Felix Holt: the Radical

Over the past 21 years I have posted almost 1000 articles to my blog, Of Clay and Wattles Made and this will be another. Some of those postings addressed issues not unlike what I might have written in a journal if I were a more careful journal keeper. Thoreau might have edited his journals to give them organization for future use, but I am not so careful a scholar. My blogposts were expressions of personal, aesthetic and cultural issues that I wanted to think more about than I might have in casual consideration. Though a public blog few were read by others. No matter. As Montaigne had said years earlier, “And if no one reads me have I wasted my time entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts.” I was for the most part entertained. They were personal, written, edited expressions about the world—the universe—in which I lived, functioned and thought, expressions not of facts but of feelings which were translations of those facts. The feelings were the facts embedded in context.  Sometimes I translated those feelings into moral and ethical principles. And in those postings occasionally I addressed issues of politics that ended up too often as screeds against the winds that too often smelled of excrement. These latter posts were angry comments many of which I am not now proud, not because I felt wrong but because they were composed in a white heat; I suppose I might have been more circumspect, though during Trump’s second term I have noted that anger is often the feeling expressed in the opinion pages of the newspapers to which I am a resistant and too often regretful subscriber. I have too often written my anger into my blog. Thoreau says that to read a newspaper daily is like a dog returning to his vomit: I appreciate his observation. But somehow it is a vomitus with which I am familiar and though foul-smelling it nevertheless grounds me: or rather, distracts me from grounding myself.
           Sometimes in my postings I have bemoaned the state of education in the United States; I have spent almost fifty years as a teacher in the public high schools and in one public university and before that I was a student in the schools and colleges. There I began to understand and to think in a language that had not been part of my upbringing nor public discourse; in my readings I acquired a perspective that broadened my understanding of myself and my expanding and expansive world. Thoreau writes, “It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.” Even before I had studied Thoreau this was the belief I embraced and promoted in my classrooms; I thought it made me a liberal teacher of literature and a good professor of education preparing teachers for the schools. I thought teachers should be wise and with wisdom; I though everyone should be taught to be wise. Thoreau writes, “we should learn liberality.” I did. And I blame the education system for the ignorance that has pervaded our country and that elects corrupt, even criminal and unfit leaders. To think has become anathema in the schools; following rules and algorithms is the accepted methodology of the classrooms. We have just to hear about the silencing and even punishing of students who protest the ways things are and demand an ethical and moral liberality that detests corruption and criminal activity in the supposed leaders of the country. We watch the lists of banned books in school libraries grow, and watch in horror as life choices have turned chooses into criminals.
           I read this in George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, published in 1866. It is considered Eliot’s political novel but I believe it is more complex than that. Felix cannot vote because the Reform Act of 1832 only gave the vote to owners of property that had achieved a sufficient value. But Felix calls himself a radical because he advocates for a greater liberality in British political life. He argues for an informed populace that knows right from wrong. Standing before a crowd of mostly ineligible voters he says, “I’ll tell you what’s the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion—the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful . . . How can political freedom make us better, any more than religion we don’t believe in, if people laugh and wink when they see men abuse and defile it? An while public opinion is what it is—while men have no better beliefs about public duty—while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace—while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petter private ends,—I say no fresh scheme of voting will med our conditions.” Here, I thought, is a novel from 1866 that speaks to our present corrupt administration with an accurate bitterness. 

            But actually Felix Holt is hopeful and advocates for citizens who “had some soberness, some sense to choose with, some good feeling to make them wish the right thing for all.” What Felix Holt calls for is an ethical foundation for living and for political and religious action. To an understanding of the contexts of our facts. For years I have offered in my critique of education an opinion that it has failed to promote an attainment of wisdom that might lead to a liberality; rather it has narrowly focused on skills for a marketplace that might enrich the already wealthy and leave in power the corrupt and corruptible. What Felix, Thoreau and myself bemoan is that too many “have no sense to choose one thing in politics more than another,” who “have wasted their own drinking money that should have helped to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another half of them who, if they didn’t drink, were too ignorant or mean or stupid to see any good for themselves better than pocketing a five shrilling piece when it was offered them.” 

            Ah, yet another screed, but it intrigues me always that our contemporary state of things is not new; as Dylan sang, “it’s all been done before, it’s all been written in the book.” Ours is not just a political problem but an ethical one. And one with which I wished education would address.

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Far Have the Mighty Fallen!

