Thursday

There’s an apocryphal exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway about the super wealthy. Fitzgerald supposedly observed, “The rich are different from you and me,” to which Hemingway curtly replied, “Yes, they have more money.” While Hemingway gets in the zinger, however, I want to weigh in on Fitzgerald’s side after reading a disturbing Atlantic article about Amazon head Jeff Bezos. In stories like The Great Gatsby and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” Fitzgerald shows that he understood in a profound way how money rewires the existential reality of the rich. Hemingway’s retort fails to acknowledge this.

First, a note on the story. A website devoted to setting the record straight tells what actually took place between the two authors. Hemingway took the line from Fitzgerald’s story “The Rich Boy” and quoted it out of context in an early version of his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Here’s what Hemingway wrote:

The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

Hemingway had to change the name from “Scott Fitzgerald” to “Julian” in the revised story because Fitzgerald was legitimately outraged. Here’s the context for the quote from “Rich Boy,” in which very little romantic awe is expressed:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

Fitzgerald knew what Noah Hawley discovered when he wrote “What I Learned about Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat.” The creator of the FX series Fargo and Alien: Earth, Hawley learned that (to quote the article’s subtitle) “For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.”

The article is chilling and explains a lot about the behavior of our own billionaires, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Although I first thought of Tom and Daisy when I read the piece—I wrote about The Great Gatsby last week in relation to our billionaires—“A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” captures even better the essence of what Hawley discovered. I’ll look first at his article and then Fitzgerald’s story.

Hawley notes that figures like Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have left the world of consequences behind. Because they “float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves,” everything becomes effectively free, nothing can ever be lost, failure fails to mean anything, and they come to feel invulnerable.

This feeling of vulnerability, Hawley goes on to say, has “deep psychological ramifications”:

If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.”

Hawley points out how most of us develop moral reasoning. The very fact that our actions have consequences means that we are continually having to accommodate ourselves to reality as it actually is. “When you can buy your way out of any mistake,” Hawley explains, “when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.”

Thus you have such jaw-dropping statements and erratic as the following:

When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.

This psychological phenomenon also explains the assault on empathy we have been witnessing, especially from Musk:

Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He sees it as a weapon wielded by liberal society to bludgeon otherwise rational people into operating against their own interests. Empathy is something done to you by others—a vulnerability they exploit, a back door through which they gain access to your resources and will. This rejection of empathy as a human value gives cover to people who don’t want to feel anything at all. If empathy is the problem, then lack of it isn’t a deficiency—it’s an advantage.

“Diamond as Big as the Ritz” dramatizes Hawley’s observations to perfection. John Unger, from a respectable family in the Midwest, attends a fancy prep school out east (St. Midas, fittingly enough) and makes friends with one Percy Washington. Percy invites John out to his place in the Montana Rockies and, on the train ride out there, confides to him that his father “is by far the richest man in the world,” although no one knows this. His wealth lies in the mountain upon which he lives, which is one large diamond.

All this must be kept secret, however, because, if it were known, diamond prices worldwide would collapse, along with the economies based on them. The sense of entitlement that this immense wealth brings with it, along with the measures needed to maintain secrecy, result in the characters exhibiting the same psychological behavior described in the Atlantic article.

First of all, there are the ways that the Washingtons have manipulated things to hide the mountain from government surveyors. Think of this as a version of the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill, which billionaires got Congress to pass, even though health and safety net programs had to be slashed to provide them with their tax breaks. Think also of the way tax laws have been set up to insure that billionaires will pay almost nothing. In “Big as the Ritz,” Percy reveals how billionaire intervention has three times stymied the government from surveying the diamond mountain: 

The first time my grandfather corrupted a whole department of the State survey; the second time he had the official maps of the United States  tinkered with–that held them for fifteen years. The last time was harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses were in the strongest magnetic field ever artificially set up. He had a whole set of surveying instruments made with a slight defection that would allow for this territory not to appear, and he substituted them for the ones that were to be used. Then he had a river deflected and he had what looked like a village built up on its banks–so that they’d see it, and think it was a town ten miles farther up the valley.

Hawley’s observation that the wealthy don’t encounter any checks is captured in the Washingtons’ golf course. John learns that it is all greens and contains “no fairway, no rough, no hazards.”

The one thing the Washingtons cannot escape, however, is airplanes, and we start getting a glimpse of how wealth has warped them in the casual way that Percy remarks on the aviators they have in captivity. Elon Musk would be proud in how he’s shut down his empathy:

We’ve got half a dozen anti-aircraft guns and we’ve arranged it so far–but there’ve been a few deaths and a great many prisoners. Not that we mind that, you know, father and I, but it upsets mother and the girls, and there’s always the chance that some time we won’t be able to arrange it.

The corruption is on full display in an interchange between Percy’s father and one of the captive pilots:

“Let me ask you a few questions!” he cried. “You pretend to be a fair-minded man.”

“How absurd. How could a man of my position be fair-minded toward you? You might as well speak of a Spaniard being fair-minded toward a piece of steak.”

At this harsh observation the faces of the two dozen fell, but the tall man continued:

“All right!” he cried. “We’ve argued this out before. You’re not a humanitarian and you’re not fair-minded, but you’re human–at least you say you are–and you ought to be able to put yourself in our place for long enough to think how–how–how–”

“How what?” demanded Washington, coldly.

“–how unnecessary–”

“Not to me.”

“Well–how cruel–”

“We’ve covered that. Cruelty doesn’t exist where self-preservation is involved. You’ve been soldiers; you know that. Try another.”

