According to the Guttmacher Institute, “nearly one in four women in the United States (23.7%) will have an abortion by age 45.” Many of those who have had abortions are anti-abortion Christians, who seek to deny that option from other women. They give themselves a pass by declaring that Christ forgives them, making everything okay.
I have encountered stories of women who had an abortion one day and were out protesting against abortion centers several weeks later. I also know the story of my Tennessee Congressman Scott Desjarlais, who despite having obtained two abortions for his wife and a third for a mistress, continues to be a hardcore opponent of abortion. Apparently (this according to his Wikipedia entry) he told a conservative radio host that “God has forgiven me” and “asked ‘fellow Christians’ and constituents ‘to consider doing the same.’” In other words, my Christianity allows freedom for me but not for thee.
Using Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card reminds me of character in George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. Spintho, on his way to martyrdom in the Colosseum, believes he can misbehave to his heart’s content because “all martyrs go to heaven, no matter what they have done.” (In a comic twist, Androcles points out to Spintho that he may die of natural causes before being martyred, causing Spintho to panic, rush off to renounce his Christianity, and accidentally run into the jaws of a lion.)
I don’t see our Christian nationalists doing even this amount of soul searching, however. For them, power is the goal, whether over women, LBGTQ folk, liberals or what have you. They ignore the powerful message in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is that love is the road to heaven and egotism the road to hell. Jesus was well aware of how people would seek to twist his words to serve the purposes of earthly power. This is why he chastised Peter (“Get thee behind me Satan”) when the disciple sought to correct him for choosing the route of the cross. If Christian nationalists are willing to turn their backs on Jesus’s message of love in return for earthly power, then they have chosen Satan as their lord and savior.
Milton knew something about this. He had been part of a revolution that thought it was bringing God’s kingdom to earth, only to see the message corrupted by power seekers. In Paradise Regained, his Christ rejects Satan’s temptation that he become the ruler of Rome—which would be London in Milton’s time and Washington in our own. Here’s Jesus’s rejection:
Nor doth this grandeur and majestic show Of luxury, though called magnificence, More then of arms before, allure mine eye, Much less my mind; though thou should’st add to tell Their sumptuous gluttonies, and gorgeous feasts…
And further on:
Wert thou so void of fear or shame, As offer them to me the Son of God, To me my own, on such abhorred pact, That I fall down and worship thee as God? Get thee behind me; plain now now appear’st That Evil one, Satan, forever damned.
Again: any Christian that does not have love at the heart of his or her faith is not following Christ but the god of Self. And if such people forego humility and make righteous zeal their god, then Satan is calling the tune.
Having finally heard from a White House insider—one who worked with Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff and who witnessed the president’s backstage machinations—we have a clearer picture of Trump’s plan for January 6, 2021: he wanted to walk into the Capitol like Voldemort striding into Hogwarts, routing his enemies as he proclaimed himself victor.
Trump hasn’t read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows so that wouldn’t be the self-image he carried in his head. Accompanied by armed secret service agents and backed by armed vigilante groups, he probably saw himself more like the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace. In any event, he apparently believed that, with such a show of force, he could intimidate Congress—or at least Mike Pence—into overturning the election. But the Voldemort comparison works for me.
In a triumphal scene where Voldemort confronts Hogwarts resisters, the arch villain claims that their leader—now apparently dead—has failed them. Think of Harry in this parallel as democracy or the Constitution:
“Harry Potter is dead. He was killed as he ran away, trying to save himself while you lay down your lives for him. We bring you his body as proof that your hero is one.”
Then he delivers a version of the speech that Trump perhaps imagined himself to Congress:
The battle is won. You have lost half of your fighters. My Death Eaters outnumber you, and the Boy Who Lived is finished. There must be no more war. Anyone who continues to resist, man, woman, or child, will be slaughtered, as will every member of their family. Come out of the castle now, kneel before me, and you shall be spared. Your parents and children, your brothers and sisters will live and be forgiven, and you will join me in the new world we shall build together.”
Come to think of it, Vladimir Putin dreamed of giving this speech in the center of Kyiv in March.
