A week has gone by and I’m still aghast. Still astonished. Still absorbing what Ginni Thomas said in those text messages to Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, as she urged him to overturn the 2020 election, and what she apparently believes in her poisoned mind.
So let’s please, please move past Will Smith and the deconstruction of that ugly incident and reallocate our attention to her behavior. It has broader and more profound consequences. It also explains why, despite my efforts not to, I sometimes feel almost hopeless about this country’s present and future.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Thomas wrote to Meadows in the days following the election, her derangement and despair wrought in a bonanza of exclamation points. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice.”
The precipice! I should haul out a few extra exclamation points myself, especially because Thomas went on to say that she and Meadows were watching “the Left” attempt “the greatest Heist of our History.”
She’s up in arms. She’s uppercase. And she’s emblematic: Her gratuitously capitalized words distill what makes political discussion today so difficult and why our democracy is indeed in danger.
“This Great President.” That’s no accidental pinkie — no clumsy thumb — on the shift key. Among today’s extreme partisans, who represent a frighteningly large slice of the electorate, a given president or politician is a commanding general in the battle of good versus evil. I mean Good versus Evil.
Restraint is retro. Hyperbole is the order of the day. Thus, “precipice” is the new “edge,” “Heist” is the updated “scam,” and “of our History” is an essential qualifier, lest someone underestimate the threat and minimize the stakes.
There’s no entertaining the thought that a majority of your fellow Americans may not share your views. In an age of extreme narcissism, that’s unimaginable, impossible, phantasmagorical.
If the polls cast you in the minority, they’re wrong. If the vote runs contrary to your desires, it’s rigged. Or those fellow Americans just don’t matter, not like you do. You’re on the side of the angels. They’re trying to shepherd everyone into the abyss.
That Manichaean mind-set is legible in Thomas’s language, which jettisons temperance and truth. There’s no oxygen for either in the right’s — excuse me, the Right’s — exaggerated sense of extreme grievance, which she so perfectly embodies.
What a terrifying moment, in which the wife of a serving Supreme Court justice unabashedly exploits her insider access, ignores the idea of checks and balances, promotes conspiracy theories and essentially endorses insurrection. Her conduct isn’t some passing curiosity. It’s a sign of the times. And it’s a warning to us all.
A Few Notes About ‘Don’t Say Gay’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is right. The words “Don’t Say Gay” appear nowhere in the “parental rights” legislation that he signed on Monday, which bans discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity with young schoolchildren in Florida. “Don’t Say Gay” is the negative nickname that the law’s opponents have given it, and DeSantis has deftly portrayed that nomenclature as liberal hysteria and leftist overreach.
But that, too, is unfair. There are reasons aplenty to balk at what Florida has done — to see it as more than a simple caveat affecting only students through the third grade. And I say that as someone who is not pushing instruction on matters gay or trans for students in that age range, who doesn’t care a whit whether a 7-year-old knows the name Harvey Milk, who agrees that parents’ sensibilities and sensitivities must be factored into how schools operate.
Here’s what DeSantis doesn’t cop to: a vagueness in the legislation’s language that suggests its potential application to children well beyond the third grade. Look at the words I’ve boldfaced in this clause of the law: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade three or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” What additional prohibitions — what future muzzling — are those phrases opening the door to?
It’s a necessary question, because it’s coupled with this one: What’s motivating the law’s promoters and supporters, who’ve lifted this issue above so many others with more relevance to, and impact on, the quality of Floridians’ everyday lives?
In case you missed it, DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, framed the bill as an important defense against pedophiles’ recruitment of children into homosexual activity. There’s no other way to read this tweet of hers: “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” She’s paid to articulate DeSantis’s viewpoints, and she’s peddling perhaps the nastiest, cruelest homophobic stereotype there is.
Under fire for those remarks, she said that she was using her personal Twitter account during her off-work hours. How very reassuring.
For the Love of Sentences
In the Times newsletter Read Like the Wind, the book critic Molly Young spins many magical sentences, sometimes within a single paragraph, like this one in a recent reflection on the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and his novel “Ubik”: “It may be worth noting that what jelly beans were to President Reagan, amphetamine tablets were to Dick. The man simply loved his uppers. Sometimes I approximate his state of mind by bolting a Monster energy drink before settling in for some sci-fi. (My favorite flavor of Monster is called ‘Assault.’ It tastes like Coca-Cola mixed with poison.) The blurb on this copy of ‘Ubik’ describes Dick as ‘The most brilliant SF mind on any planet.’ Any planet!” (Thanks to Zoe Zagorski of Portland, Ore., and Conrad Macina of Landing, N.J., for nominating Molly’s prose.)
