Edward Henry Potthast, Children Playing at the Seashore
Thursday
My four Georgia grandchildren began school this week, which for much of the world sounds outlandish. Who outside of the United States starts school in the heart of the summer?
William Blake would certainly disapprove. Check out his “School Boy”:
I love to rise in a summer morn, When the birds sing on every tree; The distant huntsman winds his horn, And the skylark sings with me. O! what sweet company.
But to go to school in a summer morn O: it drives all joy away; Under a cruel eye outworn. The little ones spend the day. In sighing and dismay.
Ah! then at times I drooping sit. And spend many an anxious hour. Nor in my book can I take delight, Nor sit in learnings bower. Worn thro’ with the dreary shower.
How can the bird that is born for joy, Sit in a cage and sing. How can a child, when fears annoy, But droop his tender wing. And forget his youthful spring.
O! father & mother if buds are nipped, And blossoms blown away. And if the tender plants are stripped Of their joy in the springing day, By sorrow and cares dismay.
How shall the summer arise in joy Or the summer fruits appear, Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy Or bless the mellowing year. When the blasts of winter appear.
This isn’t Blake’s only poem involking the tragedy of birds in cages. In “Auguries of Innocence,” which is a set of Blakean proverbs, he writes,
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage. A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
Blighted minds, Blake fears, will grow up to become blasted adults. Best to have children sing with the summer skylark.
Periodically I share comic tweets from my youngest son’s twitter feed because I find them to be hilarious. The above image is Toby repurposing an image (or meme) that has been bouncing around the twitterverse. If you don’t pick up on the literary allusions, I explain them below.
In posting it, I’ve given you the punchline without the set-up. Since the joke in such twitter humor lies in how successfully one hijacks the original image for one’s own purposes, here’s the original image so that you can compare:
The original drew a lot of twitter criticism because it trades in stale gender stereotypes of women caring for others and men caring only for themselves. Furthermore, the cartoonist’s sense of women’s moral superiority rubbed a number of readers, not only men, the wrong way. The two figures have essentially been reduced to caricatures.
Toby’s repurposing not only makes the cartoon funnier—at least for literature nerds—but more complex. The woman’s new response (as I’m sure many of you know) references Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, the man’s T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Rossetti’s poem is a wild phantasmagoria involving forbidden fruit, which is a stand-in for (I simplify here) casting off all sexual restraint. Its fairy tale mysteriousness makes it one of my all-time favorite poems. Here’s are “the goblin men” tempting Laura and her sister:
Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries– All ripe together In summer weather—
Laura gives in to temptation, buys, indulges, and then loses all joy in life. Fortunately, her sister—who heroically resists goblin temptation—sacrifices herself, thereby saving Laura. The poem is a rich exploration of sexual repression and sublimation.
In Eliot’s poem, meanwhile, the socially insecure and uptight Prufrock, attempting always to be perfectly proper, occasionally imagines (but does no more than imagine) taking a daring action. One of these actions involves eating a peach:
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
Apparently parting his hair behind in the bohemian style and walking casually and freely upon the beach (in flannel trousers, no less!) are fairly daring for Prufrock, who normally dresses in the height of fashion. (Example: “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, /My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin.”) Eating a peach, especially given Rossetti’s poem, hints at sensuality. Might he too shake off all restraint and, like Laura, indulge his repressed desires?
But no sooner has Prufrock mentioned stepping outside his comfort zone than, like earlier in the poem, he retreats back into it. Victorian sexual repression appears to be alive and well in Eliot’s 1915 poem. No sensual encounters with mermaids for him.
So look how Toby’s repurposing has made the original cartoon more interesting. Rather than a woman boasting her moral superiority over her selfish husband, we have a couple each wrestling with marital frustrations in very human ways. Both appear to worry that aging is robbing them of their youthful vitality and imagine doing something wild and forbidden. Perhaps each is contemplating an affair.
Perhaps they’ll never act upon their fantasies but instead, in Thoreau’s phrase, continue to live lives of quiet desperation. In any case, a peach is operating very much as it does in both Rossetti’s and Eliot’s poem, triggering thoughts that otherwise lie hidden beneath the surface. The woman may not be as different from her husband as she thinks.
