World Cup Semi: All for One, One for All

By Robin Bates | Published: July 13, 2026

Tuesday

An ESPN commentator has cited the most famous line from Alexander Dumas’s Three Musketeers in excited anticipation of tomorrow’s match between France and Spain, held (of all days!) on France’s national holiday. Although Graham Hunter, who was embedded in the Spanish team, is predicting a Spanish victory, he sees the French as formidable:

Tuesday’s World Cup semifinal, on Bastille Day, will carry the narrative that France’s four musketeers (Michael Olise, Ousmane Dembélé, Desiré Doué, Kylian Mbappé) make coach Didier Deschamps’ team stick-on winners.

Excited by the comradely “vibes” he witnessed in the Spanish camp, however, Hunter then appropriates the Musketeer motto for La Roja:

Their opponents have their own powerful “all for one” mentality that can push them on to New Jersey, and their second World Cup final.

When the motto appears in the novel, D’Artagnan is still an apprentice musketeer, which makes the application all the more appropriate as the French could be seen as having 3+1 Musketeers, given that Doué has been sharing the fourth position with Bradley Barcola. In any event, the four in the novel are about to embark on their most dangerous mission yet.

They have become involved in a high stakes political battle involving the king, the queen, the queen’s British lover, the powerful Cardinal Richelieu, the evil Milady de Winter, and the queen’s handmaid, who has been kidnapped. D’Artagnan has just pulled off a bit of trickery comparable to a Lamine Yamal juke or an Olise pass, following which comes the line everyone knows:

“And now, gentlemen,” said D’Artagnan, without stopping to explain his conduct to Porthos, “All for one, one for all—that is our motto, is it not?”

“And yet—” said Porthos.

“Hold out your hand and swear!” cried Athos and Aramis at once.

Overcome by example, grumbling to himself, nevertheless, Porthos stretched out his hand, and the four friends repeated with one voice the formula dictated by D’Artagnan:

“All for one, one for all.”

“That’s well! Now let us everyone retire to his own home,” said D’Artagnan, as if he had done nothing but command all his life; “and attention! For from this moment we are at feud with the cardinal.”

For all the fellowship that Hunter finds on the Spanish side, it appears that France similarly sees itself as a team rather than as a group of talented individuals. Fears that France would get in its own way or implode like the 2002 team have been unfounded. Rather than Mbappé’s ego disrupting the team, it appears that he has instead embraced the collective. 

The French team’s collectivity has further been strengthened by the racist attacks on its “Black-Blanc-Beur [North African]” makeup, first from a Paraguayan legislator and then from a former Spanish prime minister. (The current Spanish prime minister criticized the comments.) Finally, the team has rallied around coach Didier Deschamps, who lost his mother during the group stages and who has announced he is stepping down at the end of the tournament.

With the blue of the Musketeer doublets vs. the red tabards of the Cardinal’s guards, the novel even anticipates the colors of the semi-finalists. Let what many are calling “the final before the final” begin.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Lost Honor of Lindsey Graham

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2026
Trump and Graham

Monday

Few politicians have more openly sold their souls than Lindsey Graham, the one-time maverick senator from South Carolina who became one of Donald Trump’s chief sycophants and who died suddenly yesterday at 71. Yet perhaps to prevent himself from losing his moral bearings altogether, he did remain true to one higher cause, prompting Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum to invoke Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in yesterday’s reflection on the man.

Let’s look first at the betrayal. Although Graham once allied himself with John McCain as one who put principles over partisanship, Apppelbaum writes that

like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experience radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator.

Appelbaum first compared Graham to collaborators living under autocratic regimes in a 2020 piece where she conducted an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon. In addition to looking at those who resisted communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and those who didn’t, she examined Republicans who broke with Trump after his January 6 coup attempt (Mitt Romney) and those who joined him (Graham). As she reported at the time,

A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me! ” That kind of intense pleasure is hard to relinquish and even harder to live without.

