A Certain Idea of America, page 11
This is grammatically incorrect but so what? Correct grammar, and the intelligibility it allows, is a small price to pay for inclusion and equality.
We are being asked to memorize all this, to change hundreds of years of grammar and usage, to accommodate the needs or demands of a group that perceives itself as beleaguered.
There’s a funny but painful spoof of all this on YouTube. A seemingly friendly but dogmatic teacher of adult immigrants in English as a Second Language class introduces them to the sixty-three new pronouns. They are understandably flummoxed. An Asian woman announces she identifies as a girl and then shrinks in fear this might not be allowed. A confused Eastern European man asks the pronoun of his desk. The Central American asks if the new pronouns mean gay. “You’re not learning English so you can be a bigot, are you?” the teacher demands.
And there are the office arguments about bathroom policy, which I gather are reaching some new peak. There can no longer be a men’s room and a women’s room, so we can have one expanded bathroom everyone can use. No, we’ll have three. But there may be a stigma to using the third, so keep two bathrooms but remove all designations. But the women don’t want to put on their makeup with men coming in and out. But the men don’t want women walking in on them—that’s a harassment suit waiting to happen!
It’s all insane. All of it.
But we’re moving forward, renaming the months and the sexes, reordering the language. You wonder how the people who push all this got so much power. But, then, how did Robespierre?
SCENES FROM THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN LOCKDOWN
May 14, 2020
I think there’s a growing sense that we have to find a way to live with this thing, manage it the best we can, and muddle through. Covid-19 is not going away anytime soon. Summer may give us a break, late fall probably not. Vaccines are likely far off, new therapies and treatments might help a lot, but keeping things closed up tight until there are enough tests isn’t a viable plan. There will never be enough tests, it was botched from the beginning, if we ever catch up it will probably be at the point tests are no longer urgently needed.
Meanwhile, we must ease up and manage. We should go forward with a new national commitment to masks, social distancing, handwashing. These simple things have proved the most valuable tools in the tool chest. We have to enter each day armored up.
At the same time we can’t allow alertness to become exhaustion. We can’t let an appropriate sense of caution turn into an anxiety formation. We can’t become a nation of agoraphobics. We’ll just have to live, carefully.
Here’s something we should stop. There’s a class element in the public debate. It’s been there the whole time but it’s getting worse, and few in public life are acting as if they’re sensitive to it. Our news professionals the past three months have made plenty of room for medical and professionals warning of the illness. Good, we needed it, it was news. But journalists are not now paying an equal degree of sympathetic attention to those living the economic story, such as the Dallas woman who pushed back, opened her hair salon, and was thrown in jail by a preening judge. He wanted an apology. She said she couldn’t apologize for trying to feed her family.
There is a class divide between those who are hard-line on lockdowns and those who are pushing back. We see the professionals on one side—those James Burnham called the managerial elite, and Michael Lind, in The New Class War, calls the overclass—and regular people on the other. The overclass are highly educated and exert outsize influence as managers and leaders of important institutions—hospitals, companies, statehouses.
The normal people aren’t connected through professional or social lines to power structures, and they have regular jobs—service worker, small-business owner.
Since the pandemic began, the overclass has been in charge—scientists, doctors, political figures, consultants—calling the shots for the average people. But personally they have less skin in the game. The National Institutes of Health scientist won’t lose his livelihood over what’s happened. Neither will the midday anchor.
I’ve called this divide the protected versus the unprotected. There is an aspect of it that is not much discussed but bears on current arguments.
How you have experienced life has a lot to do with how you experience the pandemic and its strictures. I think it’s fair to say citizens of red states have been pushing back harder than those of blue states.
It’s not that those in red states don’t think there’s a pandemic. They’ve heard all about it! They realize it will continue, they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.
They’ll take the latter. It’s a loss either way but one loss is worse than the other. They know the politicians and scientists can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision because life is a messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified.
Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate. They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder, you choose the word.
They’re more fatalistic about life because life has taught them to be fatalistic. And they look at these scientists and reporters making their warnings about how tough it’s going to be if we lift shutdowns and they don’t think, “Oh, what informed, caring observers.” They think, “You have no idea what tough is. You don’t know what painful is.” And, if you don’t know, why should you have so much say?
The overclass says, “Wait three months before we’re safe.” They reply, “There’s no such thing as safe.”
