It was almost exactly a year ago when DJT was boasting that America had “completely and totally obliterated” Iraan’s nuclear program. Now that he is proclaiming another victory over Iran that only he can see, I am reposting an essay I wrote on Robert Southey’s “After Blenheim.” What I noted at the time is even truer today: the entire world is asking the questions posed by the little children in the poem and getting the same response from the old man.
Reposted from June 25, 2025
In Tuesday’s post I, like many others, traced Donald Trump’s bombing decision to manhood insecurities, which have led to a not insignificant number of horrors in the history of the world. When his birthday parade failed to allay these insecurities, he turned to bunker busting bombs. His vision of a grand gesture silencing all doubters—something akin to Barack Obama taking out Osama Bin Laden—continues to elude him. In fact, his obsessing over Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize proves him to be, yet again, the lesser man. This is driving him crazy.
While he boasts of having “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear bomb capabilities, he appears to have only set the country back by a few months. Indeed, he has accomplished far less in this arena than, yes, the Obama treaty that he tore up. Yet I suspect that his cult followers, including even the isolationists who initially opposed the raids, will fall in line and continue to buy what he’s selling.
In this way, they are like the old grandfather in the 1798 Robert Southey poem “After Blenheim.” Recounting to his grandchildren the story of the 1704 battle between the French and British alliances (the former of which included Bavaria, where the poem is set), Old Kaspar can only repeat what the authorities tell him: that the affair was “a great victory.”
In doing so, he must overlook the fact that thousands were killed, that his family home was burned to the ground, that the “country round was wasted far and wide,” and that many nursing mothers and their babies died.
His grandchildren ask him the same question that we should all be asking Trump: why did the armies fight each other and\ “what good came of it at last?” The answer they get is essentially what we’re getting from our president and his minions:
“It was the English,” Kaspar cried, “Who put the French to rout; But what they fought each other for, I could not well make out; But everybody said,” quoth he, “That ’twas a famous victory.
Here’s the poem:
After Blenheim By Robert Southey
It was a summer evening, Old Kaspar’s work was done, And he before his cottage door Was sitting in the sun, And by him sported on the green His little grandchild Wilhelmine.
She saw her brother Peterkin Roll something large and round, Which he beside the rivulet In playing there had found; He came to ask what he had found, That was so large, and smooth, and round.
Old Kaspar took it from the boy, Who stood expectant by; And then the old man shook his head, And, with a natural sigh, “‘Tis some poor fellow’s skull,” said he, “Who fell in the great victory.
“I find them in the garden, For there’s many here about; And often when I go to plough, The ploughshare turns them out! For many thousand men,” said he, “Were slain in that great victory.”
“Now tell us what ’twas all about,” Young Peterkin, he cries; And little Wilhelmine looks up With wonder-waiting eyes; “Now tell us all about the war, And what they fought each other for.”
“It was the English,” Kaspar cried, “Who put the French to rout; But what they fought each other for, I could not well make out; But everybody said,” quoth he, “That ’twas a famous victory.
“My father lived at Blenheim then, Yon little stream hard by; They burnt his dwelling to the ground, And he was forced to fly; So with his wife and child he fled, Nor had he where to rest his head.
“With fire and sword the country round Was wasted far and wide, And many a childing mother then, And new-born baby died; But things like that, you know, must be At every famous victory.
“They say it was a shocking sight After the field was won; For many thousand bodies here Lay rotting in the sun; But things like that, you know, must be After a famous victory.
“Great praise the Duke of Marlbro’ won, And our Prince Eugene.” “Why, ’twas a very wicked thing!” Said little Wilhelmine. “Nay… nay… my little girl,” quoth he, “It was a famous victory.
“And everybody praised the Duke Who this great fight did win.” “But what good came of it at last?” Quoth little Peterkin. “Why that I cannot tell,” said he, “But ’twas a famous victory.”
So one party is telling us that the Iranian bombing “was a famous victory” and one that “’twas a very wicked thing!” Who do you believe?
I sometimes think that the books we need will find us. They will call out to us from bookstore or library shelves and suddenly we will find our lives being impacted in unexpected ways. Timothy Snyder, noted author of On Tyranny and On Freedom, recently described how this happened to him with a Philip K. Dick novel:
The other night in Prague I had a few minutes to myself, and chanced to see the mint-colored spine of The Man in the High Castle. Something moved my hand. I was planning to run the next morning on a hill called “Vyšehrad,” which means “upper castle.” Was it that? I was about to go on stage and speak about freedom; perhaps I sensed that Dick had something to say about the subject.
From the novel Snyder got a clearer sense of how people will change their behavior and their thinking when autocrats are in charge. He also saw more clearly some of the forms resistance can take.
Snyder’s article sent me back to the novel, which I last read in the 1980s. I came out thinking that it speaks more to our present moment than it did either in 1962, when it first appeared, or in the 1980s, after the film Blade Runner caused people to rediscover Dick. It certainly illustrates a number of points that Snyder makes in his own writing.
High Castle is based on the premise that the Germans and Japanese won World War II and divided America between them. Within this novel is a writer—the man in the high castle—whose novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is an alternative history, speculating on how the world would be different if the U.S. had won the war.
Throughout High Castle we see that, under Japanese and German domination, Americans have adapted to their oppressors. Recognizing only too well how various Americans have changed their thinking to fit Trump’s delusions, Snyder notes, “We don’t need defeat to a foreign power to adapt to everyday authority or to invite atrocious violence; we Americans might do this without any excuse beyond self-delusion.”
For instance, we see people in the novel casually discussing a plan to exterminate American Jews and return African Americans to slavery, as if the fact that the Germans won the war makes it okay. The same casualness applies to German plans to commit mass genocide in Africa. We learn that they have run into some problems with this latter project—we don’t learn exactly what—but it is rationalized away in the mind of a Germanophile businessman:
Africa had almost been successful . . . but in a project of that sort, almost was an ominous word to begin to hear. Rosenberg’s well-known powerful pamphlet issued in 1958; the word had first shown up, then. As to the Final Solution of the African Problem, we have almost achieved ourobjectives. Unfortunately, however —
Still, it had taken two hundred years to dispose of the American aborigines, and Germany had almost done it in Africa in fifteen years. So no criticism was legitimately in order. Childan had, in fact, argued it out recently while having lunch with certain of those other merchants. They expected miracles, evidently, as if the Nazis could remold the world by magic. No, it was science and technology and that fabulous talent for hard work; the Germans never stopped applying themselves.And when they did a task, they did it right.
