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Sunday
Our church vestry, of which I am the senior warden, recently was confronted with a small but interesting challenge. Years ago our old church altar, constructed in 1911, was replaced and now occupies a prominent place in the old rectory, sometimes serving as a buffet, sometimes as a place upon which flowers and ornamental lamps sit. It has various hand carvings by a prominent local woodworker, and one of the descendants of this woodworker’s apprentice—the apprentice having herself contributed carvings to the altar’s side panels—would like the altar for herself. The issue of ownership has led to Vestry discussions resembling those to be found in Jan Karon’s Mitford series, about a quaint little Episcopalian parish in rural North Carolina.
I don’t know how we’ll decide—the altar, while no longer functioning in its original capacity, was after all a gift to the church—but the request has gotten us to take a closer look at it. I mention it here because it reminds me of a wonderful Malcolm Guite sonnet about his own church’s old wooden altar. While ours isn’t centuries old, many of Guite’s observations still apply. Here it is:
This Table
The centuries have settled on this table Deepened the grain beneath a clean white cloth Which bears afresh our changing elements. Year after year of prayer, in hope and trouble, Were poured out here and blessed and broken, both In aching absence and in absent presence.
This table too the earth herself has given And human hands have made. Where candle-flame At corners burns and turns the air to light The oak once held its branches up to heaven, Blessing the elements which it became, Rooting the dew and rain, branching the light.
Because another tree can bear, unbearable, For us, the weight of Love, so can this table
The other tree Guite mentions is the cross, which bore weight of Love. So did our old altar, which year after year bore the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation. As the “changing elements” were “poured out here and blessed and broken,” churchgoers experienced both God’s aching absence and God’s absent presence.
I love how Guite tracks back to when the altar was an oak tree, which reminds me of the old medieval poem “Dream of the Rood.” It’s as though that tree also was blessing the elements—the dew and the rain—and becoming one with them. As Jesus becomes one with us through the eucharist, “branching the light.”
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Friday
It so happens that Beowulf directly deals with the Joe Biden dilemma currently facing Democrats. The 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem also offers us a very workable solution.
Before laying it out, however, allow me to take a detour through Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and one of Aesop’s fables, which also weigh in on the question of whether Biden should keep running or step down. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch recently applied Ginsberg’s most famous poem to what he sees as a pile-on by media and liberal columnists. “Over the course of a remarkable weekend,” he wrote,
I saw the best minds of my boomer generation destroyed by madness — newspaper columnists and other big shots convinced they were cosplayers in a real-world episode of The West Wing, saving America by giving chief of staff Leo McGarry the best words to convince an ailing President Bartlet that it’s time to step down.
Ginsberg’s famous poem, which deals with the drug-addled beat generation, begins,
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…
I don’t know that Bunch’s characterization is entirely fair. A number of these columnists, who I have come to rely on over the years, simply want what is best for America and are terrified—as am I—of a Trump return. When I read and weigh the different arguments, however, I pay attention to what they are proposing as alternatives and to how well they understand the process of running for president. Too often, what I see puts me in mind of Aesop’s fable about the mice and the cat:
Long ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case. “You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighborhood.”
This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?” The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke. Then the old mouse said:
“It is easy to propose impossible remedies.”
With the possible exception of choosing Kamala Harris, which might address the complex money, organizational, and legal hurdles involved in swapping out a candidate, I haven’t encountered any plausible scenarios of how this particular cat would be belled—which is to say, scenarios that are less risky than staying with the president. Both Biden and Trump have lost a step but only one of them is a fascist and a threat to democracy.
On to Beowulf, which deals with the problem of dragons. Now, dragons in the poem are symbolic of kings who have become ineffective. But there are different kinds of ineffective kings. The worst are like Heremod, who is contrasted with the good king Sigemund, who slays dragons. Trump is our Heremod, a king who becomes increasingly paranoid and vindictive as he grows older:
His rise in the world brought little joy to the Danish people, only death and destruction. He vented his rage on men he caroused with, killed his own comrades, a pariah king who cut himself off from his own kind, even though Almighty God had made him eminent and powerful and marked him from the start for a happy life. But a change happened, he grew bloodthirsty, gave no more rings to honor the Danes. He suffered in the end for having plagued his people for so long: his life lost happiness.
