Trump Beats Adam in Blame Shifting

By Robin Bates | Published: August 23, 2022
William Blake, God’s Judgment of Adam and Eve

Wednesday

Miltonists may experience a shock of recognition as they watch Donald Trump attempt to wriggle out charges that he stole government documents upon leaving the presidency. After all, Adam in Paradise Lost turns to some of the same excuses when God questions him about eating the forbidden fruit. Adam, however, has nothing on Trump.

John Tures of the Missouri Independent lists a few of the excuses provided by either Trump or his defenders. I’ve added a few more, and there are probably some that we’ve missed. I don’t need to add that all the excuses are bogus:

  1. The “raid” (it was actually a search) was a wildly inappropriate move, a Gestapo-type tactic by an authoritarian president;
  2. There was nothing really important amongst the documents and Trump would have returned them if asked so a “raid” was unnecessary;
  3. Trump didn’t realize that the documents were important—he just wanted some mementoes from his time in the White House;
  4. Conditions were so chaotic in the presidential transition that the documents were accidentally thrown into boxes and transported to Florida;
  5. The documents were planted by the FBI;
  6. Trump was just bringing his work home, like so many hard-working Americans; 
  7. Other presidents, especially Obama, have taken classified documents after leaving the White House;
  8. These documents were declassified by Trump by virtue of a “standing order” (which no one recalls);
  9. The documents shouldn’t have been classified in the first place;
  10. Mar-a-Lago is actually a safer place for the documents than elsewhere—and the law only pertains to destroying the documents, not storing them;
  11. Trump needed them for his memoirs;
  12. If the documents were so important, government officials should have come for them earlier so they’re the ones who are really negligent.

Add to these a Fox pundit’s accusation the judge who signed off on the search was an acquaintance of sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell (he wasn’t) and the threat by Trump’s lawyer that violence could erupt from indicting the president. There’s also the drumbeat amongst many on the right that if they did it to Trump they’ll do it to you! In short, you have an exercise in blame shifting worthy of a teenager caught smoking pot in his room.

Or of Adam when caught out by God. Adam’s blame shifting is in response to a direct question from God:

[H]ast thou eaten of the Tree
Whereof I gave thee charge thou shouldst not eat?

In reply, Adam starts by wailing that he has been put in an impossible position Either he must take the full blame or accuse “the partner of my life”:

O Heav’n! in evil strait this day I stand
Before my Judge, either to undergo
Myself the total Crime, or to accuse
My other self, the partner of my life;
Whose failing, while her Faith to me remains,
I should conceal, and not expose to blame
By my complaint…

Upon further consideration, however, he argues that he doesn’t deserve the full blame and prepares to blame Eve. First, he blames her indirectly: rather sneakily, he suggests that God already knows that she’s guilty, so Adam is less blameworthy for throwing her under the bus. Notice that he never accepts any of the responsibility himself:

[B]ut strict necessity
Subdues me, and calamitous constraint
Lest on my head both sin and punishment,
However insupportable, be all
Devolv’d; though should I hold my peace, yet thou
Wouldst easily detect what I conceal.

Then comes Adam’s accusation, which deflects blame in two ways. Not only did Eve tempt him but God is also guilty for having foisted Eve on him in the first place (“This Woman whom thou [emphasis mine] mad’st to be my help”):

This Woman whom thou mad’st to be my help,
And gav’st me as thy perfect gift, so good,
So fit, so acceptable, so divine,
That from her hand I could suspect no ill, 
And what she did, whatever in itself,
Her doing seem’d to justify the deed;
She gave me of the Tree, and I did eat.

In other words, he’s the victim here. This is as Trumpian a maneuver as one could imagine.

God, however, is having none of Adam’s bullshit:

Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey 
Before his voice…

For a dramatic contrast, Eve confesses straight up after God turns to her:

So having said, he thus to Eve in few:
“Say Woman, what is this which thou hast done?”

To whom sad Eve with shame nigh overwhelm’d,
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge 
Bold or loquacious, thus abasht repli’d.

“The Serpent me beguil’d and I did eat.”

Forget about ever getting a similar confession from Trump or anyone around him. In fact, the next move I expect from the former president is for him to employ Adam’s tactic of blaming someone else. Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows should be very worried.

For Trump and Trump cultists, confessing is a sign of weakness. Instead, they pretend never to have said what they said and simply go on to the next excuse.