In that article Appelbaum turned to Czesław Miłosz, the dissident and Nobel-winning Polish poet who defected to the west after observing close up how writers and intellectuals justified collaborating with authoritarian rule. In “The Captive Mind” Milosz noted that careerism could not provide a complete explanation for their capitulation:

To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” 

George Orwell sums up this sense of peace in the concluding paragraph of 1984: 

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

In the article that appeared yesterday, after noting the many ways that Graham telegraphed his love of Trump, Appelbaum cites the one exception: he supported Urkaine, even though he well knew that Trump sought to curry favor with Vladimir Putin. Appelbaum reports that Graham

made 10 trips to Ukraine; he returned from the last one the day before he died. He repeatedly proposed legislation to sanction Russia, doing so with such frequency that his bill became a kind of joke, the Waiting for Godot of Congress, always proposed and never accepted by a president who did not want to make trouble for his Russian friends. 

In Beckett’s absurdist play, Vladimir and Estrogen wait fruitlessly for the appearance of one Godot, who may be God or meaning or even just something different. Occasionally they are given glimmers of hope, as when a messenger boy shows up and informs them, “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.” At the end of the play, however, they are once again fruitlessly waiting.

Appelbaum reflects that, absurd though Graham’s hopes were, he may have remained loyal to Ukraine’s struggle because he knew, at some deep level, that “he had betrayed the moral code that he grew up with.” Without this one unbroken commitment (and here I borrow a line from another existentialist parable, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) life would “have been too dark—too dark altogether.”

I suppose this struggle differentiated Graham from those around Trump who, like T.S. Eliot’s hollow men, bend with the wind. It made him slightly more complicated and slightly more interesting.

Yet, for all that, he was a lost soul.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Bible in English Classes? Good Idea

By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2026
Caravaggio, St. Jerome Writing

Sunday

Although a non-believer, Greg Olear, my favorite blogger, has unexpectedly endorsed the Texas Board of Education’s recent decision requiring high school students to read selected Biblical passages.

To be sure, he qualifies his endorsement, observing that there are 

plenty of reasons not to like the BOE decision. Is the Board trying to foist Christianity upon unsuspecting students in Texas? That may well be an ulterior motive. Is this a power grab, a brazen attempt to weld Church and State together? This being Texas, probably yes. Is it fair to mandate passages from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but not the Quran, or other religious texts? I’ll let Annie Laurie Gaylor, president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, take that question: “Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”

Olear responds that these are “arguments about politics, not about education—and certainly not about literature.” In a good English course, he writes,

what you’re supposed to do is read texts and then discuss them. It isn’t about right and wrong, per se; it’s about nuance and interpretation and, above all, the development of critical thinking…

Olear points out the rich complexities that can be found in the required Biblical excerpts, which consist of the Garden of Eden story, the Book of Job, and the passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that is often read at weddings. The nature of sin, the meaning of unmerited suffering, and the foundational importance of love are great things for high school students to be discussing.

It’s worth noting what the Board of Education leaves out, which is anything from Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Was it worried that the Sermon on the Mount or the Parable of the Good Samaritan or the impossibility of a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven make Jesus sound like a leftwing radical? Given the rightwing’s assault on social welfare programs, I’d love to see a class dive into the Prodigal Son story. Jesus, like the best teachers, challenges even the most entrenched of assumptions.

Olear makes the point that the literature we encounter in English classes is much richer if we know our Bible, and this has certainly been my experience. To cite one example that startled me, when I was teaching Beowulf, I was amazed that many of my students didn’t know the story of Cain, who the poet tells us is the ancestor of Grendel and his mother. So yes, I’m all for students being introduced to the Bible.

That is, as long as it does not shape their science, history, or political science classes. A biology teacher at my kids’ public high school refused to teach evolution because of her literal reading of Genesis, a shallow interpretation that robs the story of its richness. There will be language arts teachers who use the Biblical readings to proselytize. But most teachers I have encountered respect the works they teach, refusing to subordinate them to narrow political agendas. In any event, Olear appears to believe that the material is so substantive that it will frustrate such efforts.

Incidentally, the list of required readings is quite good. It includes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, The Inferno, and Fahrenheit 451, along with some great poems (“Prufrock,” “If,” “The Raven,” “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Paul Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”); short stories (Trollope’s “The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Coine” (!), Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”); and some essays, including Thucydides’s account of Pericles’s funeral oration and Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (whose title itself is a Biblical allusion).