Other kings, rather than lash out, simply sink into passive depression, like Hrethel, who crawls into bed after losing a son and never gets up again. There’s also the Last Veteran, who having seen all around him die retreats into a funeral barrow, which becomes a dragon’s lair. (Which is to say, as I read the incident, that he becomes a human dragon.)
And then there is Beowulf in his last days, who is far superior to Heremod (because he is generous) and Hrethel and the Last Veteran (because he doesn’t sink into depression). Nevertheless, he still has a dragon dimension.
Beowulf has had a spectacularly successful 50-year reign, but when dragonhood begins to descend, he makes what some consider to have been Biden’s mistake. Instead of passing the kingdom along to a successor, he insists on remaining king, thinking that only he can defeat the foe. Biden, some of his critics have charged, thinks that only he can defeat Trump, while Beowulf thinks the same about the dragon. As he instructs his warriors,
Men at arms, remain here on the barrow, safe in your armor, to see which one of us is better in the end at bearing wounds in a deadly fray. This fight is not yours, nor is it up to any man except me to measure his strength against the monster or to prove his worth. I shall win the gold by my courage, or else mortal combat, doom of battle, will bear your lord away.
One reason for Beowulf’s confidence, and for Biden’s, is his past record. And yes, there is some hubris involved. Thinking that one can defeat the dragon by oneself is itself a dragon trait:
Beowulf spoke, made a formal boast for the last time: “I risked my life often when I was young. Now I am old, but as king of the people I shall pursue this fight for the glory of winning, if the evil one will only abandon his earth-fort and face me in the open.”
I promised you a workable solution for our current situation and here it is. I start with the premise that Biden is not suffering from dementia and that he’s doing an adequate job running the country. (In fact, more than adequate compared to his predecessor.) As I don’t hear anyone credible saying differently—and as replacing comes with risks no less than keeping—then I think all Democrats should be giving him a full-throated endorsement, regardless of any private reservations. Indeed, we are hearing such endorsements from such people as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, California Governor Gavin Newsome, and Vice-President Harris, all names that one hears as possible replacements.
What does such an endorsement look like? In the poem, Wiglaf overlooks Beowulf’s egotism and comes to his aid. His words are not untinged with criticism—their leader should never have undertaken this task alone—but that is all irrelevant now. Wiglaf’s words to his fellows are inspiring and could function as a call to wavering Democrats:
And now, although he wanted this challenge to be one he’d face by himself alone—the shepherd of our land, a man unequalled in the quest for glory and a name for daring—now the day has come when this lord we serve needs sound men to give him their support. Let us go to him, help our leader through the hot flame and dread of the fire. As God is my witness, I would rather my body were robed in the same burning blaze as my gold-giver’s body than go back home bearing arms. That is unthinkable, unless we have first slain the foe and defended the life of the prince of the Weather-Geats. I well know the things he has done for us deserve better. Should he alone be left exposed to fall in battle? We must bond together, shield and helmet, mail-shirt and sword.
Then he wades into “the dangerous reek,” telling his leader,
Go on, dear Beowulf, do everything you said you would when you were still young and vowed you would never let your name and fame be dimmed while you lived. Your deeds are famous, so stay resolute, my lord, defend your life now with the whole of your strength. I shall stand by you.
Here’s what awaits Geat society—and America–if followers fail to do everything in their power to support their leader:
So it is goodbye now to all you know and love on your home ground, the open-handedness, the giving of war-swords. Every one of you with freeholds of land, our whole nation, will be dispossessed, once princes from beyond get tidings of how you turned and fled and disgraced yourselves. A warrior will sooner die than live a life of shame.
And here’s what awaits Beowulf’s society—and what awaits Democrats—if their leader is successful:
[Wiglaf] saw beyond the seat a treasure-trove of astonishing richness, wall-hangings that were a wonder to behold, glittering gold spread across the ground, the old dawn-scorching serpent’s den packed with goblets and vessels from the past…
And he saw too a standard, entirely of gold, hanging high over the hoard, a masterpiece of filigree; it glowed with light so he could make out the ground at his feet and inspect the valuables.
