All Authoritarians Are Like Richard III

By Robin Bates | Published: May 18, 2022
Hogarth, Richard Garrick as Richard III

Thursday

A twitter thread by one Scott Monty, who writes regularly about leadership issues, has sent me back to Stephen Greenblatt’s very insightful Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, which shows us how well Shakespeare understood the authoritarian mindset. Monty finds a number of connections between New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s work on Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and (thanks to Greenblatt) Shakespeare’s Richard III as he analyzes figures like Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Trump wannabe Ron DeSantis.

According to Ben-Ghiat, all authoritarian figures are driven by the urge to control. And yet even as they proclaim “law and order rule,” they enable lawlessness. This paradox, she notes, means that their government invariably “evolves into a criminal enterprise.”

They also lack all empathy, and Monty quotes Richard III’s admission, “Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.” Monty notes that, for his part, Mussolini said the secret to his success was to “Keep your heart a desert.”

A particularly interesting observation (this from Ben-Ghiat) is that strongmen, while they may be “genius strategists,” seldom have a master plan for their rule. This has certainly been true of Donald Trump and it’s true of Richard III as well. As I read the following passage from Greenblatt’s Tyrant, I think of Trump’s look of stunned disbelief on election night 2016 that he has just been elected president:

But once Richard reaches his lifelong goal–at the end of the third act of Shakespeare’s play–the laughter quickly begins to curdle. Much of the pleasure of his winning derived from its wild improbability. Now the prospect of endless winning proves to be a grotesque delusion. Though he has seemed a miracle of dark efficiency, Richard is quite unprepared to unite and run a whole country.

The people that Richard proceeds to bring into his administration are not unlike those Trump brought into his own. Loyalty trumps competence, as Greenblatt notes:

The tyrant’s triumph is based on lies and fraudulent promises braided around the violent elimination of rivals. The cunning strategy that brings him to the throne hardly constitutes a vision for the realm; nor has he assembled counselors who can help him formulate one. He can count–for the moment, at least–on the acquiescence of such suggestible officials as the London mayor and frightened clerks like the scribe. But the new ruler possesses neither administrative ability nor diplomatic skill, and no one in his entourage can supply what he manifestly lacks. …Cynical operators like Catesby and Ratcliffe are hardly suited to be statesmen. Though higher in social station, they differ little from the hoodlums Richard hires to do his bidding.

Richard does manage to bring in some competent administrators, especially Lord Stanley. But Stanley, like some of Trump’s more responsible Cabinet picks early in his administration, ultimately finds himself looking for a way out:

Lord Stanley cuts a more plausible figure as a prudent adviser–and the play depicts him reluctantly conveying the king’s wishes–but, as his early nightmare suggests, he has long been afraid of “the boar” and can hardly be expected to serve as a linchpin of the upstart regime. Secretly he is already in contact with the regime’s mortal enemies.

Richard’s one reliable ally is the Duke of Buckingham, who has helped Richard ascend to power, and I particularly like Greenblatt’s discussion of how Richard tries to persuade Buckingham to kill Richard’s two nephews. Their father Edward IV having died, the princes are next in line to the throne and therefore stand in Richard’s way. Like Donald Trump, Richard wants a subordinate to do something dirty without explicitly telling him to do so, thereby retaining plausible deniability. Buckingham, however, forces him to spell it out:

Though he has carefully sent everyone else out of earshot, Richard is at first somewhat coy about what he wants. “Young Edward lives,” he notes, referring to the late king’s heir, who is being held along with his brother in the Tower; “think now what I would speak.” But Buckingham steadfastly refuses to play the guessing game, whose meaning is not difficult to divine. Richard, increasingly vexed, is forced to make his meaning clear.

O bitter consequence,
That Edward still should live! ‘True, noble prince!’
Cousin, thou wert not wont to be so dull:
Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead;
And I would have it suddenly perform’d.

Greenblatt’s point is that Richard needs accomplices in his crimes, just as Trump has sought accomplices to overturn the election. Sometimes Trump has been as straightforward as Richard’s “I wish the bastards dead”: for instance, he asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him “11,000 votes.” More frequently, however, he has expected others to make the demands, in part to keep his fingerprints off of illegal activities, in part to assure himself of his subordinates’ loyalty. It’s such loyalty that Richard wants as well:

At this critical moment at the onset of his reign, he wants and needs to be assured of his associate’s loyalty, and that loyalty is best guaranteed by having Buckingham make himself an accomplice to a horrendous crime. Though it would have been still better if Buckingham had suggested on his own that the children be killed–hence Richard’s initial coyness–the associate’s simple “consent” will serve as a sufficient guarantee.

This desperate need for loyal accomplices shows how isolated Richard (like Trump) feels:

For the tyrant, there is remarkably little satisfaction….Whatever pleasures he might have imagined would be his give way to frustration, anger, and gnawing fear. Moreover, the possession of power is never secure. There is always something else that must be done in order to reinforce his position, and since he has reached his goal through criminal acts, what is required inevitably are further criminal acts. The tyrant is obsessed with loyalty from his inner circle, but he can never be entirely confident that he has it. The only people who will serve him are self-interested scoundrels, like himself; in any case, he is not interested in honest loyalty or dispassionate, independent judgment. Instead he wants flattery, confirmation, and obedience.

