Quote of the Day (Cynthia Ozick, on Letters as Literary Plot Devices)

“Letters, in our common understanding, are not meant to be fiction, or jokes, or games, or tricks. They are not meant to compete with storytelling, and if they do, if they are dragooned into real life, they become conflated with conspiracy. Yet without letters, what would become of the crux of so many novels and plays? Of literature itself? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sets out with a series of letters; more letters fever it forward. Had Mr. Darcy not hand-delivered his letter to Elizabeth Bennet, she—who could brook neither fools nor snobs—might have lived unwed. If Romeo had read Friar Laurence’s letter, he and Juliet would have averted their misconstrued deaths. Acclaimed eighteenth-century epistolary novels—Pamela, Fanny Hill, Clarissa—could not have come into being, at least not in their chosen form; nor could Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, or Bellow’s Herzog. If not for a letter to his aunt, Marlow, the protagonist of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, would have been obliged to discover another contrivance to introduce his journey up the Congo. And what of the mute and final revelation of Melville’s Bartleby: his origin in the Dead Letter Office?”— American short story writer, novelist, and essayist Cynthia Ozick, “Voices from the Dead Letter Office: On the Epistolary Life,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2025

Quote of the Day (Pope Gregory VII, ‘Oppressed’ by Multiple Challenges)

“The Eastern Church fallen from the faith, and attacked by the infidels from without. In the West, South, or North, scarcely any bishops who have obtained their office regularly, or whose life and conduct correspond to their calling, and who are actuated by the love of Christ instead of worldly ambition. Nowhere princes who prefer God’s honor to their own, and justice to gain…. And when I look to myself, I feel oppressed by such a burden of sin that no other hope of salvation is left me but in the mercy of Christ alone.”— Hildebrand of Sovana, later Pope Gregory VII (1020-1085), in a letter to his friend, Abbot Hugo of Cluny, Jan. 22, 1075, quoted by Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (1907)

The new film adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel Conclave spotlights, amid the election of a new pope, deeply unholy political infighting, corruption, and clerical disobedience of vows of chastity.

I was going to write that readers and filmgoers—with attention spans shortened to a TikTok clip and little if any historical background—may be surprised to learn that the same problems besieged the Vatican nearly a millennium ago.

But now I read that German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, and—ahem!—TV commentator Megyn Kelly have blasted the thriller for depicting such issues in a manner that Cardinal Muller has termed “anti-Christian propaganda,” according to Edward Pentin’s January 20 blog post for National Catholic Register.

Clearly, these outraged worthies haven’t read one of the greatest of medieval popes, Gregory VII, on the same subjects.

According to legend, the reforming Benedictine monk Hildebrand, on a wave of popular acclamation, was carried into the church in St. Peter’s in Vincoli (an easy task to perform, as he was dwarfish), and elected people in 1073, protesting all the while his unworthiness for the office.

Maybe the anguish that Hildebrand (who took the name Gregory) felt before and while serving as the successor of St. Peter was the kind that the intensely pious exhibit in measuring how far they fall from the injunction in Matthew 5:48 to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Or maybe he dreaded the enormous problems that had plagued his mentor, Pope Gregory VI—including exile into Germany forced at the behest of Emperor Henry III.

From the first, Gregory VII denounced the growing practice of simony, the sale of church offices or ecclesiastical preferments, and soon he also banned lay investiture, or bestowal of a church office by a member of the secular nobility rather than by church officials, and clerical marriage.

His actions sparked an epic clash with Emperor Henry IV that weakened both. Like his successors to this day, Gregory had to keep church objectives in mind even as he dealt with secular rulers. The problem was that he and Henry IV could not—or chose not—to move beyond non-negotiable positions.

Medieval monarchs like Henry saw, in appointing bishops to their offices, the opportunity to break the hereditary rule of lords, with bishops becoming vassals of kings. Countering the notion that Henry advocated of the divine right of kings, Gregory proclaimed a spiritual authority higher than a temporary power.

Though never using the word “infallible,” Gregory laid the groundwork for the doctrine by positing that the Holy See “did not err.” Pure and ascetic himself, the pope could never imagine that the supreme power he pronounced over spiritual and secular affairs in the name of removing clerical corruption might ever be used to conceal it.

Like so many reformers in all walks of life, Gregory exhibited a zeal and anger that upset his targets. (German bishops, for instance, complained that he treated them like bailiffs on an estate.) At his best, however, he was as fearless as he was fierce, overcoming his initial self-doubt, and even surviving a kidnapping and imprisonment before being liberated by many of the faithful at the end of 1075.

Henry IV could never forget his humiliating winter journey to the castle of Canossa in 1077 to beg the pope’s forgiveness as the first step in lifting his excommunication. Three years later, he invaded Rome, replacing Gregory with an “anti-pope.”

"I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore, I die in exile,” Gregory remarked sadly on his deathbed in 1085.

