Sunday Pages: "Napoleon, in an Evil Time"

A poem by Babette Deutsch

Dear Reader,

Exile has been occupying my thoughts of late: expulsion, diaspora, banishment. The White Nationalist Woodstock that was the Republican National Convention kicked off two months ago today. Rallygoers waved placards calling for MASS DEPORTATION NOW. Much has happened in the last two months, a lot of it positive, but I can’t quite exile/expulse/banish that ugly image from my mind.

These were not hand-painted signs, mind you. Like the detestable people waving them, they were all the same: uniform. Someone at the RNC had approved this display, signed off on it, laid out the artwork in Illustrator or Photoshop, sent it to the printers, and dutifully handed out signs for the yowling white supremacists to hold up at the right moment. Or, rather, the New Right moment. This was a coordinated show of race hatred, the alt-right’s white power “OK” hand gesture writ large.

The story was promptly exiled/expulsed/banished to the memory hole. Like most of the unthinkably evil concepts-of-plan circling the shit-streaked faux-gilt toilet bowl that is Trump’s rapidly-deteriorating brain, this inkling has been reliably minimized, or ignored entirely, by our supine media. He doesn’t really mean it. He’s just saying it to stir up the base. He couldn’t possibly be serious.

But he is serious. The “Haitian immigrants are eating the dogs” controversy is only the latest sign that he is serious. Those RNC signs amount to a Trump campaign promise. MASS DEPORTATION NOW is a pretty firm plank in the MAGA platform. Just because Donald failed to do something simple like build some walls at the border last time around doesn’t mean mass deportation won’t be attempted if he gets another crack at it.

And “deportation” is a quaint euphemism for what would really happen, if such a heinous undertaking were attempted. As Dustin du Cane, a Warsaw-based attorney and a contributor to the book Putin’s War, Russian Genocide, explains in a recent piece at his Substack, FALLOUT:

‘Deport’ means murder.

That’s because it is technically and financially impossible to deport millions of people. Russia could do it in the past, like many of my fellow Poles and millions of others experienced up to the 1950s. But they have a huge empty land to lose people in.

America can’t deport millions anywhere except to America and even though it’s a big place, there aren’t many unutilised or non-scenic places to drop people except the desert, which is a slightly worse place than deep Siberia or Alaska which is the same.

The media may be forgiven, perhaps, for lacking the requisite imagination to conceive of such evil. “Even the victims will refuse to believe that they’re going to be murdered right up to and beyond the point they enter a death camp,” Du Cane writes. “You simply cannot believe you’re going to be genocided. The mind refuses to accept that you are going to die because MAGA doesn’t like you.”

Remember that the next time someone claims he doesn’t like Trump the person but approves of his policies.

But my recent musings about exile are of the inverted variety. I’ve been contemplating the horrific crimes committed by Trump and his vile collaborators, and what should be done about them. In any other society, at any other point in history, all of the January 6 insurrectionist planners, Donald included, would have been rounded up, tried, and summarily executed by Valentine’s Day. But the United States doesn’t do atonement. Heck, the United States doesn’t even bring down the hammer on matters of clear-and-present-danger national security. And mass executions will not happen in a Harris Administration, and probably shouldn’t. What then should the punishment be for such abominable crimes?

Let us turn to the book Trump claims to love so well for the answer. Leviticus 18:29 tells us: “For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls who commit them shall be cut off from among their people.”

Good call, Jehovah! Exile-as-punishment. Banishment. “86 45,” as the bumper sticker from eight years ago foretold. Throw Trump and the inner circle out of the United States, and build a wall such that they can never return. Forfeit their passports, put them on one of the ostentatious yachts we seized from some bloated Russian oligarch, run it into international waters, and leave it there. I’m sure they can make it to Caracas, if not Kaliningrad or Dubai. Cast them out, like the demons they are! (Alternatively, and preferably: might Elon Musk’s rocket to Mars be completed? Off-world exile for these vile traitors would be better.)

Even now, shamefully, MAGA are bleating the nativist refrain, “If you don’t like this country, you can always leave.” Ah, but what evidence is there that Trump likes this country? All he does is slag America. If he doesn’t like it, by his own rhetoric, he should get the fuck out. Sure, there might be some obstacles when we put this theoretical exile into practice. But banishing Donald and his ghouls would certainly be easier than rounding up the [checks notes] “nearly 20 million” allegedly illegal immigrants Trump has vowed to deport. (Unlike his poll numbers or approval rating, that number keeps increasing; soon it will be at 33 million, which is a full tenth of the population. And, like, one in every ten Americans is not an illegal immigrant, because duh.)

