A Note on a Phishing Email Circulating in My Name

Several of you have written to tell me you received an email titled “A Memorable Evening Hosted by Olga Bourlin.” I did not send it. My email address appears to have been spoofed, meaning someone forged the “From” field to make it look like it came from me, without actually accessing my account. If it landed in your inbox, please delete it without clicking anything inside.

Here is the trick that catches most of these scams, and it takes five seconds to use.

Hover before you click. On a computer, move your mouse pointer over any link in the email, but don’t click it. Look at the bottom-left corner of your browser window (or wherever your email program shows a preview) and you’ll see the actual web address the link leads to. If the email claims to be from me but the link points to some unrelated string of letters and numbers, or a website that has nothing to do with Substack, that’s your answer. On a phone, the equivalent is a long press, holding your finger on the link until a preview pops up, rather than tapping it.

The same goes for the sender’s address itself. Phishing emails often display a familiar name, but the actual email address behind it is a giveaway. Tap or click on my name at the top of the email to reveal the full address it was sent from. If it isn’t mine, it isn’t me.

A few other habits worth keeping in mind:

• I will never ask you for payment, login credentials, or personal information through email.

• If you received this, mark it as spam or phishing in your own email program rather than just deleting it. This helps your provider learn to block similar messages before they reach the next person.

• When in doubt, don’t click. Come to my actual Substack page directly and check for any announcement there instead.

Here’s a helpful link titled How do I know if a Greetings Island invitation or card is real? (The link has been verified as the real deal by Hubby, who knows a lot more about these things than I do.)

https://help.greetingsisland.com/hc/en-us/articles/37251244132498-How-do-I-know-if-a-Greetings-Island-invitation-or-card-is-real

Thank you for looking out for one another, and for flagging this so quickly. It’s how these things get stopped before they do damage.

Stay safe,
Olga

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Outro: “Vesti la giubba" ("Put on the costume") from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, sung by Mario Lanza. Canio, a clown, must paint on a smile and perform moments after learning of his wife's betrayal, the mask hiding the man underneath. A fitting note for a piece about someone borrowing my name to wear a face that was never theirs.

In the book of Exodus, while Moses was on the mountain receiving the commandments, the people below grew impatient and made a god out of their own gold. They bowed to it, fed it, and called it holy. The conventional reading treats this as a story about false idols. Its more useful lesson concerns what happens when a group decides in advance what it wants to believe, then looks for authority to confirm it.

That habit crosses party lines, and religious language is unusually good at disguising it as something else.

Browse religious commentary online for a week and you will encounter some version of the same essay written from opposite ends of the political spectrum and driven by the same rhetorical machinery.

One camp argues that supporting Donald Trump is a form of idolatry: professed Christians, it says, have exchanged obedience to Christ for obedience to a man, and the fruit of that allegiance bears little resemblance to the fruit of the Spirit.

Another camp, further along the spectrum, directs the same charge at progressive commitments: idolatry of the state, idolatry of identity, a golden calf fashioned from secular politics rather than religious ones.

Both essays begin with Exodus. Both summon the same handful of verses. Both conclude that their political opponents have mistaken their politics for their god. It rarely occurs to either author that the more vital question is not whether the argument is true of the other side, but why the argument works so well regardless of who is making it.

That raises a harder question than which side is right. If the same religious text can be marshaled in support of opposite political conclusions, each advanced with equal certainty, then the text is not doing all the moral work. The reader has arrived with convictions already in hand and found, within a long, ancient and multiply authored collection of writings, the passages needed to confirm them. A sufficiently motivated reader can make such a text appear to endorse almost any conclusion.

Consider the Jesus these essays invoke. He is consistently the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount: gentle, inclusive, preoccupied with the poor and the outcast, opposed to domination and hierarchy. That Jesus exists in the text.