Suddenly we have the kind of drama that D. H. Lawrence famously takes on, say in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Li-Young Lee’s seasonally appropriate “From Blossoms,” which owes a lot to Rossetti (and to Mary Oliver as well) also comes to mind:
From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned toward signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside, succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
There are few taste sensations more delectable than a fresh peach from Georgia, Toby’s home state. If you come across one, dare to eat it.
The post I was writing for today has fallen apart rather late in the day so, as a last minute measure, I share a very witty parody—written by my father—of Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din.”
The original poem, while it has a wonderful rhythm, is somewhat problematic. It’s about a British soldier realizing, somewhat patronizingly and sentimentally, that the regimental water boy is a worthy man in his own right. You can read the whole poem at Poetry Foundation but here’s enough of it to set up the parody:
You may talk o’ gin and beer When you’re quartered safe out ’ere, An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter You will do your work on water, An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it. Now in Injia’s sunny clime, Where I used to spend my time A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen, Of all them blackfaced crew The finest man I knew Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din, He was ‘Din! Din! Din! ‘You limpin’ lump o’ brick-dust, Gunga Din! ‘Hi! Slippy hitherao ‘Water, get it! Panee lao, ‘You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din.’
And here’s the last stanza, where Gunga Din is killed while bringing water to the speaker, who has himself been shot:
E carried me away To where a dooli lay, An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean. ’E put me safe inside, An’ just before ’e died, ‘I ’ope you liked your drink,’ sez Gunga Din. So I’ll meet ’im later on At the place where ’e is gone— Where it’s always double drill and no canteen. ’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals Givin’ drink to poor damned souls, An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din! Yes, Din! Din! Din! You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, By the livin’ Gawd that made you, You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
My father’s poem was written in a place and at a time where illegal Appalachian moonshine was the only alcohol one could buy locally, Franklin County, Tennessee being a dry county in the 1950s and 1960s. To meet the inevitable demand, some converted their bathtubs into stills, just as today the same kinds of people have turned their bathtubs into meth factories. Here’s the poem:
The Ballad of Bathtub Gin By Scott Bates
You may talk of Scotch an Rye When you’re drink’ on the sly An’ you feel you ain’t got nothin’ much to lose; But when it comes to liquor You’ll never get there quicker Than on good ol’-fashioned rotgut, homemade booze!
Now in Frisco’s foggy clime Where I used to spend my time Indulgin’ in the gentle arts of sin, Of all the local brew The most potent stuff I knew Was that belly-bustin’ beverage, bathtub gin!
Refrain It was gin! gin! gin! You super-saturated Mickey Finn! Hey, gimme another slug! Wipe the sawdust off the plug! Takes the ring right off the bathtub, bathtub gin!
But they carried me away To where a jacket lay, A double-vested job with strings to lace ’er; An’ when they got me tied I ’eard ’em say aside, “ ‘E should’ve taken Draino for a chaser!”
So now I’m getting’ bored In the Alcoholic Ward An’ I’m getting’ tired o’ watchin’ my D.T.’s; But when they treats me rude I just dreams o’ getting’ stewed, An’ they can give me trouble all they please!
So it’s gin! gin! gin! Though they put me in this moldy storage bin, I know that when I die, I’ll be really ridin’ high ’Cause I’ll get a swig in Hell of bathtub gin!
–Yes, it’s gin! gin! gin! What a pandemonic pickle I’ll be in! By the devils that distill you And the poor damned souls that swill you, You’re the hottest hooch in Hades, bathtub gin!
Did you have fun? I pick up some rebellion in the poem: my father came from a teetotalling family—his grandfather moved to Evanston, IL because it was home to the national headquarters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—and the most I ever saw my grandmother stray was a dash of brandy in the Christmas pudding once a year. They were scandalized when my father, their darling youngest son, returned from World War II drinking, smoking and (maybe worst of all) having voted for Roosevelt.
I’m not sure why my father sets the poem in San Francisco—maybe because it scans better—since the fog he refers to applies equally well to Sewanee, Tennessee. In any event, moonshiners were local celebrities when I was growing up.
Not that my father partook. The stuff, after all, could render one blind. He drove to Chattanooga to get the beer and wine, which was all he ever drank. In his poem, however, he gets into the spirit of the illicit manufacture of “good ol’ fashioned rotgut, homemade booze.”