But democracy, at least so far, is kicking back. In Ukraine’s case, the curse that Putin hurls at Ukraine has, like Voldemort’s, rebounded upon him: Ukraine has never been more united, NATO has added members, and Russia’s own forces have been fatally weakened.
Will the same prove true for Trump and GOP authoritarians? Will Madisonian democracy prevail? In J.K. Rowling’s fantasy, when the bad guy goes low, the good guy goes high, and high wins the day:
Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy’s shell.
This ending is far from assured in our case. To achieve it, we are going to need everyone—progressives, liberals, independents, NeverTrumpers, principled conservatives, Gryffindors and Slytherins—working together. Whatever happens to Trump himself, Trumpism itself has metastasized and continues to storm democracy’s citadel. This is no time for rifts in Dumbledore’s Army.
Waves of Covid have crashed against the Bates household these past two weeks, hitting first my wife, then me, then my 96-year-old mother. Each one of us was laid out flat while it lasted, and my mother has still not regained the strength in her legs. This means that I must lift her up whenever she needs to use the facilities.
She has come to describe the moment as our dance together. I slide her feet off the hospital bed where she spends most of her time, prop up her back, and then hug and lift. She, meanwhile, puts her arms around my neck, hanging on “like death.”
That phrase will signal to poetry lovers where I’m going with this post: to Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” a masterpiece of ambiguity. No matter how many times one reads the poem, one is never sure whether tenderness or tension prevails in the relationship between a boy and his father. Certainly, elements of both are present.
In the speaker’s recollection of having danced with his drunken father when he was a little boy, some signs suggest the man was loving, others that he was abusive. While the father carrying the child off to bed sounds sweet, evidence of violence can be found everywhere. This includes the man’s bruised knuckle (has it been used against his frowning wife), his beating time on the boy’s head (soft or hard?), and his buckle scraping the boy’s ear. The last incident in particular comes to mind as my mother and I go through our own waltz.
That’s because “dancing” with my mother always means pressing on two sore ribs, one of which she cracked and one of which she broke two weeks ago in a fall. As a result, when I lift up her dead weight (108 pounds, to be exact), she invariably cries out. Although I know there’s no other way, it still sears my soul to hear her moan.
Unlike the speaker’s father, I’m fully conscious of the hurt I’m causing. Nevertheless, there’s a similar mixture of love and pain involved in our waltz. Here’s the poem:
My Papa’s Waltz By Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.
Of course, in addition to my not being drunk or abusive, I am also the son, not the parent, in our own dance. Our roles from 65 or so years ago have been reversed. Still, like the speaker in the poem, I find something precious in our dancing, despite the effort required and the pain involved. After all these years, the little boy is finally getting his mother all to himself.
Related story – Patrick Logan, whose sensitive story about his father I shared ten years ago, sent in a moving account of “dancing” with his mother after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It appears in his book Every Day Since Desenzano, which has been published by Peace Corps Worldwide. Here it is:
After my father returned from the war, the foxtrots and jitterbugs of the Big Band era had given way to Chubby Checker, the Twist and eventually to Line Dancing. Through all the changing music styles, Pat and Charlie twirled each other around the dance floor to the delight of all who watched. Taking care of my mother during my shift, I would often move her from her wheelchair to the sofa. Reaching down, I’d slip my arms around her while she wrapped her hands behind my neck. Placing my hands flat against her back, I’d count to three and she’d push off with her right leg and we’d stand a moment while she got her balance. In a grotesque imitation of the countless times my father had moved her with ease across a dance floor, my mother and I would then waltz back and forth, my right foot nudging her left as she stepped with her right, followed by a partial pirouette before I bent to set her down. Each time our pas de deux ended, I’d pray that she was not remembering those magical times when she was so graceful, when her movements were as steady and dependable as my father’s arm, as it reached out to embrace her waist.
Sometimes a book that one is reading matches up with current events in unexpected and amazing ways. Such is the case with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, which Julia and I listened to on our way back from an Iowa wedding. I initially chose the work because I wanted to become familiar with Coates’s fiction, only to discover that it relates to conversations arising out of the Supreme Court’s attack on abortion rights.
The novel is about the underground railroad in slave times. Hiram Walker, a man with special powers, is a slave who is betrayed by a fellow slave when he attempts to escape. Following harsh treatment by his captors, he is rescued by the railroad and then becomes an underground agent himself.
