View from the Precipice

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Night Thoughts

 

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by Roman Sympos

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Most melancholy at that time, O Friend!

Were my day-thoughts,---my nights were miserable;

Such ghastly visions had I of despair

And tyranny, and implements of death;

And innocent victims sinking under fear,

And momentary hope, and worn-out prayer,

Each in his separate cell, or penned in crowds

For sacrifice, and struggling with fond mirth

And levity in dungeons, where the dust

Was laid with tears.

 

William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 10, lines 397-8 (1850)

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“You bloated idiot!”

 

Peter Lorre, The Maltese Falcon (1941)

 

 

 

April 19, 2025

 

I’m not sleeping well these days. Kilmar Garcia is much on my mind. 

 

Garcia, a legal US resident, is being held in a jail cell in El Salvador as I write, the victim of our government’s perverse campaign to fan anti-immigration hysteria among Donald Trump’s MAGA faithful by rounding up what they call, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, the “terrorists” and “criminals” allegedly infesting America’s immigrant communities. 

 

In the prison of my mind, in the two cells to either side of Garcia’s, sit Rumeysa Öztürk and Moshen Mahdawi.

 

Öztürk, a Tufts University student, was kidnapped in full public view by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and shipped to a prison in Louisiana to await trial on similar, and similarly bogus, charges. She has been denied bail but will be sent back to Vermont, where she was first detained, so that her claims that she was denied due process and her right to free speech can be heard. She will, however, remain in custody.

 

Mahdawi, a student at Columbia and a legal US resident for the last 10 years, was arrested by masked ICE agents when he came in to be interviewed about finalizing his application for citizenship. He, too, has done nothing illegal to warrant his arrest.

 

Like William Wordsworth, arguably England’s most revolutionary poet—in the history of its poetry, I mean—I am losing sleep over the victims of a revolution I once supported and defended and endorsed.

 

For Wordsworth, this was the French Revolution, whose immediate and jubilant consequences he witnessed as a young man spending the summer of 1790 on a walking tour of the newborn French Republic. The absolute rule of Louis XVI had come to an end the year before and every village and town seemed a perpetual festival. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” the poet wrote in The Prelude, his poetic autobiography, “But to be young was very heaven!”

 

In the next three turbulent years, France saw the rise to power of Robespierre, self-anointed embodiment of the Will of the People, and his Reign of Terror by guillotine: ”Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,/ Head after head,” wrote Wordsworth, “and never heads enough /For those that bade them fall” (X, 361-3). In the political chaos following Robespierre’s own execution a year later, an obscure artillery captain would take over the army and overthrow the revolutionary government in a coup d’état. In 1804. he would crown himself Emperor and begin to impose his will on a cowering Europe, threatening England itself with invasion.

 

Overcome by guilt and confusion, Wordsworth watched with dismay as the unintended consequences of his revolutionary cheer-leading unfolded on the Continent, to the point of posing an existential threat to all that was dear to him. His nightmares now began to hold him accountable:

 

Then suddenly the scene

Changed, and the unbroken dream entangled me

In long orations, which I strove to plead

Before unjust tribunals,---with a voice

Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,

Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt

In the last place of refuge---my own soul.

                       

The Prelude, Book 10, 409-415 (1850)

 

 

My revolution, like Wordsworth’s, has brought me to a similar moment of truth, in which an incoherent, bullying TV personality afflicted by attention deficit disorder and supported by ignorant fanatics has taken over our system of government and torn its Constitution to shreds. “Conceived in liberty,” this nation has taken two and a half centuries to arrive at the same crisis point the French Republic reached in just three years. But arrive we have.

 

On this day, exactly 250 years ago, a battle was fought in Lexington, Massachusetts, where I now reside, between a few dozen militia men summoned from the surrounding countryside and British troops on their way to seize a reported stockpile of munitions in Concord, just up the road. Eight Americans were killed, and ten wounded. At stake was the freedom of England’s North American colonies.

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The colonists had good reasons to fight, and one year later, they issued a Declaration of Independence listing those reasons. Among the cruel and unjust actions taken by their sovereign, King George III, against their lives and liberties, the signatories included “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury” and “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”

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Sound familiar?