So does the Jesus who drives merchants from the temple with a whip of cords, who says he came not to bring peace but a sword and to turn family members against each other, who curses a fig tree for the crime of being out of season, who calls religious leaders a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs, and who describes, across several parables, a specific and permanent punishment for people who fail his standards.

The gentle Jesus and the wrathful one are the same book, read selectively depending on what the reader already needs to be true. Choosing one and calling it authentic, while treating the other as an embarrassing aberration, is not theology. It’s cherry picking.

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The same selective reading extends backward into the Old Testament, which these essays often treat as the wrathful prequel to the New Testament’s mercy. Yet Jesus himself says that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and the line most frequently invoked in this entire genre — love your neighbor as yourself — is not a New Testament invention. It is a direct quotation from Leviticus 19:18 (KJV), which commands:

“Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.”

The familiar division between a harsh old covenant and a loving new one is therefore less a distinction the text itself insists upon than a convenient way of reading it.

None of this means the political criticisms in these essays are wrong. The mistreatment of vulnerable people remains wrong whether or not a particular verse can be marshaled against it. But scripture is not what makes it wrong, and pretending otherwise concedes something it should not: that morality requires religious permission to be valid, and that those outside the religion are somehow less entitled to make the judgment. That is a strange thing for a moral argument to do to itself, since it effectively excludes much of the country from the conversation. If the mistreatment of vulnerable people is wrong, it is wrong regardless of which political tribe practices it and whether or not Leviticus or the Sermon on the Mount condemns it.

The Stoics, who regarded cruelty as a form of weakness, arrived at their conception of universal human obligation without a single gospel. The humanist tradition that followed them arrived there again. So, for that matter, have plenty of people who have never opened a Bible and would be surprised to learn that their sense of right and wrong required a citation.

For many of these writers, kindness and moral seriousness may have come first, with theology assembled afterward to explain and authorize dispositions that already existed. The political scientist Michele Margolis has made a documented case for something like this: partisan identity, formed early, often shapes a person’s later religious commitments more than religious teaching shapes their politics, reversing the direction most people assume. If that is even partly right, many of these authors are simply decent, humane people who have declined to give themselves credit for it, attributing their compassion to a gentle Jesus rather than recognizing it as a feature of their own character. At the same time, they set aside those parts of their tradition that complicate the story, the doctrine of hell chief among them.

Political loyalty does not cease to shape moral judgment when the politics are conservative. Christians who excuse in a political ally what they would condemn in a stranger are not discovering a permissive theology; they are manufacturing one, because the alternative would cost them the coalition. A vote for a party is not a footnote to that party’s platform; it is an endorsement of what the party does with power, whether or not the individual voter privately winces at the particulars. The distinction sometimes drawn between “MAGA Christians” and garden-variety Christian Republicans, as though the first group were an aberration and the second somehow innocent, becomes difficult to maintain once voting is understood as an exercise of political power. There is no exemption at the ballot box for having checked the box while disapproving of what the box does.

Both errors trace back to the same source: certainty borrowed from a text flexible enough to authorize whichever conclusion its reader already wanted.

History supplies the evidence that this has never been a fringe problem. The Crusades were preached from pulpits, and the Inquisition ran its tribunals with trained theologians presiding. American slavery was defended from scripture at length and in detail, by people who considered themselves faithful. None of this required a misreading, only a selective one — the same skill on display in every “Jesus would never” essay written this year, on either side, about either party.

None of this is specific to Christianity. Every tradition generates its own version of the golden calf — its own objects, garments, and gestures elevated past the reach of ordinary scrutiny — and history is not short on people who killed or died over which version was the true one: Sunni against Shia, Shaivite against Vaishnavite, rival Buddhist schools in medieval Japan and, in the present day, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. The tragedy is not that humans disagree about the sacred. It’s that the certainty required to kill over the disagreement rarely rests on anything sturdier than the certainty this essay has already described: a text, symbol, or practice, read the way its holder already needed it read.