Further note: Franklin County is no longer dry so now enterprising souls have switched from moonshine to the far more harmful meth. In fact, we are now known as “Meth Mountain,” and a dentist friend, who runs a free dental clinic on Tuesdays, says he spends pretty much all his time pulling meth teeth.
William Worcester Churchill, Woman Reading on a Settee
Monday
I’ve been listening to Amor Towles’s novel Rules of Civility, which has a protagonist that is an enthusiastic novel reader. I share today Katie comparing Dickens to a morning cup of coffee. The passage is set up by an account of what that first cup meant to her father, who is reminiscing on his deathbed:
Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee.
“Only decades later,” Katie says, “would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.” Here’s her explanation:
Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.
Then we get to Dickens:
In retrospect, my cup of coffee has been the works of Charles Dickens. Admittedly there’s something a little annoying about all those plucky underprivileged kids and the aptly named agents of villainy. But I’ve come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.
The day that lit stops giving me that special jolt will probably be the day I’m ready to pack it in.
In 1904 the great mystical poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “The Last Supper” after seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s painting. I like how he helps me see the picture anew: Rilke contrasts the grounded Jesus (“like a sage resolved to his end”) with the worried disciples (“they flutter anxious”) but also notes how alone he feels.
The disciples are understandably concerned about the news he brings them. In Rilke’s analogy, he has delivered a shotgun blast into their midst and they, like frightened birds, flutter anxiously around as they “try to find a way out.”
But there is no way out. Jesus is “everywhere like a twilight-hour” with night coming on inexorably. Fortunately, after night, the dawn.
The Last Supper By Rainer Maria Rilke
They are gathered, astounded and disturbed round him who, like a sage resolved to his end, takes himself away from those he belonged to, and who alien past them flows. The only loneliness comes over him that reared him to the doing of his deep acts; now again will he wander through the olive grove, and those who love him will take flight before him.
He has summoned them to the last supper and (as a shot scatter birds out of the sheaves) he scatters their hands from among the loaves with his word: they fly across to him; they flutter anxious through the table’s round and try to find a way out. But he is everywhere like a twilight-hour.
Mihály Munkácsy, Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters
Friday
I report today on a vivid dream that visited me Wednesday night. In it, I was working my way up an icy hill to retrieve my son Toby, who in the dream was a child visiting friends (he’s now an adult). When I got to the house late, I saw that he was sleeping in the hallway, but he awoke when I entered and gave me a joyous smile. The reason: lying next to him, also asleep, was his beloved older brother Justin, who died 22 years ago.
Then Justin too awoke and smiled his characteristic smile. Tall and lanky with blond hair that flopped over his eyes, he assured me he was back when I told him, “I thought we’d lost you.” As I knelt to hug him, however, I woke up.
I haven’t cried about Justin in two decades but, after telling Julia about the dream, I cried. I also recalled John Milton’s “Sonnet 23,” where he describes a similar dream.
In Milton’s case, he is dreaming of Katherine Woodcock, his second wife who died from childbirth complications after they had been married for only two years. Invoking the story of Heracles (“Jove’s great son”) journeying to Hades to rescue Admetus’s wife Alcestis, Milton says that, for a moment, he thought that Woodcock had been similarly restored to him. Although “her face was veiled,” Milton writes,
yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined So clear, as in no face with more delight.
That’s how it was with Justin as well. In his expression, I read pure delight. He always was an expressive child, and in my dream good humor radiated off of him.
And then, like Milton in the poem, I woke up:
But O, as to embrace me she inclined, I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
“Night” works double here as Milton was blind by this time. In fact, he never physically saw his wife. But he saw her in his dream—in darkness—before awaking to what for him was eternal night:
Methought I saw my late espoused Saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force though pale and faint. Mine as whom washed from spot of childbed taint Purification in the old law did save, And such as yet once more I trust to have Full sight of her in heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind: Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined So clear, as in no face with more delight. But O, as to embrace me she inclined, I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
I find myself wondering whether this dream has been triggered by grief for my recently departed mother. She adored Justin (and he her) and, as I was talking to her in her final hours, I told her that she’d be seeing Justin soon. Maybe the dream was to reassure me that I wasn’t feeding her an empty wish fulfillment.
