Hilary Holladay's Blog

I have always admired Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind.” It is as good and purposeful as the nib of a fountain pen sinking into a bloviating patriarch’s fleshy old fanny.

It starts off:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

We are not in a classroom, so let’s forget about “the speaker” and imagine this is Sexton herself. Picture the glamorous Anne, her lovely blue eyes scanning a bunch of boring houses 10,000 feet below her. Alone and under cover of darkness, she is out on the town doing her hitch. Or rather, she has done her hitch; it is on her resume, and she’s not hiding it.

But who is that “lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind”? Why, it is still Anne, speaking in an arch tone as she puts on a pair of male gaze-goggles and then flings them aside.

“I have been her kind,” she confesses with the mind-bending solipsism of a true sorceress.

The middle stanza amps up the weirdness:

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

Honestly, can anyone read this aloud without laughing? And yes, “A woman like that is misunderstood,” but this one is so deep into parody she can’t be bothered to care.

On to the final stanza, which finds our heroine defiantly describing what she has done (not what has been done to her) in a male world intent on debasing and destroying her:

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

Like Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” Sexton-as-witch is an exhibitionist taking charge of her spectacle. She knows her tormentors will hyperventilate at the sight of her “nude arms” and get all queasy with delight when her thigh begins to burn.

She mocks them with each self-centering ‘I’ rhyme she throws down on the page. Swerving, swirling, she nevertheless speaks in a measured verse that approaches rhyme royal. She is that sure of herself even as her ribs crack. And notice that she never dies, quite.

To borrow a couple of lines from Emily Dickinson, she is “dying in Drama — / and Drama — is never dead –.”

And yet Sexton insists: “A woman like that is not ashamed to die.”

That line is a raised middle finger with a painted, pointed nail.

It cinches the poem; it is the truth of “Her Kind.”

I wish it had not been the truth of Sexton’s life, but I salute the courage it took for her to say what she said and live as long as she was able to stand being alive.

Godspeed, Anne! Let starlight split the black waves as you swim toward us again and again.

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Jack Phillips of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, has prevailed, and that is good news for all deeply religious bakers, including me.

Here’s the background. In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court said Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission erred in charging Mr. Phillips with a violation of the state’s anti-discrimination statute due to his purported Christian beliefs.

The commission had fined him for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012, and the Colorado courts upheld that decision.

But thanks to the Supreme Court, Mr. Phillips can now turn down every single wedding cake order he receives from marriage-minded gay men and lesbians. Sweet! (And what a relief for him, since he must have quite a backlog of orders.)

As a religious baker with a heart for discrimination, I intend to get a slice of this action at my new enterprise, My Commandment Cakerie.

I can’t wait to turn away customers based on my own firmly held religious beliefs.

Starting tomorrow, I will ask a few questions before I agree to take an order of any kind:

Have you ever killed bugs, including fleas and deer ticks?

Because if you have, please know that due to my religious beliefs, I won’t bake you a cake. Heck, I won’t even let you buy a stale snickerdoodle.

Have you ever coveted your neighbor’s spouse, house, or Cooper Mini?

If so, get out of this cakerie, now! Due to my religious beliefs, I don’t serve coveters, even if the coveting of a red Cooper Mini convertible is possibly understandable (just not forgivable).

Have you ever stolen so much as an extra napkin from McDonald’s?

Yes?! Then scram, because I don’t serve thieves.

I’m sure My Commandment Cakerie will be a big hit. Stop by soon, and be prepared to walk away without the cake of your dreams!

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1.

Press its thorny stems between the pages of a book you plan to give away.

Let it simmer on the stove until the smoke is sweet and the pan is gone.

Crate it up and mail it to the moon.

Wrap your arms around it as you would a grieving child.

Tell it shush when it wants to be a dream.

2.

Imagine the faint glistening as the planetarium’s lights go dim.

Go out into the actual night and uncup your hands a final time.

3.

Listen to the saints

if saints there be

whisking us all toward uncertain sleep

if not soon then soon

enough

the sleep of birds of flowers

of years like this one

nearly gone

and years aching coming daring to be born

4.

Ah, saints!