Make no mistake, there will be no liberated treasure, no flowering of freedom, if the Republicans win. The last two GOP administrations, with their billionaire tax cuts and their botched responses to world crises, were disasters, unlike the last three Democratic administrations. Everything we hold dear about our country will be dragged through the mud, and worse, if Trump prevails.
And there’s a further lesson to be learned from Wiglaf, which starts with a contrast. Anglo-Saxon society in the 8th century was more heavily dependent upon a king than we are. Whether society thrived or whether everyone ended up dead or enslaved could all come down to the leadership of one man. But we’re not like that. We have Wiglafs running the major departments and agencies, Wiglafs in positions of authority in all 50 states, Wiglafs making sure that people get their Social Security checks and their Medicare payments and their essential services, Wiglafs scattered throughout the voting public. In other words, Biden isn’t governing all by himself. He has chosen good people to work under him, and his policies and leadership have, so far, led to significant improvements, not to mention electoral victories all around the country.
So if Biden needs to go to bed by 8 am, if he needs the aid of a teleprompter to communicate, if he walks more haltingly and talks a little slower and debates less sharply than he once did, big deal. The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is a record of good governance. And it’s not like his opponent is any healthier or more articulate or more on top of the issues than he is. In fact, his opponent is proving himself more unhinged and dangerous every time he gets up to speak.
Trump is an isolated Heremod while Biden is an aged Beowulf willing to allow Wiglafs to help him accomplish the nation’s mission. Keep that image in mind before, like Beowulf’s other followers, you run for the woods.
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Thursday – July 4th
Walt Whitman wrote “I Hear America Singing” in 1860, which is to say, a year before the Civil War. In other words, he expressed faith in American democracy at a time when its future was even more in doubt than it is today. In Whitman’s time, his mechanics, carpenters, and masons would soon be spilling blood over the question of whether this “new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could “long endure.”
Today, with Trump’s Supreme Court attempting to invest all power in (1) an imperial presidency and (2) its own invented rules, we ask the same question. Lest we lose faith, we have Whitman to remind us that our greatness lies in our diversity.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
And to supplement these Americans with a few more–to make clear that Whitman’s America is ethnically diverse–here are some from Song of Myself:
I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl, Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders, On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand, She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet.
The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him, And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet, And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north, I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.
In other words, the essence of America is not white Christian.
When I was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Ljubljana’s English Department in 1987, my officemate, an old Slovenian Melville scholar, once observed that he couldn’t figure out how America worked. He knew what it meant to be Slovenian—after all, there was the Slovenian language and a fairly homogeneous Slovenian culture—but what did it mean to be American?
When I thought about it, the American experiment really seemed to me to be extraordinary. To think there could be a unified country made of multiple ethnicities, religions, languages (don’t forget the Native American languages), and diverse past histories was an extraordinary exercise in hope. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution, supplemented by the poem on the Statue of Liberty and other key documents (including Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech), have somehow held us together even in the worst times.
Our poets and novelists have made a major contribution to this unifying narrative.
I recently completed proofreading the galleys (if that’s what they’re still called) of my forthcoming book, which of course is tremendously exciting. Then I had the slightly unnerving experience of reading a New York Times essay about another soon-to-published book that explores some of the same themes and includes many of the same thinkers and ideas. Like my book, Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality is concerned with the recent spate of book bannings, and we both note that there is a long history (2500 years long) of people freaking out over stories.
When similar books come out at the same time, it’s often because authors are tapping into the same zeitgeist or spirit of the times. Nor are Gold and I the only ones since in 2022 there was also Peter Brooks’s 2022 study Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative. Indeed, it’s good there’s a cluster of such books since they’re more likely to capture people’s attention that way. My book will be appearing (I think) sometime this summer whereas Gold’s is slated for an October release.
In today’s post I compare my ideas with Gold’s, especially noting how we arrive as almost diametrically opposite conclusions. Gold notes that the fear of fiction is a cyclical phenomenon, waxing and waning, and she points to various eruptions over the centuries. Then, as I do, she does a deep dive into Plato’s anxieties, which led him to ban the stories of Hesiod and Homer from his utopian republic. In my view, one reason why Plato banned Homer was because he himself was in love with the poet and was frightened over the effect that The Iliad and The Odyssey had over him. When he was in the grip of Homer’s mesmerizing fictions, he had difficulty exercising his “right reason,” which for Plato is philosophy’s highest aim.