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Intense Busyness: One Way to Grieve

By Robin Bates | Published: August 22, 2022
Jones and Duvall as Call and Gus in Lonesome Dove

Tuesday

With my mother’s death, I am reminded that we all grieve differently and that one person’s grieving may rub another person the wrong way. My own grieving for my mother has taken the form of intense busyness: for weeks I have been working simultaneously on preparing for the memorial service while putting her house in order. But whereas I wanted to distribute as much of her worldly goods to my brothers and other relatives as I could when they showed up, one of these brothers and one of my sons wanted to focus soley on their sadness and postpone matters of property division to another day. Once I realized that we were all grieving in our own particular ways, I felt better about the anger I encountered.

I compare my own path with that taken by Captain Woodrow Call in Larry McMurtry’s western Lonesome Dove. Call is one of two legendary Texas rangers who is outliving the heroic age of the wild west. In an epic trek, he and fellow ranger Augustus McCrae have taken a herd of cattle from Texas to the fertile grazing lands of Montana. In doing so, however, they have tamed the west even more, making themselves even more irrelevant. As Gus puts it before he dies of a gangrenous leg caused by an Indian arrow, “Look there at Montana. It’s fine and fresh, and now we’ve come and it’ll soon be ruint, like my legs.”

Because Gus understands his partner well, he makes an outrageous deathbed request: he wants Call to reverse his trek and bury Gus’s body where they started out, in Lonesome Dove, Texas. Call can’t believe what he’s heard but Gus explains his reasoning:

“My God,” Call said, thinking his friend must be delirious. “You want me to haul you to Texas? We just got to Montana.”

“I know where you just got,” August said. “My burial can wait a spell. I got nothing against wintering in Montana. Just pack me in salt or charcoal or what you will. I’ll keep well enough and you can make the trip in the spring. You’ll be a rich cattle king by then and might need a restful trip.”

Call looked at his friend closely. Augustus looked sober and reasonably serious.

“To Texas?” he repeated.

“Yes, that’s my favor to you,” August said. “It’s the kind of job you was made for, that nobody else could do or even try. Now that the country is about settled, I don’t know how you’ll keep busy, Woodrow. But if you’ll do this for me you’ll be all right for another year, I guess.”

Gus then jokingly worries that Call may die of boredom before he sets out, in which case Gus will have to settle for a Montana grave.

While Call’s 3000-mile journey back to Texas is not quite as epic as the journey to Montana, it poses serious challenges. Before he’s done, the buggy carrying the body has fallen apart, the donkey pulling it has died, and the coffin, almost lost in a river crossing, is leaking salt. Towards the end, Call must bundle the body in a tarp and drag it travois style behind his horse. At one point he is also shot by an Indian so that he has a leaking wound when he finally arrives back at Lonesome Dove. He may not live much longer.

Gus, however, has achieved his major aim: which is not to be buried in Texas but to give Call the way to mourn that suits him best.

I don’t know if intense busyness has been the best way to mourn my mother, but I feel that it has kept me going. Now that the family has dispersed and my responsibilities have diminished, I’m experiencing a void, somewhat like Call at the end of his second trek.

But it’s a void that now seems bearable.

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Surveying the Books of My Childhood

By Robin Bates | Published: August 21, 2022
James Charles, Girl Reading

Monday

Many of the memory-sharing conversations I had with my brother this past weekend—they were in town for our mother’s memorial service–involved the books that absorbed us as children. These books occupy 22 three-foot-long shelves, with the topmost ones accessible only by means of a special library ladder. I learned that sometimes we had similar reading experiences and sometimes not, which is only to be expected as my youngest brother Sam is nine years younger than I am.

For my own archival purposes, I’m listing some of our favorite books and book series. Please let me know if any of these are on your own life list:

–Louisa Mae Alcott’s Little Men. For some reason, this was the book we had, not Little Women, so I missed the back story.
–James Barrie, Peter Pan. Absolutely magical although unexpectedly dark.
–Betsy Bates, Beans in Your Ears and six others. Betsy Bates was my aunt so we recognized when she used my cousins in her fiction. Her books came out when I was older so I missed their magic.
–L. Frank Baum, the Oz Books. We had 20 of them, passed down from my grandmother to my mother. Especial favorites were The Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and Rinkitink of Oz.
–Francis Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Both were among my very favorites. Later I came across The Little Princess, which I also enjoyed but not as much.
–Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, The Little Lame Prince. A disturbing but fascinating fairy tale.
–The Maxfield Parrish illustrated version of The Arabian Nights. Absolutely magical but, as it was abridged for children, lacking the sex that I discovered later when reading adult versions.
–Paul Berna’s The Knights of King Midas. One of my favorite novels growing up, largely because it’s a group of kids working together.
–Michael Bonds Paddington books, which I enjoyed as a child but discovered I couldn’t read to my own kids because they were so repetitive.
–We have three or four of Walter Brooks’s Freddy the Pig books. We devoured the complete collection in the American Library in Paris.
–We have eight or nine of the Thornton Burgess animal books, which my father loved as a child but which I could never get into myself.
–The N.C. Wyeth-illustrated versions of James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and The Dearslayer. I’ve come to appreciate Mohicans but preferred Dearslayer as a child.
–Jean Craig’s My Side of the Mountain and the sequels. My kids loved these growing up.
–We have most of Roald Dahl’s children books—I missed them as a child but read them to my own children, who loved them.
–C. Day Lewis’s The Otterbury Incident. One of my favorites, and the copy we own is the exact copy that I used to check out from the library—and which my parents bought for me at a library sale.
–Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. In the pantheon of children books I loved, this ranks very close to the top.
–Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. Also much beloved.
–Milt Gross’s Nize Baby. My father used to read this example of Jewish humor to us with a fake Yiddish accent, which I now find myself wondering about.
–Ryder Haggard, She, King Solomon’s Mines, and Alan Quartermain. Wonderful adventures, especially the second.
–Lucretia Hale, The Peterkin Papers. These 1880 comic stories about a family which is always getting into trouble were somewhat formulaic but we loved them. The family is always set straight but a “lady from Philadelphia,” who bails them out with common sense solutions.
–Brian Jacques, Redwall and other books in the series. These came along in time for me to read them to my kids, who loved them.
–We have a complete collection of May Justus’s books, most of them autographed and one dedicated to me and my brothers. May Justus was a mountain woman from Grundy County, Tennessee and a good friend. Although she was shunned by many for supporting integration, the local library is now named after her.

It’s getting late so I’ll finish up with the rest of the collection later this week.

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A Stevenson Poem for My Mother

By Robin Bates | Published: August 20, 2022

Spiritual Sunday

Yesterday the Sewanee community filled our parish hall to remember my mother. It was an emotional occasion and I found myself in tears for much of it. I led off with the following remarks, concluding with a Stevenson poem.

Welcome to this community celebration of Phoebe Robins Strehlow Bates—or “mama,” as her children called her. I am Robin Bates, the oldest of her four sons. I was three when Phoebe and Scott moved to Sewanee in 1954, so Jonathan, David, and Sam and I all grew up here, attending Sewanee Public School, as it was known at the time, and then the Sewanee Military Academy (later Sewanee Academy).

Many of you know about Phoebe’s intense dedication to making the Sewanee community work. How she helped start the Sewanee Chorale and the Sewanee Crafts Fair, how she and my father participated in the suit that integrated Franklin County Schools, how she founded the Sewanee Siren—now the Sewanee Mountain Messenger—and ran it for 18 years, laboriously typing it up on stencils every Wednesday night.

What you may not know is that she spent much of her life with back pain, having been in a car accident as a teenager and, even before that, having been told by a doctor that she would have back problems all her life. I was in awe at how she refused to let the pain get in her way and how she seldom complained. In addition to multiple back surgeries, she partly held the pain at bay by a vigorous swimming regimen—she’d been a champion swimmer in high school—and would sometimes swim a mile a day.

Since many of you know her chiefly through her “Bard to Verse” column in the Messenger, I thought I’d focus my remarks on her love of literature. She started the tradition of a weekly poem in the Siren, each issue of which started out with a poem, and she co-edited Bard to Verse in the Messenger for years until my father died, at which point she edited it herself up until two weeks before her death. She was also a voracious novel reader and especially loved 19th century novels, especially those of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. We once figured out that she’d read 17 of Trollope’s 51 novels.

I think what she loved about Trollope and Austen was their focus on community—about how, if you live a principled life, the community thrives, while if you don’t, things fall apart. She loved the extensive network of family and community relationships that is to be found in those novels. And while she was sweet and civil to everyone, she could be critical of people who were just out for themselves. She shared Austen’s and Trollope’s satiric eye for those who sacrificed others for their own convenience, and she also shared their wit. As she saw it, Sewanee was filled with colorful characters who could have stepped out of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Trollope’s Can Your Forgive Her.

