When News Resembles an Onion Headline

By Robin Bates | Published: October 4, 2022

Wednesday

It’s not often that The Onion, perhaps America’s foremost publication for comic parody, gets serious, but it got serious recently—or at least semi-serious—when it supported a man who had been jailed for, well, parody.

According to Institute for Justice, here’s what happened. Anthony Novak, long-time resident of Parma Ohio, created a mock Facebook page imitating that Facebook page of the Parma police department. After receiving 11 complaints, the police arrested Novak, even though it didn’t take much to recognize his creation as parody (starting with its satirical slogan, “We no crime”). Among its items were the announcement “of an ‘official stay inside and catch up with family day’ to ‘reduce future crimes’ during which anyone caught outside would be arrested.”

Unamused, the Parma Police Department

obtained a warrant for his arrest, searched his apartment, seized his electronics, and charged him with a felony under an Ohio law that criminalizes using a computer to “disrupt” “police operations.” Anthony had to spend four days in jail before making bail. He was prosecuted, but after a full criminal trial, a jury found him not guilty.

In response, Anthony filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the department, only to see the 6th U.S. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals grant the officers qualified immunity and dismiss the case. He has appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which is where the Onion’s supportive brief enters the scene.

While solidly argued and filled with the relevant precedents, the Onion’s brief is unusual in that it performs parody to make its case. For instance, here’s how it describes itself:

The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.

In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and parttime journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world…

And:

The Onion’s journalists have garnered a sterling reputation for accurately forecasting future events. One such coup was The Onion’s scoop revealing that a former president kept nuclear secrets strewn around his beach home’s basement three years before it even happened.

The brief goes on to explain The Onion’s reasons for supporting Novak’s lawsuit:

Americans can be put in jail for poking fun at the government? This was a surprise to America’s Finest News Source and an uncomfortable learning experience for its editorial team. Indeed, “Ohio Police Officers Arrest, Prosecute Man Who Made Fun of Them on Facebook” might sound like a headline ripped from the front pages of The Onion—albeit one that’s considerably less amusing because its subjects are real. So, when The Onion learned about the Sixth Circuit’s ruling in this case, it became justifiably concerned.

Its reasons are given in the spirit of the satiric publication:

First, the obvious: The Onion’s business model was threatened. This was only the latest occasion on which the absurdity of actual events managed to eclipse what The Onion’s staff could make up. Much more of this, and the front page of The Onion would be indistinguishable from The New York Times.

After that, however, the brief gets more serious. Governments having the power to punish those who make fun of them is a dangerous development, it asserts, adding that, in failing to defend parody, the court “imperils an ancient form of discourse.” What then follows is a smart explanation of how parody works. I won’t go into all of it, but key is that the parodist can’t signal parody ahead of time. To do so is to spoil the joke:

The court’s decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the balloon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true. But some forms of comedy don’t work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example. Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and by doing so demonstrate the target’s illogic or absurdity.

“Parody functions by tricking people into thinking that it is real,” the brief explains. When readers “realize that they’ve fallen victim to one of the oldest tricks in the history of rhetoric,” they can then “laugh at their own gullibility.” For parody to announce itself as parody, therefore, strips it of “the very thing that makes it function.”

For an example, the brief goes on to cite the greatest parody ever written, although it does so in characteristic Onion fashion:

Assume that you are reading what appears to be a boring economics paper about the Irish overpopulation crisis of the eighteenth century, and yet, strangely enough, it seems to advocate for solving the dilemma by cooking and eating babies. That seems a bit cruel—until you realize that you in fact are reading “A Modest Proposal.” To be clear, The Onion is not trying to compare itself to Jonathan Swift; its writers are far more talented, and their output will be read long after that hack Swift’s has been lost to the sands of time. Still, The Onion and its writers share with Swift the common goal of replicating a form precisely in order to critique it from within.

As an aside, I’ll note that, when the publisher of Onion came to my college to speak, I asked him if Swift was a model for him and he essentially replied that Swift was the model. Regularly on this blog, usually on April 1, I’ve explored various Swiftian parodies, including “Meditation on a Broomstick,”

“The Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebenezer Elliston,”

and “Predictions for the Year 1708” (where he takes apart a noted astrologer by predicting his death—and then, in a follow-up essay, proving that, despite the man’s assertions to the contrary, he really did die on the date predicted). Gulliver’s Travels too is filled with parody throughout, starting with a parody of travel genre.

But back to The Onion. If parody did not mimic a particular idiom “in order to heighten dissonance between form and content,” it argues, “then no one would use it. Everyone would simply draft straight, logical, uninspiring legal briefs instead.”

The brief then gets to the heart of how The Onion uses parody.  By giving parodists the ability to mimic the voice of a serious authority, parody can

kneecap the authority from within. Parodists can take apart an authoritarian’s cult of personality, point out the rhetorical tricks that politicians use to mislead their constituents, and even undercut a government institution’s real-world attempts at propaganda.

It then cites two somewhat famous instances of authoritarian regimes who took Onion articles seriously:

In 2012, …The Onion proclaimed that Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man alive. China’s state-run news agency republished The Onion’s story as true alongside a slideshow of the dictator himself in all his glory. The Fars Iranian News Agency uncritically picked up and ran with The Onion’s headline “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama.”