While all this is going on, John and the younger Washington daughter are falling in love and are even fantasizing about marriage. At this point, if not earlier, it begins to dawn on the reader that John himself is not all that safe. In fact, we learn (this when Kismine inadvertently blurts out the truth) that he will be bumped off before the visit ends. John learns that this has happened many times before. I quote at length from their conversation because it captures just how wealth distorts the wealthy. Other people are nothing more playthings, to be used for all the pleasure that can be got out of them and then discarded:

“Do you mean to say that your father had them murdered before they left?”

She nodded.

“In August usually–or early in September. It’s only natural for us to get all the pleasure out of them that we can first.”

“How abominable! How–why, I must be going crazy! Did you really admit that–”

“I did,” interrupted Kismine, shrugging her shoulders. “We can’t very well imprison them like those aviators, where they’d be a continual reproach to us every day. And it’s always been made easier for Jasmine and me, because father had it done sooner than we expected. In that way we avoided any farewell scene–”

“So you murdered them! Uh!” cried John.

“It was done very nicely. They were drugged while they were asleep–and their families were always told that they died of scarlet fever in Butte.”

“But–I fail to understand why you kept on inviting them!”

“I didn’t,” burst out Kismine. “I never invited one. Jasmine did. And they always had a very good time. She’d give them the nicest presents toward the last. I shall probably have visitors too–I’ll harden up to it. We can’t let such an inevitable thing as death stand in the way of enjoying life while we have it. Think of how lonesome it’d be out here if we never had anyone. Why, father and mother have sacrificed some of their best friends just as we have.”

Along with sacrificing invited guests, the elder Washington even thinks he can buy off God. In one surreal scene we see him proffering a huge diamond of incalculable value to the Almighty if only He will swallow up the aviators.

While I assume that our billionaires aren’t directly killing people, they are more than willing to sacrifice the rest of us, along with American democracy, in their quest for ever more wealth. They’re sitting on a diamond as big as the Ritz and it’s still not enough.

Wednesday – Earth Day

To observe Earth Day 2026 I’m repurposing an old essay, written 14 years ago. Mary Oliver’s “Ghosts” seems appropriate given how the occasion calls for us to both acknowledge horrific damage to the environment and hold onto hope that we can turn things around. Oliver looks both back and forward—back to horrific instances of devastation and forward to the truth, written in “the book of the earth, that “nothing can die.”

 Oliver references whites slaughtering the buffalo herds, sometimes for meat, sometimes to eradicate the Native American food supply. The slaughter also receives treatment by Ojibwe/Chippewa author Louise Erdrich. In the Mighty Red she describes the size of the herds, which may have numbered 30 million animals at their height:

After crossing the Red River sometime in the 1830s, a priest climbed a tree seeking a spot where he could safely observe an approaching herd of buffalo. There he witnessed a deranging spectacle–the buffalo stretched all the way to where they disappeared into the line between sky and earth. He was forced to stay in the tree for three days as they passed, passed and migrated, three days of horizon-to-horizon buffalo. He nearly died of thirst. “You may judge now the richness of these prairies,” he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our billions. But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.

We see mention of the elimination in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. In a particularly haunting scene that twists the heart, a few remaining buffalo, crazed by the slaughter of their comrades, commit suicide:

“The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved,” said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. “The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.”

In “Ghosts” Oliver shows train passengers engaging in the slaughter: 

Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.

Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood – hellhunks
in the prairie heat.

Over a century later the poet observes that there are still traces of the once great herds:

Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth…

Rather than only despair over the devastation that whites have visited upon the buffalo, however, she talks about what one must do to “coax them out again.” The answer lies in “the people dancing.”

For the Lakota Sioux, every being shares the same spiritual essence, called Wakan Tanka, which is ritually honored through dancing and other ways. Oliver’s own dance is her poem, and her role as a metaphorical dancer is to “notice” (a word that appears repeatedly throughout the poem) and tell us what she sees. Put another way, the poet is a seer who uses words to convey her vision. The tongue, Oliver says, is “the sweetest meat.”

One thing she notices is the ecosystem that grew up around the buffalo herds. Reading the journal of Meriwether Lewis (of the Lewis and Clark Expedition), she notes how a sparrow’s nest is woven from buffalo hair.

While Oliver is identifying with Lewis as observer here, she also identifies with the day-old chicks. Even though they have “left the perfect world” and fallen into “the perils of this one,” they are also lying in “flowered fields.” In other words, our world is filled with both immense beauty and terrible danger, and it is our responsibility to record what has passed and to “notice” what can still be seen. We are called upon to be as vulnerable and open as these young chicks.

The poem ends on a visionary note very much in the spirit of Earth Day: Oliver dreams about a newly born red buffalo calf being tongued by its mother “in the fragrant grass/ in the wild domains,” and she wants to enter this communion. In the vision of perfect peace and tranquility that is the dream and the poem, that which has “gone away into the earth to hide” momentarily flares forth. Through our imaginations, it is born again. Oliver is reading from the Lakota “book of the earth” in assuring that “nothing can die,” despite all the damage done by the shooting train passengers of our world. She can see the ghosts of the past and helps us to see them as well.

Ghosts
By Mary Oliver

1
Have you noticed?

2
Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts
lay down on the earth and died
it’s hard to tell now
what’s bone, and what merely
was once.

The golden eagle, for instance,
has a bit of heaviness in him;
moreover the huge barns
seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off
toward deeper grass.

