Cavorting through Literature’s Wonderland

By Robin Bates | Published: May 29, 2026
Johann Hamza, A Gentleman Reading

Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 36th Installment

I was blessed beyond all measure to have had a career teaching at a public liberal arts college whose mission I believed in and where I had the flexibility to teach a wide variety of literature and writing courses. Whenever, as a faculty member, I was asked to fill out a “job satisfaction” survey, I could never reply with anything but the highest marks. I put a tremendous amount of time and effort into creating and teaching courses, so much so that other areas of my college service suffered. (For instance, I was a so-so department chair, except when it came to hiring good faculty, and an indifferent contributor to faculty meetings.) Serving students struck me as a sacred duty, and I was always grateful to competent administrators for allowing me to focus on my teaching.

As I am nearing the end of this memoir, I look back at the courses I taught in search of what they tell me about myself.

Every semester we taught three four-credit classes. Usually we taught either Composition or Intro to Lit, along with a 200-level survey class and a 300 or 400-level period/author/elective class. In my later years we added two-semester senior projects and first-year seminars.

Being a small college, we could teach our grad school specialty only once every two years—a Restoration and 18thCentury British Literature course in my case. Since a normal semester had us teaching a general education course and a survey class, this meant we had three extra courses to play with in a two-year-cycle. The senior projects, for their part, had their own variety, and over the years I supervised projects on Beowulf, the Arthurian tradition, Charles Dickens, the Faustus/Faust tradition, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Stoppard, Tom Robbins, Milan Kundera, and Gail Godwin (to name a few), along with a number of film projects. The senior projects were very hands-on as I required my students to meet with me weekly.

By the end of my 36 years, I had taught all three of the Literature in History surveys multiple times. These comprised British Literature to 1700 (the class I taught most often), British and American Literature in the 18th and 19th centuries, and English-language literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. The surveys were among my favorite courses. I turned the first two into “greatest hits” courses and, for the third survey, found a work that could represent each significant historical period (Wilfred Owen for World War I, Great Gatsby and The Waste Land for the Twenties, Grapes of Wrath for the Thirties, Catch 22 for World War II, The Things They Carried for Vietnam, Handmaid’s Tale for feminism, Things Fall Apart and God of Small Things for post-colonialism).

For Intro to Lit, which I also loved, I initially chose a fantasy literature focus (for which I included The Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Midsummer Night’s Dream) but eventually moved to a Nature focus after the college received a grant from the Pew Foundation.

My favorite course was my Restoration and 18th Century Literature course. I had chosen the period in graduate school on the grounds that any era that produced Tom Jones: History of a Foundling was worth studying, and I taught Henry Fielding’s novel every two years, challenging though that massive work proved to be. The author is a comic genius and fit nicely into the “Couples Comedy” theme that I ultimately settled on, as did Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In the course we explored the dark anarchistic comedy of the Restoration and the milder comedy of the later “Age of Sensibility.” In one assignment I had the class apply different theories of laughter to the Restoration works. In another, they were to compare and contrast one of the 18th century works (which also included Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Fanny Burney’s Evelina) to a modern rom-com.

Later, once the school initiated first-year seminars, I spent several years teaching “Jane Austen and the Dating Game.” Oh, and I once taught an upper-level author class on the works that Austen’s characters are reading. (Austen is critical of most of them.)

What does it say about me that I have always preferred comedy to tragedy, including Shakespeare’s comedies to his tragedies? I think of Northrup Frye, who saw in plays like  As You Like It, Midsummer, and The Winter’s Tale “the old ritual pattern of the victory of summer over winter” and “the death and revival of human beings.” Talking of the “New Comedy” of the Roman playwrights, he theorizes,

In all good New Comedy there is a social as well as an individual theme which must be sought in the general atmosphere of reconciliation that makes the final marriage possible. As the hero gets closer to the heroine and opposition is overcome, all the right-thinking people come over to his side. Thus a new social unit is formed on the stage, and the moment that this social unit crystallizes is the moment of the comic resolution. In the last scene, when the dramatist usually tries to get all his characters on the stage at once, the audience witnesses the birth of a renewed sense of social integration. In comedy as in life the regular expression of this is a festival, whether a marriage, a dance, or a feast. 

My commitment to community and my general optimism probably leads me to love comedies. Perhaps my love also stems in part from my own privilege—I can afford to believe that all will come out right—although I have found myself questioning this preference. Towards the end, I fell a little out of love with Tom Jones, coming to see Fielding’s satire, especially at the expense of women and the lower classes, as arising out of a sense of gentry entitlement. In my last year, knowing that I would never again teach the course, I used the three weeks that I usually reserved for Tom Jones to instead teach, for the first time, Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem. Still, one could do worse than embrace Fielding’s wit and his open-hearted love of life.

I’ve written about how my love of fantasy as a child never left me, providing me a way to simultaneously escape from while indirectly engaging with a threatening world. In my final years, I started teaching courses in both American and British fantasy. In the American Fantasy class, I identified two strains of fantasy running through American literature, dark and light, with the interrelation of the two defining us as a country. (On the one hand, there is Poe, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Anne Rice, on the other L. Frank Baum and Disney.) I concluded the course with Louise Erdrich’s magical realist novel Tracks, which coming from a Chippewa author from a different tradition resisted this neat bifurcation.

With British fantasy, meanwhile, I would begin with The Tempest, move on to Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes, and then plunge into the rich fantasy creations of the Victorians before concluding with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Angela Carter, and Terry Pratchett.

In the spring of 2018 I wanted to teach an entirely new course before I retired and so created a course devoted to Magical Realism. My “world literature” course began with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and then moved on to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  I chose this last because I became enthralled with what I characterized as the Japanese author’s “existential fantasies.” I also chose Murakami as the topic of my final first-year seminar.

For years I taught the department’s Literary Theory class, eventually focusing just on the reader. (Before I had divided the class into theories of text, context, author, and reader.) This became an immensely important course for me and served as the foundation for my book. As we worked our way from Plato and Aristotle to W.E.B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum, I had my students try out the different theories. We explored why audiences went ballistic over the subtitle of Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman and examined how Oscar Wilde’s opposing trial lawyer attacked Picture of Dorian Gray. For the class’s final essay, as I describe in my book, the students chose literary works that had “caused a commotion” and figured out why. I road-tested early versions of my book on the class. 