And another example:

Republican Congressman John Fleming, who believed that he needed to warn his constituents of a dangerous escalation of the pro-choice movement after reading The Onion’s headline “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.”

The brief has one last important point to make: “A reasonable reader does not need a disclaimer to know that parody is parody.” It goes on to point out all the ways that reasonable readers would have recognized Novak’s facebook spoof to be parody:

But the lack of an explicit disclaimer makes no difference to whether a reasonable reader would discern that this speech was parody. Just to be clear, this was not a close call on the facts: Mr. Novak’s spoof Facebook posts advertised that the Parma Police Department was hosting a “pedophile reform event” in which successful participants could be removed from the sex offender registry and become honorary members of the department after completing puzzles and quizzes; that the department had discovered an experimental technique for abortions and would be providing them to teens for free in a police van; that the department was soliciting job applicants but that minorities were “strongly encourag[ed]” not to apply; and that the department was banning city residents from feeding homeless people in “an attempt to have the homeless population eventually leave our City due to starvation.”  

And it then brings in another big hitter:

For millennia, this has been the rhythm of parody: The author convinces the readers that they’re reading the real thing, then pulls the rug out from under them with the joke. The heart of this form lies in that give and take between the serious setup and the ridiculous punchline. As Mark Twain put it, “The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”

“You don’t want to be on the wrong side of Mark Twain, do you?” The Onion asks the court before darkly concluding,

The Onion intends to continue its socially valuable role bringing the disinfectant of sunlight into the halls of power….And it would vastly prefer that sunlight not to be measured out to its writers in 15-minute increments in an exercise yard.

Unfortunately, with the rising popularity of whacko conspiracy theories (like QAnon’s claims of Democrats as cannibalistic pedophiles), it sometimes seems that certain politicos are using The Onion to shape their political belief systems. Democracy relies on the idea that there are more reasonable people than crazies out there—an “educated citizenry,” in Thomas Jefferson’s worlds—and we must pray that such is the case.

It wasn’t the case with the Parma police department, unfortunately, but at least the jury ruled in Novak’s favor. So I guess that’s the good news.

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Will Putin Use the Deplorable Word?

By Robin Bates | Published: October 3, 2022
Pauline Baynes, illus. from Magician’s Nephew

Tuesday

As Ukraine’s brilliant armed forces, supported by advanced Western weapons systems, continue to claw back territory seized by Russia, people are speculating whether a desperate Vladimir Putin might resort to tactical nuclear weapons. When I hear such talk, a scene from C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew comes to mind.

Regarding such a response, most commentators I’ve read rate the possibility as low, although they do not rule it out altogether. That’s because, as former American ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul has observed, Putin himself seems increasingly unhinged. Just how far will a narcissist go when facing his own collapse? Lewis’s novel gives us an unsettling answer.

Through the use of magic rings, Diggory and Polly have chanced upon another world, one in which there is only one survivor. This is Jadis, queen of Charn, who once found herself pressed as Russian troops in Ukraine are currently being pressed. Like Putin, she too has a terrible weapon, which at one point she shows off to the two children:

The Queen let go of his hand and raised her arm. She drew herself up to her full height and stood rigid. Then she said something which they couldn’t understand (but it sounded horrid) and made an action as if she were throwing something towards the doors. And those high and heavy doors trembled for a second as if they were made of silk and then crumbled away till there was nothing left of them but a heap of dust on the threshold.

“Whew!” whistled Digory.

“Has your master magician, your uncle, power like mine?” asked the Queen, firmly seizing Digory’s hand again. “But I shall know later. In the meantime, remember what you have seen. This is what happens to things, and to people, who stand in my way.”

As this point in her story, Jadis is boasting what she is capable of. Unfortunately for Charnian civilization, she actually used that power in a wartime situation. She explains the situation to the children as they stand on the steps of the ancient palace:

“It is silent now. But I have stood here when the whole air was full of the noises of Charn; the trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves, the thunder of chariots, and the sacrificial drums beating in the temples. I have stood here (but that was near the end) when the roar of battle went up from every street and the river of Charn ran red.” She paused and added, “All in one moment one woman blotted it out forever.”

Then she elaborates and, like Putin, she blames the other side:

“It was my sister’s fault,” said the Queen. “She drove me to it. May the curse of all the Powers rest upon her forever! At any moment I was ready to make peace—yes, and to spare her life too, if only she would yield me the throne. But she would not. Her pride has destroyed the whole world. Even after the war had begun, there was a solemn promise that neither side would use Magic. But when she broke her promise, what could I do? Fool! As if she did not know that I had more Magic than she. She even knew that I had the secret of the Deplorable Word. Did she think—she was always weakling—that I would not use it?”

“What was it?” said Digory.

