Unknown Citizens vs. Musk-Trump

René Magritte, Song of Man

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Tuesday

Jay Kuo, who runs the Substack blog The Status Kuo, recently addressed the issue that is on many of our minds: Is Somebody Doing Something? He is referring, of course, to the Musk-Trump on-going coup. I subscribe to Kuo’s blog because he has a clear perspective of what it possible and what is not when things go haywire. Today he contends that more is being done than we may think.

And while I know it’s a small thing, the situation has me thinking of W.H. Auden’s poem “The Unknown Citizen.” Although the poem is a satire, citizens with the characteristics that Auden appears to denigrate are stepping up to resist the takeover. Such people do indeed deserve a monument, although it is not one that a surveillance state such as the one in the poem would ever erect.

Kuo says that mass purges of FBI prosecutors and agents, the shutdown of USAID, and the “tech bro putsch” at Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management—the latter giving “an unelected billionaire access and possible control over our entire federal workforce HR and some $6 trillion paid annually by our federal payment system—was deliberately carried out on Friday so that we would have the weekend to “panic for several days and make us feel like we were rudderless and without clear options.”

On the first business day following the attacks, however, Kuo says that he “can report confidently that the anti-Trump/Musk response is well underway.” Some of those responders are unknown citizens.

But let me first share the poem before mentioning names:

The Unknown Citizen
By W. H. Auden

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)


He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

As described by Auden, Unknown Citizen (who like the Unknown Soldier has no name) appears to live his life in conformity with social expectations. He has the right kind of job, the right kind of political views, the right number of children.

But note that he steps up to do his duty, which is no small thing. And it is people stepping up to do their duty—and getting fired for it—that we are seeing at the moment. Kuo notes that, currently, the front-line defenders of our democracy are

the civil servants whose roles and responsibilities are being upended or whose jobs are on the chopping block under the new administration. How they respond matters a great deal for a number of reasons, both moral and practical.

Morally speaking, it takes courage to stand up to authoritarianism, and Kuo notes that “[o]ne person’s courage is sometimes all it takes for many to find their own.” Practically, meanwhile, “stopping an illegal move initially buys valuable time for the press to be alerted, for union leaders and politicians to organize and respond, and for lawyers to be called in.”

Among the heroic personal responses over the past three days that Kuo mentions are:

–James Dennehy at the FBI, who counseled his staff to “dig in” and who wrote, “Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy.”

–David Lebryk at Treasury, who refused to grant Musk’s team access to the Fiscal Service, which disburses over $5.4 trillion. Then he retired, depriving the team of his knowledge of how to read, sort and control payments. As Kuo puts it, “More sand in the gears.”

–Director and Dep. Director for Security, John Vorhees, and Brian McGill at USAID, who denied Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (not an actual department) access to classified materials. Both were suspended.

Of course, unknown citizens can swing both ways, and there are those faceless figures that participate in Nazi rallies and refuse to acknowledge the neighboring concentration camp. But Auden’s unknown citizen appears to have taken civics in high school, which is looking very attractive these days. The man even belonged to a union, which would not make Musk or Trump happy.

Of more concern in Auden’s poem is the “we.” Trump’s billionaire allies—not only Musk—are vacuuming up personal information in ways that the poet could never have imagined. Trump is determined to make it even easier for them.

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Responding to the Musk-Trump Coup

Elon Musk’s Nazi salute

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Monday

In February 2022 I shared “We Lived Happily During the War,” by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky, because it was important that Americans oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Little did I think that America would be experiencing its own invasion two years later. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascist takeovers, points out,

We are living through a new kind of coup in which Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has taken over the payment and other administration systems that allow the American government to function, and has locked out federal employees from computer systems. Many of Musk’s collaborators in this endeavor previously worked for his private companies and/or helped him take over Twitter.