And anyhow, the flights to Mars had distracted world attention from the difficulty in Africa. So it all came back to what he had told his fellow store owners; what the Nazis have which we lack is — nobility. Admire them for their love of work or their efficiency . . . but it’s the dream that stirs one. Space flights first to the moon, then to Mars; if that isn’t the oldest yearning of mankind, our finest hope for glory.
Hmm. Where have we encountered using dreams of rockets to Mars to distract us from horrors committed in Africa? One wonders whether the Hitler-admiring Elon Musk is using High Castle as a guidebook. (NPR last year reported that his Musk’s DOGE dismantling of USAID could ultimately result in 14 million people dying who otherwise would have lived.)
High Castle also captures an autocrat spiraling off into incoherence and yet continuing to be taken seriously by his cult followers:
Old Adolf, supposed to be in a sanitarium somewhere, living out his life of senile paresis. Syphilis of the brain…
And the horrible part was that the present-day German Empire was a product of that brain. First a political party, then a nation, then half the world. And the Nazis themselves had diagnosed it, identified it; that quack herbal medicine man who had treated Hitler, that Dr. Morell who had dosed Hitler with a patent medicine called Dr. Koester’s Antigas Pills — he had originally been a specialist in venereal disease. The entire world knew it, and yet the Leader’s gabble was still sacred, still Holy Writ. The views had infected a civilization by now, and, like evil spores, the blind blond Nazi queens were swishing out from Earth to the other planets, spreading the contamination.
It’s not only this Hitler who brings Trump to mind. Germany in the book is undergoing a succession struggle, with one of the leading figures being Herr Göring. As described by Dick, he bears more than a little resemblance (except for his military service) to the grifter in the White House who yesterday staged a modern version of a gladiatorial combat:
The Fat One, so-called, due to body, originally courageous air ace in First World War, founded Gestapo and held post in Prussian Government of vast power. One of the most ruthless early Nazis, yet later sybaritic excesses gave rise to misguiding picture of amiable wine-tippling disposition which our government urges you to reject. This man although said to be unhealthy, possibly even morbidly so in terms of appetites, resembles more the self-gratifying ancient Roman Caesars whose power grew rather than abated as age progressed. Lurid picture of this person in toga with pet lions, owning immense castle filled with trophies and art objects, is no doubt accurate. Freight trains of stolen valuables made way to his private estates over military needs in wartime. Our evaluation: this man craves enormous power, and is capable of obtaining it. Most self-indulgent of all Nazis, and is in sharp contrast to late H. Himmler, who lived in personal want at low salary. Herr Göring representative of spoils mentality, using power as means of acquiring personal wealth. Priinitive mentality, even vulgar, but quite intelligent man, possibly most intelligent of all Nazi chiefs. Object Of his drives; self-glorification in ancient emperor fashion.
Like Drumpf Trump, the Germans in the novel use spectacle to distract from their economic failures—which is why incompetents like Göring and Goebbels are leading contenders to be the next Fuhrer. An industrialist reports on what he’s hearing about Hitler’s inner circle:
‘It is a sleight-of-hand business,’ the Non-Ferrous Ores man said. ‘Mainly, their uses of atomic energy have kept things together. And the diversion of their circus-like rocket travel to-Mars and Venus. He pointed out that for all their thrilling import, such traffic have yielded nothing of economic worth.’
‘But they are dramatic,’ Mr. Tagomi said.
‘His prognosis was gloomy. He feels that most high-placed Nazis are refusing to face facts vis-à-vis their economic plight. By doing so, they accelerate the tendency toward greater tour de force adventures, less predictability, less stability in general. The cycle of manic enthusiasm, then fear, then Party solutions of a desperate type — well, the point he got across was that all this tends to bring the most irresponsible and reckless aspirants to the top.’
Mr. Tagomi nodded.
‘So we must presume that the worst, rather than the best, choice will be made. The sober and responsible elements will be defeated in the present clash.’
One lesson that Snyder draws from the novel is how easily Americans can surrender to autocracy. We might think of ourselves as freedom-loving citizens who wouldn’t stand for oppression, but Dick’s novel offers us a plausible scenario. Snyder observes that “various prejudices can be mobilized to the same effect, different hierarchies can be enforced into the practical invisibility of everyday life, and we would take it all for granted.”
“Most of the culture, he adds, “would simply bend.” Americans, he gloomily observes, can be “their own Japanese and their own Germans.”
Liberals wonder how the GOP has come around to Trump’s view that January 6 take over the Capital was legitimate protest and that the 2020 election was stolen. Dick’s novel shows that, when an autocrat is in power, many accept his reality.
But not all is lost. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the novel within the novel,shows people how things could be different. “We would need something, a special kind of art, perhaps a book of a different sort, to help us see through our own reality to some sort of other possibility,” Snyder writes. While his own highly influential books show us both how tyranny works and how freedom can fight back, novels can convey this in their own special way.
So for all the ways that High Castle shows Americans surrendering to autocracy, Snyder also finds the story to be empowering. In the end, it reveals that “power over us depends on a certain kind of charisma, ultimately on a “bluff.” And if that’s the case, then we have agency. Once we see that “many of the restraints upon us are the ones that we choose”—once we imagine a world that is different—we can take practical action.
This does not mean, Snyder cautions, that everything will then be easy. The most effective characters in the novel are those that take “the chances they are given and are aware that every choice is fraught with risk.” What matters is “not so much who actually won and who actually lost… as what we do with ourselves afterwards.”