“That was the secret of secrets,” said Queen Jadis. “It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. But the ancient kings were weak and soft-hearted and bound themselves and all who should come after them with great oaths never even to seek after the knowledge of that word. But I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it. I did not use it until she forced me to it. I fought and fought to overcome her by every other means. I poured out the blood of my armies like water——”

“Poured out the blood of my armies like water” sounds like Putin throwing new Russian conscripts, often without equipment, armaments or training, onto the front lines. He has also been deaf to those Russian forces in Lyman and Kherson who are begging to be allowed to retreat. But back to the story:

“The last great battle,” said the Queen, “raged for three days here in Charn itself. For three days I looked down upon it from this very spot. I did not use my power till the last of my soldiers had fallen, and the accursed woman, my sister, at the head of her rebels was halfway up those great stairs that lead up from the city to the terrace. Then I waited till we were so close that we could see one another’s faces. She flashed her horrible, wicked eyes upon me and said, ‘Victory.’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘Victory, but not yours.’ Then I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the sun.”

Jadis, of course, has the same callous regard for other people—even her followers—that we see in all dictators and narcissists, from Putin to Trump:

“But the people?” gasped Digory.

“What people, boy?” asked the Queen.

“All the ordinary people,” said Polly, “who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals.”

“Don’t you understand?” said the Queen (still speaking to Digory). “I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will.”

“It was rather hard luck on them, all the same,” said he.

“I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.”

To compare “the deplorable word” to nuclear armaments is not a stretch as Lewis undoubtedly had nuclear Armageddon on his mind in 1955, the date of the novel’s publication. Europe in the  1950s had already witnessed two world wars in the course of the century and could imagine only too easily a third, this one involving nuclear weapons. The end of all life on earth seemed a tangible possibility. 

Putin’s “high and lonely destiny,” as he sees it, is restoring the Russian empire of the tsars or the Soviets. It is a destiny he sees as inseparable from his own self-aggrandizement, and a narcissist experiences thwarted ambitions as a negation of the self. The good news is that he may realize that the use of a tactical nuclear strike, at this time, will lose him far more than it will gain him. Unlike the deplorable word, nuclear weapons won’t take out all life, and there will be repercussions that even a supreme narcissist could imagine.

Such people love threatening people with their nuclear might. It’s another matter, however, to actually use it.

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A Coal Poem for Attorney Woo

By Robin Bates | Published: October 2, 2022
Park Eun-bin as an autistic attorney

Monday

Julia and I have fallen in love with the South Korean series The Extraordinary Attorney Woo, available on Netflix. I mention it here because a recent episode included a fine poem by South Korean poet Ahn Do-hyun.

Although I know nothing about South Korean poetry or this particular poet, I was able to track down the poem because translator Tim Bowles, also taken by the episode, found and translated it. Attorney Woo is an autistic attorney who (at least so far) succeeds in the high-powered world of corporate law because of her extraordinary memory and her ability to think outside the box. In each episode we watch her surmounting the challenges and prejudice that those with her condition face.

Because she works for a corporate law firm, she’s not always on the side of the good guys. As her supervisor explains to her, the company’s job is to make the best defense for their client (and to pocket the fee) while letting judge and jury decide upon justice. In this particular episode she finds herself defending a company that discriminates against its female employees. Forced to downsize prior to a merger, the company pressures the wives of couples who work for it to resign, telling them that, if they do so, their husbands can continue working. “You don’t want to get in the way of your husband’s career, do you?” asks the company manager responsible for hiring and firing.

The case is taken up by a feminist attorney who has a sisterhood relationship with her clients. Attorney Woo experiences an emotional tug-of-war between the slimeball she is defending and the sympathetic plaintiffs. She is particularly struck by how, even after her firm wins the case—South Korean patriarchal society wins out—she is invited to a party held by the plaintiffs. They are buoyed up by having fought the good fight, even though they lost.

It is at this party that the following poem is read:

A Chunk of Charcoal
By Ahn Do-hyun
Trans. by David Bowles

There are many ways to say it,
but the meaning of life
is to become a chunk of charcoal,
willingly, for someone else.

From the day floors must be heated until spring arrives,
the most beautiful sight on the glorious streets of Korea
is a truck, loaded with charcoal,
struggling up a hill.

As if it knows its purpose,
charcoal burns on and on
once its body catches fire.
I refused to grasp the lesson
though I ate hot soup and rice each day,
for I was afraid that after loving
with all of my being, I’d be left alone—
just a lump of ash.

So far, I’ve never become charcoal for anyone.

Yet when I think about it,
life is about being broken
into chunks.

I never thought to spread myself upon the ice
so others might walk more safely
when the world is slippery
with early morning snow.

Despite the disclaimer—“I’ve never become charcoal for anyone”—the very fact that the speaker is thinking in these terms shows that he/she believes that such self-sacrifice is life’s purpose. That’s why the normally unromantic image of a coal truck lumbering uphill is so inspiring. We must throw ourselves into the fire because, if we hold back for fear of becoming a lump of ash, paradoxically we will indeed become a lump of ash. We will live life unloved and alone.

Throwing ourselves into the fire not only provides hot soup and rice for our fellow human beings but, again paradoxically, it means that we’ll burn on and on. As Lucille Clifton puts it in a poem written about Harriet Tubman (“to a dark moses”)

i am the bush.
i am burning.
i am not consumed.

Then, in another twist, Do-hyun essentially says it’s okay even if we are consumed. “Yet when I think about it,” he reflects, “life is about being broken into chunks.” After all, charcoal dust can be scattered “upon the ice so others might walk more safely.”