The only real lightweights on the list are Ayn Rand’s “What Is Capitalism?” and Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan, but maybe they were included to give the Board political cover for including King.

The Bible readings, of course, are getting all the publicity. But as it appears that many Christians these days are not really reading their Bible but just imagining that it confirms their own reactionary agendas, maybe it’s good that students will have a chance to examine it closely.

Further note: I remember how, in my first job, my teaching of Genesis as part of Morehouse College’s Humanities sequence startled one of my students, an 18-year-old preacher. I pointed out that there are two accounts of creation, not one. Those who compiled the Torah had the wisdom or the humility to include both rather than choose one. Amazing revelations await those who engage in close reading.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball

By Robin Bates | Published: July 10, 2026
Lamine Yamal

Friday

As one who is rooting for France to win the World Cup, I am terrified of Spain’s Lamine Yamal, who barely seems an adult—in fact, he looks like my youngest grandson, who sees the resemblance and is a fan—yet can do things with the ball that few men can do. While he hasn’t scored in this World Cup, he is drawing multiple defenders, thereby opening up spaces for teammates.

Having beaten Belgium, the next foe is France, which Spain will play on Bastille Day. “I think that if France has anyone to fear, it’s us,” Yamal said after Spain’s recent victory. The Christopher Merrill poem below has me thinking of how Yamal’s attraction lies in part in the almost boyish joy he radiates while playing with the ball.

It also takes me back to one of my own childhood memories. We were living in the Hotel des Nations,, which is close to the city’s Roman arena. I visited it one day around noon and saw six French school boys combining lunch with practice. Five of them were lined up, baguette sandwiches in hand, taking turns juggling a ball. Every once in a while, the boy with the ball would flick it towards the entryway, where a goalie stood. He would field the ball and roll it back to the group, whereupon another boy would begin juggling. Always, as I said, with sandwich in hand.

This was in 1963 and France wasn’t the soccer powerhouse that it has since become. Nor was Paris yet the incubator of many of the world’s greatest players. Of the 1,248 players at this year’s World Cup, apparently 56 (4.3%) were born in Paris, including Kylian Mbappé. (In all, 99 were born in France, with many choosing to play for other nations, including Morocco and the Côte d’Ivoire.) To be sure, the Parisian players don’t come from the Latin Quarter, where the arena is to be found, but from the working class immigrant suburbs. Still, my love of French soccer dates from this early encounter.

Here’s Merrill’s poem, which captures the love between boy and ball and reminds us that it all begins as a child’s game.

A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball
Christopher Merrill

after practice: right foot
to left foot, stepping forward and back,
to right foot and left foot,
and left foot up to his thigh, holding
it on his thigh as he twists
around in a circle, until it rolls
down the inside of his leg,
like a tickle of sweat, not catching
and tapping on the soft
side of his foot, and juggling
once, twice, three times,
hopping on one foot like a jump-roper
in the gym, now trapping
and holding the ball in midair,
balancing it on the instep
of his weak left foot, stepping forward
and forward and back, then
lifting it overhead until it hangs there;
and squaring off his body,
he keeps the ball aloft with a nudge
of his neck, heading it
from side to side, softer and softer,
like a dying refrain,
until the ball, slowing, balances
itself on his hairline,
the hot sun and sweat filling his eyes
as he jiggles this way
and that, then flicking it up gently,
hunching his shoulders
and tilting his head back, he traps it
in the hollow of his neck,
and bending at the waist, sees his shadow,
his dangling T-shirt, the bent
blades of brown grass in summer heat;
and relaxing, the ball slipping
down his back…and missing his foot.

He wheels around, he marches
over the ball, as if it were a rock
he stumbled into, and pressing
his left foot against it, he pushes it
against the inside of his right
until it pops into the air, is heeled
over his head- the rainbow! –
and settles on his extended thigh before
rolling over his knee and down
his shin, so he can juggle it again
from his left foot to his right foot
– and right foot to left foot to thigh-
as he wanders, on the last day
of summer, around the empty field.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Was Oedipus Deserving of a Red Card?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 8, 2026
David Beckham receives a red card in the 1998 World Cup

Thursday

I thought I could concentrate only on grandchildren and the World Cup this week, avoiding politics altogether, but then he who will not be named pressured FIFA to suspend the Folarin Balogun red card (see my post on the incident here, and, well, so much for that wish. At least the incident, and soccer refereeing in general, has yielded some great humor, including literary jokes from my English professor son. 

