Tag Archives: Biden

Qwertyman No. 103: Surviving the Survivor

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 22, 2024

WHEN THAT rifle bullet grazed Donald Trump’s ear last week, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in having an equally nasty thought whiz through my brain—and I’ll put this as delicately as I can: would it be un-Christian to wish misfortune on Satan and his minions? And less delicately, why does a God who allows bombs to drop on innocent children in Ukraine and Gaza spare a man who seems the very embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth to those who’ve forgotten—and who will most certainly destroy as much of humanity as we know it before he mercifully expires?

To the MAGA faithful, Trump’s salvation could have been nothing less than divine intervention, a virtual endorsement of his worthiness and indeed his destiny to rule. In one of the many ironies to be found in American politics today, Trump was shot at by a registered Republican using an AR-15-type rifle—the serial shooter’s weapon of choice, and the National Rifle Association’s darling—despite which Republican leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene were quick to denounce the attempt as a plot instigated by the “evil” Democratic Party. The Democrats are now the war freaks, with Joe Biden liable to be charged for “inciting an assassination,” according to Georgia Rep. Mike Collins (the same fellow who has called for the release and pardon of the rioters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021). Trump marched into the Republican convention with a bandage on his ear and a halo around his head. “He just won the election,” a Wisconsin congressman told the media.

Given the polls, he was probably going to do that, anyway, facing an anemic and increasingly isolated Biden, who was really the one in need of something so theatrical to happen to jolt his campaign. In an environment shaped by media coverage and social-media shares, that picture of a bloodied Trump raising his fist in front of the Stars and Stripes couldn’t have been better produced. Let’s add to the script his big Supreme Court win on immunity and the dismissal of his classified documents case, and the Orange Man is clearly on a roll and on a path back to the White House, no matter what. The stars are aligning, albeit in the wrong direction.

That bodes ill not only for Americans—whose sole business it is to elect their presidents, so there’s nothing we can do if they prove as suggestible as our own electorate has been—but for the rest of the world, where democracies have struggled under a rising class of demagogues and tyrants with whom another Trump administration will only be too happy to do business. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will end quickly, as Trump promised, because he will pull back the aid that allows Ukrainians to fight, force them to yield territory to his pal Putin, and declare himself a peacemaker. (His policy on Israel and Gaza has been consistently inconsistent, defined as much by what Biden does as by what he really thinks, which no one seems to know. “He’s just delusional at this point,” said his former NSA John Bolton. “He doesn’t have any idea what to do in the Middle East.”) So Trump survived; but can the world survive him?

For us Filipinos and the Taiwanese, almost 14,000 kilometers away from Washington, DC, Trump II will likely mean “non-intervention,” i.e., a re-embrace of neighborhood bullies like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un at the expense of even the semblance of covering for us in the West Philippine Sea. (A US withdrawal will delight our progressives and nationalists—both the real and the newly-minted—and ironically align them with the most reactionary and despotic American president ever.)

But back to that shooting. I’m not particularly religious nor philosophical, but that failed assassination attempt and its likely aftermath sent me into a deep dive, asking questions I knew had no easy answers. Maybe because of the company I keep, no one I knew, whether here or in the States, dropped to his or her knees in gratitude and relief over Trump’s deliverance. Of course we all muttered in polite agreement with the obligatory PR statements, the kind I could have written myself: “We eschew and deplore all political violence. Violence has no place in a democracy, and our thoughts and prayers are with former President Trump as we reaffirm our commitment to peace, freedom, and justice for all, regardless of their political beliefs or affiliations.” 

But to be perfectly honest, my thoughts and prayers were going another way, which is perhaps the sorriest thing about all this: we begin to entertain brutish notions and expedient solutions. Just as one trigger-happy and foul-mouthed president let out the worst in the Filipino and made it okay to laugh at rape jokes and take murder with a shrug, Trump has conventionalized a movement that will certainly survive him, founded on people’s basest instincts: fear, suspicion, selfishness, and lying to survive. (His VP pick, Sen. J.D. Vance, is said to be even worse—Trump with military chops, just as opportunistic and with much more mileage in him.) Trumpism will not die with Trump, even now a living martyr and saint in his own religion. It’s become too big to kill off with one shot, so it’s probably just as well that that rooftop shooter missed. 