On April 29 1962, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy hosted the largest State dinner of his administration honoring 49 living Nobel laureates and 124 other prominent intellectuals, artists and scientists, including Robert Frost, James Baldwin, J Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, Frederic March, Isaac Stern, Mary Hemingway, Katherine Porter, and John Glenn. In his welcoming speech, the President said, “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.: The room laughed loudly and applauded.  Frederic March read from an unpublished work by Ernest Hemingway.
           On June 14, 2026, President Donald J. Trump hosted a U.F.C. event at the White House to celebrate his 80^thbirthday. The event was priced at $60 million and the President sat at ringside to watch fighters whale at each other “inside an eight-sided cage wrapped in cryptocurrency advertisements.” Trump has financial stake in cryptocurrency. Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times wrote, “The use of the trappings of the White House for violent cage fighting. The corporate sponsorships. The eruption of casual cruelty . . . Money, ego gore, vanity, hype and the flash of the camera, all mixing on the South Lawn of the White House.” The crowd roared.
           Around 100 CE the Roman poet Juvenal coined the term ‘bread and circuses.” Bread and circus referred to the provision by the emperors of free grain handouts and spectacularly vulgar gladiator games and chariot races at the Circus Maximus to entertain the public which then remained submissive to the direction of the current emperor and was then, kept politically passive. The government used the bread and circuses to keep the citizens complacent and ignorant.

My Lord, I think, how far we have descended as a civilized culture. Culture rises up out of a civilization and encompasses and promotes the shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that characterize a group or society. Culture is a learned way of life that includes language, religion, social norms, and the arts, that are passed down from generation to generation and are continuously evolving over time. There are speech codes n dress codes that advertise a culture, In any civilization there are, of course, many cultures, but the dominant culture does what it can to suppress alternative cultures and so to pass itself off as the only acceptable reality. The attacks on Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, the Kennedy Arts Center and the awarding of Medals of Honor to Trump worshipers and sometimes even convicted criminals tells a great deal about the culture that this administration promotes. The language, the pettiness, violence and vindictiveness current in the behaviors of Trump and his sycophants speaks of a degraded culture, one not of aspiration and beauty but of cruelty and narcissistic aggrandizement. This culture promotes fascism.

Trump more recently threatened to destroy the civilization of Iran, but instead he has outraged the civilization and denigrated the civilization of the United States and set about returning out cultures to the darker ages. The violence and bloodshed of UFC events are one thing, but to place them on the front lawn of the nation’s house is offensive and speaks to a contemptuous display that eschews the intellect, music and art, theater and literature that has arisen as a culture in this civilization. Henry David Thoreau argued that every child should hunt when young but that the sport be abandoned for the attainment of higher laws. The Trump administration prefers to remain steeped in the mud and grime of the swamp and promotes a violence that knows few boundaries; he means to keep the country down there with his administration. One of the fighters, Bo Nickal, leaned down to thank Trump for hosting the event. It takes such a special person,” he said, “to be able to have the balls to do something like this.” Need I say more?

 

On Strength

I open most new books with some apprehension. I am concerned: where am I and to where am I heading; do I want to be there? I wonder: who are these people, and do I want to keep company with their like? I have long suspected that a child’s aversion to reading might stem from the strangenesses entailed in entering a new book. I think of the child’s distress when dragged into the company of strangers: withdrawn, shy, uncomfortable and begging to be taken home. “When can we leave?” they ask. Blanche Dubois may have depended on the kindness of strangers, but I think children are uncomfortable there. Entering the perplexing world of a new book is a similarly estranging event and requires some effort to overcome.

When I do begin a book I leave this world and enter another, and at the outset I wander about somewhat lost. Sometimes I stay that way; there are sentences I read that I recognize I may never understand. Suddenly within those pages I am placed in contact with a population of new characters not necessarily of my familiarity or liking; I decide to journey with them to an assortment of new and even strange events; I follow the narration of someone whom I am not certain I can trust, and am presented with new ideas in vocabularies with which I may struggle; often my current itch is scratched. Thoreau says that a good book is one that requires that the one stand on tiptoes to read it. My calves grow sore though the itch gets relieved. Reading ought to be an active and not at all a passive practice, and one must have sufficient courage and strength to properly read. From the library what book will the reader pull off of the shelf and check out at the front desk. Sometimes I pick up a book for reasons that remain a bit vague and I say, “Here I am. Introduce yourself;” I ask, “What have you to say to me?” To the narrator I confess, “You can be unreliable but intrigue me.” Sometimes when I browse in the bookstore, I read a jacket cover, purchase the book and hope that it will give relief to the pricklings in my imagination. I have occasionally experienced many a relief and joy in this manner. The exact etiology of the inspiring discomfort is not always clear at the outset but in the reading I will learn its source and gain some relief and even sometimes wisdom. I call upon my patience and make myself available. 