Returning to poetry, Mama used to say that she thought that people underestimated Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry, especially the Child’s Garden of Verses.  I’ve therefore chosen a poem from that collection. Although it’s about a child launching toy boats, I think it also sums up the way that what you do in life has ripple effects that continue on long after your death. I like to think this is my mother’s legacy:  

Where Go the Boats?
By Robert Louis Stevenson

Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating –
Where will all come home?

On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.

Bon voyage, mama.

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Don’t Mourn, Visit Paris Instead

By Robin Bates | Published: August 18, 2022

Friday

Today’s post will be short as I’m busy preparing for the community celebration of my mother’s life, which occurs Saturday. The high point for me will be when my daughter-in-law Betsy, who has a gorgeous voice, will sing the same French song that that she sang at my father’s memorial service nine years ago.

The song is Jacques Prévert’s “Two Snails on Their Way to a Funeral,” put to music by Jacques Kosma. My mother selected it for my father’s ceremony and loved Betsy’s performance—and because she, like him, was fluent in French and a fan of Prévert’s poetry, it seems right to sing it at her own ceremony.

The idea of having a drink and visiting Paris rather than spending time mourning is perfectly in keeping with how she lived her life (although she would choose white wine over the beer recommended in the poem). I imagine the moon in the poem watching over her as it watches over the two snails.

Song of Two Snails on Their Way to a Funeral
By Jacques Prévert

Two snails were going to the funeral of a dead leaf.
Their shells were shrouded in black,
and they had wrapped crepe around their horns.
They set out in the evening,
one glorious autumn evening.
Alas, when they arrived
it was already spring.
The leaves who once were dead
had all sprung to life again.
The two snails were very disappointed.

But then the sun, the sun said to them,
“Take the time to sit awhile.
Take a glass of beer
if your heart tells you to.
Take, if you like, the bus to Paris.
It leaves this evening.
You’ll see the sights.
But don’t use up your time with mourning.
I tell you, it darkens the white of your eye
and makes you ugly.
Stories of coffins aren’t very pretty.
Take back your colors,
the colors of life.”
Then all the animals,
the trees and the plants
began to sing at the tops of their lungs.
It was the true and living song,
the song of summer.
And they all began to drink
and to clink their glasses.
It was a glorious evening,
a glorious summer evening,
and the two snails went back home.
They were moved,
and very happy.
They had had a lot to drink
and they staggered a little bit,
but the moon in the sky watched over them.

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Immersed in Krook’s Rag and Bone Shop

By Robin Bates | Published: August 17, 2022
“Phiz,” Krook in his Rag and Bone shop

Thursday

As relatives show up for my mother’s Saturday memorial service, we are sifting through masses of correspondence, financial records, income tax filings, old newspaper clippings, useless remote controls, outmoded technology (such as slide projectors, light tables, and manual typewriters), and tons of flotsam and jetsam. As we sort through it, keeping some and jettisoning some, I think of Krook’s Rag and Bones Shop in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Here’s a description:

In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another was the inscription BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty bottles—blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles; I am reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had in several little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes outside the door, labelled “Law Books, all at 9d.” Some of the inscriptions I have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and Carboy’s office and the letters I had so long received from the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within. There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled parchment scrolls and discoloured and dog’s-eared law-papers. I could have fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors of rooms or strong chests in lawyers’ offices. The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been counsellors’ bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.

Apparently rag and bone men once literally collected bones, which were boiled down for glue, but the expression came to mean unwanted household items. While my mother differed from Krook in that she was a tidy lady—her checkbooks dating back to the early 1980s are all neatly filed—she was reluctant to throw anything away. Now her children are faced with doing so.

Chaotic though Krook’s Rag and Bone Shop may be, it has a copy of the most recent will in the Jarndyce v Jarndyce case. In other words, the nightmarish lawsuit that has ruined the lives of countless individuals could have been solved instantly had this actual will not been buried under mounds of stuff.

In our own searching, we have unearthed correspondence that my father had with Bill Moyer, Pete Seeger, Robert Penn Warren, poet Elizabeth Alexander, and others. We too have struck gold amidst all the junk.