Why? Because if and when Trump wins, then perhaps Americans, and especially Trumpers, will better understand themselves in the man they elected. When I teach literature, I sometimes go back to Aeschylus and Agamemnon to raise the same question I opened this piece with: Why does God (or Zeus) bring suffering upon his people? And the answer in the play is, “Man suffers, so he will learn.” And then again, do we ever? The Germans elected Hitler, only to later realize they had made a grievous mistake, but now Hitler is loose upon the world in his many reincarnations.

The expat Trumpers and MAGA Fil-Ams who regularly excoriate me for meddling in US affairs—but who won’t think twice or even know about America meddling in ours—are probably turning all shades of red and purple as they read this, but do I care? I care for our daughter in California; I hope she follows my sister who moved to Canada after Trump I, before she gets accused of “poisoning the blood” of America. (Both are legal, tax-paying US citizens.)

At least we Pinoys can say we’ve been through all of that, and more—assassinations (our assassins were better marksmen), restorations (our politicos have more patience, and can wait a generation), and Netflix-worthy political drama (next episode: SONA fashions and SONA absentees). Having survived martial law and having our own demons to contend with, we’ll survive Trump II and whatever he does in the sandbox of the White House. The question is, will America?

Qwertyman No. 101: The Truth Sometimes Stutters

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 8, 2024

LIKE MANY other global citizens with an interest in American politics, I watched the recent presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump with alarm and dismay, emerging profoundly depressed by Biden’s lackluster performance. His rousing State of the Union speech last March, which I also watched, had raised my expectations, as it surely did the Democratic Party’s, that he would come out swinging and send Trump flying out of that arena with the punch to end all punches. 

He managed to throw a few good ones—I especially liked “You have the morals of an alley cat!” But in the end—or should I say, pretty much throughout the debate–he lost steam, stuttered, and strayed. Fighting Joe stayed home; Soporific Joe turned up. Even Trump, who lied his way through the debate with his customary sneer and swagger, seemed surprised by the win being handed to him by his opponent and by all the media commentators looking on. 

Those commentators would later do the math and conclude that Trump had told about 30 lies and misrepresentations over the 90-minute bout, while agreeing that Biden had also made some false assertions, though none as outrageous as Trump’s charge that Democratic policy included killing babies even after they were born. None of this post-mortem will matter to Trump’s base, used to swallowing whatever comes out of The Donald’s mouth as God’s own truth. It mattered to Biden’s, because it seemed to confirm their deepest fears—and what had until then been a nasty snicker from the other side—that the incumbent was mentally and physically inadequate to the task of leading America for four more years, let alone beating Trump in November. 

When I reviewed the transcript of that debate—which I suspect will rank near the bottom in the history of presidential debates for quality of thought and expression—I had to conclude that the truth was poorly told and the lies came through loud and clear. Biden ran through the numbers with professorial precision: “40 percent fewer people coming across the border illegally… billionaires pay 8.2 percent in taxes… $8,000 per family written off under the Affordable Care Act… everybody making under $170,000 pays 6 percent of their income,” and so on. But Trump’s strategy was much simpler—just repeat the same incendiary claim, over and over again, and don’t bother with the details: “the worst president we ever had, the worst administration in history, we’re no longer respected, they think we’re stupid, we opened our borders to people from mental institutions, insane asylums, terrorists, people are dying all over the place….” 

In rhetorical heaven, the truth would ring like a bell and be heard from sea to shining sea, while falsehood would seethe and slither in whispery incoherence. Instead, what we saw confirmed the opposite—that in today’s media, prone to hyperbole and uncritical amplification, the brazen lie will travel farther than the complicated truth, which can be messy, inconvenient (as Al Gore pointed out), and unpopular. 

Furthermore, and even worse, the truth all by itself won’t win elections. We’ve seen that happen many times, and we don’t even need to cross the Pacific for proof. 

In the second op-ed column I wrote for this corner more than two years ago titled “Myth over matter,” I said that “The most daring kind of fiction today is out of the hands of creative writers like me. It is being created by political propagandists who are spinning their own versions of the truth, and who expect the people to believe them. The short story and the novel are no longer the best media for this type of fiction, but the tweet, the Facebook feed, the YouTube video, and even the press conference.”