For Ben-Ghiat, there is a frightening sense of familiarity to this:

What is happening now builds on classic authoritarian dynamics as I described them in Strongmen and in many essays for Lucid. There is always an “inner sanctum” that really runs the show, with its mix of family members and cronies, some with histories of working with or for foreign powers. And there is almost always a purge of the federal bureaucracy. That is now being carried out on a mass scale.

Ben-Ghiat notes that the goal is to “rearrange government around an extremist ideological project of Christian nationalism and White supremacy.” A second goal is to “enact neoliberal deregulation and privatization meaures.” Progress on both fronts has been horrifyingly rapid:

The speed of its implementation makes Trump’s takeover stand out within an authoritarian framework. The more corrupt and criminal the autocrat, the more he is obsessed with punishing enemies and feeling safe. Cue the immediate execution of the revenge and retribution part of this plan, with anyone who was involved in attempts to bring Trump and his collaborators to justice for the Jan. 6 insurrection or anything else, FBI employees included, is now a target.

Only with coups, Ben-Ghiat concludes, does one see “such a rush to punish and expel non-loyalists from the government.”

With that in mind, Kaminsky’s poem is a call for us to wake up, even if we ourselves are not yet suffering:

We Lived Happily During the War
By Ilya Kaminsky
 
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house
by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money
in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

What does enough protesting and enough opposing look like? Kaminsky doesn’t say and I myself don’t have clear answers.  But just because we aren’t seeing obvious signs of people pushing back doesn’t mean that they aren’t. In her Washington Post column an aging Anne Lamott, who believes that resistance can’t be rushed, points out some of the quiet forms protest is taking:

It is in the witness and courage of the Right Rev. Mariann Budde. It is in the bags of groceries we keep taking to food pantries. It looks like generosity, like compassion. It looks like the profound caring for victims of the fires, and providing refuge for immigrants and resisting the idea that they are dangerous or unwanted, and reaching out to queer nieces, siblings and strangers and helping resist the notion that their identities are unworthy, let alone illegal.

And:

It is in our volunteer support for public schools and libraries, because we know the new president holds them in contempt and fear. Teachers and librarians are allies for souls who have been dismissed as hopeless.

Throughout history, it has always been the case that we can’t do more than what is doable. None of us can stop the coup on our own. But what we can do, we should do.

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Prayer Is Waiting with Desire

Rembrandt, Simeon in the Temple

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Sunday

Today’s Gospel lesson features two “righteous and devout” individuals, Simeon and Anna, who have grown old while patiently awaiting the coming of the messiah. Their faith is finally rewarded when they encounter Jesus as a child.

Biblical scholar and theologian Richard Bauckman has a poem in which he describes the waiting process as travelers stranded in a train station. “The hardest part of waiting is the not doing,” he observes before warning, “waiting too long the heart grows sclerotic.”

Whatever the state of his heart, Simeon is overjoyed (so Luke informs us) when he encounters Jesus, declaring,

Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.

Anna, meanwhile, “began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.” Bauckman characterizes their prayers as “waiting with desire,” concluding, “eyes will see what hearts await.”

Wait and See (Simeon and Anna)
By Richard Bauckman

In the drab waiting-room
the failed travelers, resigned, sleep
on the hard benches, inured
to postponement and foul coffee.
Hope has given up on them.

There are also the impatient,
pacing platforms, and the driven,
purple with frustration, abusing
their mobiles, for the hardest part
of waiting is the not doing.

Truly to wait is pure dependence.
But waiting too long the heart
grows sclerotic. Will it still
be fit to leap when the time comes?
Prayer is waiting with desire.

Two aged lives incarnate
century on century
of waiting for God, their waiting-room
his temple, waiting on his presence,
marking time by practicing

the cycle of the sacrifices,
ferial and festival,
circling onward, spiraling
towards a center out ahead,
seasons of revolving hope.

Holding out for God who cannot
be given up for dead, holding
him to his promises – not now,
not just yet, but soon, surely,
eyes will see what hearts await.