It’s nothing that will have an impact on anything. But then, neither does the long-lost Jarndyce will. That’s because, by the time it’s brought to court to clear everything up, the case has just ended, legal legal expenses having exhausted all the money tied up in the lawsuit.

I’m not sure what the moral is here other than that the living should focus on living rather than be ruled by the dead hand of the past. My mother’s hand wasn’t heavy but we’re committed to throwing away anything that is of no use to anyone. Krook, by having dwelt so long in the junk of the past, spontaneously combusts—Dickens controversially insisted this was scientifically possible—and we’re determined not to let that happen to us.

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Agatha Christie’s Shallow Comfort

By Robin Bates | Published: August 16, 2022
Agatha Christie

Wednesday

Last week I commented on Katie Kontent’s love of Charles Dickens in the Amor Towles novel Rules of Civility. Today I enjoy how Towles has his protagonist turn to Agatha Christie to cope with the betrayal (or so she thinks) by the man whom she loves and who loves her.

The problem (spoiler alert!) is that he has deceived her about a wealthy benefactor, who has been making him wealthy in exchange for sex. When Katie learns that he is not her godson but actually her gigolo, she is shattered and turns to Christie’s crime novels for comfort. In a Christie novel, as in her own life, someone observant should be able to see through the deception. Katie has been so smitten, however, that she has missed clues that should have been obvious.

Kontent believes she find Christie’s novels satisfying because the plots are reassuring. Readers may think they are treading new ground, only to learn that the ground is thoroughly recognizable. As we read, we encounter our own predictable lives step by step:

You can make what claims you will about the psychological nuance of Proust or the narrative scope of Tolstoy, but you can’t argue that Mrs. Christie fails to please. Her books are tremendously satisfying.

Yes, they’re formulaic. But that’s one of the reasons they are so satisfying. With every character, every room, every murder weapon feeling at once newly crafted and familiar as rote (the role of the postimperialist uncle from India here being played by the spinster from South Wales, and the mismatched bookends standing in for the jar of fox poison on the upper shelf of the gardener’s shed), Mrs. Christie doles out her little surprises at the carefully calibrated pace of a nanny dispensing sweets to the children in her care.

The criticism that Christie’s plots are formulaic will be made by critic Edmund Wilson six years (in 1944) after Towles’s novel is set (1938):

Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion … Mrs Christie, in proportion as she is more expert and concentrates more narrowly on the puzzle, has to eliminate human interest completely, or, rather, fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it. In this new novel, she has to provide herself with puppets who will be good for three stages of suspense: you must first wonder who is going to be murdered, you must then wonder who is committing the murders, and you must finally be unable to foresee which of two men the heroine will marry. It is all like a sleight-of-hand trick, in which the magician diverts your attention from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly entertain and astonish you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may.

These are harsh words but they match my own assessment. I want more depth in my characters and more exploratory plots. It’s as though, in a Christie novel, a murder is not an earth-shattering event but a social faux pas. Or to put it another way, lapses in social etiquette are treated as earth-shattering events. Someone has upset society with an indecorous murder, and it takes a shrewd detective to restore order and return things to what they were.

In other words, Christie is not writing mind-bending literature.

 But if you’re someone who has just had her heart broken, maybe you need reassurance that the world is, despite appearances, fair and just. At this juncture, Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd (to choose someone who was writing at the time the novel is set) will not assure us that justice and fairness will prevail. As Kontent puts it,

But I think there is another reason [the novels] please—a reason that is at least as important, if not more so—and that is that in Agatha Christie’s universe everyone eventually gets what they deserve.

Inheritance or penury, love or loss, a blow to the head or the hangman’s noose, in the pages of Agatha Christie’s books men and women, whatever their ages, whatever their caste, are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them. Poirot and Marple are not really central characters in the traditional sense. They are simply the agencies of an intricate moral equilibrium that was established by the Primary mover at the dawn of time.

For the most part, in the course of our daily lives we abide the abundant evidence that no such universal justice exists. Like a cart horse heads down and our blinders in place, waiting patiently for the next cube of sugar. But there are certain times when chance suddenly provides the justice that Agatha Christies promise. We look around at the characters cast in our own lives—our heiresses and gardeners, our vicars and nannies, our late-arriving guests who are not exactly what they seem—and discover that before the end of the weekend all assembled will get their just deserts.