What would it take to argue about political cruelty without needing scripture to adjudicate it? Less insistence on already being right, for one thing, and more willingness to say plainly that a policy is wrong because of what it does to actual people, not because a two-thousand-year-old text can be made to agree. It’s a harder case to make, because it gives up the shortcut of letting a verse settle the matter. But it’s the only approach that works in a diverse society, where a policy’s body count matters more than its theological backing.

The golden calf was made of metal, but its true currency was submission. Modern idols no longer require statues.

They only require a place where questions go to die.

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Outro: "Lascia ch'io pianga" (English: "Let Me Weep") was composed by George Frideric Handel. It appears in Act II of his 1711 opera, Rinaldo. A lament sung by a captive with no say in her own fate, it closes the essay on the people the argument is actually about — not the ones debating which verse should win, but the human beings who bear the consequences.

Sources:

Exodus 32; Matthew 5:17; Matthew 10:34–36; Matthew 21:12–13; Matthew 23; Mark 11:12–14; Leviticus 19:18 (KJV).

Michele Margolis, From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf, c. 1633–34, National Gallery, London.

George Frideric Handel, “Lascia ch’io pianga,” from Rinaldo, 1711.

Background on sectarian religious violence (Crusades, Inquisition, the Sunni-Shia schism, Buddhist-nationalist violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka): Encyclopaedia Britannica, relevant entries.

I need to say something before I say anything else, because I already know some of the response this piece will engender. Not all white women. Every white woman you know may well hate him. She may well have voted against him. I believe you. That is not what this is about. It is about the bubble from which that sentence emerges — a social world so self-contained that a political reality documented by pollsters for decades can remain almost invisible within it. Call it Bubbleland.

This is also not about the tens of millions of white women — along with white men — who have voted for Democrats and helped the Democratic Party make significant progressive gains since the mid-1960s.

“Every white woman I know hates him.” The quote is a synthesis of many similar statements I’ve heard over the years. That is the sentence I want to examine — spoken with the certainty of someone reporting a fact, not offering a guess.

Permit this secular humanist to quote Jeremiah 17:9 (KJV): “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Despite evidence to the contrary, Republican voters are apt to cite racism directed at themselves rather than admit they are racist or that they support racism. So whatever a conservative white woman’s private sentiment may be, the public act is the vote, and the vote is what the data tracks.

From 1968 through 2024, white women have never given their majority vote to a Democratic presidential candidate. Not one. Not to Hubert Humphrey in 1968, not to George McGovern in 1972, not to Jimmy Carter in 1976 or 1980, not to Walter Mondale in 1984, not to Michael Dukakis in 1988, not to Bill Clinton in 1992, not to Al Gore in 2000, not to John Kerry in 2004, not to Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012, not to Hillary Clinton in 2016, not to Joe Biden in 2020, and not to Kamala Harris in 2024. Bill Clinton came closest in 1996, with 49 percent — the highest share won by any Democratic presidential candidate during this period. It was still not a majority.

The Republican advantage among white women is not a recent Trump-era phenomenon. Trump inherited a voting pattern that had been established decades before he entered politics. What changed with Trump was not the direction of the vote so much as the character of the Republican politics white women continued to support. By 2024, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump, putting the Republican share of this electorate within roughly the same range it had occupied since 2016. Trump did not create the pattern. He simply stepped into it.

I’ve watched people encounter this majority of white women voters’ abysmal record on social progress and go quiet in a particular way — not defensive, exactly, but surprised, as though the record had been sitting in plain sight the whole time and they had simply not looked at it. That’s Bubbleland cracking, however briefly.

The pattern becomes sharper when race enters the picture. White women and Black women vote at opposite ends of the political spectrum — not by a small margin, but by one of the widest racial divides in American politics. Gender is part of the picture, but it does not tell us enough by itself. Race and party affiliation are powerful influences on how women vote, which means that “women,” treated as a single voting category, conceals more than it reveals.