Why this book at this time and place. Thoreau does acknowledge that by his reading he wishes “to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced.” Ironically Thoreau was a Concord townsman writing a book that was meant to address “our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.” I have wondered if he was condemning his own book to the remainder shelf because he was urging his town people to look beyond Concord for the writers with the wisdom that would their change lives. 

And sometimes I go to the bookshelves and elect to reread a book I remember having enjoyed in the past. Though the characters might be familiar and the story known, I know the experience of reading will be different; I am different. Such was the case in the choice to reread George Eliot’s novel, Felix Holt: The Radical. The appellation ‘radical’ has been pejoratively and erroneously thrown about a great deal these days by this present Republican government, though the term didn’t have the same meaning in the context of Britain in 1832. I had brought the book down to Lotus Land actually for reasons unknown: the last time I had read the novel was in the very early 1980s when I had been awarded a fellowship to study the Serial Novel: Dickens, Eliot and James at Longwood College (now University) in Farmville, Virginia, Prince Edward County. Prince Edward County gained some notoriety when in the wake of Brown vs. The Board of Education it closed its public schools rather than integrate them. Farmville was also the last town through which Robert E. Lee passed on his way to Appomattox to surrender his armies to General Ulysses S. Grant to end the bloody Civil War. To seminar every morning I brought my heavy journal and the current text and engaged in discussion of the section we were studying; then I was free for the rest of the day. I had my lunch in the College dining hall and for the afternoon I sat on the sun plentiful college lawn and read the next day’s assignment. Then I would. turn to the other novels of the author under study that weren’t on the syllabus; George Eliot’s Felix Holt was one of the books I read. I was young then and without too many responsibilities. In the copy I have carried down here there are my early markings and annotations. I carried it down here now to Lotus Land because I wanted to stay immersed in the narratives of the 19^th century novel and to enjoy the depths of George Eliot’s style and ideas. And in the reading I came across a passage that had not scratched any itch then but did now. 

The narrator of Felix Holt raises the issue of strength; what is strength, the narrator wonders. The narrator’s addresses the  dilemma troubling Rufus Lyon. He had taken Annette and her baby into his home having found then abandoned and hungry on the roads; Lyon fell in love with her and this passion causes him a great deal of anguish. To act on his feeling would challenge his position as a vicar in the Church of England. Because Annette is a Roman Catholic.  Will Lyon’s exercise of strength allow him not to act on his love for Annette and continue to serve his Church of England congregation, or will he give up his ministry and marry Annette for whom he longs. To renounce Annette or to marry her was the situation that raised for the narrator the nature of and necessity for strength. The narrator wonders: Is strength revealed in the mere exercise of raw power which would  send her and her child to a convent because and so protect his position and the peace of his life? Or, the narrator wonders if perhaps strength is a “blind wilfulness that sees no terrors, no many-linked consequences, no bruises and wounds of those whose cords it tightens.” Is strength a willed ignorance, a refusal to see the complex contexts in which events arise and in which decisions must be made? Rufus Lyon is aware of these contexts and it is this awareness that causes him so much anxiety. And then I was led to consider the idea of strength when applied to our present so-called leader, of Donald Trump whose narrow vision s advertised as his strength is characterized by an unwillingness to see outside his tunneled perspectives leading him to be able not to see how his heartless arrogance had led for millions cruel, unnecessary agonies and privation; Trump’s strength is exercised to increase his power. Or, the narrator wonders, is strength “the narrowness of a brain that conceives no needs differing from its own, and looks to no results beyond the bargains of to-day.” I again thought of Trump and his pathological narcissism that apparently guides his actions; such might explain his obsessive concern to ensure that his name and visage appear everywhere and often where it does not belong. Is Trump’s strength defined by his vindictiveness that uses his position to punish those whom he believes have somehow hurt him when offering critique to his actions or accusations of his inappropiate behaviors? Or, the narrator wonders, is strength that which “tugs with emphasis for every small purpose, and thinks it weakness to exercise the sublime power of resolved renunciation?” Trumps’ absolute refusal to acknowledge uncertainties or mistakes and wrong decisions that have led to serious consequences for the United States and for the world. His strength, he asserts, tells him that he alone was born to set things right! But he is not Prince Hamlet, not even an attending lord. 