Gold believes that fiction causes panic most commonly in democracies. That’s because
the inner lives and motives of others matter a great deal in a democracy, arguably more so than in other political systems where people have less direct control over their social experience — and less freedom of expression. In a democracy, your fellow citizens can organize for social progress or encourage the passage of draconian laws that terrorize minorities. Fear of other people, and how they might work together to shift reality, is the reason the contest over written language so often extends to the realm of make-believe — of fiction. Fiction is the story of other people; this is what makes it dangerous.
I agree with Gold’s point but approach from the opposing angle, seeing fiction as a powerful tool for progressives. Looking at how Romantics like Blake and Wordsworth celebrated the lives of chimney sweeps, shepherds, leech gatherers, and other lower class figures, I write that
the door had been opened for poets and writers to use the Imagination to step beyond their own narrow class boundaries in ways that would have been, well, unimaginable in earlier times. Through literature authors have entered the lives of the marginalized (Walt Whitman), the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Émile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on.
Like Gold, however, I also examine why MAGA is attacking certain books. For instance, if they have repeatedly attacked the novel Beloved, it’s because Toni Morrison addresses two of their sore spots (to put it mildly), America’s dark racial past and a woman claiming control over her own body. (The slave owners steal Sethe’s breast milk and then whip her to an inch of her life.) In the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, a Republican operative complained that her son had been traumatized by being assigned the book in high school, and candidate Glenn Younkin used the story as the final argument in his successful bid.
Gold and I both look at two works that played a role in slave times and the Jim Crow south, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Clansman (which became Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation). Where we differ, however—and it’s a major difference—is that she wants to draw hard and fast lines between literature and life whereas I want to dismantle them. Gold writes,
Fiction writers can insist on having their work judged on its merits and not on whether it provides moral instruction or inculcates the right social value. This isn’t an anti-political stance but, rather, a highly political one. It tells readers to go get their values elsewhere, to stop demanding that fiction provide the difficult labor of soul-making — to do that work themselves.
Now, I agree that literature should not be yoked to an ideological agenda. In fact, a number of thinkers I explore argue specifically against doctrinaire literature, including Sir Philip Sidney, Karl Marx, Frederic Engels, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Terry Eagleton. But by potentially changing the way people see the world, literature (so I argue) sometimes changes history and so can hardly be separated from morality or social values.
Percy Shelley provides specific examples. The great poets of the past, he says, have sowed the seeds for the ending of slavery and the liberation of women. “It exceeds all imagination,” he writes, “to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.”
“Poets,” the Romantic poet concludes, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Or to quote someone who is not an activist poet, Harold Bloom makes a compelling case that Shakespeare changed the fundamental way that humans see themselves. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Bloom writes In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom writes that whereas that fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Jonson ideograms, the Bard created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Personality as we understand it, Bloom explains, is “a Shakespearean invention…Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…”
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, meanwhile, argues that literature is essential in a multicultural democracy for producing informed voters. How else are we to empathize with fellow citizens who are otherwise unlike us?
Sounds like soul-making to me.
Further thought: Gold appears to throw in her lot “art for art’s sake” crowd and elevate aesthetics above all, concluding her piece with Oscar Wilde’s contention, in his preface to Picture of Dorian Gray, that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” But Wilde’s novel was profoundly moral, providing deep comfort to many closeted gay men when it came out, some of whom had it all but memorized. For that matter, the Aesthetic movement was itself a protest against capitalism, which dismissed anything (such as art) that could not be monetized. Wilde makes this clear in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism.”
In my own book, I describe a constant tension between literature as a fun activity (aesthetic delight) and literature as a practical tool. Matthew Arnold talks of lit as sweetness and light while John Stuart Mill makes it his goal to balance aestheticism and utilitarianism. The best literature, I contend, is always both/and, never either/or.