Today’s Old Testament reading is the lovely story of Abraham and Sarah extending hospitality to three strangers, who prove to be angels that bless the aging couple with a child. “Then cherish pity,” I hear Blake saying, “lest you drive an angel from your door.” Those so-called Christians who have signed on to the White House’s demonization of immigrants should realize that they are driving away throngs of angels. Here’s the reading (Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7):
The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.” And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” And he said, “There, in the tent.” Then one said, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.” But Sarah denied, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid. He said, “Oh yes, you did laugh.”…
The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” And she said, “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”]
Malcolm Guite counsels us to be like Abraham and Sarah and to “practice hospitality.” Our hearts, he writes, will be “free flowing only as [we] take another’s part.” He suggests that the two are stuck—“Stopped in themselves, and in their own unknowing”—with their barrenness is one form that this stuckness has taken. I think of how immigrants bring new life and new energy to our own country and how we become static and ingrown when we drive them away.
Strangers unlock us so that we can breathe again, and the courtesy we extend them “begets the unexpected; generosity/ Begetting generation, as the seed/ Of promise springs and laughs in Sarah’s womb.” Waves of immigrants have, time after time, reinvigorated America. When we make room for them under our shade, we ourselves are made whole. To have access to creation’s “secret source,” we must ourselves become a “wellspring in the wilderness.”
Or to borrow from another poem, we must lift our lamp beside the golden door.
Abraham and Sarah at Mamre By Malcolm Guite
They practice hospitality; their hearts Have opened like a secret source, free flowing Only as they take another’s part. Stopped in themselves, and in their own unknowing, But unlocked by these strangers in their need, They breathe again, and courtesy, set free, Begets the unexpected; generosity Begetting generation, as the seed Of promise springs and laughs in Sarah’s womb.
Made whole by their own hospitality, And like the rooted oak whose shade makes room For this refreshing genesis at Mamre, One couple, bringing comfort to their guests, Becomes our wellspring in the wilderness.
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 38th Installment
Between the normally hapless New York Knicks overcoming the largest finals deficit in NBA history and the world’s largest sporting event coming to North America, I examine today the importance of sports in my life. What have playing and watching taught me about myself?
As a child I was fairly hapless when it came to athletics, other than being one of the fastest kids in my class. I didn’t play football, which in rural Tennessee is a religion, nor did I play basketball. I did long to play baseball but my parents didn’t know about Little League so that didn’t happen. My grandmother, to whom I had expressed my yearning, once bought me a glove and a ball, but the ball was a softball, not a baseball, which ruined the mitt.
Fortunately my parents signed me up for tennis lessons when I was 11 and I fell in love.
I like to say that tennis and academics saved my life when I entered the Sewanee Military Academy after returning from an idyllic year in France. Drilling, marching, getting hazed, and undergoing rigorous uniform inspections were hell for me, and it didn’t help that I was the shortest kid in my entire high school, as well as suffering from the worst case of acne my dermatologist said he had ever seen (acne conglobate). To make matters worse, because uniforms were expensive, my parents acquired castoffs that were too large for me, making me look like Sad Sack in the World War II comic strip.
I was sustained by reading The Iliad in my freshman English class and playing for the junior varsity tennis team, however. At one point I even wrote a tennis poem, which went on to become my only literary publication when it appeared in a national collection of high school poems. I suspect it was influenced by the imagism of H.D. and Archibald MacLeish:
The Tennis Players
Their flapping figures Expanding and contracting Like sheets upon a windblown clothesline Over an asphalt lawn Of green
My senior year I was #4 on the tennis ladder and won all but two of my matches. Although we had a fine team, we couldn’t compete with Baylor High School in Chattanooga, which that year had Roscoe Tanner (who would one day reach the Wimbledon finals) and Brian Gottfried (who would reach a French Open final and win two French Open doubles). I remember thinking that Gottfried had the most beautiful backhand I had ever seen and determined to develop one like it. He was like a clockwork figure in an exquisite 18th century music box, and when I went on to specialize in literature from the French and British 18th centuries—and learned about the era’s passion for clocks, music boxes, and mechanical toys—I always thought of the moment when I saw Gottfried warming up.
There’s a point to my bringing up 18th century clockwork here because my love of tennis is related to my choice of 18thcentury British literature as my graduate school focus. For a while, I equated that exquisite tennis stroke, and the sport in general, with the exquisite universe that 18th century deists believed an almighty clockmaker had set in motion. Along the same lines, I was fascinated by the mechanical doll Olympia that appears in Jacques Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffman; my favorite opera was Mozart’s Magic Flute (which has a music box quality);and my favorite film was Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, which was partially inspired by two intricate 18th century plays, Alfred de Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne and clockmaker playwright Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro. In the film, not surprisingly, there’s a character who collects 18th century music boxes.
[I add as an aside that my English professor son, Tobias Wilson-Bates, is doing exciting research on clocks, machines, and time travel literature in the 19th century. Among other things, he is showing that readers resorted to gothic ghost stories to understand the age’s bewildering technological innovations, including the telegraph, electricity, and the steam engine, and that scientists resorted to such stories to conceptualize their discoveries (e.g., Maxwell’s demon).]
Given my love of controlled elegance, is it any wonder that my favorite athlete of all time is Roger Federer, whose balletic grace took him further than it otherwise might have in an age dominated by powerful serves, heavy topspin groundstrokes, and dogged retrieval. Novelist David Foster Wallace once described Federer as “a religious experience,” to which I would only add that it’s a highly ceremonial religious experience.
When I reached graduate school and immersed myself in 18th century figures, I became more ambivalent about my fascination with clockwork. This was partly because I encountered Romantic attacks on mechanistic thinking, such as William Blake’s critique in “There Is No Natural Religion”:
The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
John Keats, meanwhile, accused Newton of having “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colors,” while Percy Shelley distinguished between analysis and synthesis, between “mere reasoning” and the poetic imagination. These critiques I linked up with Nicholas Fox Weber’s The Art of Tennis, which argues that breaking tennis down to its constituent parts actually makes your game worse. Feel your strokes, don’t analyze them, he counsels, and I worried that my tennis suffered because I was too much inside my head.
I also wondered if Marshall McLuhan was correct when, in Understanding Media (1964), he opined that intellectuals can’t be great tennis players because they take a linear rather than a wholistic approach to the sport.