If Kontent turns to Agatha Christie when her feelings are in turmoil, one can’t altogether blame her. As it turns out, however, her own life (and Towles’s novel) are far less predictable than an Agatha Christie novel. Indeed, resolutions we expect do not come to pass. Tinker Gray, the man who breaks her heart, proves to have unexpected depth, and Kontent grows as she discovers this. Each must break out of conventional settings in order to step into their best selves.

Nuanced authors such as Proust and big-hearted novelists such as Tolstoy prepare Kontent much better for this soul-expanding growth than do Christie’s murder mysteries.

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Trump Sycophants = Winged Monkeys?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 15, 2022
Witch sics her Winged Monkeys on Dorothy

Tuesday

Yesterday Donald Trump’s niece applied L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz those Republican politicians who have been bashing the FBI while defending Donald Trump for having carried off state secrets. “Remember how aggressively the flying monkeys protected the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz? Then when she melted the fever broke?” she asked, before adding, “It’s gonna be like that.”

In other words, GOP politicians are going to defend the former president to the hilt until, suddenly, they’ll stop.

One shouldn’t be too confident in her prediction given how Trump, time and time again, has retained the loyalty of his followers when all appeared lost for him. Still, I turned to Baum’s book to see what fevers look like when they break.

It’s worth noting just how vicious the monkeys originally are. Think of them as those Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol and who continue to threaten violence. Upon the command of the Wicked Witch of the West, some of them

seized the Tin Woodman and carried him through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks. Here they dropped the poor Woodman, who fell a great distance to the rocks, where he lay so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan.

Others of the Monkeys caught the Scarecrow, and with their long fingers pulled all of the straw out of his clothes and head. They made his hat and boots and clothes into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.

The remaining Monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the Lion and wound many coils about his body and head and legs, until he was unable to bite or scratch or struggle in any way. Then they lifted him up and flew away with him to the Witch’s castle, where he was placed in a small yard with a high iron fence around it, so that he could not escape.

They are fully prepared to destroy Dorothy as well but discover that she is supported by the kiss of the Good Witch of the North. They therefore capture her instead, carrying her off to the Wicked Witch.

After Dorothy destroys the witch, she learns that, by employing her golden cap, she too can command the monkeys. When they are carrying her and her companions back to the Emerald City, she learns their history from their leader. His description of their pre-captivity days may sound—to some members of the GOP—like the good old days before Trump:

“Once,” began the leader, “we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating nuts and fruit, and doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master. Perhaps some of us were rather too full of mischief at times, flying down to pull the tails of the animals that had no wings, chasing birds, and throwing nuts at the people who walked in the forest. But we were careless and happy and full of fun, and enjoyed every minute of the day. 

Then they play a trick on the fiancé of a sorceress and become members of the Trump cult captives of the golden cap.

Another group victimized by the Witch are the Winkies, who—like the rest of us—have had to suffer under a tyrannical reign. Here’s what happens after Dorothy frees them:

There was great rejoicing among the yellow Winkies, for they had been made to work hard during many years for the Wicked Witch, who had always treated them with great cruelty. They kept this day as a holiday, then and ever after, and spent the time in feasting and dancing.

Many of us thought we could start feasting and dancing when Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election. It appears our battle with the former president is not yet over.

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Rushdie, a Voice for Reason

By Robin Bates | Published: August 14, 2022
Salman Rushdie

Monday

After Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed Friday, many have reported on something he said in a speech before the PEN Club three months ago. As the New India Express summed it up, Rushdie stated that

 a poem cannot stop a bullet, a novel cannot defuse a bomb, but we are not helpless, we can sing the truth and name the liars. We must tell better stories than the tyrants!

I’m one of Rushdie’s many fans, especially of Midnight’s Children. Today, however, I repost an essay I wrote on Rushdie’s debate with Islamic fundamentalism in his fantasy novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. There we see two medieval Islamic theologians squaring off, Ibn Rushd (a.k.a. Averroes) and al-Ghazali. Rushdie traces much of the religious infighting we are witnessing back to this famous debate, and the issues addressed apply not only to Muslims. It fact, they arise in all debates between Reason and Faith.

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ibn Rushd was a 12th century philosopher who believed that God gave us Reason to understand creation. The 11th century philosopher Ghazali, on the other hand (this according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) saw God rather than natural law as the basis of reality. In other words, the debate was set within Islam between Reason and what Rushdie regards as blind faith.