Unwinding the future of our past

reaching toward us as we reach

toward you

let this year rise like music

like trees

let it become us

let it disappear like my own hand

holding the match

unlighting the flame

–Hilary Holladay

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It is the middle of summer, the heart of the watermelon, and I’m sitting on a patio looking out at hills and cypress trees and listening to people splashing in a pool I’ll swim in later on. There are people in that pool murmuring in languages I don’t speak, but I can tell they’re happy. So am I–it would take an act of will not to be.

How does happiness happen? How does it happen to me? Do I need a pool and a patio and a white butterfly and just the right combination of breeze and Italian to strum the strings of my soul’s harp? Surely not! Maybe not. Um ….

Happiness comes and goes, and that’s OK with me. To poach a phrase from Wallace Stevens in “Sunday Morning,” I have no desire to live in a paradise where ripe fruit never falls. Happiness can and should be pursued, but sometimes the pursuit feels like an endless game of tag with Usain Bolt. On days like that, it’s better to leave Usain alone and just do your work, whatever that might be. If you don’t have any work, find some: mow the grass, change the litter box. Floss, whatever.

Often happiness is a remedy, a balm, a way out. And the balm, the escapism of it, can become a problem if you fixate on it. As a longtime student of the Beat Generation authors, many of whom played around endlessly with heroin and cocaine and blah, Benzedrine, blah, I’ve always prided myself on my complete disinterest in narcotics. Chocolate and/or wine will almost always suffice on good days and bad, thank you very much. But when I landed in the ER back in February, I was happy to make the acquaintance of morphine. I remember our one-night stand with great fondness. But: never again, if I can help it.

Happiness can bring tears, as it did two days ago when I stood at just the right place in the Uffizi Gallery and looked at Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and then at his Spring. There were hoards of tourists milling around me, but it was my moment nonetheless. I felt very large and very small at the same time. Maybe what happened to me in the Uffizi was not exactly the onset of happiness; maybe it was the pure joy of being human. And that is pretty damned good.

There was a time when doctors prescribed travel to people feeling melancholy. Why don’t they do that anymore? Why don’t they say, “Go on a trip, you slug-a-bed. Go to a museum in some place you’ve never been.” Even a trip to the next town over can pump up the dopamine. Or, if you are really, really depressed and unable to go far, take a stroll down the familiar aisles of Food Lion–or your own, fall-back supermarket. Just go.

In any case, here we all are–alive and breathing the air that inspirited saints and geniuses and rotten criminals and cats and dogs and rats for more centuries than I care to count. We must make something of this air, this day! If you hear a splash, that’s me!

La Primavera (Spring) by Sandro Botticelli

I’ve often wondered about Robert Frost’s famous line, “I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.” I know he was making fun of free verse, which he saw as a lawless waste of his time. But wouldn’t playing without a net actually be harder in some ways than the familiar version of the game? And if that is so, doesn’t it follow that writing a truly memorable free verse poem might be more challenging than writing one in traditional meter and rhyme?

Henry Hart

For thoughts on this matter and insights into the marvelously crustaceous Frost, I turned to poet and scholar Henry Hart, whose new biography, The Life of Robert Frost, is just out from Wiley Blackwell. “Frost was constantly making wisecracks about free verse poets playing tennis with the net down,” said Hart, a professor of English at the College of William and Mary.

Why did Frost act like free verse was so ridiculous? According to Hart, it was the poet’s way of  thumbing his nose at his rivals Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg, who in their different ways were expert writers of free verse. Frost “tried writing free verse when he was close to Pound in London, and it was prosaic.  He knew writing good free verse was difficult—just as writing good formal poetry was difficult.  He preferred writing formal poetry because he was a conventional guy, but he also felt he needed the restraint and challenge of form.”

As for Frost the tennis player, I learned that the author of A Boy’s Will and North of Boston had taken up the game as a teenager while working one summer in Maine. It became one of his favorite activities–so long as he won. Hart said, “He was certainly passionate about tennis, but he wasn’t all that good and, as in most things, he was almost pathologically competitive.”

Frost was so competitive that he became furious when his daughter Lesley beat him at the game. According to Hart, the Pulitzer Prize winner stormed off the court shouting, “My children think that because they’re the children of a poet, that gives them license!  But what they don’t know or understand or appreciate [is] … I know more about the English language than any man alive.”

