Harry Kane celebrates after England’s World Cup win over the Republic of Congo
Thursday
Like much of the world, I have been enthralled by the World Cup. My favorite game so far has been England vs. the Republic of Congo, with England captain Harry Kane leading his team to a come-from-behind victory with two magnificent goals. The commentators had difficulty praising him enough, with Thierry Henry proposing he be referred to as Sir Harry Kane. They could also have compared him to Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Henry’s nickname is Harry, and in the play’s prologue we learn that a fiery muse is needed to announce the magnificence of this “warlike” king:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars…
Things were looking very grim for England up until the final 20 minutes or so, and I like to think that Kane gave a version of the St. Crispin’s Day speech during the hydration break. “Once more into the breach dear friends,” I imagine him saying, “or close the wall up with our English dead.”
Then he could have punctuated his speech with Henry’s rousing finale:
And you, good yeoman, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture; let us swear That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not; For there is none of you so mean and base, That hath not noble luster in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
The game really is afoot when it comes to soccer, with greyhound-fast players exploiting the tiniest of breaches. And in the end, like Harry at Agincourt, England prevailed.
My librarian friend Valerie Hotchkiss sent me a book that she has been teaching in an online bibliotherapy class, which at one point I visited. Because Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World so directly coincides with my own interests, I share here a passage from the opening letter.
In it, Wolf looks at how she came to study the impact of screens on our brains. I love the passion with which she talks about her early reading experiences.
Excerpted from Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home
What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace. In a span of only six millennia reading became the transformative catalyst for intellectual development within individuals and within literature cultures. The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species. There is much at stake in the development of the reading brain and in the quickening changes that now characterize its current, evolving iterations….
[W]hen I was a child learning to read, I did not think about reading. Like Alice, I simply jumped down reading’s hole into Wonderland and disappeared for most of my childhood. When I was a young woman, I did not think about reading. I simply became Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, and Isabel Archer at every opportunity. Sometimes I became men like Alyosha Karamazov, Hans Castorp, and Holden Caulfield. But always I was lifted to places very far from the little town of Eldorado, Illinois, and always I burned with emotions I could never otherwise have imagined.
Even when I was a graduate student of literature, I did not think very much about reading. Rather, I pored over every word, every encrypted meaning in the Duino Elegies by Rilke and novels by George Eliot and John Steinbeck, and felt myself bursting with sharpened perceptions of the world and anxious to fulfill my responsibilities within it.
I failed my first round at the latter miserably and memorably. With all the enthusiasm a young, flimsily prepared teacher can have, I began a Peace Corps-like stint in rural Hawaii along with a small and wonderful group of fellow would-be teachers. There I stood daily before twenty-four unutterably beautiful children. They looked at me with complete confidence, and we looked at each other with total, reciprocated affection. For a while those children and I were oblivious to the fact that I could change the circumstances of their life trajectories if I could help them become literate, unlike many in their families. Then, only then, did I begin to think seriously about what reading means. It changed the direction of my life.
With sudden and complete clarity I saw what would happen if those children could not learn the seemingly simple act of passage into a culture based on literacy. They would never fall down a hole and experience the exquisite joys of immersion in the reading life. They would never discover Dinotopia, Hogwarts, Middle Earth, or Pemberley. They would never wrestle through the night with ideas too large to fit within their smaller worlds. They would never experience the great shift that moves from reading about characters like the Lightning Thief and Matilda to believing they could become heroes and heroines themselves. And most important of all, they might never experience the infinite possibilities within their own thoughts that emerge whole cloth from each fresh encounter with worlds outside their own. I realized in a whiplash burst that those children, all mine for one year, might never reach their full potential as human beings if they never learned to read.
From that moment on, I began in earnest to think about reading’s capacity to change the course of an individual life.
I’ve been thinking about the lament, in a Guardian article that came out earlier in the month, that our digital age is ruining our novel reading. “Surrounded by screens,” moans freelance writer Ioan Marc Jones, “I lost my ability to read some of the best books ever written.”
The article got me wondering whether screens are having any impact on my own novel reading since I now move constantly between different forms of electronically delivered fiction, from Kindle to Guttenberg novels on my laptop to Libby novels an on my phone to audiobooks (Libby again). And while I still read two or three novels a week, it’s true that I no longer bury myself in them for hours at a time.