When the tyrant senses that previously loyal followers are having second thoughts—Buckingham for Richard, Attorney General Bill Barr and Vice President Mike Pence for Trump—the tyrant lashes out. Previous service means nothing:

Buckingham, he reflects, “grows circumspect” and circumspection is potentially dangerous….And when his old ally …repeatedly asks for the reward that he had been promised for his many services, Richard peremptorily dismissed him: “Thou troublest me, I am not in the vein.” Having participated in the entrapment and betrayal of so many others, Buckingham is able to read the ominous signs very clearly and decides to flee for his life. His effort is in vain; he will eventually be caught and executed.

The day that Trump no longer has the ability to influence political events will be the day that he finds himself alone, like Richard, on Bosworth Field. Never have been loyal to anyone else himself, he will find himself repaid in kind.  “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Richard famously cries out before Richmond—the man who will replace him on the throne as Henry VII—cuts him down.

No one mourns him.

Clarification: Reader Carole Williams wrote in noting that it’s important to distinguish between Shakespeare’s Richard III and the actual Richard III:

I am assuming you are talking about the main character in  Shakespeare’s play Richard the Third, as there has long been a Richard III society here for the real man. This play was  written for Tudor monarch whose forebear Henry VII seized the throne, and had to have an excuse for doing so. But as a character in a play, this fictional king serves your argument well. 


I read British author of hundred years ago, Josephine Tey: The  Daughter of  Time when I was  17 and although her argument is more basic than more recent works, it is  highly readable and based on what was known then. Did you see the excitement when his body was found in Leicester a few years ago?

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This Time Grendel Chose Buffalo

By Robin Bates | Published: May 17, 2022

Wednesday

In the wake of the horrific race killings in Buffalo, I am simply updating a past post because I can’t think of anything new to say. When I launched this blog 13 years ago, I called it Better Living through Beowulf because Beowulf is the starting text for those of us specializing in British Literature. I used Beowulf to represent all of literature and felt free to write about any literary work that provides insight into the life we are living.

While highlighting Beowulf, I didn’t realize how relevant it would prove to be in an America grappling with unending racial hatred, a hatred that is stoked by various media figures and online fascist groups and rendered lethal by easy access to guns. In my opinion, no literary work understands violent eruptions better than Beowulf, making it an essential resource for our time.

At the end of this article you can see how often I have turned to Beowulf when writing about mass killings. My book, How Beowulf Can Save America, also explores America’s anger problem, although I am less optimistic than I was in 2012, when I wrote it.

Beowulf is above all a poem about violence—what causes it, the chaos that ensues, and what can be done to counter it. Given the instability of 8th century Anglo-Saxon warrior society, the Beowulf poet was well acquainted with the subject. While some of the violence he mentions comes from abroad (Frank, Frisian, and Swedish invasions), he is most interested in the violence that comes from within. Essentially,  he focuses on domestic rather than foreign terrorism.

The poem’s three monsters, each of which is the manifestation of a different kind of anger, are all locally generated. This is noteworthy because the poem opens with images of political stability. There has been a successful four-king succession (no small thing), and the fourth king has built a magnificent mead hall designed to make any foreign invader think twice. It’s like America flexing its military might. Because Hrothgar’s Denmark and the United States are both the reigning superpowers of their time, neither fears a frontal attack.

Yet violence still occurs and in this very mead hall. Grendel is no more a foreigner than those white supremacists who dwell in the dark reaches of the internet, nursing a “hard grievance” and resenting the sounds of other people having a good time—say, liberals celebrating the richness of a diverse nation. Our own Grendels attack our shopping malls, schools, churches, synagogues, hair salons, and—this past Saturday—our grocery stores, intent on ripping us apart.

Grendel is the form grievance takes when it turns to violence. He is society’s malcontent, which in Anglo-Saxon society could take the form of a warrior angry about being bypassed, a nephew who thinks he should be king, or a relative of a diplomatic marriage who can’t get over the quarrel the marriage was supposed to solve. All three figures show up in the non-monster parts of the poem, but their fury receives full emotional articulation in the archetype of the monster.

Grendel’s mode of attack resembles any number of the shooters we have seen, including the Buffalo shooter: they storm into a space and begin shooting (in Grendel’s case, slashing) left and right. The fury of slaughter overtakes them until some strong arm takes them down. Here’s Grendel anticipating the carnage to come:

Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.
He saw many men in the mansion, sleeping,
a ranked company of kinsmen and warriors
quartered together. And his glee was demonic,
picturing the mayhem: before morning
he would rip life from limb and devour them,
feed on their flesh…

The strong arm, by the way, is not “a good guy with a gun.” The NRA’s macho stance—which is actually a sales pitch for buying more guns and is more accurately translated as “a white guy with a gun”—grows out of the very resentment that leads to the violence we are witnessing. When Beowulf enters Hrothgar’s hall, he is affronted by a trash-talking Unferth, who has killed a relative but is still accorded a place of honor. Instead of reaching for his sword, Beowulf makes a strong verbal reply that gets Unferth to back down. It’s a version of how he defeats Grendel: he disarms both figures–literally in Grendel’s case–with a strong grip, which proves more effective than the frantic sword strokes dealt out by his fellow warriors.

We cannot rely on a Beowulf to ride in and save us, although it would make some difference if Republicans and Fox News forcefully renounced white supremacy. Bullies sometimes back down when so confronted.

But because GOP lawmakers cower before Grendel’s destructive energy, the shooters in our midst are emboldened and unleash mayhem in our great hall. As a result, we find ourselves in the position of Hrothgar: head in his hands following a second monster attack, he moans, “Rest, what is rest? Sorrow has returned.”