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Fighting the Erasure of History

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Friday

Black History Month, which begins tomorrow, takes on a special significance this year given rightwing America’s attempts to erase Black history from our national consciousness. First there was the Air Force removing video materials about the Tuskegee airmen (as well as about women service pilots), although they’ve since been put back in the curriculum following a hew and cry. Now we get word that the Defense Department’s intelligence agency has paused observances of Black History Month, as well as observance of Pride Month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, and other cultural and historical annual events.

None of this should come as a surprise. For years we’ve seen MAGA go after such works as Ruby Bridges Goes to School and Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.” And then there’s the wholesale assault on Toni Morrison that has been underway for decades.

The erasure of history is an ongoing theme of George Orwell’s 1984, which increasingly appears to be describing our reality. The Party’s slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” appears to have been unofficially adopted by Trump. What he wants is an eternal now in which he defines reality. Or as Winston explains it to Julia, “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

I’m struck by the contrast between Orwell’s pessimism about totalitarian regimes reshaping history and poet Lucille Clifton’s optimism that history wields a power unto itself. In “i am accused of tending to the past,” written around 1990, she sees Black history growing up as it remembers faces, names, and dates. “When she is strong enough to travel on her own,” Clifton writes, “beware, she will”:

i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

I wonder if Clifton regarded Black History Month as being a necessary mother, required to nurture a History not yet strong enough to stand on its own, much less travel. In any event, MAGA appears to heeding Clifton’s threat—“beware, she will”—and is taking every measure to ensure it never grows up. The attacks on DEI have essentially become Jim Crow 2024, an attempt to reinstate our racial caste system following a half century of significant progress. An historical knowledge of what African Americans have endured and how they have resisted and sometimes triumphed is therefore essential.

It is therefore encouraging to learn about instances of Black history being taught in weekend programs—such as this one in Florida—to counteract MAGA assaults on school history curricula. Literature, meanwhile, has its own vital role to play, one that is particularly important given the ability of stories and poems to capture the complexities of race in America. As authors like Clifton, Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and all those others make clear, the experience of being Black and White in America is so multidimensional that no single perspective can do it justice. While the Trump administration would certainly like to end an awareness of our tortured history of race, to a certain extent Clifton is right: it’s currently traveling on its own more than it ever has, despite attacks. As one who learned Tennessee history from a segregationist teacher in 1963—Fred Langford barely mentioned slavery—I can see the difference.

Every year on the Sunday nearest Martin Luther King’s birthday, Episcopal churches (and other denominations as well, I suspect) sing James Weldon Johnson’s inspiring “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” You can read the whole song here but for today’s purpose I excerpt the lines referring to Black history:

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.   
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;   
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,   
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

When confronting renewed attempts at oppression, nothing is more powerful than knowing that one has triumphed over oppression in the past. Only when one succumbs to the timeless present that authoritarians desire does one lose hope and give up.

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Blake vs. GOP’s Strict Father Morality

William Blake, “Nobodaddy”

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Thursday

A recent essay drawing on the ideas of linguist and philosopher George Lakoff contends that, once we understand why Donald Trump’s supporters keep calling him “Daddy”–and why they continue to infantilize themselves on national television–we will “hold the key to understanding the psychology of the Republican Party and the cult of Trump.” Reading Gil Duran’s article conjured up for me William Blake’s Nobodaddy.

The examples Duran cites are disturbing and sometimes downright creepy, at least to those not in the Trumpian cult. For instance:

“It’s like daddy arrived, and he’s taking his belt off, you know?” said actor Mel Gibson during a recent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox.

“Daddy’s back!” exclaimed Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida after Trump’s inauguration. “Daddy’s home!” tweeted Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado. “Dad is home,” declared conservative troll Charlie Kirk. “Straighten up sucker, cuz daddy’s home!” sang Kid Rock at Trump’s inauguration party. “Now your daddy’s home,” jeered Roseanne Barr and Tom MacDonald in a bizarre Trump-themed rap song.