There were a few other courses sprinkled among these: a “Literature of Madness” course team-taught with a psychologist; multiple film classes (including composition courses with a film theme); a “Technology and the American Dream” class, team-taught with a sociologist; “Literature of Revolution” and “Sexual Politics of the Novel” classes (taught in my earlier, more political days); Black Literature; Minority Literature; Victorian Novels; and Feature Writing.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether my wide-ranging interests signaled a dilettante at work. Certainly, the path I took didn’t lend itself to my producing scholarship in my field of specialty, which is what people do at research universities. I was fortunate to be at a college that valued teaching over scholarship although St. Mary’s required some publications, and by the end I had 20 articles and a self-published book. But they were all stand-alone projects. My most significant publication, Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History, I completed after I retired.

I sometimes wonder how my academic life would have been different had I focused on my “reader response” interests from the very first. I now realize that studying the impact of works on readers has been the throughline of my college teaching, even though I didn’t always realize it. So do I look back with Robert Frost’s regretful sigh about the wandering path that I chose?

A little. I am certainly proud of my son Tobias Wilson-Bates, who is far more focused than I ever was and who is producing ground-breaking work on Victorian time machine literature.  My father was similarly focused in his work on the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. I, by contrast, look like someone who could never make up his mind.

And yet, I carry so many rich memories of reading and teaching these works that my regrets exist only in a minor key. Furthermore, as my blog has become my classroom since retiring, I can see how my wide range provides me with a tool for almost every occasion.

Given that I haven’t stopped filling my toolbox—once I finish listening to Dombey and Son, I will have completed my collection of Dickens’s novels (excluding the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood)—it appears that I will stick to my eclectic approach to reading. Maybe, after all, this was the pathway I was destined to follow. I was just fortunate enough to find a college that allowed me to do it.

Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026) 
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026) 
Lit in the Year following Justin’s Death (March 27, 2026)
My Eldest Son, Named after a Keats Sonnet (April 3, 2026)
Sterne’s Uncle Toby and My Own Toby (April 10, 2026)
After the 2nd Death, a Book Project (April 17, 2026)
Making Lit Meaningful for Students (April 24, 2026) 
Horizons Broadened (May 1, 2026) 
Obama’s Election and a Blog Launched (May 8, 2026)
Expanding Outward at 60 (May 15, 2026) 
On Losing My Father (May 22, 2026)

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The Odyssey, U.S. Fascism, and the Iran War

By Robin Bates | Published: May 27, 2026
Odysseus navigating between Scylla and Charybdis

Thursday

Thanks to Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film, The Odyssey is having a moment. Elon Musk once again displayed his racism by decrying the casting of Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o (she also holds U.S. citizenship) as Helen of Troy, and Jay Kuo, one of my favorite political bloggers, has invoked Sylla and Charybdis in discussing Trump’s Strait of Hormuz dilemma. And then (although this isn’t connected with the film), a friend alerted me to a news item that basketball legend Shaquille O’Neil earned an advanced degree in Sports Management with his thesis “Interdisciplinary Approach to Mentorship through the lens of the epic poem The Odyssey.” But this last one will have to await a future post.

Blogger Noah Berlatsky, another fine political blogger, lays out the fascistic foundations of Musk’s bigotry and then explores its dangers. To “racist pseudo-intellectuals like Musk”—and, one could add, to the Nazis–the Greeks were “not just white, but transcendental icons of white culture.” For them, therefore, Nolan’s casting decision is “an insult to whiteness, and a sign of Hollywood’s assault on Western purity and honor.”

In his article, Berlatsky parallels this aesthetic with Hitler’s attack on Jewish art and notes that Musk has the same genocidal aims as the Fuhrer. For Hitler, he notes, 

genocide was not just about eliminating and murdering human beings. It also involved a thoroughgoing effort to remove, destroy, and discredit art which he believed was “degenerate”—especially art by Jewish, Communist, and avant garde artists (groups which Hitler indiscriminately and compulsively conflated.) Under the Nazis, the work of Jewish composers like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were banned. Jewish musicians were barred from performing. Jewish artwork (or art that Hitler claimed was Jewish-influenced) was ridiculed in an infamous “degenerate art” exhibition. Jewish directors and actors were expelled from German cinema.

Musk, who has expressed an admiration for Hitler, obsesses over the fact that non-whites outnumber whites. Unfortunately, also like Hitler, he at one point had the power to carry out a genocidal project. His wholesale attack on USAID and other global aid programs last year led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans, mostly children, of malnutrition and preventable disease. Berlatsky points out that the end of aid has also contributed to a dangerous increase in African violence. “If aid is not restored,” he writes,”researchers believe preventable deaths because of Musk’s genocide will reach 14 million by 2030.”

In The Secret War against Hate, Steven J. Ross—interviewed by Rachel Maddow Monday night—notes that there has been an active fascist strain in nn life for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. One must see Musk’s attack on Nolan and Lupita Nyong’o in light of that strain. Unlike political correctness and DEI programs on the left—which are often attempts to address racial inequalities—violent erasure is the end goal of America’s fascists. Attacking multiracial art is integral to their project. Bertlasky observes,

For Hitler, a painting that didn’t appeal to him was not just a painting that didn’t appeal to him. It was a deliberate, violent attack on his nation and all that he held dear. Decadent art, Jewish art, was framed as an essentially genocidal assault on Germany, its culture, and its people. The destruction of such art was part of the effort to erase Jews from Germany, but it was also a justification of that effort. The ridicule of Jewish cultural production, and the framing of Jewish visibility in culture as an existential threat, served to dehumanize actual Jewish people and to legitimize their mass murder.

Over the past 18 months, we in America have becoming increasingly aware as to how far authoritarians are willing to go once they seize the reins of power. Whether it’s unleashing ICE agents on American cities, banning books, purging school history curricula, or attacking a Black actress, it is all in service of white Christian fascism.