Former Republicans like David Jolly, Joe Scarborough, Nicole Wallace, Max Boot, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Joe Walsh, Michael Steele, and many others have acknowledged that the GOP will never approve common sense gun reform, never stop catering to racist replacement fears, never stand up to Trump and his big lie that he won the election. Their solution is for voters to vote out all Republicans. Only by feeling the strong grip of electoral pressure, they believe, will the Party return to its senses.

It’s hard to see many Republicans taking their advice, unfortunately. As Grendel could tell you, perpetual rage and resentment is a potent drug.

Previous Posts on Mass Killings

Racism, Traveler of Darkness
Mass Killings, Our Most Dangerous Game
What Would Lord Jim Do?
On Labeling Survivors as Crisis Actors
In Support of Today’s NRA Marchers
Manchester: Grendel Evil vs. Beowulf’s Strength of Mind
Sen. Blackburn Unsexes Herself over Guns
NRA Uber Alles
GOP Invokes Catch-22 on Gun Control
Atwood’s Dystopias and the Gun Business
Conrad: Terrorism Not as Clear as It Looks
The Killer Always Comes Back
Las Vegas: Our Killers, Ourselves
Grendel Strikes in Orlando
This Time Grendel Chose Umpqua
Grendel Violence Never Ends 
Grendel in Paris
Pennywise Kills North Carolina Muslims
The Killer Always Comes Back
Grendel as a Norwegian Christian Fascist
Dostoevsky and the Arizona Shootings 
Lost Paradise Syndrome in Tucson
Analyzing Loughner’s Booklist
Satan Strikes Again, This Time in Aurora
Grendel’s Invasion of Fort Hood
A Modern Grendel on the Rampage

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Imagine Hemingway in Ukraine

By Robin Bates | Published: May 16, 2022
Bergman and Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls

Tuesday

When the colorful Malcolm Nance, former Navy officer and counterintelligence specialist,  joined the international fighters that have journeyed to Ukraine to fight the Russians, I figured the time had finally come for me to read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway famously reported on a similar international group of volunteer fighters–the international Lincoln Brigade—that traveled to Spain in the late 1930s to battle Franco’s fascists. While he didn’t fight, Hemingway described what was happening and also raised money and helped produce The Spanish Earth in support of the Republican cause.

For his part, Nance, at age 60, has stepped away from his career of sought-after commentator and book author to risk his life in another country fighting to hold on to its republic. “The more I saw of the war going on, the more I thought, I’m done talking, it’s time to take action,” Nance told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.

As I read the book, I am struck by how much more important Robert Jordan’s mission appears in light of Ukraine. Jordan, an American engineer, has been sent into the mountains to blow up a bridge. The timing must be right—after Republican troops have used it for their attack and before the fascists can use it in the expected counterattack. An early passage in the book lined up eerily with a remarkable battle at the Siverskyi Donets River, where the Ukrainians took out 73 Russian vehicles and somewhere between 250 and 1000 Russian soldiers as they tried to cross over on a pontoon bridge. 

Reading the twitter thread of someone who identifies as “Maxim,” a Ukrainian EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) officer, is like reading Hemingway’s novel. To show you what I mean, I’m putting them side by side. First, some tweets from Maxim, as reported in the Military Times. The quotation marks indicate the tweets:

 “I explored the area and suggested a location where Russians might attempt to mount a pontone bridge to get to the other side.” 

“Artillery was ready. We have been able to confirm Russians mounted 7 parts of the bridge out of 8. Russians have even succeeded to move some troops and vehicles over the river. Combats started.”

About 20 minutes after a recon unit confirmed the Russian bridge was being mounted, “HEAVY ARTILLERY engaged against Russian forces, and then aviation chipped in as well. I was still in the area, and I have never seen / heard such heavy combat in my life.”

“Some Russian forces (~30-50 vehicles + infantry) were stuck on Ukrainian side of the river with no way back. They tried to run away using broken bridge. Then they tried to arrange a new bridge.”

Ukrainian aviation then started a heavy bombardment of the area, “and it destroyed all the remains of Russians there, and other bridge they tried to make.”

By May 10, the pontoon bridge was gone.

“Their strategic objective was to cross the river and then encircle Lysychansk. They miserably failed.”

And here’s Hemingway, although the passage I’ve chosen is not about the bridge Robert Jordan is supposed to destroy. Rather, it’s about an earlier explosion engineered by (ironically enough) a Russian operative. Jordan’s guide Anselmo describes what happens:

He shook his head remembering, then went on. “Never in my life have I seen such a thing as when the explosion was produced. The train was coming steadily. We saw it far away. And I had an excitement so great that I cannot tell it. We saw steam from it and then later came the noise of the whistle. Then it came chu-chu-chu-chu-chu-chu steadily larger and larger and then, at the moment of the explosion, the front wheels of the engine rose up and all of the earth seemed to rise in a great cloud of blackness and a roar and the engine rose high in the cloud of dirt and of the wooden ties rising in the air as in a dream and then it fell onto its side like a great wounded animal and there was an explosion of white steam before the clods of the other explosion had ceased to fall on us and the máquina [machine gun] commenced to speak ta-tat-tat-ta!” went the gypsy shaking his two clenched fists up and down in front of him, thumbs up, on an imaginary machine gun. “Ta! Ta! Tat! Tat! Tat! Ta!” he exulted. “Never in my life have I seen such a thing, with the troops running from the train and the máquina speaking into them and the men falling.