Church historian Eamon Duffy has rendered the most judicious assessment of the pontiff in Ten Popes Who Shook the World:

“To 19th-century Protestant politicians like Bismarck, it embodied the overweening claims of a power-mad Church, a humiliating defeat for the autonomy of the secular world that must never be repeated….

“Gregory was defeated in the short term, but he changed the world all the same. Other popes would avoid such all-out confrontation, but never again would the Church accept the right of kings and rulers to determine spiritual matters. Whatever Gregory’s intentions, a lasting line had been drawn between the claims of conscience and the claims of state power. And under this overbearing autocratic pope, human freedom took one small, uncertain step forward.”

Nevertheless, spiritual leaders who dare to openly confront wayward politicians continue to encounter peril, as Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde is experiencing now following her inauguration day sermon directed to President Trump at Washington Cathedral. (I doubt that anyone would want to read the kind of messages she must be receiving from MAGA followers following their leader’s whining, abusive tweet.)

(For original source material on the escalating clash between the "City of God" and the "City of Man" in the Middle Ages, see a volume edited by Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300.)

‘Golden Age’? How About ‘Gilded Age II’?

Humorist Calvin Trillin, taking note of the fashionably attired friends of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, referred to the festivities surrounding the 1981 Presidential inauguration as “The Night of the Minks.”

Considering the attendees who helped Donald Trump plan his attempted coup four years ago, allowed him to escape legal and political punishment for it, or financed his return to the Oval Office, the parties after this week’s transfer of power might have been termed “The Night of the Finks.”

Viewers were informed, at noon on Monday, that “a golden age for America begins right now.”

Well, the newly inaugurated President got the letter “g” right in the key word in that sentence, but that’s about it. The correct word was “Gilded.”

You might recall “The Gilded Age” as the title of an HBO series about the filthy rich in New York following the Civil War. It took its name from an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized greed, political corruption, and conspicuous consumption in that period.

Alas, the book’s subtitle has a lasting significance that its collaborators could never have imagined: “A Tale of Today.”

Much like our time, the innovations in technology and finance introduced 150 years ago gave rise to fortunes of staggering proportions and equally vast inequality. The possessors of these riches, memorably dubbed “robber barons,” were—and are—not shy about crushing union and safety activism, buying legislators, and subverting attempts to regulate their businesses even while flaunting their wealth and influence.

Taking note of the assembly of the well-heeled on hand after the oath of office—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, Alphabet Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—one person on LinkedIn hailed “businesses and government [that] run their companies or departments like sports teams who put the best on the field.”

So much depends on the eye of the beholder. He saw business all-stars; I saw successors to the 1933 Weimar businessmen determined but unable to control the twitchy guy who’d taken over their country.

Some of them proceeded cheerfully, others nervously, but all optimistically to congratulate a fellow billionaire who, unlike most of them, was born into wealth, then saved by his father from falling off several financial cliffs in the early 1990s.

If they felt any jealousy over his inherited fortune, they gave no sign of it as they greeted the newly sworn-in President and recently convicted felon. It was more important that he help them maintain their privileged perch—the tax cut that has disproportionately benefited them, the government regulations from which they beg relief.

What they all share is, in the apt phrase of The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, “a playbook for exploiting public office for private gain.”

Somehow, they all managed to stifle their guffaws over the new President’s hobbyhorse about renaming the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.” Maybe they didn’t realize that the true “Gulf of America” was what now separated them from the poorest, most desperate citizens of their country.

They wouldn’t have found that out from the wall-to-wall, breathless media coverage surrounding the inaugural, which did not constitute political journalism or even fashion reporting so much as plutography—an obscene depiction of the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Stepping to the front of the line to make the most of their relationship with Trump have been Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, until recently the co-heads of the President-elect’s new Department of Government Efficiency—an advisory commission that, Musk blithely assured the public in November, could find $2 trillion in federal spending cuts.

With Musk more recently suggesting that $1 trillion might be more feasible, that hope didn’t make it to the inauguration.

Neither, as it happened, did Ramaswamy, the biotech and finance entrepreneur who auditioned as Trump’s most shameless Mini-Me in the GOP primaries, a candidate utterly unable to articulate a single point of difference with the eventual nominee.

Late last week, having already royally ticked off transition team members with his arrogance, Ramaswamy gave his rapidly growing army of enemies the only weapon they needed with his X post on H 1-B visas. Tech companies, he claimed, hire foreign workers in part because of a mindset in the country that has “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”

With immigration-conscious MAGA believers suitably inflamed, that was all Musk needed to elbow him out of co-leading the commission, according to a Politico report. 

Now, Mini-Me is consoling himself by contemplating a campaign for governor of Ohio, a state that has already inexplicably propelled another former tech finance guy, J.D. Vance, into the political stratosphere.

Not that Musk didn’t cause some head-scratching himself. On Monday night, exuberant over his newly exalted position, the X-Man pushed his arms upward and outward from his chest in a way that the Anti-Defamation League charitably characterized as an “awkward gesture” but that more than a few saw as a Nazi or Fascist salute.

