Caitlin Flanagan | The Atlantic

The Movies Got Small, and So Did We

2025-11-30T07:00:00-05:00

I saw Jaws with my father in the summer of 1975, the year it came out. When we walked out of the Oaks movie theater in Berkeley, California, we were giddy, punch-drunk. It’s a perfect movie—a big, exciting American movie. From its opening minutes you live inside of it, your regular life suspended somewhere behind you. Waiting for my mother to pick us up, we noticed that we were both vaguely on guard against shark attacks, even though we were standing on Solano Avenue, where the only dangerous sea creatures were down the street in the King Tsin lobster tank. The tagline of the marketing campaign was “You’ll never go in the water again,” and my only non-Jaws thought during the movie was I am never going to the beach again.

My mother picked us up, and we tried to tell her about the effect it had on us. My father compared it to Psycho, which many people of his generation did.

“There’s a guy who gets his leg bitten off!” I said. “And you see it floating to the bottom!”

“Sinking to the bottom,” my father said mildly.

I thought of the leg falling through the water, the foot in its tennis shoe landing first and making a little bounce: sinking.

[From the January 2025 issue: Walk on air against your better judgment]

My father loved the movies, and he knew a lot about them. He’d grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and as a child he’d gone by himself to the Pickwick Theatre every weekend. On Saturdays, he’d get the whole enchilada: the serial, the cartoons, the short subjects, the newsreel, a Western, and then the feature. On Sundays, there would be a shorter, more dignified program—the coming attractions, the newsreel, and a better class of feature. I had the clear impression that those hours at the movies—maybe as much as his tremendous reading, which began early and never stopped—were the most fully lived hours of his childhood. While other boys were playing baseball or running track or engaging in any of those dull and harassing pastimes that boys were supposed to love, he was at the movies.

He went to see the original Dracula in 1931, and it had a tremendous effect on him. He loved to say, “Children of the night—what music they make!” in a very Bela Lugosi way. He did it for laughs, but “children of the night” must have been a frightening thing to hear as a kid, and he was partly laughing off his own childhood fear.

When I was about 10, he started taking the family to a Berkeley revival house that played the great movies of my parents’ youth. I loved those nights; even though many of the movies confused me, I never missed a show. I was a Flanagan, and this is what we did—we read everything, and we saw a lot of movies. There were lines from some of them that we repeated for years: “I was misinformed” and “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” My older sister looked a bit like Lauren Bacall, with the same side part, and sometimes we’d address the question to her. “Ellen, was you ever bit by a dead bee?”

The movies were shown in a double feature, and in the half-hour intermission between them, you’d spill out of the black-and-white 1930s and into the night carnival of Telegraph Avenue, 1971. Pushing through those doors was like Dorothy Gale opening her own front door in The Wizard of Oz, when the world switches from black and white to Technicolor; the scene on Telegraph was itself a bit like Oz: filled with strange people, vibrant with noise, attractive but also tinged with menace. What a relief to get back to the world of light and shadow, to the breakfast tables set with white linen, where educated people shake open newspapers and murmur, “Yes, please,” when uniformed servants offer coffee from a silver pot. Was real life ever like that? It was in the movies.

When I was in seventh or eighth grade, my sister moved out, which left a gaping hole in the family. She was the smart one, the ideal moviegoer, my father’s favorite. In an effort to drag me up from the farm system, my father instituted a new policy: On very special Saturdays—which would follow no schedule and would always be announced on a Wednesday night—he and I would go to San Francisco, have lunch, and see a movie. My father didn’t drive, and this was before BART ran under the bay to the city, so these trips—unlike the countless times my mother drove me or all of us to the city—never really felt like a sure thing until we were back at the house. First, we’d catch the 7 bus that went from the Berkeley Hills to downtown Berkeley, and then we’d wait for the F into San Francisco. Very occasionally, and theoretically in a way that could be predicted by looking at the bus schedule in the kitchen, what creaked to a stop wasn’t the 7 but the 7-F, which had all of the benefits of the 7 combined with the ultimate destination of the F, and we received it as an augury of safe passage and a fantastic piece of luck. From the moment we took our seats, way up on Cragmont and Euclid Avenues, we could relax as the bus moved in its stately way through Oakland, and then onto the freeway and across the Bay Bridge, eventually to the end of the line, the old Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, which I recently read described as a “hot mess” during that era. But San Francisco itself was a hot mess at that time.

The city was peerless in its beauty and famous for murderers who came with boogeyman names: the Zodiac Killer, the Zebra Killers. There was also street crime, much of it violent, and political assassinations, and bombings. The terminal was cavernous and poorly lit, and I thought it was a bit scary, but my father’s noninterest in ordinary things, such as driving and figuring out a bus schedule, extended to a failure to notice—really to acknowledge—dangerous circumstances, and so we’d hop off the bus and ankle it up to Union Square to have lunch at Lefty O’Doul’s.

Lefty’s was a baseball bar named for a beloved player and manager, so you wouldn’t think it would be a Tom Flanagan kind of place. But it was also an Irish bar with shamrocks and tricolors in the grand old tradition of the San Francisco Irish, so it was actually very much a Tom Flanagan kind of place. It also had a great steam table. We always ordered either hot pastrami sandwiches or plates of corned beef with the works—cabbage, carrots, horseradish, the full catastrophe—and then we’d bring our trays to a table and give the cocktail waitress our order (“One martini and one Coca-Cola, please”), and we’d sit there eating and talking.

He’d order a second martini, and I’d have a slice of what I think of as California cheesecake (the flat kind, unlike those texture-filled ordeals I would encounter in the East). There was never another child in the bar, but no one ever said anything about my being there, just as nobody said it at the Top of the Mark or the half a dozen other San Francisco bars I frequented with my parents. I owe a lot of my education to conversations held in those places. Lefty’s closed in 2017 because nothing gold can stay, but you can almost catch a glimpse of it at the very beginning of The Birds, when Tippi Hedren walks past Union Square and takes a left on Powell to go to Davidson’s Pet Shop.

At a certain point, my father would look at his watch and say, “Okay, drink up,” and we’d squeeze our eyes shut, drain our glasses, and head out. Our first movie was The Poseidon Adventure, which was released at the beginning of the disaster-movie craze of the 1970s, and unlike Spellbound and Casablanca, I understood it perfectly and found it thrilling. It’s about an ocean liner that gets capsized by a rogue wave—“an enormous wall of water,” someone tells the captain, played by Leslie Nielsen—and a group of passengers who band together and try to escape.

Every disaster movie operates the same way. In a busy and cheerful first act, you meet the principals and find out what makes them tick: Mr. and Mrs. Rosen are going to Israel to meet their grandson. Mr. Rogo is a brusque cop who’s always trying to cheer up his wife—the 13th labor of Hercules because she’s a former prostitute who tells him that one of the men on board looks like a former customer—played by Stella Stevens. Reverend Scott, who will eventually lead the group to safety, is a turtleneck-wearing, semi-groovy Protestant minister trying to hash out his theological problems. Once you’ve made these and several more introductions, disaster strikes and you wait to see who gets picked off and who makes it.

I was engaged by every moment of that movie, horrified when Mrs. Rogo called Mrs. Rosen “old fat ass” and satisfied when she herself fell into a pit of fire. The actual plot of the movie is summarized by Reverend Scott’s runic assessment of their predicament: “We’re floating upside down. We’ve got to climb up.” Our group stalwartly tries to get to the hull, even as they pass doomed passengers, in their soaked gowns and tuxedos (it’s New Year’s Eve). At the end of the movie, Reverend Scott has delivered a sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God speech and sacrificed himself so that the survivors can make the final hurdle without being scalded by steam. Soon enough, rescuers use a blowtorch to make a hatch, and they climb out, saved. I realized that I’d been living so deeply inside the movie that I never thought about their actual rescue. As the light in the theater began to rise, I felt like the movie was breaking up with me.

My father’s favorite movie was Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, closely followed by Les Enfants du Paradis, so he certainly had a developed taste in film. But I think all of those Saturday mornings watching serials—fast-paced, full of adventures and cliff-hangers—gave him an appreciation for movies like The Poseidon Adventure.

We only once went to a restaurant other than Lefty’s. My father presented it as a special surprise and mentioned it all week. It turned out to be a fancy French restaurant, and there wasn’t one thing on the menu I wanted to eat. At the very bottom, I saw that there was an omelet, which I chose, and my father looked disappointed: “Don’t you like it?” I convinced him that I really, really loved omelets and ate most of it, but from then on, we went to Lefty’s.

Only one bad restaurant and only one bad movie—although it wasn’t really a case of its being bad; it was a case of wishing we’d never been born—and it was The Day of the Dolphin, possibly the most sinister movie of the 1970s. We all know that Roman Polanski was in Europe working on a movie when Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Manson family. Do you know what that movie was? The Day of the Dolphin. Mike Nichols replaced Polanski, Buck Henry wrote the script, and George C. Scott played the lead role, but even with this congeries of talent, the film could not escape its curse. The Day of the Dolphin is a talking-dolphin movie, but it’s also a thriller about an attempt to assassinate the president. Pauline Kael said that Nichols should find other work if he couldn’t come up with a better story. A New York Times review that said that, despite its loftier ambitions, the movie prompts “memories of last winter’s visit to Marineland.”

Scott plays Jake Turrell, a marine scientist and a man with a secret: At a marine center off Florida’s coast, he’s taught a dolphin to talk. Fa is an all-around swell dolphin, and I fell in love with him at once. If anyone else had played Jake, the thing would have been a nonstarter. But this is General Patton–level George C. Scott, and he’s not phoning it in. Jake has an obvious, fatherly bond with Fa, and Fa has the mien of a 10-year-old boy who idolizes his dad; he calls Jake “Pa” and splashes happily in the tanks of blue water, snapping up fishy treats when he says his words.

Don’t let anything happen to that dolphin, you think, because it can’t be this simple, can it? No, it can’t, and soon enough we’re in Come Back, Little Sheba territory. It turns out that if a talking dolphin falls into the wrong hands, there’s hell to pay. Poor little Fa and his girlfriend, Bea, are kidnapped and trained to attach magnetic bombs to the bottom of the president’s yacht. After 25 minutes of frantic plot that even the greatest script girl of the 1940s wouldn’t have been able to get straight, they manage to escape and find their way back home. Fa goes right to Jake, who’s standing on the dock.

“Fa … love … Pa.”

“Yes, Pa knows,” Jake says. The dolphins can’t stay; they must get as far from humankind as possible. The bad guys are probably on their way back to get revenge. Somehow he has to explain this to Fa, who’s confused and heartbroken.

“Fa … stay … with … Pa.”

I was so overcome by emotion that I had to fight to keep myself from outright sobbing in a way that might indicate I was not old enough to go to PG movies or, for that matter, bars. Moreover, I knew this was the exact thing my father hated in movies. Now I know the term is sentimentality; I couldn’t have named it then, but I could certainly recognize it.

Finally, Jake conveys that he could be in danger if the dolphins don’t leave, and Fa is persuaded to turn away and swim off with Bea.

Jake stumbles away from the marine center and walks down the beach, his wife beside him. But then Fa appears at the shoreline a few feet away, lifting his head out of the water: “Pa!”

Jake doesn’t even look at him. He collapses onto the sand and he sits there, saying nothing. His heart is broken.

Fa says it again—“Pa!”—and Jake doesn’t move. Eventually Fa turns away a final time, and he and Bea swim away forever.

By then I was so distraught that by modern standards I was probably traumatized, but it wasn’t about Fa anymore. It was because, in between the times Fa says “Pa,” my own father had emitted a sound: a quick, surprised sound—like a gasp, but not a gasp. It was a small, audible sob.

My father was from the generation of men who didn’t know that crying was even an option. He had spent much of World War II in a destroyer that eventually came under kamikaze attack, the real reason—not his oblivious nature—for his physical courage. He had been an only child, and his father died when he was 8, the same age, I realize only now, that he started going to the movies by himself. The grief, as far as I understood, had expressed itself years before I was born. But then this happened.

That one moment was probably the closest I ever felt to my father. It was probably one of the closest moments anyone but my mother ever had with him. I knew I shouldn’t mention it to my mother, or to anyone. I never even mentioned it to him directly.

When we got on the bus, I asked him, “Why did we even go to that terrible movie?”

“I don’t know,” he said bleakly. “I don’t know.”

My father and I went to see Jaws in Berkeley because we couldn’t waste a minute of time dithering over the bus schedule or the steam table at Lefty’s. We needed to see this movie right away. It had been out for only a couple of weeks, but it had roared into the center of the culture. Driving to the theater with my husband 50 years later, for an anniversary showing of the film, I had an idea that had never struck me before: At its heart Jaws is a detective movie. A cop can’t catch a vicious killer, so he brings in a profiler who knows all about this kind of crime and the men who commit them, as well as a mercenary, someone who comes as much from the killer’s world as from his own. But in the end, the cop is alone with the monster and kills him, triumphing over not just the killer but also his own fear.

I graced my husband with this cinematic observation, and in reply he asked if I’d rather get out at street level or drive down into the parking garage with him. Fair enough. But that’s the kind of thing my father and I would have talked about while real life carried on around us. If anyone asked me the famous question of “why I write,” the answer would be: to keep the conversation going. He died a year after I started.

I felt like I was watching Jaws under the influence of a mild hallucinogenic. I’d seen it only on television since that first time—the events on the screen were so vivid and so clear that it was like having my own youth returned to me, as though I could stand up from that seat to get in my mother’s car, drive up to the house, and set the table for dinner. The whole time I could feel the essence of my father beside me. Not the complicated, unknowable full measure of him, but the person who took me to the movies.

For years, going to the movies was an almost definitionally American habit. They were where you went on first dates and what you did with a friend if you wanted to get together. There was no such thing as a weekend with nothing to do, because you went to the movies. But now that tradition is falling away. Americans buy roughly half the number of movie tickets they did at the turn of the millennium. We all know the reasons: streaming, iPhones, the pandemic, and Americans’ ever-diminishing attention spans.

The movie business has tried to adjust to this reality by betting on a few tentpole movies each year. Almost all of the top 10 movies at the domestic box office last year were sequels or remakes. Half were animated—children’s movies, essentially, that the whole family can see—and the live-action movies were based on properties originally created in 1900, 1933, 1965, 1988, 1996.

Why are we so afraid of AI? We might get some new yarns out of it.

[From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? ]

We’re running out of stories to tell one another. I’m sure that Kung Fu Panda 4 breaks new ground in the Kung Fu Panda universe, but I also know that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that if you start out with a character you’ll end up with a type, but if you start out with a type you’ll end up with nothing. There used to be a million stories, but today the dead-last subject anyone wants to see a movie about is human nature. Jaws is about a shark, but it’s also about greed and courage. Disaster movies answer the question of how different kinds of people respond to crises. We don’t want to contemplate that question anymore, because we’re letting go of ourselves; we’re exhausted. To pervert Norma Desmond’s famous line: The movies are small, and we’re getting small too.

When I was a child, I wanted to be the same thing for Halloween every year: a princess or a fairy, or—eureka in the third grade—a fairy princess. My mother was great at making costumes, and my father, of course, had no practical skills to contribute. This costume included two large wings made of wire twisted together, bent into the right shape, and covered first in muslin and then in pale-blue chiffon. But the more the wire had to be twisted, the harder it was to manipulate, and my mother wasn’t strong enough to do it, so she called in my father, and he sat at the dining-room table with a pair of needle-nose pliers in his left hand, making those wings. What would I have become without my father? I’d be no one. I’d be nothing. You sink into water, and you float on top of it.

Don’t Bet Against Bari Weiss

2025-10-07T15:41:00-04:00

Updated at 2:08 p.m. ET on October 16, 2025

You could be forgiven for not knowing how much people love CBS News. I certainly didn’t until a few weeks ago, but the hoary institution is once again being described as the “Tiffany network”—Edward R. Murrow saying, “Good night and good luck”; Walter Cronkite taking the manliest moment in all of live television to get control of himself after announcing the death of John F. Kennedy; and … the trail grows cold. Dan Rather in a turban?

I don’t know and neither do you, because it turns out that fans of the network were willing to do whatever it took to save the network—except watch CBS News. It’s the least watched of all three little-watched network news programs, each weeknight a valiant struggle to report news that everyone’s been refreshing all day long—or more likely not, because … NATO?—and close with a human-interest piece, like one last bedtime story.

But now—cry havoc and write a hit piece—CBS News has been desecrated, a Slurpee sloshed on William Paley’s Picasso. The network is owned by Paramount Skydance. Paramount is now run by Larry Ellison’s son, David, who also bought Bari Weiss’s publication, The Free Press, and selected her as the new editor in chief of CBS News. Weiss is a hugely successful journalist and entrepreneur, and the target—especially from others within her field—of Bari Weiss–derangement syndrome.

Weiss famously resigned from The New York Times in 2020—she’d been an opinion writer and editor—after publishing a blistering letter of resignation enumerating the ways that the paper had abandoned the core principles that had made it great: the sharp line between opinion and reporting, and an approach to the news and editorial vision that wasn’t prey to the whims or axioms of political ideology or popular sentiment.

Apparently, sufferers of BWD include “everyone” at CBS; they are freaking out, no, they’re “literally freaking out,” a staffer told The Independent—“it’s not a good place right now.” The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the network’s journalists “reeled” as they “digested” the news, although by yesterday morning, the Post had downgraded the mood at CBS to (per one employee) “noticeably uncomfortable,” with “pockets of hopefulness”—both good signs, because reeling while digesting is misery. Apparently, there is also anxiety about coming layoffs, an understandable fear but a long-standing one.

Weiss; her wife, Nellie Bowles; and her sister, Suzy Weiss, are the founders of The Free Press and close friends of mine, a friendship born when I met Bari over coffee when she was at the Times and learned that we share the same disgust at what has become of so much of the mainstream, legacy press. (I also serve on the board of advisers for the University of Austin, which Weiss co-founded.) When I was growing up, the Times didn’t reflect the truth; it was the truth. In school, we were always encouraged to read at least one front-page story a week in the San Francisco Chronicle, with the regular reminder that, as good as our local paper might be, it was a pale shadow of the great New York Times. When I moved east and began reading the Times, the thought of doubting something it had reported was the furthest thing from my mind. Now I often have to shake the reported facts (which are almost always accurate) free from the omissions, biases, and willful imposition of narratives.

After Weiss left the Times—in a blizzard of respect but also of derision—she started a Substack. That’ll show ’em! And it did: It became The Free Press, which currently has 1.5 million readers and for which Paramount reportedly paid $150 million in cash and Paramount stock. (This last fact may be driving as much of the hysteria as anyone’s ideological beliefs; as Christopher Hitchens said in a different context, “It’s not just the principles. It’s the money of the thing.”)

Weiss’s hiring at CBS isn’t a reeling-and-digesting story. It’s a business story. Everyone in journalism has known for years that there’s been a huge opportunity for a publication that employs the traditional methods of U.S. journalism—reporting, deep sourcing, fact-checking, fearlessness—to subjects that either don’t get covered enough or get covered only from a certain perspective. If creating such an enterprise seems simple to you, you don’t know the territory. It’s one of the hardest things you can attempt in media: it’s hugely expensive, and it has to fight for space in the attention economy at a time when Americans’ drive for knowledge seems to be powering down.

That she will somehow denigrate the storied CBS News—it has been reported that some staff members have delivered minatory instructions to not “mess with the Golden Goose (s) of ‘60 Minutes’ and ‘CBS News Sunday Morning,’” as though West 57th Street were the O.K. Corral—is a complete misreading of her and her vision, which is to bring the traditional methods of American journalism back to the news, and also to build a culture of ideas. This is exactly what she’s done at The Free Press, which covers a variety of stories, the most popular of which—Uri Berliner’s explanation of NPR’s decline, for example—are those that hold powerful institutions to account.

This is exactly the kind of journalism that made CBS News so justly respected in its great era. Weiss’s understanding of the network’s role in the American imagination—both as a trustworthy source and as a holder of cultural continuity in a fractured time—is obvious in the opening of the letter she sent the staff yesterday: “Growing up, CBS was a deep family tradition. Whenever I hear that tick, tick, tick or that trumpet fanfare, it sends me right back to our den in Pittsburgh.” I’m sure there are plenty of people at CBS News who aren’t freaking out but are excited about this turn of events.

Not now but soon enough, there will be major stories about The Free Press being the creation of three female founders who constructed a hugely successful digital business out of whole cloth.

When there’s a big media story like this, everybody eats. The haters write hateful stories; the hateful stories alert new readers to the existence of an outlet they might like, and instill in those readers a fierce loyalty to it because the criticism is so absurd. A current beef against Weiss is that she’ll fail because she lacks broadcast experience. The beef against Weiss when she left the Times was that she would sink into obscurity. And the beef against her when she started to become successful was that she was selling out. If there’s one person in the world I wouldn’t bet against now, it’s Bari Weiss.

This Isn’t Dubai; It’s Tuscaloosa

2025-09-21T07:31:00-04:00

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Ole Miss, as is perhaps well known, is in the heartland of beautiful girls. We know this to be true if we are followers—however casually—of something called RushTok, and we know it to be enduringly true because the above sentence was written by Terry Southern in 1963, in “Twirling at Ole Miss,” which was published in Esquire and then included in Tom Wolfe’s essential 1973 anthology, The New Journalism. Let it be therefore established that among the various subcultures of the Deep South, even one as cotton-candy thick and Jolly Rancher wide as sorority rush is worthy of journalistic attention.

RushTok, which took off four years ago and chronicles the adventures of young women rushing the powerhouse sororities of southern universities, is now in its late-baroque phase. (Joan Didion was repeatedly told she arrived “just in time” when she went to study the San Francisco–hippie movement in 1967. “The whole fad’s dead now, fini, kaput.”) Those of us who got in at the beginning were observing something being freshly transformed into content, still trailing mists of its previous, unobserved state. This was before sorority rush was turned into reality television and podcasts and exposés and brand endorsements, and before the introduction of new characters, such as rush mothers and rush coaches, and before rush became a launch pad not only to a successful social life but also to a chance at TikTok stardom and the busy, profitable life of an influencer.

Some of the most popular content on RushTok is the OOTD (“outfit of the day,” a term of the young) worn by the PNM (“potential new member,” a term of the old, emanating, one assumes, from the managerial class up there at the organizations’ national offices and at the almighty National Panhellenic Conference). The commitment to a dominant style by these southern PNMs is as unvarying as it was in the days of the imperial espadrille and the gold-circle pin, but in its substance, that style has changed completely. Only the mildest trace of southern prep remains, the rest replaced by its opposite: pure femininity. The new look is Hilton Head brunch, country-club Tennessee. It’s sexy, but in a sense it’s more of a mood than a look: a little bit pampered, a little bit willful.

The outfits are composed of bright little wisps of clothes worn with sparkly rain showers of delicate jewelry: bangle bracelets clacking together, Kendra Scott jewelry—delicate must-haves with colored stones functioning more as amulet than as embellishment. The look is headbands, blowouts, lots of extensions, and enough bleachy highlights for an advancing army of blondes. We are face-to-face with “conventional beauty standards,” but we are alone with our phones and can freely think, Conventional though they may be, these girls look pretty good.

On an OOTD video, the PNM—alone or taking turns in groups of three or four—stands in front of the camera, tapping a finger against every single thing she’s wearing and reporting where she bought it. She likes lacy, girly dresses from LoveShackFancy, which seems to have a symbiotic relationship with RushTok: Over the past four years, it has become a major brand. She loves a venerable Alabama vendor called the Pants Store (“They started buying pants from me and they just called it ‘The Pants Store,’” its founder said), which now includes a Rush Shop selling whimsy in the form of pastel rompers and minidresses with polka dots and ruffles. She likes canvas sneakers, flip-flops, loose shorts with tight belts, and blinding-white T-shirts. She likes hot orange and royal blue and lilac: madras deconstructed, an unwitting evocation of decades past.

There’s a strong preference for cheap fashion from mass retailers, which are named without a trace of shame or of the bargain hunter’s savvy. My shoes and earrings are Amazon, she’ll say. My belt is Zara; my skirt is Shein. (Shein’s extremely short, beaded miniskirts owned rush on a national level this year, and you don’t want to be one second over the age of 22 if you try to wear one.)

If fast fashion provides the undercoat, the paint itself has many expensive touches. The girls love David Yurman bracelets in the famous cable style, which actually is preppy and starts at $275. (In fact, that bracelet is an economic indicator of whether you should be rushing at all: At Alabama, the average new-member fee is almost $5,000.) Golden Goose sneakers are still, somewhat witlessly, very popular. (Do they not know that the Ageist, a magazine dedicated to the interests of “any generation above the age of 40,” ran an article three years ago reporting that “Golden Goose Sneakers Have Hit Our People”?) Most of those sneakers start at about $500 and go up steeply.

But she’ll very often go from the highs of David Yurman to the airless heavens of Chanel, Tiffany, Dior, Gucci. “My necklace is Van Cleef,” one woman says, tapping what looks to be an Alhambra necklace from Van Cleef & Arpels, which is the kind of thing a rich man gives to his wife when she turns 40 or catches him having an affair—not to his 18-year-old daughter who’s going to run around a college campus with it.

This isn’t Dubai; it’s Tuscaloosa.

Destinee Wilson runs a TikTok account that totals up the price of OOTDs, pausing the videos every time the PNM mentions an item to report its retail price:

“My dress is from Free People.” (Wilson: “$128.”) “My shoes are New Balance.” (“$90.”) “My watch is Omega.” (“$23,900.”) “My bracelet is David Yurman.” (“$495.”) “My necklace is from Tiffany.” (“$1,025.”) “These bracelets are Enewton.” (“$206.”) “This is David Yurman.” (“$250.”) “And my cute little rush bag is from Case-Mate.” (“$100.”)

The grand total for the look: $26,194.

Wilson is assiduously neutral on the question of whether these things are authentic or dupes. But why would the girls be so forthcoming about Amazon and Shein only to lie about Van Cleef & Arpels?

Wilson’s account has received many ugly messages from people upset about its existence. That she is Black and the PNMs are almost entirely white lends some tension to her videos. Last year she made a defiant post: “I will no longer be taking down any price breakdowns,” she said. “I’m trying to destigmatize talking about money, talking about prices. Things cost money, you guys.” In August, People reported that she earns up to $8,000 a month from her social media and her storefront on Amazon, where she offers low-price alternatives to some of the items featured in the videos.

Her account feels like a revolution; it’s definitely the best thing on RushTok. That she’s also the assistant director of a high-school marching band in North Texas, with an Amazon wish list of things she would like for her students—glue sticks; hair spray; 21 large, white hair bows—makes its own quiet statement.

In the category of “affordable luxury” that PNMs want, one item stands tall: the Case-Mate jelly totes many of these girls use to carry everything they might need for a day—and night—of rushing. (The oil-blotting papers! The extra shoes! The portable fan, portable charger, Listerine strips, mini perfume, touch-up lip color and blush, body spray, deodorant, water bottle, auxiliary battery packs for the iPhone. Don’t forget the Band-Aids and—God forbid!—the tampons.) These translucent carryalls (about $100) come in a range of colors, with coordinating grosgrain ribbons—the widest, most luxurious grosgrain ribbons you’ve ever seen in your life—for tying the bag closed with a big, loopy bow. The first time I saw one, I thought I would faint; it was like seeing heaven.

Rush moms are apparently fried with anxiety, and I don’t blame them. My life has been rich and uncomplicated because I have only sons, but if I did have a daughter and her very first college hurdle was going to be—let’s cut the shit—a beauty contest, I’d be out of my mind too.

Given how freaked out these families are about rush, I wondered how they stood up to the knives-out stress of college admission itself. But then I discovered that many of these schools aren’t very hard to get into. The University of Alabama admits about 75 percent of its applicants. All you have to do is fill out an application and send in $40 and your transcript. Test scores are optional. No essay, no recommendations, no emergency calls to the marriage counselor.

In contrast, the sororities have developed a parallel, dream-time system of admission. You cannot believe how many things you have to submit to the Alabama Panhellenic Association to rush. I will say only that it includes $375, something called a “social resumé,” and a digital photograph—“preferably a headshot (no selfies).”

RushTok has hours of advice on how to conduct yourself, usually posted by young alumni of the system, one of whom explains: “You want your recruiter’s first thought to be, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl is so sweet.’”

One video says: Don’t get too hung up on your wardrobe; it’s really not that important. What does matter? Accessories. “If you have a cool hair clip or piece of jewelry that someone can compliment you on and be like, ‘I love your necklace, that’s so pretty. Where did you get it?’ and you can turn that into an interesting story.” (I got it off Amazon, and—funny story—I was watching The Yogurt Shop Murders at the same time.)

The PNM must present herself as an innocent, or at least willing to approximate innocence, in part by avoiding strapless dresses and in part by never mentioning the four horsemen of recruitment apocalypse, the B’s: boys, booze, bucks, and beliefs.

Politics, sex, religion, and money are what—we are often told—one was never supposed to discuss in polite society during some more restrained era of American life, so these girls will be set if they get invited to a Charleston supper club in 1957. It raises a question: What kind of future (or past) are these young women preparing themselves to enter?

Tradwives, I hear you yelp in horror. They’re all going to be tradwives!

It’s true that these sorority girls are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than the average American woman, but probably no more or less so than the young women who rushed “tent city” at Columbia. It’s the college degree that is most predictive of these behaviors.

Educated and ambitious young conservative and MAGA women, such as many of those who pledge southern sororities, have every reason to consider a big professional life, a professional-class husband, and a nanny as being in their future. Some of the biggest jobs in the Trump administration are held by women, including: White House chief of staff; U.S. attorney general; director of national intelligence; secretaries of homeland security, education, labor, and agriculture; and the administrator of the Small Business Association. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, went back to work four days after giving birth and has said, “I would reject that you can’t be a good mom and be good at your job.”

For a Wall Street Journal article called “The Conservative Women Who Are ‘Having It All,’” Pamela Paul interviewed more than a dozen young conservative women, all of whom said that the tradwife lifestyle was never a choice they seriously considered for themselves; Paul writes that “they always knew they wanted children and that they also wanted a meaningful career.”

One of the women she interviewed is Katie Britt, the youngest-ever Republican woman elected to the Senate. Britt attended the University of Alabama, where she was president of her sorority and of the student body.

As cowed as the Bambi-like PNMs may appear in their original videos, membership itself seems to make showgirls of them all. Have you seen the huge production numbers these places make as recruitment tools? To a pumping beat, an entire sorority appears in front of the house. The front line performs the kind of explosive, acrobatic moves we first learned about in Cheer, Season 1, while the others commence something like a Las Vegas revue from the 1980s. They look strong, sexual, unafraid of underage drinking or boys. They will not be driven out of public life easily—not after learning all those dance numbers, gathering all that bravado, and cultivating the kind of personal style that clearly opens doors these days.