In the show’s episode, we see Woo developing serious doubts about her company after she encounters the feminist attorney and the sympathetic plaintiffs. In this first season, Woo is still a rookie attorney, attempting to figure out how both the world of law and the world of the non-autistic work. I look forward to seeing whether she will, as she matures, break with corporate law and align with the charcoal workers of the world. She appears to have both the idealism and the sensibility to do so. At the moment, however, she has enough on her plate simply to stay afloat.

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i beg what i love and leave to forgive me

By Robin Bates | Published: October 1, 2022
Maurycy Gottlieb, Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur

Spiritual Sunday – High Holy Days

Judaism’s High Holy Days come to an end Tuesday and Wednesday with Yom Kippur, a day of atonement when Jews ask for forgiveness from others and from God. While not necessarily a Yom Kippur poem, Lucille Clifton’s “i am running into a new year” can function as one.

The poems reminds us that there is often one other we must forgive and that is ourselves. I think that some of what Clifton is asking forgiveness for—some of what she said to herself and about herself decades earlier—is not even her fault (for instance, her father abusing her when she was a child). That part of herself is bound up with who she was, and it is this self that she wants to leave behind.

The purpose of the High Holy Days, of entering the Jewish New Year, is to focus on soul—which is to say, on what is most essential. Clifton’s poem works as a prayer that her past forgive her so that she need not obsess about it any longer. That way she can focus on starting anew.

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

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Remembering Summers Long Ago

By Robin Bates | Published: September 29, 2022
Edward Potthast, At the Beach

Friday

I have fallen in love with the poetry of Helen Mitsios, which I discovered after learning that she will be journeying to Sewanee next week to conduct a workshop and give a reading. The poem that I am sharing —and that I also shared today in my Sewanee Mountain Messenger poetry column—seems at first glance to be seasonally inappropriate, given how the weather has suddenly turned chilly here. But some of us may find ourselves wistfully looking back at summer as the poem’s speaker looks back at a beach excursion decades earlier:

Summer
 
We stared at the ocean because 
it was there like an empty box 
or an instrument we never learned 
to play. Sand drops and cocoa butter 
convex on your skin, worn flip flops 
dangling through drifting days 
of popsicle sticks and body boards 
ready to circumnavigate the world. 
Static on the old transistor radio, 
the click track of drums between
goose bumps and long walks 
on the beach where you smoked 
weed rolled with tobacco. 
We found a perfect shell 
then tossed it back thinking
there would always be another. 
In the corner of my eye,
I saw your ghost ship set sail.

Tiny details help us date the poem—the reference to transistor radios makes me think it is set in the 1960s or early 1970s—and the speaker seems to be in the flush of young love. Unpromising trivia, which at other times might detract from the magic, instead seem to enhance it: sand particles and cocoa butter on the skin, worn flip-flops, popsicle sticks, radio static. Such is new love that everything seems possible: boxes are there to be filled, instruments to be played. The speaker even imagines that she could circumnavigate the world on a bodyboard, and she thinks it’s okay to jettison a perfect shell. After all, there will always be another.

Yet although everything seems perfect—or perhaps because everything seems perfect—she senses that everything is about to end. At least that’s how I read the final lines, which land like a thunderbolt:

In the corner of my eye,
I saw your ghost ship set sail.

Something is leaving and, while it doesn’t yet have a person aboard—after all, he’s right there with the speaker—some part of him seems of be departing, just as some part of her can see it happening. I think of the opening line in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”

Who knows whether the speaker will ever find another perfect seashell or experience another such day. Fortunately, something perfect will remain. The memory.

Further thought: For some reason, an Audre Lorde poems comes to mind when I read Mitsios’s poem, perhaps because it also occurs on a beach and is also about a perfect moment that is about to come to an end. Strength, Lorde suggests in “The Seventh Sense,” lies in hoping and building, even in the face of seemingly inevitable destruction.  Strong men who live this attract strong women who live this.

The Seventh Sense

Women
who build nations
learn
to love
men
who build nations
learn
to love
children
building sandcastles
by the rising sea

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Think of Russia as Dr. Frankenstein

By Robin Bates | Published: September 28, 2022

Thursday

I came across a fascinating account by Harvard English professor Diedre Lynch about teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Ukrainian students via zoom. One student was even taking the class while Russian soldiers prowled the streets outside.

Because Ukrainian education has been interrupted, the government set up these on-line classes for its students. Lynch says conditions were far from ideal but therefore all the more important:

Many of the students had fled the towns where they had been based while studying for their degrees in, variously, philology, law, and journalism, and with their families had taken refuge in safer locations more distant from the conflict zones. Many were lonely for that reason. Their internet connections were unstable, occasionally knocked out just by rainfall. By the end of June, the situation on the ground meant that the student in Kyiv, who had at first been feeling secure there, was having to do her Shelley reading in a bomb shelter. Another student, whom I worry about every day, was doing her reading while Russian soldiers patrolled the streets outside. The region where she and her family live had fallen under the control of the occupying army earlier in the spring.

Lynch writes that, for her twelve students, “talking and writing about Shelley’s monster story was a way both to examine and enact their commitments to education and community.”  My only disappointment with Lynch’s article is that I didn’t hear enough from the Ukrainian students to figure out how they were using the novel to process their experience. I have some theories, however.

