Tag Archives: Justice

Responding to the Verdict: Trump & Fagin

By Robin Bates | Published: May 30, 2024

How did Trump feel as the verdict was delivered? Perhaps like Fagin in “Oliver Twist.”

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Navarro, Wells, and Acting with Impunity

By Robin Bates | Published: September 13, 2023

Recently convicted trump advisor Navarro thought he could defy the law with impunity–like Wells’s Invisible Man.

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Is Jack Smith a Javert?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 6, 2023

A Trump co-conspirator is complaining that special counsel Jack Smith is like Javert. I explore the comparison.

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Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Trump’s Charges

By Robin Bates | Published: March 22, 2023

Reading Sanctuary while awaiting a Trump indictment is a good counterweight to facile optimism. In Faulkner’s world, the courts can’t save us.

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Ukraine’s Thermopylae–and Our Own

By Robin Bates | Published: May 2, 2022

Cavafy’s poem “Thermopylae” comes to mind as we watch the Ukrainian defenders hold off the Russian hoards attacking Mariupol.

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Treachery at the Justice Department

By Robin Bates | Published: September 27, 2020

Anne Perry’s “Treachery at Lancaster Gate” seems to be about the 19th century but describes Barr’s corruption of the Department of Justice only too well.

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We Need Barr to Be a Homeric Hero

By Robin Bates | Published: June 2, 2019

Monday Asked last week about damaging his legacy on behalf of Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr invoked Homer. “Everyone dies,” he said, “and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?” In […]

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A Trans Activist and a Poetic Judge

By Robin Bates | Published: April 17, 2017

When forced to rule against transgender student Gavin Grimm because of a Trump administration directive, the sympathetic judge quoted a Naomi Shihab Nye poem. I examine the poem here and show why it is applicable to Gavin’s case.

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A Tolstoy Fable about Radical Empathy

By Robin Bates | Published: August 12, 2015

Tolstoy’s story “Esarhaddon” captures a common wish fulfillment of the powerless–that the oppressor see the world through the eyes of the oppressed.

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