Varieties of Resistance

Jul 29, 2025

When asked what I have been up to by an acquaintance from the poetry demimonde I had not seen since before the pandemic, I mentioned Portable Bohemia and told him I write about books, film, other topics, and perhaps too much about politics and current affairs, whereupon he said, “Let it go.” I was not sure what to make of this comment and did not have the presence of mind to ask what he meant by “let it go.” Before I could gather my thoughts, another poet he knew appeared, we were introduced, and the conversation moved along to Portland poetry venues from years past: Cafe Lena, The Red and Black Cafe, Mojo’s Coffee Den, the Blue Monk before the poets were 86’d to make way for belly dancing.

The advice to let it go could be taken in different ways, and I do not know him well enough to have a sense of just what he intended by it. Perhaps no more than counsel not to be agitato and obsessed by things beyond my control or influence. As you might suppose, I am not inclined to let it go. The encounter did however prompt reflection.

The term resistance with its inescapable suggestion of the French Resistance in the second world war came into vogue during the early days of Trump’s first presidency. Even comrades might have found an element of romanticization in the adoption of that banner, while adversaries gleefully lampooned its presumptuousness. Six months into Trump’s restoration the call to resistance seems more apropos than ever.

Trump 2.0 ramps up the Trump 2017–2020 agenda by multiple orders of magnitude. Concentration camps are packed with undocumented immigrants and with students, professors, and scientists in the country legally whose student visas and green cards were revoked without warning for such heinous crimes as expressing political opinions said to be contrary to the national interest or foreign policy. Spurious charges of antisemitism are weaponized to suppress dissent. The military has been deployed on the streets of an American city. Millions of dollars are extorted from universities, news organizations, and law firms hoping to escape punitive sanctions that threaten their existence. I could go on.

The Department of Justice announced a policy to prioritize denaturalization of naturalized citizens “who commit certain crimes—and giving U.S. attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo.”

According to this new memo, the DOJ is expanding its criteria of which crimes put individuals at risk of losing their citizenship. That includes national security violations and committing acts of fraud against individuals or against the government, like Paycheck Protection Program loan fraud or Medicaid or Medicare fraud. (Diaz, Kim, DOJ announces).

That umbrella of “certain crimes” is, as one law professor put it, “so vague as to be meaningless” (ibid.). The deck will be further stacked by pursuing cases for denaturalization via civil litigation where the accused in not entitled to an attorney and the government has a lower burden of proof.

The big bogus bill provides $170 million for border and immigration enforcement, with $45 billion of that for detention centers and about $30 billion to hire more ICE personnel, for transportation costs, and to maintain ICE facilities. The push is on to hire 10,000 new ICE agents and 3,000 new border patrol agents. ICE is now the highest funded law enforcement agency in the country. Minister of Deportation Tom Homan threatens to flood the zone with DHS/CBP/ICE stormtroopers in so-call sanctuary cities. Anyone who can scooped up or charged with being mean to an ICE agent will be fair game.

Not everyone in the French Resistance belonged to an “action group” responsible for transporting guns, transmitting military information, or participating in sabotage. Much of the activity was less glamorous but no less risky. Albert Camus was an active member of the Resistance by virtue of his role as editor of Combat, where he chose what news would be covered and recruited contributors. He was “given false papers and an identity card in the name of ‘Albert Mathe,’” a journalist (Todd, Albert Camus). Tony Judt called him “one of the Resistance’s authentic moral voices” (Judt, Past Imperfect).

The poet Robert Desnos passed sensitive information he picked up writing at the newspaper Aujourd’hui to Resistance fighters. The Gestapo arrested Desnos in 1944 after discovering his Resistance activities. He was sent to a concentration camp and died of typhus a few days after it was liberated.

Samuel Beckett was a member of a Resistance cell called “Gloria SMH,” part of a network that passed along information to the allies in England. “Gloria” was the Resistance name of Gabriele-Cecile, daughter of painter Francis Picabia and his writer, lecturer, and art critic wife Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia. He gave an account of his activities in an interview published in Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett, ed. by his biographer and friend James Knowlson and Knowlson’s wife Elizabeth.