Here’s a description of the betrayer:
No man was more esteemed among the coloreds and the whites of Elm County than Georgie Parks. He was the major, the ambassador, the dream, though the dream took its meaning from whatever vantage it was glimpsed from….There was a tantalizing shadow about Georgie. He would disappear for long periods or be seen out in Starfall or glimpsed in the woods at the oddest of hours. We had an explanation for these mysteries. Georgie was tied to the Underground.
It turns out, however, that Georgie has been pressured by whites to be used as bait to catch potential runaways. The trap works in Hiram’s case.
It was through the lens of this story that I found myself reading the tweets of one Kiki Djarin concerning a more contemporary underground railroad. This will be the railroad that is already being set up to get red state women desiring abortions to abortion centers in blue states—and to do so without incurring lawsuits, fines, or imprisonment for anyone involved.
A reactionary Supreme Court once gave us the Dred Scott case, in which slaveholders could retrieve slaves who had run away to free states, and it’s possible that comparable dramas will play out following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. Missouri is already discussing laws that would prevent its residents from traveling to another state to get an abortion, and other states could well follow. The settled law on such matters is very much up in the air at present, and with the current Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter, anything is possible.
Anyway, Kiki Djarin’s tweets note that there are some offering help who can be trusted and some who can’t. In other words, there are Georgie Parkses out there who, even if they don’t deliberately betray you, can end up facilitating those who want to catch and punish you. Djarin warns,
If you’re in a state that just banned abortion, DO NOT reach out to these people who are offering to let folks stay at their place if they need an abortion.
Their offer of help may work as an unintentional trap, Djarin says:
While some of these folks are well-intentioned, and I do believe they want to help. None of them I have seen are part of an established abortion fund or abortion network. You cannot trust them.
These people have just gone on social media and publicly announced they are a safe haven for abortion seekers. Anti-abortion people are now watching them. Law-enforcement will learn their names. If you are seen with them… or your phone pings at their house…
Djarin speculates that some of these “saviors” may be in it for the glory:
These individuals are putting their hero complex before your safety. If they wanted to do this work, they would have gone to established networks and done the training, done the work and learn how to do this safely. Do not trust them.
Everybody is ready to be a hero. Right up until they get a letter from an attorney that their ass is possibly going to jail for helping you get an abortion. These people will sing to the high heavens about everything.
And then, there may be some offering help who resemble Georgie Parks even more. Djarin warns about people who “are going to pretend to help you for the purpose of trying to catch you.
As an alternative, Djarin advises doing what Coates’s protagonist should have done:
Instead, go to an abortion fund or abortion network. These places know how to transport you safely and discreetly. They have years of experience and have prepared for this exact moment. these individuals on TikTok and Twitter have not.
With an abortion network, the people you interact with have been properly vetted and you can trust them.
Djarin provides one trusted resource: https://twitter.com/NatAbortionFed.
In his ruling, Alito compared overturning Roe to overturning Plessy vs. Fergusson, the case that validated Jim Crow racism with its declaration of “separate but equal.” By citing the case, Alito revealed himself as a cynical troll, and the comparison is ridiculous. That’s because Dobbs has more in common with Plessy itself than its reversal. Plessy returned African Americans to second class citizenship after they had fought to be free, and now Dobbs is doing the same with women.
Coates is savagely eloquent about what it feels like to be property, and women may increasingly find those passages relevant as they too are treated as subordinate to the embryo they carry within.
Last week I came across a tweet from Louisville English professor Amy Clukey about the relevance of literature in dark times, such as when a fundamental right is being ripped away from American women—or to put it more accurately, when state legislatures are given permission to rip that right away. The observation put me in mind of something Percy Shelley says in Defence of Poetry.
First to Clukey, who tweeted,
Some are mocking literary scholars right now, like our close reading and theorizing novels and poetry is so stupid because it didn’t stop Roe from being overturned. Aren’t we useless and out of touch?
No. Literature is one place that women get to see themselves as people.