Something else is true about those pushing back. They live life closer to the ground and pick up other damage. Everyone knows the societal costs in the abstract—“domestic violence,” “child abuse.” Here’s something concrete. In Dallas this week police received a tip and found a six-year-old boy tied up by his grandmother and living in a shed. The child told police he’d been sleeping there since school ended “for this corona thing,” KTVT-TV reported. According to the arrest affidavit, he was found “standing alone in a pitch-black shed in a blue storage bin with his hands tied behind his back.” The grandmother and her lover were arrested on felony child-endangerment charges. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services said calls to its abuse hotline have gone down since the lockdowns because teachers and other professionals aren’t regularly seeing children.
A lot of bad things happen behind America’s closed doors. The pandemic has made those doors thicker.
Meanwhile some governors are playing into every stereotype of “the overclass.” On Tuesday Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf said in a press briefing that those pushing against the shutdown are cowards. Local officials who “cave in to this coronavirus” will pay a price in state funding. “These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy. In the middle of a war.” He said he’ll pull state certificates such as liquor licenses for any businesses that open. He must have thought he sounded uncompromising, like General George Patton. He seemed more like Patton slapping the soldier. No sympathy, no respect, only judgment.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer called anti-lockdown demonstrations “racist and misogynistic.” She called the entire movement “political.” It was, in part—there have been plenty of Trump signs, and she’s a possible Democratic vice presidential nominee. But the clamor in her state is real, and serious. People are in economic distress and worry that the foundations of their lives are being swept away. How does name-calling help? She might as well have called them “deplorables.” She said the protests may only make the lockdowns last longer, which sounded less like irony than a threat.
When you are reasonable with people and show them respect, they will want to respond in kind. But when they feel those calling the shots are being disrespectful, they will push back hard and rebel even in ways that hurt them.
This is no time to make our divisions worse. The pandemic is a story not only about our health but our humanity.
BRING ’EM TO JUSTICE
January 7, 2021
How do we deal with all that happened yesterday?
We remember who we are. We are a great nation and a strong one; we have, since our beginning, been a miracle in the political history of man. We have brought much good. We are also in trouble, no point not admitting it.
We regain our confidence. We’ve got through trouble before. We love this place and will keep it. We have a Constitution that’s gotten us this far and will get us further.
We lower the boom. No civilized country can accept or allow what we saw Wednesday with the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. This was an attack on democracy itself. That is not just a phrase. Rule by the people relies on adherence to law and process. The assault and siege was an attempt to stop the work of democracy by halting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, our crowning glory for more than two centuries.
This was a sin against history.
When something like this happens it tends to be repeated. It is our job to make sure it is not.
And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.
On the rioters: Find them, drag them out of their basements, and bring them to justice. Use all resources, whatever it takes, with focus and speed. We have pictures of half of them; they like to pose. They larked about taking selfies and smiling unashamed smiles as one strolled out with a House podium. They were so arrogant they were quoted by name in news reports. It is our good luck they are idiots. Capitalize on that luck.
Throw the book at them. Make it a book of commentaries on the Constitution. Throw it hard.
They have shamed and embarrassed their country in the eyes of the world, which is not only a painful fact but a dangerous one. The world, and the young—all of us—need to see them pay the price.
Now to the devil and his apprentices.
As for the chief instigator, the president of the United States, he should be removed from office by the Twenty-Fifth Amendment or impeachment, whichever is faster. This, with only a week and a half to go, would be a most extraordinary action, but this has been an extraordinary time. Mike Pence is a normal American political figure; he will not have to mount a new government; he appears to be sane; he will in this brief, strange interlude do fine.
The president should be removed for reasons of justice—he urged a crowd to march on Congress, and, when it turned violent, had to be dragged into telling them, equivocally, to go home—and prudence. Mitt Romney had it exactly right: “What happened here…was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” As for prudence, Mr. Trump is a sick, bad man and therefore, as president, a dangerous one. He has grown casually bloody-minded, nattering on about force and denouncing even his own vice president as a coward for not supporting unconstitutional measures. No one seems to be certain how Mr. Trump spends his days. He doesn’t bother to do his job. The White House is in meltdown. The only thing that captures his interest is the fact that he lost, which fills him with thoughts of vengeance.
Removing him would go some distance to restoring our reputation, reinforcing our standards, and clarifying constitutional boundaries for future presidents who might need it.
As for his appointees and staff, the garbage they talk to rationalize their staying is no longer acceptable to anyone. “But my career.” Your career, in the great scheme of things, is nothing. “But my future in politics.” Your future, even if your wildest schemes are fulfilled, is a footnote to a footnote. There are ways to be a footnote honorably. “But my kids.” When they are twenty they will read the history. You want them proud of your role, not petitioning the court for a name change.