Jones uses his parents to depict the ideal reader:
My parents hail from the literary working class, a subsection of society that believes great works lead to a richer life. Reading for them was an inverted form of class snobbery. My dad could read as well as anyone. He’d prove it on package holidays, sitting on the balcony the entire time, head bowed, cigarette in hand, flicking through the pages of Jane Austen or Herman Melville.
Inspired by them, Jones too was once such a reader. In his late teens and early twenties, he says, he worked his way through the great works, especially falling in love with Middlemarch. (“I was a smart lad, prone to bad decisions, unsure of my place in the world. It is perhaps no surprise that I identified with Dorothea.”) Later he moved on to such contemporary authors as Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante, Roddy Doyle, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Jones experienced his moment of self-doubt when he encountered the Guardian’s list of “the 100 greatest novels” (here’s my post about the list) and set out to read the 32 he hadn’t read. Suddenly he found himself impatient where once he had been engrossed. Dickens no longer captivated him, and he describes Our Mutual Friend as “complicated, the prose as heavy as the 900-page book.” With Dracula he struggled “with the glaring absurdity of the epistolary format.” Tristram Shandy, meanwhile, he found to be “inexcusable,” with the language “verbose,” the language “indecipherable,” and the detours “infuriating.”
I should note, in Sterne’s defense, that he anticipated that readers would balk at his detours. We know this from his over-the-top praise of authorial digressions.
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;——they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.
Henry Fielding, whose Tom Jones I would have chosen over (or at least placed along side of) Tristram Shandy, also anticipates readers chafing at his self-reflective introductory chapters. “There may be no parts in this prodigious work,” he writes,
which will give the reader less pleasure in the perusing, than those which have given the author the greatest pains in composing. Among these probably may be reckoned those initial essays which we have prefixed to the historical matter contained in every book; and which we have determined to be essentially necessary to this kind of writing, of which we have set ourselves at the head.
To eliminate these introductory chapters, however, would be like (to use a parallel I applied when teaching Tom Jones) removing the framing device from the movie Princess Bride: suddenly we would get a love story without the wonderful cosmopolitan irony.
Novel reading can be compared to the slow food movement: the point is savoring the work as you go along, not simply filling your stomach with plot. Sterne, Dickens, and Fielding are all inviting us into a friendship that will grow over time. Having just listened to an audiobook of Our Mutual Friend, I found nothing at all heavy about it—but that was because I took my time. The same was true with Fanny Burney’s 900-page Cecilia, which I recently read for the first time. Each evening I would read twenty or thirty pages and, by the end, could understand why Jane Austen was a fan.
Another way to think of this is that authors are charismatic cult leaders, using their individual style to reprogram our minds. But we have to be willing participants in this reprogramming—we must suspend our disbelief—in order to experience what they are offering us. It can be a gradual process.
Jones comes to this realization in the course of writing his article. For instance, he quotes a senior lecturer in 19th-century literature at St Andrews, who
advocates the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: “Replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.” Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and plenty of others initially appeared in that format. Self-serialising slows us down, lets us linger on the text, and creates suspense. “Read one chapter per session and you’ll be better placed to appreciate the detail of these Victorian worlds – and their cliffhangers.”
A number of writers have observed that reading is like a muscle, which must be exercised over time. To this, Jones adds that good reading
begets better reading. In The Novel: A BiographyThe Novel: a Biography, Michael Schmidt writes: “Reading is a cumulative act, adding skills, increasingly creative as it goes. To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure.” The more you read, the richer the reading.
After getting those muscles working again, Jones reports returning to his early love of Dickens
I’ve adopted the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: I cover only a few chapters at a time and put the book down, with a thud, even if I want to continue. I am taking Our Mutual Friend slowly, without rushing towards a self-inflicted finish line. The digressions still bore me, but I’m learning to appreciate the arguments, the flurries (at least the good ones). I’m slowly getting used to the longer sentences, the shifts in register, the complicated syntax. My love of classics is creeping back.
While I’ve never lost this love, it’s true that the presence of electronic texts volleying and thundering to the left and right of me have disrupted my reading. Writing a literary essay a day has also eaten into my reading time. A few chapters in my down times, however, still offer up immense rewards.
Last year I wrote the following post about how Donald Trump isn’t entirely managing to escape accountability, although his punishment has been more existential than judicial and doesn’t help the rest of us.
