer to his many falsehoods as lies. It took too long to stop believing that, whenever he calmed down for a moment, he was becoming “presidential.” And it took too long to moderate our instinct to give equal weight to both sides, even when one side was using misinformation for political gain.

After all, if the whole purpose of journalism is to uncover the truth, one can’t stop with what political actors claim to be the truth.

In her column, Petri moves on to Shakespeare’s witches and, in doing so, gets into the distinction between positive and normative statements. The difference is between what is vs. what should be:

Three purported witches, from whom Macbeth has yet to distance himself, also made what their critics called inflammatory remarks about Macbeth being king hereafter. The women claimed that their statements were positive, not normative, and that this was a case of listener interpretation.

Don’t blame us for predicting what will happen, in other words. We’re just telling what the future will be, not saying that it would be a good thing. That’s on you.

In Trump’s case, there’s no difference: what he claims as fact and how he believes the world should be are one and the same. He only hears what he wants to hear and makes that his reality.

The column gets better. Too avoid sounding too definite, thereby alienating potential subscribers amongst Macbeth’s supporters, Petri’s hypothetical newspaper account never clearly recounts what actually happened:

Firebrand Macbeth, who did indeed become king after Duncan’s demise in the incident — in which Duncan’s sleeping body repeatedly made aggressive contact with a dagger in Macbeth’s possession in what critics described as a “stabbing position” — waded deeper into controversy as his reign continued. Macbeth and Mrs. Macbeth announced they were launching a thorough internal review of the incident that led to Duncan’s death; the two ultimately faulted his guards for allowing his body to launch itself at a dagger in such a hostile, threatening manner. After this review, the guards also ceased to be alive in what critics again called a Macbeth-involved incident.

After the January 6 Congressional hearings, only an idiot would fail to see that Trump instigated the Capitol attack (not to mention all the other things he did in his attempt to retain power). One would also have to be an idiot not to see Macbeth as the driving force behind Banquo’s assassination. Unfortunately, too often the media, by bending over backward to be fair, plays the role of idiot. The language of Petri’s Banquo reportage sounds only too familiar. In the following two paragraphs, we see first the attack and then the Trumpian pushback:

Additionally, Macbeth’s former colleague Banquo perished in a hired-assassin-related incident, leading some critics of the king to lay the violence at his feet, calling it “a direct consequence of his rhetoric.” Indeed, in purported anti-Banquo remarks that critics labeled “asking a hired assassin to murder Banquo and his son Fleance for money,” Macbeth expressed the controversial opinion that the murderers should kill both men and that he would pay them for doing so.

Mrs. Macbeth pushed back against these allegations, telling critics to “go at once” and wondering why so much attention was paid to Macbeth’s allegedly inciting remarks and so little was paid to those critics who, for instance, said that his borrowed robes hung upon him “like giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief,” or called him a “tyrant,” a remark she called dangerously incendiary.

Lady Macbeth here is using “both-siderism” to distract and deflect critics. One version of her approach has been characterized as  “deny, deflect, distance, deride,” with that last verb marking the shift from defense to offense. I’m not the racist, you’re the racist.

And then there’s the “I was only being metaphorical” defense, which is how Petri concludes her column. On Thursday, I wondered how quickly Trump confederate Roger Stone would start using that defense after being caught on camera (this immediately before election day) saying the following:

Fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence. We’ll have to start smashing pumpkins, if you know what I mean.

Another Trump confederate, Steve Bannon, also used metaphorical language on the eve of January 6 that could (by biased sources) that he might attempt to use as an escape hatch:

All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. Just understand this: All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It’s going to be moving. It’s going to be quick.

And: 

It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. … And all I can say is: Strap in. You have made this happen, and tomorrow it’s game day.”

And then there was Trump’s own tweet: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

That Macbeth’s language is more direct than these calls to action wouldn’t prevent his defenders from using the same defense, Petri notes. Again, she points first to accusations from critics, then to the defense:

Macbeth’s detractors criticized his statement that “I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er,” as “obviously, the words of a murderer; you do not have normal people just rambling about how far they have stepped into blood.” Macbeth responded that they were a “metaphor.” Defenders of Macbeth noted that they were “not only a metaphor but in exquisite iambic pentameter.”