For all my mixed feelings, however, I really am a child of the Enlightenment. And while, for whatever reason, I’m not a great tennis player and have never claimed to be, I am an enthusiastic one. I may not be fit even to untie one of Federer’s tennis sneakers, but my imagination used to soar when I watched him. Years later, tennis analyst Peter Bodo helped me understand why I found him so transcendent.
Bodo uses the concept of sprezzatura to describe Federer. He borrows the idea from Mark Kingwell’s Catch and Release, a book about flyfishing, which defines sprezzatura as follows:
“Grace” doesn’t quite capture its extension, though that’s part of it. Nor ‘elegance’ either, though again it is partly right. Vitality and lightness are implied, but sprezzatura is more than gaiety. It’s that exhibition of relaxed competence, almost of insouciance, in amateur pursuit of one’s goal. . .
Kingwell notes that the quality of sprezzatura is no longer prized as much as it was in previous eras, finding it in figures like the Cavalier poets of the 17th century (for instance, Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace). Bodo makes the same observation about Federer, observing that he seems like a throwback to a much earlier age. He contrasts him with
the bullishness of Guillermo Vilas, the toughness of Ivan Lendl, the fire of a John McEnroe, the explosive power of a Pete Sampras, that subtle communication of menace that informed the glowering visage of Pancho Gonzalez, or the scary, almost rodent-like bloodlust of Jimmy Connors. But all pale alongside the easy, it’s-no-big-deal domination with which Federer rules.
I remember being heartbroken when Argentinian giant Juan Del Potro used his power to defeat Federer in a U.S. Open final because I felt like the future of tennis lay in brute force. It was like the contest between the boxer and the yokel that Ralph Ellison describes in the opening pages of invisible Man:
Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the hokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger’s posterior.
Many of my most prized sports-watching moments have been watching Federer play. As for my own skills, although I only have a rough simulacrum of Gottfried’s one-handed backhand, it is the strongest part of my game. And although my tennis wasn’t good enough to make Carleton’s team, my love has for the sport has never waned. Sewanee’s indoor courts factored into our retirement decision, and I now run a doubles league where I schedule 25 ardent tennis players in daily doubles matches. Julia and I have also been paying for our Georgia grandchildren to take lesson for several years now, and my reward is that I can now have extended rallies with the three girls, with my seven-year-old grandson waiting in the wings.
I now switch from tennis to soccer, which all three of our sons played, and to baseball, which engaged Justin and Darien. Darien also played tennis—he can now beat me—while Toby added lacrosse to soccer before moving on the St. Mary’s rowing team. I carry around, like precious artifacts, certain memories of them competing.
For instance, I remember Justin at 13 racing in from centerfield and diving to catch a rapidly sinking line drive. Even more vividly, I remember him that same season hitting a game-tying double in the final inning of a night game. A beautiful Dabney Stuart poem, even though it is about football, helps me frame that moment:
Ties By Dabney Stuart
When I faded back to pass Late in the game, as one Who has been away some time Fades back into memory, My father, who had been nodding At home by the radio, Would wake, asking My mother, who had not Been listening, “What’s the score?” And she would answer, “Tied,” While the pass I threw Hung high in the brilliant air Beneath the dark, like a star.
Justin may be long gone—sometimes I am like those drowsy parents and don’t think of him for days—but then that moment will unexpectedly fade back into memory. I see him as I see that ball, hanging suspended in the dark sky as the air around it shimmers.
If Justin was lanky elegance, Darien was concentrated power. One moment that stands out was his performance as a Little League catcher in a game that would determine the conference championship. We were up a run with two outs in the final inning when the batter foul tipped a two-out pitch. I saw it as uncatchable and figured we would have to endure another pitch—only to see Darien launch himself, an intense and furious explosion, against the backstop in a desperate attempt to bring it in. He seemed to fill my whole field of vision, and even though he missed it and it would take another pitch to end the game, I remember thinking that there’s nothing Darien won’t go all-out for. I was in awe of him then and I am still in awe of him as that moment pretty much epitomizes his approach to life. I can say of him as Cassius says of Caesar (but without Cassius’s sarcasm), “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”
Finally there was Toby, who avoided the limelight that his brothers courted, choosing instead to quietly go about his job. As one of his high school team’s fullbacks, he did his job very well, but for a while I seemed to be the only one who noticed that opposing players never scored on his side of the field. I was deeply gratified, then, when a visiting professional coach from England saw him practicing with the college team, recognized his skill, and chose him for a scrimmage.
A couple of stanzas from Marge Piercy’s “To Be of Use” come to mind when I remember Toby on the soccer pitch:
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
What I love about sports is that, along with the wonderful companionship, it provides feedback within a framed experience. Where else do we get such instant results to learn from? Perhaps it’s no accident that I married a woman who played starting guard for Carleton’s basketball team.
Oh, and as for our current sports: my nostalgia for the old Knicks team of Bill Bradley, Clyde Frazier, and Willis Reid has me rooting for New York. And since my first language was French and I have a long history with that country, “Allez les bleus!”
I write today on an important University of Ljubljana dissertation I helped supervise and that our committee recently approved. In her study of biopunk, Majda Nizamič has shown the importance of dystopian science fiction—Margaret Atwood calls it speculative fiction–in helping us negotiate our greatest technological challenges. Novels, Majda makes clear, can go places where expository writing comes up short.
She explains that the biopunk genre “deals with biotechnology, depicting a futuristic society that misuses biotechnology to gain power and exert control.” The genre can be seen to have originated in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but it took on new life following breakthroughs in DNA science. Biopunk focuses on such issues as genetic engineering, human enhancement, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, bioterrorism, and posthuman evolution. Its authors often show that, unchecked, biotechnology can lead to ecological collapse and even the annihilation of the human race.
Biopunk is particularly interested in genetic engineering. Of the four novels that Majda examines, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake looks at splicing and gene editing, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl at agri-tech, Greg Bear’s Blood Music at intelligent cells, and Jeff Vendermeer’s Borne at various forms of enhancement biotech. Because she limits her study to North American works, Madja didn’t mention Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-nominated Never Let Me Go but it also fits the genre.