Sometimes poetry’s gift to us is letting us know that others have felt what we are feeling and experienced what we are experiencing. I certainly found that to be true after Justin died, when I was comforted by the fact (so poems like Mary Oliver’s “Lost Children” and Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” let me know) that I was not alone in my suffering. Milton’s ability to articulate his heartbreak and to find beauty in the midst of it cushions the rest of us.
Poetry, in short, helps us through unbearable pain.
As news out of Ukraine continues to give us gruesome tales of Russian torture, shelling of civilian areas, and wholesale slaughter of prisoners and villagers, one of the most graphic literary images I’ve ever encountered comes to mind: a Russian army officer ordering a prisoner skinned alive to get him to talk. We encounter “Boris the Manskinner” in Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Boris explains the origins of his tactics to the Japanese prisoners he has captured in the latter days of World War II. He blames it all on the Mongolians:
They love to kill people in ways that involve great difficulty and imagination. They are, shall we say, aficionados. Since the days of Genghis Khan, the Mongols have enjoyed devising particularly ruel ways to kill people. We Russians are painfully aware of this. It is part of our history lessons in school. We study what the Mongols did when they invaded Russia. They killed millions. For no reason at all.
Except there is a reason, as he goes on to explain. They do it because they enjoy it. And because no one in command tells them not to.
Which sounds like the situation in Ukraine. The Russians aren’t committing war crimes as an intimidation tactic. They’re doing so because they can.
According to Australian general Mick Ryan, whose analysis on Ukraine I’ve been following, armies that commit war crimes to this extent are, barring other factors, generally headed for defeat. Such behavior points to a lack of the discipline needed to carry out effective military operations. In a series of tweets Ryan observes,
[T]his behavior by the Russian soldiers is further evidence (as if we needed any more) that the Russian Army is professionally corrupt & morally bankrupt. The entire Russian Army chain of command, because of the leadership environment they have nurtured, is responsible.
An army that either explicitly (or implicitly) permits such behavior will never be capable of fighting as an effective and cohesive force. Wars still have rules. An army that operates with an ‘anything goes’ ethos is just not an army. It is an armed group of criminals.
This is why, Ryan goes on to say, “the study of the profession of arms, ethics, and the profound responsibility of exercising lethal force on behalf of one’s nation, is such an important area of study and indoctrination in military institutions.”
Such reasoning leads Ryan to inveigh also against “rough justice and retribution.” The courts, not vengeful Ukrainians, must decide the fate of Russians who commit war crimes. “These murderous scumbags,” he writes, “must be tried and made an example of, so that others know we will never allow them to get away with it.”
Ryan concludes with an important reminder:
Remember, there is a reason Ukraine is fighting for its sovereignty, and why we are supporting it. They are fighting for their existence, and for a world where such acts are not permitted nor tolerated.
In the novel, Boris loses touch with reality when he tortures the innocent son of a high Community Party official. Stalin’s forces, in other words, turn on themselves because thuggish behavior is calling the shots. While the fictional Boris himself escapes, the army that Stalin built up—and that Soviet and Russian leaders ever since have boasted of—has been exposed as a hollow shell, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.
Or as Ryan puts it, “professionally corrupt & morally bankrupt.”
For further reading, check out my post where I compare Vladimir Putin to Boris.
An interesting article in the latest New Yorker addressed the age-old battle of the sexes at a time when toxic masculinity is on the rise, even though feminism appears firmly entrenched. Zoe Heller reviews two books arguing that too often the debate between feminists and patriarchs is a zero-sum game–which is to say, it’s bad for both the women and the men.
An even-handed fictional account of the tension appears in an unfinished novel by a dear friend, the now deceased Rachel Kranz, that has stuck with me for years. I share an excerpt with you because, in addition to acknowledging the problem, Rachel points to a possible solution.
Zoe Heller reviews French historian Ivan Jablonka’s A History of Masculinity From Patriarchy to Gender Justice and British columnist Nina Power’s What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents. I focus here on Power’s book.
Power worries that exaggerated complaining about male toxicity (say, about mansplaining or manspreading) has become “a kind of tribal habit among women.” What is lost in the demonization of men, she believes, is that which is “valuable and generative in male and female difference”:
In our haste to declare masculinity a redundant artifact, she says, we have lost sight of some of its “positive dimensions”—“the protective father, the responsible man.” Although we’re often told that modern societies have outgrown the need for male muscle and aggression, we still rely on men to do the lion’s share of physically arduous and dangerous jobs, including the fighting of wars….If we still expect men to do the dirty work, Power asks, shouldn’t some value be attached to male strength? Women in heterosexual relationships, she claims, respect a degree of responsibly channelled aggression in their partners. “However tough you feel, however independent you might be, when it comes down to it, you would like a man to be able to stand up for you, physically at least,” she writes. “Violence is not as far away from care as we might like to imagine.”
