Month: January 2026

To That Man Robert Burns

by
Woody Guthrie

In this letter-poem, Woody Guthrie points out the similarities between himself and Robert Burns, and the deep connection he felt to the poet, as well as reminiscing about visiting Scotland as a torpedoed seaman during the Second World War.

Dear Robert Burns,

You skipped the big town streets just like I done, you ducked the crosstown cop just like I ducked, you dodged behind a beanpole to beat the bigtime dick and you very seldom stopped off in any big city where the rigged corn wasn’t drying nor the hot vine didn’t help you do your talking.

Your talking was factual figures of the biggest sort, though. Your talking had the graphboard and the chart and had something else most singers seem to miss, the very kiss of warm dew on the stalk.

Your words turned into songs and floated upstream and then turned into rains and drifted down and lodged and swung and clung to drifts of driftwood to warm and heat and fertilize new seeds. Your words were of the upheath and the down, your words were more from heather than from town. Your thoughts came more from weather than from schoolroom and more from shifting vines than from the book.

I go to the church halfway between the farm and halfway into the town and halfway back. I sing and dance at just one altar only and cry with the folks that would like to be more fertile. If there’s a bench I kneel down to laugh and cry on, I suppose it’s this bench with the kids waiting along it while us dads and us mamas stamp and stomp around looking for something to give our trip more sense. I worship in the limbroof arbors of pure fertility and very little else makes sense to me. Like Robert Burns and Jesus and some others I believe we ought to learn how to make a law or two to help us brothers love the sisters more.

I bought your little four-inch square book when I was a torpedoed seaman walking around over your clods and sods of Glasgow and the little book says on the outer cover, Fifty Songs of Burns, the price 4d, and I read from page to page and found you covered a woman on every page. I thought as I picked the book up here at home that maybe the book ought to have some kind of a new name. Like, Fifty Pages of Fifty Women, enlarged upon by Robert Burns.

Well, Rob, it’s awfully rainy here in Coney today. Been drizzling like this now for several days to make some folks happy and some folks sad, since this is a big resort town and folks pay good money to come here from all over. Some like the rain today and some folks hate it. I like it and love it for several reasons, like you’d love it, to see our new seeds grow in this old trashy back yard, and to see these green shoots, roots, limbs and leaves start dancing like Tirza and her Wine Bath. And because Marjorie just painted some flowers of a wild and jumpy color on the pink wall of the baby’s room so when he does squirm his way out here to see his light of the day he’ll see some twisting flowers like you seen all around your rock hearths and heatherhills there all over your Scotland. This rain is making the grass and flowers spud out, the roots to crawl like guerrillas, and the house to take a better shape, so’s our little shoot and shaver can have these growing limbs to give him such a good fast start that maybe he can grow up in four years with us giving him pushes to be as happy and dancy and glad and joking and pretty as our little Stackybones was on that Sunday’s afternoon when she got dressed up her very prettiest in her pinkest dress and greenest ribbon to look just as nice and sweet and glad and pretty as any of your fifty girls you raved about. And fifty times fifty. The only good part about living you really did miss, Bob, was not to get to stick around a house like Marjorie keeps and see a kid like Cathy dance and grow. You died at thirty-four which was a bit too young for you to get to see these things I’m seeing in the faces of my kids.

This is why I’ll keep you posted and brought up to date as the year leafs out and me and Marjorie have more kids of the kinds you missed out on.

Published in Woody Guthrie, Born To Win (Macmillan, 1965), pp. 213–15.

Robert Burns: Scots Are Right to Revere Their National Poet

by

The Scots are right to revere their national poet.

By Madeleine Kearns

It was bizarre. The deafening bagpipes ceased as an actor — wasn’t he in Braveheart? — began frantically stabbing what looked like a pillow encased in plastic. Its gray gut spilled out, and the thespian, dressed in a tartan skirt and woolly socks, made terrifying noises, very occasionally spitting out a phrase or two in English (something about “gushing entrails”). As if this weren’t unnerving enough, the stage prop — a “haggis” — turned out to be edible: dinner, in fact, served alongside mushed turnips and mashed potatoes. . . . This is how I imagined the uninitiated to be experiencing the evening.

Complete with complimentary glasses of Aberlour whisky (too much of the honey-colored one and you’ll knock yourself out), a live cèilidh band, and — yes — the guy from Braveheart, Burns Night at the Harvard Club was just one of countless suppers happening around the world to commemorate the life and work of Scotland’s national poet. To nonnatives, perhaps it seems ridiculous, but it’s not.

Read more

Trump should be impeached and convicted, and ICE disbanded

by

By Timothy Snyder 1/25/26

Tom Nichols
Timothy Snyder

It is not just the moral horror. It is the political logic.

People are dying in American concentration camps, unseen. And people are being executed on American streets, seen by all of us.
This is enough. The radical is the pragmatic.

The president should be impeached and convicted, as should everyone responsible for these outrages. ICE should be disbanded. So should the Department of Homeland Security. The other agencies within it should be redistributed across other departments. And the people who have killed should be investigated and brought before judges and juries.

But we have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves. The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet as well as Nazi, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny.
It is the logic of lies and of lawlessness.

In a constitutional regime, such as ours, the law applies everywhere and at all times. In a republic, such as ours, it applies to everyone. For that logic of law to be undone, the aspiring tyrant looks for openings, for cracks to pry open.

One of these is the border. The country stops at the border. And so the law stops at the border. And so for the tyrant an obvious move is to extend the border so that is everywhere, to turn the whole country as a border area, where no rules apply.

Stalin did this with border zones and deportations in the 1930s that preceded the Great Terror. Hitler did it with immigration raids in 1938 that targeted undocumented Jews and forced them across the border.

And just what is Trump doing now? By his own admission, as well as by the admission of cabinet members, he is using ICE, nominally a border authority, to enforce his own whims on an American state of his choosing. It is not legal to attack a city because its policies work. It is not legal to threaten a state to gain information about its voters.

The border becomes the pretext to undo the law everywhere, at all times, and against anyone. It is the crack that can be opened. The wedge is the lie.

The lies begin as clichés, memes that are pounded into our heads by the government and by those in the media who repeat them, mindlessly or with malice.

One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like a incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun. It is not a thing in the world. It is an action.

And action is something that we have a right to see and judge for ourselves. People enforcing the law do not wear masks. And people wearing masks who trespass, assault, batter, and kill are not enforcing the law.

They are violating it.

It is indeed the job of some local, state, and federal authorities to enforce the law. It is a disservice to them when federal employees carry out public executions. It is a greater disservice to them when such actions are defined as “law enforcement.”

The lies continue as provocative inversions, as what in On Tyranny I called “dangerous words”: these are, precisely, “terrorist” and “extremist.” These two words are known to us from history as those used by tyrants. And these are the words used by the Trump people to defame those killed by their polices.

This is their “messaging,” their banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.

Or the evil of banality, as Václav Havel said. Words turned into reality with the complicity of those who hear them.

Those who actively lie are directly complicit in the deaths that just happen and in any deaths to come. But those in media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, to begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lie is the wedge, and the wedge is made up of people — of us.

Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.

The moral horror of those killings is enough. But there is a political logic as well. And the two are connected. Those who resist the lawlessness and the lies are doing right. And they are giving a second chance to the endangered American republic.