Hearing a woodpecker and a philosopher

Both nature and literature offer advice on how we can resist Trumpism

Facing Donald Trump’s regime, take guidance from the woodpecker — and and from a Greek philosopher. (Photo by Raymond Eichelberger on Unsplash)

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The tall crabapple tree outside my window draws lots of birds, none more beautiful than the male red-bellied woodpecker who has been distracting me for a while now. He’s a welcome presence since, truth be told, writers are always eager to find excuses not to do the work at hand — at least, until we’re forced to confront the crisis of a deadline. Luckily for me, this woodpecker offers a lesson in perseverance, which is both an imperative for my task here and a lesson for those of us who are dispirited by the steady onslaught of awful news from our nation’s capital.

It's hard not to be glum. The careless dismembering of government’s tasks here at home and retreat from America’s moral commitments abroad are reported relentlessly. We can hardly process the breadth of the destruction wrought by Donald Trump: The president attacks constitutionally-guaranteed free speech by imprisoning a legal immigrant for organizing political demonstrations, and by punishing journalists who don’t use the words he prefers. He stokes hatred by concocting the notion that the miniscule number of people whose gender identity is unclear pose a threat — to what, exactly? He puts all our health at risk by empowering an addled science skeptic as overseer of the nation’s health policy. He haphazardly puts millions of lives at risk, including generations unborn, by gutting environmental protections and retreating from the fight to limit climate change.

Everybody reading this could add to the list of toxic schemes emanating from the White House — perhaps by citing the mismanagement of the economy, the attack on higher education, the agglomeration of executive power, the accommodation to authoritarians, the undermining of foreign democracies, the abandonment of allies. What we are seeking leaves us heartsick: Trump’s first weeks back in office have begun to yield a meaner, dirtier and more dangerous world.

Yes, many of us had predicted that Trump’s return to power would threaten nothing less than disaster, but we didn’t imagine it would move so swiftly, or that the effort to restrain him would turn out to be so inept.

This is not how we wish to be greeting the coming spring. I find myself envying the oblivion of that red-bellied woodpecker who is happily poking for insects in the old woods around the house, rat-a-tat-tatting up to 20 pecks per second, or perhaps 12,000 pecks per day. Or maybe I ought to just emulate the opossum — hero of last week’s edition of The Upstate American, as you may recall — and pretend to be unaware of what’s going on.

But neither oblivious focus on other tasks or deadened retreat from what’s real ought to be imagined as a valid choice for those of us who care deeply about American democracy. Here on the edge of the Upstate countryside, I’ve found both inspiration and guidance for next steps, though it appears in unlikely forms.

Reading up on opossums for last week’s column, I came upon the term “thanatosis,” which is what scientists call the state of feigning death — you know, playing possum. But wait, I thought: Isn’t that the title of a famous poem that I must’ve read in high school? Not quite: that’s “thanatopsis,” the view or contemplation of death, not the mimicking of it. Thanatopsis is the title of a great old poem written by William Cullen Bryant while he was still a teenager and a Williams College dropout, in the second decade of the 19^th century. I had to look it up, but then I remembered that Bryant went on to become one of the most celebrated poets in early American literature.

These days we might consider Bryant’s elegant writing too ornate and old-fashioned, which is unsurprising in a writer whose schooling surely began with the King James Bible. But in Thanatopsis, Bryant is engagingly contemplative, invoking the nature he witnessed around his western New England home as he considers the ultimate awareness we all must carry, namely, of our mortality — when we will “mix forever with the elements,/ To be a brother to the insensible rock/ And to the sluggish clod.” Not a hopeful view, that: “The oak/ Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold.” Oh, goody.