Creepiest of all is Tucker Carlson comparing America to a naughty daughter whom Trump needs to spank:

You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. … It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.

Duran is drawing on Lakoff’s concept of “strict father morality,” which the philosopher describes it as follows:

The strict father model begins with a set of assumptions: The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winners and losers. There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong.

Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good. What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father who can:
• Protect the family in the dangerous world,
• Support the family in the difficult world, and
• Teach his children right from wrong.

What is required of the child is obedience, because the strict father is a moral authority who knows right from wrong. It is further assumed that the only way to teach kids obedience—that is, right from wrong—is through punishment, painful punishment, when they do wrong.

The punishment aimed at kids is also aimed at others, such as immigrants, poor families, and struggling women. It also informs a certain view of Christianity.

 Currently we are seeing two strains of Christianity wrestling for the soul of America, the love-oriented Christianity that Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde preached the other day and the punishment-oriented Christianity of Trump supporters. It was this latter version of God that Blake attacks in his poetry.

I admit to not understanding much of Blake’s bewildering cosmology, but I instinctively get his aversion to an angry daddy god. Nobodaddy is perhaps a compound word taken from “Old Daddy Nobody.” Some have also suggested that Blake means it to be a close anagram of Abaddon, the “angel of the bottomless pit” who appears in Revelation 9:11 and is mentioned in Job 26:6. According to Blake scholar L. Edwin Folsom, the poet sees this god as a farting and belching “Father of Jealousy” who hides himself in clouds and loves “hanging & drawing & quartering / Every bit as well as war & slaughtering.” At different points in his poetry Blake associates him with Winter, the Will, and the Old Testament God.

If there’s a connection with Revelation’s Abaddon, then he would also be associated with the king of locusts, which supposedly will be released during the apocalypse in order to torture “those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.” In the eyes of some Trump Christians, this includes anyone who votes Democratic.

Here one of Blake’s poems featuring the dark fathernfigure:

To Nobodaddy

Why art thou silent & invisible  
Father of jealousy
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds  
From every searching Eye

Why darkness & obscurity
In all thy words & laws  
That none dare eat the fruit but from  
The wily serpents jaws  
Or is it because Secrecy
gains females loud applause

When one lives in thrall to such a daddy god, one sees sexuality as a secret and sinful temptation (“wily serpents jaws”)—which helps explain why we regularly hear about MAGA pastors molesting children or committing adultery. Whereas if one sees God as a figure of love, then the world looks very different, as in this poem from Songs of Innocence:

The Shepherd

How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot!
From the morn to the evening he strays;
He shall follow his sheep all the day,
And his tongue shall be fillèd with praise.

For he hears the lambs’ innocent call,
And he hears the ewes’ tender reply;
He is watchful while they are in peace,
For they know when their shepherd is nigh.

This is closer to how I raised my own children–listening to their calls, taking them seriously, and replying tenderly–and they have grown into responsible and kind men as well as extraordinary fathers. No belt was needed.

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Auden on Living in an Age of Anxiety

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Wednesday

As Donald Trump slings around his wrecking ball, targeting such worthy programs as Meals on Wheels, Head Start, school lunches, child-care help, student loans, disaster relief, crime-fighting assistance and Medicaid itself (which provides healthcare to 82 million Americans), we await to see whether anything can pierce the bubble around him. Greg Olear of the Substack blog Prevail asks, “Why do so many Americans still walk around in a fog, oblivious to the swirl of change around them, ignorant of the ill intent of the oligarchs, in denial about the malefic character of our once and current President?”

If Trump’s monumental bungling of a plague failed to wake people up, he wonders, will anything? Are Trump supporters “capable of admitting they’d been had?”