I remember getting into a similar debate at a conference on Islamic repression in Iran where a participant wondered about the inclusion of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Why concern ourselves about how Iranian women were reading various English-language classics, the activists wondered, when there were political battles to be fought. To which I answered that literature helps us figure out what we’re fighting for. It gives body to ideals that otherwise can all too easily by hijacked and even corrupted by narrow self-interest. Literature, I suggested (thinking of Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth) that work in conjunction with political action, functioning as a kind of compass.
With the rise of an authoritarian GOP and an authoritarian Supreme Court—not to mention the revival of authoritarian systems in various parts of the world—we are in dire need of such a compass. What Percy Shelley says about poetry’s power in dark times is therefore worth revisiting.
If poets are, in his words, the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” it’s because they hold open an expansive vision of humanity, even when human society is closing down human possibility. Shelley describes the expansive vision we get from the great Greek tragedians of 5th century BCE Athens as follows:
The imagination [when engaging with Aeschylus or Sophocles] is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life…. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
So when Europe (as Shelley saw it) fell into darkness, poets such as Dante and the French romance writers kept that vision alive:
[T]he world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts.
I used a compass analogy but thinking of books as “generals to the bewildered armies of [our] thoughts” works as well.
To be sure, poetry should never be substituted for political action. We need to protest and write letters and run for office and vote, vote, vote. But literature will keep us grounded in what is essential. As Clukey notes, it will remind us—lest we forget—of what is involved with being a whole person.
Frontispiece to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831)
Monday
The eloquent and very smart blog Marginalian has a suggestive post on how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as a reflection on abortion rights. To be sure, it’s not an exact fit in that Dr. Frankenstein’s decision to create or not create his “Creature” is not the same as a woman choosing to continue a pregnancy or end it. Maria Popova’s point, however, is that responsible choice is essential, and she shows how Shelley explores the ethics involved.
Incidentally, at the end of today’s post I’ve provided links to many of my own posts on the abortion debate over the years. George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lucille Clifton, John Irving, of course Margaret Atwood, and even Virgil and Jane Austen provide useful perspectives on the issue.
Popova observes that Shelley’s titanic work touches on many issues that continue to confront us today, including “artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, racism and income inequality, the longing for love and the lust for power.” The novel’s “overarching concern,” she notes, is
the responsibility of life to itself and the question of what makes a body a person; the clear sense that any life is a responsibility — one not to be taken lightly, not to be sullied with vanity and superstition, not to be used as a plaything of power (my emphasis).
Rightwing attacks on abortion have, above all, become a power play. If the so-called “right to life” movement were truly concerned about life, it would do everything in its power to support life as it comes into the world and grows into adulthood. Instead, it loses interest as soon as the child is born, as shown by its readiness to cut (or fail to fund) safety net programs for young families. As Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri savagely puts it, “We must protect life from conception until the moment of birth!”
Why’s that? Petri explains,
Once you have been born, you are a nuisance and, possibly, a woman — two categories the Supreme Court generally frowns upon. The born are always asking for things. You want baby formula? Uncontaminated formula? You want people not to be able to bring guns to your school? You want to be mirandized? Can’t we go back to that lovely place when you were just an exciting concept who might grow up to be a Supreme Court justice?
I know some right-to-lifers say the right things, at least when they appear on National Public Television. They claim that they will work just as hard on behalf of children after they are born as they do before. This, however, is just to convince us they are humane. The actual political behavior of the GOP contradicts their ready assurances. As Peter Beinart, editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, puts it,
It’s like throwing someone from a window and then promising to build a net. Worse: It’s like doing so when ripping up nets has been your life’s work.
But back to the Marginalian essay. In Popova’s framing of Frankenstein, the scientist faces the issue all potential parents face. Shelley’s warning, Popova contends,
rises from the story sonorous and clear as larksong: Life is not to be made, unless it can be tended with love — or else it dooms all involved to a living death.
In the case of Frankenstein, because he turns his back on his creation, it becomes a murderer. As Popova puts it,
Deprived of that primary bond of love, which moors us to the seabed of being to weather life’s storms, the Creature…is savaged by such profound self-loathing that he ends up destroying numerous innocent passersby who cross his sad path. “I am malicious because I am miserable,” he roars in one the truest and most devastating lines in all of literature, in all the common record of our reckoning with human nature.