In what follows, it sounds like the Spanish fascists have some of the same reluctance to fight as Ukraine’s Russian invaders. If so many Russian generals have been killed, some theorize, it’s because morale issues have forced them to personally step forward, putting themselves within range of Ukrainian fire. In the Hemingway passage, Anselmo notes that the fascist commanding officer has to shoot a couple of his men to get them to advance. Unfortunately, he’s not as vulnerable to enemy fire as the Russian generals:

Later, after we had been down at the train to see what there was to take, an officer forced some troops back toward us at the point of a pistol. He kept waving the pistol and shouting at them and we were all shooting at him but no one hit him. Then some troops lay down and commenced firing and the officer walked up and down behind them with his pistol and still we could not hit him and the máquina could not fire on him because of the position of the train. This officer shot two men as they lay and still they would not get up and he was cursing them and finally they got up, one two and three at a time and came running toward us and the train. Then they lay flat again and fired. Then we left, with the máquina still speaking over us as we left. It was then I found the girl where she had run from the train to the rocks and she ran with us. It was those troops who hunted us until that night.”

If the two accounts sound so similar, it’s in part testimony to how well Hemingway listened to the fighters he interviewed.

One other note: My father, who was a soldier-interpreter in World War II, has a story about For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was a guard duty in Coventry, England on June 5, 1944 and, because all was quiet, he was reading Hemingway’s novel. He reports, however, looking up and suddenly seeing the entire sky filled with airplanes. It was the night before the D Day invasion, and bombers were setting off for France to pound German positions, thereby preparing the way for storming the Normandy beaches the following day.

Incidentally, as a member of the administrative forces, he would not himself land on the beaches until two weeks later.

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They Really Are Coming for Your Body

By Robin Bates | Published: May 15, 2022
Still from Handmaid’s Tale

Monday

Although I’m 70 years old, I’m always learning, and one thing I’ve grasped in a new way over the past six years is that appeasement doesn’t stop bullies. My natural inclination when I encounter disagreement is to make concessions in hopes that the other side will engage in good faith negotiating, but Trump and Putin have made me realize how naïve this is. As authoritarians see it, any concession is a sign of weakness and an invitation to push even more.

This is true as well of anti-abortion crusaders—which is why scaling back or overturning Roe v Wade, as Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus points out, will be

just the start. For those who believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, allowing it to remain legal in wide swaths of the country is intolerable.

As Marcus sees it, anti-abortionists will start with banning abortion in red states and then in all states. After that, rightwing forces will go after birth control and same sex marriage and who knows what else.

Last week Margaret Atwood wrote in  an Atlantic article about composing The Handmaid’s Tale. “I stopped writing it several times,” she reports,

because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?

Atwood notes that she took some of her inspiration from “17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence,” which is ironic given that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cited a 17th century judge, one Sir Matthew Hale, in his draft opinion overturning Roe. (Hale voiced suspicion of women who charge rape, contended marital rape was an impossibility [since men own their wives, they can’t rape themselves], and sentenced two “witches” to death.) In her article Atwood observes that there are differing religious views on abortion and that, in settling on one, the United States would be imposing a religious rule on the entire country, in violation of the “freedom of religion” clause in the First Amendment:

When does a fertilized human egg become a full human being or person? “Our” traditions—let’s say those of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the early Christians—have vacillated on this subject. At “conception”? At “heartbeat”? At “quickening?” The hard line of today’s anti-abortion activists is at “conception,” which is now supposed to be the moment at which a cluster of cells becomes “ensouled.” But any such judgment depends on a religious belief—namely, the belief in souls. Not everyone shares such a belief. But all, it appears, now risk being subjected to laws formulated by those who do. That which is a sin within a certain set of religious beliefs is to be made a crime for all.

If America were being true to its Constitution, Atwood says—which is what the self-proclaimed “originalists” on the Supreme Court claim they are–it “ought to be simple”:

If you believe in “ensoulment” at conception, you should not get an abortion, because to do so is a sin within your religion. If you do not so believe, you should not—under the Constitution—be bound by the religious beliefs of others. But should the Alito opinion become the newly settled law, the United States looks to be well on the way to establishing a state religion. Massachusetts had an official religion in the 17th century. In adherence to it, the Puritans hanged Quakers.

Once jurisdictions start policing such matters, Atwood points out, they will unleash chaos. For instance,

it will be very difficult to disprove a false accusation of abortion. The mere fact of a miscarriage, or a claim by a disgruntled former partner, will easily brand you a murderer. Revenge and spite charges will proliferate, as did arraignments for witchcraft 500 years ago.

The Canadian author concludes that if America really wants to “be governed by the laws of the 17th century,” then it “should should take a close look at that century.”

“Is that when you want to live?” she asks.

After reading Atwood’s article, I revisited Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ve taught twice, to see what insights she gives on how a society becomes a Gilead. In flashbacks scattered throughout the novel, handmaid Offred recounts how the current theocratic state came about. A one point, she notes,

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. There were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

If one is living in a blue state, the possibility of banned abortion seems far removed. If one is living in a red state, the possibility of a ban on contraception seems far removed. And yet Mitch McConnell has said that, if the Republicans were to regain power, they could well pass a federal ban, and there are Republican legislators (including my home state senator Marsha Blackburn) who want the Supreme Court to revisit privacy laws allowing birth control. There are also legislators talking about forbidding women to travel out of state to get abortions and tracking the health records and internet searches of those who are pregnant. Yet we find ways to shrug off these concerns. As Offred observes,

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.

Later in the novel, the United States experiences a military coup following an unspecified national catastrophe. In spite of this, the army reassures the public:

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.