Jay Kuo takes his use of Odyssey in a different direction. I start first with the passage he alludes to in his discussion of the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike Trump with his war of choice, Odysseus is forced to navigate a dangerous strait if he is to get home. Both men, however, learn that a price must be paid once they are enmeshed. The island goddess Circe sets forth the problem, starting with the six-headed serpentine Scylla: 

That is the den of Scylla, where she yaps
abominably, a newborn whelp’s cry,
though she is huge and monstrous. God or man,
no one could look on her in joy. Her legs—
and there are twelve—are like great tentacles,
unjointed, and upon her serpent necks
are borne six heads like nightmares of ferocity,
with triple serried rows of fangs and deep
gullets of black death. Half her length, she sways
her heads in air, outside her horrid cleft,
hunting the sea around that promontory
for dolphins, dogfish, or what bigger game
thundering Amphitrite feeds in thousands.
And no ship’s company can claim
to have passed her without loss and grief; she takes,
from every ship, one man for every gullet. (trans. Robert Fitzgerald) 

To avoid her, however, a ship would have to deal with a whirling maelstrom:

On the opposite point seems more a tongue of land
you’d touch with a good bowshot, at the narrows.
A great wild fig, a shaggy mass of leaves,
grows on it, and Charybdis lurks below
to swallow down the dark sea tide. Three times
from dawn to dusk she spews it up
and sucks it down again three times, a whirling
maelstrom; if you come upon her then
the god who makes earth tremble could not save you.

Circe advises Odysseus to choose Scylla:

[H]ug the cliff of Scylla, take your ship
through on a racing stroke. Better to mourn
six men than lose them all, and the ship, too. ..

This is what Odysseus does, even though, in a futile gesture, he tries hacking at Scylla as she grabs his men. The scene is heartrending:

Then Scylla made her strike,
whisking six of my best men from the ship.
I happened to glance aft at ship and oarsmen
and caught sight of their arms and legs, dangling
high overhead. Voices came down to me
in anguish, calling my name for the last time.
A man surf-casting on a point of rock
for bass or mackerel, whipping his long rod
to drop the sinker and the bait far out,
will hook a fish and rip it from the surface
to dangle wriggling through the air; so these
were borne aloft in spasms toward the cliff.
She ate them as they shrieked there, in her den,
in the dire grapple, reaching still for me—
and deathly pity ran me through
at that sight—far the worst I ever suffered
questing the passes of the strange sea.

Now for Kuo’s application. First, there’s the Scylla option, which would involve America cutting its losses and rowing like hell to get out of the entanglement. 

For Trump, the Scylla of Hormuz is the giant loser of a “peace deal.” Steering toward it means accepting a brutal political accounting: Trump started a war that sent oil prices surging 40 percent above pre-war levels, drove inflation to its highest point in three years, and cost innocent lives, including 13 Americans and over 120 Iranian school children. Under the current proposal, Iran would be in a stronger position than it was in February. Even more humiliating for Trump, Iran’s uranium stockpile—which he repeatedly cited to justify the global economic pain inflicted by the war—would remain intact. And to top things off, Iran would retain de facto control of the Strait.

As bad as this is, the Charybdis option is even worse since it would involve

a full resumption of the war. It would require more U.S. military strikes and more economic pressure, all in the hopes of finishing what Operation Epic Fury started. But a wider conflagration risks pulling in an already volatile entire region, setting neighboring nations’ oil refineries ablaze, sending oil above $200 a barrel, and inflicting economic damage on an unprecedented scale. Once caught in its vortex, no one would return from that whirlpool, and Trump seems finally to recognize this.

Those Republicans worried about a shellacking in the November elections are opting for Scylla:

For all their bluster, Trump’s officers on deck remain in a trap they cannot escape. The party fears becoming the sacrificial vessel, politically devoured by Scylla from a terrible and humiliating deal. But they understand that there is no better deal to be had. 

There are Congressional war hawks, however—including Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham—who are arguing against the Scylla option. To do so, however, they are refusing to openly acknowledge that the whirlpool of all-out war is the only alternative.

Say that Trump, like Odysseus gets through the strait—which is to say, that he walks away and pretends that the Iran debacle never happened. If one goes by the story, although he himself will survive, his party won’t. Kuo draws the continuing parallels:

Six of his party had been devoured by Scylla, and the rest had grown restless. They were warned by the gods not to slaughter the sacred cattle of the sun god, but they proceeded anyway, with hunger, exhaustion and the collapse of discipline doing what Scylla and Charybdis could not.

As punishment, Zeus destroyed the ship. Every last member of his party perished, and Odysseus had to survive on his own, the wreckage of his vessel now his life raft.

Tidy though the comparison is, Kuo needs a second Greek myth to round out his story. This one, like so many Greek stories, involves hubris, and I can’t think of a more perfect story to sum up Trump, not only with regard to Iran but to the United States as well:

Yet to compare Trump to Odysseus is to flatter him beyond recognition. The figure from Greek mythology Trump more closely resembles is Phaethon, the vain mortal son of the sun god Helios, who demanded to drive his father’s celestial chariot across the sky to silence those who doubted his divine bloodline. His father warned him, begged him, enumerating every danger, every reason Phaethon was unqualified for the task.

Phaethon grabbed the reins anyway, certain that his stature accorded him what greater beings had mastered through long experience. He lost control almost immediately. The chariot lurched and careened. The earth scorched, and rivers boiled. Whole civilizations burned below while he clung to the reins. He was unable to halt the conflagration he’d lit, and unable to admit he never should have begun it.

Zeus finally struck him down with a thunderbolt, not to punish him, but to stop the terrible damage he was inflicting on everyone else.

Kuo concludes with a punchy moral:

Were this Ancient Greece, we’d say the gods are being sorely tested by Trump’s hubris and recklessness. And their patience is wearing thin.

With Trump’s all-out assault on efforts to address climate change, the story works literally as well as metaphorically. God help us all.

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The Loneliness of the Tyrant

By Robin Bates | Published: May 26, 2026
William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III

Wednesday

I bring your attention to an essay that expresses something I have long thought. In writing about Donald Trump’s response to Stephen Colbert’s final appearance on CBS’s Late Show, Editorial Board’s John Stoehr reflects that Trump, for all his power, is “the loneliest, most miserable man in America.” As such, he hated Colbert’s joy.