That’s in part because of the way that Lynch sets up her piece, noting the the novel is about how Dr. Frankenstein’s creation

overcame his unpromising beginnings and, learning language, obtained the wherewithal to tell his story. The monster, the reader finds, must steal an education. He is not given one.

She then provides a useful reminder of how that education occurs:

After being abandoned by his creator, on the very night when Frankenstein’s science experiment first ushers him into his unnatural existence, the monster sets to wandering through the woods and fields, destitute and solitary. Eventually he happens upon a cottage with a ramshackle lean-to annexed to it. He takes shelter inside and, finding a gap in the boarding that joins the hovel to the cottage, realizes that he can peer through this aperture and, unseen, watch the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. Having already experienced the antipathy his ghastly appearance provokes in human observers, he decides to make this hiding place his place of residence. The monster soon makes a momentous discovery: “I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. […] This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it. 

Through various means, the monster achieves a liberal arts education, only to be spurned by society when people actually see him. Lynch says his determined efforts struck a chord with her students:

For Ukrainians in 2022, education has the same high stakes it is granted in Shelley’s novel, where the monster dreams that the language lessons on which he eavesdrops will, in giving him the means to tell his own story, enable him to elicit sympathy. He believes — in vain, it turns out — that this clandestine education will secure his entry into the human community.

Unfortunately, Lynch doesn’t go much deeper into how her students used the novel to process their experience. The most she says is the following:

Fiction-reading provided them relief from the pressures of a real world, in which choices had to be made and firm lines drawn between enemy and friend.

At the same time, the novel does bear some resemblance to the real lives these students and their compatriots have led since the Russian invasion. In Shelley’s fictional universe, disasters are always lurking, and one bereavement follows hard on the heels of another. For all its sensationalism, indeed even because of its sensationalism, the novel is, as the kids say, relatable. “When […] real disaster comes, even the innocent will suffer and there will always be many victims,” Anastasia wrote on our class discussion board, reflecting on the fate of one of the novel’s minor characters but in terms that resonated more widely. On some days I feared that Elizabeth, Victor Frankenstein’s fiancée, spoke for these students and their generation, as when she says to him, “Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books or heard from others, as tales of ancient days, or imaginary evils […] but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood.”

I want to build more on this since Lynch doesn’t—with the caveat that I wasn’t teaching these students and so can only speculate. But I think the students identified with the monster because of the way that Russia, like Frankenstein, has denied them their humanity. Before Russia began its two invasions, many in Ukraine felt friendship for Russia. After all, most Ukrainians speak Russian, some of Russia’s greatest authors were either born in Ukraine or have strong Ukrainian ties (most notably  Gogol, Bulgakov, and Chekhov), and there are many Russian-Ukrainian intermarriages. In the novel, the monster is more than willing to let the scientist go his own way unmolested—all it wants is a companion for itself—but Dr. Frankenstein, like Russia, is unwilling to grant it autonomous rights. Instead, he tramples on all that the monster holds dear, thereby unleashing a bloody response. It is Russia/Frankenstein, not Ukraine/monster, that has set chaos into motion.

Remember, these students are reading about the enmity between Frankenstein and monster at the same time that they are witnessing war first hand between their country and Russia. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Russia refuses to give up its vengeful pursuit of the monster—a drama that he created in the first place—and the monster, like Ukraine, stays always just out of reach. It sounds like the students appear to see Dr. Frankenstein as the real monster.

Lynch, who wants a more nuanced response, seems somewhat taken aback by their black-and-white reading. She says that, before she taught the class, she thought that the novel’s “multiplication of points of view”

impedes the reader who might want to take sides. Before this summer I had thought of that as the book’s greatest asset, the very ground of its claim to be a cornerstone of a humanistic education.

With these Ukrainian students, however, she’s not so sure. In fact, it sounds like the students, without reservation, saw Dr. Frankenstein as the real monster. Lynch doesn’t want to fully acknowledge this—she claims that her students didn’t want to take sides—but reading between her lines, it sounds like they actually did, labeling Frankenstein as the evil one:

But with this group of students, who were reading from within a war zone, who were inclined — indeed, forced by circumstances —to use, unironically, words like “evil,” I felt less certain about that.

Readers shift from sympathizing with Victor — who, as he has recounted to Walton, lost his brother to this monster’s vindictive revenge — to sympathizing with the monster, who, after he takes up the narrative reins, makes the case to Victor that such “vices” are only “the children of a forced solitude that [he] abhor[s]” and that his “virtues will necessarily arise” as soon as he lives “in communion with an equal.”

Yes, Ukraine will cease hating and killing Russians once it is considered an equal. It would be surprising, given their circumstances, if the students read the novel in any other way. And now the situation in the novel appears to have reversed for these readers, with the monster chasing Frankenstein.

Russia, however, like Frankenstein, remains as arrogant and sure of its righteousness as ever. It has created a monster that may destroy it, even as its young men, like Frankenstein’s bride, are paying the price.

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What Made Roger Federer Special

By Robin Bates | Published: September 27, 2022
Roger Federer at Wimbledon

Wednesday

So Father Time finally caught up with the incomparable Roger Federer, who last week played one last match before retiring. Although others have surpassed Federer records that once appeared unsurpassable, no one has ever played as beautifully as the Swiss tennis player, and I suspect no one ever will. Novelist Davis Foster Wallace once wrote an article entitled “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” and he didn’t overstate the case.