I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?

Even after the new leaders suspend the Constitution, there’s a muted response:

They said [the suspension] would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your hand on.

Looking back, the naïve June reports that her more worldly-wise friend Moira was more alert to the danger:

You wait, she said. They’ve been building up to this. It’s you and me gainst the wall, baby.

Atwood’s plot may have appeared far-fetched in 1985 but not now, given that we barely escaped our own coup on January 6, 2021. And unlike the coup in the novel where Muslim terrorists provide the rationale, Trump supporters have been openly taking credit for ours. We learn from Trump flunky Peter Navarro that the coup plan had a name–“The Green Bay Sweep”—and from Trump lawyer John Eastman’s e-mails about attempts to convince Pennsylvania politicians to come up with “cover” (fraudulent voting accusations) so that GOP fake electors could vote for Trump. There were also plans, pending anticipated disturbances following an election overthrow, to declare martial law. Several in the GOP were very open about it.

One would think that all this would be hot enough to get us to leap out of the bathtub. And yet, once again, many Americans are pushing the danger aside, telling themselves that “everything is under control.”

So now there’s talk in some states, if Roe v Wade is overturned, about not allowing pregnant women to cross state lines to get abortions. In the novel, meanwhile, June and her husband and daughter attempt to flee to Canada. June sees her husband shot and her daughter kidnapped, and she herself is turned into a breeding machine.

Could Christian fascists triumph here? If Roe v Wade is overturned, they’ll have the wind in their sails.

Reader response: When I first responded to Alito’s draft ruling, I received the following response from reader Matthew Currie, which smartly lays out what may be coming:

One of the things I find most scary about this already scary future is that many on the anti-choice side have announced that their next target will be the Griswold Vs. Connecticut decision, with an aim toward outlawing the protection of birth control, ostensibly on the ground that the IUD creates an abortion. And of course, with the privacy issue may go gay marriage, and racial equality. Of course the people going against Griswold assure us they don’t want to ban all birth control, and don’t want to do this or that, but they are making it possible.

A woman gets an IUD at a time when she is not pregnant. It is a procedure performed on the single individual who, up until now, has been considered to own her own reproductive apparatus. In fact a person could get an an IUD and die a virgin. What it does is to make the uterus unreceptive to a zygote. If the IUD is banned, it will, not sort of, not virtually, but literally, mean that a woman is not allowed to control a part of her own body. The idea that an IUD is an abortion requires that a fertilized egg not only has the rights of a human being to live, but the right to find a home, and that this right is retroactive – that a person must provide that possibility before the “person” exists.

The banning of any form of birth control is, I think, an abomination, but singling out the IUD adds a fearsome dimension, because it truly declares that at any time, any place, any age, and any circumstance, a woman’s uterus is government property. We can, of course, assume that the ignorant idiots in charge of this will not realize or take advantage of the existential change this entails, but our faith in human nature and moderation is rarely met. If you can tell a woman what procedures she may perform on her uterus, why can’t you tell her what else she must do with it, when she must, with whom she must or must not?

You could argue, I think, that banning the IUD, if not any birth control, is a subset of eugenics.

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Reporting on My Lenten Observance

By Robin Bates | Published: May 14, 2022
Una saves Redcrosse from suicide in the Cave of Despair

Spiritual Sunday

I realize that I have not reported on my Lenten reading project, which was to read as much as I could of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. As it turned out, I only got through Book I and those parts of Books II and III that are in the Norton Anthology. Nevertheless, it proved to be a rich experience, especially when I realized how much C.S Lewis owes to the poem for his Narnia books. More on that in a future post.

Since I was reading the poem for Lenten observance, one thing that stood out was how the Redcrosse Knight—a St. George figure—does penance. I’ve been arguing in some of my Lenten posts that Lent is not a time to beat yourself up for how bad you’ve been but a time to get closer to God. At one point I shared a Madeleine L’Engle poem that opens, “It is my Lent to break my Lent, /To eat when I would fast.” In other words, she’s not going to observe Lent by mortifying her body, which she sees as counterproductive. Rather, she will observe it by attempting to follow Christ’s Sermon on the Mount instructions.

The vision of Lent she’s pushing against, however, is the one that Redcrosse observes, with hot sauce added. In the poem, he has just been rescued from Despaire, where he almost commits suicide. As you read his cleansing ritual, don’t be daunted by the language—while it mimics Chaucer’s middle English, it’s actually closer to modern English, prettied up in the Spenserian style. Una, incidentally, is Redcrosse’s lady fair, who suffers as she witnesses his self-flagellation but nevertheless regards it as necessary:

Book I, XXVI
In ashes and sackcloth he did array
His daintie corse, proud humors to abate,
And dieted with fasting every day,
The swelling of his wounds to mitigate,
And made him pray both earely and eke late:
And ever as superfluous flesh did rot
Amendment readie still at hand did wayt,
To pluck it out with pincers firie whot
That soone in him was left no one corrupted jot.

XXVII
And bitter Penance with an yron whip,
Was wont him once to disple every day:
And sharpe Remorse his hart did pricke and nip,
That drops of blood thence like a well did play:
And sad Repentance used to embay
His bodie in salt water smarting sore,
The filthy blots of sinne to wash away.
So in short space they did to health restore
The man that would not live, but earst lay at deathes dore.