The girl who more or less created RushTok and became its breakout star is Kylan Darnell. She entered rush as a freshman who had pageant experience and brought a lightly professionalized manner to her OOTD, in which she looked very young and very pretty. She eventually consolidated her extremely positive approach to life in the mantra “I hope you’re having a great day, not just a good day.”

Now she is a senior, that fleeting, fragile state in which college seems at once too small for you and more precious than rubies. She recently posted a video while walking across campus in a halter top. “Y’all, my life is so weird,” she said. “It doesn’t feel real. Because how do you go from being at probably the best nightclub in Vegas, sitting at the most expensive table, getting everything for free just because of the way that you and your friends look, and dancing with Heidi Klum’s daughter and Marshmello”—the DJ, not the confectionery—“all at the same time that night to me having an eight-page essay due tonight?”

There was a time when this kind of exploit would horrify parents, making them fear that their daughter had become cheap, ruined. But today? Secretary of energy.

We have a sense, sometimes, that America has become so homogenized through consumer culture and generalized depravity that we’ve lost any sense of regionalism, of ways of speaking and doing things that are particular to only one part of the country. But rush in the SEC schools is proof that certain old southern patterns endure.

The system reinforces many long-standing southern ideals: the importance of social connections over academic excellence; the notion that strong relationships flourish in closed societies; the emphasis on regional belonging over national competition; and above all the cloistering of young white women.

We can hardly leave this subject without noticing that the sororities of RushTok are the historically white ones, although, when it comes to several of these schools, they might also be called the currently white ones. It’s very hard to find a nonwhite girl in those production numbers and OOTDs.

You would think that the University of Alabama, in particular, would have some anxieties about this fact, considering that just more than 60 years ago it was where George Wallace made his most famous stand against integration, blocking the doors of an administration building to prevent two Black students from registering for classes and budging from his spot only when forced to by federalized National Guard troops.

In 2013, according to the university’s student newspaper, a very qualified young Black woman rushed these sororities at Alabama and didn’t get a single bid. A former director of Greek life told Time magazine that it wasn’t the current sorority students who had kept her out; rather, it was pressure from alumni: “There’s definitely some fear, whether real or imagined, that there would be some repercussions if a sorority took an African-American member.”

These sororities, like the historically white fraternities, stand on their members’ right to freedom of association, which allows them to socialize with whomever they want. (The segregationists’ rationale: freedom of association.) But after the story broke in 2013, the university ordered sororities to reopen their bidding, and offers were extended to several Black women. The university did not respond to a request to comment, but as of a few years ago, of the 7,481 women in the Alabama Panhellenic Association, just 56 were Black.

But enough of all that! We are having fun. We are looking at pretty girls dressed up in LoveShackFancy dresses. This is America in 2025, not 1963. Lighten up, reader!

The conclusion of Alabama rush is an event in which all of the PNMs open their bids at the same time and then run to their new chapter house. These buildings are giant wedding cakes, and they are fortresses, and many of them have crystal chandeliers and wide, sweeping staircases big enough for a hundred Scarlett O’Haras to make a thousand dramatic entrances.

Let us be among them, thundering across campus in our Golden Goose sneakers, tears of excitement and relief in our eyes. By midnight we have to come up with the money, but our parents are good for it. The sisters are ready for us, they’re clapping us inside, and finally—finally—we can set down our heavy Case-Mate bags in the massive, marble foyer because now it is over, and now we can belong.

Pamela Anderson Forever

2025-07-13T09:00:00-04:00

Pamela Anderson wore a structured Tory Burch gown to the Met Gala this year, its bell-shaped skirt, rounded neckline, and long sleeves hiding every part of her except her hands and her face, which was mostly free of makeup, her preference for the past few years; her blond hair was newly cut into a bob. It was the fashion of subtraction, only her face identifying her as the famous star.

If she had wanted something like invisibility, however, she missed the mark. If clothes can convey messages, hers screamed, Alert the incels! These unfortunates have a number of obsessions, one of which is locating famously beautiful and unattainable women who would once have scorned them but are now, the men imagine, stripped of their power because they aren’t young anymore. The incels spoke as one that night, posting photographs of Anderson in her youth next to the ones of her at the Met. Their comments were predictable.

Not typing his feelings about Pamela Anderson’s dress was the actor Liam Neeson, who finished shooting a remake of Naked Gun with her last year and then confessed that he’d fallen “madly in love” with Pamela Anderson. She picked up the ball and said that the relationship had been “professionally romantic,” and that he’d been a “perfect gentleman.”

That exchange says more about Anderson and her appeal than anything mewled by the misbegotten. She is 58. She can keep going until she’s 102 and she’ll still have plenty of male attention. Because she’s been famous for so long, and because that fame is the result of her youthful work in Playboy and on Baywatch, she can seem dispensable, one more Populuxe American Blonde from an era when Hollywood was full of them. In fact, she’s a much more interesting person than that, serious and funny, an eager student of a range of arcane topics.

The person she is most like is Marilyn Monroe, not for the simple fact of her great beauty, or for its type, but because as with Monroe there is something sacrificial about her. Long before the internet became the central force in people’s lives, Anderson was the victim of something that has been made almost common because of it: a celebrity sex tape. Today, women have adopted a range of strategies to manage such a violation, chief among them the assertion that they have nothing to be ashamed of, that the person who released the video and those who seek it out are the ones who should be ashamed.

At the time, however, Anderson had no role models, only her own humiliation, gleefully celebrated by millions of men who finally had what they wanted from her, which is what men always want from women: everything. Many people never would have recovered from what was done to her; Monroe was dead at 36, a casualty of barbiturates and Hollywood.

[Sophie Gilbert: What is it about Pamela Anderson?]

Monroe lived her life dependent on the kindness of sadists; Anderson has lived hers on the strength of what once would have been called her own “hopes and dreams.” Her current cultural relevancy—she was cast in her first serious film role last year, and she’s at the center of conversations about beauty and youth—might seem like the result of a series of power moves, but she doesn’t operate on that economy. Her vulnerability is as much a part of her constitution as her strength is. It’s the old, dangerous combination, but she has triumphed by it.

The Pamela Anderson origin story is legendary. After a troubled childhood spent in a small town on an island in British Columbia, she had an idea that many young people from obscure places have: She should move to a city and maybe, just by being in a larger and more exciting place, something would happen to change her life.

It was the right impulse. She moved to Vancouver, and almost before she had unpacked she was on a rocket ship that didn’t touch down for more than a decade. Friends who worked in publicity for the Labatt’s beer company gave her an extra ticket to a football game and a Labatt’s T-shirt to wear. She was not long in the stands before the Jumbotron caught sight of her. A planet-shaking male cheer erupted.

Stand up, one of her friends told her. She did, and she shimmied a little bit. She was 22, her brown hair aggressively highlighted with Sun In, and I’m certain that a hopeful thousand or more men made a plan to go find her during halftime, but she wasn’t in her seat at halftime. She was down on the field, picking the winning number in a lottery.

Labatt’s asked her to be its “Blue Zone Girl,” and she appeared in a commercial and on a poster, but the campaign was short-lived because soon the phone rang. It was Playboy, asking if she wanted to come to Los Angeles and be on the cover of the October 1989 issue.

It was the kind of call that we are taught to distrust, but Anderson was—and to some extent still is—a trusting person. The animating idea of Playboy magazine, which was launched in 1953, was that it was different from the publications of the “smut” industry. It would not feature desperate-looking women engaged in various forms of depredation, but rather women who may have been naked but could still plausibly be presented as having hobbies and interests outside of sex, and who were “clean”—not just of sexually transmitted diseases, but of backgrounds tarnished by experience.

Soon enough she had landed at LAX and was being driven by limousine to the Playboy mansion. She was lonely in the back seat of the cavernous car and asked the driver if she could sit up front with him. She could. She had her hair colored an “acceptable shade of honey blond,” had only a moment of embarrassment at the very beginning of the first shoot, and from there on out loved her work for the magazine, for which she would eventually shoot 14 covers. The closest she came to waffling over the implications of nude modeling was calling her mother soon after her first shoot to see if it would be all right if she became a Playmate. “Do it, sweetheart,” her mother said.

She loved posing for Playboy. From a young age, she said, she’d had “so much shame” about her body. That changed in front of the camera. It was “the first time I felt like I’d broken free of something.” Anderson’s feelings about sex and her naked body were less in line with the hyper-materialist 1980s and ’90s than with the attitudes of the ’60s—she just wanted to be free.

A new Playboy model didn’t usually create a sensation in Hollywood, but Pamela Anderson did. Through her connection to the magazine, she met a wide range of people. The legendary movie producer Jon Peters waged a full-on campaign to romance her, drenching her in expensive gifts, allowing her to live in one of his Bel Air houses, and installing her as the hostess of his dinner parties, where she mixed with writers, artists, and intellectuals. Anderson had already read Jung, and now entered analysis. She read Nightwood, The Drama of the Gifted Child, The Golden Notebook, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Peters wasn’t used to getting friend-zoned, but he put up with it, because what else could he do? (“There are beautiful girls everywhere,” Peters told The Hollywood Reporter in 2020; “I could have my pick, but—for 35 years—I’ve only wanted Pamela.”)

Then something happened that made Anderson not just famous, but one of the most famous people in the world. Permanently famous, globally famous. She was cast in the third season of Baywatch, and quickly became the most popular character on what may be the most-watched television show in history. At its peak, more than 1 billion people watched it every week.

Baywatch was made when the idea of the American dream burned strongly around the world and found its highest expression in the California dream, which, reduced to its purest elements, meant gorgeous young people, endless summer, and the beach. The show was first broadcast on NBC, which canceled it after its first season; in another bit of entertainment legend, one of its stars, David Hasselhoff, helped revive it under new ownership. It had all the elements of a global hit, including plots so simple that even a viewer who didn’t speak one of the 48 languages into which the show was translated could understand what was happening—and what was happening, seemingly three or four times an episode, was that the lifeguards were running across the sand in red bathing suits and extreme slow motion, perhaps to save someone from drowning, perhaps to see if the rest of the gang wanted to play beach volleyball.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entire episode of Baywatch, but the show was so much a part of the wallpaper of the time that actually watching it seemed redundant. Like a lot of American television at the time, Baywatch was conservative: It was on the side of law and order; the lifeguards often fell into bed with each other, but rarely outside an established relationship, and never in any overtly sexual way. The most you would see was a couple giggling under the sheets while one of them (usually the man) fumbled for the switch on the bedside lamp.

[Sophie Gilbert: Curse of the ’90s bombshell]

Anderson had broken a well-policed barrier between the kind of woman who could be a Playboy model and the kind of woman who could be a television star. The two roles amplified each other. Playboy wanted to be as much in the mainstream as it could be: Whenever Anderson was on a new cover, entertainment shows reported on it. The television series—sexy without being sexual—seemed racier because of its association with the magazine.

In 1995 she married Tommy Lee, the drummer from the band Mötley Crüe, on a beach in Cancun. They wore bathing suits, the day was brilliant, the photographs were everywhere, and on the flight home to California, she asked him what their last name was, thinking it might be Jones, like the actor Tommy Lee Jones.

In the early ’90s, personal video cameras became popular, in part because of parents’ eagerness to film their children. A different use soon became apparent to other users (let us call them “men”): They could record intimate sexual acts. Persuading women to participate in that kind of video usually required some effort, but so did composing The Federalist Papers. Anderson and Lee spent a lot of time in luxurious hotels while one or the other of them was on tour, but for their honeymoon they kept it real: a houseboat on Lake Mead, in Arizona. They brought the video camera on that trip and a few others, recording a total of about eight minutes of sexual activity.

The couple returned to their Malibu house, and Lee hid the tapes inside a large home safe he kept behind a carpeted wall in the garage.

Why would someone as reckless and Mötley Crüe–ish as Tommy Lee go to the trouble of hiding videocassettes so carefully? Because this was 1995, but when it comes to sexual norms, it might as well have been 1955. The internet has caused as dramatic and irreversible a change in people’s sexual behavior as the birth-control pill did more than half a century ago. The pill made the true liberation of women a possibility, and the internet made their near enslavement to male sexual desires so commonplace that we don’t even acknowledge it. The concepts of the empowered sex worker, the financially savvy OnlyFans account creator, the winning-at-life porn star are the product of women trying to create a personal ethic that encompasses the fearsome power of the internet. But back in the ’90s, that was a long way off; the world could still lose its mind over a private film of a woman having sex with her own husband.

Anderson and Lee realized that the safe—and with it the tapes—had been stolen in January 1996. Soon after, they got a letter from Bob Guccione, the pornographer and creator of Penthouse magazine: He wanted to buy the rights to distribute the footage.

The realization that the tapes were in the hands of strangers was horrifying to Anderson; her choice to model for Playboy had been an act of her own liberation. This was entirely different—a violation, a precursor to a kind of public shaming few women had then experienced. Even in the midst of her shock, she realized that whatever happened next would be good for her husband’s career and ruinous to her own—and it just about was. News of the recordings—which were eventually retailed by an associate of the thief—was received by millions of men with savage glee. Night after night after night, Jay Leno made cruel jokes about it. It was as though Anderson was experiencing her due punishment for giving men just a peek at her naked body, not access to the whole of it. Pornography runs in one direction: A woman can go further and further into the form, but reversing course is all but impossible. Once men have seen everything, they’re rarely in the mood to see it covered back up; the spell is broken.

The couple filed a civil suit, but Anderson couldn’t make it through the depositions—lawyers plastered the office where it took place with giant reproductions of her Playboy pictures and assaulted her with irrelevant questions about her sexual preferences and experiences. She was pregnant, after suffering an earlier miscarriage, and so upset by the experience that she feared she would lose this baby, too.

For a long time, I thought the cruelty of the episode could never be repeated. But in 2022, Hulu broadcast a limited series in which the event was played for laughs—including a re-creation of the making of the tapes themselves. In a documentary released the next year, Anderson explains how painful this was to her: She had blocked it out “in order to survive,” and “now that it’s all coming up again, I feel sick.” The show’s star, Lily James, eventually sent her a letter of apology, but Anderson said she never opened it.

Anderson has always been devoted to her sons. When one of them was a little boy, he came home from school, rattled by another day of facing relentless comments about his mother, and said, “Mom, why did you do that tape?”

It seems a hell of a thing to make a comedy about, but pornography has driven us mad.

Anderson divorced Lee and remarried several times. She had the sense—shared by many—that she was foundering. The low point was when she took a job as a magician’s assistant in Las Vegas. But through it all, she has remained a beloved figure. The painter Ed Ruscha had become a friend, and introduced her to Werner Herzog, who called her regularly about a movie project; her sexy friendship with Julian Assange was based on genuine feeling for him and his plight.

One of her long-standing goals has been to end the Canadian seal hunt, a brutal event that kills seals for their meat, pelt, and oil. In 2010, she wrote to Vladimir Putin—Russia was by then the world’s biggest importer of Canadian seal fur. Sure enough, those imports were banned the next year. Later, she went several times to the Kremlin to lobby for other animal-rights issues. “Have you ever talked directly to him?” Piers Morgan asked her during an interview. She kept a long, smiling silence. “Putin was only in the room once, but he heard of everything,” she reported. “I would get messages from other people that he was pleased that I was there—he kind of got a kick out of me.”

[Max Fisher: Pamela Anderson vs. Orthodox Jews]

Two years ago, she went to Paris for Fashion Week. She didn’t want to spend three hours in a chair getting her hair and makeup done; she’d rather go to the Louvre. So she did. Many older women have decided at a certain point to stop wearing cosmetics, but none has made as big of a splash as Anderson.

“I’m not trying to be the prettiest girl in the room,” she told Vogue France. “If we all chase youth,” she added, “we’re only going to be disappointed and maybe a little bit sad.”

This past fall she appeared on the Today show to promote her new plant-based cookbook. She was wearing black pants and a bright-white shirt, and she looked like she was having a great time. The hosts had been discussing Mariah Carey’s long-term battle with unflattering overhead lighting. “Let the makeup go, let the lighting go!” she said as the hosts laughed and agreed with her. She said she’d had no idea what a big impact her decision to toss the cosmetics would have; women have come up to her with their young daughters to thank her for what she’s doing. She does look different without makeup, but she is still a very pretty woman, and clearly she has been renewed in some deep way.

Anderson starred in a movie released this year that could have been written for her, although it wasn’t. The Last Showgirl is a beautiful, small movie about a dancer in one of the last big Las Vegas revues. As the movie opens, the dancer discovers that this show, too, is about to close. She’s a Tennessee Williams character, facing a delicate situation—she’s too old to appear in the newer, more explicit shows—with a mixture of fatalism, daydreams, and terror. Reviewers took Anderson’s performance seriously, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe.

She’s always handled herself with grace, always been bigger than the situations thrust upon her. And probably more than she realizes, we’ve always been on her side. She spent the most tumultuous years of her life protecting her sons as best she could from the cruelty that followed the stolen tape. They’re men now, fiercely protective of her—her older son, Brandon, urged her to read The Last Showgirl script after her agent had passed on it.

In 2015, Pamela posed for her last Playboy cover, but before doing so, she asked her sons how they would feel about it. They told her they weren’t embarrassed anymore. As Brandon said, “You know, we think you’re great.”

Americans Don’t Do This

2025-04-29T09:56:48-04:00

Just when you think you’ll never laugh again, Columbia University students pick up a new cause: free speech. Who among us wants to step on the punch line by asking questions? For example, do these newfound champions of the First Amendment really mean it, and will their next move be to champion a Zionist whose speech has been policed (probably by them) and demand that his right to free expression be upheld? Magic 8 Ball says: Don’t count on it.

Two kinds of speech are routinely censored on college campuses: anything that could come under the broad taxonomic category of “hate,” and certain statements of fact that might cause pain to community members. The vague goal is a student life in which feelings of “belonging” and “inclusion” are extremely important, and actively fostered. Students have come to understand the college campus as a place where never is heard a discouraging word.

Observers question whether these institutions are thereby inculcating fragility in their students instead of resilience. Yes and no. Protesters at Columbia certainly seem to be swayed by the notion that speech can be a form of violence. Yet they are anything but fragile. Casting an event which included the murder of children as an act of “armed resistance” requires cool calculation. (What, exactly, was Hamas resisting in those children? )

[Franklin Foer: Columbia University's antisemitism problem]

I have a pretty high tolerance for student protests, even as the outrageous cost of college has turned many of them into exercises in bourgeois decadence. But the Columbia protests have been different from past campus uprisings in several stark ways. They have exposed the whole “belonging” and “inclusion” system of handling offensive speech as fraudulent. The amount of intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students over the past year and a half should have been more than enough to alert that particular cavalry, but Jewish students turn out to belong to the only religious minority unprotected by it. (A regular talking point to emerge from last year’s encampment was that no Jewish students at the university had reason to feel harassed or intimidated by the protests, an assertion that was at best ignorant and at worst sinister.)

And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed.

Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don’t do this.

Everything that has failed in American universities has failed because of the opposition to freedom of expression. It’s a sorrowful subject for me because I am an almost literal child of UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, which kicked off when I was 3 years old, a faculty kid among thousands of them. That movement followed an earlier struggle for free expression: the fight against an anti-Communist loyalty oath that faculty and staff were required to sign beginning in 1949. As a girl, I knew adults who had suffered the consequences of refusing to do so. One of them was the medievalist Charles Muscatine, my father’s colleague in the English Department, whose previous crimes against the state included storming the beaches of Normandy. Years later, he explained why he didn’t sign:

“It was a violation of academic freedom, which is the idea that in a free society, scholars and teachers are allowed to express and believe anything that they feel to be true,” he said. “As a young assistant professor, I had been insisting to the kids that you stick to your guns and you tell it the way you see it and you think for yourself and you express things for yourself, and I felt that I couldn’t really justify teaching students if I weren’t behaving the same way. So I simply couldn’t sign the oath.”

Muscatine knew he could lose his job because of it, but he was a principled man and willingly left the university after being fired. A dramatic legal battle took place, in which the cause of academic freedom was pitted against Red Scare thuggery, and in 1952, the First Amendment won big. Many fired faculty, including Muscatine, returned to the university.

[Caitlin Flanagan: America’s fire sale–get some free speech while you can]

More than a decade later, however, a second battle at Berkeley—concerning not compelled speech but freedom of expression itself—would change the nature of campus life forever. In the fall of 1964, a group of students who had gone to Mississippi to take part in Freedom Summer returned to campus, eager to tell their California peers what was happening in the South. The students set up tables near Sproul Plaza—then, as now, a locus of student life. They were told to disband; political speech was not allowed.

A free speech protest at UC Berkeley in 1964 (Bettmann / Getty)

The university’s intention was apparently to squash anything that might encourage racial tension, and obviously it was asserting a power it did not possess. As the students of the Free Speech Movement pointed out, the university was a public institution, and they did not forfeit their constitutional rights when they stepped onto campus. The university’s administration had no honest way to resist this challenge, and the students won.

I grew up the daughter of a man who, like Muscatine, had also seen combat in the Second World War, who stood firmly on the side of the Free Speech Movement, and whose belief in a university’s commitment to academic freedom was absolute. I knew that the search for truth required that speech must always, always be protected, and I knew that tenure was not a sweet deal that promised a lifetime’s employment, but a guarantee that no matter what political pressure was brought to bear on a scholar and his work, he would not lose his job because of it. If students and faculty cannot speak, write, and think freely, a university is an imitation of what it ought to be.

One night last spring, dozens of protesters at Columbia participated in the time-honored tradition of occupying Hamilton Hall. (The question of how many of these people were actually students at Columbia and its affiliated institutions is a charged one.) Keen students of the ways of this particular form of “resistance,” they took hostages of their own: three maintenance workers who were inside the building when the protesters entered.

Two of the three men—Mario Torres and Lester Wilson—spoke on the record with The New York Times in a May 8, 2024, article. Torres was at work on the building’s third floor when he heard a commotion below. He found five or six protesters blocking a staircase with chairs. Proving himself to be the single best employee of Columbia University since Lionel Trilling clapped his erasers a final time and went home for good, Torres said, “What the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?”

Torres said he was told that he didn’t make enough money to get involved and was offered “a fistful of cash” to look the other way.

To that Torres replied, “I don’t want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.”

It was a face-off between the values of the Ivy League and those of the working class, and I know exactly where I stand on that particular matchup.

In his interview with the Times, Torres, who says he was injured during the incident and bootlessly called public-safety officers for help, spoke for many of us when he said of Columbia, “I cannot believe they let this happen.”

Wilson, another maintenance worker, went down to the ground floor only to find that the main doors had been shut tight with zip ties. “So, I begged them,” Wilson said. Eventually someone cut the ties and allowed him to leave (the other two men were allowed to leave soon after that). When a maintenance worker has to beg for his freedom, his fate in the hands of people whose messes he literally has to clean up, you have to wonder if these people are on the right side of anything at all.

In their complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently opened an investigation into their claims, Torres and Wilson report something we have not heard before: that long before the spring of 2024, they had been repeatedly ordered to erase swastikas off Columbia University chalkboards. I am not inclined to disbelieve the testimony of these two hardworking men.

To believe in free speech means that you support the cause even when the speech in question is repugnant to you. In a perverse way, you almost run to those cases; it’s how you keep clean accounts with yourself. For this reason, I am on Mahmoud Khalil’s side.

[Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run]

To the degree that any layperson can understand the range of legal issues undergirding his case—which include a law from the anti-Communist 1950s and the apparently undecided issue of the extent to which a noncitizen has First Amendment rights—what is clear is that the government’s desire to deport Khalil is largely related to the nature of his political speech. A two-page memo about Khalil by Secretary of State Marco Rubio released earlier this month does not allege any criminal activity.

Yet Khalil’s position that a genocide is occurring in Gaza is exactly the kind of potentially offensive but protected speech America was designed to tolerate. Our country has had a legally enforceable right to free speech since the 18th century, and we did not become great in spite of it. We are the inheritors of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, not Joseph McCarthy or Leon Trotsky.

If America is folding up its tent, as it perhaps seems to be doing, hold your head high. Once you were part of the greatest idea in the history of the world.

Sex Without Women

2025-03-17T13:55:00-04:00

There’s a saying—or maybe a truism—that the test of any new technology lies in its ability to reproduce pornography. Long ago, pornography was the stuff of private collections: crude figurines and drawings that spread their influence only as far as they could be carried. But man could not live in this wilderness forever. He had opposable thumbs and pressing needs, and thus were born woodblock printing, engraving, movable type, daguerreotype, halftone printing, photography, the moving image. Man needed these innovations, of course, to spread the great truths of God, nature, king, and country. But it was never very long before some guy wandered into the workroom of the newest inventor, took a look at his gizmo, and thought, You know what I could use that for?

Down through the ages, one thing united these mass-produced forms of pornography: the understanding that no matter how exciting, they were always and only a pale imitation of the real thing. Any traveling salesman who checked into a motel with his copy of Playboy would rather have had a human being on his arm.

But then the internet arrived.

What a testament to man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties!—that he continued doing anything else after the advent of online porn. Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it.

Where would this take us? Well, now we know. The heterosexual man can now have what many see as a rich sex life without ever needing to deal with an actual woman.

There are men who have fallen in love with sex dolls, the way toddlers fall in love with teddy bears, although for children the toy is a transitional object. Early this month, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that AI-powered sex robots aren’t far away from the U.S. market: “less than five years probably.” They will be able to provide everything except human connection, and what is that anyway? Human relationships, especially between the sexes, are fraught with diverging interests and needs, and when you get right down to it, aren’t women kind of a drag? With their talk-talk-talk and their dinner parties, and their pouting about laundry that never gets washed the right way? Your sex robot won’t do that. She’ll never make you go apple picking. She will do only what you want to do.

Sex has the ability to create or strengthen a bond between people, and—no matter how many precautions you might take against this terrible outcome—you could find yourself emotionally attached to a person you have sex with. Before online porn, men had an obvious incentive to put up with the stress of dating, and they developed the social skills necessary to close the deal: enough resilience to ask a woman out, and then a second woman, if the first one rejected them; the drive to locate a clean shirt; and the skill to make conversation over two orders of chicken piccata. It could be awkward; it could be a nightmare. But whether the resulting attachment lasted half a century or a single week, one thing was certain: While the relationship was going on, they were not a statistic in the loneliness epidemic. They were humans in a world made for humans.

But who needs to spiff up now? Porn will never reject you or look at you with a pitying gaze. It’s always there, it never disappoints, and you never have to dig through the clothes hamper for something that smells okayish. As Michael says in The Boys in the Band, one good thing about masturbation is that you don’t have to look your best.

Watching online porn has become most adolescents’ first sexual experience. The average 14-year-old boy today has seen more hard-core porn than all of the American fighting forces in the Second World War. (Probably a good thing, because we really needed to win that one.) Because of the internet’s power to desensitize people and wear down their natural responses to shocking things, and because of the way these algorithms work, young people quickly proceed to more and more extreme videos, and—as it has always been—these earliest experiences of sexual events pass deeply into their sense of what sex should be.

You can’t spend 15 minutes scrolling through a porn site without coming across a video in which a woman seems to be not performing fear or pain, but actually experiencing those things. If you’re one of those people who enjoy watching coerced sex, you’ll never be bored for a second of your life. As far as the moral equations of watching porn go, the one that matters is: Are you excited by the obvious abuse of women, or have you learned to countenance that abuse as a necessary cost of your own pleasure? And which of those is worse?

We’re talking about a private, individual experience. Could that have an impact on society? Surely it does. When straight men don’t need women for sex, a question starts to form: What do they need them for? If it’s having children, these men are going to have to surface out in the world and meet some women, even if they think that means settling for second-best sex. Someone whose adolescence has been spent using a phone and laptop for sex probably isn’t skilled in making conversation with actual women, which will be a problem if he decides to get out among the apple pickers.

The porn-first man tends to be an Andrew Tate kind of guy. Former kickboxer, chancellor of Hustlers University, early-episode rejectee from Big Brother (he said a video of him whipping a woman with a belt had been edited to take out the humor and fun of the moment), he’s an influencer and the current president of the He-Man Woman Haters Club. He spent the past two years in Romania after he was accused of rape and human trafficking, but late last month was allowed to travel to the freedom of the United States, only to land in the flypaper of Florida, where he is now the subject of another criminal investigation. (He has denied any wrongdoing.)

Tate is charismatic and mesmerizing, a perfect companion to the lonely masturbator. You’re not a loser; you’re a king! He provides hours and hours of online content warning men that women are trying to emasculate them. What he’s gesturing to is an old idea, probably more true than not: that it’s in society’s best interest for men to couple off with women, because women civilize men. When confronted with that notion, women reject it: Their job isn’t to civilize men. When men see the same adage, they feel uncomfortable (what man wants to be “civilized” by another person, especially by a woman?).

But men taught that women are “barely sentient,” there to be used and abused, will likely spend their lives alone.

The internet’s biggest by-product is loneliness; porn isn’t special in that regard. You and I weren’t made to live this way; we barely are living this way. Many of the traits that make us human—our compassion, our ability to devote sustained thought to a problem, our capacity to fall in love and to sacrifice for the people we love—are meaningless to the algorithms that rule us. They’ve deformed us. Every time I hear a middle-class young woman make the utilitarian argument for why she makes sexual videos on OnlyFans—because she can make in two hours of work what would take her 40 hours to earn waitressing—I think, Here it is at last: end-stage capitalism. The phase in which nothing has any value or meaning other than its sale price.

The internet did not arrive like a wave, allowing us to take time to think about our humanity before we put our toes in the water; it arrived like a flood, and we’ve been drowning in it for more than a quarter century. It keeps taking our souls away from us; every passing year, we’re less of who we were. Soon there won’t be much of us left at all. The only thing that can save us is a great unplugging. But we’ll never do that. We love it down here under the dark water.

A Christ-Lite Sermon

2025-01-24T09:24:00-05:00

It is not unusual for clerics to address their leaders directly. King James regularly caught hell from the pulpit. So when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde went for the king, at the end of an interminable sermon on Tuesday morning in the National Cathedral, she was acting within an established tradition. She was also operating within another well-known tradition, the “Where did everybody go?” confusion within her church regarding its sharply declining membership.

She asked Donald Trump to think of America’s undocumented immigrants in a compassionate light, and to see them for who so many of them really are: “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”

Exactly right—and she was exactly the right person to say it in exactly the right place. These vulnerable people, now with the full powers of the American state readied against them, aren’t just a Christian concern; in a sense they are the Christian concern. Christ is always on the side of the outcast, the stranger, the prisoner, the leper. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

[Read: How social justice became a new religion]

I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the entire thing. It was dry, high-minded, and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity” in which all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith, with everyone directing their prayers to Whom It May Concern.