Reprinted from January 14, 2025
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has just announced that Donald Trump, had he not been just reelected president, would have been prosecuted for the January 6 coup attempt. One of Donald Trump’s special powers has been his ability to escape accountability, which he has accomplished by abusing the law in the manner of his mentor Roy Cohn, stacking the Supreme Court, and playing a special brand of resentment politics. So are we to conclude that he has gotten away with everything?
In Anthony Trollope’s Small House at Allingham, which I’ve just finished, the author addresses this very question. Although young and stylish Crosby has promised to marry the wonderful but penniless Lily Dale, a week later, blinded by the lights of high society, he makes a second marriage proposal, this time to the daughter of a peer. While Lily’s friends and families are infuriated at the way Crosby appears to escape all punishment, Trollope points out that he doesn’t escape at all.
That’s because Crosby is miserable in his mercenary marriage, with a wife that doesn’t love him and an aristocratic family that bullies him. How much more joyous his life would be, he thinks, had he married the loving and caring Lily, despite her lack of money. While Lily’s friends are described as “wretched in thinking that this man was escaping without punishment,” Trollope assures us that he’s suffering “as much as they could desire.” They just don’t realize it:
Those who offend us are generally punished for the offence they give; but we so frequently miss the satisfaction of knowing that we are avenged! It is arranged, apparently, that the injurer shall be punished, but that the person injured shall not gratify his desire for vengeance.
So is Trump being punished in ways we cannot see? After watching Trump attack fire-ravaged California and direct a volley of hate tweets at Jack Smith, television comic Seth Meyers, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, I was struck by just how miserable he is. He appears shackled to those he attacks.
I borrow the image from a recent New Yorker article about Paradise Lost, which notes how Milton’s Satan is tied to his victims. I’ve compared Trump to Satan multiple times—they are both supreme narcissists—and author Merve Emre observes that, for all his success in making humans miserable, Satan never experiences the joy of true freedom. Emre describes Milton’s view of such freedom as follows:
In his 1654 treatise “The Second Defence of the People of England,” Milton wrote, “Know that to be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave.”
Satan, by contrast, has a debased version of freedom:
By the sun’s blinding rays, we can perceive how depraved Satan’s freedom is. By one hand, he is bound to himself, to his impiety, his recklessness, his envy and pride, his guilt and spite. “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell,” he laments. By the other hand, he is bound to the Almighty, whom, as the critic John Guillory has observed, Satan imitates. But God’s authority tends toward reason and grace; Satan’s is a poor, perverse copy. His every thought is shaped in reaction to God’s glory. It is as if God had never lifted Satan’s chains.
For his part, Trump is a slave to his resentment. Satan’s line “myself am hell”—which is inspired by Mephistopheles’s line in Doctor Faustus “why this is hell, nor am I out of it”—is Trump’s existential state. When Satan says, “The mind can make a heaven of hell or hell of heaven,” he accurately describes how both he and Trump have made perpetual hells for themselves.
One should note that Marlowe in his turn borrows from Dante to describe Mephistopheles’s condition. As the devil puts it,
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
Dante’s damned have consigned themselves to everlasting torment because they choose their compulsions over God’s love. Some are aware of what they have done, others just blindly writhe. For all the similarities between Satan and Trump, Satan appears more self-aware. Trump seems to be in hell without knowing it, more Grendel in this regard than Satan.
While I believe Trump is suffering, I draw no pleasure from it. That’s because I’m far more concerned about the effects of that suffering: those who are miserable often do all they can to make others miserable. “For only in destroying I find ease/ To my relentless thoughts,” Satan says, providing a profound insight into why Trump behaves as he does.
Domenichino Domenico Zampieri, Abraham Leading Isaac to Sacrifice
Sunday
I’m reposting a past essay on the horrifying Abraham and Isaac story as Julia and I are currently in Washington, D.C. attending the wedding of a close family friend. We will leave before our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, which our president has somehow confused with his own.
Reprinted from June 27, 2020
Is there a more horrifying story in the Bible than that of Abraham and Isaac, today’s Old Testament reading? Other stories feature more bloodshed (Noah’s flood) and raise comparable challenges (God allowing Satan to torment Job), but the intimacy of Abraham’s supposedly God-ordered sacrifice of his son sets it apart.
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, host of The Velveteen Rabbi, imagines Abraham as a faulty interpreter of God’s word. Abraham, she notes, has a mixed history. On the one hand, he is a force for life: he has dug wells and has pushed back against God’s determination to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. He also has a violent streak, however, such as when he smashed idols. Barenblat wonders why he doesn’t consult Sarah in this instance. How does he know God’s voice is actually God’s voice?