What do the humanities teach us about banishment? Literature provides fewer examples of exile-as-punishment than I anticipated. Exile is often a plot device in Greek tragedies—Medea, for example, convinces King Creon to wait a day before sending her into exile, and uses that day to exact her bloody revenge—and there are myriad literary works by writers who fled their native countries and sought political amnesty elsewhere. But stories about banishment of the kind I’m envisioning? Not so much. The most notable literary example is also the most obvious: God expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. But that’s a problematic tale, the genesis (ha ha) of patriarchal woman-hating, and I’m not sure there’s much to be learned from it beyond banishment being the most divine form of retribution in the “Judeo-Christian tradition” MAGA won’t shut up about.

Likewise in the real world: While banishment used to be a thing 25 centuries ago, I found remarkably few examples in recent history where exile is used as punishment. Plenty of political leaders live or lived “in exile,” but most choose to remain outside their country of origin for fear of reprisal. Mohammad Zahir Shah, the deposed king of Afghanistan, lived in Rome for three decades; Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran, resides in Virginia. The Russian oligarchs on the U.S. and EU sanctions list, meanwhile, are reverse-exiled: they are condemned to remain in their own country (which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of said country).

The exception here is Napoleon Buonaparte, modern history’s most notable exile, who was banished not once but twice: first to Elba, a lovely Mediterranean isle between Tuscany and his native Corsica; and then to St. Helena, a godforsaken rock somewhere in the vast South Atlantic. It was in the middle of that nowhere that the corpulent conqueror died, painfully and horribly, of stomach cancer. Initially buried in the Valley of the Geraniums on that remote volcanic island, his remains were brought to France in 1840, where almost a million people came out for the funeral procession. (Now that, Donald, is an impressive crowd size.) His well-preserved body was removed to a special tomb at the Dôme des Invalides, where Buonaparte was laid to rest for the last time on April 2, 1861—just ten days before the hostilities at Fort Sumpter started the Civil War.

In looking up literature about Buonaparte, I came across a wonderful poem, “Napoleon, in an Evil Time,” by Babette Deutsch, an American poet, novelist, translator, critic, editor, professor, and all-around literary genius, who died on my tenth birthday—November 13, 1982—at 87.

Her four-stanza poem was written in 1940, after the Nazi invasion of Poland had started the Second World War, and is a meditation on warmongering dictators. The first stanza sets the poem at Buonaparte’s grand Parisian tomb. Deutsch clearly has Napoleon wannabe Adolf Hitler in mind here, but it’s hard to read this bit from the second stanza…

You, having grown too fat
Upon your island fed
Your cancer and your pride.
Poetic Fate allows
It was of these you died.

…and not think of our resident Napoleon, now in his Elba exile phase on Palm Beach Island, marshalling his forces for one last push to recapture power.

Too, Donald is clearly one of those “whom terror cannot take / From their deliberate toil” that Deutsch describes in the last two stanzas. And her depiction of Buonaparte as small and weak and sick and pathetic applies just as readily to Trump:

Exiles and prisoners
And soldiers do not make
A world, but some there are
Whom terror cannot take
From their deliberate toil.
They know you, little man,
The fear behind the frown,
The thought you could not bear
Who wore the iron crown.
They know your eyes, whose stare
Reflected in the glass
Was Caesar’s and is theirs
When they are left alone.

Ah, Buonaparte, here…
The plague, the shame is clear.
Puny imperial ghost,
You who so meanly lost
And once so greatly willed:
The coward violence,
The thievish love is here
Deep in your private breast.
And here you must be killed.

The damage Napoleon Buonaparte did to Europe, and to the world beyond, is incalculable. Two centuries later, in another evil time, Kamala Harris is all that stands between Trump and imperial power—which brings with it military might the diminutive Corsican general could only dream of. And so here, once and for all, Donald’s despotic ambitions must be killed. He must be exiled to St. Helena, figuratively if not literally (although I’m totally down with the latter).

Let Election Day be his Waterloo.

---

ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was the historian Manisha Sinha:

The episode also featured some original music, with the usual genius artwork and animation by the great CHUNK:

---

Photo credit: B via Flickr. Napoleon’s tomb at les Invalides.