I couldn’t resist asking Hart, a longtime tennis player, his thoughts on tennis without a net. It turns out he agrees with Frost: “I suppose playing tennis with the net down or without the net would just be silly.” Still, he reminded me that the subject of his new biography was more concerned with poetry than tennis when making his remark: “Frost was emoting when he used the metaphor to mock free verse; he was just trash talking.”

Not quite done rallying back and forth on this topic, I decided to lob a few questions to several other tennis-playing writers in various genres.

In the case of William Pritchard, the eminent critic and author of Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, I wasn’t sure he played tennis, but something told me that the English professor emeritus at Amherst College had hit a few overhead smashes in his time. He was quick to write back that yes, indeed, he played tennis “until Old Age, etc.” As for playing the game without a net: “I can’t imagine what it would be like to play without a net. No fun, no restriction, what the hell can’t lose!”

William Pritchard

Invited to contemplate net-free tennis, Boston-based novelist and short story writer Jessica Treadway responded an hour before she was scheduled to play a match–very much in keeping with her literary flair for timing and suspense. “I don’t think I’ve ever played without a net, but my immediate reaction to the idea of doing so has not to do with whether it’s harder or easier, but with whether I’d want to do it, and the answer is no. The analogy that came to mind was no-ad scoring, which I dislike. To my mind, it is not ‘real’ tennis.”

Jessica Treadway

The author of Lacy Eye and How Will I Know You added, “I also wouldn’t want to do it because I’m used to having a net, and I like the game the way it is. I wonder if someone never having written poetry would prefer free verse because it does seem that it would be easier?”

Keith Clark, professor of English and African & African-American Studies at George Mason University, likewise nixed the idea of playing tennis without a net. Compared to the game he knows and loves, the netless version would be “infinitely dumber and less interesting, mind-numbingly less interesting, in fact.” The author of The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry and Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson makes time for tennis even during the busiest weeks of the semester at GMU.

Keith Clark

As for Frost’s remark, the ever-erudite Professor Clark noted, “I think Frost’s comment speaks to his classical approach to the art of poetry, which eschews radical approaches to form. Not to say that he wasn’t aesthetically daring, but free verse to him seemed a bridge too far.”

Carol Henderson, author of Losing Malcolm and Farther Along: The Writing Journey of Thirteen Bereaved Mothers, made it clear that tennis without a net is not high on her to-do list. “You need the net to gauge distance, height, depth,” said this dedicated tennis player and writing workshop instructor, who secludes herself at home in Chapel Hill, N.C., to watch Grand Slam matches on a large-screen TV. “Playing or watching tennis without a net would be a waste of time.” What about Frost’s quip echoing in English classes across the land? “It’s not an apt metaphor.”

Carol Henderson

Finally, I turned to Philip Holland of Boston, novelist and author of one of my all-time favorite short stories, “Mentor,” about a club tennis pro trying to teach a singularly unpromising young boy how to play the game. He wrote, “Believe it or not, I have played a few times without a net, in those New England springs in my hometown before the nets went up and our team could officially practice. Here’s what I remember: without a net, the game is much easier on the person hitting the shot, and

Philip Holland

much harder on the person receiving the shot. Perhaps you experienced the same, if you ever tried? The person hitting the shot, being much less constrained, could hit it lower and harder, and with all kind of crazy angles, or even lower and softer–and the person receiving had to deal with all that additional variability.”

With the philosophical turn of mind that makes his fiction so engaging, he continued, “I might say this, in response to Mr. Frost. Perhaps like tennis without a net, free verse too might be a bit easier for the author, as it is for the ‘author’ of the shot, but more difficult for the reader, as it is for the receiver of the shot, in that by removing the ‘constraints’ of form, rhyme, meter, etc., not unlike the net, it might free up the poet but make it more difficult on the other end to process his or her offering.”