XXVIII
In which his torment often was so great,
That like a Lyon he would cry and rore,
And rend his flesh, and his owne synewes eat.
His owne deare Una hearing evermore
His ruefull shriekes and gronings, often tore
Her guiltlesse garments, and her golden heare,
For pitty of his paine and anguish sore;
Yet all with patience wisely she did beare;
For well she wist his crime could else be never cleare.
If that’s what it takes to become clear, sign me up for a different religion.

I don’t know a lot about either Faerie Queene or the Christianity of the time, but if fear of hell played a big role in it, then I can see why one might go overboard to make sure one didn’t go there. To end this post on a more cheerful note—one more in keeping with the Easter season—here’s one describing where Redcrosse hopes he ends up. Since in today’s lectionary readings we finish up the Book of Revelations, it’s more than appropriate. First, the lesson:

In the spirit the angel carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day– and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. 

And now for the vision of heaven that a holy hermit shows Redcrosse after he has completed his penance. Like Jacob, Redcrosse sees angels ascending and descending the stairway to heaven

Faire knight (quoth he) Hierusalem that is,
The new Hierusalem, that God has built
For those to dwell in, that are chosen his,
His chosen people purg’d from sinfull guil

With pretious blood, which cruelly was spilt
On cursed tree, of that unspotted lam,
That for the sinnes of al the world was kilt:
Now are they Saints all in that Citie sam,
More dear unto their God then younglings to their dam.

Emily Dickinson has written, Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –/ I keep it, staying at Home .” Yes, and some observe Lent by plying their flesh with whips while others with reading books. No ruefull shriekes and gronings for me, thank you very much. We can debate which way gets us closer to God.

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If You Find Joy, Give in to It

By Robin Bates | Published: May 12, 2022
Fragonard, The Swing

Friday

A Mary Oliver poem has been making the rounds on twitter and it’s easy to see why. The poet’s image in “Don’t Hesitate” of  “whole towns destroyed” brings to mind Russia’s wanton shelling of Ukrainian civilians, leaving us to wonder if any joy is possible. To which fear Oliver defiantly replies, “Still, life has some possibility left.”

On Tuesday I shared an Oliver poem that ended on an unexpectedly dark note so I bookend the week with a poem that ends on a light one. Oliver’s poems tend to veer between depression and ecstasy, but when she speaks of joy, she gives herself into it fully. In “Humpbacks,” for instance, she writes,

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body…

And in “The Plum Trees”:

Such richness flowing
through the branches of summer and into

the body, carried inward on the five
rivers! Disorder and astonishment

rattle your thoughts and your heart
cries for rest but don’t

succumb, there’s nothing
so sensible as sensual inundation.

 But back to “Don’t Hesitate,” our poem for today. While she must acknowledge that “we are not wise, and not very often kind” and that “much can never be redeemed,” she nevertheless counters with the possibility of love and light. So whenever you “unexpectedly feel joy,” don’t hold back, hoarding it the way that one perhaps hoards crumbs, hoping in this way to make the dinner last longer. Instead, dive into the feast, fully and without holding back.

Don’t Hesitate
By Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

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Russia Has Always Hated Ukrainian Lit

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2022
Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet

Thursday

I never would have anticipated that a host of literary issues would arise from a horrific conflict, but so it has been with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia has one of the world’s great literary traditions—it rivals that of Great Britain’s—but it comes with a cost.

The cost is the suppression of other languages. Guilty of language chauvinism, Russia apparently has been ruthless in imposing its language on others. Some of the chauvinists, as a recent article in Literary Hub reveals, have been great authors.

“We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then all would have been lost,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his 1959 study, Gogol. He continued: “When I want a good nightmare, I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume….” What he calls the “Little Russian dialect” is none other than the Ukrainian language, which is about as close to Russian as Spanish is to Italian.

Author Askold Melnyczuk observes that Nabokov wasn’t alone but has been joined by countless Russian writers and intellectuals. This has me rethinking my recent interpretation of Joseph Brodsky’s poem “On Ukrainian Independence,” where the speaker describes the Ukrainian poet Shevchenko as a “bullshitter” when put up against the immortal Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. I argued for a distinction between the speaker and Brodsky, imagining that Brodsky was channeling the voice of a Russian chauvinist rather than expressing his own thoughts. While this might still be the case, I’m now wondering whether Brodsky himself doesn’t agree.

Ukraine certainly doesn’t regard Shevchenko as a bullshitter. Melnyczuk observes,

Ukraine is the only country I know of that was dreamed into existence by a poet. Born a serf in 1814, Taras Shevchenko was freed from slavery by the efforts of fellow artists. The painter-poet then took on himself the mission of telling the story of the indigenous people of Ukraine in their native tongue. For this the Russian empire punished him with decades of exile and imprisonment—this despite the fact that he wrote his prose in Russian. His Ukrainian-language poetry, however, had the effect of solidifying and fortifying the indigenous people’s sense of themselves. Ever since, poets have held a singular importance for the culture.

Actually, as I noted on Monday, Slovenia might be another such country. But set that aside. Melnyczuk says that, although Ukraine isn’t the only neighboring republic that has had Russian pushed down its throat, it has long been a particular target. First, two years after the abolition of serfdom in 1863, there was a ban on Ukrainian publications. Then, in 1876, Tsar Alexander

outlawed all publications in Ukrainian, including books imported from abroad. The policy also rendered illegal theater productions and performances of songs in Ukrainian. Russia feared that the indigenous peasant population might began to demand human rights and undermine Russia’s imperial claims. 