“Today’s savviest political operators know this: spin a tale, make it sound appealing, trust ignorance over knowledge, and make them feel part of the story. ‘Babangon muli?’ Well, who the heck who dropped us into this pit? It doesn’t matter. Burnish the past as some lost Eden, when streets were clean, people were disciplined, and hair was cut short—or else. Never mind the cost—’P175 billion in ill-gotten wealth’ is incomprehensible; “a mountain of gold to solve your problems” sparkles like magic.”

Biden isn’t just fighting Trump, but a growing global disdain for intellectual acuity, in favor of populist platitudes and despotic bombast. Sadly none of this analysis, of which Joe Biden surely must be aware more than anyone else, is going to help him and his party defend democracy in America if he sticks to his dated notion of an idealist America that clearly no longer exists. To buy time and opportunity for that hope, he may have to do what he has never done, and yield his place to a fitter champion. (Biden famously labored to overcome a childhood stutter and being bullied for it by reciting Yeats and Emerson in front of a mirror.)

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have called for Biden to stand down, a rising chorus that has been joined by important leaders and donors of the Democratic Party. There’s wishful speculation that—despite the obligatory public display of bravado and strong familial support—the more sensible Joe will prevail and see the election as being more than a personal Rubicon but indeed, as he himself puts it, an existential battle for democracy itself. If Biden goes down, the chances are he won’t be alone; the Republicans will win both the House and the Senate, giving Trump virtual carte blanche to reshape the rest of America in his own sour image. (And for us Filipinos, a Trump win will mean even less leverage in the West Philippine Sea, not that the US under any president will likely go to war on our behalf for a pot of soil at high tide; but isolationist Trump will be far more willing to bargain our rights away with China for economic and political gain.)

As distant onlookers with a strategic investment in November’s outcome, let’s pray that Sensible Joe will get the better of Fighting Joe, and give the stuttering truth a chance.

Qwertyman No. 75: Trump 2.0

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 8, 2024

IN MY column last week, I mentioned the “Trumpian dystopia” threatening to take over the United States and many other rightward-leaning societies and governments around the world. 

A “dystopia” is, of course, a place or a situation where everything has been turned on its head, where the bad has become good and the wrong has become right, and where the things we most feared or abhorred have become the norm. You find this in George Orwell’s 1984, where the government controls everything; younger readers and viewers will relate to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, where citizens are sacrificed for the Capitol’s entertainment. In other words, it’s social and political hell for those reared in the kind of postwar liberalism that eschews racial discrimination, authoritarianism, gender inequality, and religious intolerance, among other shibboleths.

It’s hard to believe that much of America seems to be marching in lockstep toward that dystopia under a revived Donald Trump, wh0m nearly all polls see as leading the race for the US presidency, which will be at stake in November this year. On this date three years ago, he was squarely in the doghouse in the aftermath of the shockingly violent assault on Congress on January 6 by Trump partisans unwilling to accept that he had lost to Joe Biden in the election. Even his closest allies at that time distanced themselves from his apparent captaincy of that bloody caper, although many of them have returned to his kennel. 

Nearly a full presidential cycle later, he’s back in the Republican saddle, way ahead of a pack of rivals who, save one, have refused to denounce Trump for what he is: the greatest single threat to American democracy because of what he represents (leaving aside foreign tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un). That, not surprisingly, is President Joe Biden’s exact description of him, so some might say it’s biased, but to remain unbiased against Donald Trump is to lie prostrate in front of a steamroller, begging to be annihilated.

It doesn’t help that the incumbent is 81 years old, palpably slow, avuncular, and whispery where Trump screams into people’s ears (to the delight of many). Their age difference—just four years—isn’t actually all that much, but beyond personalities, it’s a difference in cultures, and perhaps of understanding how politics works in this post-Facebook age, where obnoxiousness has become a virtue and regularity a liability.

Trump thrives on notoriety, parlaying the four indictments involving 91 criminal charges against him—plus the two disqualifications from state ballots—into a kind of a badge of courage, flipping prosecution into persecution. Rather than fracture his base, any attack on Trump (and any attack by him) only seems to consolidate the estimated 30-40% of hardcore Trumpers who now effectively define the Republican party, the tail wagging the dog.