Weighing all these observations, I suspect a tennis player of the caliber of Serena Williams would see a kind of “ghost net” even if no tangible net were there to guide her shots. She would know when she or her opponent hit the ball even an inch below the ghost net, and she would use her knowledge of the net, even in its absence, to play her best game. On a parallel note, various critics have written about the ghost of meter lurking within exemplary free verse. Truly expert free verse–for instance, the later poems by Adrienne Rich and just about everything by Lucille Clifton–makes use of meter (and rhyme) when it suits the needs of the poem. In short, Frost’s famous comment may say more than he realized about the subtle skills and awareness involved in writing free verse. Deuce point, Mr. Frost!

Robert Frost

A cloudy Saturday afternoon in January 2017 at the University of Virginia. A friend and I show up at a hastily organized march in response to Trump’s latest executive order, a cruel, poorly conceived attempt to ban Muslim immigrants from entering–or re-entering–the U.S.

After listening to rousing speeches by several young women and men, we make our way from the Rotunda down the Lawn. Students yell, “Show me what democracy looks like!” Crowd of 600 or so responds, “This is what democracy looks like!” I notice all the bright signs and the rushed, charming ones scrawled on brown cardboard.

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We continue toward Old Cabell Hall. Baby in stroller gets an early taste of peaceful assembly.

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The crowd rounds the corner and heads toward the walkway in front of Bryan Hall. “No hate, no fear!” A few tears sliding down my face, I feel moved by the occasion but also, truth be told, a little nervous. This is the closest I’ve ever come to being part of a mob. Pressed together, yelling, hearts pumping–what are we capable of?

And what about those young white men with their arms crossed, standing on the steps of Old Cabell and smirking at us? What are they thinking? What are they capable of? If one of them yelled a slur at this group, would I stay silent? Would I join in a loud chant of rebuke? But they don’t yell; they just stand on the steps and watch us go by.

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In front of Small Library, home of several extremely rare copies of the Declaration of Independence, a student stops and asks me, “Is this an anti-Trump rally?” “No,” I say, “it’s more of a pro-immigrant rally.” “Great!” she says and goes on her way.

It occurs to me yet again that some UVa students have no idea what’s going on at their own school. There was a time when they all would have known this march was happening because they would’ve read an announcement about it in the Cavalier Daily. But the CD is no longer a daily, and I rarely see students reading it. It is available on the web, of course, but who has time for that when you have Facebook and Twitter to wade through? This is a problem at lots of universities, not just UVa. The absence of objective print journalism by and for college students is an example of what democracy doesn’t look like.

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As I look out at the people milling around as the march winds down, I think about Thomas Jefferson. A genius, a complicated man not without flaws. Today, though, I think particularly about his “Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.” It is relevant to our current president’s not-so-veiled attempt to keep out immigrants who practice the Muslim faith.

“Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” speaks across generations in Jefferson’s characteristic language of cool, eloquent reason. This is what democracy is:

… Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. –excerpted from “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” by Thomas Jefferson

One evening, not long after I graduated from college, my father and I paid a social call on a new acquaintance of his, a  tall, talkative man probably in his sixties. At the end of the visit, I shook our host’s hand. To my surprise, he began lecturing me on the virtues of an assertive handshake.  He knew I’d just started a career as a newspaper reporter, and he thought I needed a good firm grip to make the right impression on people. We stood there and practiced for a few moments.

After that unexpected schooling, I resolved to do better. For a while, I proffered an aggressively strong handshake to one and all. It was not always returned in kind, and I sensed that some people would have preferred the passive grip I’d disavowed. Eventually, after trying out handshakes of varying lengths and pressures, I settled on a fairly brief, medium-light clasp that no one would mistake for performance art. I’m not sure my long-ago handshake tutor would have liked it, but at least it hasn’t provoked any further lectures.

What is the best type of handshake? What is the creepiest? Here are my thoughts and ratings on a scale of one to five shakes:

The Crunch. You’ve met Crunchers. They have hearty smiles and alarmingly good eye contact. The Cruncher says,”Nice to meet you!” and you say (to yourself), “Ow!” Not a great start for friendship or business, but Crunchers are trying so hard to make a favorable impression that I cut them some handshake slack.

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The Lady Shake. You don’t have to be a lady to do the lady shake. All you have to do is offer the tips of your fingers to the other person as if you were feeding a cricket to a python. Is it the height of politesse?  Having reach that height at first meeting, is there anywhere to go but down?