 

The MAGA movement is the counter-revolution for which the Revolution of 1775 sowed the seeds, a coup far surpassing in scale and its threat to world peace Napoleon’s rise to power. It marks, like his, a return to tyranny, to rule by the whim and diktat of someone who holds himself above the law.

 

As we are now learning, painfully, day by excruciating day, the seeds of freedom we sowed on April 19, 1775, were mingled with seeds of anarchy. For two and half centuries, we’ve managed to weed them out. In the three short months since Trump’s inauguration, they’ve taken over the garden.

 

Trouble was, the seeds looked alike and came in the same seed packets: “Don’t tread on me.” “That government is best which governs least.” “Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.” Who knew that Christopher Gadsden’s patriotic rallying cry, Thoreau’s “motto” in Civil Disobedience, and Tom Paine’s definition of “government” in Common Sense—three pillars of strength in the history of this nation’s defense of the rights of its citizens—would end up scrawled on the placards of MAGA protestors bent on destroying government altogether?

 

On this anniversary of America’s War of Independence, it is salutary to remember that what is born in violence almost inevitably ends in violence, and that violence in the name of freedom may well lead to investing freedom in a single man (and isn’t it almost always a man?)—a Napoleon, or a Stalin, or a Mao. Even as unlikely a Man of the Hour as Donald Trump.

 

This, it turns out, is what our civic forebears fought for, and what we, their descendants, are celebrating today--this perfect storm of anarchy, which is just another name for an independence so complete, so free from any restraints whatsoever, that it creates a vacuum in which only violence can survive. When self-restraint is gone, as we are learning to our cost, what rules is not law, but power. Raw power.

 

I wish I could feel as much pride as I once did in the promise of liberty that inspired Colonel Parker’s men in 1775 to face down King George’s redcoats. Or as much confidence. Marching in the streets against Jim Crow and my country’s misadventures in Vietnam, I still felt proud of what the flag stood for: a promise as yet unfulfilled but glimmering on the horizon. Now I see only darkness there, and the glimmer of approaching brush fires. I feel, not pride or confidence, but only shame and fear and indignation.

 

And an impulse to violence.

 

This is the side of me that Wordsworth can’t reach, but Peter Lorre can.

 

In The Maltese Falcon, John Huston’s brilliant film adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s brilliant novel, Lorre plays the role of Joel Cairo, the scented, sinister, smooth-talking, spats-wearing sidekick of criminal mastermind Caspar Gutman, immortally (and abundantly) embodied in the person of the corpulent Sydney Greenstreet. When it turns out that the priceless “black bird” Gutman led Cairo to believe he had in his possession is a fake, Cairo cannot restrain himself. “You fat fool!” he screams. “You imbecile! You bloated idiot!”  Then he bursts into tears.

 

My feelings exactly. Right down to the tears.

 

You can guess who my “bloated idiot” might be, but at least I never invested a scintilla of trust in him.

 

Maybe you have another candidate in mind: one of the “fat cats” (and no, it’s not “fat shaming” when the cats choose to be obese) that our vaunted free market seems to spawn generation after generation—the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts and the Zuckerbergs and the Musks, icons of obscene wealth peddling the Ponzi scheme of trickle-down enrichment for all. (Oh, those tears!)

 

Or perhaps, like me, you sometimes hold up a mirror (or an action-cam) and behold your own fat, foolish self, a Big Kahuna riding the ever-breaking wave of an economic system that seems to be carrying you toward a golden shore, while in reality, the rip-tide is carrying you out to sea while all around you swimmers are silently drowning.

 

It feels good to vent, doesn’t it? But after the raging and railing, the huffing and the puffing, the bawling and the blubbering, it’s just you, my friend, lying in the dark, alone in your “separate cell,” laying the dust with your tears.

 

Let’s get out of here.

 

 

UPDATE: May 1, 2025

 

Yesterday afternoon Moshen Mahdawi was released on bail from Federal custody in Vermont while US District Court judge Geoffrey W. Crawford considers whether his First Amendment rights to free speech and due process have, as his lawyers contend, been denied.

 

One down and two to go.

 

For now.