In making his case, Stoehr cites a Robert Hayden poem and also references Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Trump pressured CBS to fire Colbert and then, following the final show, posted a putdown that doubled as a self-description. Colbert, Trump wrote,

is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!

Colbert, of course, has always refused to be dragged down to Trump’s level, and I learned from Stoehr that he once quoted the first stanza of the following Hayden poem: 

We must not be frightened nor cajoled 
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. 
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction 
police and threaten us.

Reclaim now, now renew the vision of 
a human world where godliness 
is possible and man 
is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike

but man 

permitted to be man.

The major monsters of abstraction currently threatening us are race-based, but Hayden generalizes beyond African Americans to include Vietnamese, whites, Italians and Jews. His poetry was criticized by Black activists in the late 1960s, who engaged in their own abstracting (some even called him an Uncle Tom), but today we are facing white fascism’s far more lethal abstractions. To counter them, Hayden tells us, we must hold on to a vision of humanity “where godliness is possible.”

Stephen Greenblatt’s 2018 book about Shakespeare’s tyrants helps Stoehr understand Trump’s loneliness. The eminent Shakespearean, writing with Trump in mind, has this to say about Richard III:

What excites [the tyrant] is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince with pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.

His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone hates him. At first that knowledge energizes him, making him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies. But it soon begins to eat away at him and exhaust him.

Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage. It would have been better had Richard never been born.

Alone and panicking as his enemies close in, Richard calls out, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” By this point in the play, however, he has alienated practically everyone and there is no one to come to his aid. 

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How Roberts Might Rewrite the Classics

By Robin Bates | Published: May 25, 2026
Chief Justice John Roberts

Tuesday

Writing for the satiric website McSweeney’s, Mark Paglia smartly and wittily takes down Chief Justice Don Roberts, the man largely responsible for shielding Donald Trump from responsibility, for attempting to return America to the Jim Crow and back-alley abortion era, and for unleashing big money and irresponsible corporations on America. Entitled “Excerpts from Chief Justice John Roberts’ High School English Essays,” the article imagines how a teenage Roberts would respond to literary classics. Here are some of my favorites:

— Rather than tilting at a windmill, the proper procedure would be for Don Quixote to file suit to abolish all windmills, ideally in the Fifth Circuit.

— Huck shows great disrespect for the Court’s precedent in Dred Scott when aiding the fugitive Jim, presumably due to liberal indoctrination by the Widow Douglas.

— Simply wearing a small red letter A is no great burden, and it would infringe upon the free speech of the rest of the town were Hester Prynne not to wear it.

–The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass relates only his own views on slavery; we cannot properly assess the merits of his book without giving equal time to his slave owner.

— It is the prerogative of the government of Oceania to determine each day whether Eurasia or East Asia is the enemy, and congressional approval would unjustly constrain Big Brother.

— Iago says that he has no reason for hating Othello, and it would be wrong of us to impute any racist anti-Moor motivation on his part.

— Despite The Jungle’s focus on the possibility of rats or the occasional factory worker winding up in a hot dog, the true horror would be higher meat prices due to an overprotective nanny state.

— Packing Bertha Mason into the attic of Thornfield Hall while allowing Jane Eyre to use the rest of the house is permissible because it is based on restricting her proto-feminist hysteria, not her Creole racial identity.

— By being such a miser, Scrooge saves enough money to cure Tiny Tim of the diseases caused by Scrooge not paying his father enough in wages, demonstrating that privatized health care and non-union labor are self-correcting.

The piece concludes with Roberts presenting a doctor’s note that excuses him from reading The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. The reason: “It could cause acute psychological distress and fainting spells.”

In this spirit, I could imagine this teenage Roberts

–arguing for the entail that makes Mr. Collins heir to the Bennet estate;

–defending the workhouse policies that starve and beat Oliver Twist and then make him a child apprentice to an undertaker;

–endorsing the 18th century pamphleteer’s modest proposal for preventing the children of the poor people of Ireland from being a burthen to their parents or country and for making them beneficial to the public;

–contending that it is no big deal for the Baron to cut off a lock of Belinda’s hair (“rape?!! puleez!”);

–arguing that Anna Karenina and Tess of the d’Urbervilles deserve what they get; and

—declaring that no one has the right to subpoena Humbert Humbert’s diary.

To get serious about the Chief Justice, Roberts infuriates me the way that Blifil in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones does—which is to say, he is sanctimoniously self-righteous and oh-so-innocent, even as he presides over the worst Supreme Court since the 1857 Roger Taney court. Here he is complaining about the criticism: 

I think [people] view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. Certainly, those aspects are open to debate and people should talk about them, but we’re not simply part of the political process and there’s a reason for that and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate.

Blifil claims to look with more sorrow than anger at the accusations directed against him. When Squire Allworthy’s landlady defends Tom, Blifil responds “with one of those grinning sneers with which the devil marks his best beloved.” “As for my character,” he says, “I perceive, by some hints she hath thrown out, he [Tom] hath been very free with it, but I forgive him.”

Recent evidence has come to light that, for all his lofty talk, Roberts has been striving to dismantle the Voting Rights Act ever since he clerked for rightwing justice William Rehnquist and served in Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice. As an article in Slate puts it, “The justice bent the law to meet his will,” and with SCOTUS’s Louisiana v. Callais decision—which will allow legislatures to oust African American legislators from office throughout the south, he has finally succeeded.

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Bivouac of the Dead

By Robin Bates | Published: May 24, 2026
The McClellan Arch at Arlington, on which are inscribed lines from Theodore O’Hara’s “Bivouac of the Dead”

Monday – Memorial Day

Donald Trump wants to build a triumphal arch near Arlington Cemetery, which along with dwarfing the Lincoln Memorial would also dishonor the military dead in a manner consistent with all the other ways he has done so. As Benjamin Parker of The Bulwark observes, there’s already an arch at Arlington, the much more “human scale” McClellan Gate. Better yet, on it are eloquent lines taken from Theodore O’Hara’s “Bivouac of the Dead.”