Then, with a straight face, she described the county’s undocumented, much-abused subsistence workers this way: “They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.”

Our gurdwara? Tell me, high priestess, are there many undocumented Sikhs laboring in poultry farms and meatpacking plants where you live? Sikhs are 0.06 percent of the U.S. population. Jews are 2.4 percent—the number of undocumented people of these faiths toiling in the shadows and performing menial labor must be tiny. And what “temples” is she talking about? Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian?

Have we considered the implications of Trump’s policies on the undocumented Zoroastrian?

[Read: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

It was a minor moment of an otherwise forgettable sermon. And yet it was revealing. The problem, as she described it, was one in which the undocumented immigrant performing stooped labor in the California fields is as likely a Sikh as a Christian. She was presenting the world not as it is but as she would presumably like it to be: diverse and unified in the strength of its religious belief, although not any particular religious belief, which is a really strange position to hold. If she wanted to be more precise about the situation, she might have acknowledged that the huge majority of undocumented immigrants began their journey in Latin America. Latinos are joining the evangelical Church in huge numbers, which might help explain the significant number of Latino U.S. citizens who voted for Trump—and is that okay with you, Bishop Budde?

In her appeal to a great big interfaith community of people who probably more or less believe the same or same-ish thing (a community in which all believers are equally imperiled by anti-immigration policies), she offered one more reminder of how we got ourselves into this sorry state, in which anti-intellectualism, populist rage at established institutions, and the thirst for ever more bizarre conspiracy theories have run riot over good sense and established fact.

The high priestess wanted to reveal her goodness, her moral purity, her inclusive and diversity-forward politics. She wanted a gold star, and in many quarters she got one. A headline in The New Republic read “Trump Seethes as Bishop Calls Him Out in Heartfelt Plea.” Trump issued a demand that the bishop apologize. But in the church he had looked only bored, as though his mind was on other things. Maybe he was seething. Or maybe he was thinking, That’s why I won.

Michelle Doesn’t Want to Go to Barack’s Work Thing

2025-01-20T08:00:00-05:00

No constitutional scholar or judge has ever questioned the American right to skip a spouse’s annoying work thing. Has anyone ever had a good time at one of these horrible events? You’re clutching your little plastic cup of wine (Sheila knows so much about wine!) while you get shuffled along like an oddity—Look, it’s Mike’s wife! Nobody wants to talk with you, and you don’t want to talk with them. They want to drink wine and talk about work, and you want to drink wine and watch Severance.

Sometimes it’s a minefield because you have to pretend you don’t already know a whole lot about these people. You’d happily eviscerate a few of them if you could be your authentic self. But you have to be like a Rose Bowl float, wheeled around in mild weather and emanating impersonal goodwill. Don’t ever make me do that again, you say in the car on the way home.

So when Michelle Obama announced that she would be skipping Donald Trump’s inauguration today, I thought, Good move. I bet Barack’s not crazy about going either, but he’s on the place mats and gets a pension, so he probably has to play ball. The corner of the internet occupied by insufficiently-hinged Michelle Obama haters thought they had some red meat. The norms! The traditions! The continuity of government! But they were robbed of a win when reminded that neither Donald nor Melania Trump attended the last inauguration.

There had to be some way for the brain trust to work this to its advantage. But how? And just like that a theory, a possibility—no, a probability—arose: Because Michelle hadn’t attended Jimmy Carter’s funeral either, she must be trying to avoid … her own husband. What are the chances of those two running into each other anywhere else? The pieces fell quickly into place. Carter’s corpse was at the funeral but won’t be at the inauguration, so that can’t be what she’s trying to avoid. George W. Bush was at the funeral and will be at the inauguration, but Michelle and W. kind of like each other. Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi will surely be at the inauguration, but they weren’t at the funeral—are you seeing a pattern? The Daily Mail even hinted that someone had come between husband and wife: Jennifer Aniston.

I suspect that the Obamas’ marriage is fine, and Michelle Obama can’t stand Donald Trump and doesn’t want to be anywhere near him. She went to his first inauguration because she had to, but if your spouse has been at a different company for the past eight years, you’re certainly not required to show up at the old home week of the damned. To disrespect her right to stay home is to disrespect your own right not to spend your Saturday playing mini golf with your own Pete Hegseth when you could go to Costco or sleep in a tangle of warm blankets. Let it enter the work-life lexicon: The next time you get approached with one of these grisly invitations, tell your mate that you’re going to have to pull a Michelle Obama, and then put your feet up, enjoy your normal blood pressure, and fill three hours of your life any way you see fit.

Is Anyone Shocked by Babygirl?

2025-01-10T15:20:34-05:00

Not since Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut has a female movie star offered such an awkward portrayal of sex as Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. The movie is meant to be daring, a Last Tango in Paris for our time, but its essential premise would work in a Douglas Sirk production: A sexually frustrated, long-married woman accepts her fate until a stranger comes to town and puts everything at risk.

What Kidman—as Romy, the CEO of a soulless corporation—dreams of and seeks out in online pornography is the experience of being sexually dominated. Not the most obscure of sexual fantasies, but for the movie to work we must understand this kind of sex as so shocking, so unnatural, that we are being given a privileged glimpse at something few decent people have seen before. What follows is a yoga class’s worth of heavy breathing (Romy’s) and a salute to the kind of soft-core porn that we haven’t seen much of in the past quarter century.

Romy’s life and world are sketched out in the first act in a way that makes her seem like an alien, but we are apparently meant to see her as an ideal. She’s married to the wonderful Jacob, a theater director who really respects her but who, for the 19 years of their solid, loving marriage, has never once brought her to sexual ecstasy. This might be believable except that, in the greatest bit of stunt casting of the past decade, he’s played by Antonio Banderas, who has been fulfilling sexual fantasies for more than 30 years. He manfully takes on the material and is good as the kind of sensitive and enlightened man who could never debase his wife in any way—this is Romy’s cross to bear. All of this—and her creepy home life, in which she makes a hot breakfast on weekdays and then puts “Mommy loves you” notes in her daughters’ backpacks before school, although one of the girls is a smoker who looks to be about 17—might as well have been presented as a series of storyboards, because no care has been taken to make any of these characters or their emotional and material circumstances remotely compelling.

Just when you think you might die of boredom, the oxygen masks drop and Harris Dickinson arrives in the role of Samuel, a member of the new class of interns at the company. He is the knight errant of the film, there to relieve both the audience’s tedium and Romy’s dry spell. His performance is so layered and interesting that you realize a great actor can rescue almost any script. Samuel is a chancer and a charmer, transparently uninterested in the intern life, his eye out for ways to subvert its structures. He quickly locates Romy as a means to a bit of fun. He stands too close to her, asks her personal questions, never acknowledges her as the most powerful person in the company, and soon figures out what she wants.

He manages to have a private meeting with her, and listens to her tell a story of entering corporate life. It was a “gruesome” process that involved solving “math formulas,” she says: “One of the questions was how many ping-pong balls would fit in that specific room.”

Girl bosses are going to girlboss, but math is always going to be hard. Samuel quickly calculates how many ping-pong balls would fit in the room they’re in, and she looks at him with new regard. Stay in school, girls!

Samuel’s boldness and command of Algebra I soon lead to their kissing, a passion born partly of his assertion that “I think you like to be told what to do,” and the affair begins. Don’t expect a frank accounting of what sexual domination and submission look like, because one of the more outrageous demands he makes of Romy is telling her to get on her hands and knees (apparently for some kind of … sex thing). After a considered pause, she assents, as though she’s Edmund Hillary boldly deciding to climb Mount Everest.

The movie turns on the idea that Sam has ultimate power over Romy because he could report what they’ve been doing to HR. “They could fire me,” she says, frightened. But his true power does not involve work politics. It lies in the fact that she’s become sexually dependent on him because he’s the first person to give her sexual pleasure in almost 20 years. There’s also a chance that his boldness and unpredictability might be signs not simply of his unsuitability for corporate life, but of something more sinister, even dangerous. He spends his free time skulking on the office’s balcony, wearing a giant jacket and smoking, a serpent among the ambitious interns. There’s a very good moment when we—and Romy—learn that he’s not just involved with her, but also with her assistant, which makes her wild with anger. Romy’s the CEO, but Samuel’s the boss.

Will this affair ever end? Or more to the point, will the movie? Yes and yes, for though its clear intention is to reveal that women in their 50s are full of sexual desires as various and urgent as those of the young, the film comes up with a 1950s-style answer to why Romy wants what she wants: a hinted-at childhood sexual trauma, the implication that her desires are problematic, and can be corrected if the trauma is healed.

The affair ends with the sensitive, cuckolded husband once again taking it in the shorts. Jacob confronts Samuel and they fight in front of Romy, but soon enough they’re sitting in the living room nursing their bruises with bags of frozen peas, which Mom has given them. Jacob is trying to explain that “female masochism is a male fantasy” to Samuel, but just as the gender theory heats up, he experiences a panic attack (never have we known him to be a victim of panic attacks but—to stand outside the moviegoing experience and inside the movie-writing experience—it must have worked in the room). The attack is resolved only when Samuel comes over, gently rubs his back, and talks him down while Romy sits on the couch near him. You think: threesome?

But it’s blessedly Act III, and things are starting to roll up. The panic attack prevents anyone from kicking off some age-gap discourse, and Romy quickly sorts out her problems, getting rid of Samuel by finding him a job at Kawasaki in Japan. (The rest of the interns have to stay in the claustrophobic office; Sam wins again.) If only she could dispatch her sexual impulses to Japan, too. What is to be done with her desires?

Early in the film, Romy tells her assistant that she was “named by a guru” and raised in many cults—“cults and communes”—and we see her undergo EMDR therapy in which meaningful images flash past her eyes. While tearfully confessing all to Jacob, she explains that she has tried therapy to kill the kink; nothing has worked. Successful girlbosses don’t want sexual domination! They want nice, normal sex, and through cleansing talks with a loving and patient husband, they can find it. What Romy has isn’t a kink; it’s a pathology, a pretty reactionary stance for the film to take, given its intention to shock us with the unthinkable.

By far the worst part of this terrible movie is the decision to give Romy a special sound to make when she’s having a real—instead of a fake—orgasm. This sound is a loud, growling grunt meant to suggest ecstasy but sounding more like the noises a character makes when he’s about to be transformed into a werewolf. In the final scene, Romy and Jacob are in bed together in a dreamy light, engaging in a healthy act of marital sexual congress. How can this ever be fulfilling to Romy, now that she’s discovered doggy style? Because a small accommodation has been made: As things heat up, Jacob very gently—as though he is shielding her from strong sunlight—places his hand over her closed eyes. Can this mild gesture toward her dangerous fantasies ever bring her the kind of pleasure she experienced with Sam? Apparently so: We are grunted out of the theater.

Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgment

2024-12-09T07:30:00-05:00

Photo-illustrations by Sarah Palmer

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When my older sister, Ellen, was 4 or 5, she and a neighbor girl were playing in the front yard of our Berkeley house. The friend, who lived across the street, was the daughter of a Lutheran minister, who our father thought was a pompous and ridiculous person. Suddenly, Ellen slammed through the kitchen door and pounded upstairs to our father’s study.

“Daddy, Daddy!” she cried out in anguish. “Margaret Mumm says there’s no Santa Claus!”

Our father stopped typing, considered briefly what she’d told him, and then said, “You tell Margaret Mumm there’s no God.”

In the Berkeley Hills, long, public staircases run between streets like steep sidewalks, and the minister and his family lived in a house built next to one of them. So, not long after Ellen ran off, as my father looked through the window above his desk, he saw the man approach like an advancing filmstrip: first the shiny black shoes, then the black pant legs, and soon enough the whole of him, making his way to the bottom step and crossing the street.

In America in the ’60s, members of the clergy were generally considered moral authorities and accorded a certain measure of respect. But this particular clergyman was placing a very bad bet if he thought he could pay a visit to Tom Flanagan and tell him the right way to talk to his children about God.

After the inevitable knock at the door, my father descended the stairs, and then there it was: American Mainline Protestantism face-to-face with post-Hiroshima rational thought. The minister must have assumed that Tom would at the very least invite him in, but he didn’t, so the man was forced to stand on the front porch and reduce his plaint to its elements.

“Your daughter told my daughter that there is no God,” he said, more in sorrow than in anger. I think it was meant to be a pastoral visit.

“And your daughter told my daughter that there is no Santa Claus,” my father replied.

“But—there is no Santa Claus!” the minister sputtered.

“And there is no God.”

We didn’t have any notion of God in our house, but we certainly had Christmas, and with it revealed truth: the carrots on the front porch, eaten down to stumps! The presents piled under the tree, with our names on them! Our cosmology was just as considered as his.

Until all of this certainty was challenged.

Ten years later, Ellen and I were called down to the living room of a rented house in Dublin, where we were spending one of our father’s endless sabbatical years (I went to first, fifth, and tenth grade in Ireland), and tersely informed that we were going to be baptized.

We shrieked in horror. If our parents had told us they were getting divorced, we would have taken the news with equanimity. We would have said, “Hey, you gave it your best shot,” and recommended that they wait until we got back to California, where theocracy would not impede their plans. But religion? There was no explanation for it; they certainly didn’t say they’d had their own conversions.

Ellen spoke for us both: “I’m not doing it!”

I echoed her: “No way!”

Our parents were up to something, and clearly our mother, Jean, was the instigator. Tom would much later confess that the whole thing was a hypocritical plan that my mother had hatched to get us into Catholic schools (which were like private schools, but cheap) when we returned to Berkeley.

Jean was unmoved by our yelps of disgust and fear. We were to be whipped through the tenets of the faith via weekly lessons delivered at a convent school by two nuns (one for Ellen, and one for me), and the event would occur early one evening in December, in time for a drinks party afterward. The guests would be 25 of my parents’ friends. Would we like to invite any of our own friends? We would rather be buried alive.

The first lesson was the next day, and I began my session with tea in a cup and saucer—very civilized—and biscuits. But no sooner had I eaten the last Jaffa Cake on the plate than we turned to Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride: the virgin birth (“What’s a virgin?” “It’s a girl who hasn’t even met a boy”); the Crucifixion (holy shit!); original sin; confession; the Eucharist; priests’ ability to transform ordinary bread and wine into literal (this was very, very important to understand: not symbolic—literal) human blood and flesh, a tiny bit of which we would be consuming once a week for the rest of our lives.

You can’t jump people into Roman Catholicism after the age of reason; they have to “come to God” on their own, or be in some kind of trouble. We didn’t believe any of it, and not just because of what our parents had always told us. It didn’t sound plausible. We lay in our beds at night and fumed. At the baptism, Ellen and I would have to have water poured on our long hair, like a couple of idiots. We would have to say something about believing in God, and we would have to reject the devil and all his pomps. (Pomps : shows of magnificence, splendor. Enough said! Rejected!) We took our final lesson, and a rehearsal was staged. Someone made a fruitcake with marzipan icing. In Ireland, when a woman makes a fruitcake, there’s no turning back. We were fucked.

But then—like a dream, like a magic fish bone—word arrived from Belfast that Seamus and Marie Heaney were coming down for the event, and that Seamus would write a poem. That changed everything for me. Anything the Heaneys were cool with, I was cool with. They were my idea of what a dazzling couple ought to be, and they were always, always kind to us, and we needed kindness.

When Seamus stood up and read the poem, “Baptism: for Ellen and Kate Flanagan,” I accepted everything—all of it, all at once: poetry, God, and myself.

For half a century, I’ve kept the piece of onionskin he typed that poem on, so thin that it’s almost translucent. It’s a blessing on the long, strange project of being Kate Flanagan. That winter night in Dublin, Seamus gave me the one thing I desperately needed growing up in that crazy family: my certificate of belonging, in this world and the next.

Photo-illustration by Sarah Palmer. Source: Courtesy of Caitlin Flanagan

We first met the Heaneys the year before the baptism, in 1970, when I was 9 years old. Seamus, Marie, and their two little boys, Michael and Christopher, had come to California so that Seamus could spend the academic year in the UC Berkeley English department. (Their daughter, Catherine Ann, was still circling in the future, choosing her moment.) My parents were almost 20 years older than the Heaneys, my father a professor in the department, and they took the family under their wing as they did for many visiting professors—Jean in her motherly way, and Tom with his incredible erudition and merciless, legendary wit.

“Berkeley swings like a swing-boat, has all the colour of the fairground and as much incense burning as a high altar in the Vatican,” Seamus wrote to his editor, Rosemary Goad, shortly after arriving. That wonderful description spent 50 years in a folder, but now—on the tenth anniversary of his death—has been published in the collected Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by the poet Christopher Reid. Of course I’ve read and loved Seamus’s poetry most of my life, but the way I actually knew him was in person, talking with people. Every joke, kind word, and cynical quip expressed in the letters—many of which mentioned or were addressed to my father—made me feel that he was in a room just beyond the one where I sat reading.

[Read: James Parker on the letters of Seamus Heaney]

One Heaney is fun. All of the Heaneys together are the best time you’ll ever have. Marie is smart and beautiful and funny, and the boys, then 4 and 2, were incredible, with their Northern Irish accents, their serious first names (in America, they’d have been Mike—even Mikey—and Chris), and their fealty to each other. While Ellen was grinding it out in ninth grade—expectations were higher for her, owing to birth order and the obvious fact that she was giving education much more to work with—my mother was blessedly eccentric about my own school attendance. I would report mild health problems and head out with Jean and Marie and the boys on field trips to the pumpkin patches in Half Moon Bay, my mother fearlessly navigating our Plymouth Valiant up and down San Francisco blocks so steep that you would feel the front tires inching across the asphalt until suddenly the center of gravity shifted, physics took over, and for 30 seconds, your fate was anyone’s guess.

The family wasn’t in Berkeley long before Heaneymania broke out. Berkeley in those days was an archipelago of dinner parties, and my parents were no pikers. There were many mornings when I’d go downstairs to watch cartoons and find Seamus asleep on the couch—he would have driven Marie home to relieve the babysitter and come back so he and Tom could talk and talk, cracking each other up and also taking part in what Seamus would later call the beginning of an ongoing tutorial. If you wanted to discuss Irish history and literature, Tom Flanagan was your man.

[From the February 1988 issue: Seamus Heaney on Oscar Wilde]

Imagine being liberated from Belfast in 1970—when the violence and terror of the Troubles ran in parallel with the most narrowly defined social conventions, policed every hour of the day and night by neighbors, teachers, priests, and ministers—for a year in Berkeley! The contrast was as stark as any between two Western cities could possibly be. This wasn’t London, where King’s Road offered velvet pants, joss sticks, and a friendly attitude toward sex between strangers as a thriving, but still circumscribed, performance. This was a citywide retreat from the known social order, with a California twist.

Early mornings, Seamus would sometimes drive the family across the bay to Sam’s, in Tiburon, for pancakes and champagne, getting home in time to teach his 9 a.m. class. Their first weekend in town, the family went to a Pete Seeger concert. At parties he met the great California poets—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder. He and Leonard Michaels became friends. His one regret when they arrived was that he’d gotten his hair cut before leaving Ireland.

“It’s lotus land for the moment,” he wrote to friends—a perfect Seamus sentence, suggesting both his ease with the sensual experience of California and his sly, characteristic caution: for the moment. All too soon, from my perspective, the year ended, and the Heaneys packed up their flat, said goodbye to champagne and pancakes, and headed home to Belfast. As Seamus would say, “Back to porridge and gunfire.”

Tom and Caitlin Flanagan in Dublin (Sarah Palmer; Source: Courtesy of Caitlin Flanagan)

We Flanagans wouldn’t be far behind the Heaneys, because my father’s sabbatical year was upon us. Once Ellen and I had re-enrolled at our Dublin school and settled back into our Irish life, we drove north to spend a week with the Heaneys in Belfast.

Of course I knew about the Troubles, but I’d never seen a militarized border before. Tom warned us to be quiet while an officer took our passports and inspected the trunk of the Morris Mini for weapons. Our mother was at the wheel because Tom refused to learn to drive a car, while Ellen and I sat in the back seat, staring out anxiously from beneath a welter of books and the glinting gold wrappers of a dozen Cadbury Milks. A few soldiers (“They’re so young,” my mother said) watched us in a wary and—in the manner of all soldiers on shit deployments—contemptuous way. The mystified officer who waved us through seemed to figure that we were creatures of extreme naivete who would be dealt with, one way or another, once we were in Belfast.

The country roads were beautiful, but terrible things happened on them. For two decades, the most frightening sound in the north was the screech of brakes preceding a bomb being thrown through the doors of a dance hall or pub. The “proxy bomb” was created during the conflict, such a well-designed instrument of terror that it was later deployed as far away as Colombia and Syria. Gunmen stop a driver on a country road and force him to get into the driver’s seat of a waiting car that has been loaded with a bomb. He will drive that car into whatever target he’s told. The gunmen’s leverage is absolute: They have the man’s family at gunpoint back at the farm—perhaps they will remind him of what the children were wearing that morning.

I remember that Seamus was haunted by an incident in which a van full of workers was stopped by masked men, who demanded that everyone get out and stand in a line. The Catholics were ordered to come forward. In fact, only one of the men was Catholic. The man next to him secretly took his hand and pressed it: Don’t do it; we’ll cover for you. But for whatever reason, habit or loyalty, he stepped forward—and all of the others were swiftly machine-gunned. The ambushers were Catholics.

Left: Seamus Heaney, the literary critic F. W. Dupee, and Tom in California in 1974. Right: Caitlin with Seamus in California in 1974. (Sarah Palmer; Source: Courtesy of Caitlin Flanagan)

In Berkeley, one of Seamus’s Black friends once asked him to explain what was happening in the north of Ireland, and when he’d finished a brief accounting, his friend said, “I don’t know the words, but I sure recognize the tune.” It was the old thing, the thing that people do to one another. And as the violence continued, the threads holding the tapestry together started to snap.

Belfast frightened me, but once we got to 16 Ashley Avenue, nothing bad could happen. It was like a family reunion. Ellen and I watched The Magic Roundabout with the boys, and every night at dusk, Seamus and the other men on the street would unroll concertina wire at the ends of the block.

One evening, the adults were planning to go to a party while Ellen and I watched the boys—the babysitter had backed out. Ellen was extremely beautiful and getting more so by the month. My parents didn’t seem to care that their teenage daughter was stuck at home, fed a constant diet of Seán Ó Riada and the Irish rebellion of 1798, but Marie did. Other young people would be at this party, and Marie many times said it was a shame that Ellen couldn’t go too. I was determined to save the night, and I insisted that I would be the babysitter. Everyone thought it was a weird idea—no one more so than the little boys—but I’m an adamant person. Marie told me that I could call her at the smallest hint of trouble.

Everyone left, the boys got into their pajamas, and we hit the Richard Scarry pretty hard. Soon they were asleep. I felt amazing and useful and like a teenager myself. But after about an hour, I started hearing noises—muffled booms, shouting. Perhaps they were the sounds of any normal city at night, but Belfast in 1972 wasn’t a normal city. I looked in on the little boys, and realized I had taken on more than I could handle. What in the world was I going to do if I had to get them out? In defeat, I called Marie, and she came home. All the rest of my life, I’ve regretted doing it. I could have been the hero; I could have been the Ellen!

Because what was happening in the north was so violent, because it was unfolding in an English-speaking country, because it could be read as an ethnic minority’s final fight against empire, and—perhaps most important—because it involved Ireland, a country from which millions of Americans claimed ancestry, the Troubles quickly became not just a European story but a global one. And because the six counties of the north were filled with children going to school, women shopping, farmers walking cows down tiny lanes to be milked, and young people’s dances and secret spaces, they produced a river of blood.

What did people want from Seamus Heaney at that time? Everything. There was tremendous pressure for him to turn his poetry into a form of opinion writing and take moral command of the situation. He would never have done anything like that. He was a poet, not an on-call political-versification machine. More than that, he understood that what was happening didn’t fit into a neat rubric of oppression and colonial rule. This was a 14-year-old headed to band practice who was abducted, hooded, and murdered. This was an 11-year-old on her way to school when a bomb exploded in her father’s car. This wasn’t an academic debate about the Stormont government or the British army’s casual use of rubber bullets. This was hell.

[From the July/August 2020 issue: Seamus Heaney’s journey into darkness]

Seamus in the early ’70s had become very interested in the bodies that had been discovered in the bogs that stretch across Northern Europe. This type of bog has the perfect conditions to preserve bodies for thousands of years. The majority of those that have been found were Iron Age people, and despite their wide geographic distribution, they tend to have commonalities: A great number were naked, except for perhaps a ceremonial piece of clothing or jewelry; their stomachs were filled with a gruel of local grains; and many had been murdered. Some had been staked into the bog with wooden pegs, as though to protect them from theft or interference, or even to offer them as a sort of display.

In 1950, an archaeologist named P. V. Glob, who was employed by a museum in Aarhus, Denmark, oversaw the removal of a body from the village of Tollund—the astonishingly well-preserved corpse of a man killed more than 2,000 years earlier. Glob wrote a book about that find and several others, and he gave it a riveting title: not The Bog Bodies, but The Bog People. Who were they? What did they tell us of their beliefs and their cultures?

Seamus knew bogs well; he’d cut turf on the family farm in County Derry. And he knew the things that had been pulled out of bogs: the skeletons of giant Irish elk, long extinct; clay jars still filled with butter. The Bog People inspired him. Soon after his return from Berkeley, he published “The Tollund Man,” a terrifying abduction of a poem that casually welcomes you on a short journey before grabbing hold of you and taking you right down to the underworld.

“Some day I will go to Aarhus,” the poem begins, like an epic:

To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

Already the poem is turning, taking you to the place in the bog “where they dug him out,” wanting to see the “gruel of winter seeds / caked in his stomach.” We are in the territory of Robert Graves and the White Goddess:

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers

Laborers, brothers, children, old men—the ambushed dead; the missing; the disappeared.

We’re in the underworld now, chthonic and mad, as the townspeople point at the Tollund Man while he is raced in a cart to his murder. How was he chosen? How is anyone chosen?

The famous last stanza of the poem is the answer to the question people didn’t even know how to pose about the river of blood.

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

Seamus often compared his bond with Tom to the one between father and son. “I suppose you’re destined to be a father-figure of sorts to me,” he wrote to Tom in 1974. “Blooming awful.”

Seamus had a father, of course, the farmer and cattle dealer Patrick Heaney. But Tom was his “literary foster father.” In the year that Seamus arrived in California, he later told an interviewer, his “head was still basically wired up to English Literature terminals.” It was Tom, he said, who gave him a “far more charged-up sense of Yeats and Joyce” and the “whole Irish consequence.”

[From the November 1997 issue: Seamus Heaney on W. B. Yeats, “All Ireland’s Bard”]

Seamus was a poet in a country known for them. My father often said that Seamus came early into a sense not merely of his talent, but also of the obligations that went along with it. But he didn’t necessarily want to be a poet of the madness unfolding in the north. Of the Tollund Man he later said: “Even if there had been no Northern Troubles, no mankilling in the parishes, I would still have felt at home with that ‘peat-brown head’—an utterly familiar countryman’s face.”

Even as a global figure, Seamus never stopped being grateful to Tom for playing what he saw as an essential role in his development as an artist. In the collection of letters, I came across one he’d written to a friend soon after Seamus had accepted the Nobel Prize in Stockholm. He and Marie were in New York, where they’d driven the two hours to my parents’ house on Long Island—“a chance to see Tom and Jean Flanagan and sit with them in gratitude and sage memory, friendship and wonder at what can happen to a youth from the fields.”

Left: Seamus reading in New York. Right: Seamus, Tom, and Caitlin on Long Island in the early 1980s. (Sarah Palmer; Source: Courtesy of Caitlin Flanagan)

As the years went on, Seamus quietly took care of all kinds of needs that Tom had. One year we lived in Ireland in a rental house that had the basics, including a set of cheaply made but brand-new furniture. What it didn’t have was a bookcase. Tom was working on a novel, and his office looked like a graduate student’s squat until Seamus showed up with wood and nails and stain, and built my father a bookcase.

Near the end of Tom’s life, when he was becoming frail, my parents bought another house in the Berkeley Hills, and Seamus came out to see it. My father was anxious to show him the impressive study, which ran the length of the house in a gabled attic. It was a magnificent space but had a very steep staircase, and the second Seamus saw it, he said my parents had to get a banister put in.

My mother (a former nurse and essentially the breathing apparatus of one Tom Flanagan) had of course been saying that since the day they moved in, and my father (pretty much the hair shirt of one Jean Flanagan) had ignored her. Each time she raised it anew he would say, “Banister, banister, awk, awk,” like she was a parrot in a cage. (I’m telling you, this was one of the world’s great marriages crammed with enough nuclear-level rage to split the world apart like two plates.) But when Seamus said “banister,” my father got the banister.

I used to think that my father was my ace in the hole. He had the same handwriting as Santa Claus, who was, of course, God. He was at absolute ease in any group of great thinkers and writers, and because of him, I grew up around many remarkable people. Sometimes when we were talking, he would say, “That’s a good point,” or even “That’s a very good point.” He never said it to jolly me along; he said it when I’d made a good point. To this day, if you were to observe me thinking—while gardening or cooking or waiting in the TSA line—you might hear me mutter, “That’s a very good point,” and at first opportunity, I’ll go write it down.

Why would a girl with such a wonderful father ever need a second one? Because someone must have dropped Tom on his head as a baby. A streak of cruelty ran through him that could be channeled into incredibly destructive behavior, sometimes directed at himself, more often at the three people he loved most: my mother, my sister, and me.

If you had caught up with me 20 years ago, or even 10, I would have showered you with shocking tales. But something happens when you turn 60. You just let go. You finally realize there isn’t ever going to be a reward for thinking about something and talking about it. And you realize (terrible truth though it may be) that, as Philip Larkin—of all people!—reports, “what will survive of us is love.”

One of the many things I inherited after my father’s death was Seamus’s loyalty. My parents died within a year of each other. Hardly a tragedy: I was almost 40! But who has ever been closer to their difficult parents? My position in the family was that of a suitcase to the traveler. Half of the time it’s an unholy burden, but when you see it thundering back down the luggage chute, you could weep with relief. I was deeply loved, and I was never left behind.

Six months after Tom died, I was suddenly diagnosed with aggressive and life-threatening breast cancer. I felt a strong need to keep the information contained to as small a group as possible. I thought it would hurt my career if people knew I was that sick, and also, in a primitive way, I thought that the fewer people who knew about it, the better the chance it wasn’t real. But somehow Seamus found out.