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Tuesday
In a ruling that most of us never thought we’d see, our rightwing Supreme Court has approved immunity for presidents–or at least Trump–when they break the law when carrying out “official acts.” Horrified by how immunity “now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation,” Sonia Sotomayor wrote,
The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding….When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
And then:
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
Given that America’s founders had a particular king in mind when they wrote the Constitution, I share a sonnet on George III by an angry Percy Shelley, written when the British monarch was insane and a year from death. If Trump is reelected president and begins (among other things) siccing the justice department on his political enemies on the grounds that they present a danger to the republic, I could imagine him devolving into the kind of figure that Shelley describes:
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
While this king feeds parasitically off his country, the people are suffering. Shelley goes on to mention untilled fields, which would have been commons areas seized by wealthy landowners, and soldiers firing upon protesters. (In our own, think of GOP tax cuts for billionaires and Trump fantasizing about the military shooting Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs.) In Shelley’s time, there are so-called Christians who don’t bother to open their Bibles—“a book sealed”—which sounds like those MAGA Christians who follow the gospel according to Trump. Meanwhile, many Americans feel the same contempt for the GOP House of Representatives that Shelley feels for England’s House of Lords (“a senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed”).
Shelley ends with a slight silver lining. More on that in a moment. Here are the final eight lines:
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,— An army, whom liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed; A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed— Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
A revolutionary optimist who believes that the long arc of history bends towards justice, Shelley does think that this leechlike monarchy is dying out and that the Phantom of liberty will burst through to “illumine our tempestuous day.” America’s Supreme Court, by contrast, appears determined to bring back authoritarian rule.
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Monday
Here’s hoping that Democrats have had a chance to recover from their panic over Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance against Donald Trump. I recall seeing similar panic following Bill Clinton’s first debate against George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama’s first debate against Mitt Romney and they did just fine in November. In other words, debates don’t determine who wins, and Biden already is showing some ability to bounce back.
I’m also persuaded by comments from people who have a deep understanding of what is involved in a presidential race, figures like Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Bouzy, Allan Lichtman, and Simon Rosenberg. All point to the futility of longing for a candidate on a white horse riding in to save the day. Bouzy, one of our most accurate prognosticators, says replacing Biden at this stage would lead to a red wave for sure in November.
Others say that the only replacement plan that would have any chance of working is Biden making a full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris, who is the only figure who would inherit his funds (since the money raised is for the two of them). O’Donnell warns that a late replacement could be a rerun of Humphrey vs. Nixon, Humphrey having been a convention-time replacement who later said he lacked the time needed to catch up (he almost did).
The Aesop story of the mice deciding that the cat should be belled also comes to mind. None of the editorials and columns I’ve seen saying that Biden should step down suggest who should replace him and all the obstacles that person would face.
In his play Galileo, Bertolt Brecht has his protagonist lament, “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.” If the only way to defeat a pathological liar and convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government is by fielding someone with the charisma of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama—well, then we are indeed uphappy as there are only so many people with those credentials. Biden’s doing a good job of running the government—maybe the best I’ve seen since Lyndon Johnson (if you ignore Vietnam)—and he has built a good organization. Brecht says we need collective action, not heroes, to prevail, and the Democrats have plenty of people willing to work hard to defeat Trump. Perhaps they should stop looking for a hero.
Returning to the debate, the best explanations I’ve heard about what happened Thursday night come from historian Heather Cox Richardson and authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Richardson says that Trump used a rhetorical technique known as “the Gish gallop,” which involves throwing out
a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
Ben-Ghiat, meanwhile, says that Biden faced a “firehose of falsehoods” comprised of
a stream of lies, half-truths, and insinuations, all delivered at high volume (thus the firehose). It’s a Kremlin tactic but practiced by authoritarians around the world. Trump’s one of world’s most skilled practitioners of this dark art, as is the Murdoch family, who deliver a tsunami of lies and smears daily.
At the end of today’s post I provide Richardson’s summation of Trump’s tsunami of lies but you probably know what they are already.
The ultimate aim of such a tsunami, Ben-Ghiat says, is
to destroy the idea that we can know the truth, creating situations of dependence on leaders’ fake versions of reality, and ultimately encouraging nihilism —if you distrust everything, you believe in nothing. Then you are far less likely to engage in resistance to uphold ideals like justice and freedom.