3
1805
near the Bitterroot Mountains:
a man named Lewis kneels down
on the prairie watching

a sparrow’s nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop
and lined with buffalo hair. The chicks,
not more than a day hatched, lean
quietly into the thick wool as if
content, after all,
to have left the perfect world and fallen,

helpless and blind
into the flowered fields and the perils
of this one.

4
In the book of the earth it is written:
nothing can die.

In the book of the Sioux it is written:
they have gone away into the earth to hide.
Nothing will coax them out again
but the people dancing.

5
Said the old-timers:
the tongue
is the sweetest meat.

Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.

Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood – hellhunks
in the prairie heat.

6
Have you noticed? how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins. Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth as the herd stood
day after day, moon after moon
in their tribal circle, outwaiting
the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also
have you noticed? gone now.

7
Once only, and then in a dream,
I watched while, secretly
and with the tenderness of any caring woman,
a cow gave birth
to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him
in a warm corner
of the clear night
in the fragrant grass
in the wild domains
of the prairie spring, and I asked them,
in my dream I knelt down and asked them
to make room for me.

We can use this day to rekindle our own connection and ask for admittance.

Further thought: I wonder if the passage

Have you noticed? how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins. 

alludes to the Sara Teasdale’s unsettling “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which imagines the world recovering after nuclear warfare has wiped out humanity:

Then Will Come Soft Rains
By Sara Teasdale

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

I suppose there’s some consolation in knowing that nature will continue on, regardless of what we do to ourselves. Still, homo sapiens are such remarkable creatures that it would be tragic if they disappeared from the scene. Better to learn how to live together.

Tuesday

As this is National Library Week, here’s a Charles Simic poem about the magic of libraries. I love the sense of mystery that he experiences as he discovers a book that no one has opened in 50 years.

While the book Simic discovers is about angels, it’s also about much more. Libraries open up the imagination, throwing us back into a world where angels and gods were once an integral part of people’s lives. I think of Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us” where the poet—disgusted at how we “lay waste our powers” by buying and selling–longs to “have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/ Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.”

There may be another allusion at work in Simic’s poem. In the tale told by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, she imagines a time when the land was “fulfild of fayerye”—filled with fairy folk—and ruled over by an elf-queen. Just as, in modern times, the light of reason has banished angels and gods to the shadows—sun shines through Simic’s library window and the supernatural deities are “huddled”—so (according to the Wife) the “blessings” of friars have chased away the fairies. In her account, the light of Christianity has banished earth spirits, with Christian men of God clogging up “every land and every stream,/ As thick as specks of dust in the sunbeam.” The result is a world stripped of mystery.

In libraries, however, we can still catch glimpses of angels and gods, fairies and elves. While Simic’s librarian may carry the prosaic name of Miss Jones, she hears the books whispering. She is a priestess, presiding over this sacred space where earth and spirit worlds meet. If you are quiet, you will hear the whispering as well. 

In the Library 
By Charles Simic

There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

Past posts about libraries
—The Courage of a Tennessee Librarian (March 25, 2026)
–“Useful Knowledge” vs. Literature  (March 9, 2026)
—Sharon Draper: My Granddaughter and a Banned Book  (Oct. 19, 025)
—Stephen King Understands MAGA (Oct. 5, 2025)
—Libraries, Bulwarks against Fascism  (April 8, 2025)
—Why Are Books Banned? They Change Lives (Sept. 22, 2024)
—Elena Ferrante: Idaho Libraries and My Brilliant Friend  (Sept. 19, 2024)
—Paul Hamilton Engle: The Dangerous Power of Libraries  (Aug. 20, 2024)
—On Defending Books against Bullies  (Oct. 1, 2023)
—The Social Novel Tackles Our Dilemmas (Sept. 19, 2023)
—Judy Blume: Fighting Back against Book Censors (April 11, 2023)
—Books Are Banned Because They Are Powerful (Jan. 19, 2023)
—Read to Resist Fascism (Oct. 26, 2022)
—Books Bans Leave Children Defenseless (April 25, 2022)
—The Fascist Right Goes for Sendak (April 17, 2022)
—LGBTQ+ Books under Fire  (Feb. 3, 2022)
—Time to Reread Fahrenheit 451 (Jan. 27, 2022)
—Banned Books Again on the Rise (Jan. 18, 2022)
—Yes, Virginia, Books ARE Dangerous   (Nov. 28, 2021)
—Rightwing Book Bans on the Rise  (Nov. 11, 2021)
—A Texas Pol Attacks Cider House Rules (Oct. 31, 2021)
—Literature, the Best Medicine (Oct. 20, 2021)
–Joe Mills: If Librarians Were Honest… https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/if-librarians-were-honest/ Feb. 19, 2020)
—Nikki Giovanni, A Book Held to the Chest, Close to the Heart (Feb. 11, 2020) 
—Libraries, Critical to Democracy (April 22, 2019)
—What Our Libraries Reveal about Us (June 13, 2018)
—Norman Finkelstein: A Poem in Praise of Libraries (Sept. 19, 2016)
—Scott Bates: The Liberating Power of a Yo-Yo in a Library  (Nov. 21, 2012)
—Alberto Manguel, Fight the Power, Check Out a Book  (June 30, 2011)
—Alberto Manguel, Our Inner Library: A Quiz (Jan. 5, 2011)
—Jorge Luis Borges, A Bookstore and the Library of Babel  (March 17, 2024)
—Scott Bates, Books Unleashed in Christmas Carrels (Dec. 25, 2009)

Monday

Like many concerned about the state of the nation, I have been discouraged at how the mainstream media (MSM) fails to hold Donald Trump and rightwing authoritarianism to account. Rather than exposing the genuine threat that these figures represent, many news outlets simply present the two sides as equivalent. The New York Times has become so notorious at whitewashing Trump that there’s a parody social media account—New York Times Pitchbot—which hilariously imagines how the newspaper would soft pedal the president’s most egregious acts. Not that one has to invent examples since some of the actual headlines make the point by themselves.