Things then got particularly nasty in the 1930’s under Stalin in what Melnyczuk calls Ukraine’s “aborted Renaissance”:

In 1930 some 260 writers actively participated in the country’s literary life. By 1938 only 36 remained on the scene. Surveying the fates of the missing speaks volumes about the leitmotif of that decade: Of the 224 MIAs, 17 were shot; 8 committed suicide; 175 were arrested or interred; 16 disappeared without a trace. Only 7 died of natural causes. Belorussian culture was similarly decimated and thwarted by Stalin.

“The crime for which writers and intellectuals in former Soviet republics were punished,” Melnyczuk writes, “was that they dared aspire to autonomy and cultural independence.”

Russia is, of course, not the only country that has imposed its culture on others. France, England and others did so as well. Frantz Fanon, the legendary author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), notes how the soft power of culture complements the hard power of state violence. Looking at how Europe colonized Africa, Fanon notes,

Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture, which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his “nation.”

As a result, imported culture overwhelms native culture, which becomes “more and more shriveled up, inert, and empty.”

What Fanon says about national culture in general applies to literature. As African children are brought up reading, say, the French tragedies of Corneille and Racine, little is left of indigenous culture other than “a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress, and a few broken-down institutions.” In these “remnants of culture,” Fanon says, “there is no real creativity and no overflowing life.” For instance, old folktales that grandparents tell their children, while they may survive, cannot address the issues of the day.

Fanon then goes on, however, to talk about a “literature of combat” in which a new sense of nation arises. Combative literature “calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation,” Fanon says. As such, it “molds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours,” thereby opening up “new and boundless horizons.” Such literature Fanon characterizes as “the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.”

Such literature includes folk art, and Fanon notes that in Africa, the authorities, from 1955 on, began to systematically arrest storytellers. After all, the stories they told conflicted with the official colonialist narrative.

On Chris Hayes’s podcast Why Is This Happening?, Yale historian Tim Snyder, an expert on Russia and Ukraine as well as the author of the influential On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, recently spoke of Russia’s long history of cultural genocide. Russia, Snyder said, doesn’t acknowledge the existence either of the Ukrainian language or of Ukraine itself. To support his contention, he discussed a statement that appeared on Russia’s official state news agency site on April 3rd, just a few days after the discovery of the mass murders by Russian soldiers in Bucha.” Melnyczuk quotes Snyder in her article:

The Russian handbook is one of the most openly genocidal documents I have ever seen. It calls for the liquidation of the Ukrainian state, and for abolition of any organization that has any association with Ukraine. Such people, “the majority of the population,” …more than twenty million people, are to be killed or sent to work in “labor camps” to expurgate their guilt for not loving Russia. Survivors are to be subject to “re-education.” Children will be raised to be Russian. The name “Ukraine” will disappear.

But Ukraine can’t disappear if it has a vital literature, and Melnyczuk notes that “dozens of presses are rushing out translations of work by Ukrainian writers, whether they’re written in Ukrainian, Russian, Belarussian or Crimean Tatar.”

It’s ironic that the same language that has given us Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, and Akhmatova should also be used to silence indigenous authors. And indeed, there has always been this push and pull in liberation movements: should Chinua Achebe write in Igbo or Salman Rushdie in Urdu, thereby limiting their readership—or should they write in the colonizers’ language, which expands their scope? By writing in English, Achebe was able to speak to much of Africa and Rushdie to all of India, but they gave up something in the process.

In his interview with Hayes, however, Snyder made an important point. Ukrainians have no difficulty moving between languages, which means that multiple literatures are available to them. Their multicultural nation is far more vibrant than monocultural Russia.

Which means that Gogol writing in Ukrainian might not have the nightmare that Nabokov feared.

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PBS’s Sanditon: Austen + Jane Eyre

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2022

Wednesday

Two years ago, not realizing that the PBS Sanditon series was going to experience a second season, I expressed my dissatisfaction. When Charlotte doesn’t marry either of the two very attractive prospects available to her (for her part, Austen never gives us more than one attractive bachelor per heroine), I speculated, “Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to capture the disappointment we feel over Austen’s own unfinished ending.”

It’s not that I was demanding a traditional marriage plot. I would have been more than happy with a bildungsroman (growth story). To elaborate, feminist Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an influential book, sees the marriage plot warring with the bildungsroman in much of 19th-century women’s fiction, with the marriage plot invariably winning out. Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre may flirt with the bildungsroman, she observes, but in the end the marriage plot wins the day, with the protagonist dwindling from hero to heroine. Jane Eyre may undergo remarkable growth in the course of Charlotte Bronte’s novel but, on the last page, she is triumphantly proclaiming, “Reader, I married him.” Elizabeth, meanwhile, must curb her satiric tongue—what we love best about her—once she is engaged to Darcy. A pretty good joke at his expense*, one that could prod him to grow, never sees the light of day.

My problem with season #1’s conclusion was that Charlotte appeared to be heading back to an obscure life in the country, where she would be unable to exercise her powers in any way that we could see.

But now that there has been a season #2, and with a season #3 on the way, I’m more forgiving. We are getting the marriage plot after all, with all the perils that go with it. And who knows—Charlotte may end up as a hero rather than a wife in the end. Or perhaps she will be an equal partner with a husband. After all, that architect from season #1 is still around while Charlotte has good design ideas and admirable drive. I could imagine them as joint partners, something like Dorothea Brooke and Ladislaw in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

I noted in my previous post that, since Jane Austen didn’t complete Sanditon, the filmmakers aren’t bound to a specific ending. In the first season, as I observed in my post, they mostly rearrange previous Austen characters and plots. Part of the fun for Janeites like myself is recognizing when they do so. In fact, I called them out as I watched the series with my wife and mother, and they—perhaps because they are Janeites themselves or perhaps because they were being nice—didn’t complain.