Like Rushdie, I’m in the Ibn Rushd camp. In the Episcopal Church we sometimes say that, when we enter church, we don’t check our brains at the door. God gave us this great gift to use it. Or as the Internet Encyclopedia puts it,

Ibn Rushd strived to demonstrate that without engaging religion critically and philosophically, deeper meanings of the tradition can be lost, ultimately leading to deviant and incorrect understandings of the divine.

Of course, we must guard against the sin of pride, as John Wilmot warns us in Satyr against Reason and Mankind. We can become too full of ourselves if we don’t let God guide us. (See Frankenstein.)

In Rushdie’s fantasy, jinn awaken the corpses of Ibn Rushd and Ghazli, who debate from their crypts. The rational Ibn Rushd opens the debate:

“Let us think of the human race as if it were a single human being,” Ibn Rushd proposed. “A child understands nothing, and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge. The battle between reason and superstition may be seen as mankind’s long adolescence, and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age. It is not that God does not exist but that like any proud parent he awaits the day when his child can stand on its own two feet, make its own way in the world, and be free of its dependence upon him.”

The faith-based Ghazali pushes back:

“As long as you argue from God,” Ghazali replied, “as long as you feebly try to reconcile the rational and the scred, you will never defeat me. Why don’t you just admit you’re an unbeliever and we can take if from there. Observe who your descendants are, the godless scum of the West and East. Your words resonate only in the minds of kafirs [African blacks]. The followers of truth have forgotten you. The followers of truth know that it is reason and science that are the true juvenilia of the human mind. Faith is our gift from God and reason is our adolescent rebellion against it. When we are a;dult we will turn wholly to faith as we were born to do.”

Rushd counters that time is on his side:

“You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.”

Once Rushd starts talking about the future, however, Ghazali feels on familiar ground:

“There,” said Ghazali,. “Good. Now, father of many bastards, you begin to speak like the blasphemer you are.” Then he turned to matters of eschatology, which, he said, was now his preferred topic, and he spoke for a long time about the end of days, with a kind of relish that puzzled and distressed Ibn Rushd.

And further on:

For what the living call life is a worthless triviality when compared to the life to come.

There are fundamentalist Christians who also believe this, making Ibn Rushd’s puzzlement relevant to more than just Muslims. As Ibn Rushd complains to the good jinn Dunia, Ghazali

believes that God has set out to destroy his creation, slowly, enigmatically, without explanation; to confuse Man into destroying himself. Ghazali faces that prospect with equanimity, and not only because he himself is already dead. For him, life on earth is just an anteroom, or a doorway. Eternity is the real world.

It so happens that Ghazali has released a dark jinn from a bottle and told him to instill fear in humans. Doing so, he believes, will bring them to God:

“Teach them,” Ghazali said, “Teach them the tongue of the divine Just-Is. The instruction should be intensive, severe, even, one could say, fearsome. Remember what I told you about fear. Fear is man’s fate. Man is born afraid, of the dark, of the unknown, of strangers of failure, and of women. Fear leads him towards faith, not as a cure for fear, but as an acceptance that the fear of God is the natural and proper condition of man’s lot. Teach them to fear the improper use of words. There is no crime the Almighty finds more unforgivable.”

“I can do that,” said Zummurud the Great. “They’ll be speaking my way soon enough.”

“Not yours,” Ghazali corrected him, but only mildly. When one was dealing with a Grand Ifrit one had to make certain allowances for his vast egotism.

Ghazali, however, has underestimated how much damage a fear-inducing jinn can do. In the book, he has literally let the genii out of the battle. Like many fundamentalists, Zummurud will indeed set himself up in place of God. In fact, he horrifies Ghazali when he manifests in the terrorism of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups:

As Ghazali would soon discover, however, sending the most potent of the dark jinn down the path of extreme violence could have results that alarmed the sender. The student soon surpassed the master.

Ibn Rushd is given one last chance for a counterargument, and it is a version of Rushdie’s comments at the PEN Club:

The enemy is stupid. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.

It can be hard to hold on to that idea in the face of terrorism, including Friday night’s stabbing. That Rushdie continues to make public appearances, even with a fatwa hanging over his head, shows that he is willing take chances in order to get the word out. Since he appears to have survived the attack, I suspect we’ll hear a lot more from him, even with evil jinn goading on people who wish him dead.

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