For instance, during the 2024 presidential campaign media columnist Margaret Sullivan complained about the headline, “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.” Harris’s idea involved tax cuts designed to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers. Trump’s was massive deportations. One idea, in other words, was serious and worth examining, the other fascistic. You wouldn’t know that from the headline, however.

When voters are presented with such apparent symmetry, an understandable response is to voice Mercutio’s dying accusation in Romeo and Juliet: “A plague on both your houses.”

In a moment I’ll explain why Mercutio is in no position to make such an accusation, but let’s first examine what’s going on. By choosing not to judge, the MSM doesn’t acknowledge how the extreme right is exploiting false equivalence (also called “both-siderism” and “the cult of both sides”). As an article in Rational League puts it, false equivalence “rewards the side willing to break rules and punishes the one still trying to follow them.” Sometimes MSM goes even further, as MSNOW’s Nicole Wallace noted the other day in an interview with law professor Sherrilyn Ifill: the MSM will clean up Trump’s garbled statements so that they appear more coherent than they actually are. 

The Rational League article notes that, in pursuit of balance, the MSM “promises symmetry where none exists” and as a result, “allows tyranny to dress itself in the garb of democracy and go unchallenged.” Both the MSM and audiences get something from this: the MSM is able to float serenely above the fray while audiences retreat into “the safety blanket of false equivalence.”

“If both sides are bad,” Rational League points out, “then no side needs to be chosen. No side needs to be condemned. No side needs to be fought.” There’s no need to do anything about MAGA abusing immigrants, censoring books, criminalizing healthcare, or rewriting history.

Mercutio is guilty of false equivalence when he says “a plague on both your houses” although, in his defense, he is dying when he says it. Furthermore, there does not appear to be a great deal of difference between the Montagues and the Capulets (although Tybalt appears worse than any Montague). But Mercutio himself has thrown in his lot with the Montagues and has been helping inflame the rivalry. After all, if Mercutio did not insist on Romeo fighting Tybalt and then take on the duel himself, thereby prompting Romeo’s ill-fated intervention, things would have taken a less violent turn.

In a way, I suppose this makes Mercutio a good symbol of those bad faith actors in our own political wars: while he claims to be above the partisanship, he is actually profiting from it. He is certainly not the cool head that is needed to defuse the situation. Indeed, Romeo and Juliet might have found a way to realize Friar Laurence’s dream of reconciling the two families if this unstable “friend” hadn’t stirred the pot. Think of Mercutio as a media personality who feeds off of conflict and whose ratings would drop if there were a peaceful resolution.

By ignoring the threat to journalism itself, the MSM is not unlike Verona’s prince, who in the end castigates himself as well as the warring families. If he had taken the situation more seriously, he says, he wouldn’t now be surveying smoking ruins. Or to use his words,

Where be these enemies? Capulet! Montague!
See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
And I for winking at your discords too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish’d.

The MSM has been winking at our discord rather than taking a stand for democracy. At this rate, all will be punish’d.

Sunday

While I had planned an Earth Day-related post for today, it will have to wait until next week because of how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is using Jesus to justify our attack on Iran. I know what John Milton would say.

Let’s first survey how Hegseth is invoking Christianity. Back on March 15, several members of the military (11 Christians, one Muslim, one Jew) complained that Hegseth regards the attack as a holy war with End Times ramifications. As one non-commissioned officer reported in an email, Hegseth

urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan” and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

More recently, Hegseth compared journalists exposing the war’s failures to the Pharisees who complained about Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath: 

“The Pharisees — the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time — they were there to witness, to write everything down, to report,” the Defense chief continued. “But … even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn’t matter. They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda.”

I guess this means that Trump and Hegseth are like the unappreciated Jesus.

Finally there was Hegseth citing the Book of Pulp Fiction in a prayer delivered at the Pentagon. The occasion was the rescue of the downed aviator, with “Sandy” being the call sign that aircraft use in rescue missions:

The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” Hegseth prayed. “Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen.”

In Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino has Samuel Jackson cite Ezekiel 25:17 prior to murdering a man. “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them,” he thunders. 

This post wouldn’t be complete without the comparisons that televangelist Paula White-Cain has been making between Trump and Jesus, including this one on April 1:

“Jesus taught so many lessons through His death, burial and resurrection. He showed us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life,” she said.

“You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for Him, and it didn’t end there for you,” she continued.

“God always had a plan. On the third day, He rose, He defeated evil, He conquered death, Hell and the grave. And because He rose, we all know that we can rise. And, sir, because of His resurrection, you rose up. Because He was victorious, you were victorious.”

Perhaps it was such language that prompted Trump to tweet out an image of himself as Jesus healing the sick. If his longtime spiritual advisor and member of his Faith Office sees the resemblance, why doesn’t everyone?

In response to people who abuse the word of God in these ways, Milton cites Matthew 7:15-16, where Jesus predicts that there will be “false prophets” who try to deceive people in his name:

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they?

