Struggling through the first and worst of my three bouts with COVID-19 during the pandemic’s early days of 2020, a time when our massive unknowing served massively, often irrationally, to elevate our fears, I received a handwritten letter from a friend, a highly decorated Green Beret who, in retirement, had become a scholar of English poetry.
Knowing I had already lost two close friends to the virus, his note urged me not to allow my fears, however understandable, to conquer my hopes for recovery.
Beneath his signature, he wrote, in quotation marks, “If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.”
That line stayed with me along my journey to renewed health, reminding me to question my fears. Are they irrational? Might my fears be liars?
Quarantine offered ample opportunity to search for the source of the line, and I found it in the short poem, “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth,” published in 1849 by the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
I was fascinated that Clough’s poem played a key role in World War II history. A favorite of Winston Churchill, it provided a literary undergirding for his defiance of the unthinkable defeat that, for many, seemed inevitable: “Never give in! Never, never, never!”
Churchill read the poem to the British people in his April 27, 1941, radio address to the nation, urging them not to allow their fears during the German bombardment known as “The Blitz” to vanquish their hopes for victory.
In that very same week, eight months before Pearl Harbor catapulted the United States into the war, Churchill shared the poem with President Franklin Roosevelt. Knowing England needed America to better the odds of victory, Churchill yearned for Clough’s words to spur the president to courageous action.
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
These first four lines served Churchill as a call for the Brits to persevere, rallying them against imagining that their beloved nation’s struggle might be in vain, that the Germans possessed such strength that Hitler could not fail.
Churchill’s bull’s-eye for the next four lines was none other than FDR:
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
Imagine Roosevelt hearing those words from Churchill’s own lips: “And, but for you, possess the field.”
Ah, the power of poetry! Poetry, as Paul Engle wrote in the New York Times, “is ordinary language raised to the Nth power … boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”
Do not each of us, at some point along life’s journey, come to moments of decision, sensing a call to courageous action based on principle, however strong the opposition and no matter how stacked the odds?
For those in the crux of such a decision, the poem’s central appeal strikes hard, as it must have for FDR: “Mr. President, if only YOU would join the fight, we WILL possess the field.”
Fast-forwarding to the 2024 election of Donald Trump, I offer this poem as a song of victory to the valiant ones struggling against the Deep State, beginning with Trump himself who, against all odds, will now “possess the field” (the White House) which not long ago seemed impossible.
Victory became possible only when others came to regard their fears of his inevitable loss as liars. Somewhere along the contentious campaign they saw, “in yon smoke concealed,” that Trump was actually gaining ground, and came to believe that he would surely “possess the field” if they would engage.
Engage they did. Vance. Musk. Gabbard. Kennedy. Rogan. And so many more, including me and, probably, you.
Since, though, I opened this column with my personal COVID-19 story, I write today to offer this hymn of victory to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Trump’s nominee to occupy the office of the director of the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Bhattacharya joined the health care battle raging around COVID-19 early and will now possess the field of the “enemy,” i.e., the director’s office held by Francis Collins from 2009 to 2021, the very office that attacked Bhattacharya mercilessly as a fringe scientist dangerous to the public’s health.
Bhattacharya is one three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which, in October 2020 (near the time of my first COVID-19 infection), urged a more targeted effort at combating the virus by focusing on highly at-risk segments of the population, allowing the healthy young to go about their normal lives.
Like Clough’s poem, the Barrington Declaration was a call for Americans to realize that their fears may be liars.
Why lock down our economy and our schools?
Why enforce absurdities such as masking our toddlers or standing 6 feet apart while shopping?
Why shut down gyms while allowing liquor stores to remain open?
Going into combat against the Great Barrington Declaration, NIH Director Francis Collins joined with Dr. Anthony Fauci, wasting no time in marshaling their efforts to stop it before its dangerous views could convince anyone of the irrational government response to the pandemic.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Collins said, “This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment. I’m sure it will be an idea that someone can wrap themselves in as a justification for skipping wearing masks or social distancing and just doing whatever they damn well please.”
Calling a scientist of Bhattacharya’s stature “confused” seems to me very close to Biden’s calling Trump’s supporters garbage. Collins treated Dr. Bhattacharya as promulgating non-scientific garbage.
As the Deep State’s arrows kept flying, Dr. Bhattacharya experienced both racist attacks and death threats, in addition to having his ideas suppressed, identified as “misinformation” by Facebook and Google.
In April of 2021, California proposed a bill that would discipline physicians for spreading false information about COVID-19, leading Dr. Bhattacharya to claim that the bill would “turn doctors into agents of state public health rather than advocates for their patients.”
As the Deep State emptied its quiver of arrows at him and his comrades, Bhattacharya gallantly stood his ground. He will now, with Trump’s victory, “possess the field.”
How sweet must be the victory for Dr. Bhattacharya, whose experience on the battlefield makes Clough’s poem an apt tribute: “Say not the struggle naught availeth.”