But as he writes of our inevitable demise, Bryant evokes the beauties of the world we all will ultimately leave, reminding us that every living creature has gone ahead of us to this fate — to face “the great tomb of man” — and that our company in death will thus be greater than it was in life. That brings him to the point of all this: “So live, that when thy summons comes… sustained and soothed/ By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave/ Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch/ About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”

How we die, Bryant thus suggests, will depend upon how we live. His prescription seems to be that our awareness of the natural process of things can lead us to trust it. This is a notion that would come to be popular with the Transcendentalists who emerged in Bryant’s home region just a few years after he wrote Thanatopsis — by which time, incidentally, Bryant had become editor of The New-York Evening Post, which in our day is an eager apologist for the earth’s current uber-tormentor.¹

Having stuck with me this far, folks, I must thank you for your patience — because we’ve rather quickly gone from a woodpecker to an opossum, then to a Romantic poet and an early American philosophical movement. Which brings us next, of course, to a Greek philosopher, who I promise has something to say to those of us who are so deeply troubled by what’s going on in the government that is supposed to represent our best interests. Trust me here: We have something to learn.

The name of the Greek philosopher Plutarch has always struck me as a portmanteau — that is, a word created by the blending of two words, like “smog” and “brunch.” Poor Plutarch, to be associated with both plutocracy and oligarchy: plutocracy being a government run by a wealthy minority, oligarchy a government in the hands of a privileged few.

That may strike you as familiar just now, in the era of Donald Trump and his designated hitter, Elon Musk, billionaires both. Our Congress has yielded its power entirely to their whims, and the wealthiest Americans have given Trump control of a half-billion dollars in a campaign cache to power the MAGA movement forward even after he is gone.² With billionaires in command of all the levers of government, we’re ruled by both a plutocracy and an oligarchy; that is, American plutocrats have become our oligarchs. The small-d democrats are in retreat, as are the Democrats.

What are we, the citizens looking at all this in disbelief and horror, supposed to do? How can we possibly prevail against such powerful forces who are assaulting what we know to be right on so many fronts?

Plutarch — he whose very name seems a contemporary slander — wrote about this sort of thing in the first century from his home near Mount Parnassus. Plutarch’s work focused on the influence of character on societies, both good and bad. His writings were surely familiar to William Cullen Bryant, and they were popular among the Transcendentalists, who held as a core belief a deep trust in the goodness of nature and humans.

In one of his major works, Plutarch wrote about the value of perseverance, suggesting that keeping at the task at hand was not only an essential skill for civilized people, but a tack that would also ultimately prevail over the more harsh tactics that the powerful used. “Perseverance is more prevailing than violence,” he wrote, “and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.”³

That is, the onslaught of many offenses being committed by Trump cannot be met with a single countervailing force, but with the power of many who refuse to yield. The notion advanced 20 centuries ago is that we might yet prevail if we move with perseverance, a bit at a time, each of us doing what we can to counter what is clearly a violent assault on our democracy.

Speaking of portmanteaus: There’s a useful one here which comes from German, a language that is more accommodating of complex words than English. It’s sitzfleisch, which in literal translation means “sitting flesh,” but which is usually translated as the ability to work through a difficult situation and see it through to the end. It’s a more colorful way of describing perseverance, the trait that Plutarch considered superior to even violence.⁴

Surely there’s no quick solution to the offenses of Trumpism in America. While the president’s popularity has begun to slip — the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll has his unfavorability rating among voters 8 points above his favorability — there’s little likelihood that his direction will change anytime soon.⁵ He will continue to slash away at the competency of government, wreak havoc on our nation’s global standing, pick on the weak and poor among us in order to lift up the oligarchs who are his friends and generally make us ashamed of our nationality. (I don’t want to go to a hockey game now; it’s a bilateral sport in this part of the country, and I can’t bear the idea of Canadians booing The Star-Spangled Banner — though I understand why they do.)

We need sitzfleisch, the perseverance that was recognized in Greek philosophy, albeit not in that term, as a necessary ingredient of success. There’s no comfort in mimicking the opossum — rolling over and playing dead, so that our friends who support what Trump is doing will think we’re just fine with his many offenses. My friendly rose-breasted woodpecker has a better idea as he keeps drumming away in pursuit of what he needs.

Each of us surely has a little place we can find that enables us to be subversive in the face of the power arrayed against us. It may be in supporting our local library, volunteering to help a public broadcaster, speaking up for a threatened university, reading to children in a literacy program, or working for a candidate who will confront those now in charge. We can donate to a food bank, write letters to the editor, speak up on social media. To sustain ourselves in these hard days, we can embrace spirit-lifting artistic endeavors that soon will surely lose public funding — music, theater, visual arts and dance — and volunteer to help human-services groups that are likely to also lose federal support.