In one of Paradise Lost’s angriest passages, Milton also refers to these false prophets as wolves. The archangel Michael, foretelling the future so that Adam will understand the arc of history, tells him what will happen once Jesus’s apostles are no longer around to spread the message. He specifically has in mind authorities in the church establishment but the words apply equally well to anyone who appropriates “the Spirit of God” in joining “the sacred mysteries of Heaven” with “secular power”: 

Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves,
Who all the sacred mysteries of Heaven
To their own vile advantages shall turn
Of lucre and ambition…
Then shall they seek to avail themselves of names,
Places, and titles, and with these to join
Secular power; though feigning still to act
By spiritual, to themselves appropriating
The Spirit of God…

These wolves will ultimately be judged, Milton predicts, and then he too draws on the Ezekiel sentiment:

Truth shall retire
Bestuck with slanderous darts, and works of faith
Rarely be found: So shall the world go on,
To good malignant, to bad men benign;
Under her own weight groaning; till the day
Appear of respiration to the just,
And vengeance to the wicked…

In other words, Hegseth will not be the instrument of God’s vengeance, as he so deliciously fantasizes, but the target. 

All this talk of vengeance, however, misses Jesus’s point entirely. As Jesus understood and as Milton demonstrates in his depiction of Satan, we make our own hells. “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly/ Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?/ Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell,” laments the rebel angel.” Elsewhere, realizing that the adrenaline rush that accompanies destruction hollows out the soul, Satan acknowledges, “For only in destroying I find ease/ To my relentless thoughts.”

Hegseth is thoroughly enmeshed in his own mental turmoil although he appears to lack Satan’s self-awareness. Like those who crucified Jesus, he knows not what he does.

Friday – Life Installment #30

Today I look back at the year following what C.S. Lewis calls “the second death,” which is the death of the grieving. As I noted in a previous post, the intensity of my grief over Justin was a means of keeping him present so that diminishing emotions felt like losing him a second time. One should never say to the bereaved that “things will get better” because, in addition to its being a trite cliché, it also fails to acknowledge that those grieving may not want things to get better. The resumption of daily routine after I had been living at a knife edge of perception felt like a surrender to something lesser.

Thankfully, 19-year-old Darien helped shake me out of this state. A year after the death, as we were traveling to Iowa to visit family, Darien exploded as I was talking about Justin, berating me for what he felt had become an obsession. Now Darien, like Toby, had taken Justin’s death very hard, although he dealt with it in his own way. He had a cross and the date tattooed on his ankle—the only tattoo any of us have—and the day after Justin’s death he went swimming in the spot where Justin had drowned (he didn’t tell us) so that the river wouldn’t have power over him. But now, as was only right, he was ready to step into the future and saw me as trying to drag everyone back. And because I had vowed to put family first—to wield Beowulf’s giant sword in the face of troll grief—I heard the message and started the process of letting go.

I did the same for our youngest. For my sabbatical year I had planned to apply for a third Fulbright to Slovenia, but Toby, who had a very strong friend group and was entering his senior year of high school, declared very firmly that he would stay behind if we went. Again I declared to myself that family comes first and that Toby deserved to get what he wanted. I would spend most of my sabbatical year at home working on my book while watching him have what proved to be a stellar senior year. (He starred in soccer and lacrosse, bonded deeply with his friends, had a fun girlfriend, and made a smart and very funny film that entranced his high school.)

There were other ways that the death would continue to dwell with me, however. At the end of the previous year I had received the college’s Teacher of the Year award—the award rotates between Teaching, Scholarship, and Service and I received it for Service—and while my service record was in fact stellar, part of me wondered whether it was a sympathy award. I resolved, as I was thanking the College and my colleagues, that I would make sure there were no doubts. To prove myself worthy—to prove to myself and everyone else that I was “of use” (as John Irving puts it in Cider House Rules)—I took on far too much when I returned from sabbatical. 

I’ll tell that story in next week’s post but, for the moment, I note that intense service was already a family characteristic. Both my parents gave their lives to the Sewanee community and I married a woman who had community commitment branded into her by her Moravian upbringing. In other words, the tendency was already there. Justin’s death just pushed it to 11. 

Fortunately, however, my sabbatical gave me another year of reprieve, and I threw myself into my book. I would look at nine canonical British works, examining how each addresses a specific life issue. Written more as self-help than scholarship, it would be accessible to a general audience, drawing on my skills as a journalist. Each chapter would contain a plot summary and recommended resources, along with five or six exercises. It took me seven years to write and, as it turned out, never saw the light of day as the financial crisis of 2008 prompted the publisher to rescind his offer.

Here’s what was to have been its table of contents:

Better Living through Beowulf: How the Early British Classics Can Guide You beyond Terrorism Fears, Relationship Anxieties, Consumer Emptiness, Racial Tension, Political Cynicism, and Other Contemporary Challenges

Introduction: Harnessing the Power of Literature
Chapter 1 – ANGER & FEAR
Using Beowulf to Subdue Your Inner Demons and Find a Lasting Peace
Chapter 2 – DEATH
Using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Transform Your Fear of Dying into a Deep Joy
Chapter 3 – MARRIAGE
Using Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Save Your Relationship
Chapter 4 – SOUL
Using Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to Escape Your Private Hell
Chapter 5 – GENDER
Using William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to Discover Alternate Selves
Chapter 6 – RACE & CLASS
Using Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to Negotiate Difficult Friendships
Chapter 7 – INJUSTICE
Using Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and “Modest Proposal” to Keep Fighting the Good Fight
Chapter 8 – BEAUTY
Using Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock to Reach beyond Star Worship and Touch the Star Within
Chapter 9 – COURTSHIP
Using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Find Your Soul Mate
Bibliography