I am most familiar with Oryx, having taught it multiple times in my nature-themed Intro to Lit class. Here’s Atwood’s description of pigs raised with organs that can be used as transplants:
The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host—organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fight off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there were more strains every year. A rapid maturing gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were perfecting a pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time. Such a host animal could be reaped of its extra kidneys then, rather than being destroyed. It could keep on living and growing more organs, much as a lobster could grow another claw to replace a missing one. That would be less wasteful as it took a lot of food and care to grow a pigoon. A great deal of investment money had gone into OrganInc Farms.
In addition to pigoons, ethically-challenged scientists in Atwood’s novel have created other new species, including rakunks (raccoons and skunks), wolvogs (wolves and dogs), phosphorescent rabbits, liobams (lions and lambs), and caterpillars with smiley faces:
The rakunks had begun as an after-hours hobby on the part of the OrganInc biolab hotshots. There’d been a lot of fooling around in those days: create-an-animal was so much fun, said the guys doing it; it made you feel like God. A number of the experiments were destroyed because they were too dangerous to have around—who needed a cane toad with a prehensile tail like a chameleon’s that might climb in through the bathroom window and blind you while you were brushing your teeth? Then there was the snat, an unfortunate blend of snake and rat: they’d had to get rid of those. But the rakunks caught on as pets, inside OrganInc.
The cosmetics industry also gets involved:
There were pigoons at NooSkins, just as at OrganInc Farms, but these were smaller and were being used to develop skin-related biotechnologies. The main idea was to find a method of replacing the older epidermis with a fresh one, not a laser-thinned or dermabraded short-term resurfacing but a genuine start-over skin that would be wrinkle- and blemish-free. For that, it would be useful to grow a young, plump skin cell that would eat up the worn cells in the skins of those on whom it was planted and replace them with replicas of itself, like algae growing on a pond.
Majda writes that we should think of biopunk as thought experiments that “aid us in imagining the improbable, or even impossible, which deepen our understanding and comprehension of the world around and from within us.” She says that although we may derive some comfort that this hasn’t happened yet, there’s always the possibility that the novels are predictive. Indeed, if the once vibrant genre of cyberpunk has fallen off, to be replaced by biopunk, it’s because computers taking over our lives now seems normal rather than a futurist nightmare.
In her conclusion, Majda asks a number of important questions, including
— Will humans become more human or less so, more biological or less, over time? –What are the consequences of unbridled use of biotechnology, such as genetic engineering and splicing? –Are we on the path of remaking humanity? –Might we at some point also be talking about a “synthetica sapiens” which will come to replace homo sapiens?
Returning to Oryx and Crake after a decade away from it, I was dispirited by how much closer we are to the world Atwood depicts. In her dystopia, large corporations and big money run everything, regulations have been swept away so that laissez faire capitalism reigns supreme, and great gaps have opened between the super wealthy and everyone else. We were well on our way to this America prior to Trump, but his pay-to-play policies, along with Project 2025, have accelerated the process.
Majda quotes one passage from the book which helps explain the rise of vaccine skepticism and Robert Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” schtick. If you can’t trust the pharmaceutical giants, then why not “do your own research” and opt for your own remedies? The advice comes from a survivalist who is living off the land:
Now, promise me that you will never take any pill made by a Corporation. Never buy such a pill, and never accept any such pill if offered, no matter what they say. They’ll produce data and scientists; they’ll produce doctors – worthless, they’ve all been bought.’ ‘Surely not all of them!’ said Toby, shocked by Pilar’s vehemence: she was usually so calm. ‘No,’ said Pilar. ‘Not all. But all who are still working with any of the Corporations. The others – some have died unexpectedly. But those still alive – those with any shred of the old medical ethic left in them …’ She paused. ‘There are doctors like that, still. But not at the Corps’.
It turns out that, in this instance, Pilar is right since there is a mad scientist who creates a pill that kills practically all of the world’s humans (although Toby and Pilar escape). In the case of MAHA, unfortunately, skeptics are rejecting legitimate science, which in turn is leading to the return of measles, whooping cough, and other diseases we had all but stamped out. Also, thanks to Elon Musk’s DOGE boys, we’re seeing the return of screw worms in our cattle and Ebola in Africa.
Majda’s dissertation needs to get out into the world because it shows that the novels it treats are grappling with foundational questions. As I read through it, I thought of a Laguna elder’s admonition at the beginning of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony:
I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just for entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.
“While America Burns, Trump Builds Himself a Colosseum,” Thom Hartmann declares on his blog The Hartmann Report before citing the Roman poet Juvenal. “The UFC spectacle is more than a cage fight;” he writes; “it’s a monument to corruption, self-enrichment, and the imperial Roman politics of bread and circus.”
Referring to Satire X: The Vanity of Human Wishes, Hartmann elaborates:
There’s an ancient phrase for governing this way, and it isn’t a compliment. The Roman poet Juvenal, watching his republic rot into empire, sneered that a people who once handed out commands and legions had shrunk their whole appetite down to two things, panem et circenses, bread and circuses.
Keep the mob fed and entertained with a little blood, and they’ll never notice the men in charge stripping the place down to the studs.
Vanity of Human Wishes was much admired by such satirists as John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson. (Johnson’s greatest poem, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” is a brilliant imitation.) Given Rome’s record of emperors since Augustus, Juvenal is understandably more acerbic than his gentle forerunner Horace, and while I myself have always leaned more towards Horatian satire, DJT has threatened to make a Juvenalian out of me.
Satire X is broken into such sections as “Be Careful What You Ask For,” “The Emptiness of Power,” “The Penalties of a Long Life,” and “And as for Good Looks.” The bread and circuses line appears in “Emptiness of Power” and refers to the fickle mob.