Information came in from all over France about the German military movements, about movements of troops, their position, everything that concerned the occupational forces. They would bring this information to me on various bits, scraps of paper. There were about forty agents in that group. It was a huge group. It was the boy-scouts! They brought it all to me. I would type it out clean. Put it in order and type it out, on one sheet of paper, as far as was possible. Then I would bring it to a Greek…who was part of the group…And he would take photographs. And my sheets would be reduced to the size of a matchbox.…Probably unreadable but it could be magnified. And then he would give them to Madame Picabia, the widow of Picabia, the painter. And she was a very respectable old lady. Nothing could be less like a Resistance agent. And she could get over to the other zone, the so-called unoccupied zone, without any difficulty. And so it was sent back to England.
When the whole thing blew up, as soon as I knew—the same day—I went to tell the Greek, but he didn't take it seriously enough and he was arrested. There was an informer in the group. Everybody used to know everybody else…I'll tell you what happened. In August of 1942, Suzanne and I were at home. Mania and Alfred Péron were on holiday at the time, when Alfred was picked up by the Gestapo. I remember we got it at eleven and we'd gone within the hour. First we went to Marcel Duchamp's and Mary Reynolds’…That was our first refuge. Then some of Suzanne's communist friends found us another safe place where we lay low for a time while we were provided with forged papers."

The portion of the population active in the Resistance is estimated at one to three percent. Most people kept their heads down, went about their business, and tried to survive. Some lesser number collaborated and were dealt with harshly after the liberation.

Most people living under the Trump regime have a life, family, work, other responsibilities, and the host of appetites, yearnings, and passions that come with being human. A sizable minority make up the MAGA cult, more than a lunatic fringe but still a minority. The regime’s immigration tactics and other extremist policies are increasingly unpopular among the non-MAGA majority as the public becomes generally aware of them. Even for these people, it may be no small matter, or not possible at all, to step away from the office, cafe, retail establishment, or construction site in the middle of the day to take part in a demonstration. Keeping up with the daily outrage is a challenge. Lofty appeals to duties of citizenship, moral, and for those who think in such terms intellectual integrity run up against the exigencies of everyday life.

Too many university administrators and business leaders are keeping their heads down, hoping to stay out of the line of fire, leaving individual institutions isolated and vulnerable when they are targeted. Last Friday’s PBS News Hour aired on the heels of Columbia University’s ransom payment and took up the subject in the “Brooks and Capeheart” segment. David Brooks called for institutions of all stripes to unite in a broad coalition of resistance.

Well, there are two possible responses. One, the one that's being chosen by most organizational leaders right now, is lay low. It's so, well, maybe they won't pick on me, or maybe we will make a concession and they won't pick on me…
The other option, which I thought we were going to have, is a broad coalition, not only of all universities, but all law firms, businesses, nonprofits foundations, anybody in any sector that could be part of the extortion attempt. And they would say, we will band together. There's strength of numbers. If they come for one of us, they come for all of, sort of a domestic NATO Article V…
Somebody's got to take the fight back to the administration. And it has to be organizational leaders acting together who collectively have a lot more power than they do alone. (Bennett, Brooks and Capeheart)

It was never my intention for the focus of Portable Bohemia to be as much on politics and current affairs as it has become. I am under no illusion that my contributions here have any effect in the greater scheme or even any lesser scheme of things beyond being of some interest to a modest number of readers who find something in what I have to offer. From the beginning I have commented on politics and current affairs in an honorable tradition of pamphleteers, gadflies, and rabble rousers that dates back to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable type in the mid-15th century, and in the spirit of Isaiah expressed in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d: ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded & remain confirm’d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.’

In the same spirit I show up at demonstrations sponsored by organizations with stated commitment to peaceful, nonviolent protest. As a general rule I steer clear of protests that take place under cover of darkness, which tend to invite violence against people and property that only harms our cause. None of this will change anything in and of itself, but I do not accept the tacit collaboration of silence. I suppose I hold out hope, maybe naïvely, unreasonably, that some critical mass of opposition will be reached, the wave of mass hysteria will break, and we can begin to dig out from the rubble. What might emerge is anyone’s guess.

We are not France under German occupation. But the stakes are comparable. The country we grew up in is in peril, our country with all its flaws and faults from founding to the present, but still with shining ideals, beacons of hope, in whose light decent people do what they can to remedy those flaws and faults. Camus, Beckett, and Desnos did not let it go. They did what they could at great risk and grave personal cost. They are exemplars on whose shoulders we stand. So I write.

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Keep the faith. Hold the line.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt

David Matthews Portable Bohemia

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