On the east side of the arch can be found the closing quatrain of the opening stanza: “On Fame’s Eternal Camping Ground Their Silent Tents Are Spread and Glory Guards With Solemn Round the Bivouac of the Dead.” On the west, meanwhile, is a quatrain from the penultimate stanza: “Rest on Embalmed and Sainted Dead, Dear as the Blood Ye Gave; No Impious Footsteps Here Shall Tread on the Herbage of Your Grave.”

This is not a day to dwell on how Trump’s impious footsteps have violated the cemetery with tasteless photo ops. What strikes one is just how beautifully the cemetery honors those who lie buried there. The simple gravestones bring to mind Donne’s “The Canonization,” in which he believes a poem, which he compares to “a well-wrought urn,” does more honor to his love than a vast monument would. He is talking of burial because he imagines that he and his mistress have died for love:

We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
             As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs…

O’Hara wrote his poem in 1847 to honor Kentucky volunteers who died in the imperialistic war that took Texas and California from Mexico. For the poet to complain about “the vengeful blood of Spain,” therefore, sticks in the craw. The best parts of “Bivouac for the Dead,” however, focus on how the dead are “free from anguish now.” I’m pretty sure that the poem was inspired in part by Sir Walter Scott’s “Soldier Rest”: 

Soldier, rest! thy warfare o’er,
Dream of fighting fields no more:
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Morn of toil, nor night of waking.

No rude sound shall reach thine ear,
Armor’s clang, or war-steed champing,
Trump nor pibroch summon here
Mustering clan, or squadron tramping.

Here’s “Bivouac for the Dead” in its entirety:

Bivouac of the Dead
By Theodore O’Hara

The muffled drum’s sad roll has beat
The soldier’s last tattoo;
No more on life’s parade shall meet
That brave and fallen few.
On Fame’s eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead.

No rumor of the foe’s advance
Now swells upon the wind;
Nor troubled thought at midnight haunts
Of loved ones left behind;
No vision of the morrow’s strife
The warrior’s dream alarms;
No braying horn nor screaming fife
At dawn shall call to arms.

Their shriveled swords are red with rust,
Their plumed heads are bowed,
Their haughty banner, trailed in dust,
Is now their martial shroud.
And plenteous funeral tears have washed
The red stains from each brow,
And the proud forms, by battle gashed
Are free from anguish now.

The neighing troop, the flashing blade,
The bugle’s stirring blast,
The charge, the dreadful cannonade,
The din and shout, are past;
Nor war’s wild note nor glory’s peal
Shall thrill with fierce delight
Those breasts that nevermore may feel
The rapture of the fight.

Like the fierce northern hurricane
That sweeps the great plateau,
Flushed with the triumph yet to gain,
Came down the serried foe,
Who heard the thunder of the fray
Break o’er the field beneath,
Knew well the watchword of that day
Was “Victory or death!”

Long had the doubtful conflict raged
O’er all that stricken plain,
For never fiercer fight had waged
The vengeful blood of Spain;
And still the storm of battle blew,
Still swelled the gory tide;
Not long, our stout old chieftain knew,
Such odds his strength could bide.

Twas in that hour his stern command
Called to a martyr’s grave
The flower of his beloved land,
The nation’s flag to save.
By rivers of their father’s gore
His first-born laurels grew,
And well he deemed the sons would pour
Their lives for glory too.

For many a mother’s breath has swept
O’er Angostura’s plain —
And long the pitying sky has wept
Above its moldered slain.
The raven’s scream, or eagle’s flight,
Or shepherd’s pensive lay,
Alone awakes each sullen height
That frowned o’er that dread fray.

Sons of the Dark and Bloody Ground
Ye must not slumber there,
Where stranger steps and tongues resound
Along the heedless air.
Your own proud land’s heroic soil
Shall be your fitter grave;
She claims from war his richest spoil —
The ashes of her brave.

Thus ‘neath their parent turf they rest,
Far from the gory field,
Borne to a Spartan mother’s breast
On many a bloody shield;
The sunshine of their native sky
Smiles sadly on them here,
And kindred eyes and hearts watch by
The heroes sepulcher.

Rest on embalmed and sainted dead!
Dear as the blood ye gave;
No impious footstep shall here tread
The herbage of your grave;
Nor shall your glory be forgot
While fame her records keeps,
Or Honor points the hallowed spot
Where Valor proudly sleeps.

Yon marble minstrel’s voiceless stone
In deathless song shall tell,
When many a vanquished ago has flown,
The story how ye fell;
Nor wreck, nor change, nor winter’s blight,
Nor Time’s remorseless doom,
Shall dim one ray of glory’s light
That gilds your deathless tomb

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Pentecost in Prince Caspian

By Robin Bates | Published: May 23, 2026

Sunday – Day of Pentecost

John Gatta’s Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm has just been released, and while I will examine it in a future post, it has me thinking about images of Pentecost as they show up in the Narnia books. Two years ago I wrote about a Pentecostal moment in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and now, thanks to a blog essay by an Anglican curate, I realize there is also one in Prince Caspian.

In Wardrobe, the moment occurs when Aslan breathes on the stone statues in the White Queen’s Palace and they become living, vibrant selves. As the old spiritual puts it, “Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around.” Here’s the passage I particularly like:

I expect you’ve seen someone put a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny streak of flame creeping along the edge of the newspaper. It was like that now. For a second after Aslan had breathed upon him the stone lion looked just the same. Then a tiny streak of gold began to run along his white marble back—then it spread—then the color seemed to lick all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper—then, while his hindquarters were still obviously stone the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stony folds rippled into living hair. Then he opened a great red mouth, warm and living, and gave a prodigious yawn. And now his hind legs had come to life. He lifted one of them and scratched himself. 

In my post, I drew a parallel between the cacophony of languages that breaks out as the Pentecostal spirit descends—so much so that some skeptical witnesses conclude that the worshippers are drunk—and the response of the Witch’s former victims:

And instead of the deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs and laughter.