The context is the fall of Sejanus, the head of the Praetorian Guard for 17 years and counselor to the emperor Tiberius. When Tiberius retired to Capri, Sejanus took over administrative control of the empire. Juvenal observes that if Fate, in the figure of the Etruscan goddess Nortia, has ruled differently, Sejanus might even have become emperor. Instead, upon orders from Capri, he was accused of treason and executed. Juvenal describes the mob’s reaction to the fall of men in high positions:
The wheels of their chariots are smashed, and broken to pieces, With axes, while the legs of their innocent horses are shattered. Now the flames roar, the bellows hiss, and the head idolized By the people glows in the furnace, flames crackle around the huge Sejanus, the face of the man who was number two in the world Is converted to jugs and basins, turned to pots and frying pans. Deck your houses with laurel, lead a great bull whitened with Chalk up to the Capitol: come see Sejanus dragged along by A hook, everyone’s celebrating! “Look at the lips, look at the Face on that! You can take it from me, he was never a man That I liked.” “But what was the crime that brought him down?! Who informed, what’s the evidence, where are the witnesses?” “That’s all irrelevant; a lengthy and wordy letter arrived from Capri.” “That’s fine answer enough.”
I think of how a mob suddenly turned on Vice President Mike Pence, brought in to shore up Trump’s evangelical base, in response to a not-so-wordy directive from the White House. Other men and women elevated by Trump should take note.
Whether this mob will ever turn on Trump himself remains to be seen. They have certainly failed to live up to the informed citizenry that Thomas Jefferson envisioned as the bulwark of democracy. Here’s Juvenal again, hearkening back to a time when the people—or at least the Senate—had a say in Roman affairs:
They shed their sense of responsibility Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only, Bread and circuses.
Two thousand years ago Juvenal foresaw how politics as entertainment would replace politics as civic responsibility.
What’s striking about Trump is that he provides only entertainment. As Hartmann sardonically notes
,The Roman emperors understood the deal they were making with the public: bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the cheap grain and the gladiator games delivered together, because if you fed them and entertained them they wouldn’t ask awkward questions about the empire. Trump has inverted the formula. He’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.
I wonder if even some in MAGA will see a privately staged cage fight as degrading “the people’s house.”
At the end of his satire, Juvenal tells us what we should wish for in an era of greed and self-aggrandizement. You’ve probably heard it: Mens sana in corpore sano or “a healthy mind and a sound body”:
You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body. Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death, and deems length of days the least of Nature’s gifts that can endure any kind of toil, that knows neither wrath nor desire and thinks the woes and hard labors of Hercules better than the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus. What I commend to you, you can give to yourself; For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.
Imagine if we all dedicated ourselves to living a life of virtue.
Added note: During Trump’s first term I applied Samuel Johnson’s imitation of Satire X to him and his sycophants. Think of figures like Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Tulsi Gabbard in the following lines:
Unnumber’d suppliants crowd Preferment’s gate, Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great; Delusive Fortune hears th’ incessant call, They mount, they shine, evaporate and fall. On every stage the foes of peace attend, Hate dogs their flight, and Insult mocks their end.
Cooper and Cumming as plotters Antonio and Sebastian
Tuesday
My faculty book group just finished discussing The Tempest, the last play in our Shakespeare binge, undertaken before Sewanee’s Shakespearen, Pamela Macfie, moves to Maine. For years a beloved professor, Pamela previously led us in discussions of Hamlet, King Lear, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night. As we talked about the drama that many consider to be the Bard’s farewell to theater, I recalled teaching itat the University of Ljubljana only hours after learning that Trump had defeated Kamala Harris.
In the course of election night, I kept changing the post I was writing on Shakespeare’s play. When it was fairly clear that Trump would emerge victorious, I introduced my essay with the following (slightly amended) note:
If today’s essay is a bit uneven, it’s because–writing it from Slovenia–I started it fairly confident that Kamala Harris would win the election, only to begin realizing we were witnessing 2016 redux as the night wore on. What Shakespeare designed as a comic if somewhat disturbing subplot in Shakespeare’s final play–inept insurrectionists trying to overthrow Prospero, destroy his magic book, and seize Miranda–suddenly became our central action. It was as if The Tempest had transmuted into Richard III. (Think of Prospero’s book as the Constitution, Miranda as reproductive freedom.) In the course of the night, my headline changed from “Caliban vs. Prospero” to “Can Caliban Defeat Prospero?” to (sadly) “Caliban Defeats Prospero.” Following Trump’s victory, white nationalist Nick Fuentes gloated, in a tweet that received 22,000 likes, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Or as Caliban fantasizes after Prospero reminds him that he “didst seek to violate the honor of my child,”
O ho, O ho! would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else This isle with Calibans.
When I walked into class the following morning, I noticed that every one of my students was scrutinizing me for my reaction. How would an American respond to the dreadful news? Because I have always been careful to keep my politics out of my classes—after all, I have conservative as well as liberal students—I didn’t say much, but the students could tell my heart wasn’t in my teaching. Halfway through the class, I discovered I couldn’t go on and ended early, something I never do.
Reexamining the play a year and a half later, I find it more relevant than ever, despite its being a comedy. As Trump and various Republicans look for ways to steal the upcoming Congressional elections, it’s useful to remember that the play features a string of coups and attempted coups. First there is Antonio, Prospero’s brother, overthrowing him with the aid of Alonso, king of Naples. Prospero is cast adrift with his daughter Miranda, and only with the aid of his magical books, provided him by the kindly Gonzalo, is he able to survive.
Then Prospero himself seizes the island from Caliban. Although the monster claims ownership, however—“This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me”—it is worth noting that Sycorax herself stole the island from Ariel, whom she imprisoned in a tree. Caliban is like those white supremacists who contend that their America is being stolen from them without acknowledging others who have equal or even prior claim.
Shakespeare is not done with takeover attempts. First, Antonio suggests to Sebastian that they kill Alonso, Sebastian’s brother, in a repeat of Antonio’s seizure of power. That way Antonio will free himself of the debt he owes to Naples. Then there’s Caliban plotting with jester Trinculo and butler Stephano to kill Prospero and wed Miranda. Caliban has a variety of different plans for doing this, just as Trump has multiple ideas about stealing the next election, from seizing voter rolls and voting machines to creating racist gerrymanders to posting ICE agents at polling places to having the postal service intervene. Note how Caliban too fantasizes about the many ways he can overthrow Prospero.
Perhaps we can think of Prospero’s books as the Constitution, without which America is “but a sot, as I am, nor hath not one spirit to command.” Indeed, democracy rests upon the Constitution.