In recent years I have written posts about Federer and the aging process, posts that cited Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, and even Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. In these I compared him, respectively, to a man dying of sepsis, an aging epic hero setting off on one last voyage, and an aged suitor (Gremio) who doesn’t stand a chance against a younger rival. In one post, written in pain over an early Federer loss, I cited Arizona poet Richard Shelton’s “Requiem for Sonora”:

I am older and uglier
and full of the knowledge
that I do not belong to beauty
and beauty does not belong to me
I have learned to accept
whatever men choose to give me
or whatever they choose to withhold
but oh my desert
yours is the only death I cannot bear

And yet, I had no reason to complain as Federer delighted us for far longer than we could have reasonably expected. What’s important is that, win or lose, he did it all with grace. In the words of Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” somehow he could “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” (In a post on the poem I mention a a video of him reading alternate couplets from the poem with his great archrival Rafael Nadal .)

Rather than share one of my more recent Federer posts, I reach back to reprint the essay I wrote thirteen years ago when he won—for the first and only time—the French Open. In it, with the help of tennis writer Peter Bodo, I compare Federer with the 17th century Cavalier poets as I try to get at that special something that caused Federer to stand out.

Reprinted from June 12, 2009

As a tennis player and fan of Roger Federer, I am still vibrating over his having won the French Open this past Sunday. After his archrival Rafael Nadal went down in an early match to Swede Robin Soderling, all the pressure was on Federer to win the one grand slam event that has eluded him.  He barely avoided defeat in the two matches leading up to the final.

In the quarterfinals match, he was one missed shot away from losing in three sets to the German Tommy Haas (who would have gone on to serve out the set), saving a break of his service by hitting a wondrously angled crosscourt forehand for a winner. Against the overpowering game of Argentine Juan Martin Del Potro, he found enough variety to eke out a five-set victory after twice being down a set. By the finals, he had rediscovered the game that made him unbeatable in 2006 and 2007 (or unbeatable by anyone other than Nadal on clay) and won easily.

Early in Federer’s career I resisted his lure because I was an Andre Agassi fan and also had hopes for Andy Roddick. But ultimately I fell in love with the most beautiful style of tennis I had ever seen. (I speak as someone who started watching tennis the year that Rod Laver won his second grand slam.) Seemingly without effort, Federer has the ability to turn a backhand defensive shot into an attack weapon that sends his opponent scurrying. His serve is amazing in its precision, as is his forehand down the line, and he has recently added a remarkable drop shot that he uses against players who, like Nadal, play deep behind the baseline. Federer is poetry in motion.

I was struck by Peter Bodo’s article on the Tennis Magazine website that puts Federer in a conversation that includes a couple of actual poets.  Bodo is trying to put his finger on what distinguishes Federer and concludes that it is his ability to make difficult things look easy. Bodo applies the Italian concept of sprezzatura to Federer, which he says he learned about from Mark Kingwell’s book on flyfishing, Catch and Release.

Kingwell defines sprezzatura as follows:

“Grace” doesn’t quite capture its extension, though that’s part of it. Nor ‘elegance’ either, though again it is partly right. Vitality and lightness are implied, but sprezzatura is more than gaiety. It’s that exhibition of relaxed competence, almost of insouciance, in amateur pursuit of one’s goal. . .

Bodo invokes Kingwell’s definition as he contrasts Federer with other tennis greats:

He frequently seems to think, act, and express sentiments nothing like those of a host of iconic tennis players whose qualities were often trumpeted as germane to their station: the bullishness of [Guillermo] Vilas, the toughness of Ivan Lendl, the fire of a John McEnroe, the explosive power of a Pete Sampras, that subtle communication of menace that informed the glowering visage of Pancho Gonzalez, or the scary, almost rodent-like bloodlust of Jimmy Connors. But all pale alongside the easy, it’s-no-big-deal domination with which Federer rules.

So where do poets come into the conversation? One poem that comes to my mind is W.B. Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” where the poet talks about how a poem should seem effortless, even though much effort goes into it:

I said, “A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

That’s how Federer’s game looked. But drawing on Kingwell’s book, Bodo reaches back to an earlier era, making Federer appear somewhat as a throwback. Noting that the quality of sprezzatura is no longer prized as much as it was in previous eras, Kingwell finds the quality within Cavalier poets Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace:

Puritanical critics tend to regard sprezzatura as a suspect quality, a polish in manners that indicates overrefinement or even feyness, the transparent self-justification of the fop. But such judgments ignore the real edge that must remain beneath the polish. Castiglione’s elegant courtiers or the dandy Cavalier poets of (Izaak) Walton’s own time were anything but fey. They were brave, wily, and often dangerous men – men who served with distinction in battles and intrigues. . ..Only a clod could fail to be impressed by the combination of poetry and military distinction observable in Richard Lovelace or Sir John Suckling. And yet, what military man today would dare admit he read poetry, let along composed it? On the others side, from what poet could we expect to see a display of manly vigor, except perhaps in the vulgar form of drunken brawling at a book launch. There may be such men out there – I really hope there are – but no one could reasonably argue that they form our currently dominant notion of masculine accomplishment.