The Rev’d Dr. Hannah J. Swithinbank identifies a similar awakening in Caspian. In this instance, the “rush of a violent wind” described by Luke is a lion’s roar:

The light was changing… Aslan, who seemed larger than before, lifted his head, shook his mane, and roared. The sound, deep and throbbing at first like an organ beginning on a low note, rose and became louder, and then far louder again, till the earth and air were shaking with it. It rose up from that hill and floated across all Narnia. Down below that in the Great River, now at its coldest hour, the heads and shoulders of the nymphs, and the great weedy-bearded head of the river-god, rose from the water. Beyond it, in every field and wood, the alert ears of rabbits rose from their holes, the sleepy heads of birds came out from under wings, owls hooted, vixens barked, hedgehogs grunted, the trees stirred. 

Ecstatic dancing follows as all creation awakens: 

What Lucy and Susan saw was a dark something coming to them from almost every direction across the hills. It looked first like a black mist creeping on the ground, then like the stormy waves of a black sea rising higher and higher as it came on, and then, at last, like what it was, woods on the move. All the trees of the world appeared to be rushing toward Aslan. But as they drew nearer, they looked less like trees, and when the whole crowd, bowing and curtseying and waving thin long arms to Aslan, were all around Lucy, she saw that it was a crowd of human shapes. Pale birch-girls were tossing their heads, willow-women pushed back their hair from their brooding faces to gaze on Aslan, the queenly beeches stood still and adored him, shaggy oak-men, lean and melancholy elms, shock-headed hollies (dark themselves, but their wives all bright with berries) and gay rowans, all bowed and rose again, shouting “Aslan, Aslan!” in their various husky or creaking or wave-like voices.

The crowd and the dance round Aslan (for it had become a dance once more) grew so thick and rapid that Lucy was confused. She never saw where certain other people came from who were soon capering about the trees.

These other figures include the Greek fertility deities Silenus and Dionysus (a.k.a. Pan, Bromios, Bassareus), along with the Bacchantes and possibly also an Egyptian ram god. Given Luke’s mention of “new wine” in his Gospel account, it’s striking that Lucy and the others soon find grape vines and grape clusters entwined in their hair. Lewis appears to borrow some of his imagery from Euripides’s The Bacchae.

In The Magician’s Book, journalist Laura Miller talks about how, as a child, she became disillusioned with Narnia after concluding that it is Christian propaganda. The pagan figures, however, suggest that Lewis doesn’t find Christian symbolism sufficient for capturing the ecstasy of spiritual awakening. Perhaps it’s because Luke’s account of Pentecost doesn’t include images from nature (other than the wind and the tongues of fire that hover over the worshippers). Lewis wants to include all of creation in his vision, not just people.

As a result, his vision is like that which Gatta puts forth in his books The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation, Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology, and now Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis. As Gatta writes in Green Gospel,

Faith must encompass everything—all things seen and unseen, human and nonhuman beings of every stripe, throughout the whole of creation. For us living today, a Jesus capable of rescuing just ourselves, or our kind alone, from sin and death can no longer be recognized as God’s savior of the world. Only a cosmic Christ, as Saint Paul first envisioned, could possibly fulfill that role.

I’ve shared multiple times the contention of Dr. Rob MacSwain, editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, that Anglicans conduct their theology through literature rather than systematic philosophy, and these scenes from Prince Caspian make his point. One can either say that that the Cosmic Christ came to earth to redeem not only humans but all of creation…or one can tell a story featuring a lion, dancing trees, celebrating animals, rivers liberated from bridges, and students freed from indoctrinating history classes.

“What is the use of a book,” I hear Lewis Carroll’s Alice asking, “without pictures or conversations?”

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On Losing My Father

By Robin Bates | Published: May 22, 2026
Photo taken at Highlander Folk School in Tracy City TN in 1957. Founder Myles Horton, Martin Luther King, and I believe Rosa Parks are in the front row. My father is the man with glasses about four rows back in the center of the photo. The photo was on billboards throughout the south. For the record, Highlander was not communist but an integrated space—the only one in the south–where Civil Rights activists could gather to share strategies.

Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 35th Installment

In 2012-13 my first two grandchildren were born, assuring my father—who died the following year—that life continues on. Scott Bates, the man most responsible for my being who I am, died at 90, and the memorial service we had for him (as he had requested) was filled with poetry and red wine. Many of us read poems that he had either written or that he had loved. Before he passed, I spent two summers, two Christmases, and a sabbatical fall semester with him. He was my blog’s #1 fan, and I, knowing he would read it daily, loved occasionally surprising him with his own poems. Those times together were special as he became increasingly incapacitated.

I have one memory from this time that sums him up nicely. One night he fell out of bed (he was now sleeping downstairs), and unable to get up, he pushed his medical alert button. Although the EMT unit was supposed to call us before showing up, for some reason they didn’t—or perhaps my mother slept through the telephone call—but at any rate the ambulance was suddenly at our door. The two men helped my father back into bed (which I could have done) and then asked him about the various nail and hardware artworks that he had painted, which were strewn around the house. Although it was 2 am, my father saw this as an opportunity to share one of his many passions and, for the next 30 minutes, proceeded to share his vision. Although my mother and I were ready to collapse, the men were fascinated.

The memory brings back another one from when he was being cross-examined by the defense counsel in our 1962 desegregation trial. Along with other white and Black families, we had sued the Franklin Board of Education for failing to comply with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and were pleading our case before a judge in a courtroom reminiscent of the one that appears in the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. “Are you associated with that Communist organization Highlander Folk School?” the attorney asked at one point, earning a sustained objection from our attorney and the judge. My father, however, wanted to answer the question: not knowing or caring how courts worked, he figured that this was the perfect opportunity to share his knowledge of Highlander. Give him the chance to deliver a lecture and he would grab it.

It was unsettling, of course, to see him lose first his mobility and then, for a couple of months, his mind. When he returned from a brief bout of senility, brought on by a bladder infection, he vividly remembered his unit being strafed by a German plane on Omaha Beach shortly after they landed there in July of 1944. My graduate professor Jerome Beaty once said that, to understand an author’s vision, look at the historical moment when he or she was 21, and my father arrived in France just after his 22nd birthday. In the remaining months of his life, he couldn’t couldn’t stop talking about his World War II experiences, and I took the time to record some of them—from the University of Chicago (where he was trained as a translator) to England to Normandy to Paris to Germany. He arrived in Munich three days after Dachau was liberated, and one of his jobs was taking Germans through required tours of the camp so that they couldn’t dismiss the Holocaust as U.S. propaganda.