Sticking with Times book critics, here’s Alexandra Jacobs in her recent review of “Truly, Madly,” by Stephen Galloway, which describes Vivien Leigh’s romance with a certain screen and stage legend named Laurence: “Her three-decade entanglement with Olivier, considered one of the greatest talents of his generation, was its own sort of doomed flight: It soared sharply into the heavens, then was rocked with turbulence before its inevitable tumble down to earth and straight through to hell.” (Sandy Peters, Phoenix)
Also in The Times, Ligaya Mishan, contemplating lentils, had lyrical leguminous fun: “They start out as pebbles in the hand, hard and tiny — in certain parts of the world, they are the size against which all small things are measured. Then, in the pot, their little stony hearts melt. They soften, loosen up and let other flavors in. They’re still discrete, still individuals, but now joined in common cause, and they swell and grow plump, so you end up with more than twice as much, velvety and lush.” (Stella Liu, Manhattan)
Paul Krugman noted: “Putin’s response to failure in Ukraine has been extremely Trumpian: insisting that his invasion is all going ‘according to plan,’ refusing to admit having made any mistakes and whining about cancel culture. I’m half expecting him to release battle maps crudely modified with a Sharpie.” (Avi Liveson, Chatham, N.J., and Valerie Masin, Boston, among others)
And Bret Stephens, in his weekly back-and-forth with Gail Collins, wrote: “It looks like we have a new superinfectious subvariant of Covid to keep us awake at night. Forget Omicron, now we’ve got Omigod.” (Kris Schaff, Omaha, Neb., and Larry Berman, Westfield, N.J.)
In National Parks magazine, Jacob Baynham reported on a positive reaction to the meatless, fungus-based breakfast patties he cooked for his family one morning: “Our disobedient dog begged at my feet, an endorsement tempered by the fact that he also eats mouth guards, used tissues and socks.” (Peter Alexander, Longmont, Colo.)
In a review of “Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman,” by Susanne Schattenberg, in The London Review of Books, Neal Ascherson wrote: “Polish communism was dead, though it took nearly eight years for the nation to wriggle out from under the corpse.” (George Milman, Beverly Hills, Calif.)
And in his Weekly Dish newsletter on Substack, Andrew Sullivan pondered the rebirth of imperial Russia with this observation: “The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of postmodern life into a new collective, ancient meaning.” (Stephen Ranger, Toronto)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.
On a Personal Note (Reader Mailbag Edition)
I’ve felt the lash of your anger when I’ve written harshly about a public figure you admire. I’ve experienced the sting of your disappointment when I’ve praised a book or movie that you then checked out and didn’t like at all. In a manner that pleases me — because it tells me that you’re engaged — you’re quick to give me feedback, bitter as well as sweet.
And you let me have it about my possible miscoloring of a beautiful bird.
I wrote last week about “flares of orange” outside my windows in Chapel Hill, N.C., and I guessed that those were cardinals flying by. Many of you were scandalized and sent me emails noting that cardinals are red. You recommended apps that could help me with my avian ineptitude. You urged me to educate myself about the natural world. I could feel myself being marched off to flora-and-fauna boot camp — which is probably where I indeed belong.
My feathered friends are definitely cardinals, and they may well have been more red than orange — my grasp of color is less than firm. But cardinals, it turns out, can be orange or at least orange-ish red. They’re chromatically noncommittal. I was probably being sloppy with my description of those “flares,” but maybe my yard’s cardinals are special? I’ll keep an eye peeled and a color wheel at hand and I’ll let you know.
You wrote me, too, with a complaint that I’ve also fielded from many of you in the past: Where’s Regan? When a few newsletters go by without any photo of, or tribute to, my canine companion, some of you object and others actually worry.
I’m happy to alleviate your concern with the picture at the top of this section of the newsletter. It’s Regan rolling around recently in the front yard, just for the tactile sensation and pure fun of it. She does that sometimes when she’s excited, or when there’s a perfect nip in the air, or maybe when she’s bored, or possibly when she feels some generous impulse to entertain me. Down she goes and around she twists. Each of my giggles prompts more of her squiggles. We have this down to a clownish science.
Many of you also point out errors of language, and Ervin Duggan of Davidson, N.C., flagged my statement last week that Ted Cruz, so odious during the confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, at least deserved points for “gumption.” “Gumption” actually or usually means initiative or resourcefulness, and I indeed didn’t intend to compliment the Texas senator for either. I was steering toward something more along the lines of audacity and took a wrong turn. Maybe I had, in my mind, “bumption,” which isn’t a word according to several dictionaries I consulted but has, in the past, circulated a bit as a kin to overblown arrogance. Cruz possesses that in spades.
Judge Jackson doesn’t, as best I can tell. None of you complained that in my assessment of the hearing, I never digressed from my disgust over many senators’ bad behavior to praise her for a preternatural degree of restraint. But I’ll say it: I should have. She comported herself with dignity, which strikes me as the ideal cornerstone of judicial character.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