So many of Seamus’s letters in the collection begin in apology—over and over again, he makes amends for being so egregiously late in responding to someone. And yet, not 10 days after the diagnosis, a letter arrived from Seamus and Marie. They were aghast at the completely “arbitrary insult upon health and beauty.” Soon after, another letter: He’d heard I’d come through surgery, “as valiantly and gracefully as the great spirit you are and have been.” They would be in St. Lucia for 10 days—probably to visit their friend, the poet Derek Walcott—and he told me how to reach them if I needed them.

Everyone who knew Seamus has a story like that. He had a sense of obligation to others that in anyone else would be incapacitating. Once, when my own children were small, I took them to visit Seamus and Marie. After tea and hugs, we climbed into the taxi, and the driver said, “So you’ve been to see the great man.” Almost around the corner was a billboard with his picture on it, promoting a new documentary. By his later years, there was no escaping himself, and the endless duties the role entailed. He may have fantasized about ditching those duties, but he never shirked them.

The letters helped; the poems too. After I first got sick, and in the years since, I have returned often to some of his most famous lines, from The Cure at Troy, which argues for faith in an unseen future. Seamus didn’t believe in a force as mere as optimism. He believed in something far greater and more powerful: hope.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore

Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

It was because of those lines that I started ignoring the oncologists who insisted that I would never be cured.

When a public person dies as suddenly and shockingly as Seamus did—on an ordinary August morning in 2013, in a hospital corridor on his way to surgery—before the family has an hour to confront the unthinkable, the news flies out the window and circles the world. It was an international story, of course, but in Ireland, the grief was personal, intense, self-reflective.

Whatever it means to be Irish—whatever qualities of heart and mind, whatever generosity and love for the very earth and rocks of that island—millions of Irish people were convinced that Seamus Heaney embodied it. All over Ireland, the grief was not just for a storied Irishman and a great poet. The grief was for a friend.

[Read: Seamus Heaney’s plainspoken power]

Two days after he died was the All-Ireland football semifinal. Dublin versus Kerry, no kidding around, and 80,000 people packed into Croke Park. Before the match, a photo of Seamus appeared on two giant screens, and almost unthinkingly, as though rising for “The Soldier’s Song,” everyone in that stadium stood up. The announcer said: “We’d like to mark the passing of one of our greatest literary icons, the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.” And with that, the entire crowd began clapping. The announcer said that in addition to his great works and awards, Seamus had played underage football for Castledawson in Derry. The weight given to that last fact was the same as to the first ones. It meant: He was one of us. Among the sacks of letters to The Irish Times was one written by a man called Frank Munnelly: “As a nation we are a man down.”

The funeral was in Dublin, and the burial was in Bellaghy, and the roads were lined with people. Seamus had read his poetry around the world, and been welcomed everywhere, but he never had any doubt about where the journey would end: in the graveyard of his parish church. “We are welcoming Seamus home,” said the parish priest, while 2,000 mourners strained to hear him. The family was there, of course: those children of the father who had never once failed them and had only and always loved them, and, in the center of everything, always—Marie. Michael (now Mick) spoke briefly, informing the world of Seamus’s last words—a text to Marie that read, “Noli timere”: Don’t be afraid.

My parents don’t have graves. We were a very anti-death family. They had both suffered devastating losses when they were children, and so they tried to keep the very notion of death a secret from us for as long as possible. When Ellen texted me, “Have you heard about Seamus?,” I knew it could mean only one thing. But for a minute or so I stopped myself from Googling his name. I was giving reality a chance to sort itself out. My rational self reported that if he was dead, then there would someday be a grave and a gravestone, and I instantly decided that if that was true, I would never go see them. It would be an acceptance of a fact I was fighting against.

[Read: How so many people got Seamus Heaney’s last words wrong]

But a few months ago, a full decade after he died, I went at last to Bellaghy. My husband took me—“Stalwart Rob,” as my father described him in his last letter to Seamus—and we sailed over the “invisible border,” as it’s now called. There’s no more signage than there is crossing a state line in America—in fact, none at all.

The sky was darkening because we were late; we’d been having lunch with Marie and Mick in Dublin and hadn’t wanted to leave. We arrived at St. Mary’s church under a spitting rain that would suddenly let up, in bursts of revelation and transfiguration, as Irish rains do. Halfway down the graveyard, dark marble austere against the hard gray of the church wall, the headstone seemed almost to hover a few inches off the earth because of the famous line carved into it: “Walk on air against your better judgement.”

It’s from a poem, “The Gravel Walks,” and it gives you the ability, the permission, to hold the full, complicated equation of life lightly. I repeat it often. I’ve been sick for many years now, and whenever I get a call that explains some bad finding, I listen stoically and then remind myself that I’ll walk on air despite the news.

The words are for the world—ours and that of future generations—but most of all, I imagine them as a private communication to Marie. The point of the entire operation was always Marie, the quarry turned way of life.

I’d bought three pots of violets at SPAR market, in the village, and I put the flowers next to the gravestone, feeling a bit sheepish, as though I was performing something I’d learned from the movies, or television, though Seamus—and Tom, come to think of it—would have approved of SPAR market. It was the right way to go about it.

I was inclined to stay there forever; why else had I come? But it was getting cold, and Rob gently kicked at some of the gravel in the path between graves.

“The kingdom of gravel was inside you,” the poem says. “Hoard and praise the verity of gravel. / Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.” And yet that’s the poem that ends in air, with the gentle counsel to establish yourself “somewhere in between” the earth and heaven, the gravel and a song.

Then, just past where Rob was standing, I saw a much older headstone, weathered, but its letters clearly read HEANEY. And, in smaller print, beneath:

Erected by Patrick Heaney
In Memory of his son Christopher
Died 25th Feb. 1953 Aged three years.

It jolted me in a way Seamus’s grave hadn’t. Christopher was Seamus’s little brother, who ran into the road and was struck by a car and killed. “Mid-Term Break”—one of the first poems people read when they discover Seamus’s work—is about Seamus receiving the news at 14, when he was away at boarding school, and then coming home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—

Seamus hated crying—“blubbering”—and I always wondered if this terrible scene was a reason for that.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

A child dead, and a sudden manhood foisted upon Seamus. His early poems are so familiar to me that the events they record can seem like the ones in fiction, the responses of the speaker those of a fictional character. But there was Christopher’s grave, just as real as his brother’s, just as much a marker of a human life.

I’ve been a Catholic since my baptism, but the only Catholic tradition I remember my father handing down to me was lighting a candle “for the dead of the family.” Catholicism provides you with something no rational approach to the world ever will: a cosmology of intercessors, saints. It’s a religion that acknowledges, openly and from the very beginning, that faith itself is a mystery. Walking out of that graveyard left me with a bleakness, but I didn’t have time to confront it, because I was already entering the church so that I could light a candle for the dead of my family.

We can’t escape it: losing the people we love and need the most. Each death has to be countenanced as a fact, squared away in the record books. But there are people so well known to us, so loved, that death is one more thing that can be turned to air.

Seamus Heaney photographed at the Royal Society of Literature in London, March 16, 1995 (Steve Pyke / Getty)

When Tom died, Seamus wrote an obituary for him in The New York Review of Books : “Since our first meeting in 1970, he was like a father to me and like a typical Irish son I felt closest at our times of greatest silence and remoteness.” He described a few of their endless car trips and excursions; only Tom and Seamus would scramble down a cliff path in Antrim to see the site where Roger Casement had wanted to be buried. Let no stone be unturned, no vigil unattended. And then Seamus quoted the poem he’d written at the time of his own father’s death:

And there was nothing between us there
That might not still be happily ever after.

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgment.”

The Democrats’ Billionaire Mistake

2024-11-25T11:09:00-05:00

Let us extend our ethic of care to our celebrities, and in particular white celebrities, so many of whom contributed their time and talent to the Kamala Harris campaign. These people understand both justice and mercy, and their greatest concern is neither fame nor fortune, but the plight of America’s—and the world’s—most disadvantaged. Consider Mark Ruffalo.

The day before the election, he posted on Instagram a comedic short to “help Trump go bye-bye,” a compilation of clips of Donald Trump saying “Bye” or “Bye-bye.” The day before that, he’d posted a video of two young Native American people worried about the upcoming election: “We need a superhero,” one of them says and, just like that: Mark Ruffalo! “It’s scary,” he says. “Trump does not care about the Native people.”

He also posted a video he’d made with Rania Batrice, a Palestinian American who is a World Economic Forum “Exceptional Woman of Excellence.” Ruffalo, however, was the star. The video was intended for voters so angry about the war in Gaza, they were considering a protest vote for a third-party candidate over Harris: “If you’re thinking of voting for Jill Stein, please take a listen,” Ruffalo said, in his compelling, patronizing way. “I understand how devastated and angry you are,” he said. “For over a year now, many of us have been on the front lines of calling for the end of the genocide in Gaza and now the killing in Lebanon.” Who is “us”? And where was the “front line”? West L.A.? Studio City? (Ruffalo, needless to say, has not spent the past year sharing his outrage over the Hamas attacks of October 7 that took 1,200 lives and precipitated the conflict.)

“We’ve been outraged at the Biden administration’s complicity and inhumanity as the invasion has spread to Lebanon and marches closer and closer towards a forever war,” he said, and offered the weirdest political pitch in history: Show up for Harris because “we can and we will hold her accountable on her first day in office.” Even for those voters who might have shared his premises, it was a bizarre theory: Vote for a war criminal so we can frog-march her to American Nuremberg as soon as she climbs down from the podium.

[Read: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

This is one of the things that white celebrities do best: forge a bond with members of a marginalized community, and then tell them what to do. But this time, it didn’t work. What’s a superhero to do when he learns that at least half of Native Americans voted for Trump? (“Long time coming,” said a former vice president of the Navajo Nation, Myron Lizer.)

What about the gut punch of almost half of Latino voters choosing Trump? That’s something the white celebrities weren’t prepared for, and it hurt. But they had to put on a brave face. As Brad Pitt told Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” Let us respect the privacy of the white celebrities at this difficult time. Three-tenths of Black men under the age of 45 voted for Trump. There’s no one with whom white celebrities assume greater common cause than young Black men. The Black Lives Matter protests were their Tiananmen Square.

The minute it became clear that Harris had lost, reporters and panelists began offering explanations—explanations so obvious that you had to wonder why they hadn’t seen the loss coming. Of course they were correct: The results proved that millions of people don’t want to see an apparently endless flow of undocumented immigrants entering the country; they loathe the way DEI absolutism empowered an army of bureaucrats to mete out mysterious punishments for ridiculous offenses. They don’t want to hear anyone’s pronouns; they don’t want to be told that crime is down when they’re busy getting carjacked; and they never, ever want to watch The View again.

These various social causes helped win Trump the election. His narrative didn’t pass most tests of logic or economic theory and yet it was constructed on a foundation of grievances that rang true to millions of Americans, and Democrats met it with no narrative at all. It was as though the party had spent a quarter century running a very large tab, and on Election Day, the whole thing finally came due. I couldn’t really attach that vague sense of the problem to any of its component parts, so as I always do when I’m confused about the Democratic Party, I called Noah Redlich.

“How did this happen?” I asked him, and he said something that not a single aggrieved commentator or anyone on the Topanga front line had said.

“When I heard J. D. Vance say that he was in fourth grade when Joe Biden voted for NAFTA, I said, ‘We’re screwed!’”

Noah is a second-year law student at Fordham University. I’ve known him since he was 5. At 7 he could tell you the name of every U.S. senator. It wasn’t just a party trick—as he grew older, his interest in politics grew into a strong belief in the Democratic Party’s potential to improve the lives of the working and middle classes. I spend a huge amount of time talking to Democrats, some of them extremely well versed in the party’s positions on various topics. So why do I trust Noah more than these mandarins? Because more often than not, they’ll break into an argument that requires me to accept that various facts on the ground don’t exist. Noah has worked or volunteered on many campaigns, and when he would come back from a red state he would never say “Those Republican voters are scum.” He would come back saying “These voters are concerned about …”

“When Vance talked about NAFTA,” Noah said, “it had a visceral connection with a lot of people who continue to be deeply affected by it. Even the name of that agreement has deep resonance for a huge number of people from Appalachia and across the Midwest, because they saw their manufacturing jobs disappear.”

Industrial decline began long before NAFTA, of course, but it was an efficient engine for taking away jobs. Corporations did what they always do, if they’re allowed to do it, which is chase cheap labor. Their response to union efforts and worker resentment was to say, You better just keep working or we’ll send your jobs away.

“No one at the Democratic convention talked about NAFTA,” Noah said. “How could they? They’re too in love with Bill Clinton.”

Bill Clinton spent his first year in office aggressively lobbying for the passage of NAFTA. He curried favor with Wall Street, and in 1999 signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall regulations enacted after the 1929 stock-market crash, which helped lead to the 2007–08 financial crisis and the Great Recession. He ushered in the era of the billionaire-friendly Democratic Party, which was somehow going to coexist with—and benefit—the members of its traditional stronghold: the working class.

Clinton once held a lot of credibility with the working class, but that was a long time ago. And yet the party remains so convinced of his popularity that it sent him to Michigan to campaign.

And then there’s Hillary. “Noah, why in the world is Hillary Clinton still taken seriously by the Democratic Party?”

“I have no idea! She lost an election; her entire worldview has been rejected; people don’t like endless free trade that sends their jobs overseas; they don’t like the endless wars, like the Iraq War, which she voted for. People don’t want that anymore. She’s stuck in a previous era that people have moved away from.”

And yet she wields a particular power at the most elite levels of the party. In the rooms where the rounds of toast are always spread with roasted bone marrow and the “California varietals” are always Kistler and Stag’s Leap, and where the sons and daughters are always about to graduate from Princeton or rescue an African village or marry a hedge funder or become an analyst at McKinsey—in those lovely rooms, where the doors close with a muffled click of solidity, Hillary Clinton still wears the ring to be kissed.

She was perhaps the first person to launch a woke argument during a presidential campaign, ridiculing Bernie Sanders’s intention to break up big banks by asking: “Would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” Seeing that argument in its infant form, made by a woman who several times collected $225,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, is a reminder of how stupid and morally bankrupt it is.

For that matter, why does the party keep dragging Liz Cheney everywhere like she’s Piltdown Man? Yes, there are Republicans who don’t like Trump, but they don’t hold much sway with Democratic voters. Nicolle Wallace and Bill Kristol do not a coalition make.

One thing the party needs to learn is that no one, anywhere, ever wants to be reminded of the Iraq War.

“It was disastrous to use her so heavily,” Noah told me. “She represents the establishment, the ruling class that people rejected during this populist moment. These people aren’t popular. That’s why Donald Trump runs the Republican Party, not the Cheneys or the Bushes.”

He’s a second-year law student! Why couldn’t the leaders of the Democratic Party see these obvious mistakes?

Harris’s campaigning with Liz Cheney allowed Trump to say, as he did many times, that the Democrats are tied to the Cheneys and their endless wars, and liable to send your kid off to die in a foreign conflict. Trump ran as an anti-war politician, but he certainly wasn’t one the last time he held office. He did most of the things Liz Cheney would have wanted him to do: He ripped up the Iran nuclear deal, and increased military spending numerous times. He was more hawkish on Russia than Barack Obama was, and increased sanctions against the country. I’m not saying any of these things were necessarily wrong, but it certainly wasn’t John and Yoko on a bed-in for peace.

But all of these are mere blunders when compared with the real problem. The sign that needs to be Scotch-taped to a window at the Democratic National Committee should say: It’s the billionaires, stupid. What ails us is that 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and 40 years of allowing private equity and an emergent billionaire class to have untrammeled power has created—in the country of opportunity—a level of income inequality that borders on the feudal. Changing that is supposed to be the work of the Democratic Party, but three decades ago, it crawled into bed with the billionaire class and never got out.

Billionaires are, of course, precious snowflakes, each one made by God and each one unique. But one thing unites almost all of them, be they Republican billionaires or Democratic billionaires: They want to protect a tax code that keeps their mountains of money in a climate-controlled, locked room.

Mark Cuban was a huge and very visible Harris supporter, but for a Democrat, he took some strange turns. He wanted Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, out of her post. Khan has taken on corporate monopolies that block competition and filed some of the most aggressive antitrust litigation in a generation, and has been especially critical of Big Tech. “By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence,” Cuban told a reporter. The response to that was so severe that he backpedaled by saying that he was “not trying to get involved in personnel.” Personnel? She’s the chair of the FTC, not a booker on Shark Tank. Breaking up the monopolies that rule Big Tech would be very bad for Cuban, but probably give the rest of us some breathing room. (On the other team, Vance said he agreed with some of Kahn’s positions.)

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

In a populist moment, the Democratic Party had the extremely rich and the very famous, some great music, and Mark Ruffalo. And they got shellacked. Now a lot of people seemed stunned by what happened, sobered by it.

Cuban scrubbed his X account of all political posts, declared himself on “political vacation,” and joined Bluesky, where, if not absolution, then at least a less political position could be staked out. He made a bad bet (why does Bezos make all the right moves?) and now needs to retool the factory.

Ruffalo appeared at a long-scheduled awards dinner for the ACLU of Southern California five days after the election. He got a little choked up, asked everyone to stand up and hug it out, and admitted that it had been hard for him to come to the event at all—which was a relatable position, because everyone hates the Beverly Hilton, but surely it was an easier gig than the front line?

But it’s not the trans athletes or the immigrants or the wokeism that lost the Democrats this election. It’s the rigged economy that has had its boot on the throat of working people for decades. Billionaires, even our very special Democratic billionaires, care about all kinds of things—and many of them peel off a lot of dollars for worthy causes, no doubt—but their political involvement usually comes with a specific price: that the party leaves alone the tax code that safeguards their counting houses.

And, really, after all the billionaires have done for the Democrats, is that too much to ask?

The Video That Perfectly Captures the Utter Strangeness of RFK Jr.

2024-09-10T07:31:00-04:00

RFK Jr. slid into my TikTok “For You” page this weekend. I had never thought of him as being For Me, but TikTok knows all of us better than we know ourselves, so I kept watching. He was standing outside on a sunny day, wearing a pale-blue T-shirt, his mien familiar: inexhaustible, in high spirits, a solo artist ever ready to start one more aria.

“Hey, everybody,” he says cheerfully; “I’m down in Baja with Cheryl.” Trying to save his marriage, I thought cynically. It’s been widely reported that his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, was “the opposite of encouraging” about his dropping out of the race only to join Donald Trump’s team. “This is my first day off in 17 months,” Kennedy said, “and it’s been great.” Great, and apparently not something that required marital lockdown. Hines was not part of the video message. One pictured a casita in which the lights had been dimmed, the AC had been turned to emotional-emergency full blast, and a long-suffering wife lay flattened on the bed.

“Look what I just caught,” Kennedy said. It seemed like a statement that should have begun or ended with the word Mom. He lifted a small, bright-green lizard, its head held steady between his forefinger and thumb, its ancient eye glittering. “I wanted you to see this.”

He’s going to snap that thing’s head off, I thought.

“This is a beautiful little lizard,” he said, explaining that it was “a cape spiny-tailed iguana” and that “they’re so beautiful; they’re this emerald color right now. But later on, they’ll turn gray, and they get about—ah, 40 inches long.”

The life cycle of the cape spiny-tailed lizard seemed to be one more subject that Kennedy knows a hell of a lot about, and on which he can freestyle until the listener is partly hypnotized. The lizard was apparently like the American economy, suicide rate, poisoned soil, teenage disaffection, and vaccination accidents: one more crisis he’s got firmly in hand.

“They eat mainly flowers and fruits,” he continued, “and occasionally—and opportunistically—some small animals.” He paused and smiled slightly at the thought of opportunistically taking down some small animals.

[Read: RFK Jr. was my drug dealer]

Another thing to know about the cape spiny-tailed iguana, he said, was that “they make great pets.”

Pets? Is this the new environmentalism—taking beautiful creatures out of their delicate biospheres and relocating them, far from the land of flowers and fruit, into a mesh cage, there to be fed on handfuls of bitter greens gleaned from the clippings of produce departments? The iguana pet business has led to an overpopulation problem in Florida, where the offspring of lost or abandoned lizards disturb the natural habitats of other species, tear up yards, and fight above their weight in making that state one of the strange wonders of the world.

RFK himself had once owned an iguana, he said, “and also chuckwallas, another great pet I had as a kid.” Chuckwallas, he informed the viewer, were the cape spiny-tailed iguana’s biggest competitor. The specter of cage fights arose. He had more to say on this subject: The iguanas “were brought here to Baja by the Seri Indians, who canoed over from the mainland, and they were brought to the island as a food source. I’ve seen green iguanas—which is like their cousins—sold in Barranquilla and some of the other markets in the Caribbean—”

Can nothing shut this man up? He was filibustering, but at least it was sort of interesting. A lot of what he says is interesting. More than interesting; it can be mesmerizing.

It turns out that iguanas are fit for consumption, as are their eggs, and that he’d seen people “cut the eggs out” in markets. That’s something I never wanted to see myself, but a mental picture could not be prohibited, because he then added another image: “The eggs come out on a string, and they’re considered a delicacy.”

The end of the video was even creepier: “It’s such a beautiful lizard,” he said, lifting the terrified creature up to the camera again. He looked beyond the lizard directly to the lens and, with another slight grin, asked the viewer, “Don’t you wish you had one of these?”

I can’t explain it; just watch it.

Last month, Kennedy made a video in which he told Roseanne Barr that he’d once been hunting with his friends and, on the way up the mountains, a driver in front of him struck a bear cub, killing it. Kennedy’s response was to pick up the dead animal and throw it in the back of his van. “I was going to skin the bear,” he told Roseanne, “because it was in very good condition, and put the meat in the refrigerator.”

This seems implausible, and in any case, the day went long and he never got around to cutting steaks out of the creature. Instead, with a table at Peter Luger waiting, and the genius machine always running, he told some buddies: “Let’s go bring the bear into Central Park, and it’ll look like it got hit by a bike … Everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea!’” Police and news crews descended on the scene the next morning.

This isn’t something Kennedy did in college; he did it when he was 60 years old. That isn’t the time to grow up; it’s the time to start getting old. He released the video with Barr because a New Yorker profile was about to drop that included the anecdote, and he must have wanted to get his own version out first. What’s clear is that he remains delighted by this nasty story, proud of a prank whose only possible purpose was to freak out the cyclists in Central Park and to show his buddies how reckless and hilarious he was. I don’t know a single person who could watch a six-month-old bear get struck and killed by a car and not feel any pity for the animal. But Kennedy didn’t show a flicker of compassion.

This summer, reporters also dug up an old photograph of Kennedy holding the ends of a spit on which a four-legged animal had been splayed and charred. He’s leaning over the carcass with his mouth wide open, looking like the Prince of Darkness himself. This was followed by the resurfacing of an old magazine story in which his daughter Kick described the day in her youth when he put all of the kids in the car, drove to where he’d been told there was a beached whale, and took a chainsaw to its neck. He then attached the whale’s head to the roof of the car with bungee cords. On the drive back, his kids covered their heads with plastic bags that had mouth holes cut out so they could breathe, while blood and fluids streamed down the windows of the car and the other drivers gave them the finger as he bore his grotesque souvenir homeward.

These are behaviors you read about in news articles not about a candidate but about a suspect. Mutilating animal carcasses, or exploiting them for a laugh, or trapping live animals for your enjoyment—these are all acts that can make a detective look at you twice.

The problem with Kennedy is that a lot of what he says actually makes sense.

Consider the address he gave after Joe Biden’s most recent State of the Union, comparing the exhausted America of today with the incredibly vital one of his youth, and mine. He talked about the America I grew up in, one in which you might be aware that the government was involved in some very shady operations—principally the Vietnam War—but you never questioned its place as the strongest, the richest, the most innovative, put-a-man-on-the-moon country in the world. In those days we still recited the Pledge of Allegiance, even if the words—allegiance? indivisible?—were incomprehensible. We said the pledge with a sense of purpose—even if our purpose was not to defend the Republic, but to get the morning started so that we could eventually go to recess. But day after day, staring up at that flag, we understood that it was important, and that America was a good thing.

“I grew up in an America that seemed to have achieved its promise as an exemplary nation,” Kennedy said. He called us “the freest country in the world and, by no coincidence, also the most prosperous.” Back then, he said, “working Americans could provide for their families on a single salary. They could buy a home, raise a family, save for retirement without mountains of debt. We made the best music. We made the best movies, we made gold-standard automobiles that everybody in the world wanted. We made blue jeans. We reconstructed Europe. We put men on the moon. We had the world’s healthiest, best-educated children. Our productivity, ingenuity, our can-do spirit were the envy of the world. We had confidence in our strength, our capacity, and the limitless potential of our country.”

All of that was true. It wasn’t something you figured out; it was something you knew. But where, I wondered, would he place the issue of race within this cosmology? I had forgotten that he is Bobby Kennedy’s son—Bobby, who was the muscle on all of his brother’s tentative steps in the civil-rights arena and behind all of Lyndon B. Johnson’s significant ones, including the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

“Yeah, we had serious racial and environmental problems,” RFK said. “But in the heady days of my youth, the environmental movement and the civil-rights movement were picking up steam. My father and some of his allies were fighting to eliminate the last pockets of hunger in Appalachia, in the Mississippi Delta, and on the Indian reservations. And we became, for the first time, a true constitutional democracy in this country, with all races voting and holding political office. Other countries aspired to be like us, and our children grew up proud of their passport, proud of their flag.”

[Read: The first MAGA Democrat]

Then he adumbrated America’s current problems: “We’ve become a nation of chronic illness, of violence, of loneliness, depression, and division, and poverty. Our great cities are becoming tent encampments, modern-day Hoovervilles filled with undocumented immigrants and dispossessed Americans and people living in their cars, plagued by mental illness and addiction and despair.”

He rattled off some harrowing truths about our country, things we’re used to confronting one at a time, not in a single, shocking snapshot: Among the rich nations of the world, we’re 35th in child poverty. Worldwide, we are 36th in literacy and 59th in life expectancy, just behind Algeria. Close to half of us are obese, many of us have chronic illnesses, and our cancer rate is criminally high.

He presents all of this along with a vision of the future both sunny and elegantly expressed—a vision of “the America that almost was and yet may be,” which is really just “Make America great again,” but with some spin on the ball, and the old Kennedy magic. But at the same time, he is beholden to a long list of the kind of conspiracy theories usually associated with street-corner prophets and the tinfoil-hat crowd. It’s impossible to shake him of them, and matched with his abilities of oratory and inspiration, they’re dangerous.

Put it this way: One more sign that we’re on the downward escalator is that we once had Bobby Kennedy, and now we have Bobby Kennedy Jr.

He and his wife are presumably back from their excursion. Kennedy has already caught a grasshopper in his airy Brentwood home and set it free into his bright garden, a charming little video except for the unnerving skill he displays at clamping his hand around the creature and holding it so that we can see its head clearly. There has been no report on the whereabouts and well-being of the cape spiny-tailed iguana, which we now understand could make such an excellent pet or snack or possibly even souvenir, its tiny head mounted on a matchbook cover and hung alongside other treasures in a trophy room of the great and the meek, between the chainsawed whale’s head and whatever was left of the bear.

The Greatest Speeches of All Time, and What Biden Said

2024-06-24T07:31:00-04:00

If you want to reach the kids, you’ve got to go where the kids are. Where are they right now? With their devices, of course. And what are they doing on those devices? Listening to podcasts, of course. This, presumably, was the reason behind the release of a corker: NATO Through Time, in which a grandfatherly former NATO official and three young and extremely well-informed co-hosts plunge into the past.

What’s next, Yalta: The Musical? It would probably be a more successful venture, because Yalta was once; NATO is forever. From age to age, a new generation of supporters must be rallied, and that is becoming the 13th labor of Hercules. If the thudding disappointment of Unfrosted taught us anything, it’s that young people hate Boomer nostalgia. And NATO is the rotary phone of geopolitical alliances.

I grew up a long time ago, when the world was every bit as complicated and dangerous as it is today. But, if only as a reassuring fiction, the American president was often referred to as “the leader of the free world.” America was the most powerful country in history, and it was sworn to protect—and was protected by, should the terrible day come—an alliance of other free nations.

NATO was principally a firebreak against the Soviet Union and remains one against Russia. But Barack Obama felt that a foreign policy in which Russia was our chief enemy was a little old-fashioned. Too From Russia With Love. Too Rocky IV and Rambo III. In a presidential debate in 2012, he mocked Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was the biggest threat to America: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Then the Cold War rose from the dead and Russia invaded Crimea, and two years ago began its bloodthirsty attack on Ukraine.

Two people who don’t like NATO are Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump (who once told his foreign-policy adviser, “I don’t give a shit about NATO”). This ought to ring a distant alarm bell. Managing the very special relationship between these two powerful men seems to be Trump’s version of NATO: cheaper, more direct, perhaps one day turning into an alliance of its own.

Around the world, autocracy is rising; spend any time at all reading about the evidence, and your hair catches on fire. Russia, China, North Korea—they have all been strengthening their ties to one another; all of them have a dim view of America and of democracy.

Toward self-preservation, allow me to offer my own extremely brief assessment of NATO through time, in the form of three speeches by American presidents.

No one really knows what John F. Kennedy actually said in his famous 1961 inaugural address, because he was so goddamn sexy and so goddamn confident that the beautiful words and soaring phrases float through your receptive brain but can find no purchase. But by looping the video for a week, this is what I’ve got:

Kennedy believed that the Second World War—which had ended just 15 years earlier—was a turning point in American history. The war had revealed the extent of America’s commitment to freedom and its special role as the defender of nations where tyrants ruled. The speech recognized that the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan had forever changed the equation of human progress: “The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” America had nuclear weapons, but so did its greatest enemy.

Embedded within the beautiful speech was the rationale for a lot of very questionable foreign policy. But the speech was also a flex and a warning: “To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do—for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.”

In his beautiful words, he was talking about the rotary phone—NATO. And the desperate need to keep the peace: “To those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”

Ronald Reagan presided over the Soviet Union’s demise. He also popularized that oxymoronic piece of realpolitik “Trust but verify.”

In 1984, he gave a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. Peggy Noonan wrote it, and it took its place among the greatest American political speeches of all time. No one could sell a speech like Reagan, and this one opened like a novel, or better yet, a screenplay:

ESTABLISHING SHOT: “We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France.”

DISSOLVE: “The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon.”

The genius of the speech was that, while it described dramatic action that took place in the context of extremely complicated political history, it left that history as assumed fact and centered on the individual and collective actions of very young American men, some of them boys, who had more or less been dumped out of landing craft into waist-high waves, and were immediately under German machine-gun fire.