When parents enter the final years, it is unsettling because roles are reversed as children begin caring for them. The children also lose their perceived buffer: suddenly there is no one left between us and the abyss. I think of the Flannery O’Connor short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” in which Julian, an adult who lives with his mother and who is perpetually irritated by her, comes face to face with that abyss when she unexpectedly dies. O’Connor concludes her story with Julian panicking:

“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.

I cite the passage for contrast purposes because it is nothing like what I experienced with my father’s death. Since I had established my own independent identity by this time, and since I could fully appreciate the rich life that he himself had led, it was clear to me that his was the natural end of a beautiful arc. Furthermore, I was consoled by the fact that much of what was best about him—his kindness, his intellectual curiosity, his love of books, his wonderful wit and playfulness, his commitment to the environment, his passion for justice, his concern for the marginalized, his integrity and generosity—I can see in myself, in my sons, and in my grandchildren. We each embody these traits in our own particular ways, of course, but there’s enough of a throughline for me to trace them all back to Scott Bates. In conjunction with my mother, this member of the “greatest generation” (a description my father hated) established a foundation for those who came after. 

For that, I am deeply, deeply grateful. 

Note: The Scott Bates poem I read at his memorial service captures some of the themes I have been mentioning.  In “The Boy with the Golden Crown,” my father draws imagery from Greek mythology, Judaism, Christianity, and various sun and earth religions. Death, the poem assures us, does not get the last word: the “boy with the golden crown” always rises again at dawn, just as the spirit moves on the waters, the phoenix rises from the ashes, and Jesus emerges from the tomb. I saw my father, who was always boyish in his enthusiasms, as this boy. As I told those assembled, although physically he was longer with us, his spirit rises again and again–in his poetry, in the lives of those he touched, and in the lineages he set in motion.

The Boy with the Golden Crown
By Scott Bates

In the beginning I was the sun
the chaos and the father
my spirit moved upon the deep
I made the earth my mother

She married me and gave me birth
I died my name was Jesus
In three days I was born again
I was as rich as Croesus

I flew my father’s ashes home
I fell in love with Venus
I loved my neighbor as myself
my mother and my penis

Each evening I go down in flames
I rise again at dawn
I am the bird the flesh the word
the boy with the golden crown 

Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026) 
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026) 
Lit in the Year following Justin’s Death (March 27, 2026)
My Eldest Son, Named after a Keats Sonnet (April 3, 2026)
Sterne’s Uncle Toby and My Own Toby (April 10, 2026)
After the 2nd Death, a Book Project (April 17, 2026)
Making Lit Meaningful for Students (April 24, 2026) 
Horizons Broadened (May 1, 2026) 
Obama’s Election and a Blog Launched (May 8, 2026)
Expanding Outward at 60 (May 15, 2026)
On Losing My Father (May 22, 2026)

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GOP’s Faustian Bargain May Backfire

By Robin Bates | Published: May 20, 2026

Thursday

The Faustus story has been invoked so often in politics as to lose some of its force. Since Trump has now spurned some of those who sold their souls to serve him, however, it’s worth returning to Christopher Marlowe’s 1594 play to see what we can expect of them going forth. I have in mind Kentucky representative Tom Massie and Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, who lost to Trump-endorsed challengers, and Texas senator John Cornyn, who looks as though he will lose to Texas’s corrupt attorney general Ken Paxton, also endorsed by Trump. These men are learning what Faustus learns: not only is it bad to sell out your principles and your integrity but you get very little in return.

Of course, how little you get shouldn’t matter compared to what you have given up. “For what shall it profit a man,” Jesus asks in Mark, “if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (8:36). These Congressmen, however, didn’t get the whole world. After a brief thrill-ride of power, they will now be held in contempt by practically everyone.

The good news, according to the play, is that soul selling doesn’t have to be forever. Even though Faustus signs his contract in blood and the devil informs him that the deed is forever, he is then given multiple opportunities to repent. At one point late in the play, an old man informs the despairing doctor what he must do:

I see an angel hovers o’er thy head,
And, with a vial full of precious grace,
Offers to pour the same into thy soul:
Then call for mercy, and avoid despair.

The question now is whether our three GOP pols can find their way back to salvation—which is to say, will they call out Trump’s corruption and stand up for the rule of law and the Constitution. Although they will have little to lose going forward, however, Marlowe shows us why they may not.

A brief review of the play is useful. As the leading physician/theologian/scientist of his age, Faustus is a man of immense potential. Rather than being content with having saved entire cities from the plague, however, he dreams of exerting total power over the world:

All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command:  emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a mighty god:
Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.

 The evil angel sitting on his shoulder, meanwhile, instructs him,  

Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,
Lord and commander of these elements.

Now think of what Massie, Cassidy, and Cornyn might have done with their power. Recognizing Trump for what he is—and all three do—Massie and Cornyn might have voted for his impeachment. While Cassidy, to his credit, did so (which is how he earned Trump’s enmity), he did not have the courage to prevent Robert F. Kennedy from becoming Health and Human Services secretary, even though he himself is a doctor and understands the necessity of vaccines. Instead, to retain the perks of power, they twisted themselves into pretzels to prove their loyalty to Trump. Now they are just pathetic losers.

As is Faustus after signing his deal with Satan. Rather than following through on any of his ambitions (for instance, “I’ll have [my spirits] wall all Germany with brass,/ And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg”), he travels to Rome to play pranks on the pope and then serves out the rest of his life as a court magician doing tricks in return for applause. Although he has second thoughts at the end of his life, he finds he cannot repent.

The reason: his pride gets in his way. Better eternal damnation than admitting to having been a patsy and a fool. Think of the devil’s threat in the following passage as Faustus’s own sense of shame:

Oft have I thought to have [repented]; but the devil threatened to tear me in pieces, if I named God, to fetch both body and soul, if I once gave ear to divinity:  and now ’tis too late. 