I wrote on this subject this past Monday, citing a passage from George Eliot’s Silas Marner about living in denial. Olear suggests another passage that applies, this one from W.H. Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety.

Before giving it to you, however, let me first quote from the poem that serves as its preamble. In “September 1, 1939,” written about the start of World War II, Auden writes,

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.

The Trump era can certainly be called low and dishonest, with Biden’s four-year interlude ultimately unable to overcome Trumpism’s incessant lying and fearmongering. In Age of Anxiety, written eight years later and reflecting on how fascism got so far, Auden writes,

 We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

We would rather remain in our illusions—stay stuck in our s**t, as the saying goes—than face up to the truth of our condition. Our dread may make us miserable but it’s familiar. Jesus understood this state of mind and climbed “the cross of the moment” to awaken us. Stepping away from our ruin and embracing real change requires a courage that appears beyond many of us.

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Trump Has Let Slip the Lapdogs of War

Charlton Heston as an Antony bent on revenge

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Tuesday

“F**k it: Release ’em all,” Donald Trump reportedly said about the insurrectionists who, at his instigation, stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, battling with police in a conflict that led to many injuries and several deaths. He has, to borrow from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, cried “havoc” and let slip the dogs of war.

America’s militant right was, needless to say, jubilant at Trump’s decision. Proud Boys’ leader Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy, declared, “The people who did this, they need to feel the heat, they need to be put behind bars, and they need to be prosecuted.” Oath Keepers leader Stuart Rhodes, sentenced to 18 years for the same, said the prosecutors should be tried for their “crimes.” And the so-called QAnon shaman crowed, “”I got a pardon baby! Thank you President Trump! Now I am gonna buy some motha f***in guns!”

The judge who sentenced Rhodes in 2023 said at the time, “You are smart, you are charismatic and compelling and frankly that’s what makes you dangerous. The moment you are released, whenever that may be, you will be ready to take up arms against your government.” In other words, Trump is well on his way to inspiring a paramilitary to supplement his other powers.

Antony delivers his famous line immediately after Julius Caesar has been assassinated. Seething with feelings of revenge and resentment, he vows that “domestic fury and fierce civil strife shall cumber all the parts of Italy” and that all pity will be “choked with custom of fell deeds.”  Caesar’s spirit, he promises, will come “ranging for revenge” from hot hell and will be accompanied by Átē, the Greek god of moral blindness and ruin:

Over thy wounds now do I prophesy
 (Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips
 To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue)
 A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
 Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
 Blood and destruction shall be so in use
 And dreadful objects so familiar
 That mothers shall but smile when they behold
 Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds;
 And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
 With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
 Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
 Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
 With carrion men groaning for burial.

Trump is no less unhinged than Antony in his desire for retribution against those who tried to hold him accountable. His pardons are one way of expressing this.

And as for the results, we can say—shifting to another Shakespeare play—”Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

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George Eliot Applied to Climate Change

Dunstan Cass stealing Silas Marner’s gold

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Monday

My friend Valerie Hotchkiss, Oberlin’s head librarian, alerted me to a Wall Street Journal letter to the editor applying George Eliot’s Silas Marner to the California wildfires. While I’m grateful to the letter writer for alerting me to the passage, I believe he fails to apply it to the real culprit.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Journal has fallen in line with Donald Trump in denying the fact of climate change,* and the letter is one of three pieces of writing blaming the extensive fire damage on California bureaucracy. All three insist that the state should have insisted that homeowners do more to prepare for an inevitable cataclysm. The fire devastation, in other words, is the Democrats’ fault, not the Republicans’.

The second letter uses Eliot to explain why Californians failed to prepare. They have been living in denial, Jonathan Schmerling writes, thinking that there’s no reason to adopt special fire prevention measures because they haven’t been victimized by fires in the past. They are like Silas Marner, who is confident that the gold he has hidden away under his floorboards is safe because he has never before been robbed. Here’s the Eliot passage cited by the letter writer:

The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as the reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”

Eliot then provides the following concrete example:

A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death. This influence of habit was necessarily strong in a man whose life was so monotonous as Marner’s—who saw no new people and heard of no new events to keep alive in him the idea of the unexpected and the changeful; and it explains simply enough, why his mind could be at ease, though he had left his house and his treasure more defenseless than usual. 