Importantly, too, we must hold elected officials to account right now. Republican members of Congress are being urged by their leaders to back away from meeting their angry constituents in public; we ought to shame them wherever they surface and demand that they face the consequences of their acquiescence to a lawless president.

Whatever we do, we need to keep at it, remembering the persistence of the woodpecker during those thousands of daily pecks and, as William Cullen Bryant suggested, the opportunity to ease out of this life in psychic comfort if we have thus lived well.

Only then, when we have each done as much as we can for as long as we can, will Plutarch’s notion of the power of perseverance pay off. And then, too, we can, as Bryant wrote, “Go forth under the open sky, and list to Nature’s teachings,” with the comfort of knowing that we have done our part to make lives better here and to restore what’s beautiful in our land. That’s a good project for springtime, I’d say.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cullen_Bryant

2. https://www.axios.com/2025/03/10/trump-maga-inc-power-fundraising

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives

4. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180903-to-have-sitzfleisch---its-a-professional-compliment

5. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-march-14-tracker-2044984

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AN ATTACK ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

As many of you know, I’m a proud graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and the current chair of the school’s Alumni Board. It’s fair to say that the university is under siege by the Trump administration, resulting in the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants that the United States government had promised. On Friday, the faculty of the Journalism School issued a statement from Pulitzer Hall, which I share with you here to stimulate our thinking. Thanks for taking the time to read.

— Rex

Freedom of the press — a bedrock principle of American democracy — is under threat in the United States. Here at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism we are witnessing and experiencing an alarming chill. We write to affirm our commitment to supporting and exercising First Amendment rights for students, faculty, and staff on our campus — and, indeed, for all.

After Homeland Security seized and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia's School of Public and International Affairs, without charging him with any crime, many of our international students have felt afraid to come to classes and to events on campus.

They are right to be worried. Some of our faculty members and students who have covered the protests over the Gaza war have been the object of smear campaigns and targeted on the same sites that were used to bring Khalil to the attention of Homeland Security. President Trump has warned that the effort to deport Khalil is just the first of many.

These actions represent threats against political speech and the ability of the American press to do its essential job and are part of a larger design to silence voices that are out of favor with the current administration. We have also seen reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is trying to deport the Palestinian poet and journalist Mosab Abu Toha, who has written extensively in the New Yorker about the condition of the residents of Gaza and warned of the mortal danger to Palestinian journalists.

There are thirteen million legal foreign residents (green card holders) in the United States. If the administration can deport Khalil, it means those 13 million people must live in fear if they dare speak up or publish something that runs afoul of government views. There are more than one million international students in the United States. They, too, may worry that they are no longer free to speak their mind. Punishing even one person for their speech is meant to intimidate others into self-censorship.

One does not have to agree with the political opinions of any particular individual to understand that these threats cut to the core of what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy. The use of deportation to suppress foreign critics runs parallel to an aggressive campaign to use libel laws in novel — even outlandish ways — to silence or intimidate the independent press. The president has sued CBS for an interview with Kamala Harris which Trump found too favorable. He has sued the Pulitzer Prize committee for awarding prizes to stories critical of him. He has even sued the Des Moines Register for publishing the results of a pre-election poll that showed Kamala Harris ahead at that point in the state. Large corporations like Disney and Meta settled lawsuits most lawyers thought they could win because they did not want to risk the wrath of the Trump administration and jeopardize business they have with the federal government. Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos decided that the paper’s editorial pages would limit themselves to pieces celebrating “free markets and individual liberties.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration insists on hand-picking the journalists who will be permitted to cover the White House and Pentagon, and it has banned the Associated Press from press briefings because the AP is following its own style book and refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

The Columbia Journalism School stands in defense of First Amendment principles of free speech and free press across the political spectrum. The actions we’ve outlined above jeopardize these principles and therefore the viability of our democracy. All who believe in these freedoms should steadfastly oppose the intimidation, harassment, and detention of individuals on the basis of their speech or their journalism.

Signed,

The Faculty of Columbia Journalism School

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ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-Rex

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