Along these lines, Heller’s New Yorker article quotes from Manliness, a 2006 book by
conservative Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield, who regards protection as “a defining task of masculinity.” As he observes in his book, “A man protects those whom he has taken in his care against dangers they cannot face or handle without him.”
Power appears to want men to be both strong and considerate, assertive when necessary but otherwise committed to living “on terms of scrupulous equality the rest of the time.” To which Heller asks,
Is this plausible? Can women enjoy the warm embrace of he-men without having to endure bossiness and swagger? Harvey Mansfield didn’t think so. “Honor is an asserted claim to protect someone, and the claim to protect is a claim to rule,” he wrote. “How can I protect you properly if I can’t tell you what to do?”
Now to Rachel’s unfinished novel, which I find to be brilliant and which was to be a sequel to her first novel, Leaps of Faith. (The Long Wave in my opinion was 90% complete when she died.) In the novel, psychic Warren is working with a Wall Street bonds salesman who is encountering relationship problems. Warren, a sensitive gay man, doesn’t like Gary, who is everything he is not, but finds himself unexpectedly sympathizing his dilemma.
Gary’s girlfriend wants him to be both the man of the house and a little boy who leans on her for support, mixed messaging that leaves him thoroughly confused and angry. He says that, when he is aggressively assertive, she complains that he isn’t taking her needs into consideration, but that when he tries to be vulnerable and lean on her, she accuses him of being weak and whining. Here he is:
“She wanted to cut my balls off,” he says bitterly. “Well, maybe you’ll take her side. But I’m telling you—” His voice is harsh and trembling, and I can hear the way he must sound on the phone consummating a deal, angry, offended—when does he ever feel safe? “She said I wasn’t available enough, and what does that even mean? She was like, ‘Be home more, pay more attention to me, you never tell me anything,’ but you know if I had done it, she would have been all, ‘Oh, what are you complaining about, Gar, get the fuck over it.’ She said she wanted me to—to—lean on her more—but you know she didn’t mean it, it was like a game for her. She had no fucking idea what she was asking me to do, and if she had known, she wouldn’t’ve cared. She just wanted it both ways.”
And:
[W]hatever I do, she’ll never be satisfied. ‘Lean on me, lean on me’—that’s not the way you make money! Who the fuck is going to respect a man like that?” He swallows and I swallow, too. “She thinks I could just turn it on and off, like some fucking machine, like some fucking machine, when she wants me to be the man of the house and when she wants her little boy—”
“So,” he repeats softly, triumphant and resentful, “she’ll never be satisfied. Will she?”
All I can see is what he sees, and no, that woman won’t be, ever.
To break the impasse, Warren asks Gary to tell him what he wants, to which Gary replies, “I want her. But—not like this. Not where I have to go crawling back to her. I can’t live like that.”
Warren’s feels stymied but is aided by his psychic intuition. His suggestion is that the two work on the problem together as companions:
“Tell her,” I say slowly, “that you want to be her friend. Tell her—if it’s true—that you’re going to think about what she said.”
“And then what?”
“And then—think about it. See if—see if there’s a way—” I take a breath. “Not the man of the house and not the little boy,” I say finally. “Something—else.” I don’t know how else to help him, though it astonishes me how much I want to—Gary, of all people. Both his weakness and his strength seem so deadly to me.
But he’s nodding as he stands up, gathering his raincoat and briefcase, handing me a check. “What the hell,” he’s saying in a shaky voice. “It might work.”
I myself am not what you would call a manly man, but the urge to be my family’s protector and chief breadwinner runs deep in my psyche. Now, I’m a 71-year-old boomer so maybe things are different for the generations that grew up after the feminist revolution. Then again, the two books reviewed by New Yorker seem to indicate that the forces that shaped me are still alive and well.
But I also know that, as a result of the feminist revolution, Julia and I have practiced listening to each other throughout our married life. There have been breakdowns, of course, but our breakthroughs have occurred when we in fact heard what the other said.