Political scientist John Stoehr looks at the psychological effectiveness of the tactic:
[A]s someone who recognizes in the president a variety of neurodivergence – he stutters; I have ADHD – I also saw in him what happens when lies come at you like a torrent. It’s paralyzing. I mean that literally. You don’t know what to do. And while your brain is firing in all directions simultaneously, you look like someone, as my friend Hussein Ibish said, who “couldn’t keep his train of thought together most of the time and had difficulty forming coherent sentences.”
This talk about firehoses and Gish gallops brings to mind Jonathan Swift’s “Description of a City Shower.” In that poem, a shower starts off quietly but assumes apocalyptic dimensions by the end. Early on, Swift compares the looming clouds to a drunkard about to vomit up everything within, which certainly describes Trump’s verbal torrent:
Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings, A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings, That swilled more liquor than it could contain, And, like a drunkard, gives it up again.
Once the storm really gets going, Swift gets to describe the filthiness of London. In the last line, the chaos has become so overwhelming that the rhyming iambic couplets break down and we are given a line that is virtually impossible to scan:
Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, And bear their trophies with them as they go: Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. They, as each torrent drives with rapid force, From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course, And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge, Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge. Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.
Swift is not only writing about London in this poem but the way that modern urban life is disrupting the quieter and more genteel traditions of the landed gentry. In other words, this is an early attack on the modern world, one that England will see repeated in the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, and others. In Trump’s case, he has found ways to disrupt the orderly process of debate, just as he has disrupted so many of our society’s institutions. Last Thursday we saw his dead cats and turnip tops come tumbling down the flood.
Yet all we seem to be talking about is whether Joe Biden is up to the job of being president.
Trump’s swelling kennels:
Trump’s string of lies were so overwhelming, Richardson notes, that it took CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, quickly speaking, to get through the list. She continues,
Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.
There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie.
Perhaps Biden should have been better prepared for Trump’s Gish gallop, so I suppose one could blame him or his team for that. Apparently, in his debate prep he was drilled on policy positions, but policy becomes irrelevant when you’re debating a non-stop liar. The real judgement of his competency, however, should be how well he’s doing as president. And what a catastrophe Trump was.
Healing of a Bleeding Woman, Peter-Marcellinus catacomb, 4th century A.D.
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Sunday
For help in understanding today’s Gospel reading, which involves two healing stories, I turn to Lory Hess’s recently released book When Fragments Make a Whole, which she and I have written about here Lory’s project involves looking at each of the instances where Jesus heals, interpreting the incident, reflecting on it poetically, and applying it to a time in her own life when she was struggling. Her reflections are wise, heartfelt, and healing in their own right. It’s Lectio Divina at its best.
Lory sees connections between the story of the woman suffering twelve years of perpetual hemorrhages and the death of a synagogue leader’s daughter. In her view, they represent respectively a menstrual disorder and “a girl of 12 on the threshold of puberty having difficulty crossing over into womanhood.” Lory says that the two female figures represent “an excess and a deficiency in the powerful life force that flows through the organs of reproduction and guides women through the changes of their cycle.” To achieve balance, they need Jesus’s mediating presence.
Here the Gospel passage in its entirety:
When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” So he went with him.
And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat. (Mark 5:21-43)
Lory imagines a backstory for both women. The hemorrhaging woman, she speculates, was raped when a teen, thought she would be able to hide that fact when she miscarried, but then found herself beset with ongoing bleeding. The little girl, by contrast, Lory imagines lacking the strength and the courage to transition into womanhood so that every day, little by little, she wastes away before finally dying.
As Lory sees it, integral to the woman’s healing is her willingness to reveal the whole truth about herself. When Jesus tells her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well,” Lory says this faith is a trust in divine love and goodness. “Healing can only take effect,” she writes,
when we let go of the fear that holds us imprisoned and open up to the good that guides our destiny, no matter how painful and incomprehensible it may appear at the moment. If we can persist patiently in spite of years of failure and suffering, and dare to reach out when we sense a healing power approaching, a sudden resurgence of energy is possible.
And then she adds,
Miracles are not events that overturn the laws of nature, but simply what happens when long-disjointed channels come back into alignment so that life can flow through them again.
As for the little girl who has died out of puberty fears, Lory says that that fear “must be replaced by trusting faith in the loving purposes of God.” When Jesus says, “Little girl, get up!” the girl finds the strength within herself to grow into her potential.