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The Shake-and-Kiss. I first encountered the Shake-and-Kiss in New England. Let’s say I’m at a party, and I run into the husband of a friend from work. In the midst of the hello-again handshake, this very proper fellow kisses me on the cheek. In contrast to a joyously unwieldy hug and kiss, the Shake-and-Kiss is a marvel of platonic precision: the kiss lands where it should without schmooshing one’s hair or violating an ear. Better still, after a properly executed Shake-and-Kiss, both parties can head straight for the chips and dip: one good combo deserves another.

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The Long Shake. Have you ever shaken hands with someone who won’t let go? Sometimes your hand gets repeatedly pumped, sometimes just gently but unyieldingly held. If the person’s left hand gets involved, make no mistake: you’re in a hostage situation. When you get trapped like that, you want to scream, “Give me my hand back, now!” And yet if you were to scream and yank your hand away, that would mean abandoning all attempts at the Friendly Clasp ….

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The Friendly Clasp. Not crunchy, not noodley. Neither sweaty-hot nor Morticia Addams-cold. Not too pumpy and not wax-museum still. As incisive and assured as Michelle Obama, the Friendly Clasp gets job offers and lunch dates. It never malingers. A model of dignity and good humor, it is an upstanding citizen in the nation of body language. Give it up for the Friendly Clasp!

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When Barack Obama and Donald Trump met at the White House shortly after the election, President Obama was, as always, a statesman and gentleman. To Mr. Trump he said, “We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.”

We all understand the generous spirit in which President Obama expressed that sentiment, but I want to pause and consider the notion of success. We are anticipating an administration rife with conflicts of interest and a total lack of respect for facts and the truth. During the campaign, Donald Trump encouraged his followers to believe and propagate lies and to wreak mayhem in the name of those lies. He is no gentleman, no statesman.

I’m not the first person to hypothesize that Trump’s definition of success has everything to do with his own ego and pocketbook and very little to do with the future of our country. If he succeeds by his own terms, the country will not succeed: the country will sag; the moral core of the nation will rot.

Let’s turn away from him and toward the saving words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran cleric and Nazi dissident imprisoned in Germany in 1943 and executed by the Nazis in 1945. In his posthumously published  Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer writes eloquently about success:

As long as goodness is successful, we can afford the luxury of regarding [success] as having no ethical significance; it is when success is achieved by evil means that the problem arises. In the face of such a situation we find that it cannot be adequately dealt with, either by theoretical dogmatic armchair criticism, which means a refusal to face the facts, or by opportunism, which means giving up the struggle and surrendering to success. We will not and must not be either outraged critics or opportunists, but must take our share of responsibility for the moulding of history in every situation and at every moment, whether we are the victors or the vanquished.

In our national history, we have seen goodness succeed time and again–goodness coupled with fairness. Look at the 1st Amendment. Look at the 13th and the 19th. Look at all the people you know whose lives and prospects were forever brightened by civil rights legislation. Look at that freakin’ beautiful rainbow flag and think about how proudly it waved on the day same-sex marriage was legalized. Of course, setbacks and outrages and hatred accompanied and followed in the wake of each of these milestones. Still, we know that our leaders in those instances were doing what they could to make things better for those of us alive today.

Now here we are in December of 2016, and I want to believe that goodness will prevail in the next presidential administration. If that happens, it will only be because Trump has changed in profound ways that seem unlikely, given what we know of him and the people he has chosen as his closest advisers. I don’t believe he has earned the benefit of a doubt; he has only earned our closest, most searing scrutiny.

And yes, I’m an outraged critic. But in the coming months and years, I’m going to try to remember, and act on, Bonhoeffer’s point about taking responsibility. It is very easy to point fingers and write blog posts. It takes a lot more energy and brainpower to mobilize and work toward a better outcome than the one we’re facing now.

Bonhoeffer’s further thoughts, on heroism, have given me still more to ponder. Extremists and armchair critics alike would do well to wrestle with the following:

[T]o talk of going down fighting like heroes in the face of certain defeat is not really heroic at all, but merely a refusal to face the future. The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live. It is only from this question, with its responsibility toward history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating. In short, it is much easier to see a thing through from the point of abstract principle than from that of concrete responsibility. The rising generation will always instinctively discern which of these we make a basis for our actions, for it is their own future that is at stake.