To provide a sense of the book’s exercises, here are a couple. The first draws from Doctor Faustus: 

Reflection Exercise – Facing Death
When you are dying or know someone who is dying—or even if you know someone with a heightened fear of death—keep an eye out for the following (very common) Faustus behaviors.  Acknowledging and examining the behaviors will not necessarily make the fears go away.  With awareness, however, comes the possibility of spiritual breakthrough.
 1.  Resorting to shallow distractions
Is there some version of carousing with colleagues and fantasizing about Helen of Troy?
2.   Wallowing in regret, guilt, and self-recrimination
Is there unhealthy regret and an obsessive fixation on opportunities squandered? (“Wretch, what hast thou done!  Damned art thou, Faustus, damned; despair and die.”)
3.  Complaining about helplessness
Is there despair about being helpless, a Faustus blaming the devil for his inability to repent and find peace?
4.  Lashing out against others
Are there attacks against others, even those (like the old man) who offer a healing perspective?  Are those who seem to have come to terms with death seen as an implicit reproof?
 5.  Bargaining with death
Is the individual, like Faustus, prepared to say and do anything to avoid facing up to the inevitable?

The second applies to Pride and Prejudice:

Bad reasons for getting married
As the dream of marriage or committed partnership involves honoring the deepest part of ourselves, we sell ourselves short when we settle for a superficial or compromised relationship.  The romance story turns sour for anyone who wants a relationship but won’t undergo the necessary self-transformation.  Thus, when seeking a partner, it is good to first ask yourself what your motivations are and how committed you are to the process.  Pride and Prejudice presents us with a number of dubious reasons for getting married.  They include
Security – Charlotte Lucas and George Wickham want someone to support them and will marry virtually anyone with money (Collins, Mary King);
Vanity and a desire for power – Caroline Bingley is driven by the dream of becoming mistress of a great estate while Mrs. Bennet vicariously pursues the same dream through her daughters;
Custom – Collins marries because Lady Catherine de Bourgh expects her rector to be married.  Miss de Bourgh, similarly under the sway of Lady Catherine, might also feel pressured by custom;
Sexual desire – Mr. Bennet, to his everlasting regret, has married a once pretty face, and Lydia is attracted to anyone in a soldier’s uniform.  Lydia needs marriage if she is to follow her inclinations legally. 

As I look back at the book, I’m somewhat relieved it was never published. It always felt vaguely inauthentic as I never entirely bought the self-help genre. After all, how many people sit down with a proposed exercise and follow it? Meanwhile, my intentionally flippant title (it’s an allusion to Dupont’s “Better Living through Chemistry” slogan) seemed to clash at times with my seriousness. 

And then there’s the fact that people use literature for lots of different things, many unpredictable. My book, I came to realize, was too prescriptive and too pat. Better to approach literature as my blog does, which cites endless instances of literature impacting lives with no definitive conclusions drawn. The title works better in that case, capturing the playfulness of literature even as it acknowledges its seriousness.

In my book’s defense, however, I was desperately looking for ways to make literature relevant to society at large—we humanities teachers have been in a defensive crouch for a while now–which means that a wrong turn or two were to be expected. Furthermore, writing it supercharged my teaching, providing me with new tools and perspectives with which to engage my students. To cite one instance, it allowed me to encourage an older student to use Pride and Prejudice as a marriage manual.

Ashley was in the process of escaping from a controlling husband who didn’t want her taking college classes, and the novel provided her a forum in which to explore her life options. A courtship novel, she said, is just what she needed given that she had started dating again. Furthermore, realizing that literature could function as a life guide, Ashley would go on to write a senior project for me about three novels by Margaret Atwood, who she said had “saved her life.” You can read about her inspiring story here.

Returning to my sabbatical year, I see how writing the book also helped me deal with the second death. Three of the chapters—the ones on Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Doctor Faustus—deal directly with death, and all are about using crisis to turn one’s life around.

To complete the year, I took a trip to Barcelona to visit the college’s former guitar teacher, Gustavo Thiem, a very spiritual man who had known Justin and who brought his funeral service to a powerful and fitting close by playing “Brahm’s Lullaby.” (I still see him sitting on the steps leading up to the altar.) Although he had been performing with orchestras all over the United States, Gustavo had left that behind to return to Catalonia to take care of his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, and was remaking his career there. In turn, he introduced me to a close friend, a Franciscan monk, who gave me the best spiritual guidance I received about Justin’s death. The man noted that young people are often in intense spiritual search—he said he loves that about young people his age—and that Justin’s search was no less meaningful for having been cut short. As we walked around Barcelona, I recognized Justin in his words and felt the full force of the life that Justin had actually lived.

I then went on to Slovenia, reconnecting with friends, former students, and colleagues and visiting places that Justin had loved. And then returned to see Toby graduate from high school. Life was set to continue on.

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

Thursday

My faculty study group has been discussing Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a play about a pious but corrupt judge that I’ve never fully appreciated until now. When I think of the rot that has overtaken MAGA Christians, along with the cynical religiosity of its political leaders, it seems all too timely.

The sanctimonious Angelo believes that Vienna’s strict morality laws apply to others but not to himself. He is in charge because his brother the Duke, realizing he has been too lax in his enforcement of these laws, takes a leave of absence.

Angelo’s first act is to condemn to death one Claudio for premarital sex with Juliet. Now, the two of them are fully intending to get married—they have just not yet completed all the legal technicalities—but that matters not the least to Angelo. In his eyes, fornication is fornication.