Strength has customarily connoted a positive quality: we go to the gyms to increase our strengths; pump irons and work the machines. Strength is what gets us to the finish lines in races and marathons. Strength is what we require to deal with the complexities of our lives including that when engaged with our families, our relationships . . . our even our studies. Be strong, we are from childhood advised. But Eliot’s narrator suggests to me another perspective on strength and one that complicated how I approach the world and my relationships and my studies. Reverend Lyon chooses to make Annette Ledru his wife and adopts Esther her daughter as his own. The decision costs him dearly and changes the direction of his life. But his act reveals an exercise of strength that understands and accepts the consequences of his actions; his act recognizes that his love demands fulfillment; nonetheless recognizing that the needs of others might take precedence over his own offered Annette rights of refusal. Acknowledging his doubts, his weaknesses and the needs of others, the character of Rufus Lyon reveals his strength.
           I am not far into this rereading of Felix Holt: The Radical, and I do not yet know what itch it was meant to scratch. But the narrator’s brief meditation has already clarified for me some of the concerns that trouble me about Trump and his administration and about the nature of strength. I came to see that Trump’s claims of strength in governing are merely a self-serving promotion, revealing what that so-called strength often amounts to: limited intelligence and a deeply disturbed personality. His claims of strength reveal his weakness. And there are others too susceptible to his influence who also claim strength, but what they display is overt prejudice and personal folly, exposing both the narrowness of their thinking and the absence of real strength.

On the firing of Scott Pelley

The firing of Scott Pelley from CBS News reveals two things at least. Pelley had been at CBS since 1989 and though I am not an interested viewer of CBS or “60 Minutes” he has apparently during his long tenure produced exemplary work. On Monday at a meeting run by newly-hired Nick Bilton, Pelley strongly objected to the management of “60 Minutes” for which he has been a correspondent since 2004 and to the evisceration of not only the show’s correspondents but the entire news department by Bari Weiss and company. Pelley also objected to her hiring of Nick Bilton who had little or no experience in network broadcasting. The New York Times reports, “The firing of Mr. Pelley is among the most consequential moves of Ms. Weiss’s rocky tenure at CBS. And it is almost certain to spike tensions that have coursed through the network for months. [The firing] also raises the stakes of Ms. Weiss’s surprising decision to replace the entire leadership team at “60 Minutes,” CBS News’s most successful franchise, and hire Mr. Bilton, who has had very little or no experience in broadcast TV to oversee the show.” The Times’ notes that ironically, the program’s viewership was up 9 percent this past season from a year prior, and the show is routinely among the nation’s highest-rated weekly broadcasts, according to Nielsen. It seems to me another very sad day for the United States.
            I think the first thing I have learned, as if I didn’t already know this from the agenda of Trump and his administration, that during this dangerous second term dissent in any form or legitimate outlet is forbidden. To disagree means to be disappeared. To express any disagreement with orders from above will result in serious and threatening consequences. This is, of course, the technique of a fascist regime where obedience to authority is paramount and dissent is met with harsh consequences and usually accompanied by vicious and often obscene calumny. Trump’s obscenity-laced rhetoric denigrates the office of the president and demeans its audience, makes mockery of dignity, decorum and civility. Such speech belongs in the gutter and explodes out of the mouths of children. And yet, there are people, cruel and coarse themselves, to whom these obscenities are cheerfully received and even welcomed; the level of public discourse has become trampled in the dirt. 
            And the second thing I have learned is that there are still principled individuals who refuse to bow to authority and are prepared to stand up to power and suffer the consequences. In this time of abject sycophancy from so-called leaders and of an alarming ignorance of Trump supporters who seem to have little concern for the imperial and corrupt presidency and its incompetent and often illegal behaviors of their leaders, it comforts me to hear a man like Scott Pelley refuse to keep silent when injustice and incompetence threaten to overturn the democratic governance of the United States and bring suffering to those least able to get relief. The country is at war despite the deceitful campaign promises that there would be no foreign war; the populace is suffering, except of course the billionaires, despite Trump’s boast that he will make affordability his goal. But his scowling face on a new $250.00 bill that only he and his billionaire friends can carry; his name everywhere on buildings for which he has no relationship and for which he can claim no responsibility for its existence; for his usurpation of ownership despite the  unconstitutional of his greedy grasp seems to be foremost in his limited attention span and uncertain mental capacity.  But Scott Pelley reminds me there are principled people still willing to confront stupidity and power grasping greed; Pelley’s action reminds me of Howard Beale in “Network,” who tosses the television out of the window crying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” I am safe here in Lotus Land, I hope. 
            Daniel Webster’s support of the Compromise of 1850 which affirmed fugitive slave laws was excoriated by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Pho! Let Mr Webster for decency’s sake shut his lip once & forever on this world. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.” Where are these voices now? Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience,” “What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity.” Alas, we have so few of them now.