Some survivors of that pitiless day sat in the front rows of the audience, and Reagan addressed them directly: “You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”

I doubt if any of the terrified young men bleeding and dying on that beach thought of themselves as morally bound to defend democracy. But Reagan followed an established tradition of recognizing the highest aspirations of American troops in combat and of finding within the individual acts of one soldier the aims and honor of a just war.

In one of the speech’s most arresting passages, Reagan tied the horrors of combat back to the suffering of parents and families. “The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They thought—or felt in their hearts, though they couldn’t know in fact—that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.”

I don’t think any other politician of the past 50 years could have sold that line about the Liberty Bell, but when Reagan said it, you were pierced by it.

Young Americans then had comparatively little experience with the Second World War as an exercise of American greatness. They’d been ground down by Vietnam, and by all the music and movies about it, and by the homeless vets who sat in wheelchairs panhandling and drinking. Vietnam had brought shame to America—but the Second World War was different. This speech gave them a chance to reconsider America in a new light, as the hero of a global catastrophe. This was before Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, and Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s Band of Brothers. In fact, those lionizing, mythmaking inventions probably would not have existed without Reagan’s speech.

The tone was Shakespearean, Prince Hal into Henry V: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”

But the real heart of the speech was here, in the emphasis on the ways that the Allied powers had worked together to achieve this joint victory: “All of these men were part of a roll call of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors they bore: the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland’s 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England’s armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard’s ‘Matchbox Fleet,’ and you, the American Rangers.”

And then he said this, possibly the point of the whole thing—his endorsement of the idea that the “strength of America’s allies is vital to the United States”: “We were with you then; we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny.”

When I read that Joe Biden was giving his own speech in Normandy this month, I think I actually said, “O almighty God, forbid it.” I knew it would feature our ever-diminishing president delivering a warmed-over version of Reagan’s great speech.

It was that. But, in its unspectacular way, it was also a speech that drew the sharpest possible contrast between Biden and Donald Trump, and what Trump imagines is his ability to cajole and bully our enemies, to find common cause with them and to stage dramas in which he emerges as a global ambassador of peace through strength. During his administration, Trump threatened North Korea with nuclear attack (sweet Jesus!). But he softened after Kim Jong Un “wrote me beautiful letters.” The kind of foreign policy that involves, say, sending aid to Ukraine to beat back Russian soldiers seems far less interesting to him.

Biden said this: “When we talk about American democracy, we often talk about the ideals of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. What we don’t talk about is how hard it is.” He said the “most natural instinct is to walk away, to be selfish, to force our will upon others, to seize power.”

“American democracy asks the hardest of things: to believe that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.”

You would think that freedom is the force that flows naturally, but it’s not. Freedom generally has to be fought for and always must be vigilantly—and sometimes militarily—guarded.

There’s no point listing Joe Biden’s manifold shortcomings here. They’re in front of our eyes, and they’re not all “cheap fakes.” But Biden believes in NATO and in supporting our allies. Maybe that seems quaint, and rotary-phone-as-hell, but these are very good things.

Trump is flashier: a convicted felon, an insult comic, the last man on Earth to run on a platform of “Trust me,” and yet it’s working on a huge number of Americans.

If you vote for Biden, you’ll have to ask yourself a question: Is he still fit for office, or is he too frail, too ancient-seeming to make another term anything but a mockery of the country?

And if you vote for Trump, you’ll have to ask yourself this one: Do you feel lucky?

Colleges Are Lying to Their Students

2024-02-02T07:31:00-05:00

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If you’ve taken a college tour lately, either as an applicant or as the parent of an applicant, you may have noticed that at some point—usually as you’re on the death march from the aquatic center to the natural-sciences complex—the tour guide will spin smartly on her heel, do the college-tour-guide thing of performatively walking backwards, and let you in on something very important. “What’s different about College X,” she’ll say confidently, “is that our professors don’t teach you what to think. They teach you how to think.”

Whether or not you’ve heard the phrase before, it gets your attention. Can anyone teach you how to think? Aren’t we all thinking all the time; isn’t the proof of our existence found in our think-think-thinking, one banal thought at a time?

On Thinking for Yourself

The tour eventually ends, and in a couple of hours, you’re on another college campus, and while you’re marching from that institution’s climbing gym to its sophomore-student housing, a different tour guide spins on his heel, speeds up, and lets you in on his school’s secret: “What’s different about College Y,” he says—with what seems to be complete confidence that you haven’t heard such a thing before—“is that our professors don’t teach us what to think; they teach us how to think.”

Each of the guides seems to think this is a point of difference about his or her college, which is itself a sign that they have spent a lot more time in the “what to think” school of higher education than in the “how to think” one. When you’re visiting a college, walk through the corridors of some of the humanities departments. Look at the posters advertising upcoming events and speakers, read the course listings, or just stand silent in front of the semiotic overload of the instructors’ office doors, where wild declarations of what they think and what they plan to make you think will be valorously displayed.

Does this look like a department that is going to teach you how to think?

The truth of the matter is that no one can teach you how to think, but what they can do is teach you how to think for yourself.

To the extent that I have learned how to think for myself, it’s because my father taught me. Usually by asking me a single question.

For the love of God, I hated that question. And for some reason I always, always forgot to see it coming. My father was an academic and a writer who cared a great deal about teaching, and he was never off the clock.

There we’d be, chatting away, when some new subject or other would heave into view, and I’d launch into a long assessment of it. I’d be certain—absolutely positive—that I was right. My father would listen, head cocked a little to the side, often smiling a bit, sometimes raising his eyebrows after an especially bold point. For some reason, I would feel encouraged—not wary—and I’d bash ahead into bolder assessments.

Eventually, I’d run out of steam and finish up, with some sort of gesture meaning “case closed.”

There would be a moment of silence. And then my father would say—gently, because there was zero need to say it any other way: “And what is the best argument of the other side?”

The best argument of the other side! Jesus Christ—the other side? The whole point of the argument was to destroy the other side! I was there to illuminate and then devastate the other side by engaging deeply with the worst it had to offer.

Which is usually a light lift.

I had learned the style and the rhetorical turns of making a great case, but I didn’t know the first thing about fortifying it with facts, reason, logic—or the best argument of the side I was treating in such a cavalier way.

You don’t have to delve into the arcana of the Third Reich to destroy anyone making a case for it. But these layups rarely present themselves in decent places. Most of the time, the subjects we talk about are—for all of their flattening by cable news and internet wormholes and all the rest of it—extremely complicated.

A teacher should never do your thinking for you. She should give you texts to read and guide you along the path of making sense of them for yourself. She should introduce you to the books and essays of writers who disagree with one another and ask you to determine whose case is better.

Many college professors don’t want to do that today. They don’t want to “platform” a writer they think is wrong; they don’t want to participate in “both sides-ism.” The same thing is true for the students who pound on the doors of lecture halls and pull fire alarms and throw garbage cans down hallways to protest the 45-minute speech of a visitor.

They believe in sympathetic magic. They believe that words—even those spoken within a lecture hall—will damage them and their classmates. The truth is that they’re scared. They don’t think their ideas can outmatch those of the hated speaker.

Is there anything more satisfying than watching a debate in which the sophist gets defenestrated by someone smarter, better prepared, and obviously right?

Don’t bang on the doors of the lecture hall. Universities should book this character in the biggest auditorium they have. Broadcast him live on a campus radio station. Tell him the only requirement for his visit is that he engage in debate with a student—and then track down the young woman or man who owns this subject. And the professors who can help him or her to make the strongest possible case.

Do you think evil can stand up against that student’s case? It can’t.

The truth bats last.

In the broadest possible sense, “what’s wrong” with the modern American university is that although it still understands itself to operate under the model established by the 19th-century German university—which emphasized academic freedom, seminars, and laboratories as means of allowing students to discover the truth for themselves—it’s becoming a parody of that model. The professors are going to tell you what to think, and you’re going to backfill that “truth” with research of your own.

To college-bound students, I would say this: The college campus is full of salesmen eager to get you to buy the deluxe model without so much as a test drive. But it’s your life and your mind, and—as of present writing—you have every right to think and speak and write for yourself. You’re needed out here.

This essay is adapted from the introduction to the book On Thinking for Yourself: Instinct, Education, Dissension.

The Timeshare Comes for Us All

2023-11-11T07:31:00-05:00

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Very early in my first marriage—I’m talking four or five days—I lay on a lounge chair on the white, powdery sand of an island paradise and took stock of my problems. First off, in that short time I’d already managed to lose both a piece of precious heirloom jewelry that my new mother-in-law had given me and also my new husband’s lucky Mets cap, which I’d left at a bar one island over. He’d taken both of these losses hard, and he’d felt that the missing jewelry had to be reported at once—long-distance and from the front desk—to his parents. The losses and the long-distance phone call were harbingers of the inevitable. But my biggest problem was immediate (aren’t they all?): Cheryl and Don, as I’ll call them.

Cheryl and Don had grown children, were either world-class social drinkers or textbook alcoholics, possessed a font of knowledge on matters such as how to take advantage of a loophole in the island’s customs law so we could each bring home an extra gallon of rum, and had decided that these two honeymooning 25-year-olds (us) needed their company. No matter where we went or what we were doing—limbo-ing, eating dinner, bronzing ourselves under a punishing sun—we’d hear a little Cheryl-pitched shriek of delight and there they were.

But—as in a mystery novel—it was these two apparently minor and eccentric characters who would offer the most important lesson of the honeymoon.

The four of us were lying on lounge chairs under the carcinogenic Caribbean sky when a young man appeared down the beach from us, offering brochures to tourists. This happened all day long: The brochures were for catamaran rides, or buffet dinners, or happy hours. But when Cheryl caught sight of this particular man, she said, “Oh no! No, no, no,” and began to reposition her chair so that she had her back to him.

“Nope,” Don said, and got to work turning his own chair around. It was a circling of the lounge chairs.

What was going on? “Timeshare,” Cheryl said, the way you might say rape or endoscopy.

Apparently, on a previous vacation, they had been suckered into a timeshare presentation (probably on the inducement of free drinks), and something about it had been absolutely horrible. Cheryl and Don were a couple of seen-it-all New Yorkers; you wouldn’t think a salesperson would get the best of them, but whatever had happened had left a mark.

The lucky Mets hat never turned up. Neither did the jewelry. We ended up tapping out on the marriage at five years—the paper anniversary, which was in our case observed with an 8-by-11 decree of divorce—and going our separate ways. But those five minutes on the beach with Cheryl and Don were forever, and they left me with a dictum to last a lifetime: Never, ever, no matter what, go to a timeshare presentation.

And then Sandra (not her real name) called me.

We’re always on guard for situation-specific dangers—to be careful of riptides when we’re swimming in the ocean, but not when we’re cleaning the lint trap. To keep an eye out for pickpockets when we’re on the tube, but not when we’re getting a mammogram, life’s most pocketless experience. Similarly, we cast a cold eye on the timeshare hustlers who approach us on beaches or ski resorts or on the Las Vegas Strip. Get behind me, Satan. But in our own bathrooms, where we’re putting on lipstick 10 minutes before friends are due for dinner, our soft throat is exposed.

The number on my phone had an unfamiliar area code and lacked multiple zeros, and I was intrigued; had some real person from this unknown (by me) American place misdialed? Or was it a call to adventure? Neither. It was Sandra, telling me that because of my Hilton Honors membership, I’d qualified for a special offer. I could spend five nights at any Hilton Grand Vacations resort for $120 a night.

A question: I’m a Hilton Honors member?

A thought: That’s a really good price.

Here’s what a rube I was. I spent much of the call worrying that I might not be a Hilton Honors member after all and that at any moment Sandra would realize it. How humiliating it would be if she performed the Telemarketers’ Revenge and hung up on me.

I asked if they had a resort in Hawaii, figuring there was no way they could be selling rooms there for $120 a night. Why yes, there absolutely was a Hilton Grand Vacations Resort in Hawaii! It was in Waikoloa Village on the Big Island, and I was going to love it! It was oceanfront! It was 62 acres! There were no hotel taxes (which can run as high as 17 percent in Hawaii) and also no resort charge. (Joe Biden: “Those fees can cost you up to $90 a night at hotels that aren’t even resorts!”)

I tried to think whether I was missing something. Was there anything else I should know? “There’s just one thing!” Sandra said brightly, like it was the best part of the deal. We’d have to go to a 90-minute timeshare presentation.

“Oh no! No, no, no!” I said. “I don’t do timeshares!” A principled stand, although one invalidated two minutes later when I took out my credit card and bought the package.

Afterward, I told myself I shouldn’t feel bad about going against my convictions. The chance that a middle-class American could make it to 60 without going to one of these damn things has got to be small. The reality, I told myself, was that I’d waited 35 years for the right deal.

And besides, what was so important about my precious time that I couldn’t spend 90 minutes of it sitting through a sales presentation?

My Real Husband (let us call him R.H., as those are in fact his initials) picked me up in “as is” condition at a fire sale 30 years ago, and we are a happy union of opposites. He’s in the problem-solving business, and I’m in the problem-having business. Yes, somewhere there are enough lost baseball caps—and one very nice pair of earrings—to fill a few airplane hangars, but he’s not the kind of person who loses his own mind if I lose something. He seems to have some bigger vision for himself—and for us—than worrying about baseball caps.

Still, in the minutes following the purchase, I realized that I really should have talked with him before signing us both up for this potential scam. But I couldn’t have waited! The deal was only good for the length of the call!

I decided to do some research so that when I presented the situation, it would sound like a great decision.

Have you ever Tripadvisored yourself to a goddamn fare-thee-well, to the point that you know more about the Austin JW Marriott (“Excellent rooftop pool”; “pillows should have been replaced months ago”) than you know about the Roman Forum, or, for that matter, your own dwelling?

From that night until we left for Hawaii months later, Tripadvisor reviews of the Hilton at Waikoloa Village were my constant reading material. Typical for the genre, there were odes, comedies, horror stories; the domestic details were nonpareil. The five-star reviews tended toward the Edenic:

“Paradise it is!”

“Heaven on earth.”

Less encouraging—and in some instances revolting—were the many reviews that expressed, in vivid terms, a very different kind of experience.

“Luxury apparently means that the walls are so thin that you can hear your neighbor urinate.”

“The carpet smelled like it hadn’t been deep cleaned for ages! The bathtub had a ring from the previous occupants.”

A pair of honeymooners had complained about their room and been switched, they said, to one in the “basement.” They fired a flare from their dank chamber of delights: “The basement is disgusting! Dark, Musty, Moldy, stained walls and carpet.”

What the hell was going on? Were these two hotels, the former an Elysium, the latter a rendition site of filthy carpets and lies?

Apparently, yes. As I discovered, at the resort, you can stay in one of a few different buildings, including the Makai. The Makai is a Hilton hotel, and people seem to like—even love—staying there. But at the far end of the property is an enormous complex of almost circular buildings that give an impression less of a resort than of a municipal jail designed by an enlightened architect of the 1970s. Here is where you’ll find the Ocean Tower: the locus, it seemed, of many of the bad reviews. That behemoth isn’t a Hilton. It’s a property developed and managed by an entirely different company—Hilton Grand Vacations—that licensed the Hilton name after Hilton itself got out of the timeshare business back in 2017. Sandra had not sold me a grand vacation at a Hilton. She’d sold me a Hilton Grand Vacation.

Goddamn it, Sandra! I’d already proved myself a patsy—and at 61, I worried that I could be a figure in one of those articles called “Top 7 Financial Scams Targeting Seniors.” It was already happening! The cougar years were now over. What comes next? Chico’s and a timeshare?

Illustration by Nicole Licht

I called the reservation desk—my spindly, senior fingers punching in the numbers as fast as they could—and asked where we were booked. Sure enough, the woman on the line told me, we were slated for five nights in God’s smelly waiting room, Ocean Tower. Very calmly, so as not to arouse suspicion that I was already cooling on the timeshare lifestyle, I asked what it would cost to move to Makai. She could have said any number.

By the time we got on the plane, I had spent 12 weeks immersed in Timeshare Horror Porn.

There are, apparently, tons of happy timeshare-presentation-goers who try to build a presentation into every trip. These people whip through the presentations at warp speed, and some huge number of them post about the experience on TikTok, laughing about it and sometimes kind of enjoying it. The vibe is: Don’t overthink it!

But of a very different cinematic character—no views of white beaches or enormous swimming pools—are the reports from timeshare victims. They post not on TikTok but on YouTube: Haunted people explain how they were misled, bullied, detained for hours, and broken down to the point that they’d actually bought something that they couldn’t afford and rarely used and that had death-do-us-part annual fees.

Orlando, Florida, is the undisputed timeshare capital; the Disney Vacation Club is its own shining city on a swamp, but all the big players are there: Wyndham, Marriott Vacation Club, and good old Hilton Grand Vacations. According to the American Resort Development Association (ARDA), more than 10 million American households own at least one timeshare membership, and there are at least 1,500 timeshare resorts nationwide. If you’re not currently sitting in a presentation, you’re ahead of the game.

Timeshares took off in America in the 1970s, when a glut of condo construction near vacation spots blighted skylines and squeezed developers. Getting people to share the ownership of a single condo and each use it a different week of the year was lucrative. From the very beginning, the marketing of these things was sleazy. Since then, regulations have been passed. Almost every state in the union now offers a rescission policy—some period of days during which a buyer can come to her senses and cancel her deal. But the industry still has a lot of tricks up its sleeve.

The Federal Trade Commission’s website devotes a page to “Timeshares, Vacation Clubs, and Related Scams,” warning consumers of the high-pressure tactics employed in their sales offices. It informs visitors to the site that reselling a timeshare you no longer want is extremely difficult. And it says the same thing any accountant or investment adviser would: Never think of a timeshare as an investment that will grow over time. The ROI is the pleasure you and your family take in it, and the probably remote possibility that it will save you money if hotel prices rise precipitously.

We weren’t wheels up over Inglewood before I was immersed in “What have I done?” anxiety. I waved away the breakfast omelet, ordered a fresh-squeezed bourbon, and took a nap, snapping awake an hour later realizing I hadn’t told R.H. about any of these things I’d learned, and that I’d better do it before we got to Hawaii.

I tapped him on the shoulder and told him what we could be up against. When I got to the part about the bullying salespeople who could keep us for hours, he looked at me the way you might look at a weird but beloved item you picked up at a fire sale 30 years ago and can’t quit.

“That’s not going to happen,” he said.

But what did he know? He’s from Minnesota, and he’s always seeing the best in people—an admirable trait that, I must confess, has rarely failed him—but in this situation, it could be our undoing.

We got to the Makai just after dusk, and when we turned into the wide driveway, you could tell immediately that something was off. The hotel was dark. I had read that the hotel was seriously understaffed, even by post-pandemic standards. Only two people were parking cars, in a very ad hoc—though friendly—kind of way. Then we pushed through the enormous doors and into the massive indoor/outdoor lobby. It, too, was minimally illuminated and nearly deserted; leaves scuttled back and forth across the floor.

The only bright place was the reception desk, where we met the greatest employee not just of the Hilton corporation but of any corporation anywhere. He looked like a young Elvis, wore an electric-blue aloha shirt, and was fanatically committed to our happiness. We had a great room; we would be very happy; we could self-park, if we liked, or use the valet; here were our key cards; was there anything—anything at all—he could do to improve our stay?

Everyone on the Hilton’s skeleton crew was extremely kind and helpful. It was as though both workers and guests were stranded together in this weird predicament, all doing our best not to overtax a fragile system. R.H. and I made our own beds, hung up and reused our towels, and instead of bothering one of the rattled bartenders for drinks, used a rinsed-out Frappuccino cup as a cocktail shaker to make martinis at sunset.

The first morning I opened the curtains and saw that we had a vast and unobstructed view of the ocean. It was one of those Kodachrome days you can get in Hawaii, when everything looks like a color-infused travel photograph. The room was furnished in mid-price hotel-room drab, but it was really big. At $210 a night with no hotel tax, I started to feel like the timeshare-presentation lifestyle might be for us. But that was before we went to ours. O Cheryl! O Don! Why had I forsaken you?

The presentation was on the second day, at 2 p.m. Apparently if you’re from Minnesota and have a good attitude and genuinely respect other people, and if you agree to be at a certain place at a certain time, you show up there on time, and in appropriate clothing. Whereas if you grew up in Berkeley and have a bad attitude, you can work up a righteous anger about corporate greed even when you have contracted with a particular corporation for the express purpose of having a good time. So I was halfway through a cheeseburger and fries at the Lagoon Grill, the one place where you could reliably get a decent lunch at the resort, when R.H. tracked me down, eyes widened at my wastrel ways (waffle fries, large Coke, Kindle tilted against a ketchup bottle, all the time in the world) to inform me that we were going to be late.

I quickly signed the check, submitted to having a bit of ketchup wiped off my face, and marched to the parking lot in my swimsuit cover-up and sandals. I really, really didn’t want to go.

We had to drive about a mile to the sales office, which was located in another HGV property, a tidy complex of townhouses. We walked down the type of bright-white corridor usually reserved for passage to the mothership or the final chapter. It was lined with photographs of choose-your-afterlife locations—glowing pictures of happy families, delighted couples, amber sunsets, and endless beaches, all with the HGV logo stamped on a corner.

Three other couples were in the waiting room. All, I sensed, were there under similar conditions. Nobody said a word. R.H. opened his computer; I thought about going to the car to get the rest of my cheeseburger, which would have blown his mind, so I sat still. But then, 15 minutes late and wearing a rumpled aloha shirt, came Moondoggie, as I immediately thought of him—because it was the most beach-tastic name I could think of, and because, like his namesake (Gidget’s boyfriend), he seemed like a person who couldn’t put the screws on anyone.

We went down a gleaming corridor, lined with bright Lucite boxes, which were the sales offices. Each office was named for a particularly exciting HGV destination: Portugal, Waikoloa, Scotland, Seychelles. What taxonomic category united these various entities—two European countries, a census-designated place on the island of Hawaii, and an archipelagic state in the Indian Ocean? It was obvious: They were all places of thrilling and appealing difference that had been shrunk into grab-and-go portions by a benevolent American corporation.

Moondoggie ushered us into Seychelles, I think, but I was so hot with anxiety that I could be remembering wrong. I came out of the gate with a rookie mistake. I felt that we should be very honest that we were not going to buy a timeshare and that we were just there for the cheap hotel room. Moondoggie took the news really well. That was because, as I later learned in my research, I had revealed the pact. Apparently, many couples agree beforehand that there’s no way in hell they’re buying one of these things, and they reveal this fact to the salesperson. At that point, his job is to look for any sign of breaking the pact—an indication that one person is taking an unexpected interest in the arrangement, at which point that salesman swings away from a joint presentation to focus exclusively on the Pact Breaker (presumably until the Pact Keeper either gives in or starts a week-long, vacation-ruining fight).

Moondoggie and R.H. engaged in some “getting to know you” chat, which they were both very good at, while I sat nervously on the edge of my chair until it was my turn to get known. Things petered out exactly the way many of my conversations with strangers peter out, with me saying, “Well, sometimes the editor picks the subject, but a lot of times I come up with one.”

The next two hours were like some kind of social-science experiment, in which we were placed in a small glass box and put under intense pressure to buy something against our best interests. First we were informed that we don’t take enough vacations. The reason we needed HGV was that it would force us to take vacations, a concept that Moondoggie kept repeating during the presentation, each time making the title of Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” pop into my head.

Moondoggie then told us in some tricky or possibly just confusing language that what was on the block was the “deeded ownership” of a tiny portion of one particular unit in Waikoloa. But it soon became clear that the place itself was not the point; we might not even be able to spend a day of our forced vacations there. What we’d really be buying were points that could be used to book HGV units around the world on some kind of giant, computerized trading floor.

Each year, we would be given a new infusion of points. But they probably wouldn’t be enough at first to go anywhere good anytime good. The seasons were ranked by precious metals—platinum, gold, silver, and bronze—and the bottom line was Don’t think you’re going skiing anytime soon.

Moondoggie gestured toward a saleswoman sitting alone in an adjoining glass box, who apparently spent a week in Park City, Utah, every winter, and who, he said, seemed to spend all year trying to get seven days in a row in the same unit. One of the many endearing things about Moondoggie was the way he would bond with us by innocently telling us some damning bit of information about the company, for example that it would probably take us several months to learn how to use the booking system, because it’s really complicated.

About an hour in, R.H. took advantage of a lag in the monologue to say, “I want to understand your business model.”

Moondoggie and I both looked at him in confusion, my own intensified by embarrassment—it seemed like a rude question.

“I mean,” R.H. said helpfully, “if I looked at your annual report, what’s the most important source of revenue? Is it the initial sales? Or the maintenance fees? Or the financing?”

Each moment of a marriage is every moment of a marriage, and in that particular one, 30 years of our financial discussions were laid bare. The “price” of a thing always turns out to be a rough sketch of what it’s actually going to cost you.

Moondoggie was stumped by the realization that this good-natured, Minnesotan preacher’s kid understood business in a way that a thousand photographs of Scotland would not change, and at that point we all realized that we were running down the clock. We talked about Moondoggie’s son, whom he was worried about and obviously loved a lot. I asked to see a photograph, and the boy was so handsome and had such an open face that I realized that Sandra in sales had been wrong, and that it wasn’t okay to waste his father’s time making a presentation to us when we knew we wouldn’t buy.

All that was left was the inevitable meeting with the closer: a former football coach of incalculable size with a gray ponytail, a leather necklace with a shark-tooth pendant, and a mess of somewhat disorganized paperwork because, he said, many sales were all closing at the same time all around us.

He told us the deal:

Deed location: Kings’ Land

One bedroom

Deposit today of 10 percent: $3,098

Closing costs: $800

Annual maintenance: $1,368 + $291 (for club-membership dues)

Activation: $199, billed in 45 days

Bonus points: 24,000

Total sale price: $30,980

The unit, in a development near the Hilton, would be our “hedge against inflation.” It would secure us “a lifetime of prepaid vacations.”

Once R.H. politely clarified that we would not be taking that offer, the closer immediately stood up from the desk and made a fast—and, in my opinion, somewhat disgusted—exit. After a few more excruciating sales promotions, Moondoggie finally walked us out to the parking lot, which felt like one of those awkward situations when a man you’ve refused to sleep with walks you to your car, because he’s a decent person, but you both can’t wait to shake each other.

At last we were free and alone, in the intense brightness of the actual sun, on the surface of which we seemed to be walking. At that point, I needed prescription headache medication, over-the-counter Imodium, a cool washcloth for my forehead, and a dark room in which to pray for death.

I glanced over at R.H., for one of those moments of perfect sympathy that occur only in the context of a long marriage, but he wasn’t looking at me—he was looking toward our rental car, lifting the fob with a blissful look. “Nice guys,” he said, and clicked “Unlock.”

Here are a few things to know about buying a timeshare. First, heed my advice and never take out a loan for it. HGV reports that its fixed interest rates can run up to 25 percent a year; in 2022, the company collected a quarter of a billion dollars in financing payments, perhaps with the assistance of its in-house collections division. Annual maintenance fees are another revenue driver. The company does not break out maintenance in its annual report but folds it into a category called Resort and Club Management, on which it collected half a billion dollars last year.

This practice results in a profound hardship for members who hadn’t realized that even in old age they would still be required to pay those fees. Many haven’t set foot on a vacation property in years, and yet HGV still bills them for maintenance. The obvious solution would be to sell the timeshare, but as the FTC pointed out, that’s very, very difficult to do. Look up timeshares on eBay, and you’ll see plenty listed for $1. Some are surely fake, but not all. Why would anyone sell a timeshare for $1? Because they’re desperate to escape these fees.

Fortunately even timeshare owners get to die, but the company isn’t done with you yet. The perpetuity clause in most of these contracts means that the timeshare will become part of your estate—one of your beneficiaries is going to get stuck with those fees for the rest of her life, if she doesn’t file a so-called disclaimer of interest by her state’s deadline.

When The Atlantic reached out to Hilton Grand Vacations, a spokesperson wouldn’t speak on the record about these fees and their effect on the elderly, their children, and other owners who didn’t grasp that they would have to pay this money for the rest of their lives. The spokesperson sent me some boilerplate on the subject, writing: “Hilton Grand Vacations redefined what vacation ownership should be through our flexible model,” and that “this dynamic model is why the vast majority of HGV members are happy with their vacation ownership.” The spokesperson added: “We also understand that life circumstances can change and we are committed to helping our members find the right solution for their needs in the event they need to modify their vacation ownership.”

When pressed multiple times about these matters—for example, about why the company doesn’t make it easier for heirs to cancel a contract—the spokesperson told me that my questions about the “vacation ownership business model” should be directed to ARDA, the trade association. But I wasn’t asking about the industry. I was asking about HGV and the hardships it causes the elderly. At that point, the trail—already cooling—went cold. (As for Hilton itself, when given the chance to comment, it did not reply.)

Everything turned out alright in the end. I have to believe that the compensation Moondoggie gets from the company is enough to justify all the presentations he gives to refuseniks. Besides, his dream isn’t to sell timeshares; it’s to open a breakfast stand. HGV won because these package deals allow them to fill up empty rooms for a little money. And R.H. and I came out even, because we’d had some fun and left the island with all of the possessions we’d brought to it.

This July will be our pearl anniversary, although we always forget which day of the month it falls on, and one of us usually says “Hey, happy anniversary!” a few weeks late. We both were married before, and the dates stuck in our brains are the ones that were sent out on invitations, and that were the occasion of massive blowouts funded by our parents. We never give each other presents; it just seems weird—“Please accept this gift for sticking with me. I really flamed out the first time.”

But it seems like we should probably take a trip or something. I can’t top the time that, on what turned out to be the occasion of our 19th, I took him to a passage grave in Ireland and showed him the big cremation bowl, but I’ll think of something. It will surely be a whirlwind of headaches and upset stomachs for one of us, amortization and struck-up conversations for the other. And that’s what it’s like to be married for a long time. You’re operating on the perpetuity system, and what you want to do is get a couple of umbrella drinks at the edge of a pretty vista every year or so, somewhere you can tell each other your favorite stories, and eventually wander away altogether, sticking your kids with the maintenance fees and slipping off to the place where time is all there is.

Get That Senator a Cinnabon

2023-09-22T14:37:00-04:00

At long last, the rigid and outdated dress code in Congress has been sent down the river of bad ideas, along with the Segway and natural childbirth.

Americans have been going through a sea change regarding work, with many of us experiencing not less but more productivity when we started working from home during the pandemic. Among the young, the change is even deeper. They are vocal about their disdain for jobs that might not end at 5 o’clock and bosses who police employee behavior, right down to what they wear. They are rightly disaffected by the workings of a government where a gerontocracy rules and things never seem to get better. The elimination of the dress code could be one small step toward making Congress more relevant to them; it will make the institution seem less formal, less impenetrable.