Driving home to Georgia after visiting us in Tennessee, he and the kids listened to a dramatized version of The Hobbit, leading to this Bluesky tweet (Tobias Wilson-Bates@phdhurtbrain@bsky.social) about soccer’s video review system:

The ref is coming back from the review station and it doesn’t look good. He’s shaking his head and I’m afraid it’s what we predicted. After VAR review “what have I got in my pocket?” is NOT a valid riddle and Bilbo is going to have to concede being eaten.

This was followed up with a Sophocles reference:

The ref is coming back from the sideline and, OH MY GOD, he’s telling Oedipus that Jocasta is his MOTHER! Goodness, VAR saves him from yet another bad call.

There were a couple of good responses, including this from one Antonio Barros:

Such a good VAR intervention! How come the ref Tiresias didn’t not see this? Is he blind? 

And this from johnw60.bsky.social:

Deus ex machinvar

After an England player picked up a red card for a studs-up tackle, Toby tweeted:

Really hope England splurged for the retractable red card insurance before the tournament 🤞🤞

The red cards made him think of the Cruciatus or torture curse (a.k.a. the Crucio) in Harry Potter:

Red cards are so wild. The closest thing in professional sports to a magical curse or hex.

Toby then elaborated:

You have crossed the football gods and must now be BANISHED from the land of foot

After commenting on the World Cup games, Toby then considered applying them to his teaching. For instance:

Going to start calling the last ten minutes of class “stoppage time” to get my students more invested in learning

To which Bluesky’s Eric Rauchway responded,

I’m gonna go further and tell them the class will be only forty minutes unless there are any fouls in which case it will be lengthened by stoppage time

Toby again:

Will occasionally drop to the ground grabbing my face for several minutes to keep them on their toes

There was also was this fantasy of a system for calling fouls on students for not paying attention: 

“Please refer to the syllabus” = Penalty 
“We covered this in class” = Yellow Card
“Per my last email” = Red Card

And then there’s this from one who has clearly attended many faculty meetings:

Much respect to Messi the middle aged king for knowing you only need to pay attention for the final 10 minutes of the meeting

Humor aside, Toby had the following thoughtful reflection on the tournament, in which chance often determines who wins:

Almost every World Cup the eventual winner needs to win at least one match along the way via penalties which means we’re less determining the best team than some alignment of the team w the best play, best draw, and best penalty luck.

To me this is part of the beauty of the World Cup. It’s rarely a meditation on dominance, and much more often an extended experience of global equality and the randomness of joy and beauty.

Years ago I remember someone remarking that the occasional randomness and element of chance in soccer were one reason why it would never catch on in the United States, where we want to believe we have power over what happens to us. Other cultures are more fatalistic, resigned to the idea that sometimes unfair things happen. 

The most spectacular soccer example is Maradona’s “hand of God” goal in a 1986 quarter final victory, but there have been countless other bad or missed calls over the years. While people may never accept what has happened—ask any Brit who was around for the Maradona game—one of the lessons learned is that we can be victimized by things outside our control.

Hmm, now that’s something Sophocles understood.

With video review, it’s as though the world has tried to Americanize the game, letting technology replace human limitations. Now we are seeing goals negated because a player’s toe was offside, and France was awarded its game-winning penalty against Paraguay because VAR picked up a clear foul that the referee missed. FIFA has made it appear that it can remove uncertainty from the game.

But the Balogun red card, which may have been awarded because the foul looked worse in slow motion than it actually was, calls that into question. Rather than removing all doubt, now there are debates over whether the technology has been properly used, with Egypt especially arguing that its goal-of-the-tournament should not have been negated because of a VAR-detected foul at the other end of the field. Things get particularly murky when the technology is used to determine motive: was a player actually tripped in the penalty area or was he deliberately diving?