Many women who unexpectedly find themselves pregnant grapple with whether it is more responsible to continue with their pregnancy or to end it. Some decide one way, some another, and no universal governmental policy can begin to approach all the factors and all the struggle involved in their decision. That is why, for the past 50 years, we have let them choose. We advise them to confer with their doctors and the wise people around them but, in the end, it is they who are putting their bodies on the line and so they who must make the call.
While Popova treats Victor Frankenstein as the father, her argument works better if he is seen as those who force a woman to have a child against her will—and who then wash their hands of all responsibility for what happens to mother and child. Think of them as akin to absentee fathers. As Popova puts it, “Unable to love the life he has made, [Frankenstein] fails to rise to the fundamental responsibility that parenting demands.”
Instead, having created a life “out of vainglorious ambition and existential loneliness,” he “flees from his own creation in horror.” Here’s the moment from the novel:
[The Creature’s] jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.
Later, when the Creature disappears from the scene, Frankenstein believes he has escaped all consequences:
I threw the door forcibly open, as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side; but nothing appeared. I stepped fearfully in: the apartment was empty, and my bedroom was also freed from its hideous guest. I could hardly believe that so great a good fortune could have befallen me, but when I became assured that my enemy had indeed fled, I clapped my hands for joy and ran down to Clerval.
Of course, there are consequences. Now that Roe v Wade has been overturned, will the right-to-life people take responsibility for women who become gravely ill or even die because doctors, fearing the law, are reluctant to perform timely abortions? Will they deal fully with the emotional scars of women and children who give birth to their rapists’ children—or even to children they don’t want or are not ready for? Will they take responsibility for the poverty that might otherwise have been avoided had a woman or a couple chosen to abort? Or will they run out of the room, clap their hands for joy, and then pretend that the problem has taken care of itself.
Frankenstein, at least, takes responsibility. As he puts it,
In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being.
If the right-to-life movement were truly interested in life, it would do all in its power to support women and children in poverty, to ensure mandated and paid maternity leave, to guarantee universal health care so that the United States would not lead (by a long shot) all developed nations in infant mortality.
But “right to life” has never been about life because this country’s rightwing is not interested in life, as indicated by their opposition to gun safety and vaccinations and police accountability and their support for the death penalty. Life for these people, as it is initially for Victor Frankenstein, is to be used as a plaything for power.
Until their actions demonstrate otherwise, ignore their protestations to the contrary.
Previous Posts about Abortion Issues (in reverse chronological order)
Appeasement doesn’t stop bullies, and having overturned Roe v Wade will not stop the right from going after other rights. Margaret Atwood understands this.
Given Amy Comey Barrett’s rightwing positions on abortion, healthcare, and LGBTQ rights, she can be compared to Aunt Lydia in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.
A recent Atlantic article provides a compelling explanation for why rightwing evangelicals love Trump: feeling embattled, they have traded core principles for power. Like Doctor Faustus.
Camilla is a woman who fights back against Aeneas. It proves to be all in vain, which may be the case of those opposing rightwing justices on the Supreme Court.
With Hulu set to release Handmaid’s Tale tomorrow, I gather together all my past posts on Atwood’s dystopian classic. The novel isn’t only important for liberals but has lessons for rightwing women as well.
Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is topping bestseller lists at the moment. The reason is probably because of the GOP’s prospect of success in curbing reproductive freedom.
Donald Trump’s characterization of late-term abortions as “ripping” harken back to a verb used in Macbeth. Most people, however, would argue that both Trump and Macduff are describing caesarians.
The late Antonin Scalia claimed to be a strict textualist and would have found some excuse to support Texas’s law designed to close down abortion centers. There’s a Scalia-type character in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fortunately, by the end of the play he has been overruled.
As reproductive service centers are closed down by conservative state legislatures, attempted self abortions are on the rise. For a literary depiction of a desperate woman there is Hetty Sorrel from George Eliot’s Adam Bede.
Shock strategies by anti-abortionists may work on Congress but are less likely to work on women. As the body poems of Lucille Clifton demonstrate, women already know much more about their bodies than Congressmen do.
Our society’s impasse over abortion is like the impasse in Ibsen’s Doll’s House between Thorvald and Nora: he insists on moral absolutes, she resents being infantilized.