Changing the dress code is, however, a half measure, because there is no way of getting around the problem of the Capitol itself. With its Latin inscriptions, marble staircases, and graven images of slaveholding presidents, the building—and the ideas of American greatness and exceptionalism it represents—is hardly consistent with our current interests. Its power to suppress self-expression—personal and political—is obvious. It may be time to reexamine not just Congress’s dress code, but its office space.

No legal document absolutely requires the legislative branch to conduct business in the Capitol, so the possibilities are endless. Consider, for example, moving Congress from the Mall to a mall, specifically, its food court.

A mall would offer our legislators drivability, endless parking, and a casual atmosphere that would help them work smarter, not harder. Gone would be those fusty chamber desks that make the members look like Longfellow scratching out a poem with an old nib. Food courts’ abundant seating would get rid of the hierarchical arrangements in the chambers. Of course, everyone will want to sit next to Orange Julius, but it won’t take five reelections and membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution to do it. In true democratic fashion, the best seat can go to the newest and youngest—all he or she has to do is floor it on the Beltway and get there first.

Imagine a new senator, riddled with anxiety about his first vote, asking his tablemate to hold his seat while he gets up, stretches his legs, and pours himself a refreshing half gallon of Hi-C. His blood sugar raised, his body uncramped, he can vote to invade Mexico with confidence. Busy working parents could end their day by grabbing a delicious meal to take home. Kids love two things: bicameral legislation and Baja Fresh. And imagine the sergeant at arms (in a Snuggie and shower slides) calling the (food) court to order as he announces the arrival of the president to give the State of the Union address. Innovative, fun, casual. Or picture the Ways and Means Committee conducting its important work in a Foot Locker. That makes more sense than anywhere with a transom window.

Chuck Schumer’s decision to change the rules was apparently prompted by the situation of Senator John Fetterman, who does the people’s business in a mall-appropriate hoodie and gym shorts, and has therefore sometimes been forced to yell votes in from doorways. But when announcing the reform, Schumer revealed the cowing nature of long-held and empty traditions: “Senators are able to choose what they wear on the Senate floor. I will continue to wear a suit.”

Usually the people chafing against dress codes are women and girls. But all it took here were the whims of two cisgender, straight white men. Still, shopping malls can impose a mediating force on all that privilege. Despite the sports bars and Best Buys, American malls were originally designed for suburban women, who were newly stranded away from the commerce of urban centers, and malls have been meeting their needs ever since. In a mall, the thundering pronouncements of male legislators—traditionally booming upward into the Capitol’s great dome (on which George Washington himself is depicted being borne straight to heaven)—would quickly get dialed down to the inside voices of small boys politely asking their mothers for quarters to play in the arcade.

A lot of people are losing their mind over the dress-code situation, mostly conservatives who are appealing to the kind of propriety, decency, and correctness that they can no longer claim for themselves. There was a time—very much in living memory—when the hallmark of a conservative was his forbearance, his unwillingness to match the crude language and outrageousness of the radicalized left, and his almost religious belief in the power of dressing quietly.

Think of Richard Nixon in the East Room welcoming the Ray Conniff Singers to the stage. “If the music is square, it’s because I like it square,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye. The singers—very young women in pale-blue gowns and very young men in navy-blue blazers—file in, but before they begin one of the girls unrolls a scroll that reads Stop the killing, and says, in a calm, certain voice: “President Nixon, stop bombing human beings, animals, and vegetation.” She then goes on to explain that although he “pray[s] to Jesus Christ,” his faith is hollow.

Did the humiliated president match incivility with incivility, in the way of modern conservatives? No, he took it like a man and worked through his feelings by planning the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam.

But many of today’s elected conservatives are no longer interested in public restraint, which they consider a sucker’s game. They feel that their own politeness and even temperament allowed liberal savagery to mow them down, and they’re not taking it anymore.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called Lauren Boebert “a little bitch” on the House floor, and Tim Burchett said he thought that was cool because he’s a “professional-wrestling fan” down with the idea of the women someday having a fistfight: “I kind of dig that.”

Lindsey Graham went on Fox News (blue blazer, no tie) to explain—regarding immigration—that Donald Trump “scared the shit out of Mexico.”

One night in July, some congressional pages were commemorating their last week in the program by taking pictures of the awe-inspiring Capitol dome, lying down on the floor to get a shot that encompassed its sweep. When newly elected Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin encountered them, he yelled, “Wake the fuck up, you little shits,” according to one of the pages. He told them to “get the fuck out of here,” called them “jackasses,” and then—God love him—told them that they were “defiling the space.”

Now, what kind of talk is this? Is it “Here, Sir, the people govern” talk? Hell no. It’s mall talk! These people will fit right in. Lauren Boebert doesn’t want to spend one more lunch hour eating a bowl of bilious navy-bean soup. No, she wants to get a Jamba and check out the sale at Forever 21.

The best aspect of this modest proposal is that shopping malls are a failing enterprise. Scores of them sit empty, abandoned temples to a forgotten god. The good ice no longer rattles into paper cups, Santa has left the building, and even the most star-crossed teenagers no longer want to wander, pinkie fingers linked, through the runway-size halls.

We’ve moved on. We’re tired of malls, although we take their existence for granted. If there weren’t a Sharper Image, no grandfather would ever get a Christmas present. Of course the mall exists; we just don’t go there anymore.

In Praise of Heroic Masculinity

2023-08-30T07:31:00-04:00

The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”

It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.

As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.

[Read: The miseducation of the American boy]

Over the past several years, The New York Times has located signs of the brave fight against toxic masculinity in the television series Ted Lasso, in a production of the 19th-century opera Der Freischütz, and in a collage made in less than an hour. “White Lotus Didn’t Care About Toxic Masculinity After All,” wrote a disappointed Michelle Goldberg, as though someone had snatched away her bag of Good & Plenties.

Notably, however, the Times has not referred to toxic masculinity in its coverage of the Gilgo Beach murders. Nor does the term appear in an article headlined “Professor Charged in Scheme to Lure Women to New York and Rape Them,” nor in one about the abduction of a 13-year-old in which the suspect has been charged with kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines for criminal and sexual purposes.

Why don’t these qualify as toxic masculinity? One suspects it is because murder, rape, and kidnapping are serious, and “toxic masculinity”—as we now use the term—is trivial. Still, I use it in this essay, because in its grammar we find something instructive. If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it?

The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes and it is ungratefully demanded by the very people who usually decry it.

Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?

Heroic masculinity is the understanding that someone has to climb the endless staircases in the towers. On 9/11, 343 New York City firefighters died at Ground Zero, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t know, or at least suspect, that he was climbing to his death. They didn’t do it because of a union contract or an employee handbook. They climbed those towers because they knew that it must be written into the American record that heroes were there that day, and that the desperate people inside those buildings had never—not once—been abandoned.

(There were also, of course, women who responded to the catastrophe, three of whom were killed—two police officers and an EMT: Kathy Mazza, Moira Smith, and Yamel Merino.)

A year ago, at a drag show in Colorado Springs, a man opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. A second man, Richard Fierro, was at the club with his wife, his daughter, and a few friends. When the shots roared into that enclosed space, Fierro ran toward the gunfire and pulled the killer to the floor. When Fierro found that the man was carrying a second gun, a pistol, he seized it, and pounded the man’s head with it over and over again, screaming, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

Fierro is a combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t know exactly what I did,” he told The New York Times. “I just went into combat mode.” He told CNN simply, “My family was in there. My little girl was in there.”

These examples are about heroic masculinity at its most extreme. Heroism is usually much less dramatic. You can see it every time a high-school kid puts himself between a girl and some boy who’s hassling her, and every time a man steps up to another man who is screaming—or worse—at a woman. Girls and women do this, too. But the kind of men who harass women don’t tend to listen to them.

Toxic and heroic masculinity can easily exist in the same man. There are plenty of examples of a bad man who sees something unjust and who suddenly—if only for the minutes it takes to stop another man from harming someone—puts a stop to it. For that tiny stretch of time, he is connected to greatness.

There are questions that must be answered. For instance, aren’t women capable of heroic acts? Of course, and mere examples don’t suffice to tell the tale, but here are several: Heather Penney was one of the two fighter pilots sent screaming through the air on 9/11, on orders to find and take down the fourth hijacked aircraft. The only successful end to that mission would be suicide: There was no time to load the jets with missiles, so if they found the missing plane, they would have to fly straight into it. “There was no second-guessing,” she told a reporter on the 20th anniversary. “And there was no tears.” Leigh Ann Hester was the first woman to be awarded the Silver Star for combat valor, for her swift action during a 2005 firefight in Iraq.

But the heroism that marks most women’s lives is the endless effort to protect themselves—and very often, their children—from male threat or violence. It is in spite of this deep, perpetual vulnerability that the world goes on, that women go out alone with men they don’t know well, that they bear their children, and—on nothing more than trust—sleep at night beside them. The number of women who have risked everything—and in many cases lost their lives—in self-defense is without end, and the number who haven’t thought twice about throwing themselves between their children and great threat is all you need to know about female courage and sacrifice.

We know from experience, if we have lived long enough—and from thrillers if we have not—that there can be something deeply attractive in a man who is strong enough to hurt but also to protect. It is the knife’s edge of masculinity that women negotiate. No matter how far women have come in the modern world, the fact of male power remains a deep and, I would imagine, primal attraction for many women. How could it not be?

The next question involves the police, the overwhelming majority of whom are male, and the fact that so much corruption and malevolence exist within the ranks. There are many jobs, usually those that involve the possibility of danger and the conferring of power—that are appealing to both kinds of men. The bad cops reveal how malevolent a force manhood can be if exerted against the innocent. The good ones remind us that in the moment of violence, laws won’t protect us, and norms won’t protect us. In the moment of male violence, the best luck you’ll ever have is for a good cop to be nearby.

I’ve talked about this topic before, and almost instantly someone interrupts to report in outraged tones the monstrous action of some man who has been in the news. “Is he heroic?” they will ask.

Patiently I will explain that obviously he isn’t. There is a very simple test for whether or not something constituted an act of heroic masculinity, and here it is: Ask yourself if it was heroic.

In certain parts of the country, including Los Angeles, where I live, the strength and bravery of girls are specifically championed. The message is that it’s great to be a girl, and that girlhood itself is part of what makes each girl so powerful. On the soccer field I’ve often heard parents cheer “Girls rule!” after a winning goal.

But never once have I heard parents at a match yell “Boys rule!” Why not? Because in sports they do rule, and in such great measure that it’s rude to point it out. In 2017, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team played a scrimmage against a boys’ team in Texas. The boys were all younger than 15, and they won that match 5–2. The same thing had happened in Australia a year earlier; the national women’s soccer team played a team of under-15-year-old boys and lost 7–0. When CBS reported the loss in Texas, it softened the blow by noting that it “should not be a major cause for alarm.”

Alarm? Alarm about what? You would be alarmed only if no one ever told you that boys and men are stronger and faster than girls and women.

There used to be a T-shirt that I sometimes saw little girls wearing that said Boys are terrible. Throw rocks at them. Good luck with that, I would think. Maybe a rock-throwing girl would make contact with a boy who knows that you don’t get into a physical conflict with girls, because that’s not right. Or maybe she would make contact with a boy who believes that girls are the absolute equal to boys in every way, and she’ll get beaned.

In progressive areas, there is a kind of suspicion about boys, a sense that if things aren’t handled very carefully, they could go wrong and the boy might never express his feelings.

The New York Times is a central purveyor of this What’s wrong with boys? agenda. A couple of years ago it published an op-ed called “What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human.” The writer reported that despite her intention to raise her sons in a gender-neutral way, the culture kept getting its hands on them.

First “preschool masculinity norms” meant that while girls’ books are about the inner lives of people, boys’ books explore “the emotional lives of only bulldozers, fire trucks, busy backhoes and the occasional stegosaurus.” Setting aside the weird, sexist assumption that some books are for girls and other books are for boys, we learn about what happened next:

“Now, they are 10, 7 and 3, and virtually every story they read, TV show they watch or video game they play is essentially a story with two men (or male-identifying nonhuman creatures) pitted against each other in some form of combat, which inevitably ends with one crowned a hero and the other brutally defeated.” Despite all of her best efforts, she has managed to produce boys who care deeply about being heroic and saving good people from villains.

Boys are various and wondrous, and their inclinations are wide and changeable. There are boys who love art and literature, boys who are dreamy and funny, boys who play football and also study ballet. Let them be who they are, including those boys—among them many artists and poets—who are very interested in what it means to be heroic, in the sense of defending and protecting the weak.

Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of otherwise reasonable young men who admire Andrew Tate, a vile and widely watched influencer facing charges of rape, human trafficking, and organized crime? (He denies the allegations.) That is because the only thing they have been taught about masculinity is that it is a dangerous and suspicious and possibly socially constructed fantasy that they must cast off in every way possible. They’re so confused that when they finally see a thug like Tate, reveling in talk of dominating and abusing women, they think he’s admirable. At least he isn’t telling them that they’re bad seeds.

If we don’t give these boys positive examples of strength as a virtue, they will look elsewhere.

[Tom Nichols: The narcissism of the angry young men]

The final complaint about men is the demand for tears. Why aren’t more men crying? Crying is important and men should cry!

Men do cry. Freely and openly. But women are often looking in the wrong places for it.

When a gunman attacked the Covenant School, an elementary school in Nashville, in March, only 14 minutes lapsed between the first 911 call and officers on the scene taking the shooter down. The Nashville chief of police, John Drake, spoke to the press often on that day and the days that followed. He spoke in the language of data and facts—but also in the language of human beings trying to understand this great evil.

About a week after the shooting, Drake spoke again. First he thanked everyone who had helped, including the cops who had entered the building first, and were also at the press conference. And then he talked about a memorial service he had attended with other members of the force:

“As I sat in a church Saturday, and I watched students from Covenant School take flowers down to the altar, literally I’m in tears. And the other first responders, police officers, firefighters are in tears. And I look at these kids, and they look at us and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ And they believe that their classmate is going to Heaven, that they’re in a better place and they’re not hurting. The ones that was hurting the most was us.”

Almost overcome, he said that the thing he always tells new recruits, men and women alike, is “No one ever said it would be easy, but they said it would be worth it.” And then he turned to the cops: “I’m totally proud of these men.”

What if we showed that speech to boys? What if we didn’t repeatedly tell them that we want to know their feelings and that we want them to be unashamed to cry, but instead showed them that everything is possible for a man—even a straight chief of police? If you think that boys, even ones raised in liberal places and by liberal parents, aren’t deeply interested in the testimony of this kind of man, then you haven’t been around boys very much.

What if we understood that boys are born into a destiny, not a pathology?

America’s Corporate Tragedy

2023-07-21T16:17:00-04:00

I was a child soldier in the California grape strikes, my labors conducted outside the Shattuck Avenue co-op in Berkeley. There I was, maybe 7 or 8 years old, shaking a Folgers coffee can full of coins at the United Farm Workers’ table where my mother was garrisoned two to three afternoons a week. I did most of my work alongside her, but several times an hour I would do what child soldiers have always done: served in a capacity that only a very small person could. I’d go out in the parking lot and slip between cars to make sure no one was getting away without donating some coins or signing a petition. I’d pop up next to a driver’s-side window and give the can an aggressive rattle. I wasn’t Jimmy Hoffa, but I wasn’t playing any games either.

My parents were old-school leftists, born in the 1920s and children during the Great Depression. They would never, ever cross a picket line, fail to participate in a boycott, lose sight of strikers’ need for money when they weren’t getting paychecks. My parents would never suggest that poverty was caused by lack of intelligence or effort. We were not a religious family (to say the least), but I had a catechism: One worker is powerless; many workers can bring a company to its knees.

What I’m describing, of course, is a lost world, glimpsed only through history books or the memories of old people. It was a world already in the midst of death even as I was pumping fresh second-grade life into it. The great labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—of steelworkers, textile workers, railroad workers, coal miners—were in the past. Union membership peaked at 35 percent of the U.S. workforce in 1954. By the grape strike in 1965, it was already down to 28 percent. A decade and a half later, the former president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, put collective bargaining in the dustbin of history by ordering striking air-traffic controllers back to work, and when they didn’t go back, he fired them. Today only 10 percent of workers have union protections.

Unions faltered for many reasons. Occupational Safety and Health Administration laws and various regulations forced companies to conform to standards of workplace safety or face serious penalties, and most states passed a minimum (subsistence) wage. And Americans are crap socialists, forever lighting out for the territory in the spirit of rugged individualism you hear so much about on truck commercials. Many of the biggest American corporations, such as Amazon, have become world-class union busters. As Cesar Chavez himself pointed out, repeatedly, large-scale immigration makes it all but impossible to keep a union together. Desperate people don’t make the terrible journey to this country to go on strike. They do it so they can send money to their impoverished families as quickly as possible.

But the real reason union membership is so low in this country is globalization. What that word means for Americans is that corporations found the ultimate means of union busting: They sent the jobs away. Good jobs that usually paid well in a union shop, and that once upon a time allowed one parent to support a family—they got sent to China and India and Mexico and Bangladesh, places where people will work for far less money and with far fewer “demands.”

All of this means that we have two or more generations of Americans who have no idea how labor politics work, and who believe that #boycotts are as effective as the real thing.

In 2018, two Black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks on suspicion of “trespassing,” which ignited one of the many attempts to #BoycottStarbucks that have taken place over the years. It may have been the most successful of these efforts, in that it spurred the company to relax its policy regarding using the cafės and their bathrooms without buying anything. But the boycotters had no real power because nobody stopped buying Starbucks, which was apparently just a bridge too far. #Boycott the place, yes. Ankle it up the block to Peet’s? Come on. Starbucks eventually helped the boycotters out by staging a kind of self-boycott, closing thousands of stores for an afternoon of anti-bias training and thereby contributing a few hours of lost sales to the cause.

#BoycottChickFilA—initiated in reaction to the owner’s disapproval of gay marriage—began more than a decade ago, during which time the company has only grown. There are principles and there is the Spicy Chicken Sandwich, and one of them has got to give. Now there’s a counterinsurgency of Chick-fil-A #boycotters (it has something to do with “DEI = bad”), so conservatives and liberals can find common ground in cramming their mouths full of deep-fried chicken while #boycotting the company that makes it.

The same is true about #BoycottGillette and #BoycottNike. These #boycotts weren’t about labor disputes. They were about commercials and the perception that American corporations were in the pocket of “woke” leadership. They were puny and powerless. And they are the only kind of boycott that millions of young people have taken part in.

This is why the sweeping success of the boycotts of Bud Light and Target this spring has so many leftists confused and angry and hurt. Activists on the right deployed the old union tactic for frivolous causes, and it worked. Bud Light lost a quarter of its sales. Target lost more than $13 billion in market cap. All of us associate boycotts with some of the greatest fights of the past century—the Montgomery bus boycott, or the UFW boycotts and strikes. But a boycott has no inherent moral position. It’s just a strategy.

The seeds of both recent boycotts were similar, and ultimately had to do with the growing visibility of transgender people in mainstream culture. Bud Light engaged Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer, to make a 50-second promotional video released only on her Instagram account. Target’s annual display of Pride merchandise included a kind of women’s swimsuit that could disguise a penis. The display also had children’s clothes, which rang alarm bells for many conservatives.

The boycotts themselves aren’t in any larger sense meaningful. Some men started drinking different brands of beer. So what? Some Target shoppers started going to Walmart. So what? You can buy whatever you want and you can not buy whatever you want. As every episode of Mad Men proved, people have deep and powerful associations with the brands they like, associations that have much more to do with advertising than with the relative merits of the products. Forget Don Draper; listen to Mick Jagger:

He can’t be a man

’Cause he doesn’t smoke

The same cigarettes as me.

It’s a big country, and people think and feel all kinds of things.

What is meaningful are the threats of violence that quickly accompanied the boycotts. On May 24, Target announced that it would be removing some of the Pride items because of “threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being while at work.” It was a cautiously worded statement, and some couldn’t help but wonder whether Target was just weaseling a way to appease boycotters.

Then, in mid-June, Target stores in five states had to be evacuated because of bomb threats sent to local media outlets, many of which contacted the police. It seemed at first that this was the realization of the chain’s dark intimations about the far right. The truth was more complicated. A Vermont police chief said the threats included emails accusing Target of betraying the LGBTQ community. In Louisiana, a local news station reported on the email it received, which called the company “pathetic cowards who bowed to the wishes of far right extremists.”

You could tell how utterly confusing all of this is to the left by the response of the liberal press. A Washington Post opinion piece revealed that the writer was game for the fight but deeply confused about the terms of engagement: “The free market is telling right-wingers something they refuse to hear: Transgender people exist, and they buy stuff.” But Target’s huge loss of market cap wasn’t the result of transgender people boycotting. It was the result of anti-transgender people boycotting. And the literal definition of the free market is the ability of consumers to shop wherever they want. The writer was on the right side of history but the wrong side of The Wealth of Nations.

There was also a counterfactual attempt to posit that the precipitous decline in Target’s stock was unrelated to the boycotts. CNN Business published an article called “Here’s the Real Reason Target’s Stock Is Dropping,” which located a mix of factors to explain the sudden development, “including broader changes in the US economy, the possibility of a recession, and Target’s over-exposure to discretionary merchandise.” (“Hey, Smitty, short Target for me. I think on Wednesday, shoppers are going to freak out about broader changes to the U.S. economy.”)

The New Republic published an article called “The Right’s War on Brands Is Stupid and Terrifying,” which bore the characteristic traits of the form: The writer’s outrage over the transphobic response forced him to present the boycotts as a heartless attack on defenseless … corporate America. “Cross the pissbabies, and your stock price will tank, your quarterly earnings will collapse, and your executives will be fired.” I haven’t encountered rhetoric like his since the Reagan administration. If a sign of the apocalypse is The New Republic fretting about the quarterly earnings and executive job security of a company like Anheuser-Busch, it’s time to get in the bunker.

Anheuser-Busch’s CEO earns about $12 million a year and its warehouse workers—at least in Southern California, where I live, and which is one of the most expensive regions in the country—start at $18 an hour. Temp warehouse workers must be able “to work with minimal supervision and in cold temperatures” and “to perform the physical requirements of the job.” Those physical requirements include being able to spend entire shifts loading and unloading trucks in a refrigerated warehouse. The benefits package includes some inspirational language and the promise of “Free Beer!” These workers should not earn $18 an hour while their CEO, sitting in ergonomic comfort and temperature-controlled ease, earns $5,700 an hour.

As for Target, where to start? Its stores are full of fast fashion, well known to be a human-rights and environmental disaster. The differential between its CEO’s pay and his workers’ pay is similarly shameful.

The confusion about these boycotts reveals something much larger than an infirm grasp of how the strategy works, and larger, even, than the pain and fear they produced in transgender people and their allies. It’s part of something that is so pervasive among Americans, and especially young Americans, that one hardly notices it anymore: the feeling of being powerless against huge forces that they understand to exist far beyond their control, including the questionable—or outright evil—actions of giant corporations.

Last year, The Nation ran an article titled “Don’t Boycott Amazon”: “They’re too big to be hurt by individual consumer choice. Instead, hit them where it really hurts.” When I first read it, I thought the piece was very funny, but in the months since I’ve found it poignant. The writer offers a complicated strategy: “Don’t just feel bad when you buy from Amazon. Make it count by kicking in twice as much to the Amazon Labor Union, and let Amazon know why.” The strategy also involves … buying Amazon stock. Jesus wept.

You could say that this writer would be well served by brushing up on the fundamentals of microeconomics and the institutes of logic. But it was the personal example of her sense of powerlessness against the machine that got my attention. She says that she’d been avoiding shopping on Amazon but then she slipped. Her cat’s veterinarian had recommended a certain product and had sent her an Amazon link to it, which the writer used to buy it: “Immediately, I felt the anger and guilt that comes with trying to be a person of conscience in a culture of pathological convenience. And I felt foolish for imagining that ethical consumerism can do anything other than temporarily assuage those feelings.”

That’s the sign of a demoralized person, one who feels herself to have no agency at all.

We haven’t left these young people much. Many of them are so terrified about global warming that they believe that bringing a child into this world would be wrong. The retreat from religion has perhaps unburdened many of them from unfounded claims—but what has replaced it? What provides a community of shared belief, social outreach, the sense of living for some larger purpose? Nothing. What is the reliable path into the middle class, one that requires only a willingness to work hard? It’s gone. Corporate America sent it away.

The Bud Light and Target boycotts have been the most successful American-consumer boycotts in a quarter century. They made two large companies sustain serious material losses. That isn’t cause for more ennui or alienation. It’s a beacon: It can be done. And it should be done.

I said that one of the reasons that union membership had dried up is that OSHA had made workplaces safer. But as this article was closing, a 16-year-old boy was killed while working at the Mar-Jac Poultry processing plant in rural Mississippi. According to The New York Times, Duvan Tomas Perez died “after becoming ensnared in a machine he was cleaning.”

His family posted an obituary describing him as having been a student at N. R. Burger Middle School, the mission of which is to “educate all students to become productive citizens of a dynamic, global community.”

On Saturday he will be buried. The obituary noted the date of the visitation and that “a Mass of Christian Burial will follow at 11:30 a.m.,” at Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

I am the resurrection and the life;

he who believes in me, though he die,

yet shall he live, and whoever lives

and believes in me shall never die.

My mother knew Cesar Chavez, which was one of the reasons she was so committed to his cause. And now, a literal lifetime later, a Central American boy has been killed on a factory floor and his education, his future, his life ended in what must surely have been an event of overwhelming terror and pain, dying in the same pitiless place where the chickens are killed.

And do you know what the company had to say about his death? It was, of course, a “tragedy,” but it wasn’t the company’s fault: “It appears, at this point in the investigation, that this individual’s age and identity were misrepresented on the paperwork.”

Do you know what I say to that?

Strike.

Boycott.

Shut it down.

The Harry and Meghan Podcasts We’ll Never Get to Hear

2023-06-27T07:31:00-04:00

The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry content farm is facing contradictory supply and demand challenges. On the one hand, Netflix is reportedly threatening that the couple had better come up with some more shows, or $51 million comes off the table. On the other, Spotify has found that the 12 episodes of Markle’s podcast, Archetypes, were 10 episodes too many (the Serena Williams and Mariah Carey interviews were blockbusters, but after that: crickets). And—in a mutual decision! mutual!—it has cut the couple loose from their $20 million deal. Together, the news stories formed a classic example of the macroeconomic principle of too much, too little, too late.

In rapid response to the Netflix needling came word that the couple was working on a possible prequel to Great Expectations, centered on the life of a young Miss Havisham. It was exactly the kind of project you could imagine them dreaming up and an improvement, perhaps, on one of Harry’s earlier pitches, “Jude the Obscure, but in Vegas.”

We learned, too, of a private humiliation: Markle had composed a heartfelt and deeply personal letter inviting Taylor Swift on her show, but received only a rejection from her staff. News also broke of some ideas for podcasts that Harry was reportedly considering making, including talking with the pope about “religion,” and with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump about their childhood.

A list of other possible subjects, its authenticity not confirmed, was leaked by the couple or possibly by the Prince and Princess of Wales, or perhaps it was found at the end of a California writer’s garden. Here they are:

Meghan’s Content Ideas

Armed Vulnerability: How 24-Hour Private Security Can Make You More Open to Feelings

Two Girls Talking: Meghan and Gwyneth Get Real About Italian Vogue

SCOTUS SHOT CLOCK: Alan Dershowitz, Gloria Allred, and Dua Lipa Explain Why Justice Brandeis Believed in the ‘Right to Be Let Alone’

Suits Reunion, Part 1

This Candle Smells Like My Prenup

Centering Yourself When Others Are Centered on You: Finding Peace on the Red Carpet

Suits Reunion, Part 2, with Hoda Kotb

The Grandmother Was Extra

Red Scare Booked Taylor Swift, and I’m Not Taking Calls

He Spends Two Days on the Witness Stand to Talk About … Chelsy Davy?

Hoda Kotb Canceled. Unbelievable.

What Mothers of Ordinary Children Might Feel: A Four-Part Scientific Investigation

~~Amy Schumer~~ (scheduling conflict)

SCOTUS SHOT CLOCK: Kelly Clarkson and Former Princess Tessy of Luxembourg discuss Marbury v. Madison and Louis Vuitton’s Keepall 55

What I’d Really Like to Do Is a 12-Episode Single-Camera Mockumentary That Showcases My Comedy Skills

Brainstorming With Andrew Morton and Martin Bashir

Beyond Green Juice

Montecito Solutions to the Housing Crisis (It’s All About Zoning)

Cutting Out the Chelsy Davy Pages From 500,000 Copies of Spare

Suits Reunion Wrap-Up, With NBC4 News Los Angeles Anchor Colleen Williams (confirmed)

How to Talk So Matrimonial Lawyers Will Listen

The People’s Duchess?

Harry’s Content Ideas

Animals

Tall Things and Short Things Ruined by Climate Change

Slacks

Conversations With Obama (if available)

Conversations With Tony Blair (if no Obama)

Conversations With Liz Truss (confirmed)

“Mediocrity”: What Is It and How Do You Spell It?

I Think I’m Still in Love With Chelsy Davy

Are My Bed, Bath & Beyond Coupons Worthless?

I Still Have Chelsy’s Diamond Earrings

If You like Piña Coladas

Trey Parker and Matt Stone Can Bite Me

Chris Martin Acoustic Set (maybe with the pope?)

I’m Trapped

Ukraine: Where Is It?

Can a Listener Please Get Me Out of Here?

Coping With Princess Fucking Michael of Kent

I’m Tired of the Chickens

How to Write a Book By Yourself

I Want to Go Home

Harry, Meghan, and the Men Who Hate Them

2022-12-30T11:03:00-05:00

At the end of the first episode of Harry & Meghan—the five-and-a-half-hour exploration into the tender center of everlasting love; rat-bastard English people and the nasty things they get up to; heady, “Goodbye to You” defection from the British Royal Family; and the reality-show-within-a-reality-show miniseries Fifteen Million Dollar Listing—I informed my husband that henceforth he should call me “C” and I would call him “R.” This would put us in league with the glamorous young couple, and also allow us to imagine that we are characters in a Victorian novel whose names must never be revealed, not even to each other.

This project was immediately undermined, because it is just about impossible to impose a new nickname on someone you’ve known intimately for three decades, and with whom—even in the early years, back in the rent-controlled apartment with your big dreams and your red wine—you have never achieved even an ounce of the “Band on the Run”/Sentence Finishing/Pillow Talk Spectacular of the famous couple. These kids are so in love that absolutely any obstacle—bad press, frosty English sister-in-law, mean American half sister-in-law, disappointing fathers, paparazzo in a boat—only makes their love more passionate, their need to review their wedding videos and photo albums more urgent.