Claudio’s sister Isabella, a devout woman intent on becoming a nun, goes to Angelo to plead for a pardon. While she doesn’t disagree with the seriousness of the offense, she asks that justice be tempered with mercy. In response, the smitten Angelo makes her a Trumpian offer: her brother’s freedom for her body (although these days Trump demands money in return for his pardons).

Shocked at such a proposition from a supposedly moral man, Isabella—after rejecting the offer—seeks consolation from her brother. He, however, surprises and unsettles her by urging her to accept the offer. After all, he’s about the die. Only the intervention of the Duke, who has been secretly monitoring his brother in the disguise of a friar, brings about a happy ending. 

So who are our Angelos? Well, we’ve got a lot of them in the GOP these days. There’s Pete Hegseth, a Christian fundamentalist who has been trying to bring back the Crusades: a Guardian profile reveals that on his arm is tattooed “Deus Vult” (God Wills It), which Crusaders in 1095 chanted as they followed Pope Urbana’s call to reconquer the Holy Land from the infidels. Hegseth “has promised to give ‘no quarter’ to the ‘barbaric savages’ of the Iranian regime and called on the American people to pray for victory ‘in the name of Jesus Christ.’” Claiming that the war is divinely sanctioned and that “Jesus has the final say over all of it,” he has been invoking Matthew 10:

If our Lord is sovereign even over the sparrow’s fallings, you can be assured that he is sovereign over everything else that falls in this world, including Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles …

Like Angelo, however, Hegseth’s personal life has failed to live up to his supposed Christian beliefs:

He was elevated to leadership roles at two different advocacy groups for veterans only to be forced out over what the New Yorker called “serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct”. Twice divorced due to reported infidelity, he is now raising seven children with his third wife, whom he married in 2019. He paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of rape in 2017, though he denies the allegation.

Then there’s Vice President J.D. Vance, who has been proudly proclaiming his conversion to Catholicism, only to criticize the pope for quoting Jesus’s views on war (“Blessed be the peacemakers”). “I think it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance opined. For the vice-president, “theology” means not opposing the things that Trump does.

Trump, meanwhile, has angered even conservative Catholics, first by posting an image of himself as the pope and then, most recently, of himself as Jesus Christ. In one way, however, it makes sense that he would do so as many Christian evangelicals have been seeing him as, if not the messiah, at least as a version of the Persian king Cyrus, who freed the Israelites held captive in Babylon. If your devoted Christian followers are proclaiming you as Christianity’s best and last hope, it’s understandable why you might think of yourself as Jesus.

When I compare these figures to Angelo, I hasten to add (with my eldest son’s critique that such comparisons elevate the real life counterparts) that Angelo is a deeper figure than any of these. That’s because, in private soliloquies, he admits to having qualms. He knows that Isabella is devout and pure but still wants to defile her. In fact, he wishes to defile her because she is pure:

What, do I love her,
That I desire to hear her speak again,
And feast upon her eyes? What is’t I dream on?
O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue…

I can’t imagine Hegseth, Vance, or Trump experiencing such inner doubts.

The somewhat naïve Isabella—I’d compare her to the Trump-disillusioned Marjorie Taylor Greene except that Isabella is far superior—fails to pick up on Angelo’s broad hints and initially believes him to be acting out of higher principle. Greene too once believed in Trump, only to be shocked by his threat to obliterate Iran:

Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.

Greene has accused Trump of “blasphemy” for depicting himself as Christ. Nor is she the only MAGA Christian to do so.

Isabella, when she finally realizes what Angelo wants, is similarly horrified and threatens to expose him. At this point, he plays the card that abuse victims know all too well:

Who will believe thee, Isabel?
My unsoil’d name, the austereness of my life,
My vouch against you, and my place i’ the state,
Will so your accusation overweigh,
That you shall stifle in your own report
And smell of calumny.

She will pay a price if she goes public, not he.

Interestingly, when she reports the corrupt proposal to her brother, expecting him to back her up, she is similarly horrified to discover that he wants her to take the deal: what is her virtue to his life? We can perhaps put him in the category of those Trump Christians who are willing to excuse immorality if it gives them what they want although, in Claudio’s defense, he’s under far greater pressure than they are.

Fortunately for Claudio and Isabella, the Duke has witnessed all that has happened. While I suppose he could just reveal himself, expose Angelo’s perfidy, pardon Claudio, and set everything right, what would be the fun of that? Instead, he engages in some trickery. The woman who gives her body to Angelo under cover of darkness is not Isabella but Mariana, a woman to whom Angelo was once betrothed but then jilted. Then we learn how little a tyrant’s word is worth: despite having slept (he thinks) with Isabella, Angelo goes back on his bargain and condemns Claudio to death anyway.

To use the framing of authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder, Isabella would have gained nothing from surrendering in advance.

In the end, Shakespeare assures us that justice will prevail. The Duke steps forth, pardons Claudio, and condemns Angelo to death. (Mariana and Isabella plead for his life, however, so he too is pardoned and marries Mariana.) The Duke, meanwhile, marries Isabella and presumably they live happily ever after. 

Given how accustomed we have gotten to corrupt officials escaping accountability, I find Angelo getting exposed more satisfying than the marriages.

Further note: I’ve blogged once in the past on a passage in Measure for Measure that only too well describes Trump and Hegseth, who think that their access to military might gives them the right to do anything. It is when Isabella calls out Angelo:

O, it is excellent 
To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous 
To use it like a giant.