The sting videos by anti-abortion activists are designed to shock. But being shocked by the use of dead bodies for medical research is nothing new, as seen in the grave robbing scene in Tom Sawyer.
Paul Ryan may resemble Angel Claire in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but there’s a vicar in the novel who shows us a better way of dealing with a “fallen” woman.
I’m writing today’s post in an Omicron haze, which is why this Antony Hecht poem about Saul and David speaks to me at the moment. A “villainous spirit” has possessed Saul, and while my own illness is not like Saul’s—his is more psychological or spiritual than physiological—I feel that I too have been intimately acquainted with what the poet describes as “snub-nosed, foul of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent.” For three days, I have felt “no peace on pillow or on throne.”
In the poem, the psalm-singing David breaks through Saul’s illness. Hecht describing David’s lyre as “Pythagorean strings” may be an allusion to W.B. Yeats’s “Among School Children”:
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddlestick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard…
In any event, “father of music” Pythagoras not only discovered musical intervals but he believed that music could function as medicine.
If David’s “modal artistry” is healing, it’s because through it he assembles the “very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired/Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord.” Perhaps these “Sons of Morning” are those mentioned in the Book of Job (38:7). Where were you, God asks of Job, “while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”
Saul and David By Anthony Hecht
It was a villainous spirit, snub-nosed, foul Of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent, That squatted within him wheresoever he went …….And possessed the soul of Saul.
There was no peace on pillow or on throne. In dreams the toothless, dwarfed, and squinny-eyed Started a joyful rumor that he had died …….Unfriended and alone.
The doctors were confounded. In his distress, he Put aside arrogant ways and condescended To seek among the flocks where they were tended …….By the youngest son of Jesse,
A shepherd boy, but goodly to look upon, Unnoticed but God-favored, sturdy of limb As Michelangelo later imagined him, …….Comely even in his frown.
Shall a mere shepherd provide the cure of kings? Heaven itself delights in ironies such As this, in which a boy’s fingers would touch …….Pythagorean strings
And by a modal artistry assemble The very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord, …….And make Saul cease to tremble.
Yesterday, as I lay wrapped in my misery, unable even to read, I googled a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute (by the Hamburg State Opera)and just let the musicwash over me for two and a half hours. I did the same with Schubert’s Mass in G and Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. I didn’t entirely cease to tremble—I still felt awful after the pieces concluded —but they got me through some rough spots. I didn’t feel “unfriended and alone.”
While, in the January 6 Congressional hearings, we’ve learned about various government officials who heroically thwarted Donald Trump’s coup attempt, sometimes their heroism comes with an asterisk. After all, if some of these men had spoken up during Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial—just as if John Bolton had spoken up in the first—they might have stopped the toxic myth of a stolen election in its tracks. Instead, they waited for a year and a half, giving Trump’s lies a chance to metastasize.
Perhaps they deserve the reward of the heroic gunner in Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three.
Set in the year 1793, Hugo’s novel describes a cannon that has gotten loose and threatens to destroy the ship. (I believe this is the origin of the phrase “loose cannon.”) It’s a disastrous situation, not to mention a fairly good metaphor for the damage that Trump has been inflicting on our own ship of state:
This is perhaps the most dreadful thing that can take place at sea. Nothing more terrible can happen to a man-of-war under full sail.