Instead of repenting, in a classic Trumpian move Faustian blames the messenger, who tells him that it is not too late. The old man, who cares for Faustus’s soul, must be delivering fake news and should be punished for having done so. Faustus instructs his devil assistants to “torment that base and crooked age,/ That durst dissuade me from thy Lucifer,/ With greatest torments that our hell affords.” When caught up in a prideful stance, we hate no one so much as those who tell us what, in our heart of hearts, we know to be true.

I’ve lumped Massie in with Cassidy and Cornyn but, as I noted yesterday, he actually lost the election because he fought a good fight: appalled at how Trump’s justice department has been covering for Jeffrey Epstein’s collaborators, he has relentlessly held people accountable. It appears that he will become an even more vocal critic in the months to come.

Now that he’s lost his election, Cassidy too has started pushing back, albeit modestly. If these legislators can join with Democrats to keep Trump from hijacking the 2026 elections, which increasingly appears to be his plan, then they will have accomplished more than Faustus, who never repents and goes screaming off to hell as devils tear him apart.

Do these men really want to be accessories in the death of the republic? Do they want to end their days torn apart by regret over what they could have done?

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A GOP Pol Pays for Relinquishing the Ring

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2026
Elijah Wood as Frodo

Wednesday

Weakened though he may be, Donald Trump sent another strong message to Republicans who consider opposing him: Tom Massie, who bucked the president over the release of the Epstein files, went down to defeat at Trump’s bidding. I mention him here because he once made a perceptive allusion to Lord of the Rings.

Writing for MS Now Daily, journalist Matt Fuller remembers back ten years ago when he invited Massie to a congressional correspondents’ dinner. Before entering, “Massie asked me if he should put on ‘The Precious.’” Fuller explains,

“The Precious” referred to his congressional member’s pin. And just like in “The Lord of the Rings,” Massie contended that The Precious had special powers. It can get you around security lines and out of speeding tickets and a drink faster at the bar. But keep it on too long, Massie liked to joke, and it would start to turn you into a worse version of yourself — like Sméagol transforming into Gollum.

Because he failed to heed his own advice, the pin worked as Massie predicted. In subsequent years Fuller says he watched “Thomas Massie, the principled libertarian most likely to vote no, turn into Rep. Thomas Massie, the Trump-supporting good soldier who voted yes with every other Republican.”

And:

I watched Massie become a strong advocate for Speaker Kevin McCarthy. I watched him vote for spending bills that the old Massie would have screamed about. I watched him construct tenuous explanations as to why the latest Trump outrage wasn’t really that outrageous. And, having kept his Twitter on alerts for at least a decade, I watched him accuse people over and over again of “Trump derangement syndrome” — a disease that only those who give the diagnosis actually have.

In short, I watched him become just another Republican, with a subcommittee chairmanship and a staff of people making sure he had a good seat on the plane back to D.C.

Precious, Fuller observes, “had turned Frodo Baggins.” Perhaps he has in mind the scene where Sam, thinking Frodo dead, has salvaged the ring, only to be forced to relinquish it when Frodo discovers he has it:

‘You’ve got it?’ gasped Frodo. ‘You’ve got it here? Sam, you’re a marvel!’ Then quickly and strangely his tone changed. ‘Give it to me!’ he cried, standing up, holding out a trembling hand. ‘Give it me at once! You can’t have it!’

‘All right, Mr. Frodo,’ said Sam, rather startled. ‘Here it is!’ Slowly he drew the Ring out and passed the chain over his head. ‘But you’re in the land of Mordor now, sir; and when you get out, you’ll see the Fiery Mountain and all. You’ll find the Ring very dangerous now, and very hard to bear. If it’s too hard a job, I could share it with you, maybe?’

‘No, no!’ cried Frodo, snatching the Ring and chain from Sam’s hands. ‘No you won’t, you thief!’ He panted, staring at Sam with eyes wide with fear and enmity. Then suddenly, clasping the Ring in one clenched fist, he stood aghast. A mist seemed to clear from his eyes, and he passed a hand over his aching brow. The hideous vision had seemed so real to him, half bemused as he was still with wound and fear. Sam had changed before his very eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure, a foul little creature with greedy eyes and slobbering mouth.

When you are a Republican legislator in love with your Congressional power, suddenly journalists and Democratic colleagues become foul little creatures with greedy eyes and slobbering mouths out to steal your treasure.

Sam, of course, is the archetype of loyalty. Imagine him as an American who prizes the Constitution above all. He even, in the brief time that he wears a ring, gets an insight similar to that of Massie before he turned into a worse version of himself:

Without any clear purpose he drew out the Ring and put it on again. Immediately he felt the great burden of its weight, and felt afresh, but now more strong and urgent than ever, the malice of the Eye of Mordor, searching, trying to pierce the shadows that it had made for its own defense, but which now hindered it in its unquiet and doubt.

Trump may be losing it—he may be increasingly caught up in his own bubble—but he is very aware of any Republican who shows signs of independent thought. His flunkies spent millions to defeat Massie, making it the most expensive House primary battle in history.

For his part, Massie had felt freed up by challenging Trump, at least with regard to the Epstein files. It is as though that mist had cleared from his eyes:

But now the vision had passed. There was Sam kneeling before him, his face wrung with pain, as if he had been stabbed in the heart; tears welled from his eyes.

‘O Sam!’ cried Frodo. ‘What have I said? What have I done? Forgive me! After all you have done. It is the horrible power of the Ring.”

Fuller predicts that Massie will be okay with losing. As he puts it, 

Massie doesn’t need The Precious anymore. He told me he hasn’t even taken the newest congressional pin out of its wrapper. 

I’ve been struck by how many Trump-tolerating Republicans have felt liberated once they cast their personal rings into Mountain Doom, although sometimes they did so with as much initial reluctance as Frodo. It’s refreshing to reconnect with one’s remaining principles.

If only they had all done so in concert with each other rather than one by one. If only they had stood firm following January 6 and voted for impeachment. If only Isildur has cast the ring into the fire the moment he obtained it.

George Washington did when he stepped down after two terms. The founding fathers, especially James Madison, attempted to forestall people using the ring by setting up a system whereby Congress would check executive power. Unfortunately, our Sauron has turned Congressional Republicans into his Nazgul, and yesterday they claimed another victim.

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