Barenblat’s Abraham sounds like an abusive parent in the way he suddenly switches from violence to remorse. His terrible punishment is that “God never spoke to him again,” which explains the poem’s title:
Silence (Vayera) By Rachel Barenblat
Abraham failed the test. For Sodom and Gomorrah he argued but when it came to his son no protest crossed his lips.
God was mute with horror. Abraham, smasher of idols and digger of wells was meant to talk back.
Sarah would have been wiser but Abraham avoided her tent, didn’t lay his head in her lap to unburden his secret heart.
In stricken silence God watched as Abraham saddled his ass and took Isaac on their final hike to the place God would show him.
The angel had to call him twice. Abraham’s eyes were red, his voice hoarse he wept like a man pardoned but God never spoke to him again.
Barenblat appears to be calling for humility when it comes to what we think God is telling us. Far too many of us impose our own agendas on God rather than engaging in dialogue with God’s voice. As a result, throughout history God’s will has been invoked in countless acts of horror.
If we genuinely want to hear from God rather than our own egos, we must listen with our minds, our hearts, and our souls. We must also turn to others to help us hear.
Further thought: Last week I shared a Thylias Moss poem that imagined God changing once His divinity took on human form. Put another way, our vision of God becomes more humane as we evolve so that He (and now She) is no longer the avenging punisher that shows up in many of the Old Testament stories. Along these lines, the story of Abraham and Isaac has sometimes been seen as capturing Israel’s evolution from human to animal sacrifice.
Put another way, the bigger we become, the bigger God gets, something Jesus understood in a foundational way. To cite today’s Gospel’s reading,
Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple– truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward” (Matthew 10:40-42).
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 39th Installment
This memoir is finally reaching the present so the end is in sight, although I may include a few follow-up posts on particular themes. In today’s installment I go back to my last two years at St. Mary’s, the second of which included a brush with mortality.
In 2016 Julia moved to Sewanee to (1) be with my mother, who was depressed over having lost my father three years earlier and (2) spend half weeks in Georgia with our third granddaughter. Childcare was needed as our daughter-in-law Candice had been hired for a dual position in Film Studies and Asian Studies at the University of North Georgia while our son Tobias was teaching at Georgia Tech.
Living alone was already a challenge, and then in 2017 I contracted a case of myocarditis and pericarditis. If Julia had been in Maryland, she would have insisted that we drive to the emergency room when I started experiencing back pains in the middle of the night, but instead I gritted my teeth and made an appointment with my doctor the following morning.
She thought, as I did, that I had pulled a muscle playing tennis but sent me to the hospital for an EKG to make sure. I barely made the trip there—driving at 15 miles an hour, I was prepared to pull over and call 911—and then had to wait for 90 minutes for the EKG. Once the nurse saw the results, however, everything sped up as the emergency room physicians, fearing I was suffering from a heart attack, bundled me into a helicopter and flew me to a Washington hospital.
It turned out that all I needed was an anti-inflammatory, and I was well enough in the evening to post an essay, a point of pride since I hadn’t missed one since I began the blog three years earlier. (I’d had the presence of mind to bring my laptop with me.) When I recalled the feeling of iron bands squeezing my chest, the image that came to mind was Giles Corey being crushed to death as a suspected witch in The Crucible. As Elizabeth describes the scene,
Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. (With a tender smile for the old man): They say he give them but two words. “More weight,” he says. And died.
I visited many specialists in the following months, and they ultimately traced my episode to an infection picked up in a Bronx hospital when I was visiting a friend dying of ovarian cancer. I’ll write more about Rachel Kranz in a future post on friendship, but given how traumatized I was, I wondered at one point whether Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones offered a credible diagnosis. There we encounter a character who dies from a broken heart:
The doctor went directly to London, where he died soon after of a broken heart; a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bill of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases—viz., that no physician can cure it.
Although I was back again teaching two days later, the anti-inflammatories didn’t catch everything and I would have to another trip to the E.R. At this point I decided that I really should retire—at 67 rather than at 70, as I had planned—and gave notice.