A cannon that breaks loose from its fastenings is suddenly transformed into a supernatural beast. It is a monster developed from a machine. This mass runs along on its wheels as easily as a billiard ball; it rolls with the rolling, pitches with the pitching, comes and goes, stops, seems to meditate, begins anew, darts like an arrow from one end of the ship to the other, whirls around, turns aside, evades, rears, hits out, crushes, kills, exterminates. It is a ram battering a wall at its own pleasure. Moreover, the battering-ram is iron, the wall is wood. It is matter set free; one might say that this eternal slave is wreaking its vengeance; it would seem as though the evil in what we call inanimate objects had found vent and suddenly burst forth; it has the air of having lost its patience, and of taking a mysterious, dull revenge; nothing is so inexorable as the rage of the inanimate. The mad mass leaps like a panther; it has the weight of an elephant, the agility of a mouse, the obstinacy of the axe; it takes one by surprise, like the surge of the sea; it flashes like lightning; it is deaf as the tomb; it weighs ten thousand pounds, and it bounds like a child’s ball; it whirls as it advances, and the circles it describes are intersected by right angles. And what help is there? How can it be overcome? …You can reason with a mastiff, take a bull by surprise, fascinate a snake, frighten a tiger, mollify a lion; but there is no resource with the monster known as a loosened gun. You cannot kill it,—it is already dead; and yet it lives. It breathes a sinister life bestowed on it by the Infinite. The plank beneath sways it to and fro; it is moved by the ship; the sea lifts the ship, and the wind keeps the sea in motion. This destroyer is a toy. Its terrible vitality is fed by the ship, the waves, and the wind, each lending its aid. What is to be done with this complication? How fetter this monstrous mechanism of shipwreck? How foresee its comings and goings, its recoils, its halts, its shocks? Any one of those blows may stave in the side of the vessel. How can one guard against these terrible gyrations? One has to do with a projectile that reflects, that has ideas, and changes its direction at any moment. How can one arrest an object in its course, whose onslaught must be avoided? The dreadful cannon rushes about, advances, recedes, strikes to right and to left, flies here and there, baffles their attempts at capture, sweeps away obstacles, crushing men like flies.
Fortunately, the heroic efforts of two men save the day:
Suddenly in the midst of this inaccessible circus, where the escaped cannon was tossing from side to side, a man appeared, grasping an iron bar. It was the author of the catastrophe, the chief gunner, whose criminal negligence had caused the accident,—the captain of the gun. Having brought about the evil, his intention was to repair it. Holding a handspike in one hand, and in the other a tiller rope with the slip-noose in it, he had jumped through the hatchway to the deck below.
What follows is even more breathtaking than the committee hearings. A second man throws a bale of paper between the wheels, at which point the gunner darts forward with a spike:
The bale had the effect of a plug. A pebble may block a log; a branch sometimes changes the course of an avalanche. The carronade [cannon] stumbled, and the gunner, availing himself of the perilous opportunity, thrust his iron bar between the spokes of the back wheels. Pitching forward, the cannon stopped; and the man, using his bar for a lever, rocked it backward and forward. The heavy mass upset, with the resonant sound of a bell that crashes in its fall. The man, reeking with perspiration, threw himself upon it, and passed the slip-noose of the tiller-rope around the neck of the defeated monster.
The combat was ended. The man had conquered. The ant had overcome the mastodon; the pygmy had imprisoned the thunderbolt.
For his heroism, the cannoneer is applauded, just as we are applauding those who resisted Trump’s coup:
The old man looked at the gunner.
“Step forward,” he said.
The gunner advanced a step.
Turning to Count Boisberthelot, the old man removed the cross of Saint Louis from the captain’s breast, and fastened it on the jacket of the gunner. The sailors cheered, and the marines presented arms.
Then, since it was the gunner’s fault that the cannon got loose in the first place, there’s this:
[P]ointing to the bewildered gunner he added:
“Now let the man be shot!”
Stupor took the place of applause.
Then, amid a tomb-like silence, the old man, raising his voice, said:—
“The ship has been endangered by an act of carelessness, and may even yet be lost. It is all the same whether one be at sea or face to face with the enemy. A ship at sea is like an army in battle. The tempest, though unseen, is ever present; the sea is an ambush. Death is the fit penalty for every fault committed when facing the enemy. There is no fault that can be retrieved. Courage must be rewarded and negligence punished.”
These words fell one after the other slowly and gravely, with a certain implacable rhythm, like the strokes of the axe upon an oak-tree. Looking at the soldiers, the old man added,—
“Do your duty!”
People like Vice President Mike Pence and Attorney General William Barr, even while enabling our loose cannon-in-chief, at least stood tall in the closing moments. I’m not saying that they should be shot, but if they are to be rewarded for their courage, they must be punished for their negligence.
One other thing: Arizona State representative Rusty Bowers, who was threatened with violence by Trump supporters after refusing to send fake electors to the Capitol, said after his testimony that he would vote for Trump were he to once again be the Republican nominee. Barr, who told Trump that claims of election fraud were “bullshit,” has said the same. If they were the gunner in Hugo’s novel, it’s as though they would willingly release the cannon once again.