Schmerling sententiously concludes his letter,

When the fire-ravaged communities rebuild, perhaps Eliot’s warning will be heeded by both the public and private sectors to ensure that the complacency Mr. Dittrich exposes, which inexorably led to the current calamity, doesn’t again take hold.

Now, it may be true that Californians should have taken more measures to protect their homes against fires. In that way the editorial and the letter writers may have a point. We could also say that homeowners living on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts could and should do more to protect their homes against hurricanes and sea level rise. But because temperatures are unquestionably rising and storms are unquestionably becoming more frequent and intense, to put most of the blame on complacency rather than on hydrocarbons is like…well, like Silas Marner thinking that his gold will be safe if he hides it better or locks his house. Determined thieves will find their way in, regardless of precautions taken.

The GOP these days would like to blame the victim rather than address the problem when it comes to climate change, pandemics, political violence, growing income inequality, and other ills. Because the catastrophes are happening to other people, they confidently assume that a crisis is not (to use Eliot’s word) imminent. They believe that they will remain untouched.

Or to borrow again from the Eliot passage cited by the Journal letter writer, “The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as the reason why the event should never happen.”

*On the connection between climate change and the California wildfires

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports,

Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States during the last two decades. Wildfires require the alignment of a number of factors, including temperature, humidity, and the lack of moisture in fuels, such as trees, shrubs, grasses, and forest debris. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change.

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Jesus, Defender of the Oppressed

Heinrik Olrik, Sermon on the Mount

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Sunday

This past week Mariann Budde, who was my diocesan bishop when I lived and worked in southern Maryland, called upon to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” Among these were LGBTQ+ children, immigrant laborers, and refugees fleeing oppression. It was very much in the spirit of Jesus when, returning to Nazareth, he spoke before the synagogue in which he had grown up (today’s Gospel lesson). And just as Jesus was roundly attacked and almost thrown off a cliff, so was the bishop roundly attacked by Trump and his supporters, including so-called Christian Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House. Trump’s Christian supporters seem to have no problem beating up on the poor.

At the end of today’s post I include a poem by Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, a practitioner of liberation theology who draws on the psalms just as Jesus did.

First, here’s what Jesus had to say in today’s Gospel:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

And now Budde:

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen”

And finally Cardenal’s poem, translated by Jonathan Cohen. If you know the psalms, you will see it as written very much in that tradition:

Give Ear to My Words, Psalm 5

Give ear to my words O Lord
        Hear my groans
Listen to my protest
For you are not a God who is a friend of dictators
nor a supporter of their politics
nor are you influenced by their propaganda
nor do you associate with any gangster

There’s no honesty in their speeches
nor in their press releases

They talk of peace in their speeches
while they increase their war production

They talk of peace at Peace Conferences
and secretly prepare for war
    Their lying radios blare all night long

Their desks are piled with criminal plans
      and sinister documents

But you will protect me from their plans

They speak through the mouth of machine guns
Their flashing tongues
      are bayonets…

Punish them O God
   foil their politics
mix up their memos
      block their programs

At the hour of the Alarm Siren
you will be with me
you will be my refuge on the day of the Bomb

You bless the righteous
who don’t believe in the lies of their ads
nor in their publicity and political campaigns

Your love surrounds them
       like armored tanks

It’s worth noting that, while Cardenal’s radical Christianity drew the fire of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza so that he had to flee to Costa Rica, it also angered the Marxist government that overthrew Somoza. His funeral in 2020 was disrupted by pro-Daniel Ortega supporters and he had to be buried in secret.

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