Actually, I did know one such military man: three-star marine general Robert Hogaboom, famous for directing the ship-to-shore invasion of Iwo Jima during World War II, retired to the town where I live, which allowed me to witness his refined artistic sensibilities. But Kingwell’s point is well taken since Hogaboom too seemed a throwback to an earlier era. 

At any rate, Lovelace and Suckling were both warriors fighting in the doomed cause of King Charles I. Suckling, after a failed attempt to free the king’s minister from execution, fled to France and died bankrupt a year later. Lovelace was twice imprisoned for fighting for the king and is most well known for a couple of poems he composed in his cell. You may know them:

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

And the last stanzas from “To Althea, from Prison”:

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage.

If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

Suckling, meanwhile, is famous for such poems as the one below, which finds a comic new take on the image of the languishing lover that was a staple of Renaissance love poetry. Don’t be put off by the explosive punch line at the end. Although it is an instance of a man venting about female rejection, Suckling is also making fun of the speaker: the poet claims to be able to dispense dispassionate and common sense advice, only in the end of lose his cool:

Song
Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
Will, when looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee, why so pale?

What so dull and mute, young sinner?
Prithee, why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can’t win her,
Saying nothing do’t?
Prithee, why so mute?

Quit, quit, for shame; this will not move,
This cannot take her.
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her:
The devil take her.

Whether or not one agrees with the political sympathies (or the sexual politics) of the Cavalier poets, they remind us of the value of keeping things light when life gets serious. Today we live in an earnest and often Puritanical culture (Suckling and Lovelace were fighting against the Puritans) and spend a lot of time and energy getting bent out of shape. While these poets risked their lives for a cause, they do not come across as humorless enthusiasts. Suckling makes light of rejection and Loveless of imprisonment as they model an alternative way of responding to crisis.

So the next time you feel the pull of a passionate intensity, whether it involves a sacred cause or politics or sports or some other aspect of life, pick up a Suckling or Lovelace poem. They will help you regain perspective. And while it is still possible, watch Roger Federer dancing elegantly, fending off cannon shots that muscle-bound young men fire his way. You’ll find life a little easier to bear.

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Read to Resist Fascism

By Robin Bates | Published: September 26, 2022
Jessie Wilcox Smith

Tuesday

Oops, I just realized that I missed Banned Book Week, thinking that it was this week rather than last. With the alarming rise of book bans nationwide, however, every day is a good day to push back against the forces of illiberalism so here goes.

Esquire’s Charles Pierce has alerted me to Pen America’s survey of banned books. Pierce sums up their findings as follows:

From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles. The 1,648 titles are by 1,261 different authors, 290 illustrators, and 18 translators, impacting the literary, scholarly, and creative work of 1,553 people altogether. Bans occurred in 138 school districts in 32 states. These districts represent 5,049 schools with a combined enrollment of nearly 4 million students.

Pen America breaks down the titles into the following groupings:

–674 titles (41 percent) explicitly address LGBTQ+ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ+ (this includes a specific subset of titles for transgender characters or stories—145 titles, or 9 percent);

–659 titles (40 percent) contain protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color;

–338 titles (21 percent) directly address issues of race and racism;

–357 titles (22 percent) contain sexual content of varying kinds, including novels with some level of description of sexual experiences of teenagers, stories about teen pregnancy, sexual assault and abortion as well as informational books about puberty, sex, or relationships;

–161 titles (10 percent) have themes related to rights and activism;

–141 titles (9 percent) are either biography, autobiography, or memoir; and

–64 titles (4 percent) include characters and stories that reflect religious minorities, such as Jewish, Muslim and other faith traditions.

PEN also looks at the forces that are driving the banning:

[A]t least 50 groups [are] involved in pushing for book bans across the country operating at the national, state or local levels. Of those 50 groups, eight have local or regional chapters that, between them, number at least 300 in total; some of these operate predominantly through social media. Most of these groups (including chapters) appear to have formed since 2021 (73 percent, or 262). These parent and community groups have played a role in at least half of the book bans enacted across the country during the 2021–22 school year. At least 20 percent of the book bans enacted in the 2021-22 school year could be directly linked to the actions of these groups, with many more likely influenced by them; in an additional approximately 30 percent of bans, there is some evidence of the groups’ likely influence, including the use of common language or tactics.

Finally, it fingers some of the particular groups that are leading the push:

Of the national groups, Moms for Liberty, formed in 2021, has spread most broadly, with over 200 local chapters identified on their website. Other national groups with branches include US Parents Involved in Education (50 chapters), No Left Turn in Education (25), MassResistance (16), Parents’ Rights in Education (12), Mary in the Library (9), County Citizens Defending Freedom USA (5), and Power2Parent (5)…While some of these groups have existed for years, the overwhelming majority are of recent origin: more than 70 percent (including chapters) were formed since 2021.

Predictably, the groups love to drop the phrases “grooming” and “critical race theory.” As Pierce sees it, their attacks are ultimately attacks on imagination itself because “imagination inevitably leads to curiosity, and curiosity inevitably leads to people asking the question most fundamental to democracy—“What the hell are you people doing?”