I had settled in to watch Episode 2 when R said that he’d rather watch hockey highlights, a preference that produced in me a stab of the kind of minor, familiar disappointment that—stab by stab, year by year—amounts to a strong and unbreakable union. In this way, Harry & Meghan, though it depicts a couple married for only four years, is a statement on marriage itself: Isn’t the institution, at its essence, a union between two people making compromises and trying to avoid their in-laws?

Ultimately, however, this is a series shaped around a single question: Can these two titled but underappreciated lovebirds transcend their bad luck and learn to find happiness in a nine-bedroom mansion located in the most exquisitely beautiful place in the world?

This is a story about resilience.

The very first scene of this Russian novel takes place at Heathrow Airport and consists of a clearly careworn Harry looking into his laptop or cellphone—the couple have been advised by “a friend” to keep a video diary, because “one day it will make sense,” and also (presumably) because B-roll doesn’t grow on trees—and telling us, “We’re here.” Before you can ask yourself where, exactly, they are (a Starbucks in Terminal 5? A laptop-charging power pole in Terminal 3?) a chyron solemnly informs you that Harry is speaking from inside the WINDSOR SUITE, LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT.

Let this be a reminder that whatever you or I think of as the better thing (the first-class lounge, the ramekin of warm nuts in business class, Boarding Group A) is merely a token in a game that the truly rich would never play. The Windsor Suite comprises eight “private lounges,” in which the champagne wishes and caviar dreams of the traveler come true, starting at $4,000 for two hours. It’s the bottle service of Departures.

This, then, will be the ongoing challenge of watching (and presumably making) Harry & Meghan: The show needs to provide a compelling enough account of their emotional injuries that we are moved by them, while also luxuriating in the unimaginable opulence in which the couple nursed their wounds. It’s been done before: Wuthering Heights; Harlequin romance novels; all 22 seasons of Kardashian content. We’ve all had our problems, but have we had them in the rolling hills and designer shopping malls of Calabasas? The poor little rich girl is a perennial. But watching Meghan Markle sitting in a grand living room while bravely explaining that as a senior royal she wore muted colors so as not to upstage anyone could try the patience of Malala. (The couple was interviewed inside someone else’s Montecito pleasure dome, now on the market for $33.5 million, presumably because they’re determined to safeguard their … privacy. Or could it be that their own $15 million spread is too down-market for the dream to endure?)

We will be introduced to a few themes in this 330-minute (plus hockey highlights) presentation, the first of which concerns what was apparently a shock to Meghan and an oversight of Harry’s: the overt racism that lingers among members of European royalty who live in castles and whose exalted status depends on convincing a populace that fairy tales are real.

At Meghan’s first Christmas lunch (an annual tradition in which the extended Royal Family gets together at Buckingham Palace before the seniors decamp for Sandringham), Princess Michael of Kent arrived wearing a white coat, on the lapel of which was affixed a large brooch, depicting a Black man wearing a golden turban, and decorated in colored gemstones. The figure was a “Blackamoor,” portrayed in a historical style celebrating the glory days of colonialism and combining exotica with the perennial theme of ownership: of the man, the continent, the gold, the gems.

Why in God’s name would this woman wear this ornament to an event where Meghan Markle was being introduced around? Let me remind you that Princess Michael of Kent is the daughter of a literal Nazi, and has spent years making viciously racist comments (“The English take the breeding of their horses and dogs more seriously than they do their children”) and then offering insulting “apologies” for them. But please don’t call her a racist, because she feels that as “a knife through the heart.” She has traveled to Africa and described in a TV interview her “adventure with these absolutely adorable, special people … I really love these people.” Moreover, “I even pretended years ago to be an African, a half-caste African, but because of my light eyes, I did not get away with it. But I dyed my hair black.” The apology for the jewelry is in a class of its own: “The brooch was a gift and had been worn many times before. Princess Michael is very sorry and distressed that it has caused offense.” In other words, everyone’s been cool about it except Meghan Markle, and this whole episode has victimized Princess Michael, who is now enduring distress.

Anyone can find themselves related to a racist, and the standard method of dealing with this fact is simplicity itself: You disavow them, you shun them, you block their phone number, and if anyone asks about them, you tell the truth. That’s not what the Windsors have done. Princess Michael lives in a grand apartment in Kensington Palace (owned by King Charles, on behalf of the nation), where, at various times, she has been neighbor to William and Kate, Princess Eugenie, and—for half a decade—Harry himself, who lived in a cottage on the palace grounds.

God knows Harry himself hasn’t been perfect. He dressed up as a Nazi (specifically as a member of the Afrika Korps—you know, Rommel and all that) for a costume party when he was 20, and he tells us during the show that it was one of the biggest mistakes of his life. But, he says earnestly, he atoned by meeting with the chief rabbi in London and traveling to Berlin to talk with a Holocaust survivor, which is apparently the Windsor Suite version of doing the work. What’s going on in that family that you need to have some champagne and me-time in Heathrow VIP and fly to Germany to learn that Nazis = Bad? Currently, Harry’s immersed in a wholehearted effort to unpack his “unconscious bias,” but that could be an endless enterprise, given the complex history of his own family.

This is the incoherence of the couple’s position. They had wanted to carve out a “progressive new role” for themselves within the Royal Family, a role they had seen as including more outreach to the Commonwealth nations, in particular the ones (principally in Africa and the Caribbean) in which the majority population consists of nonwhite people. But what could possibly be progressive about representing the crown—the entity, more or less, that perfected the concept of empire—to these countries?

In the other corner: M’s family.

As she has throughout this courtship and marriage, Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, remains a class act. In her interviews for the series, she shows grace and restraint, and an absolute determination not to sully herself or her daughter with the antics of either her ex-husband’s family or Harry’s family—two groups that seemed equally matched. You can clearly sense that having her daughter and grandchildren safely back in California, barely two hours’ drive from her home in L.A., is a tremendous comfort to her.

Meghan’s father—and the aforementioned half sister, Samantha, from his first marriage—turn out to be spectacular characters, an accurate portrait of whom would require the combined talents of William Faulkner, J. D. Vance, and the Wicked Witch of the West. The half sister turns out to be genuinely frightening, having once left Florida to show up uninvited at Kensington Palace in order to “deliver a letter” and later pitching a book on “the evolution of my biracial lens.” (She’s white, her parents are white, whatever biracial lens she possesses has been trained on her biracial half sister and the best way to make her miserable.)

The salve for having been raised among these various characters has been the intense and world-historical level of romantic love that bonds our principals and that provides the through line of our five and a half hours in their company. Have you ever been to one of those weddings where the bride and groom—although well into their 30s—each deliver a speech that includes so many cute and romantic and “Love Will Keep Us Together” moments that you don’t know where to look and your face becomes a rictus of sympathetic embarrassment for the couple, and people start kicking you under the table?

Harry & Meghan is the eternal return of that experience.

The things the British tabloids had to say about Meghan’s race are beyond the pale, and that this kind of coverage sells papers in the U.K. was reason enough for Harry to take his wife and baby and get the hell out of there. The soundness of this decision was proved a few weeks ago, when The Sun published a column by a popular television commentator named Jeremy Clarkson: “I hate her on a cellular level. At night I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

When I read that, I felt a stab of fealty and protectiveness more powerful than anything evoked by Harry & Meghan. The Sun withdrew the column and apologized for it after 20,000 complaints—but someone accepted it, someone approved it, someone published it online, and any number of people must have known that in addition to the people the column angered, there would be plenty of people who agreed with it. Who would like this kind of filth? Clarkson spells it out for us: “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.” No kidding, old man.

The very top of the column set the tone. It said that everyone had known that Harry (whom Clarkson referred to as “Harold Markle”) was a “slightly dim” but fun-loving fellow, and Meghan had “obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.”

And there it is: The idea that women will use whatever wiles they have to castrate a real man and turn him into a eunuch who lives to serve her, no matter how much humiliation she serves up. People like Clarkson—and Piers Morgan, and so many other men of their generation—are apparently experts on the treachery of women. Many are also devotees of the notion that masculinity is best defined by military service, the ultimate test of manhood. Clarkson has made popular television documentaries about great battles of the Second World War, and apparently that, too, is an act of manhood. Except that it’s not.

Here’s the truth: Harry served two tours in Afghanistan with the British Army, the second as an Apache helicopter pilot—once apparently helping rescue American servicemen under Taliban fire—and fought with great valor, very much in the shit. He was held in the affectionate, ball-breaking high regard of his fellow soldiers. This wasn’t Charles getting seasick in the navy, or Andrew forgetting how to sweat in the Falklands, or William assisting the Liverpool Coast Guard on civilian rescue sorties. This was war, and Harry survived it, came home with the usual psychic wounds of combat, and carried on with his life.

Harry is a grown man, he’s had a lot of experience with women (and “bedroom promises”), and he married the one he loved. When she was miserable, the way his own mother had been miserable, he didn’t do what his grotesque father had done—cheat on her, treat her like a broodmare, ignore her suffering; he moved her and his family far away. Considering that three of his grandmother’s four children got divorced, he seems to have a better idea of what constitutes marital obligation than most of his in-house role models.

Quit while you’re ahead! you want to yell at the television screen—but they can’t. These two burn through money at a fantastic rate, and the only thing that reliably sells is their own story, which is getting pretty threadbare. It’s so familiar to us by now that we could tell it ourselves.

But we probably could never tell it the way they do, could never cast the fairy-tale spell that they can. We could never convince a vast audience that the paper moon hanging over the cardboard sea is real—if only you can believe in it.

In the first episode, we see a video diary of Meghan standing on an endless lawn, in the blue shadows of early evening, the sky beyond turning the saturated orange and pink of a color-enhanced postcard of the original California dream. She’s wearing a striped apron and a pair of gardening gloves, and she’s holding a handful of blush-colored roses. In the weary tones of Every Mom, she tells us in a near whisper, “Both the babies are down.” It’s a “nice, calm night.”

For a moment, we take it all in: the huge lawn, the sunset, the rose garden in which not a single bloom is marred by spider mites or overwatering or bad attitude. Her voice lowers to an actual whisper and here she is, the picture of a pretty wife and mother, her children sleeping and her attention turned to simple abundance: “Just picking some roses.”

The Petulant King

2022-11-12T07:00:00-05:00

A difficult labor—30 hours!—and someone has to make the terrible decision. Right there in a Buckingham Palace bedroom, with mother and child etherized upon the table, deft hands make the cut, the unwilling baby is tugged out—and it’s done.

A boy! Clever girl.

To sleep, to sleep, to sleep.

Posted on the gates of the palace, a handwritten announcement:

Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth Duchess of Edinburgh was safely delivered of a Prince at 9.14 o’clock this evening. Her Royal Highness and the infant Prince are both well.

They are both children of empire, princess and prince, though as they lie there recovering, that empire is receding, the long, melancholy withdrawing roar audible even above the cheers of the crowds outside the palace.

They have been chosen for the same fate, but only one at a time can live it out. This will at once draw them together and complicate what will be a strange and mutually disappointing relationship. In just three years, Elizabeth will become the 25-year-old Queen of the United Kingdom, but Charles won’t be King until he’s 73. What must it be like to watch yourself fade into a middle-aged man and then an old one, but still your life’s work has not begun? He is only hours old, and at the very start of the world’s longest apprenticeship.

When he finally became King in September, not even a week passed before the tabloids were talking about his poor hands looking as red as lobster claws, perhaps because never before had so many people wanted to shake them. Things were not going perfectly! But they were going well. There was the hand-shaking—undertaken, however painfully, with his mother’s famous commitment to duty—and there was the first speech to his people, with him sitting in Buckingham Palace doling out sinecures to all the good little kittens (Queen Consort for Camilla; Princess of Wales for well-behaved Kate; sweet fuck all for Meghan, who had dragged Harry off to the non-realm of California). Had he struck the right note when he referred to the late Queen as “my darling mama” rather than “my mother”? Everything he’d waited so long to do was happening so quickly.

But it was during a hop to Northern Ireland that the wheels came off the carriage, and Charles lost his cool. While signing the visitors’ book at Hillsborough Castle, he wrote down the wrong date, was quietly informed by Camilla that the pen was leaking, and seethed: “I can’t bear this bloody thing! … Every stinking time!”

There was something a little Fawlty Towers about the scene, and it gestured toward the fact that the English monarchy seemed to be downsizing. Charles’s mother had survived the Battle of Britain; he couldn’t survive a guest book.

But we’re ahead of ourselves! It’s Elizabeth who’s got to get out of that birthing bed and take the first shaky steps down the long corridors. The health of her father, George VI, is failing. Already, she has been performing some of his duties. Once she takes the throne, she’ll head off on many, many royal tours—some months long—leaving Charles, who will spend his childhood pining for her, behind.

During the first half of her reign, Elizabeth will preside—in her wholly symbolic, yet powerful way—over the final dismantling of the empire. She will be the last face of a centuries-long fiction of ownership, in which human beings, gold, precious gems, rubber—anything that could be chained up, prized from the Earth, grabbed from villages and palaces, or literally cut out of rock—was transformed into property of the British empire or its NGO, the unfathomably brutal East India Company.

Everything you saw at the Queen’s funeral—the sheer size of the regiments, their ornamental uniforms, the perfection of their marching, all of it so unbelievably out of step with modern, cash-strapped Britain—was a proud reminder of the days when Britain was the most powerful nation in the world, a place that could be hyped up in pubs and snooker halls the way football teams are now:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never will be slaves.

Consider the Queen’s—now the King’s—scepter, which figured so prominently in the service. What is that massive, glittering, unreal-seeming jewel at the top? The Great Star of Africa, one of many diamonds relocated from South Africa to the Crown’s vast holdings.

You would assume that Elizabeth would be despised in Britain’s former colonies—she was, after all, the great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, the first empress of India. But Elizabeth was admired by millions of people in many of those former colonies, from the earliest years of her reign to the hour of her death. Even now, when we view so much of world history through the lens of colonization and its devastations, the Queen is mourned.

[Read: What the Queen’s funeral taught me about Britain]

Queen Elizabeth II was formal, interested, uncomplaining, and always respectful. Her warehouse’s worth of matching coats and whimsical hats were an aspect of that respect. It didn’t matter if she had arrived for a tour of your rat-extermination business in Manchester; she was dressed as if attending a new exhibit at the National Gallery. She seemed to understand that her fate and that of the rat exterminators were deeply bound together—which they were. She didn’t really serve at the pleasure of God and the House of Windsor; she served at the pleasure of the exterminators and the takeaway-shop owners and the Daily Mail.

Once the sun had set on the British empire, the Queen began her more complicated mission, which was forming a coherent narrative of “England” and “Englishness” in the face of the great disrupter: 25 years of massive immigration. In 1997, Prime Minister Tony Blair began relaxing immigration laws in hopes of creating an England imbued with the best traditions of a range of cultures, an England that was no longer fortified against the world but wide open to it, an oasis of people eating fusion cuisine and voting Labour.

In a way it’s sort of worked, as any episode of The Great British Bake Off attests. To watch contestants from every racial, ethnic, and religious background tell the hosts the secret ingredient in “me gran’s sponge” from inside a giant white tent pitched on the green lawns of a country house in Berkshire is to see “England” smacked down to a set of consumer preferences: Emma Bridgewater, strings of fluttering Union Jacks, cake.

But the old lessons of empire were not lost on the newcomers, a few of whom brought to England the same thing that England had once brought them: contemptuous disregard of the religion, customs, habits, traditions, and shared beliefs of the native population. And that’s how you get Sharia councils in modern England.

It fell to Elizabeth—older daughter of a man who never wanted or expected to be King, a woman with many interests of her own that she would much rather have pursued—to try to maintain the fantasy of a continuous England that could absorb within it wildly different cultures. What she relied upon was the West. The Englishmen who caused so much devastation around the world did not bring any miracles with them; they brought only bloodshed and cruelty and plunder, the same forces that had ruled the world since the beginning. But by the time of Elizabeth’s reign, England understood itself as a Western nation, identifiable by its commitment to individual rights, equality, and self-determination. These values created the free world, and to the very limited extent that a Queen can stand for them—the Queen of a country with such a terrible imperial history—she was determined to do so.

Elizabeth never “celebrated” multiculturalism in the smarmy, meaningless way of college presidents or HR functionaries. But she often acknowledged how Britain was changing, never once disparaged it, and found within it a plausible case for continuity. What she did was locate—or possibly create—a unifying culture of Englishness as defined by the values of the Blitz: courage, calm, resolve.

[Read: No one performed Britishness better than Her Majesty]

Here she is just a couple of years ago (at 93!) giving a televised address about COVID‑19: “I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it. I hope in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any. That the attributes of self-discipline; of quiet, good-humored resolve; and of fellow feeling still characterize this country. The pride in who we are is not a part of our past; it defines our present and our future.”

Well. Goddamn.

It was COVID, not war. She was just asking her subjects to wear a mask and watch the telly. But it sounded like a call to greatness.

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

It was COVID, but it was also the Battle of Britain and Agincourt and all of it. Elizabeth spoke of Englishness and its enduring character, not of racial composition or traditional custom. She—of all people—said England’s greatness wasn’t in its past. It lies in its present and its future.

And now this whole delicate operation of creating a Britain in which the old and the new don’t merely coexist, or inform each other, but are together part of a cohesive narrative of greatness, in which the monarch is both the defender of the Church of England and the symbolic leader of a country with 3 million Muslims—all of this has fallen to … Charles?

Weak, selfish, petulant Charles?

Only in fairy tales does it make sense to weep for a prince. That said, Charles’s early years were sorrowful. He longed to be with his mother, but she was often away. One newsreel of the little boy captured him immaculately dressed, standing trustingly at his grandmother’s side, looking anxiously down a train platform for any sign of his approaching mother. Once there, Elizabeth greeted her mother, and then—as an afterthought, almost—bent down neatly, pressed a light kiss on her child’s head, and went about her ceremonial duties. Charles stared up at her in a bemused way, as though the months-long dream of “mother” had not really suggested this slender, preoccupied adult.

A word so often applied to Charles in his early years that you might have assumed it was a code word for gay—which he is not—was sensitive. There is nothing his ghastly father wanted less than a sensitive son, which only redoubled his certainty that Charles had to attend Prince Philip’s own brutal, “make a man of you” Scottish boarding school, Gordonstoun, from which Charles begged to be rescued and where he complained of serious bullying. What does bullying mean in the context of a mid-century, Scottish, all-male boarding school? It means, I would imagine, that it was a traumatic experience in a variety of ways. (Gordonstoun is under investigation by the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry for accusations of physical and sexual abuse of students from the 1960s to the 2010s.)

He did the required military duty (tangling his legs in the rigging on his first parachuting exercise, getting seasick on naval ships, and banging his head on low doorways belowdecks), and after that … the long, long wait, filled with the eccentric preoccupations of a country gentleman.

The aspect of Charles’s character that makes him particularly unsuited to being King is that he’s weak. How many men in the history of the world have managed to have a wife and a mistress without damn near burning down civilization? In his first address to the nation, he sounded less like he was assuming the throne of England than throwing his hat into the Pennsylvania Senate race. He promised to respect people no matter their heritage and beliefs and to uphold “constitutional principles” (well, that’s a relief).

More than anything, what Elizabeth was able to do, for an astonishing 70 years, that her feckless son will not be able to do was prevent a very large bill from coming due. She was allowed to keep the Great Star of Africa and the palaces and the untold billions of pounds because she was Elizabeth.

But make no mistake, Charles has been handed an England in which a growing percentage of the population has no inclination to continue making nice with the Crown. After the racial-justice protests of 2020, statues of English slavers were taken down, one famously stomped by a mob. This is not an era of reconciliation and bygones being bygones. This is an era of reparations. A lot of people around the world don’t want to “celebrate diversity,” a concept wholly born of the dying West. They want their treasures back, and they know where to find them.

Most of them were stolen, and in the most sadistic way possible. Will Charles—Boomer Zero—be able to keep hold not merely of the things but of the idea of England that his mother helped create?

Doubtful.

This article appears in the December 2022 print edition with the headline “The Petulant King.”

America’s Fire Sale: Get Some Free Speech While You Can

2022-08-23T06:00:00-04:00

Two years ago, a friend emailed me: Some writers were composing an open letter to appear in Harper’s; it would address the growing threats to freedom of expression in this country. Did I want to read and possibly sign it? I read it and said to myself, This is going to be a shitstorm of biblical proportions, and wrote to my friend, “In.”

Of course I was in. I have shown up for free expression when it was a major cause of the left, and I show up for it now that it has become a cause of the right. Freedom doesn’t belong to a political party, and it’s not the tool of the powerful; it’s the tool of the powerless.

The letter came out, and in the small, bitter, vengeful worlds of journalism and publishing—we’re a fun crowd—it was a festival of freedom of expression, a gathering of like-minded antagonists from the mighty to the dweeby. Someone named Richard Kim, who was then the enterprise director of HuffPost, tweeted (enterprisingly), “Okay, I did not sign THE LETTER when I was asked 9 days ago because I could see in 90 seconds that it was fatuous, self-important drivel.” (It was the I also got into Cornell of tweets: Of course I think it’s gross, but I want you to know I was asked.)

[Eliot A. Cohen: A tale of two letters]

Later in the week, about 150 writers and academics signed an open letter that appeared on Substack, “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” They expressed a widely held, emerging idea about freedom of expression, which is that it cannot be considered without a coequal consideration of the issue of power. How could the Harper’s signers have a rational discussion about free speech without a consideration of “the marginalized voices [who] have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing”? The Substack writers observed that “Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ people—particularly Black and trans people—can now critique elites publicly and hold them accountable socially, and this was the signers’ real concern.”

The letter said that “the intellectual freedom of cis white intellectuals has never been under threat en masse” (To the memory hole, Mr. Solzhenitsyn!), and characterized the Harper’s signers as a group of writers that has “never faced serious consequences—only momentary discomfort.”

A week ago, one of Harper’s signers, Salman Rushdie, experienced some of that momentary discomfort when he was nearly eviscerated on a sun-dappled Friday morning at the Chautauqua Institution. Rushdie signed the Harper’s letter, and I wondered why its critics hadn’t allowed themselves a little carve-out where he was concerned, given that (a) he has been the most persecuted writer in the world for the past 30 years, and (b) it would be a bad look if someone tried to collect the $3 million bounty on his head in relative proximity to the “never faced serious consequences” claim.

Soon after the attack, another writer who had signed the Harper’s letter, J. K. Rowling, tweeted out the news about Rushdie, calling it “horrifying,” and in short order received a serious death threat. A Twitter account called @MeerAsifAziz1—which had earlier praised the supreme leader of Iran and posted about the possible destruction of Israel, and that morning had called Rushdie’s attacker a “revolutionary”—replied to Rowling: “Don’t worry you are next.”

[Graeme Wood: Salman Rushdie and the cult of offense]

@MeerAsifAziz1 does not strike one as the kind of person dedicated to trans rights, so what could he possibly have against Rowling? Gryffindor scarf on back order? Theme-park Butterbeer just nasty? I think the impulse was probably more in line with a union action—whenever writers are being threatened and attacked, you can count on jihadist solidarity.

The most important tweet was posted by PEN America, the organization that, for 100 years, has protected writers’ freedom of expression: “We can think of no comparable incident of a public attack on a literary writer on American soil.” But lately PEN has had to resist pressure from some of its members to abandon its mission. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015, the organization announced that it would be conferring a special award for courage on the survivors. This distressed 250 of its members, who signed a shameful open letter (if you’re a writer and haven’t signed an open letter, you need to call your agent). They said they were not clear—not clear at all—on the “criteria” used in making the decision to confer the prize.

I think the criteria probably had to do with surviving a massacre that left their colleagues’ brains and blood pooled on the office floor, and the day after that announcing they would put out the next week’s issue on time.

The letter chided the decision makers for forgetting that “the inequities between the person holding the pen and the subject fixed on paper by that pen cannot, and must not, be ignored.” I’m a little more concerned with the person holding the knife.

PEN still gave the award to Charlie Hebdo—all honor to them. But some members who’d opposed it made their displeasure known in a stunning way: They didn’t go to the gala. No dinner jacket, no tuna tartare at the Museum of Natural History, no making or enjoying of writerly witticisms. Just a bit of leftover prime beef, microwaved and eaten—to make the sacrifice as bitter as possible—off a TV tray.

One writer who signed the Harper’s letter was not just a member of PEN America; she was—and is—one of its trustees: Jennifer Finney Boylan. But on publication day, she freaked out. With trembling hands, she typed her own ransom note:

I did not know who else had signed that letter. I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company. The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.

Frederick Douglass said, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” Boylan’s version: I’ll tell you what I believe if you tell me who else believes it.

Malcolm Gladwell pointed out the absurdity of her position by tweeting, “I signed the Harpers letter because there were lots of people who also signed the Harpers letter whose views I disagreed with. I thought that was the point of the Harpers letter.”

Boylan’s having so publicly distanced herself from the letter put her in a bit of a pickle when Rushdie was attacked. How to get in on the action without alluding to her own abandonment of him? She found a way, retweeting the announcement of a PEN event to be held in solidarity with the writer: PEN members would read from his work at an event held on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Above the announcement, she wrote, with apparently zero self-reflection, “Show Up for Salman.”

[Randy Boyagoda: To support Salman Rushdie, just read him]

I did not see her name on the list of writers who were to read from his work at the event, but the announcement said the list was “still in formation.” Boylan often comes to New York for PEN events, and I did wonder if she might go and read from his work; that would have been courageous, and it would certainly cancel out her earlier action.

But this suspenseful interlude was cut short the day before the event, when she tweeted, “I’m off to my cousin’s house in Ireland tomorrow.”

After a few days in the country, she tweeted—in the spirit of merriment, but not, apparently, of self-knowledge—“‘Boylan,’ btw, in Irish, means ‘oath breaker’ or ‘liar.’”

The concept of free speech evolved in the West for 2,000 years, beginning with the Athenians (although not without a few setbacks, such as the death of Socrates). But America was the first country in history to enshrine a formal, legal, and enforceable protection for free expression, ensuring that people have the right to speak no matter who’s pissed off or how powerful they are.

Whenever a society collapses in on itself, free speech is the first thing to go. That’s how you know we’re in the process of closing up shop. Our legal protections remain in place—that’s why so many of us were able to smack the Trump piñata to such effect—but the culture of free speech is eroding every day. Ask an Oberlin student—fresh outta Shaker Heights, coming in hot, with a heart as big as all outdoors and a 3 in AP Bio—to tell you what speech is acceptable, and she’ll tell you that it’s speech that doesn’t hurt the feelings of anyone belonging to a protected class.

And here we are, running out the clock on the American epilogue. The people on the far right are dangerous lunatics and millions on even the center left want to rewrite the genetic code.

If you don’t want to stick around for the fire sale (The Federalist Papers! “Letter From Birmingham Jail”! Everything must go!) and you’re not too eager to get knifed on a Friday morning because of something you said, you might want to look into relocating to one of the other countries shaped by the principles of the American Revolution. They aren’t hard to find. Just go to Google and type in the free world.

Where Do the Democrats Find These Guys?

2022-08-02T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 1:30 p.m. ET on August 3, 2022

The old saying is “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.” But that’s not quite true. Democrats wait for a dream candidate to come along—a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama—and they go out of their minds with excitement and ardor. But when they don’t find one, they kiss a frog and wait to see what happens. Then they stand at the altar wondering what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into, the church doors swing open, and Michael Dukakis walks down the aisle.

It’s a pattern I’ve watched Democrats enact my whole life: Terrible Candidate/Important Election. It’s the opposite of a Hail Mary pass. It’s an Act of Contrition. Bless me, father, for I have sinned: I played John Kerry at wide receiver.

So here we are, with Donald Trump rattling his cage and Ron DeSantis emerging as Florida’s Duke of Wellington. Who knows what other rough beast could be slouching toward Iowa to be caucused. And Democrats? They’ve got a good man who’s a terrible candidate, and getting worse by the week.

My first experience with TC/IE took place when I was 10. The big one: 1972, McGovern versus Nixon. I grew up in Berkeley, California, and I never once saw a Nixon bumper sticker; every single car, including our own, had a McGovern sticker. He was going to be an excellent president because he was going to stop the war in Vietnam. One afternoon, looking out the car window at a sea of McGovern signs, I asked my mother if she thought Nixon would get any votes at all, and she said, “Oh, honey, he’s going to win.”

What? I was in a fifth-grade blue bubble and hadn’t even known it.

I know my mother was trying to prepare me, but how do you prepare a 10-year-old for Election Night, 1972? Even my own parents seemed unprepared for Nixon to carpet-bomb 49 states. I was allowed to stay up to watch the results come in. “Oof,” my father said every time another state went to Nixon. “Oof” or “A body blow.” Wednesday would be a day of healing.

As bad as the defeat was, it came with a moral clarity—only strengthened over the decades—that that war was a travesty. It made the Iraq War look like the landing at Normandy. It seemed to me, in my childish apprehension of things, that this was what it meant to be a Democrat: that even in loss you had the consolation of knowing that your candidate was right and just, and that however small your part had been, you had aligned yourself with the thrilling possibility of justice.

Travel with me now to a Long Island living room, where 12 orders of kung pao chicken are slowly congealing and Walter Mondale is getting shellacked. It was the first election I was old enough to vote in, and I’d gone back to my parents’ town to watch the outcome. Mondale did not run on ending a terrible war. He ran on a nuclear freeze, the Equal Rights Amendment, and cutting the deficit. Feel the excitement? Ronald Reagan was 17 years older than Mondale, but he always looked fantastic. You’d spend hours fuming about all the rat-bastard things he was doing to the country, and then catch a glimpse of him on television and think, But for some reason, I kind of like that guy.

Mondale barely squeaked out a win in his home state of Minnesota. It wasn’t exactly heartbreaking to watch him lose; it was mostly a sense of confusion. Where did they find this guy? The prospect of waiting up to watch Mondale give a concession speech was heinous; his whole campaign had been a concession speech. Everyone left early; no one took home any kung pao chicken.

One thing was very clear to me after that election: What we needed was charisma. What we got was Michael Dukakis.

Dukakis said he was going to “rekindle the American spirit of invention and daring,” but he wasn’t a rekindling kind of guy; he was a let’s make sure this campfire is fully doused kind of guy. He said he would save us from “the limited ambitions” of the Reagan administration. The whole problem with the Reagan administration was that its ambitions were limitless. He was probably hindered by the dumbest fact about American politics: We usually choose the taller guy, and Dukakis was 5 foot 8.

Exciting interlude: Bill Clinton! Finally, some relief. Sex appeal, competence, Fleetwood Mac, and two terms. Also the 1994 crime bill, which accelerated mass incarceration, so—like every single president before and after—he left a complicated record.