There’s one other literature story connected with emergency room visits. In my final semester, I was teaching, for the first time, an ambitious world literature course on Magic Realism. After having read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Colombia)and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (India), my students were sucking wind. I realized this as I lay on the hospital bed at 3 am and decided then and there to drop Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (Germany), replacing it with Laura Esquivel’s much shorter and more accessible Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico). The students were grateful.
The other works in the course, incidentally, were Toni Morrison’s Beloved (the U.S.) and Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Japan).
I was teaching my “Theories of the Reader” class that last year, using a rough draft of Better Living through Literature as one of my textbooks (along with the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory). I also taught Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, so that the students could see an author battling with a censorious readership, and Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, so that they could study his strategies of deliberate alienation.
The students’ final essays, meanwhile, opened my eyes to various works that had “caused a ruckus” (as I put it), including a fascinating study of why Tennessee parents had objected to a teacher teaching L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. My student learned that the book was far more feminist than she realized, which may explain why the parents objected to the good witches in the book. Baum’s suffragette mother-in-law provided a model for Glinda the Good, and he also saw Dorothy as a tough pioneer woman (which is not how Judy Garland plays her).
When my department asked me what I wanted in a farewell party, I prefaced my wish by telling a joke a German colleague had shared with me. Terrorists have taken over a plane filled with language professors headed for the annual Modern Language Association conference. To show they mean business, they announce they will throw three of them out of the plane—a Brit, a German, and an American—but will first grant each of them a final wish. The Brit asks for a spot of tea, the German asks to a lecture…and the American asks to be thrown from the plane before the German delivers his lecture. Invoking my mother’s German heritage, I said I wanted to deliver a lecture. Which is what I did, speaking for 20 minutes on literature’s life transforming potential.
Although I did some teaching after retirement—intro classes for Sewanee as well as some lifelong learning courses—I spent most of my time working on my book. Once I retired, I was able to work full time on my book, which I completed with the incredible assistance of Rebecca Adams. It is the culmination of my life’s work, and I have given readings at Sewanee, St. Mary’s, and the University of Ljubljana.
By retiring when I did, I missed having to teach remotely or grapple with AI. And I got to spend the Covid year, plus another three, with my mother. Then, once life returned to normal, I went on to head Sewanee’s Friends of the Library; delivered card-playing lectures on Jane Austen (speculation) and Alexander Pope (ombre); ran our church’s Sunday Forum (to which I also contributed numerous literature lectures); started a weekly faculty reading group to study Divine Comedy and other classics; joined (with Julia) a lectio divina group to discuss Biblical passages; joined (again with Julia) a monthly book group to discuss various works of fiction and non-fiction; visited Slovenia three times to teach Shakespeare and post-colonial literature courses (along with other assorted classes); lectured on Beowulf at our 50th Carleton reunion; and wrote countless political posts while participating in multiple anti-Trump marches. Oh, and I play tennis doubles five or six times a week.
In short, retirement is a lot like my life when I was working, only without the meetings and the grading.
While I don’t miss those last two, I do miss the students.
As we travel around the country, Julia and I have been listening to Stanley Kim Robinson’s New York 2140, a work of cli-fi or speculative fiction about climate disaster that should be enough to scare the bejeezus out of all of us.
In it, the world has been hit by two catastrophic sea level rises, known as Pulse One and Pulse Two. As a result, coastal cities all around the world have been inundated. The economic consequences include mass migrations and unimaginable property damage, with New York transformed into a Venice with collapsing buildings. (Venice itself, we can assume, is no more.)
I share today a passage where the author rants (his word) against the short-sightedness of humans. Given my interest in how literature changes lives and (sometimes) history, I note the author’s frustration that his science fiction is not having an impact:
It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately. They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of the civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e. doctor) to seek aid.
Along with the sarcasm directed at science skeptics, Robinson also goes after capitalists preaching “creative destruction”:
But hey. An end is a beginning! Creative destruction, right? Apply more police state and more austerity, clamp down hard, proceed as before Cleaning up the mess, a great investment opportunity! Churn baby churn!
By the end of his rant, the author throws up his hands and returns to his story:
Enough with the I told you sos! Back to our doughty heroes and heroines!
While literature is impactful, it has a mixed record when it comes to immediate changes in social policy. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, while it may have ushered in food regulation, didn’t directly lead to better working conditions in Chicago’s slaughter houses. Charles Dickens, the author most associated with social reform, didn’t bring a stop to child labor with Oliver Twist, transform the court system with Bleak House, norend laissez faire capitalism with Hard Times.