It was honorable to arrive with high hopes and idealistic commitments. It is not honorable to stay.
As for the other instigators, a side note.
True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding of the fragility of things. They understand that every human institution is, in its way, built on sand. It’s all so frail. They see how thin the veil is between civilization and chaos, and understand that we have to go through every day, each in our way, trying to make the veil thicker. And so we value the things in the phrase that others use to disparage us, “law and order.” Yes, always, the rule of law, and order so that the people of a great nation can move freely on the streets and do their work and pursue their lives.
To the devil’s apprentices, Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed, endlessly articulate. They see themselves as leading conservative lights, but in this drama they have proved themselves punks practicing punk politics. They are like people who know the value of nothing, who see no frailty around them, who inherited a great deal—an estate built by the work and wealth of others—and feel no responsibility for maintaining the foundation because Pop gave them a strong house, right? They are careless inheritors of a nation, an institution, a party that previous generations built at some cost.
They backed a lie and held out the chimera of some possible Trump victory that couldn’t happen, and hid behind the pretense that they were just trying to be fair to all parties and investigate any suspicions of vote fraud, when what they were really doing was playing—coolly, with lawyerly sophistication—not to the base but to the sickness within the base. They should have stood up and told the truth, that democracy moves forward, that the election was imperfect as all elections are, and more so because of the pandemic rules, which need to be changed, but the fact is the voters of America chose Biden-Harris, not Trump-Pence.
Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.
The price they will pay is up to their states. But the reputational cost should be harsh and high.
Again, on the president: There have been leaders before who, facing imminent downfall, decide to tear everything down with them. They want to go out surrounded by flames. Hitler, at the end, wanted to blow up Germany, its buildings and bridges. His people had let him down. Now he hated them. They must suffer.
I have resisted Nazi comparisons for five years, for the most part easily. But that is like what is happening here, the same kind of spirit, as the president departs, as he angrily channel surfs in his bunker.
He is a bad man and not a stable one and he is dangerous. America is not safe in his hands.
It is not too late. Removal of the president would be the prudent move, not the wild one. Get rid of him. Now.
PSYCHOS IN THE C-SUITE
December 1, 2022
It is my impression we’re making more psychopaths. I can’t back this up with statistics because doctors don’t write “total psycho” on the diagnosis line. Psychopathy isn’t a diagnostic category and is largely viewed as part of a cluster of antisocial personality disorders. But doctors commonly use the term and it has defined characteristics. The American Psychological Association calls it a chronic disposition to disregard the rights of others. Manifestations include a tendency to exploit, to be deceitful, to disregard norms and laws, to be impulsive and reckless, and, most important, to lack guilt, remorse, and empathy.
The APA has reported that 15 percent to 25 percent of prison inmates show characteristics of psychopathology, far more than in the general adult population.
But that’s where I see growth. Subtle psychopaths, the kind who don’t stab you, are often intelligent, charming, and accomplished. I believe two are currently in the news. (I confine myself to the business sphere, leaving out the equally rich field of politics.)
Elizabeth Holmes was just sentenced to eleven years in federal prison for defrauding investors in her famous Theranos scam. People used to ask why she did it. By now that’s clear. She did it to be important. She wanted to be admired. She wished to be thought a genius, a pioneer. She no doubt wanted money, though part of her con was to live relatively modestly—she wore the same black turtleneck and trousers most days. She wanted status, then and now, as Tom Wolfe said, the great subject of American life. And she seemed to think she deserved these things—that she merited them, simply by walking in. One thing you pick up as you read John Carreyrou’s great reporting, in these pages and his book, is that she seemed not at all concerned with the negative effects of her actions on others. She didn’t seem to care that investors lost hundreds of millions, people lost jobs, the great men she invited on her board were humiliated.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency-trading firm, FTX, collapsed last month. We’re still in the why-did-he-do-it phase—Was it deliberate deception? Untidy bookkeeping? Visionaries often leave the details to others! We make mysteries where there aren’t any. He had a great life while it worked! He made himself famous, rich, admired—friend of presidents and prime ministers, the darling of a major political party. To the Democrats he was the biggest thing since George Soros.
But somehow a valuation of $32 billion was, in a matter of weeks, turned into, or revealed as, nothing. FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11, and FTX’s new CEO, John Ray, said he believed gross negligence was involved and a “substantial portion” of FTX customers’ assets may be “missing or stolen.” Soon after, the crypto firm BlockFi filed for bankruptcy in New Jersey and Bermuda.