Given Musk’s full-throated support for the far right in Europe (“Only AfD can save Germany, end of story"), his straight-arm gesture the other night looks a lot like Dr. Strangelove’s impulsive “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"

Throughout the day and night on Monday, you couldn’t help noticing Melania Trump’s navy blue boater-style toque. The past and present First Lady adored it so much that she kept it on even after she stepped inside the Capitol and watched her husband take the oath of office again.

The hat was really expansive. Could she have been concealing the expression in her eyes from a curious public? Moreover, the President’s niece Mary spoke for many in saying that the headgear was Melania’s ingeniously convenient device for preventing her husband from kissing her.

Much remains to be seen for Trump’s return to power, but in terms of the First Lady’s hat, one can already conclude: Mission Accomplished.

“The robber barons probably looked in the mirror and thought they were God too,” noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in an interview with The Financial Times this past weekend.

As they look in the mirror, how many of these contemporary fat cats must wonder, “If a know-nothing like Trump can get to the White House, why can’t I?”

Just imagine: Even now, as one billionaire after another waltzed around the inaugural ball, at least one—not unlike Yeats’ “rough beast, its hour come round at last” in “The Second Coming”—might have imagined fitting into the MAGA mold of a White House plutocrat in populist’s clothing.

(The image accompanying this post shows the new-money Gladys, George, and Bertha Russell of New York in the Season 2 premiere of The Gilded Age.)

Quote of the Day (Carl Hiaasen, on the Growing Necessity for Reporters)

“People can’t get outraged [at the political arena] without rapid access to solid, useful information—what we used to call journalism. There’s so much garbage being disguised as fact and so many gasbags posing as sages; somebody has to cut through the crap. That’s the job of reporters, and their job will be more important than at any time in history. There’s been this great lamentation about the end of newspapers as we know them, the end of the era of the paper hitting your doorstep in the morning, but I don’t think the language or the craft of writing is dying. In the next 40 years, there’s going to be a larger demand than ever for people who can communicate with the written word, whatever format it takes.”—American crime novelist and retired Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, “Slipping Backward” (part of a “40 Things To Know” article cluster), interviewed by T. A. Frail, Smithsonian, July-August 2010

Fifteen years ago today, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for unlimited campaign spending to corporations and other outside groups by ruling that any restrictions constituted a violation of freedom of speech.

In his Smithsonian Q&A, Hiaasen denounced the decision as “toxic to the whole democratic process,” and correctly predicted that “From now on, it’s basically going to be all the free speech that money can buy.”

Besides the communication skill that Hiaasen identified, more will be needed for the journalism of the present and future to affect the political process, however: the fearlessness of its practitioners and the open-mindedness of its readers. The portents for both these factors are deeply troubling right now.

While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has twisted freedom of speech beyond recognition, it has permitted a lack of legal accountability for a President’s misdeeds and signaled, through Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, that its landmark New York Times v. Sullivan freedom of the press ruling might be up for reconsideration.

Even with an unfettered press, there’s no guarantee that, in the present digital environment dominated by what Hiaasen calls “gasbags posing as sages,” their revelations will be acted upon. 

“Confirmation bias”—the tendency to seek out and accept anything supporting our beliefs and ignoring anything contradicting them—has only solidified in the current polarized environment.

I’m not sure that I am any more hopeful than Hiaasen was 15 years ago. I only know that not to push back against these troubling trends constitutes preemptive, unconditional surrender that will haunt the democratic process now and into the foreseeable future. 

(For more information on the baleful effects of Citizen United—including the influx of secret “dark money” into elections—and what can be done to bring about campaign finance reform, I urge you to read Tim Lau’s December 2019 report for the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.)

Quote of the Day (Erasmus, on Leaders, Flatterers and the Truth)

“Yet in the midst of all their prosperity, princes in this respect seem to me most unfortunate, because, having no one to tell them truth, they are forced to receive flatterers for friends.” — Dutch monk and scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), In Praise of Folly (1509)

Quote of the Day (Isaac Bashevis Singer, on a Creator’s ‘Inner Vision and Its Ultimate Expression’)

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.”— Polish-born Jewish-American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator—and Nobel Literature laureate— Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), quoted in Aspects of I. B. Singer, edited by Joseph Landis (1986)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Book of Exodus, With Laws of Justice)

“You shall not utter a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man, to be a malicious witness. You shall not follow a multitude to do evil; nor shall you bear witness in a suit, turning aside after a multitude, so as to pervert justice; nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his suit….

“You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his suit. Keep far from a false charge, and do not slay the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked. And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the officials, and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.

“You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”—Exodus 23: 1-3, 6-9 (Revised Standard Version)

Moses, the prototypical Judeo-Christian lawgiver, is depicted in the image accompanying this post, Moses With the Ten Commandments. It was created in 1659 by the Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, AKA Rembrandt (1606-1669).