All of which argues for literature and the humanities, which teach us that that life, including the games we play, can never be reduced to technological engineering. That may frustrate some, but the endless debates that ensue can lead to social bonding as strangers have things to talk about. The great books teach us that human reality is never simple but always shifting, and we leave ourselves vulnerable when we forget that.

Other recent Toby literary tweets:

—Full respect to Brontë and Faulkner, but I’m reading a Wilkie Collins’ novel where FOUR characters have the same name so far and I don’t think he’s done yet

—Middlemarch, written 155 years ago, is in part about the unbearable cultural inertia that blocks simple affordable housing and healthcare reform.

—More things in life need to operate like the Pizza Hut Book-It challenge that used to give kids personal pizzas for reading books.

If I read Brothers Karamazov, I think that should pay my mortgage for the month is all I’m saying

Followed by:

—Since I’m a professor, in a sense it does fairly literally pay my mortgage 🤔 but I think everyone should have access to this option

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Children as Devouring Mice?!

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2026
Longfellow’s daughters

Wednesday

I am updating a post I wrote six years ago to apply to a visit over the weekend from our four grandchildren. As we cavorted around in the lake by our house, I once again recalled Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour.” I’ve added some thoughts about devouring imagery in children’s literature.

The 1863 poem was one that, for decades, children were required to memorize. I encountered it first when my father read it to me as a child and later when I saw Don Martin’s Mad Magazine spoof of it. Martin, of course, took shots at its sentimentality.

But Mad wasn’t the first publication to question “The Children’s Hour.” Lillian Hellman in 1934 made ironic use of the poem by borrowing its title for her own play about a disaffected girl in a boarding school. In order to avoid being sent back to the school, she accuses two of her teachers of having a lesbian love affair, thereby destroying their lives. In other words, little girls are not as innocent as you think.

Sentimentalizing children doesn’t do justice to their full personhood. When one has rigid expectations of innocence, one doesn’t give children room to breathe. I use the analogy because of the images of devouring and imprisonment in the poem. If we trap children in angelic expectations, we have trouble handling those times when they are devils.

The Bishop of Bingen reference is to the folk tale of Bishop Hatto, who was eaten alive by the mice that invaded the tower where he was hoarding grain from the starving peasants. After feeling devoured by his children, Longfellow does his own version of devouring in return, imprisoning them in the fortress of his heart. Here’s the poem:

The Children’s Hour
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Between the dark and the daylight,
     When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
     That is known as the Children’s Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
     The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
     And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,
     Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
     And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence:
     Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
    To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,
     A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
     They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret
    O’er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
     They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,
     Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
     In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
     Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
     Is not a match for you all!

I have you fast in my fortress,
     And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
     In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,
     Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
     And molder in dust away!

Sentimental though the poem may be, I fully understand the emotions at play. My grandchildren and I hugged each other long and hard as they were leaving. I wanted to swallow them up in my love and for a few moments they basked in the feeling, even as I was attuned to the moment when they would want to wriggle free. Feelings of wanting to be loved and feelings of wanting to be independet toggled back and forth.

We see some of the same back and forth in the stories I read to my own children. In Maurice Sendak’s The Night Kitchen, Mickey is swallowed in the cake batter of the night cooks before breaking free to assert his independence: “I’m not the cake and the cake’s not me, I”m Mickey!” he crows before flying off in an airplane he has constructed out of the batter. 

In Helen Bannerman’s “Little Black Sambo,” the protagonist is threatened with devourment—“Little Black Sambo, I am going to eat you up,” threatens each of the tigers–only to have Sambo, somewhat like Anansi the Spider, use his wits to escape. In the end, through an unexpected plot twist, he devours them instead as they have churned themselves into butter, which his mother then uses for pancakes.

One other popular children’s book that includes includes emotional devouring is Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny. No matter how much the bunny wants to break free of his mother’s loving embrace and establish his own identity, the mother assures him that she will always find him. The plot speaks both to the child’s desire for independence and the need  to be reminded that he or she always has emotional backup. That reassurance also come in Brown’s Goodnight, Moon. 