Having once chosen country over party, they sound prepared to reverse course in the future.
Weddings can be occasions for substantive conversations, and I had such a conversation with my eldest son this past weekend when we assembled for my nephew’s wedding. Our talk touched on some of his frustrations, including my failure to initiate phone calls—he usually calls me—and his desire for more substance when we do converse.
It was an important talk but, by the end, I felt like Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Hang on while I explain.
First, I must point to an obvious contrast. Okonkwo despises his father, so much so that everything he does is motivated by his desire to prove he is different. So whereas Unoko is “lazy and improvident,” Okonkwo is a super achiever:
He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had had no patience with his father.
Unoka, for that was his father’s name, had died ten years ago. In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow. If any money came his way, and it seldom did, he immediately bought gourds of palm-wine, called round his neighbors and made merry. He always said that whenever he saw a dead man’s mouth he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one’s lifetime. Unoka was, of course, a debtor, and he owed every neighbor some money, from a few cowries to quite substantial amounts.
It so happens that Unoka also dies a dishonorable death. The novel explains that he
had a bad chi or personal god, and evil fortune followed him to the grave, or rather to his death, for he had no grave. He died of the swelling which was an abomination to the earth goddess. When a man was afflicted with swelling in the stomach and the limbs he was not allowed to die in the house. He was carried to the Evil Forest and left there to die.
Throughout the novel, Okonkwo strives to be the anti-Unoka, and for a while it appears that he will succeed. Achebe notes that he is a self-made man, one who has—through dint of ambition and hard work—pulled himself up by his own bootstraps:
With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had. He neither inherited a barn nor a title, nor even a young wife. But in spite of these disadvantages, he had begun even in his father’s lifetime to lay the foundations of a prosperous future. It was slow and painful. But he threw himself into it like one possessed. And indeed he was possessed by the fear of his father’s contemptible life and shameful death.
Okonkwo’s fear of being weak like his father, however, gets him into trouble. At the end of the book, flexing his muscles, he kills one of the British colonists involved in “the pacification of the primitive tribes of the Lower Niger.” Then, realizing that the others will not join him in his rebellion, he hangs himself. Guess where suicides end up. As one of his fellow tribesmen explains to the British,
It is an abomination for a man to take his own life. It is an offense against the Earth, and a man who commits it will not be buried by his clansmen. His body is evil, and only strangers may touch it. That is why we ask your people to bring him down, because you are strangers.
We think we are not like our parents until we discover that we are.
Now, Darien and I do not a Unoko-Okonkwo relationship. Far from it, as I admire him tremendously, all the more so because he has taken a path far different from mine: I am a professor who found a position he loved and stayed there for 36 years whereas Darien is an entrepreneurial soul who will work for a company for only as long as he is learning new things. When the learning ends, he goes off in search of new opportunities. He only recently left a company where he was paid very well in order to start his own company. Yet for all his different interests, Darien admires my dedication to my students and my love of literature
As we talked, I found myself thinking back to frustrating telephone conversations with my own father, who was a professor of French literature. He too would not call me—I would always be the one to initiate the discourse—and he was always working conversations around to his own concerns. Furthermore, since I admired him tremendously, I could never figure out why our conversations never got as deep as I wanted them to get. Instead, I found myself listening to him discussing his course syllabi, just as Darien hears me talking about my book, my blog, and my tennis game. While I also express enthusiasm for his own endeavors (as my father did with mine), I’m not able to add much if anything to Darien’s understanding of them. He has ventured into waters that are unfamiliar to me.
In short, while I thought I had a different relationship with Darien than I had with my father, I find myself replicating the same patterns. Like Okonkwo.
Unlike Okonkwo, however, I have read Things Fall Apart and can learn from these frustrations. While I don’t know much about the world of business, I can (if I listen carefully) apply works of literature where appropriate. Darien is an avid reader—he read Moby Dick while commuting and, like his father, is a big Tom Jones fan—so if we discover useful parallels, we can both learn something. And have fun at the same time, with each bringing something to the table.
Anyway, I made a special point of calling him on Father’s Day. And we had (I think) a substantive conversation.
