Sunday Pages: "The War-Song of Dinas Vawr"

A poem by Thomas Love Peacock

Dear Reader,

The word trump, as applied to card games, derives from the Middle French triumphe: triumph. A trump card is one that has more value than other cards in the deck—a winning card. For a shallow, terminally insecure guy like FPOTUS, consumed as he is with status and domination, “Trump” is the ideal surname. He is literally Donald Winning, and contextually Donald Better Than Everyone Else.

The former president’s detractors, myself very much included, have been calling him a loser for more than eight years now. And yes, he has lost elections, and yes, he has lost lawsuits, and yes, his businesses have all failed as spectacularly as his marriages, and yes, he has often found himself on the verge of financial ruin. But objectively, he has remained Donald Winner, in the sense that he’s never been held accountable, truly accountable, for any of the countless criminal, petty, negligent, and hateful things he’s done in his long, miserable life. He stiffs vendors, rapes women, lies, steals, rats out his criminal accomplices, monetizes the presidency, attempts coups—all with impunity. We have screamed until we’re blue in the face, but after all the shit we’ve been through, the MFer was still leading in the polls against the best president of my lifetime.

Trump was, as his name suggests, winning the hands that mattered. And he did this by following the advice of his mentor Roy Cohn: always be on the attack. “All gas, no brakes,” in the parlance of our times. Even in the wake of the pandemic and the insurrection, he managed to stay in the driver’s seat.

That’s what’s made the last four weeks so revelatory. For the first time since he came down that stupid escalator, Trump finds himself playing defense. And he sucks at it. The tactics that work so effectively when he is in command of the narrative—the bullying, the name-calling, the abuse, the false accusations, the braggadocio, the effortless media manipulation, the firehose of shit—come off as desperate when he’s not initiating the offense. The knights on the chessboard are designed to attack, not defend, the king.

When President Biden self-destructed at the debate on June 27, somehow just six weeks ago, Donald seemed invincible. Not only did he “win” the debate, he discombobulated the Democrats so thoroughly that the party elites plotted an usurpation. On the night of Saturday, July 13, Trump survived an assassination attempt with just a minor cut on his right ear. Venal politicians like Marco Rubio opined that God had saved him. MAGA tried to make Donald’s childish response to the incident seem heroic; at the coin show last week, I saw for sale Trump T-shirts emblazoned with that iconic stupid photo, and pieces of shiny silver in plastic “slabs” with Donald’s face next to Theodore Roosevelt’s, as if the two assassination attempts were somehow equivalent. One of the hot takes on Twitter the night of the rally shooting was: Trump just won re-election.

Not so fast! Ever since that bullet glass shard nicked his ear, Donald Trump has been on a downward spiral. It’s almost like that little piece of shrapnel punctured the rough beast’s carapace, and for the last month, hot air has been slowly sputtering out, like the Rudy Giuliani courtroom fart that gave Jenna Ellis covid.

Look at all that’s happened since then:

July 15

• Donald taps JD Vance as his running mate

• Twitter user “ricksrudescalves” drops the most consequential shitpost of modern times: “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, 𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘺, pp. 179-181)”

July 18

• After being introduced by washed-up has-been wrestler Hulk Hogan at the RNC in Milwaukee, Donald Trump, who has pledged to run on unity, instead delivers a hateful, grievance-infused, lie-filled, batshit-crazy acceptance speech

July 21

• President Biden steps down as the Democratic nominee for president, endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris

• Endorsements and money come pouring in like it’s the end of It’s A Wonderful Life

July 22

• Ron Filipkowski of Meidas Touch tweets a clip of JD Vance with Tucker Carlson: “JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth like Kamala Harris are ‘childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,’ and have ‘no direct stake’ in America.” Cat lady memes are born

July 25

• AP retracts a story with the headline “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch,” apparently because it can’t be definitively shown that Trump’s running mate did not have sex with a couch

August 6

• Kamala Harris picks Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate

• At first official event, Walz makes JD Vance couch joke

August 8

• Trump’s “general press conference” of unhinged crazy lies

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The country has fallen in love with Walz, Kamala is filling stadiums for her rallies—all while Vance creepily stalks the VP, and Trump struggles to fill smaller venues in red states like Montana.

In a word, Trump is losing. Much to the consternation of pearl-clutchers like Jake Tapper, the Democrats have abandoned the stupid “we go high” philosophy and are—I know this strains credulity, but indulge me here—playing to win.

It feels good, right? Our delight at Trump flailing and failing. (Shall we call this “flailure”?) Our joy at Kamala drawing all those crowds, and galvanizing the base, and giving us all not just hope, but confidence, and the anticipatory thrill of blowout victory. This emotion is orders of magnitude greater than, say, the elation of Team USA winning the gold medal in basketball. It’s so much more intense than that. This feels like conquest.