I saw the tension exhibited in each of my grandchildren over the weekend, with it working itself  differently for the teenager, the middle schooler, and the two in elementary school. It was a gift.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

U.S. Soccer and the Ancient Mariner’s Curse

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2026
Balogun’s red card, later overturned following Trump’s intervention

Tuesday

Everything Trump touches turns to crap, and that goes for sports as well as for monuments, institutional norms, the rule of law, and Constitutional rights. His congratulations to the Olympic gold medal-winning men’s hockey team included denigration of the Olympic gold medal-winning women’s hockey team. He insisted on attending the New York Knicks game during their championship run, seeking to leech off the city’s joy and in the process ruining the traditional watch parties held outside the stadium. Then he went on to taint one of the feel good stories of the World Cup, the exciting U.S. men’s team (USMT). 

Fans from other nations who had been rooting for the U.S. turned against them after Trump  instructed persuaded the equally corrupt FIFA leadership to overturn a red card, something they never do. 

The ancient Greeks could have predicted what happened next. Even with the now unsuspended Folarin Balugon playing, the team lost in humiliating 4-1 fashion to Belgium. The goddess Nemesis, who punishes humans for their hubris, struck again.

For those fans who cared only to get Balugon back on the field and were fine with Trump’s intervention, I remind them of the fate of the crew in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. They are fine with the mariner killing the albatross when doing so appears to have cleared away the fog and mist but then outraged when all the breezes cease to blow and the ship is becalmed. At that point they hang the dead bird around the mariner’s neck, preferring to blame someone else rather than acknowledge that they have become complicit in the crime.

I don’t know whether the stain of Trump’s intervention hung around the necks of the USMT, but they didn’t appear to play with the same elan as in previous games. Of course, they were facing a Belgium team that was outraged at how the rules had been broken, which provided extra motivation. Whatever the cause of the U.S.’s lackluster performance, it felt like some kind of karmic justice had been served, even though the team and Balogun were themselves innocent.

And what about Trump? As usual, he pulled off his usual Tom and Daisy retreat:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

What next after messing with the World Cup and ruining the nation’s 250th anniversary? The 2028 Olympics will be held in Los Angeles during the final year of Trump’s presidency.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Beowulf and “the Viking Row”

By Robin Bates | Published: July 5, 2026
Norwegian fans perform the Viking Row

Monday

One of the things that we will carry away from this year’s World Cup is “the Viking Row” of Norwegian fans, which they once more exhibited in Norway’s unexpected win yesterday over favored Brazil.

As Fox Sports describes it, the Viking Row

involves a group of people — in this case, Norway’s men’s national team and their fans — sitting down and moving their bodies back and forth in a rowing motion. Fans will do it at any time of the game, with a drummer setting the rhythm. Every two beats, the crowd shouts, “ROW!” and the chant commences.

The article explains that the exercise celebrates that time in history—between 800 and 1050 AD— when Vikings ventured around the world, sometimes raiding, sometimes trading. England, whose thrilling victory over Mexico I’ve just watched, could take the celebration personally since the Vikings attacked their own shores.

This was also the period that produced Beowulf, and there are dramatic images of Scandinavian rowers in the poem, although the Geats were from modern day Sweden rather than Norway. Also, unlike the soccer team, they come in peace.

Imagine that Erling Haaland, Norway’s extraordinary striker, is Beowulf. The Geat hero has shown up in the Danish court—Denmark is the reigning power in the region— claiming that he can perform miracles, which would be like someone striding into the White House from a tiny country (let’s say Trinidad) and making a similar claim. In other words, he appears to be in above his head. 

This is how some have viewed Norway, which (in stark contrast  to Brazil) has only qualified for the World Cup four times, the last time in 1998. In fact, one of King Hrothgar’s retainers is outraged at Beowulf’s effrontery. 

Beowulf, however, exudes absolute confidence, as though he belongs. Here he is landing in Denmark with his handpicked crew of young men:

When he heard about Grendel, Hygelac’s thanewas on home ground, over in Geatland.
There was no one else like him alive.In his day, he was the mightiest man on earth,
high-born and powerful. He ordered a boat
that would ply the waves. He announced his plan:
to sail the swan’s road and search out that king,
the famous prince who needed defenders.
Nobody tried to keep him from going,
no elder denied him, dear as he was to them.
Instead, they inspected omens and spurred
his ambition to go, whilst he moved about
like the leader he was, enlisting men,
the best he could find; with fourteen others
the warrior boarded the boat as captain,
a canny pilot along coast and currents.
Time went by, the boat was on water,
in close under the cliffs.