For instance, I noted that Charlotte starts out as a Catherine Morland type (from Northanger Abbey), and that her relationship with Sydney Parker has an Elizabeth-Darcy vibe. The filmmakers have also drawn a lot from Mansfield Park, with Edward and Esther Denham at one point resembling the Crawfords. Lady Denham, meanwhile, echoes various tyrannical widows, like Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility and Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. Like Mrs. Ferrars, Lady Denham has control of her estate and can disinherit if she chooses (and in fact does so).  

Season 2 continues with some of this rearranging. Charlotte’s sister is invited to Sanditon like Fanny Price’s sister to the Bertram household, although the two have more in common with Elinor and Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. Sense and Sensibility may also have inspired some of the backstory of Mr. Colbourne, the estate owner who (spoiler alert) does not, in the end, propose to Charlotte: just as Colonel Brandon’s first love runs away from his brother, whom she is pressured to marry, so Colbourne’s first wife runs into the arms of the unscrupulous Captain Lennox, before returning to her husband to give birth and die. (It doesn’t, however, appear that her tomboy daughter will suffer the fate of Colonel Brandon’s ward, who is seduced and ruined by Willoughby.)

Captain Lennox, meanwhile, has some of Wickham’s debt issues in Pride and Prejudice, although in the end he is far more malicious, resembling Mr. Eliot in Persuasion. Mr. Eliot, like Lennox, has eyes for the heroine (whose desires point in another direction), and, like Mr. Eliot, he ruins (or attempts to ruin) other people. Meanwhile, the West Indian colony of Antigua, which appears in Mansfield Park, continues to play a role: Georgia, mixed-race heiress and ward of Sydney Parker, is still with us. Sydney, meanwhile, takes a trip to Antigua (like Sir Thomas Bertram), where he dies of yellow fever.

But for all that, the series is also moving in a very Victorian direction. This Sanditon, for instance, has a far more positive view of the governess profession than Jane Austen ever did. It’s more Bronte-esque than Austen-esque. Here’s how Jane Fairfax in Emma, perhaps speaking for Austen, tells Mrs. Elton how she sees the profession:

When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed. There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something—Offices for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect.”

“Oh! my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave-trade…”

“I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade,” replied Jane; “governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies. But I only mean to say that there are advertising offices, and that by applying to them I should have no doubt of very soon meeting with something that would do.”

Sanditon’s Charlotte, on the other hand, sees the job as a possible future and means of independence. As I recall, on her way to Mr. Colbourne’s estate she first encounters his dog before meeting him on horseback, which is how Jane Eyre first meets Rochester. Edward Denham, meanwhile, has turned into a Wilkie Collins-style villain (I’m thinking of The Woman in White) as he secretly feeds her opium to convince her and the world that she needs to be locked up in a madhouse. There’s also something Dickensian about the woman he impregnates, who ends up running away from her child.

By the end of season #2, it sounds as though Charlotte, now twice crossed in love, is considering marrying a neighboring farmer. This of course cannot stand as the filmmakers are unlikely to go in a Thomas Hardy direction. There’s far more energy to be found in resort towns, like Sanditon and Bath.

I have no problems with the televised Sanditon. Austen herself was moving from a classical 18th century sensibility to a more Romantic one in her late fiction, with Anne Elliot—in her last completed novel—marrying a risk-taking captain rather than a landed squire. Sanditon, meanwhile, was venturing into the very un-Austen territory of real estate. Who knows where the author would have ended up?

*Elizabeth’s joke: Austen tells us that

Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful friend; so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked herself. She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and it was rather too early to begin.

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Add the Climate to a Week of Disasters

By Robin Bates | Published: May 9, 2022
Peter von Cornelius, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1845)

Tuesday

I seem to be writing about one catastrophe after another these days. Last Tuesday it was Mariupol, followed by the likely repeal of Roe v Wade, which was followed by another post on Russian atrocities, before the week ended with news that America had just registered one million Covid deaths. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are certainly making their rounds, and to make sure they don’t miss anything, I turn today’s post over to climate change, as seen by Mary Oliver.

The four horsemen, as I’m sure you know, are War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. So I’ve covered War, Death and Pestilence, and I could note that Famine is riding hard in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and could come to other parts of the world with the interruption of the Ukrainian wheat harvest. In their collaborative novel Good Omens, fantasists Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett feature the four horsemen, only they have replaced Pestilence with Pollution on the grounds that that latter poses more of a threat, especially with advances in modern medicine. While the grave threat that carbon emissions are posing to the future of the planet makes the swap understandable, it’s worth noting that the novel was written before the Covid pandemic.

Oliver gets the tone just right in her poem “On Traveling to Beautiful Places.” As is customary with her, she looks out at nature and captures a sense of wonder.

Then she throws in a kicker.

On Traveling to Beautiful Places
By Mary Oliver

Every day I’m still looking for God
and I’m still finding him everywhere,
in the dust, in the flowerbeds.
Certainly in the oceans,
In the islands that lay in the distance
Continents of ice, countries of sand
Each with its own set of creatures
And God, by whatever name.
How perfect to be aboard a ship with
Maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.
But it’s late, for all of us,
And in truth the only ship there is
Is the ship we are all on
Burning the world as we go.

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