Among the most repugnant (and, by Trumpian logic, among the most attractive) of his recent statements has been his denunciation of undocumented migrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” specifically mentioning Latin America, Africa, and Asia as the sources of what in other speeches he has called rapists, terrorists, and Covid carriers.

You would think that that kind of Hitlerian rhetoric would galvanize the Hispanic and Asian-American—not to mention the African-American—communities in America against Trump, but no. If anything, his support among these groups seems to be rising, driven ironically enough by his hardline position on immigration, the very same factor that made these minorities possible to begin with.

What I’m interested in is how the Filipino-American community will respond to Trump 2.0, and what that will say of us as a people, albeit as one of many minorities in America’s multiracial society.

There are now about 4 million Filipino-Americans; half of them, 2 million, are voters. (To put this in context, the US population now stands at 336 million, of whom 170 million are voters.) Historically, Filipino-American voters have leaned Democrat, with a majority of them voting for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020. But a very vocal (though perhaps somewhat less visible, as many people tend to reveal their preferences only in the voting booth) “Filipinos for Trump” movement exists, and if trends persist will likely gain more traction this time around.

In 2020, Filipino pro-Trumpers cited “family, religion, and faith” as the main reasons they were backing him, like many American evangelicals, despite all the evidence to the contrary in Trump’s personal behavior and speech. For many, it all came down to one issue—abortion—the right to which has now been successfully rolled back by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. This time around, the flashpoint will likely be immigration, a global problem abetted by collapsing economies and repressive regimes. Well-settled minorities such as Filipino-Americans derive a strong sense of entitlement from all the personal sacrifices and legal processes they went through to acquire their citizenship, and feel cheated by migrants scrambling across the border. This kind of single-issue vote—a gross simplification and reduction of values into one criterion—favors demagogues like Trump, who work through two-dimensional posterization.

A more interesting—and more sinister—reading of Trump’s popularity came up in a recent guest essay in the New York Times by Matthew Schmitz, arguing in his title that “The Secret to Trump’s Appeal Isn’t Authoritarianism,” but rather that “Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters—often with good reason—as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate” and “a flexible-minded businessman who favors negotiation and compromise.” That logic, while fetching, predictably drew quick rebukes. One reader said: “Thanks, Mr. Schmitz, but we’re already well aware of this. Italians liked Mussolini because he ‘made the trains run on time.’ This is exactly our point. This is how dictatorships happen.”

That brought me back to our own long and continuing affair with despotism, and how sharply simplified populist sloganeering can cut through and cut down on complex reasoning—with devastating consequences for democracy, here and across the Pacific. 

(Photo from colorlines.com)

Qwertyman No. 52: Joe Biden’s SOTU

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 31, 2023

BECAUSE OF a glitch that happened when Chinese hackers tried to hijack America’s C-Span network so they could replace congressional programming with X-rated cartoons (on the theory that no one would miss the analogy), for a few minutes in the early morning of July 24, 2023 (Eastern Standard Time), the channel’s viewers were treated instead to the live coverage of an apparently big event happening in faraway Philippines.

Celebrities and bigwigs were getting dropped off by their limousines and luxury SUVs at some place called the “Batasan,” which a commentator helpfully explained was the building that housed the Congress of the Philippines—the Philippine Capitol, in other words, minus the dome.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was just about to go to bed in his home in Bakersfield—he had flown back to California for the weekend to avoid the screechings of the Freedom Caucus in his ears—and he had been having a hard time sleeping, wondering which was worse, having to deal with Joe Biden or with Donald Trump. Just when he was about to drift off to dreamland, his cellphone rang. It was an aide back in Washington, and immediately Speaker Kevin wondered if something earthshaking had happened—like Biden resigning after being diagnosed with dementia or Trump discovering honesty and humility and turning to God. “Boss, you have to see this. Tune in to C-Span!”

Grumbling, the Speaker did as asked and had to rub his eyes as he watched a woman step out onto the red carpet dressed like some aboriginal priestess, complete with warlike tattoos. Others came in headdresses, butterfly sleeves, heavily embroidered gowns, and sashes with pictures of dead people. “What’s going on? What the hell am I looking at? Is this some movie premiere or what?”