At this point the men begin engaging in the Viking Row:

Men climbed eagerly up the gangplank,
sand churned in surf, warriors loaded
a cargo of weapons, shining war-gear
in the vessel’s hold, then heaved out,
away with a will in their wood-wreathed ship.
Over the waves, with the wind behind her
and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird
until her curved prow had covered the distance
and on the following day, at the due hour,
those seafarers sighted land,
sunlit cliffs, sheer crags
and looming headlands, the landfall they sought.

Arriving like the Norwegian team in America, the Geats disembark with all their gear:

It was the end of their voyage and the Geats vaulted
over the side, out on to the sand,
and moored their ship. There was a clash of mail
and a thresh of gear. They thanked God
for that easy crossing on a calm sea.

The herald, on the outlook for sea invaders, is impressed by the confidence of the Geats:

Never before has a force under arms
disembarked so openly—not bothering to ask
if the sentries allowed them safe passage
or the clan had consented. Nor have I seen
a mightier man-at-arms on this earth
than the one standing here: unless I am mistaken,
he is truly noble. This is no mere
hanger-on in a hero’s armor.

Having satisfied the sentry, the Geats make their way to the stadium king’s hall::

So they went on their way. The ship rode the water,
broad-beamed, bound by its hawser
and anchored fast. Boar-shapes flashed
above their cheek-guards, the brightly forged
work of goldsmiths, watching over
those stern-faced men. They marched in step,
hurrying on till the timbered hall
rose before them, radiant with gold.
Nobody on earth knew of another
building like it. Majesty lodged there,
its light shone over many lands.

In the end, of course, Beowulf—a decided underdog—emerges triumphant. As, buoyed by the Viking Row, did his Scandinavian descendants.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Finding Deep Rest in a Still Room

By Robin Bates | Published: July 4, 2026
Granger, Quaker Meeting Room, 1790

Sunday

My friend Rebecca Adams, who organizes our weekly lectio divina group, this past week shared an excerpt from John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Meeting.” The Quaker poet is exploring how best to open oneself to God, and, though he wouldn’t have been familiar with Emily Dickinson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to church,” he appears to be making a counter argument.

Dickinson’s poem opens,

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Whittier’s friend, meanwhile, makes a similar arguments against meeting houses and church ritual:

“What part or lot have you,” he said,
“In these dull rites of drowsy-head?
Is silence worship? Seek it where
It soothes with dreams the summer air;
Not in this close and rude-benched hall,
But where soft lights and shadows fall,
And all the slow, sleep-walking hours
Glide soundless over grass and flowers!
From time and place and form apart,
Its holy ground the human heart,
Nor ritual-bound nor templeward
Walks the free spirit of the Lord!

Whitman’s response is basically that Nature is too populated and too noisy:

Dream not, O friend, because I seek
This quiet shelter twice a week,
I better deem its pine-laid floor
Than breezy hill or sea-sung, shore;
But nature is not solitude;
She crowds us with her thronging wood;
Her many hands reach out to us,
Her many tongues are garrulous;
Perpetual riddles of surprise
She offers to our ears and eyes;
She will not leave our senses still,
But drags them captive at her will;
And, making earth too great for heaven,
She hides the Giver in the given.

Then comes the excerpt Rebecca shared, which is a lovely argument, not only for quiet Quaker worship, but for communal worship in general:

And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world’s control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on either side,
The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

There are many who argue that they are spiritual but not religious and so reject church attendance altogether. While I’m sympathetic, Whitman makes the case that communal worship offers something special, even when (as can happen in Quaker gatherings) everyone is silent. The “still forms on either side” multiply the silence so that the world of time and sense falls away.

In the end, we are left one on one with the numinous. Which is what, after all, we seek.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

  • Sign up for my weekly newsletter

  • Buy Now
  • Learn More
  • Buy Now
  • Learn More