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Wednesday
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” Donald Trump told a New Hampshire crowd in November, channeling Adolph Hitler in ways that stunned even those of us who thought that he had already scraped bottom. Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, which I’m currently listening to, has me thinking of Trump’s use of “vermin” since Pratchett villains use the word to justify exploiting, enslaving, and exterminating goblins, seen in the Discworld series as an historically oppressed race.
In the novel Commander Vimes, vacationing in the country, begins investigating the murder of a goblin woman, during which process he comes to see goblins in a new and sympathetic light. This particular encounter leads him to discover other crimes, including goblins being dragged from their caves and shipped off to parts unknown. When local police commissioner Feeney joins Vimes in the investigation, the Clerk to the Magistrates attempts to buy him off, telling him “not to bother about the goblin girl because goblins are officially vermin.”
In yesterday’s post, I noted Pratchett’s version of Pastor Martin Neimöller’s “first they came for…” Just as Trump starts with immigrants but soon is applying the word to all of his political opponents, Vimes tells the Clerk of the Magistrates that “once the goblins are vermin, then the poor are vermin, and the dwarfs are vermin, and the trolls are vermin.”
Snuff, while still containing Pratchett’s characteristic humor, is one of his angriest books as we see innocents killed and hearts broken. The author is so in love with the wondrousness of diversity that he feels violated to the core by those who deny others their full personhood. To cite again the observation of Granny Weatherwax, which appears in yesterday’s post on Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight, “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”
This story, however, has a happy ending as a goblin girl named Tears of the Mushroom plays such celestial music on her harp that hearts and minds are changed, leading to new laws guaranteeing goblin rights. As Lord Vetinari, Lord Patrician of the city-state of Ank-Morpork, reports to Vimes,
Ankh-Morpork, the kingdom of the Low King [the dwarfs] and also that of the Diamond King [the trolls], Uberwald, Lancre and all the independent cities of the plain are passing a law to the effect that goblins will henceforth be considered as sapient beings, equal to, if not the same as, trolls and dwarfs and humans and werewolves, et cetera et cetera, answerable to what we have agreed to call “the common law” and also protected by it. This means killing one would be a capital crime. You have won, commander, you have won.
And he attributes it all to the music:
One spends one’s life scheming, negotiating, giving and taking and greasing such wheels as squeak, and in general doing one’s best to stop this battered old world from exploding into pieces. And now, because of a piece of music, Vimes, a piece of music, some very powerful states have agreed to work together to heal the problems of another autonomous state and, almost as collateral, turn some animals into people at a stroke.
We all wish it could happen this way. Unfortunately, even as African American contralto Marian Anderson, defying the Daughters of the American Revolution, wowed thousands with her celestial version of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” at the Lincoln Memorial in 1955, Jim Crow still persisted for another ten years. Meanwhile, to this day, demagogues like Trump continue to characterize people of color as vermin.
Art helps but Vitineri’s scheming, negotiating, giving, taking and greasing are still necessary to “stop this battered old world from exploding into pieces.”