“It’s a live feed from the Philippines, what they call a SONA—the president’s State of the Nation Address, their version of our State of the Union. The president’s arriving shortly to deliver his speech.”

“You woke me up to get me to listen to some political crap in some backwater country? Are you out of your mind? Don’t we get enough of this in DC?”

“No, no, boss, it’s not about the speech—that’s the whole point, forget the speech, it’s about the fashions! Look at them, preening like peacocks and peahens. Look at the coverage, I’ll bet you, tomorrow, all the papers and social media in Manila will be talking about the dresses, not the speech!”

“And so?” Kevin got up from bed, sufficiently intrigued to pour himself a scotch in anticipation of a longer chat. This aide was his top PR strategist, and sometimes the guy came up with truly inspired ideas, like plucking Ms. Horseface away from the Freedom Caucus to boost his conservative credentials and keep the restless natives in check. Joe Biden was the enemy, but his own crew members could be a bigger pain.

“Well, don’t you see, boss? Joe Biden’s next SOTU is coming up, and… we need a distraction. We don’t want him lecturing the American people about how we’re stripping women of their rights to safe abortions, or teaching the young that slavery had some real benefits, or carving up congressional districts to make sure that dark-skinned people don’t get too much sun on election day. I mean, he’ll do that anyway, but these Filipinos know something we don’t—it’s not the speech, it’s the party! We can turn the SOTU into a fashion show and no one will care what Old Joe says!”

McCarthy took a closer look at the screen and listened to the commentators blabbering about this and that gown and comparing it to last year’s versions—the more outrageous, the better. He recalled being canceled back in January for appearing in a picture wearing a blue suit with brown shoes—par for the course in cool Europe but never in redneck America!—and smiled in anticipation of his revenge. 

As it turned out, the Speaker and his aide weren’t alone. Before the footage could be pulled off C-Span, it had made the rounds of the bars around Washington, DC, and someone found even more detailed coverage on YouTube, and when daylight broke over the Potomac it was all that the senators, congressmen, and their flunkies could talk about over their morning coffee. 

“So what are you going to wear to the SOTU?” reporters asked Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as soon as she stepped out the door of her DC apartment. She had a ready answer for that, having pondered the question over her Wheaties: “I’ll come in a long black dress,” she said, “with the word IMPEACH running down the front!”

It didn’t take long for Marjorie’s arch-rival on the right, Rep. Lauren Broebert of Colorado, to announce that she was coming “As Annie Oakley, in defense of the Second Amendment, the biggest victim of all the mass shootings happening in America today!”

Even Kari Lake, who was still refusing to accept her defeat for the governorship of Arizona, revealed that she was attending the SOTU as a guest, and that she was coming dressed as a Mexican muchacha—“Not to glorify diversity or any of that woke garbage, but to draw attention to illegal immigration, which is sucking the lifeblood of this great country and its legal, blue-passport-carrying citizens!”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who had stubbornly and singlehandedly been holding up the confirmation of dozens of generals because he didn’t want the military to pay for the abortions of women in the service, had his own idea: “I’m having myself fitted for the uniform of a Confederate general.” Inspired by something he had seen on a related YouTube clip, he added, “And for good measure, my wife Suzanne will be wearing a gold necklace made from the excavated medals and buttons of Union Army officers!”

Reached for comment at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump declared he wasn’t coming, and fumed when a reporter reminded him that former presidents were invited to the event. “Who’re you calling a former president? That thievin’, lyin’ Joe is a never president—never, never, never! I should be the one giving the SOTU, not him—and I will, again!”

Alerted to the SONA brouhaha by his butler, Joe Biden passed the sugar on to Jill as the video played in the background. He listened briefly to the other president’s speech and smiled. “A New Philippines, hmmm…. How does ‘A New America’ sound to you, honey?”

“I think not,” said Jill. “In fact, we rather miss the old one, don’t we? When America was a kinder and gentler place?”

“That’s George Bush Senior’s line, honey. From the 1988 GOP convention.”

“Exactly. Back when even some Republicans got some things right.”