Speaking of imagination, I recommend a short, illustrated Neil Gaiman essay lauding the role of libraries in fostering the imagination. Now we know who to thank for the imagination that brought us such works as the Sandman series, American Gods, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and others. “Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading, and Daydreaming” appears in the Guardian (you can find it here without a paywall). Here are some of the highlights:

–I suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m making a plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

–People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literature children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

— I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. It’s tosh, it’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy.

— You’re finding out something as you read that will be vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this: The world doesn’t have to be like this! Things can be different.

— Fiction builds empathy. Fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.

— I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up, and met the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children’s library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them. Looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders.

— They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and they would talk to me about the books I was reading. They would find me other books. They would help. They treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

— Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education, about entertainment, about making safe spaces and about access to information.

— I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens. As Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before digital books showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old. There were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

— Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand. They are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.

— Books are the way that the dead communicate with us. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, the way that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.

— We have an obligation to read for pleasure. If others see us reading, we show that reading is a good thing. We have an obligation to support libraries. To protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries, you are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future. As Ray Bradbury said, “Without libraries, we have no future and no past.”

— Fiction is the lie that tells the truth. We all have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge and the individual is less than nothing. But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

— Albert Einstein was once asked how we could make our children intelligent. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

— I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine and understand.

Do I hear an Amen!

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Russia’s Falstaffian Mobilization

By Robin Bates | Published: September 25, 2022
Hogarth, Falstaff Examining His Recruits

Monday

Professor of Strategic Studies Phillips P. O’Brien, whose tweets on the Russo-Ukrainian War I’ve been following, yesterday described Russia’s mass mobilization as “the worst mobilization process in modern history.” Even as Russians with money and connections flee the country, ethnic minorities are seeing their communities raided for young men. There has been some resistance, and one can find video footage of villagers fighting against the police as their sons are loaded onto buses. Apparently some that are being conscripted (this according to the Washington Post) are “elderly, sick, disabled or otherwise unfit or exempt from military service.”

We might call the mobilization Falstaffian in that it brings to mind Falstaff’s corrupt enlistment of troops in Henry IV, Parts I & II.

Because of his close connection with Prince Hal, Falstaff has been given the power to press men into service to fight against the rebels. Exhibiting a corruption that would be familiar to the Russian army, Falstaff confesses to “misus[ing] the king’s press damnably.” Since in England at the time, as in modern day Russia, one could buy oneself out of service, Falstaff drafts men from wealthy families, who then pay him to be excused:

If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet. I have misused the king’s press damnably. I have got, in exchange of a hundred and fifty soldiers, three hundred and odd pounds. I press me none but good householders, yeoman’s sons…; such a commodity of warm slaves, as had as lieve hear the devil as a drum; such as fear the report of a caliver [handgun] worse than a struck fowl or a hurt wild-duck. I pressed me none but such toasts-and-butter, with hearts in their bellies no bigger than pins’ heads, and they have bought out their services…

Falstaff pockets the money and then proceeds to fill his ranks with those who can’t afford his fees. From what we’re hearing of Russia’s mobilization, some of the new draftees don’t sound much better than Falstaff’s recruits. Certainly they have no training for the kind of war they are about to enter:

…and now my whole charge consists of ancients, corporals, lieutenants, gentlemen of companies, slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton’s dogs licked his sores [see yesterday’s post for this reference]; and such as indeed were never soldiers, but discarded unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters and ostlers trade-fallen, the cankers of a calm world and a
long peace, ten times more dishonorable ragged than an old faced ancient: and such have I, to fill up the rooms of them that have bought out their services, that you would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows.

Prince Hal is taken aback when he encounters Falstaff’s troop, remarking, “I did never see such pitiful rascals.” Falstaff’s reply is existentially profound. When it comes to dying, he says, they’ll do as well as anyone:

Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.

We have more recruiting scenes in Henry IV, Part II, and in this play they have names and personalities. Falstaff must choose two from amongst Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble and Bullcalf. Mouldy and Bullcalf, although more fit, escape through bribes. (They are the two figures on the right in Hogarth’s painting above; you can see them delivering the money into Falstaff’s hand.) Falstaff’s chooses Shadow and effeminate Feeble because he thinks they will prove better at escape:

And this same half-faced fellow, Shadow; give me this man: he presents no mark to the enemy; the foeman may with as great aim level at the edge of a penknife. And for a retreat; how swiftly will this Feeble the woman’s tailor run off! O, give me the spare men, and spare me the great ones. 

The current version of “food for powder” is “cannon fodder,” a future I’ve heard predicted numerous times for Russia’s new draftees. With virtually no training or logistical support, and some being assigned rusty AK-47s and bolt-action rifles used by the USSR in World War II, they will prove no match for the better armed, better led, and better motivated Ukrainians. It may well be that they should model themselves on Shadow and Feeble if they want to avoid swelling Russia’s casualty figures, which the Pentagon has estimated number between 70-80,000.

O’Brien says that the Russians are still thinking of World War II, when, in the end, sheer numbers of Soviets overwhelmed the Germans. This, however, is not that kind of war. He also figures that the 300,000 reservists that Russia is calling up “won’t matter that much.”

Fortunately for Prince Hal, he does not need Falstaff’s men, winning glory on his own. But that too is not this kind of war.

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