Maybe Gary’s problem is that he feels as though he needs to solve everything himself, and maybe his girlfriend’s problem is that she both wants him to fix everything and is frustrated when he tries (and inevitably fails). Maybe, as I used to tell my writing students, they need to make the problem the subject.
Male-female tensions will probably continue to the end of time. But addressing those tensions together? “What the hell, it might work.”
Among the other things we learned (and had confirmed) from the January 6 hearings are that entitled people in power will use every means available to stay in power—and if they can’t do so legally, they will employ violence. Setting a mob loose on Congress and on Vice President Mike Pence was not Trump’s first option but it was his predictable last one.
I’ve been thinking about Trump-inspired violence in terms of Richard Slotkin’s 1992 study of the Western, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. As Slotkin observes, America has often framed political violence as a frontier drama. Although America is hardly the only country to experience violence—in fact, most countries have bloody histories—its particular way of processing its past is to frame it as a drama involving attempts to subdue a recalcitrant wilderness. What emerges is a myth—Slotkin calls it the American myth—of “regeneration through violence.”
Throughout American history, he says, there have been different versions of this myth, from the Puritans emphasizing
the achievement of spiritual regeneration through frontier adventure; Jeffersonians (and later, the disciples of Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” [seeing] the frontier settlement as a re-enactment and democratic renewal of the original “social contract”; [or] Jacksonian Americans [seeing] the conquest of the Frontier as a means to the regeneration of personal fortunes and/or of patriotic vigor and virtue.”
Trumpism is closest to the Jacksonian model, but in each case, Slotkin says, the Myth
represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state, and regeneration through violence.
When Trump in 2017 gave his “American carnage” inaugural address, describing America as a nation under attack by forces domestic and foreign (Muslims, urban Blacks, Central American immigrants), he was invoking this myth, which may be why his vision has resonated with so many. When he has praised the tactics used by thuggish dictators like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un, or when he has pardoned Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, the court-martialed psycho killer, so-called responsible Republicans could rationalize that his actions were the primitive means needed to regenerate American society. Trump might be crude, they often said, but sometimes a society needs such crudeness to shake things up.
It should be noted that, while the “regeneration through violence” myth had its origins in the Indian wars, it has mapped easily onto other American conflicts, including those involving race and labor movements. For instance, in D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece Birth of a Nation, one sees the KKK playing the role of the U.S. calvary, riding to the rescue of people under assault from, not Indians but rampaging ex-slaves. Because they do so, Northerners and Southerners can reunite after their bitter war and a new nation can be born.
One sees the myth played out in many of Hollywood’s greatest westerns, such as High Noon, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and others. In the 1970s, the western got transferred to urban settings but the theme was the same: Dirty Harry resorts to primitive means, with thugs now playing the role previously taken by Indians, as he deals out the violence necessary to restore civilization.
Slotkin focuses mainly on cinema in his study, but one finds literary westerns grappling with the same theme. Two novels that come to mind are Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. Lonesome Dove mourns (like Frederick Jackson Turner) the closing of the frontier, conveying a sense that the age of heroes is past once we’ve civilized the entire nation. While one is reading the novel, however, one cheers on Gus and Cal, the two Texas rangers who take the law into their own hands. Such actions are necessary in a landscape that includes a murderous Indian (Blue Duck) and a pathological gang of outlaws (the Suggs Brothers).
In the end, the rangers prevail, showing cattlemen that they can take their cattle from Texas to Montana’s green pastures. In their success, however, the rangers render themselves obsolete. Like John Wayne in a number of his movies, Cal cannot join the civilization he has helped bring about. In the process, however, the violence that he and Gus have resorted to has served its purpose.
Blood Meridian focuses less on the regeneration than on the violence as the murderous Judge Holden goes rampaging through the 19th century American west, killing Indians and settlers alike. In the end, he is proclaiming that he will never die, which may be how McCarthy sees America. Perhaps exposing the comforting myth that society can in fact be regenerated. McCarthy’s novel disturbs because it suggests that violence, not social order, always gets the last word.
Trump and Trumpism certainly focus more on violence than on social stability. Only an authoritarian leader, they claim, can bring the safety and security that people crave. The result is cult worship of a leader who praises violent crackdowns. It’s also a formula for perpetual violence.