Literature works best at a leisurely pace, expanding consciousness so that people see new possibilities in how we imagine human relations. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, we need immediate action. A novel like New York 2140 can be used by activists but can’t bring about change on its own.
Authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny and On Freedom, has introduced me to an important new concept that helps explain the White House’s love affair with bombing, blowing up boats, ICE violence, and brutal detention: “utopia of violence.”
Utopians of violence believe that the overwhelming use of force “will always bring about what you desire, and that the only problem is that people will try to hold you back.” There’s an element of spectacle in this drama, which we can see clearly in how Trump responded to his Venezuela attack and how Pete Hegseth talked about the Iran attack. As they saw it, “Violence is amazing, war is divine”:
For those of us who listened to Trump call in to Fox and Friends right after the operation, it was clear that he was elated and wanted more. “I watched it,” he said, “literally like I was watching a television show.” Indeed he did, transfixed: “And this is something that, gee, I don’t know, it’s amazing.” And he wanted more of the amazing feeling: “We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us.”
This language was very close to something his Secretary of Defense had said: “Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.”
Unfortunately, utopians of violence don’t limit themselves to foreigners and immigrants. Snyder observes that history
instructs us fairly clearly about how utopians of violence interpret defeat in foreign war: they blame an “enemy “at home for their own poor judgements and failures, and then claim that this enemy must now be defeated. The poor performance of the armed forces cannot be explained by their own ideological folly or their own manifest incompetence; it must be the fault of someone else. It will be quite easy for Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) to shift from their current (and risible) claim that we won the war to the claim that we would have won it if not for the stab in the back at home. And that way of seeing things then becomes the justification for putting soldiers (and ICE) on the streets during an election, or claiming that a terrorist attack (most likely a fake one) means that we have to have a state of emergency instead of an election, or something else along those lines.
Snyder talks about others who talk in these terms, including the collection Utopia of Terror, edited by Rory Yeomans, Jacques Semelin’s Purify and Destroy, and Jovan Scott Lewis’s Violent Utopia. To these I would add Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation, which contends that “regeneration through violence” is a foundational American myth, expressed through the western, both in novel form and in film.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we must acknowledge that it is only one strain within the American experiment. As Suzy Hansen notes in a recent New York Review of Books article, Trump and Hegseth are
heir to a tradition handed down from the Founders—not the noble, revolutionary ones in the history books but the ruthless, ragged genocidaires who went west…the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.”
Perhaps no 21st century novel captures this better than Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, whose psychopathic protagonist, no less than Trump and Hegseth, revels in the spectacle of violence. Here’s a post I wrote applying Slotkin to the novel, and also to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, three years ago
Reprinted from Sept. 27, 2023
Increasingly I’m hearing Donald Trump described as a “stochastic terrorist,” which is someone who demonizes his or her enemies so that they stand a chance of becoming targets of violence. We saw him behaving as such, of course, when he got his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and now it appears that the former president is employing stochastic terrorism as a way to keep from going to jail. If he can use threats of retribution to intimidate his foes, perhaps he may once again escape accountability.
While this might strike us as un-American, we have seen instances of stochastic terrorism throughout our history. Violence has always been latent, awaiting individuals or events to trigger it. An author like Cormac McCarthy understands this well, as do William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), James Dickey, Toni Morrison, and others. I focus here on McCarthy because, as a contemporary, he sensed where we are now. This essay draws on two past posts as it applies Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the Westto the dangers of Trumpian violence.
According to the recent Mitt Romney biography, Trump’s stochastic terrorism swayed votes during his impeachment hearings. Asthe Washington Post reports,
“One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety,” Coppins writes. “The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?
“Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”
Since his numerous indictments, Trump’s threats have only escalated. After one set of rulings, he sent out word, “If you come after me, I’m coming after you.” Pundit David Corn has other instances, including one that brings to mind the 2018 attack on a Pittsburg synagogue, in which 11 died. Corn points out,
In a Rosh Hashanah message posted on social media earlier this month, Trump railed against “liberal Jews”: “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”
Trump has also called Army General Mike Miller, whom the former president hates for standing up to him, “treasonous” and worthy of death. (Texas congressman Paul Gosar followed this up with his own instance of stochastic terrorism, writing in his weekly newsletter, “In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.”)