Penman No. 406: Poets and Politicians

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Penman for Monday, February 1, 2021

NOBODY EXPECTED a 22-year-old poet named Amanda Gorman to be the runaway hit at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration last month, but there she was, bright and exuberant, delivering a clear and ringing message of hope in her now-famous “The Hill We Climb.” Once you have both grandmothers and teenagers quoting the same verses in their posts, you know that a chord has been struck, a nerve touched, in the national psyche.

Of course, that was another nation, not ours, but I’m sure many Filipinos exulted as well in that new beginning for America after four years of chaos, and not too secretly hoped for a similar return to civility and decency—indeed to optimism and intelligence—where they were. As a boy whose early education was steeped in Americana—nothing too strange in Filipino private schools of the 1960s—I grew up to become something of a junkie for American history and politics, which explains why, for the past three months, I followed every turn of the Trump-Biden saga as if it had anything to do with us (and inevitably, it will; when America burps or worse, we hear it).

There have just been four American presidents who had poets read at their inaugurals: John F. Kennedy in 1961, Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1997, Barack Obama in 2009 and 2013, and Joe Biden in 2021. Robert Frost read “A Gift Outright” for JFK; for Clinton, Maya Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morning” in 1993 and Miller Williams read “Of History and Hope” in 1997; for Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, Elizabeth Alexander read “Praise Song for the Day” and in 2013, Richard Blanco read “One Today.” (Many thanks to poets.org for the information.)

As you can see from the titles alone, these poems were flush with positivity, as inaugurals should be. Why only Democrats brought poets along to their inaugurals seems something of a mystery—but then again maybe not, as poetry and the brand of culture it implies could be seen as “soft” by the gun-toting machos who typically vote Republican. 

There’s an article in the Chicago Tribune from 2012, when Mitt Romney was challenging Obama for the presidency, that faulted Romney for his rhetorical gaffes and asked if he could use a poet at his side. (Among his critics was a guy named Donald Trump who called Romney’s language “inartful.”) The Tribune noted that while “the world of poetry… is a liberal tradition,” there was also a smaller category of politically conservative poets—T. S. Eliot and Samuel Coleridge among them—that was still current, and had even been anthologized into a book called, unsurprisingly, The Conservative Poets, published by the University of Evansville Press in 2006. None of these featured poets made it to Trump’s inaugural in 2017.

Surely there must be parallels in our own political history—we even had a president, Carlos P. Garcia, who wrote poems called balak in his native Boholano, and Ferdinand Marcos retained a coterie of Palace poets to sing his and Meldy’s praises. These deserve longer commentary for another time.

Even as I admire Amanda Gorman’s achievement, and especially her delivery, I do have to say that, as a poem, “The Hill We Climb” was far from perfect for me—not that it matters much in the context of what the poem had to do. In modern poetry, we usually suggest that the poem be less direct, less declarative about its intentions, leaving the reader with a little puzzle to figure out. It’s the difference between saying “Nobody loves me like you do” and e. e. cummings writing “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” 

But Amanda was engaged in what we might call public poetry, poetry meant to be almost immediately understood and appreciated by a live audience, so it had to be more obvious in its meaning. That’s why it worked, like a popular song whose refrain people can easily remember; note, too, the rap-like rhyming and rhythm of its lines. What’s important is that the poem connected and made sense of recent events in a way and on a level that news stories and editorials couldn’t, delivered by a young, black poet with a credibility that politicians could only dream of.

Speaking of politicians, I’ve long maintained that leaders incapable of tenderness and of acknowledging their vulnerability can’t be trusted. Poetry’s appeal to the emotions requires a certain sensitivity on the listener’s or reader’s part, but it also engages the mind in ways that force you to go beyond the literal and to make intuitive connections between this and that. Leaders shackled by their own simplistic “us vs. them” mindsets and their self-defensiveness can’t make those imaginative leaps, or appreciate the rich ambiguities of literature, stuck in their rigid dogmas.

This doesn’t mean that culturally literate leaders can’t be tough when they need to be; JFK stood up to Khruschev and the Soviets with a naval blockade when they tried to ship missiles to Cuba. We can only wish other national leaders would be so brave against their nations’ enemies, instead of picking on certain universities for letting their professors and students think and speak freely, which not incidentally are basic to the writing of great poetry.