Petri’s satire works particularly well for her purposes because the Macbeths are noteworthy for how direct and explicit they are, making any defense of their actions difficult. They announce their plans to kill and then go kill. She would have gotten closer to Donald Trump’s actual M.O. if she’d turned to a different Shakespearean king, say Henry IV. We know from Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen how Trump conveys his orders through hints (thereby providing him with plausible deniability), and it is through such a hint that Henry achieves the assassination of Richard II:

EXTON Didst thou not mark the king, what words he spake,
‘Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?’
Was it not so?

Servant These were his very words.

EXTON ‘Have I no friend?’ quoth he: he spake it twice,
And urged it twice together, did he not?

Servant He did.

EXTON And speaking it, he wistly look’d on me,
And who should say, ‘I would thou wert the man
That would divorce this terror from my heart’;
Meaning the king at Pomfret. Come, let’s go:
I am the king’s friend, and will rid his foe.

After the deed is done, however, Henry, like Trump, pleads his innocence and banishes Exton. After all, the nobleman is now an encumbrance:

HENRY Exton, I thank thee not; for thou hast wrought
A deed of slander with thy fatal hand
Upon my head and all this famous land.

EXTON From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE They love not poison that do poison need,
Nor do I thee: though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murderer, love him murdered.
The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labor,
But neither my good word nor princely favor:
With Cain go wander through shades of night,
And never show thy head by day nor light.

Trump will similarly throw former supporters under the bus when doing so suits his needs. Always he is an innocent, not to mention a poor, abused victim.

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Trumpists Resemble Dracula’s Renfield

Dwight Frye as Renfield in 1931 Dracula

Tuesday

A New York Magazine column has just applied a Dracula character Trump enablers and followers. Upon looking up the relevant passages in Bram Stoker’s novel, I discovered the allusion was even better than I realized.

The reference comes to us courtesy of Tom Nichols, Atlantic writer, professor emeritus of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College, and prominent anti-Trumper. Trump, he writes, is like a hurricane except for the fact that he can “return and destroy again.” Trump, Nichols continues is “pacing just offshore, waiting and plotting to flatten and flood our political system, perhaps for good.”

And yet, unlike our response to hurricanes, some Americans are rooting for the winds to hit us while many others have given up resisting them altogether. As Nichols puts it,

And the hell of it is, we Americans know he’s there. We know what he’s done and what he can do (again). Yet millions of us would gladly welcome his landfall again. Millions more of us have thrown up our hands in exasperation as Trump and most of his regiment of Renfields have, for now, managed to escape any consequences for their actions.

Renfield, of course, is Dracula’s realtor and agent. More on him in a moment. But first let’s let Nichols finish up:

Yesterday, in what was likely the final hearing of the January 6 committee, the nation was told, once more and without ambiguity, that Donald Trump, the commander in chief, actively sought to subvert our democratic order. My Atlantic colleague David Frum summed up the committee’s findings—and the nation’s reaction—in one tweet: “Decisive [and] irrefutable documentary evidence that the 45th president of the United States tried to overthrow the US Constitution by violence, no big deal, just another news day.”

In Stoker’s novel, Renfield has been captured and is being studied by the prison doctor. Like an ardent Trumpist, he feels empowered by his Master’s presence. The doctor reports,

He is usually respectful to the attendant and at times servile; but to-night, the man tells me, he was quite haughty. Would not condescend to talk with him at all. All he would say was:—

“I don’t want to talk to you: you don’t count now; the Master is at hand.”

The doctor compares Renfield’s infatuation to a religious mania and warns of danger:

The attendant thinks it is some sudden form of religious mania which has seized him. If so, we must look out for squalls, for a strong man with homicidal and religious mania at once might be dangerous. The combination is a dreadful one.

The good doctor would see his observation confirmed by certain White Christian terrorist groups operating currently in the United States.

Later that evening, we get more insight into what Renfield wants from Dracula. The doctor and prison guards overhear him calling out to the vampire after they track him down following a prison escape:

He was talking, apparently to someone, but I was afraid to go near enough to hear what he was saying, lest I might frighten him, and he should run off. Chasing an errant swarm of bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic, when the fit of escaping is upon him! After a few minutes, however, I could see that he did not take note of anything around him, and so ventured to draw nearer to him—the more so as my men had now crossed the wall and were closing him in. I heard him say:—

“I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar off. Now that You are near, I await Your commands, and You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master, in Your distribution of good things?”

Trump followers expect no less. The fact that Trump has shown, repeatedly, that he cares for no one other than himself does not faze them. They have found their savior and nothing else matters. Like Renfield, they cry out, “I shall be patient, Master. It is coming—coming—coming!”

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