And then there are Trump’s attacks on NBC News, MSNBC and Comcast for committing “Country Threatening Treason.” As New York University’s expert on terrorism Ruth Ben-Ghiat recently pointed out,
it is clearer than ever that inciting political violence is Trump’s political project, and his campaign appearances and events must be seen in that light. Trump is a marketer… [N]ow his brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence, presenting it as the preferred way to resolve differences in society and as the only way to move history forward.
She writes that Trump’s visit yesterday to a gun shop to admire a customized “Trump 45” Glock “was inevitable.”
African Americans have long known that White elites turn to authoritarian violence to control them. Women, American Jews, Latinos, members of the LBGTQ+ community, and others have encountered their own versions of such coercion. What’s new, perhaps, is that (1) many of us thought America had left such violence behind and (2) now it is also straight White males who are being threatened. Whereas once White liberals such as myself had to take an imaginative leap into another perspective—that’s why novels by authors from diverse backgrounds are so important—now we are seeing up close what these others groups saw. On January 6, it was White members of Congress and White cops who were included in the targets. And it’s judges, lawyers, jury members, FBI agents, military personnel, journalists, and others who find themselves on hate lists.
I said I’d look back at American history before turning to Cormac McCarthy, and for this I draw on Richard Slotkin’s 1992 study of the Western, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. As Slotkin observes, America has often framed political violence as a frontier drama. Although America is hardly the only country to experience violence—in fact, most countries have bloody histories—it has had a distinctive way of framing the drama. For America, the myth involves subduing a recalcitrant wilderness. “Regeneration through violence,” Slotkin says, is the American myth.
Throughout American history, he notes, there have been different versions of this myth, from the Puritans emphasizing “the achievement of spiritual regeneration through frontier adventure” to
Jeffersonians (and later, the disciples of Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” [seeing] the frontier settlement as a re-enactment and democratic renewal of the original “social contract”; [or] Jacksonian Americans [seeing] the conquest of the Frontier as a means to the regeneration of personal fortunes and/or of patriotic vigor and virtue.
Trumpism is closest to the Jacksonian model—think of Jackson’s role in the Trail of Tears—but in each case, Slotkin says, the Myth
represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state, and regeneration through violence.
When Trump in 2017 gave his “American carnage” inaugural address, describing America as a nation under attack by forces domestic and foreign (Muslims, urban Blacks, Central American immigrants), he was invoking this myth, which may be why his vision has resonated with so many. When he has praised the tactics used by thuggish dictators like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un or when he has pardoned the court-martialed Navy Seal and psycho killer Eddie Gallagher, so-called responsible Republicans could rationalize that his actions were the primitive means needed to regenerate American society. “Trump is crude,” they would say, “but maybe it takes someone like him to shake things up.”
It should be noted that, while the “regeneration through violence” myth had its origins in the Indian wars, it has mapped easily onto other American conflicts, including those involving race and labor movements. For instance, in D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece Birth of a Nation (1915), one sees the KKK playing the role of the U.S. calvary, riding to the rescue of people under assault from, not Indians but rampaging ex-slaves. Because they do so, Northerners and Southerners can reunite after their bitter war and a new nation can be born.
One sees the myth played out in many of Hollywood’s greatest westerns, such as High Noon, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and others. In the 1970s, the western got transferred to urban settings but the theme was the same: Dirty Harry resorts to primitive means, with thugs now playing the role previously taken by Indians, as he deals out the unregulated violence necessary to restore civilization.
Slotkin focuses mainly on cinema in his study, but one finds literary westerns grappling with the same theme. Along with Blood Meridian, which I’ll turn to in a moment, there’s Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer-prize winning novelmourns (like Frederick Jackson Turner) the closing of the frontier, conveying a sense that the age of heroes is past once we’ve civilized the entire nation. While one is reading the novel, however, one cheers on Gus and Cal, the two Texas rangers who take the law into their own hands. Such actions are necessary in a landscape that includes a murderous Indian (Blue Duck) and a pathological gang of outlaws (the Suggs Brothers).
In the end, the rangers prevail, showing cattlemen that they can take their cattle from Texas to Montana’s green pastures. In their success, however, the rangers render themselves obsolete. Like John Wayne in a number of his movies, Cal cannot join the civilization he has helped bring about. In the process, however, the violence that he and Gus have resorted to has served its purpose.