How will the coming generation live? That is the question Bonhoeffer asks us to keep foremost in our minds. And how will that generation judge us? How will I be judged? These are matters to address in solitude, over dinner tables, in classrooms and public forums. Let’s think it through, talk it out, put it in print, on the walls, in the airwaves, on the screen and stage.

We owe future generations the effort it takes to discern the difference between ethical success rooted in goodness and fairness, and a corrupt version of success rooted in calumny and evil. We don’t need martyrs; we need people who can look an image of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the eye and say, “I hear you,” and mean it. We need to believe that we are capable of living in this world and making it better, not worse. And then we need to do it.

The presidential election campaign has been going on for roughly 63 years. Some of you were around to hear Adlai Stevenson marvel over five-year-old Hillary’s grasp of foreign policy. Not only that–boy, was she fast on the playground! And never a sick day from school. Everybody said so.

Others of you recall the 1984 sighting off Long Island of a stunning and provocatively noisy orange creature. It was a sort of floating mouth with scales that looked like dollar signs and a thousand grasping, finger-like protrusions. When the thing swam ashore, the locals realized with joy that it was our good friend Donald Trump, hurrying to a rally in Ohio! Long may he run on his amphibious protrusions.

Now, suddenly, voting day is nearly upon us. I wish we had another six months to a year before we had to vote. Why end the fun? This campaign has been one long hayride of delight.

The only thing that has bothered me is the shortsightedness of the research on voting blocs. All we hear about are the women voters, the blacks, the Latinos, the idiots, and don’t forget the women. There are some crucial blocs of voters that have thus far been ignored, much to the peril of our candidates.

As a bipartisan service, I offer the following list of overlooked blocs. There are undecided voters lurking within each of these groups. If they get a little late-stretch love, who knows but they might determine America’s future.

Voters who buy expensive fresh produce but rarely get around to eating it.

Voters who are quietly proud of their high arches.

Voters deeply amused by Gertrude Stein.

Voters who kind of like the way stink bugs smell.

Voters who sleep in the upright and locked position.

Voters who strongly prefer Anne Sexton to Sylvia Plath.

Voters who remain silent and completely focused when the engine light comes on.

Voters who know art when they see it but haven’t seen any lately.

Voters who intend to meet Jack Kerouac in heaven.

Voters who met Jack Kerouac on earth but didn’t realize it at the time.

Voters who identify as cat people but persist in owning dogs.

Voters who continue to floss daily despite news reports saying it’s unnecessary.

Voters who have never, ever had the hiccups.

Voters who live for the day after tomorrow.

Voters who cast a cold eye on life and death but would not let a horseman pass by.

Ivanka, Robby, Roger, Huma, there’s still time to appeal to these groups. Get moving, you chuckleheads, and don’t forget the women!

Anne Sexton

We know Donald Trump is a narcissistic ignoramus, but is he also a rapist? A pending court case in New York raises the possibility. The incendiary story has not gotten much play beyond a handful of online articles, including this one in the Huffington Post. It’s worth knowing about.

The accusations in the case are ghastly: a woman identified only as “Jane Doe” claims that he tied her up and raped and beat her when she was thirteen years old back in the 1990s. The statute of limitations has run out, but her lawyer says she was afraid to speak up until now and therefore deserves a chance to pursue justice.

In an earlier case, Trump’s then-wife, Ivana, accused him of rape. After they divorced, she blurred the edges of her claim, perhaps as part of the divorce agreement. Another previous charge involves a woman who had business dealings with Trump long before he became a presidential candidate. She says Trump sexually assaulted her–and she has not recanted.

The three women’s detailed descriptions of the abuse they purportedly suffered at his hands are of a piece with what we already know about Trump, a cruel and unethical man with no impulse control.

He deserves his day in court just like everybody else, but boy, if he’s guilty, wouldn’t it be sweet to see him convicted, sent to the slammer, and taken off our hands. Wouldn’t it be nice to trade in the nightmare for a little bit of peace.