And now to the poems. The first captures the woman’s dilemma:
I could never be clean, and no one could touch me without soiling themselves– no, not even the hem of my garment. So my dark life flowed out, abundant but useless, love consumed by death.
Then she sees Jesus, out of whom also pours an endless source of life, although this is an affirmation, not a denial, of life:
Then I saw where he walked, a bright star mobbed by clouds, and a ray of hope pierced my darkness. He, too, poured out life from an endless source, but no death reigned in him.
Sensing an opportunity, the woman thinks,
If I could just touch his shining, come in range of that radiance, my light might be rekindled, my empty heart cease its weeping.
She therefore approaches, stealthily, and touches the hem of God:
I’ll not halt his healing of the maiden, nor show myself or speak, just come close in the crowd and reach out my hand, nearer, nearer, now…
The girl also has a secret shame, although it’s a biological process that all girls experience. Lory imagines that her dying begins at the puberty rituals that mark childhood’s end:
That’s when I started to die a little, as if some essence left my limbs along with the bloody flow. I couldn’t speak of it, too ashamed to say I might not have the strength for shouldering a woman’s lot of suffering and care. But day by day my life bled out, and I walked in a dream unaware how I went, until I staggered and fell.
As the girl sees it, there’s no turning back:
How could I return to that life I’d failed? Wouldn’t it happen again? The bleeding, the losing, the fainting, the dying? Better to just float away.
When Jesus reaches out his hand, however, all this begins to change. Lory sees the moment as an acceptance of womanhood and possible motherhood:
Then his hand in mind, and I felt flowing through it a woman’s courage, that no man can know: courage to bear impossible life, to strive against hope, and face down death for the sake of a future unborn.
The final stanza may echo George Herbert famous “Love (III)” in which the poet reports, “Love bade me welcome” and proceeds to override all the poet’s self-doubts. Lory has the girl declare,
Love asked me to live, and at last I could answer Yes.
So there you have it: mediating excess and deficiency by means of the way, the truth, and the life.
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Friday
I’ve been reading Indigo: The Color of Grief, Jonathan Foster’s recently released book of poems about the death of his 20-year-old daughter, which is salve for anyone who has lost a child—or for that matter, anyone who has lost someone close. In my case, we lost our 21-year-old son Justin, and although it happened almost a quarter of a century ago, the underlying ache is always there. Foster provides lyrics that are so poignant, so true to my own experience, that they take my breath away.
For instance, he somehow manages to capture the evanescence of one who was intensively present at one moment and then gone the next. The book opens with a memory of father and daughter being caught in a thunderstorm while hiking in the Rockies, which leads to the following image:
my daughter was a twenty-year lightning strike brilliant detonation across the backdrop of all we were
she flashed in what now seems like an instant
though i think i still see the outline of her power etched into the air lingering
electricity of the past throbbing beauty of the present
Many of the poems in the collection revisit memories, both of what his daughter brought to the world and of how she shaped him as a father. It brings to mind my own memories, which sometimes I carry as luminescent gems. The departed one is both “a no-thing” and “a some-thing”:
it’s weird absence is nothing a no-thing but it’s very much something a some-thing
it has no form but it forms me it has no energy but it energizes me i’m full of its emptiness
One reason why you should never tell those grieving that they will get over it is that (1) one never does, even though the grief becomes less acute and (2) because grief is a way of keeping the dead present. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis talks about the pain of the second death, which is the death of the grieving. In the week before the first-year anniversary of Justin’s death I remember feeling terrified of losing Justin this second time. But I need not have worried. The dead always remain, as Foster assures us they will.
Foster opens and closes his book, prologue and epilogue, with the thunderstorm episode, and I wonder if he is alluding to the concluding section of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. In “What the Thunder Said,” Eliot speaks of his desolation as he wanders through a waterless landscape. Yet, in the end, there is the promise of rain and of healing grace, and the poem’s last line is “Shanti, shanti, shanti,” which means “peace, peace, peace.” Eliot compares this to the Biblical “peace that passeth all understanding.”