Sándor Petőfi reading “National Song”

Wednesday

Given how often 19^th century poets have played critical roles in the modern liberation movements of various eastern European countries, I’m not surprised to learn that a Hungarian poet played a role in Sunday’s election. In the past, I’ve blogged about Ukraine’s Tara Shevchenko, Belarus’s Vincent Dunin-Martsinkevich, and Slovenia’s France Prešeren, Today’s post is given over Sándor Petőfi, whose poem “National Song (Rise Up Magyar)” provided Péter Magyar with the following stanza as he campaigned against Viktor Orbán. 

Beautiful again shall be Hungary’s name
Worthy of its ancient fame
What centuries past have smeared with blight
We shall wash off and set aright.
We swear by God we shall be free
No longer sons of slavery.

Given the Orbán regime’s staggering level of corruption—“smeared with blight”–the vision of washing off and setting aright resonated deeply with the Hungarian people. They were determined no longer to be the sons and daughters of authoritarian slavery. 

Petőfi was a lyrical poet who turned to political poetry in 1848, when revolutions were sweeping through Europe. According to Wikipedia, Petőfi “read the poem aloud on 15 March on the steps of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest to a gathering crowd, who by the end were chanting the refrain as they began to march around the city, seizing the presses, liberating political prisoners, and declaring the end of Austrian rule.”

Although the revolution would ultimately prove to be defeated by the combined forces of the Austrian and Russian empires, the revolution “initiated a chain of events that led to the autonomy of Hungary within the new Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867.”

Think of the joy Hungarians are currently feeling, not to mention friends of democracy around the world, as you read Petőfi’s poem, translated by Kőrőssy László. “Magyar” essentially means Hungarian, Hungary’s dominant ethnic group:

National Song (Rise Up, Magyar)
By Sándor Petőfi

Rise up, Magyar, the homeland calls!
The time is here, now or never!
Shall we be slaves or free?
This is the question, choose your answer! –
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we won’t be slaves
any longer!

We were slaves up til now,
Damned are our ancestors,
Who lived and died free,
Cannot rest in a slave land.
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we won’t be slaves
any longer!

Useless villain of a man,
Who now, if need be, doesn’t dare to die,
Who values his pathetic life greater
Than the honor of his homeland.
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we won’t be slaves
any longer!

The sword shines brighter than the chain,
Decorates better the arm,
And we still wore chains!
Return now, our old sword!
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we won’t be slaves
any longer!

The Magyar name will be great again,
Worthy of its old, great honor;
Which the centuries smeared on it,
We will wash away the shame!
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we won’t be slaves
any longer!

Where our grave mounds lie,
Our grandchildren will kneel,
And with blessing prayer,
Recite our sainted names.
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we won’t be slaves
any longer!

Tuesday

Julia and I live by a small lake, which means that, when we eat our suppers on our screen porch these days, we get to hear a full-throated frog chorus, both spring peepers and bullfrogs. Thinking of how the Modern Major General in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance boasts of knowing “the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes,” I decided to check out the play.

It turns out that there are relatively few lines in the frog chorus, so the MMG doesn’t have much to boast about. It could also be that he himself is like one of the frogs, croaking out a meaningless list accomplishments that have nothing to do with effective military leadership. In the play, the frogs of Hades are pestering the Greek god Dionysus as he travels to the underworld. His mission is to free one of the great Greek tragedians, either Euripides or Aeschylus, since Greek theater has declined since their deaths.

I’m not clear what thematic role the frogs play or why the play is called The Frogs. Maybe they represent the babble of the modern theater. Emily Dickinson’s frog comes to mind:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Dont tell! they’d banish us – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell your name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Whatever they represent, their incessant chirping—sound without substance–drives Dionysus crazy. Here they are:

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!
We children of the fountain and the lake
Let us wake
Our full choir-shout, as the flutes are ringing out,
Our symphony of clear-voiced song.
The song we used to love in the Marshland up above,
In praise of DIOnysus to produce,
Of Nysaean DIOnysus, son of Zeus,
When the revel-tipsy throng, all crapulous and gay,
To our precinct reeled along on the holy
Pitcher day.
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.

When Dionysus complains, “Hang you, and your ko-axing too! There’s nothing but ko-ax with you,” the annoying frogs reply:

That is right, Mr. Busybody, right!
For the Muses of the lyre love us well;
And hornfoot Pan who plays on the pipe his jocund lays;
And Apollo, Harper bright, in our Chorus takes delight
For the strong reed’s sake which I grow within my lake
To be girdled in his lyre’s deep shell.
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.

When Dionysus prays for them to “give o’er, sing no more,” the frogs takes this as a challenges to grow louder:

Ah, no! ah, no! Loud and louder our chant must flow. 
Sing if ever ye sang of yore,
When in sunny and glorious days
Through the rushes and marsh-flags springing
On we swept, in the joy of singing
Myriad-divine roundelays.
Or when fleeing the storm, we went
Down to the depths, and our choral song
Wildly raised to a loud and long
Bubble-bursting accompaniment.

Finally Dionysus concludes that, if he can’t beat them, he’ll join them, so that both parties are croaking by the end of the scene:

DIO. Go, hang yourselves; for what care I?
FR. All the same we’ll shout and cry,
Stretching all our throats with song,
Shouting, crying, all day long.
FR. and DIO. Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.

Unlike the Greek god, Julia and I enjoy the frogs. In fact, we’ll miss them later in the summer when the katydids drown everything out, from frogs to coyotes. At the moment, however, the frogs capture our excitement over the warm spring nights and the tree foliage bursting out all over.

It’s a magical time.