Fortunately for Prospero, the insurgents are as inept as those who stormed the Capitol on January 6. As I noted in my original post, when Stephano and Trinculo get to Prospero’s cave, they behave like those who wandered around the building taking selfies, trashing Nancy Pelosi’s office, and looting souvenirs. In this case, they put on Prospero’s garments, infuriating Caliban, who understands Prospero’s power:
The dropsy drown this fool I what do you mean To dote thus on such luggage? Let’s alone And do the murder first: if he awake, From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches, Make us strange stuff.
Caliban himself is like those MAGA fanatics whose cult-like devotion to their leader blind them to his buffoonery. Caliban has attached himself to Stephano in part because he is intoxicated with his liquor—”I’ll swear upon that bottle to be thy true subject; for the liquor is not earthly”—and Trump’s supporters experience a similar high. Only at the end does Caliban realize that he has sworn allegiance to an idiot:
We’ve been praying for a while that Trump voters will experience their own remorse.
The character of Prospero is worth examining further given our own situation. He has taken his eyes off the ball once already, failing to anticipate Antonio’s coup, and he may be naïve in thinking that all will work out in the future if he simply forgives his enemies. Here he is with his usurping brother:
One can see some of the same naiveté in his daughter. When she delivers her best-known line—“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/ That has such people in’t!”—three of the four she is looking at are coup plotters. One also sees such naiveté in Gonzalo, who believes that they have landed in an Edenic paradise but fails to acknowledge—as Sebastian and Antonio do–the power dynamics that are always present in human society.
Will all go well once Prospero magnanimously breaks his staff and drowns his book? To this point, he has been able to maintain social order because he can in fact command a spirit. In a way, Prospero is like those who believe our Constitutional democracy has sufficient safeguards to ward off threats. But without Ariel orchestrating a happy ending, Sebastian and Antonio would kill Alonso and Gonzalo and the Caliban crew would kill Prospero. When the magician says to Alonso, “Two of these fellows you/ Must know and own; this thing of darkness!/ Acknowledge mine,” he could be reminding us today that, for all our idealism, America has always had a Caliban side.
In other words, I can look at Trump and say, “This thing of darkness! Acknowledge mine.” He did not arise ex nihilo but is a manifestation of a strain that has been with us since the beginning.
The good news is that, although that darkness prevailed in 2024 election (barely), it doesn’t have to get the last word. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Prospero famously says, and America’s Constitutional democracy is also made on a dream. In the play, rightful rulers Ferdinand and Miranda represent a new hope.
Whether our own usurpers will be defeated by people committed to a multicultural society is the question of the hour.
A recent Tempest citation: Blogger Phil Williams, in his column Hate Comes to Main Street, borrows the line “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” to describe a disturbing attempt by neo-Nazis to assume control of the Southern Baptist Convention. and neo-Nazis. Apparently William Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, is push blood and soil politics, KKK genetic theories, and a Baptist version of Sharia Law. Although the group has not yet taken over the SBC, they are making a concerted push.
The “strange bedfellows” reference, which originated with Shakespeare, is to the strangest scene in the play. Trinculo, to escape the rain, crawls under the gaberdine under which Caliban is hiding, even though he smells strongly of fish. Stephano, coming upon the pair, thinks he is witnessing “some monster of the isle with four legs.” When he hears the voice of a companion he believes he has drowned, he is utterly confused. As are those of us who see a man quoting Christ in the cause of cultural genoicide.
It sounds like the SBC has not yet joined forces with Wolfe as Caliban does with Trinculo and Stephano. “Strange bedfellows,” however, already describes Trump’s alliance with Christian evangelicals, so Williams’s warning should not be taken lightly.
Reaffirming our wedding vows after 50 years (and in our original—albeit slightly altered—wedding garb!)
Monday
Today Julia and I celebrate our 53rd wedding anniversary. When I asked her if I could share something she wrote about bringing up our sons, she suggested the poem below instead. “If I Go First” was penned a little over a year ago, shortly after Julia. experienced a stroke that put her in the hospital for three days. Although she emerged relatively unscathed, her brush with mortality led her to pen this love note. She imagined me finding it on her computer if she suddenly passed away.
While there are other reasons to survey and reflect on one’s marriage, the rattle of bones gives a special urgency to the exercise. The poem begins with our meeting at Carleton College (our senior year I edited the Carletonian while Julia was the arts editor); journeys on to graduate school in Atlanta; mentions a trip to France (Julia’s first venture abroad); and then takes us to our jobs, first at Morehouse College (for me) and a Decatur middle school (for her) before ending up in southern Maryland, where I and then eventually she taught for St. Mary’s College of Maryland. In both Atlanta and Maryland we lived in Black communities, and one of the caregivers with the voice of an angel was William Boyd, a music major from inner city Baltimore who lived with us for four years. He then journeyed with us to Yugoslavia, where he sang gospel in major concert halls in Zagreb and Sarajevo.
Of course, losing our eldest son is mentioned. (The secret society is parents who have lost a child.) The poem ends with the two of us paired one-on-one, as we were in the beginning, our other sons having departed to form families of their own.
To borrow a Philip Larkin image but using it very differently than he does, a good marriage deepens like a continental shelf. The passage of years has worn away various sharp edges and there comes a time when (now I’m stealing from Ezra Pound) “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours/ Forever and forever, and forever.” Not that we’re in the dust state yet (I hope). Just very good friends and essential supporters as well as lovers.
If I Go First By Julia Bates
If I go first Then here in some small way I want to tell you about All you have given me
We began our relationship As a team on a weekly college paper You as editor Me following the arts| We learned to listen To guide To create a small community Of creatives, the first of many
We followed family As we always would Even those times when Our neglected parents Sent fill in the blank Post cards to establish That we still lived
We studied We taught We played scrabble And held weekly Supper clubs Another community of Twenty somethings who Were grimly unsure that We could save the world But would not give up trying
You took me across oceans and into The thicket of a language I thought I knew from School. HAH! But we garnered Chocolates and cheese And I finally knew what Abroad meant.