While McMurtry may think we have reached an end of the violence so that rangers are no longer necessary, however, McCarthy is another story. Forget about regeneration, I hear him saying as his murderous Judge Holden rampages through the 19th century American west, killing Indians and settlers alike. More of an archetype than a flesh-and blood figure, Holden by the end is proclaiming that he will never die, which may be how McCarthy sees America. Perhaps exposing the comforting myth that society can ever find stability, McCarthy’s novel disturbs because it suggests that violence is perpetual and social order hangs by a thread.
The novel is based on the carnage caused by John Joel Glanton and his ruthless gang of scalp hunters following the Mexican American War (1846-48). We first encounter Holden when, as if on a whim, he enters a revival meeting and fabricates a charge that turns the audience against the preacher. He’s a stochastic terrorist in this scene, behaving as Trump did on January 6:
Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an impostor. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.
On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years—I said eleven—who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God…
Let’s hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear.
Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat.
Why damn my eyes if I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side of the tent, and drawing a pistole from his boot he leveled it and fired.
More shots are fired, someone seams the tent, and there follows a mass exodus, with people “pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud.”
When the Judge later admits to having fabricated the charge, like Trump he is appreciated for his entertainment value. At that point, his auditors become complicit in his action. Maybe they, like Trump supporters, get a thrill from the judge’s sheer audacity, and also from his sadism:
Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him? You mean the Reverend Green? Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here. I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was. They looked from one to the other. Well where was it you run up on him? I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him. He raised his glass and drank. There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.
I want to caution against pushing comparisons between Trump and the Judge, since Holden is a sophisticated, learned, and refined psychopath whereas Trump (in the words of Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien) is driven by nothing more complicated than “self-aggrandizement and self-preservation.” The former president, O’Brien observes, “thinks about money, food, sex, and revenge. Very little else. Maybe sports.” Both men, however, act with impunity.
What we get in the revival meeting is only a taste of what is to come as the Judge joins with the Glanton gang on their murder spree. The narrative sucks us in somewhat since, at first, they are battling “bad” Indians (bloodthirsty Comanches and Apaches). Then, however, we see them attacking peaceful Pueblo villages and Mexican townspeople. As an extra flourish, sometimes the Judge will casually break the neck of a child or drop a gift of puppies into a river.
By the end of the novel, the Judge is orchestrating a dance, which becomes a metaphor for the great human drama. Only the truly barbaric man, he tells the protagonist, can really dance this dance:
Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance…
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps.
At the end, McCarthy reflects on the Judge and his dance:
His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
I have sometimes wondered what drives a writer to imagine worlds that lack any sympathetic characters. Why doesn’t McCarthy write more novels like All the Pretty Horses, which features a protagonist of unimpeachable integrity who stands up against the forces of darkness? Why Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, with its cold-blooded and seemingly invincible killer Anton Chiguhr?
But if the world is truly becoming a place where stochastic terrorists such as Trump can thumb their noses at judges—if horror really does speak to humanity’s “inmost heart”–then maybe McCarthy is using the lawless and violent west to get at a vital truth. Perhaps he sees us as further gone than we realize.
At the very least, McCarthy’s vision tests those of us who like to think that civilization will triumph over barbarism in the great American democratic experiment.
Traveling has pushed back today’s post, but Julia and I are staying current with the World Cup results as we drive across the country, including Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé’s extraordinary feats. Here’s a soccer poem by Diane Ackermann, written after watching the New York Cosmos play in the 1970s. Former soccer greats Giorgo Chinaglia of Italy and Marinho Chagas of Brazil had come to America in the first concerted attempt to jumpstart soccer in this country.
We can see the long-term impact of such players on the U.S. today (along with Brazil’s Pele) as we watch America’s exciting team. At the time, few schools had soccer programs, and there weren’t the youth leagues we see today. As a result, most Americans found soccer fandom inexplicable and goal celebrations such as that witnessed by Diane Ackerman to be exotic.
Soccer at the Meadowlands By Diane Ackerman
Near the goal, head sunk into his shoulders as he sprints, Chinaglia takes the ball spat at his feet,
dribbles it around a thatch of yellow shirts and, sliding between the legs of two defenders, belts it hard
into that caged, invisible something beyond the green reason of the field into the netted calm no one enters.
The home crowd’s ear-splitting rant grows seismic. Screams blur to wind howl and cymbals.
A jig-step. Chinaglia raises his fists as laurels. In a walking faint, he gallops round the pitch,
leaping, as if lovesick, into Marinho’s arms, leaping to the hypnotic boom of the crowd.
