Monday
I share today literary allusions associated with ICE’s apparent withdrawal from Minnesota following the courageous resistance of its citizens. The first two are courtesy of an interview that MS Now’s Chris Hayes had with Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey.
The first one involved Frey saying, “We’ve got a saying among mayors, and that’s good mayors copy and great mayors steal. I have certainly taken great ideas from other mayors and utilized them in Minneapolis for the betterment of our community.”
The quote itself has been stolen from T.S. Eliot, who once wrote that ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” It so happens that Eliot himself stole the quote from literary scholar W.H. Davenport Adams, who in defense of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “thefts” wrote that “great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.” An instance of an Eliot theft in The Waste Land (one of dozens) is “But at my back in a cold blast I hear/ The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.” The allusion is to Andrew Marvell’s line (in “To His Coy Mistress”), “But always at my back I hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”
Eliot argued that he wasn’t plagiarizing because readers would recognize the source and regard his “theft” as a riff and an homage. In any event, Eliot’s primary purpose is writing a good poem, just as Frey’s is enacting good policy. I don’t know whether the recently elected Freye will become a great mayor, but I know that he learned important lessons from watching ICE operate in Los Angeles and Chicago. Let us hope that other American mayors steal from Minneapolis’s example if ICE invades their cities.
Frey also made a powerful allusion to Lord of the Rings when he said,
I’ve heard from some, whether elected officials of business executives that, well, hey, if we just keep our head down, we don’t want to attract the eye of Sauron or whatever. I don’t know if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan. But that’s the wrong way of looking at it. You know, don’t bow your head in despair. Pick your head up. Kick your shoulders back.
Here’s the passage Freye has in mind:
But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness. In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew, until it filled nearly all the Mirror. So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze. The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.
Then the Eye began to rove, searching this way and that; and Frodo knew with certainty and horror that among the many things that it sought he himself was one. But he also knew that it could not see him—not yet, not unless he willed it.
The hobbits initially think that they can live in blissful ignorance of what is transpiring in the rest of Middle Earth. That, however, is wish-fulfillment. The only way that Frodo and Sam defeat Sauron is by, well, picking their heads up, kicking their shoulders back, and walking directly into Mordor. It’s not unlike Minnesotans directly confronting ICE.
In the same Chris Hayes show, he shared an interview he had with one of these brave Minnesota citizens, who referenced a tradition I first learned about from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Here’s what Hayes was told:
We’re going to outlast them. We not going to get tired. They’re going to get tired and they’re going to leave. And the county is going to get tired of ice, of using people like this. There’s a saying around here, when does the ice go out? It’s when does the ice melt off the lakes? It’s called Ice Out Day. You know people will park old cars on a lake, or they used to, and make bets on when the car would sink. You know how to wait till ice out. And people around here, we’re going to outlast ice, and we’re going to be here when ice is out.
In Gaiman’s fantasy novel, a northern German sprite or kobold is economically protecting an idyllic town in exchange for a yearly sacrifice of one of its young people. He hides the sacrifices in old clunkers that sink to the bottom of the lake on Ice Out Day.
The town, which reminds one of Mayberry in the Andy Griffith Show, is what the right fantasizes about: it’s homogenous, white, and prosperous. All that is required is sacrificing its future.
When they figure out what is happening, the protagonist (Shadow) and the town’s police chief find the cost to be too high and defeat the kobold. The town will now experience all the aches and pains of modernity but also the multicultural excitement that has always been a deep part of what makes America America. Maybe Somali refugees take up residence there.
I have one more item tangentially related to the right wing’s antagonism toward Americans and immigrants of color. Last week I imagined the trees that walked onto Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show as the Ents invading a tyrant’s domain. A reader wrote in to mention another invading forest. Macbeth thinks that he is home free when the witches tell him,
Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.
Let every soldier hew him down a bough
And bear’t before him: thereby shall we shadow
The numbers of our host and make discovery
Err in report of us.
Which allows us to rephrase the witch’s prophecy:
Donald shall never vanquish’d be until
Bad Bunny to the Super Bowl
Shall come against him,
Declaring love a greater force than hate
And unity the wished for goal of all.
Between Minnesotans caring for their neighbors and Bad Bunny invoking foundational American ideals to millions, there’s a glimmer of hope on our horizon.