And then children As a choice Though my father groaned He would never see his grandchildren And died to prove his point I had played him the sound Of the heartbeat of my first son A month before he died.
Big graduations And first jobs In places Where white skin Stood out And finally a place that Anchored us firmly in the south In a neighborhood that taught us how to Raise children in diversity With caregivers who had voices of angels
Children grow up They grow away With varying degrees of Anger, resistance, and distaste And at a river’s edge The oldest died In cold sunshine And in the following weeks The four of us stood alone Together
And we haunted poems For warmth and Assurance that whether We wanted to or not We would live Part of a secret society No one wants to join
Healing has come As guilt has weathered away. What we did or did not do Is beside the point We turned to love And the sons who Stood beside us Through it all. And you continued to shower Us with words in that Magic way you have of finding A thought here, an event there, Connected to a past writer All loops threaded in that sweet mind Of yours.
In joy our sons have Formed families Of their own And we are back to Two table settings Two suitcases for travel Not twelve Navy duffels Two for walks Two for the pew in church
And if you are reading this At some point You will be sitting alone But surrounded by all who We have touched By the web of love That still holds And I send you my deepest Love from whatever new Place I occupy To keep you warm To let you know you were Always the greatest gift You could have given me.
I’m very glad that I didn’t have to wait for Julia to die to read this. It has led us to reminisce together, perhaps the best thing one can do to celebrate an anniversary.
It’s no surprise that the Christian right is losing its mind over Texas senate candidate James Talarico. Liberals aren’t supposed to quote Jesus when they campaign (or, for that matter, ever). Still, even I was taken aback when Mike Lee, a vitriolic Mormon senator from Utah, accused him of being in thrall to Moloch, the Palestinian god to whom babies were supposedly sacrificed. The accusation sends me back to Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl,” written in 1955-56, where Moloch stands in for an America that is destroying “the best minds of my generation.” From the poet’s perspective, the real Moloch is the America that Trump & Co. want to return us to.
The Moloch accusation arises from Talarico’s support for a woman’s right to an abortion. As Talarico said to Stephen Colbert in an interview that CBS banned after pressure from Trump,
[T]he religious right … convinced a lot of our fellow Christians that the most important issues were abortion and gay marriage, two issues that aren’t mentioned in the Bible. Two issues that Jesus never talked about. Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I and … our fellow believers [are] going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger. Nothing about going to church. Nothing about voting Republican. It was all about how you treat other people.
Talarico believes that creation is a matter of freedom and consent and that abortion is consistent with Christian values. After all, he argues, God asked for, and received, Mary’s permission to impregnate her. John Stoehr at Editorial Board, to whom I owe this information, notes that this used to be taken for granted by Protestants. And although Catholics have always been against abortion, Pope Leo recently made the same point, that Christians make a mistake when they prioritize abortion over the Sermon on the Mount or Matthew 25:40-45 (“whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”).
In my opinion, the right wing’s “right to life” obsession has more to do with controlling women than with honoring life, for which they show little interest. As Stoehr observes, they believe they must slime Talarico in every way possible since, if he “is allowed to explain himself and his theological views, free of the slander against him, the most conservative religious voter might come to the conclusion that despite being a Democrat, he’s still a good Christian.” Stoehr adds,
As was the case during Donald Trump’s three campaigns, what matters to many voters isn’t leadership or policy or character. What matters is the collective desire to punch down on people whom the mob believes are deserving of it. (In this case, Talarico is associated with LGBTQ folks.) GOP campaigns are now like Vegas: what’s done there stays there. They are vacations from morality, excuses to indulge in deviance and depravity. That Texans would suffer by electing [Republican candidate Ken] Paxton doesn’t change the fact that they think slandering “Soy Boy” is fun.
Given that Trump and rightwing Christians want to return America to their idealized view of the 1950s, it’s interesting to look at Ginsberg’s depiction from that period. As he saw it, the machinery of modern America consisted of money, war, government and soul-crushing conformity. In his long howl of a poem, he gives us images that we recognize:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!… Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
What with the Trump family’s boundless greed and pay-to-play corruption, along with the president’s love of bombing, his attacks on environmental regulation, his promotion of fossil fuels (smokestacks that “crown the cities”), his paving over the rose garden and the White House lawn, his soulless skyscrapers and other “cement and aluminum” temples to himself (“granite cocks” sounds about right), his “crossbone soulless”prisons, his desecration of national parks and other hallowed institutions, his “Congress of sorrows,” Ginsberg could well be describing the aspirations of Project 2025.
“Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!” Check and check.
For all its apocalyptic despair, however, “Howl” ends on a note of hope as Ginsberg imagines America awakening to its potential. Although despair over the American dream has driven one of the “best minds”–his socialist friend Carl Solomon–to drugs and to incarceration at the Rockland Psychiatric Center, Ginsberg imagines that dream triumphing in the end. It will resurrect like Jesus “from the superhuman tomb” and we will “wake up electrified out of the coma.” In an inversion of war imagery, our “own souls’ airplanes” will drop angelic bombs,” the imaginary walls will collapse (what William Blake called “the mind forg’d manacles”), and we will run outside in our underwear, free at last. “O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here”:
I’m with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I’m with you in Rockland where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I’m with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Although dreaming in the face of a suffocating reality (or, for that matter, Trumpism) may lead to madness, Ginsberg tells us that it can also lead to freedom. The poem ends with that archetypal journey, the western Odyssey, where new possibilities open up. The American dream doesn’t die just because there are setbacks.
My Ginsberg experience: I was invited to a dinner with Ginsberg when he came to St. Mary’s College of Maryland to see his friend Lucille Clifton and can report that he was interested in everything. When I told him that my research field was 18th century British literature, he rhapsodized about the mad poet Christopher Smart, author of the very Ginsbergian poem “Jubilate Agno.” (“For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry./ For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.”) When I mentioned that I was writing an article on Jean Renoir’s 1939 film Rules of the Game, he reported that he saw the film in the 1940s with Neal Cassady. Later that evening, he mesmerized a packed auditorium by having us sing a stanza from Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” repeatedly for 20+ minutes as he accompanied us on a harmonium.