A few years ago, thumbing through my well-worn copy of The Penguin Book of English Verse, I came across a curious poem called “The War-Song of Dinas Vawr.” It was a ballad, really, a tall tale of an invading army kicking ass. Printed there, without any context, the poem struck me as violent and cruel, not least because I was reading it right around the time that Russia began attacking Ukraine. And yet the poem resonated with me. I could feel the energy, the excitement, the balladeer’s unbridled joy at his account. The way the narrator extols the enterprise, and talks up his own achievements, seemed to me a precursor to rap lyrics, which often involve self-aggrandizing boasts of money made, women won, guns waved, charts topped, Lambos driven, rhymes dropped, rivals bested.

The poem was written in 1829 by Thomas Love Peacock—satirist, novelist, poet, intellectual, East India Company finance guy, friend to Percy Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg, husband to one of the most beautiful women in all of Wales, and owner of one of literature’s greatest author names—and comes from his novel The Misfortunes of Elphin, an historical romance and a sort of spoof of the myth of King Arthur. While “War-Song” is certainly bloody and violent, it is also so over-the-top as to be parodic—much like the cartoon violence of video games or John Wick movies.

In his satirical take on poetical analysis, The Four Ages of Poetry, written nine years earlier, Peacock lays the groundwork for what he will later achieve with “War-Song”:

The first, or iron age of poetry, is that in which rude bards celebrate in rough numbers the exploits of ruder chiefs, in days when every man is a warrior, and when the great practical maxim of every form of society, “to keep what we have and to catch what we can,” is not yet disguised under names of justice and forms of law, but is the naked motto of the naked sword, which is the only judge and jury in every question of meum and tuum [“mine” and “yours”—ed.]….

The natural desire of every man to engross to himself as much power and property as he can acquire by any of the means which might makes right, is accompanied by the no less natural desire of making known to as many people as possible the extent to which he has been a winner in this universal game. The successful warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief becomes a king: his next want is an organ to disseminate the fame of his achievements and the extent of his possessions; and this organ he finds in a bard, who is always ready to celebrate the strength of his arm, being first duly inspired by that of his liquor. This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.

Poetry is thus in its origin panegyrical. The first rude songs of all nations appear to be a sort of brief historical notices, in a strain of tumid hyperbole, of the exploits and possessions of a few pre-eminent individuals. They tell us how many battles such an one has fought, how many helmets he has cleft, how many breastplates he has pierced, how many widows he has made, how much land he has appropriated, how many houses he has demolished for other people, what a large one he has built for himself, how much gold he has stowed away in it, and how liberally and plentifully he pays, feeds, and intoxicates the divine and immortal bards, the sons of Jupiter, but for whose everlasting songs the names of heroes would perish.

And with that long preamble, which should serve as a trigger warning of sorts, here is “The War-Song of Dinas Vawr,” which contains more than its fair share of “tumid hyperbole”:

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.

On Dyfed’s richest valley,
Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,
To furnish our carousing.
Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;
We met them, and o’erthrew them:
They struggled hard to beat us;
But we conquered them, and slew them.

As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king marched forth to catch us:
His rage surpassed all measure,
But his people could not match us.
He fled to his hall-pillars;
And, ere our force we led off,
Some sacked his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.

We there, in strife bewild’ring,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen;
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.

We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow, our chorus.

There is a famous audio clip of Dylan Thomas reading the poem. While he certainly has a nice voice, I think his rendition, lugubrious as it is, misses the point. The lines should be read briskly, in the military march rhythm the poet gives us. This is basically a rap song: less “Danny Boy,” more “Not Like Us.”

Despite “War-Song” being a spoof, and despite (or because of?) its violent imagery, I am exhilarated every time I read it. I feel, albeit vicariously, the joy of conquest. Here is a poem about winning. About the overthrow of an enemy. About—if we may apply the lines, metaphorically of course, to the events of the last four weeks—trumping Trump. How can we read Peacock’s poem and not think of the imminent defeat of MAGA and their Orange King?

It’s not for nothing that during the primaries back in 2019, Kamala Harris—then as now my choice for nominee—was known as “The Joyful Warrior.” Seeing the Democrats go on the attack this past month; watching the VP marshal the forces of righteousness and good; viscerally feeling the hope, the renewed faith in humanity, the confidence, the joy; and contrasting that with Trump’s “flailure,” I feel that these two lines from Peacock in particular are, as his friend Shelley would put it, the trumpet of a Trump prophesy. When Election Day is over, it says here, these 12 words will have told us all we need to know about what went down:

His rage surpassed all measure,
But his people could not match us.

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ICYMI

I was on the road this week, so LB hosted The Five 8 with Rosanna Arquette(!). The guests were Frank Figliuzzi, Sandi Bachom, and Jimmy Kennedy:

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Photo credit: Josef Neumeyer. Trull of the current, most popular Tarock cards by Piatnik (Industrie und Glück, Type VI).