Foster too seems to find a kind of peace in how the electrical presence of his daughter still “lingers in the air”:
throbs of beauty the past electricity
lingers in the air power etched in an outline flash across the backdrop of all we see the detonation is brilliant lightning bolt
beauty terrible beauty air charged with a buzz pine trees in sway atmosphere smell i remember
The two are pelted with rain and surrounded by thunderous explosions:
on top of us behind us before us shale and rock
And yet, because of the lightning flashes, the mountain seems to rise up toward the “brooding skies”:
the mountainside scrambling up toward brooding skies
thunder
I sense a kind of uplift in that final image, despite the cosmic chaos. We have been blessed with “beauty terrible beauty,” which death cannot take that away. As Foster, echoing Paul in Corinthians 2, writes immediately before the epilogue,
and now these two questions remain why do bad things happen? and why do good things happen? but the greatest of these is why do good things happen?
There may be one other Eliot tie-in. In his final lines, Eliot talks of using these fragments—fragments of different poems and different languages—to shore up against “my ruins.” Foster talks of doing the same in an introductory poem that explains how the poems were composed:
i have written this story the way i received it the way it’s been bouncing around inside conversational tone short sentences hints suspicions little punctuation no capitalization
That seems a powerful way to deal with loss. Death defies all of our meaning-making attempts—no use of language can fully do justice to the tragedy—but we make do with the fragments that we have. It helps explain why Indigo comes as close as anything I have read in a while at capturing what it’s like to lose a child.
Gustave Doré, Satan addresses the fallen angels in Paradise Lost
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Thursday
After having watched Trump’s debate performances in the past, I’m wondering how he will manage without a live audience and with his mic cut off when it’s Biden’s turn to speak. So much of his energy comes from feeding off his fans and from interrupting his opponents that he might find it hard to perform. I think of what Charlie says about Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman:
Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a Shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake.
I grant that the parallels quickly break down. While Loman is a flawed character, he is not the conman that Trump is. And he’s simply looking for smiles, not worshipful adulation. Nor is he calling for retribution against people he doesn’t like.
But that being acknowledged, there’s some merit to pushing the comparison, starting with the fact that Trump too is a salesman. Nothing more and nothing less. He too has no rock bottom to his life since, despite his claims, he doesn’t build anything. He just slaps his name on things, being no more than a brand. If people ever stopped buying his schtick, he would be finished.
Unfortunately they keep on buying it, allowing him to escape Willie Loman’s earthquake. He’s one salesman who hasn’t died but who is still going strong, even at 78.
Perhaps a better parallel is with Milton’s Satan, with whom I’ve compared Trump in the past (for instance, here). Satan is the quintessential narcissist and in his last appearance in Paradise Lost, he is thrown when he gets a different audience response than the one he is expecting.
Here’s the situation: Satan has promised the fallen angels that, in revenge for their defeat at God’s hands, he will corrupt God’s special creation. This he succeeds in doing, and he returns to Hell to receive the applause of his troops.
In doing so, he demonstrates that he has Trump’s flair for the theatrical. Just as Trump descended his golden escalator when he first announced he would be running for president, so Satan has his own surprise: he sneaks unnoticed onto his throne and then allows his light to shine forth:
All amazed At that so sudden blaze the Stygian throng Bent their aspect, and whom they wished beheld, Their mighty Chief returned: loud was th’ acclaim: Forth rushed in haste the great consulting Peer…
At this point, Satan imperiously raises his hand for silence and delivers a self-congratulatory speech. Having returned “successful beyond hope,” he tells the angels, he will now “lead ye forth triumphant out of this infernal pit.” He also mocks God as he recounts how he has seduced Adam and Eve with an apple. God is “worth your laughter,” Satan concludes, and then goes silent in order to bask in the anticipated congratulations.
He gets a very different response, however:
So having said, a while he stood, expecting Their universal shout and high applause To fill his ear, when contrary he hears On all sides, from innumerable tongues A dismal universal hiss, the sound Of public scorn…
It so happens that God has turned everyone into a snake, which explains the hisses. Now, Trump won’t be receiving hisses for his own performance tonight—there will be no audience to give him any kind of response—but for a man who lives to be applauded, the silence could well throw him off balance. I think it’s even possible that he stalks out of the room midway through the debate.
Not being much of a political prognosticator, I shouldn’t be making predictions. Let’s just say that the former president will not be in his comfort zone, and when he’s uncomfortable, anything is possible.
