Sunday Pages: "Incantation"

A poem by Czesław Miłosz

Jun 02, 2024

At work on Friday, a younger colleague asked, perhaps trollingly, what I thought of Kevin O’Leary’s proposal regarding the Trump verdict.

O’Leary, whom I’d never heard of, is a Canadian entrepreneur-cum-TV personality and one of the judges on Shark Tank, a reality TV show based on the Canadian show Dragons’ Den. Like The Apprentice, Shark Tank involves ambitious “real” people shamelessly sucking up to the show’s rich and powerful stars. In 2017, curiously, O’Leary ran to be the head of Canada’s Conservative Party, building a decent lead before dropping out a month before the elections. The similarities between Kevin and Donald, then, are obvious.

In a Fox News appearance in advance of the verdict—this is what my young colleague was referencing—O’Leary made this suggestion: “What Biden should do is pardon Trump the moment he gets convicted of any of those charges. Half the country thinks this is a politically motivated prosecution, and this would lift Biden out of the garbage he’s involved in with this kind of De Niro stuff. Let’s debate on the merits of policy!”

So what did I think? First, that O’Leary is a moron for not knowing that the president has no authority to issue pardons for state crimes (although, watching the clip later, he did seem to be dimly aware). And, second, Biden would absolutely lose the election if he did such a thing. “No one would vote for him after that,” I said. “I wouldn’t vote for him if he pardoned Trump.”

O’Leary’s blithe, ignorant proposal has irritated me all weekend—well beyond what a dumb guy saying a dumb thing on a dumb network watched by dumb people should have. It isn’t just that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And it isn’t the last bit, about debating policy—although there is no way to debate policy with a crooked, corrupt criminal who wants to end American democracy; it creates a false equivalency to even try—as I didn’t know he said that part until later. Some combination of this rich asshole’s idiotic comment and my young colleague’s entertaining it as a serious proposal worthy of further discussion rankled me. But why?

Of all the horrible things Trump did in the White House, his venal use of the presidential pardon power is perhaps the most offensive to me. I’ve written about this on these pages a number of times, and the entire third chapter of my new book, Rough Beast, focuses entirely on the corrupt pardons. This is not the worst thing he did, of course, but it’s the thing that pisses me off the most, that triggers the most emotional response in me. I hate, I loathe, the unfairness of it.

My friend and Five 8 co-host Stephanie Koff made an astute observation about Trump’s modus operandi a few weeks ago: “Trump,” she says, “shits on what you find holy.” In a word, he desecrates. And he dares you to do something about it. What O’Leary suggests is for Biden to pardon an abominable creature who is manifestly unworthy of the gift. To me, that is intolerable. It’s shitting on what’s holy.

For the next six weeks, we will argue and wonder at the nature of Trump’s sentence. Should he get jail time? Will he? O’Leary is calling on the president, an honorable man despite MAGA attempts to portray him otherwise, to circumvent that process entirely—to exert power in order to subvert justice.

This recalls the scene in Schindler’s List, where Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler is trying to sell Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth on the quality of mercy:

Schindler: They fear us because we have the power to kill arbitrarily. A man commits a crime, he should know better. We have him killed, and we feel pretty good about it. Or we kill him ourselves, and we feel even better. That’s not power, though; that’s justice. That’s different than power. Power is when we have every justification to kill—and we don’t.
Goeth: You think that’s power.
Schindler: That’s what the emperors had. A man stole something, he’s brought in before the emperor, he throws himself down on the ground, he begs for mercy, he knows he’s going to die. And the emperor pardons him. This worthless man, he lets him go.

Justice is the sentencing; power is the pardoning. And the impetus for the use of that kingly power is mercy. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare gives English literature the canonical meditation on mercy. Here, Portia, a loving soul, is trying to convince Shylock to drop his grievance against Antonio and release him from his bond:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

The “temporal power” is the dreaded use of force: police brutality, punishments cruel and unusual, the lopping off of hands and other pounds of flesh, the guillotine and the gallows. Mercy, Portia suggests, is, by contrast, a divine power—it is holy—and its bequeathment allows the merciful king to approach godhood.

But implicit in Portia’s plea is the caveat that this power not be used willy-nilly. Indiscriminate mercy is not mercy at all, because true mercy requires reciprocity. Her speech begins and ends with this “both sides” idea. Mercy is a two-way street. It blesses “him that gives and him that takes.” And in praying that mercy be granted to ourselves, we learn to grant mercy to those who trespass against us.

Trump is incapable of mercy, and that makes him unworthy of mercy. There was no divinity within him when he signed off on the pardons for Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. He is a transactional creature—temporal, devoid of wisdom and refinement. He is, as Schindler puts it, the man who commits a crime and should know better.

Czesław Miłosz, the great Polish and later American poet, was intimately familiar with mercy and its lack. His life, as Helen Vendler wrote in the New Yorker years ago, was one of “chaos and exile”: “He was born in 1911 in Lithuania, and has known two wars, the Marxist experiment, diplomatic service in the postwar Polish regime, and a break with that regime and consequent exile (in France and later in the United States).”

Miłosz spent the Second World War in Poland—going back there to be with his wife after he had escaped, something a character in a film would do; like Oskar Schindler, he and his brother Andrzej helped Jews escape the Nazis. Two years after his defection from Communist Poland in 1951, he published The Captive Mind, a seminal work that helped leftist intellectuals in the West realize that Stalin was a monster, and Stalinism an abomination. “In both poetry and prose,” Edward Hirsch writes in Poet’s Choice (2006), Miłosz “gave us a series of Cassandra-like warnings about America’s painful indifference to European experience, about the consequences of what happens when ‘nature becomes theater.’”

In “Incantation,” published in 1968, Miłosz seems to be channeling Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech. They are almost exactly the same length. Both begin with a declarative statement about a sublime attribute: respectively, mercy and “Philo-Sophia,” or human reason. Both contain the word “Jew”—Shakespeare, pejoratively; Miłosz, I submit, both as a callback to The Merchant of Venice and as a reference to the horrors he witnessed in Poland during the war.

The difference is that Portia’s speech has no resolution. It is an appeal to Shylock, and while she says enough to convince the theatergoers watching the play, she still must await his response. “Incantation,” by contrast, does not want for closure. Poetry and human reason, Miłosz declares, are undefeated:

Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

I could spend a month poring over my anthologies and scouring the Poetry Foundation website and not find five words that better, and more poetically, describe Donald Trump than “lie and oppression with small.”

And yes, human reason may not be invincible. Mercy may not be unstrained. History is littered with writers making bold, provocative declarations that wind up not being absolute. (“We shall prevail” may well be one of them, although I shall continue endeavoring to speak it into existence.)

What I do know is that Kevin O’Leary is dangerously, offensively wrong. Trump deserves neither mercy nor power but Justice—with a capital “J,” unseasoned by mercy. Unicorns and echoes have no place here, nor gentle rains from Heaven. Punishing this heinous criminal is best managed temporally, the old-fashioned way, with the transactional sway of the scepter.

ICYMI

On The Five 8, the two of us try, and fail, to remember all of Donald’s crimes:

ROUGH BEAST NEWS

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