John Kerry. That was the election when I finally realized that either the Democratic Party was high or I was. You could not imagine a more unelectable person. Kerry came back from a four-month hitch in Vietnam convinced that American war crimes were widespread, largely covered up, and encouraged by the officers who sent men into battle. He became the spokesman for a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and in a Senate hearing, he described a recent meeting in which members talked about things that they had done: “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.” He said that the men sent to Vietnam had been given the chance to die for the “biggest nothing in history.” The next day he took part in the most powerful anti-war protest of that era, and perhaps of any era, in which veterans stood outside the Capitol and hurled their medals and service ribbons back at the government that had awarded them. One man threw his cane over the fence.

It was one of many turning points in the anti-war movement. But it came with a steep cost, perhaps steeper than Kerry realized. When he testified, there were still American POWs in Vietnam. He implied that war crimes weren’t rare and terrible events but everyday occurrences. He dishonored 2.5 million service members. No one who does that can ever become commander in chief.

I mean, isn’t that freaking obvious?

The one good thing about Kerry was that he represented rock bottom. It would be impossible to nominate another candidate so clearly bound to fail as John Kerry.

I speak too soon.

Hillary Clinton was the subject of decades of intense and volatile rage, much of which was directed at her by misogynists and lunatics. But to paraphrase Michael Jordan, misogynists and lunatics vote, too.

When she delivered her concession speech the day after the election—she’d had to pull herself together the night before—she seemed to be in a state of shock, and to feel somewhat culpable for what had happened to America. (Not an entirely misplaced emotion; there are at least 10 nonstops a day from New York to Michigan.)

In the speech, she repeated one of the big lines of her campaign: that someday we would elect a woman president and break “the tallest, hardest glass ceiling.” Did she honestly think that a rich white woman who had gone to Wellesley and Yale would have an inherently harder time becoming president than any Black man in America?

She did. The problem with Hillary Clinton’s campaign was Hillary Clinton.

Joe Biden announced his first presidential campaign in June 1987, a few weeks before my first wedding. We both experienced a long streak of summer richness and promise, but by September the honeymoons were over. I had traded the bridal registry at B. Altman’s for a classroom in Metairie, Louisiana, and five sections of high-school English; Biden’s campaign had blown up in an astonishing plagiarism scandal.

In an early primary debate, Biden had lifted—almost word for word—a speech off a British Labour politician named Neil Kinnock. This included telling the audience that he was the first person in his family to go to college in “a thousand generations” (taking the lineage back to Cro-Magnon Biden), and that he came from a family of coal miners. That no one in his family had worked in a mine and that there were college graduates on his mother’s side of the family were the least of his problems. Someone working for his rival for the nomination, Dukakis (remember him?), sent reporters a tape of the two men making their almost identical speeches, and the scandal kept growing from there.

It turned out that, in various speeches, Biden had lifted passages from Robert F. Kennedy and at least one line from John F. Kennedy (and not an obscure one, a greatest hit: “Each generation of Americans has been summoned,” which is the kind of thing you can say when you yourself have been summoned to defend the free world, not to take a summer lifeguard job in Delaware). He’d also lifted lines from some of Hubert Humphrey’s speeches. In that pre-internet era, it took a few days for reporters to find all of these quotations, but then there was a grand finale: In law school, he’d been assigned to write a 15-page paper, five pages of which turned out to have been plagiarized. He then held a press conference.

The goal of the press conference was to clear all of this up, and the effect of the press conference was to make viewers think that Joe Biden was a big dummy: “I’ve done some dumb things, and I’ll do some dumb things again. I’ve done some dumb things as a senator. I’ve done some dumb things as a lawyer. So, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve done something very dumb.” To my knowledge, it’s the only instance of a “Dumber days ahead” speech, and on that point alone it’s engaging. What Biden wanted America to know was that, yes, of course, he was a doer of dumb things, but he was basically a nice guy.

His approach to the problem was to address not the question of why he’d done these things, but rather how he’d done them. On the law-school paper: “I took the cases out of the Law Review article and the footnotes out of the Law Review article—and I honestly thought what I was doing was the right way of doing it—and the representation of what the cases said from the Law Review article. And then at the end of the Law Review article when they set out and said, ‘This is what all this means,’ I wrote that in my paper—and I footnoted it! I footnoted the Law Review article! I used, in a 15-page paper, I used five pages”—he holds his hand up, fingers splayed: five—“of the Law Review article.” He seemed to genuinely believe that this one footnote was a mark in his favor, not the clue that led the reader straight to the article he’d copied.

Regarding his speeches, he wanted the reporters to understand that “I don’t write speeches; I do them.”

Huh?

“I do them on the backs of envelopes,” he said, and for a moment you thought you might be about to board a train hurtling toward Gettysburg, but instead he explained the series of events that led to his lifting Neil Kinnock’s speech for his closing argument in the debate.

He said that the day before the debate, he’d realized that “I didn’t have a close.” He said, “Usually what I do, as you’ve observed, is I wait for the debate to go on and see where the debate takes us. So, to make an appropriate close, not some canned thing.” This would seem to obviate the need for coming up with a close, but when he got to Iowa, the need for one was pressing. “So I’m getting in the car, and there’s a young man named David Wilhelm who runs my campaign. And I said, ‘David, I don’t have a close.’ He says, ‘Well, we prepared you seven or eight closes!’ And I said, ‘I don’t agree with any of ’em. They don’t have any feeling to ’em. And he says, ‘Well, why don’t you do what you did on the Kinnock thing; that expresses what you mean.’ And I said, ‘You’re right!’ And I said, ‘Thinking about it—that applies to me!’ And that’s honest to God what happened—we were riding over in the van. And I mean I said that to my—” Here he seems to be getting ready to say “I said that to myself,” but then catches himself. “I mean I said that to him.”

It is at this point that we get the full Biden, because he turns to the side and asks an aide, “Was he in the van?” There’s a beat, presumably long enough for some panicked underling to mime Fuck if I know! And then Biden says, “I think he was.”

The entire point of this illustration is to tell us about a particular conversation with a particular person in a particular van, and a sentence later he tells us he doesn’t know if that person was even in the van. But God love him, he kind of sells it.

Much of the criticism lately of President Biden’s apparent senescence is based on something that happens to many old people: Age is determined to be the cause of some peculiar habit of behavior or thought, when in fact that habit has been with the person throughout his life. A lot of what people are calling the “gaffes” of old age are just Joe Biden. He’s a bullshitter, a teller of tall tales. His method has always been to give informal speeches that are discursive, anecdote-laden, in which the editing process takes place in real time. His classic move is to turn a forensic intelligence on the unimportant part of a situation and then to gloss over—or skip entirely—the main point. Barack Obama is said to have observed that it’s impossible to overestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up, and in large part that has to do with the endless, improvisational talking. But that gabbing is also the reason he was so effective at getting people to consider changing their votes when he was a senator and then the vice president. He doesn’t use verbal communication as a means of transmitting facts. He uses it to bond with someone. Talking is a kind of lubricant, easing people along to a new point of view—at the very, very least, you know that if you agree to change your vote, he might stop talking. He doesn’t hold grudges, he doesn’t shit-talk, and he tends to see the best in others.

It’s just that, as he ages, the whole system is slowing down, and his ability to bounce his way through gaffes and to revise stories in the midst of telling them (“Was he in the van? I think he was”) is diminishing. In the 1987 press conference, you can watch him remember that Anwar Sadat is dead halfway through saying the words “Anwar Sadat,” but he finesses it and keeps on rolling.

If Joe Biden had been the nominee in 2016 instead of Hillary Clinton, Trump would never have been elected. People didn’t hate Joe Biden back then. But now, for a dozen reasons—many of them not his fault—regard for him has plummeted.

In the early decades of the last century, a Viennese surgeon named Eugen Steinach claimed that he could restore the virility of old men by grafting tissue from monkey glands onto their testes. The procedure was later modified to one that left the animal kingdom undisturbed and was essentially just a partial vasectomy. Sigmund Freud underwent the procedure, as did William Butler Yeats (in Ireland it earned him the nickname “The Gland Old Man”). They both raved about the results, which in and of itself is testament to the fantastical imaginings of old men.

Old men dream of youth and often embarrass themselves in its pursuit. Many younger people in the Democratic Party seem to think Joe Biden’s already out the door. Gavin Newsom isn’t just measuring for curtains; he’s packing the U-Haul. But Biden’s never been a quitter, and his great optimism has helped him survive the tragedies that have befallen him. He very well might want to run again, which would be a disaster.

In the middle of his second term, Barack Obama invited Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the White House for lunch. His plan was to gently suggest the possibility of her retiring before he left office, so that there would be no chance of her seat going to a conservative. She was then 80 and had had cancer four times. Nothing doing. She stayed right where she was, and soon enough we got Amy Coney Barrett.

Have you ever had to take the keys away from an old relative? It’s not easy. Sometimes you give up the fight to keep the peace. And then you hope against hope that everything will be all right.

This article originally stated that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 85 and had had cancer five times when she had lunch with Barack Obama. She was 80 and had had cancer four times.

Hell Yeah, Tom Cruise

2022-07-04T07:00:00-04:00

Top Gun came out in the spring of 1986, a movie so big, so wall-to-wall, so resistance-is-futile that you just had to coexist with the damn thing until it finally went away. Now—like one of those flowers that comes into bloom only once every 40 years—it’s back.

Apparently Paramount had been after Tom Cruise to make a sequel before the original even opened, which is no surprise. In the 1980s studio executives began to operate more like hedge-fund managers, strip-mining any possible asset in a movie by making sequel after sequel until the thing was finally taken off life support. We can blame Francis Ford Coppola for that; in the 1970s he did the stunning and unrepeatable thing of making one of the greatest American movies of all time—and then making a sequel that was even better. In the ’80s Hollywood tweaked this golden formula by making horrible movies and then a series of progressively worse sequels (unintentionally giving birth to the greatest title in movie history: Rambo: First Blood Part II).

And now, after all these years: Top Gun: First Blood Part II. Or, as it is formally known, Top Gun: Maverick.

I kind of wanted to see it.

I was 24 when Top Gun came out, and everyone in my generation saw it. The references and proto-memes and Academy Award callbacks have been part of my entire adult life. But I never saw it. In fact, the first time I saw the trailer, I thought, There’s no way in hell I’ll ever see that movie. This was partly because it looked like it was going to be really loud, and partly because it looked like there would be a lot of very boring parts. But there was something else—I flinched when I saw that rollicking, need-for-speed trailer.

But I wanted to see the new one, because it seemed like some kind of generational marker. I’m exactly the same age as Tom Cruise (in dog years, not in comparative physical preservation) and Top Gun was, even more than Risky Business, the role that started it all. I had a nostalgic feeling about the whole thing—I mean about Tom Cruise, not so much about this movie. I would go! But first I would have to get over 36 years of stubbornness and watch the original, so I would know what long-ago setups were being paid off.

It took 45 seconds for me to realize why I’d responded so strongly to that trailer. All was revealed in the opening words that appeared on the screen:

On March 3, 1969 the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to insure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world.

They succeeded.

Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School. The flyers call it [wait for it] TOP GUN

I knew why I’d flinched at those glorified planes. Because Jerry Bruckheimer and Tom Cruise can call the airplanes at the center of the franchise whatever they want—F-14s, Tomcats—but I knew what they were: killing machines.

In 1969, the United States military was not interested in reviving any lost arts. It was interested in continuing what would come to be known as “the longest and heaviest aerial bombardment in history,” one that involved America dropping more bombs on the impoverished country of Vietnam—and on the equally impoverished nations of Laos and Cambodia—than were dropped during the entirety of the Second World War.

In 1986, the questions and sorrows of Vietnam were still very much unresolved. Maya Lin’s monument to the American dead had opened on the National Mall just four years earlier. I lived in Washington at the time, and I remember visiting that extraordinary place several times in those early years. It was not like any other monument, because it was a living place, alive with the sobs of family members looking for the names of their sons, fathers, brothers, husbands. There were young men, looking for the names of friends they’d watched die. People were praying; people were holding their hands against names. Thirty percent of the men who died in that monstrous war had been drafted, sent against their will and cut down before their lives had really begun.

So, 45 seconds in, I realized what Top Gun really was: propaganda. Never again tell me you can’t make a conservative movie in Hollywood. After its release there was a 500 percent increase in applications to the Navy’s flight program.

Here’s the story. (Spoiler alert for any other Rip Van Winkles out there.) Top Gun is about a romantic friendship between two men, Maverick (Cruise) and Goose (Anthony Edwards), which is strengthened when they are both selected for Top Gun training at the base in Miramar, California. Goose has a wife, a son, a home. Maverick has no one: “You’re the only family I’ve got,” he tells Goose. Cruise’s official love interest in the film, Kelly McGillis, lumbers in and out, and watching these two fulfill their contractual duties of performing sexual attraction to each other is embarrassing. We want to see Maverick with Goose.

The movie shouldn’t have much dramatic tension. America was not at war at the time, and almost all of the (endless, loud, super-boring) flying scenes are merely training exercises. But Tom Cruise takes hold of that movie and doesn’t let go; whatever deal with the gods he’s made, when he wants to glue you down in your seat, he does it with a single glance.

And then Goose is killed, and in a way that might have been Maverick’s fault. Maverick’s plane goes into a death spin over the ocean, he can’t pull out of it, and both men eject from the plane, but Goose hits the canopy. The most powerful and true scene in the movie is of Maverick cradling Goose’s body in the water as a rescuer yells that he has to let go to be saved. (I don’t mean true in the sense of the mechanics of the scene. I mean true in the sense of Cruise’s love for Goose being fully realized, both emotionally and physically.)

We next see Cruise in the hospital, standing over a sink in his briefs, splashing water on his face after shaving. His commanding officer comes in to buck him up in one of those war-movie scenes where the CO suddenly becomes paternal and kind, so that he can get the kid back to the front: “You fly jets long enough, something like this happens.”

When a person tells you something like this, you probably want to have your clothes on, but this is Top Gun.

“My squad in Vietnam, we lost eight of 18 aircraft,” the officer tells him quietly. “10 men.”

“First one dies, you die too,” the officer says. “But there will be others. You can count on it.”

The CO runs his hand lingeringly over Cruise’s bare back. “You gotta let ’em go.” (This thing may have nothing real to say about the lost art of aerial combat, but it’s a gorgeous illustration of the lost art of suppressed homoeroticism.)

In Freudian terms, Maverick has become impotent, his crisis of manhood rendering him unable to fly. But it turns out that doesn’t matter, because—get this—he already has enough credits to graduate. (Imagine being the screenwriter forced to jimmy the plot by introducing this sterling bit of business.) He reluctantly shows up at graduation, and it’s a good thing he does, because the champagne has no sooner popped than an instructor announces, “Some of you have to depart immediately. We have a crisis situation.”

A crisis? In San Diego? Volleyball net torn? Surf too gnarly? No, the “crisis” takes place somewhere in the Indian Ocean, where a disabled American vessel has drifted into “foreign territory.” (What? Which hostile nation-state is threatening ships in the Indian Ocean in 1986? Think of it as Madagascar. Anyway, the ship must be rescued.)

So they book it over to the Indian Ocean (Hang in there, disabled American vessel! We’re almost to the Strait of Hormuz!) and then get up in the sky and engage with the enemy. The Americans take heavy fire, return it, and end up shooting down four of the enemy’s planes. The whole incident seemed a bit Gulf of Tonkin to me, but geopolitics is not the point. Maverick getting his courage back is the point.

Cruise is cleared of responsibility for Goose’s death; he’s a naval hero. He throws Goose’s dog tags into the ocean (in much the same manner and spirit as Rose throws the Heart of the Ocean necklace overboard at the end of Titanic). In the final scene, he’s back in San Diego, a man at peace, drinking a beer and reading a newspaper when Kelly McGillis shows up, and we actually muster some interest in the moment because we want a sense of fulfillment, and—The End.

An excellent script actually, except for all of the vrooming around, the unexplained international incident, and the way McGillis keeps popping up like the Freddy Krueger of heterosexuality.

Thus informed, I went to the AMC theater for an 11 a.m. showing of the brand-new Top Gun. There was only a smattering of people in the audience, all of them old (they were my age), and I took my seat among them. Then AMC—which I presume wants to encourage people to return to the movies—subjected us to 40 minutes of hell. First, something called “The Noovie Trivia Show,” hosted by Maria Menounos, which produced actual groans in the audience. Then there were so many trailers—one stinker after another—that a quiet sense of panic began to spread. Were we even in the right theater? By that point, my last Milk Duds were rattling around in the box. Finally, Nicole Kidman (Tom Cruise’s ex, of all people!) appeared on the screen, talking about movie magic, and we all laughed at her because no one who has just seen “Noovie” believes in movie magic. And then, at last—the film.

What do you want from me? You can’t bet against Tom Cruise. I might have even cried a little at the end.

Something happened at the beginning of the movie that no one expected: Tom Cruise came to talk to us. “Hi, everybody,” he said, “and welcome to Top Gun: Maverick.”

A few people sort of giggled. It felt manipulative and mercenary, but also strangely intimate. It was like being on a date with the most confident guy in the world. He knew we were infatuated with him, and he was only trying to make us feel comfortable. “Thank you all for being here,” he told us.

He said that everyone involved in the movie had put their heart and soul into it. “We’re so happy you’re here in this theater and seeing it on the big screen,” he said. “We all made it for you.”

He put a spell on me a long time ago. He’s not a television star. He’s an honest-to-God movie star, and I love him. He’s a complete loon in real life, but we don’t spend any time together in real life.

Well, the movie turns out to be excellent. Here’s the story, minus the spoilers, because this time some genuinely exciting and unexpected things do happen.

We’re supposed to consider Maverick very old—“thanks, Pops,” a young aviator says to him—despite the fact that Cruise looks better than most of the world’s 35-year-olds. The call to adventure comes walking into the hangar, a Naval official saying that Maverick is needed back in Miramar to help with a big crisis. (It’s one of those “I keep trying to get out, but they keep pulling me back in” scenes.)

Cruise meets with Jon Hamm, who really needs to call his agent, because this is the worst role of all time: the tight-assed officer who is forever being made a fool of by Maverick. But he needs Maverick, because only he can select and train a group of pilots to carry out a … mission impossible.

In a far-off and evil land, an enemy has built a secret uranium-enrichment facility and will soon receive a shipment of raw uranium. Maverick’s team must fly into the valley where it is located, bomb the hell out of the facility, and then climb out of the resulting canyon in a way the planes may not actually be able to do.

I wanted to wave my hand at the screen and say “Tom! Over here! It’s me. Just wanted to remind you that we fought a very bad war that started exactly this way. Are you sure about this uranium? Was Judith Miller involved in any of this?”

But I couldn’t get his attention (he was super-focused on logistics), so the challenge gets accepted, and Top Gun is up and running again.

It might seem that there would be no way to top the shirtless volleyball scene from the original Top Gun, about which the director, Tony Scott, later said, “I didn’t have a vision of what I was doing other than just doing soft porn.” But this new one … mercy. The shirtless football-in-the surf scene justifies the 36-year wait. (The second-worst role in the movie goes to the actor who had to play the role of “women also attend the Top Gun program now,” and she’s there in the surf too, and she’s pretty good with the football, but no woman can break through in this picture—it’s Top Gun!)

Maverick has arranged this football game, but he is not playing in it. He’s sitting on the dry sand and trying to act like an old guy who can’t risk tweaking a hip. He looks like he could easily step into Tom Brady’s shoes and do a better job of it, but you just have to go along with the conceit.

In real life, Val Kilmer, an essential part of the first movie, has suffered tremendous health challenges. He has been diagnosed with throat cancer and now speaks through a voice box. The film found a way to include him: Cast as an admiral who is himself suffering from cancer, he meets with Maverick and gives him advice by typing on a computer. Kelly McGillis is a healthy 64-year-old woman, so she was not asked to participate.

The mythic aspect of the movie is that one of the pilots under Maverick’s command is Goose’s son, Rooster. The two of them have a lot to work out. Maverick is old and fading; Rooster is young—everything belongs to him now. The plot finds a brilliant way to resolve his anger and Maverick’s guilt about Goose’s death. The young actor who plays Rooster, Miles Teller, has charisma to burn, and you can easily see him picking up the franchise, although the series’s commitment to using the pilots’ call signs means that the movie would have to have the wet-blanket title of Top Gun: Rooster.

Top Gun: Maverick isn’t a Vietnam movie. It’s certainly not a movie about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which are never mentioned, but loom in a “Don’t talk about the war” kind of way). What it is is a World War II movie, without the war. Antiseptic, safe, filled with valor and sunshine, it celebrates the military capability of the United States and provides a fictional—but sound—representation of the excellent young men and women who stand up to serve.

Nothing could feel less like combat than a Top Gun movie. It’s more like a children’s game or a video game, with the characters’ huge helmets and silly names. Death is bloodless and exceedingly rare. New lives are granted—Goose evolves into Rooster. Nothing is for keeps.

And what about the first movie’s beginning, with that nonsense about 1969? Did Paramount get rid of it? No. Once again, it’s right there at the start, with the lost art and all of that crap, as if Vietnam were only an exciting theater of aerial excellence and not a country soaked with civilian blood, and the cradle of 60,000 American deaths.

That’s the thing about war: We have to forget what it’s really like. We move past our sorrows, and then Hollywood performs its act of reverse transubstantiation—turning blood into movies—so the next generation (maybe your children, maybe mine) can more easily be summoned to combat.

Sheryl Sandberg and the Crackling Hellfire of Corporate America

2022-06-18T07:00:00-04:00

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In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year. She was the chief operating officer of Facebook, back when most of us had no understanding of the platform’s fearsome powers—in the halcyon days when we thought it was just for sharing pictures of the grandkids and ruining marriages. The book was about how women can make it to the top. It was a sort of “work-life balance” category buster, because she was telling women to pretty much forget about the “life” part.

In the weeks before the big rollout, I was contacted by editors at several publications asking if I would write something about it. I knew exactly what they wanted—not the main article, which would be a rapturous announcement of this bold American visionary. They wanted some crank to pump out a “What About the Children?” sidebar, pointing out that to lean into work you have to lean away from your family, to lend a spirit of objectivity to their 21-gun salutes to author and book. Trust me, around 2013 I was the top crank for that kind of thing.

But when I looked through the galley, the whole thing was so manufactured and B-school-ish that I just wanted to put my head on the keyboard and have a little nap. Still, I myself had been leaning in to the lucrative book-reviewing space for a long time, and I could tell there was money on the table because these Sheryl Sandberg packages were obviously going to be lavish. If I played my cards right, I could be looking at one large. Where to get it?

[Read: How Sheryl Sandberg lost her feminist street cred]

Time Inc., as it turned out. It was a purely meretricious transaction, but I didn’t phone it in. I did the honorable thing and read the book closely. Almost immediately I saw that its main problem wasn’t the children. This was a book about how women in corporate America could—and should—strive to get the most money and the most power. But where should they seek such power? In the crackling hellfire of C-suite America.

Sandberg invoked the name Goldman Sachs multiple times—in a good way. Mind you, this book was published five years after that despicable outfit played a major role in almost bankrupting the country. She tells us it was a “seismic event” when, in the late ’90s, Goldman Sachs made a woman named Amy Goodfriend head of its U.S. derivatives team; she stayed at the company until 2001. “Amy’s a bitch, but an honest bitch,” one man said about her. If I ever write one of these books, I’ll call it A Few Honest Bitches, and explain that if we can get the right kind of women inside these places, we might be able to burn them down.

Why were the progressive worlds of publishing and journalism embracing this junk as some kind of giant step toward equality? It will surely go down in history as one of white feminism’s greatest achievements.

I didn’t send Time a book review so much as a red-flag warning. Time had published a cover story in the midst of the financial crisis called “The Price of Greed”; Lean In was a return to Greed is Good. But the editors didn’t care about Cassandra in the sidebar. The copy was clean, and they slapped on a title they liked (the title was “What About the Children?”), and I decided to act very Goldman Sachs about the situation. I cashed the check the day it arrived.

Sheryl Sandberg announced this month that she’s resigning from Facebook—now called Meta—to focus on her philanthropy. Her work there is done.

During her 14 years at the company, she’s done so much damage to our society that we may never recover. The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good. Facebook—supposedly a wondrous, no-charge gift to the world—was made of you and me. It needed our baby pictures, our religious and political affiliations; it needed the names of our high schools and employers and favorite movies and hometowns. It let us set up shop as the very particular and special individuals we are—and it was all free. In fact, it was ruinously expensive. As the saying goes, “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.” There we were: suckers, lambs to the slaughter. It didn’t even occur to us that all of that information wasn’t “safe.” We didn’t want it to be safe! We wanted our long-lost friends from Brownie Troop 347 to be able to find us! When we realized what we’d done, it was already too late.

During the Trump campaign, we got a taste of what a giant, mysterious corporation can do with all of that information. A political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica had gotten hold of the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users. That data was used in service of the “psychological warfare” that Steve Bannon wanted to wage against the American public. It sent voters down just the right rabbit holes; it whispered in their ears. It was a fooling-some-of-the-people-all-of-the-time operation.

“We made mistakes and I own them,” Sandberg eventually said about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “They are on me.” The impression was of radical transparency, a Harry Truman of the C-suite: The buck stops here.

[Read: The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in three paragraphs]

But according to The New York Times, the buck was about to embark on an Oh, the Places You’ll Go! journey to the bottom of the Earth. Sandberg oversaw the company’s bizarre damage-control efforts. It was an old-school, dirty-tricks campaign, combined with the unimaginable power of Facebook. That campaign included hiring “a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros,” and lobbying “a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.”

Excuse me—Facebook did what?

But more interesting is the way that Sandberg deployed some of her personal power. In Lean In, we were power-posing, assuming male levels of self-confidence, asking for the big money and knowing we deserved it. But when The Daily Mail attempted to publish something unflattering about Sandberg’s then-boyfriend, the Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, she seemed more like the head cheerleader standing up for the captain of the football team. On two separate occasions she is said to have contacted The Daily Mail and successfully kept the information out of the paper. (The source of the critical story recanted some of it, and Sandberg denied pressuring the paper, The Wall Street Journal reported.)

(Look, I fully understand that as the result of this article, I’m going to wake up next to a horse’s head, and all I ask is that it not be one of the weeks when I’m using the paisley sheets.)

Now we learn that Meta has been investigating Sandberg for possible misuse of company resources. The Wall Street Journal reported that some of her colleagues think she may have broken Securities and Exchange Commission rules by having Facebook employees work on her pet projects. These include her Lean In foundation; her second book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy; and even her upcoming wedding, to a consultant named Tom Bernthal. (The Journal reported that a Meta spokesperson declined to comment and that a spokesperson for Sandberg denied that she had inappropriately used company resources in connection with her wedding.)

I should have left well enough alone, but I couldn’t help myself, and I Googled the fiancé’s company’s website, which reads, “From Manila to London we help Facebook with their most pressing Communications and global Brand Strategy challenges.” So this is a match made in heaven.

(It’s going to be my own head bleeding out on the sheets, I realize now. Will have to pin a note to my pillow reminding the night caller of what Michael Clayton said: “I’m not the guy you kill. I’m the guy you buy!”)

One lesson I learned in the Berkeley of my 1960s and ’70s youth has never failed me: Huge corporations are never, ever on the side of the people. You can’t take your eyes off of them for a second, because any time you look away, they’ll do terrible things, like make napalm (Dow Chemical) or Agent Orange (Monsanto), or get desperately impoverished women in developing countries to use expensive baby formula instead of breastfeeding (Nestlé).

Today’s young people have been forced to learn that old lesson, because they are the inheritors of 40 years of corporate greed, private equity’s smash and grab, bank deregulation, and the collusion of the very rich and the U.S. government to squeeze every penny it can from the middle class and move it into the counting houses of billionaires. They know the game isn’t rigged against them; they know the game was lost long before they were born.

Corporations are now faced with labor shortages, and there are rumblings from the owner class about the demise of the great American work ethic. But corporations are the ones who killed it. Young people today know that work is not your life; it’s how you pay for your life. It’s an exchange of money for labor, and they are not interested in devoting a jot of extra energy to jobs that pay minimum wage and offer no health insurance or savings plan, for employers who show no loyalty to their workers.

[Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen: How to care less about work]

These are signs that a real labor movement may be growing in this country. Here’s another old lesson from my misspent youth: If workers organize, they become more powerful than the men—or, lean in!, women—who own the companies.

So farewell to Sheryl Sandberg. But maybe her departure is finally the moment to answer the question Time magazine asked me so long ago: What about the children?

I’ve heard a number of young people lately say they won’t have children because of the climate crisis. That’s a tremendous sacrifice and a principled position. A Pew Research Center survey from November found that 44 percent of adults without kids say that they probably won’t have any, up from 37 percent in 2018, the last time Pew asked the question. But often when you talk with these young people, after the climate comes a whole lot of reasons the choice isn’t a sacrifice at all. Children seem like a hassle, and an impediment to a fun life.

To them I say, Hold on. That’s the corporation speaking, which seeks to cleave you from human experience and sees you only as a worker, a unit of production. That’s the corporate demand that you lean in to work and lean away from your family. “For some women, a career is their baby,” said Business Insider, in its article on the Pew results.

Staying home with very small children—Jesus Christ! There’s no way to explain the amount of labor, tedium, and occasional desperation it includes. Especially if you also work from home. Nothing is going right, the kids are running around, and you really can be brought to tears by mud tracked across a clean kitchen floor. Nothing to recommend it on that front.

But here’s the thing. Ask any older person when the happiest time in their life was, and they will always, always say it was when their children were young.

A few weeks ago I came up with the absurd project of digitizing all of the photographs of my children taken from the pre-iPhone half of their lives. I bought the scanner, and the cord to attach it to my computer. I hauled up the cardboard boxes and opened one—and the whole endeavor stalled out.

My children, thank God, are healthy young men living their adult lives—they are twins, 24 years old. But when I opened the box, I saw the faces of those little boys who aren’t here anymore, the ones who lived with me in the dreamtime of early childhood. My husband worked, I stayed home, and five long days a week we did things I knew they would never remember. Like the first time they heard the music of an ice-cream truck. I bought them each a Pokémon popsicle, and here’s the mind-blowing thing: They had no idea what was inside those wrappers until I took them off. When I gave them those astonishing, perplexing, never-before-seen popsicles (“My popsicle is raining,” one of them said in confusion when it started dripping), they looked at me the way they often did in the dreamtime: as though I was the most wonderful, and kind, and important person in the whole world. In the corporation of their love, I was at the top of the power structure.

There is no greater joy in this life than having a baby. Here is a person who has been uniquely designed to love you. And here is Goldman Sachs.