This is important when we look at the Trump coalition. White women are not simply observers of the political order Trump represents. Some have been among its most fervent participants.

Observe the women who have occupied positions close to Trump. Susie Wiles became his chief of staff, placing her at the center of his political operation. Karoline Leavitt served as his press secretary through August 2026, defending Trump and his administration from the White House podium. Natalie Harp, Trump’s number-one sycophant, has remained a close aide, known for supplying him with material from conservative media. Laura Loomer operates outside the administration but within its wider political orbit, using social media to push racial, religious and conspiratorial claims further than most elected Republicans would publicly attempt.

Then there are white women who have exercised direct institutional power. Kristi Noem headed the Department of Homeland Security until Trump moved her out in March 2026, reassigning her as Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas. Pam Bondi serves as attorney general and has become one of Trump’s prominent defenders. These women have occupied positions inside the government, where they have helped carry out and defend the administration’s policies.

The point is not that these white women all think alike, or that every white woman who votes Republican shares their views. The point is simpler: white women are not merely being acted upon by a political movement organized by white men. Some white women help run it; some defend it; some supply the president with the information he wants and, especially, the affirmation he desperately needs to hear. Others give its policies the authority of government. They are participants in the political order they support.

This is one reason the sentence every white woman I know hates him tells us less about white women than it first appears to. It describes a social circle, not the electorate.

Bubbleland has had its seasons of doubt.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, white women stood alongside women of color in protests outside the Court and elsewhere. For a time, it was possible to imagine that opposition to the decision might produce a durable coalition among women across racial and partisan lines. Democrats performed better than many expected in the 2022 midterms.

Then another presidential election arrived.

The coalition visible in the demonstrations did not reproduce itself at the ballot box. Partisanship proved stronger than broad gender solidarity. Women did not suddenly begin voting as women. They continued to vote largely as Democrats or Republicans, with race strongly shaping where white women stood. Class, religion, education and geography also influenced those choices.

That raises the more difficult question. If women do not vote primarily as women, what shapes the political choices made within that category?

Race is central to the answer.

Since the civil-rights movement, racial backlash has been one of the Republican Party’s most effective political instruments. There have been other issues, of course — abortion, taxes, guns, religion, immigration — but the politics of white racial grievance have remained close to the center of the Republican coalition for decades. The language and policies have changed. The underlying political divide has not.

White women benefited from the expansion of civil-rights protections that followed the civil-rights movement, protections demanded first because Black Americans had been systematically excluded from political and civic life and later extended to other groups. Yet a substantial majority of white women have repeatedly voted for the Republican Party throughout the same period.

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A person does not have to use a racial slur, belong to the Ku Klux Klan or consciously regard herself as a racist to participate in a political system that preserves racial inequality. If you repeatedly vote for a party whose policies restrict voting access in ways that disproportionately burden Black voters, weaken civil-rights protections, oppose affirmative action and tolerate persistent racial disparities in housing, criminal justice and economic opportunity, your vote has a racial consequence whether you acknowledge it or not.

You can believe yourself free of racial animus. You can sincerely reject the word “racist.” But a private belief does not erase a public act, and it is the act — not the belief — that the data records.

This is the distinction between overt racism and de facto racism. Overt racism is explicit racial hostility. De facto racism operates through political choices that preserve racial advantage without requiring the person making those choices to acknowledge, or even consciously recognize, the racial hierarchy those choices help preserve.

That is why the familiar image of the racist — the hood, the cross, the shouted slur — is inadequate to the politics of the modern Republican Party. Racial hierarchy does not require everyone who benefits from it to declare allegiance to it. It requires enough people to vote for the political arrangements that keep it in place.

There is also a gap in how this political behavior is discussed. When commentators ask why campaigns devote particular attention to Black men, they are willing to examine race and gender as political categories. White women receive less scrutiny, even though their voting record has been consistently aligned with the Republican Party for decades.

Perhaps that is another feature of Bubbleland. If the white women in your family, workplace, neighborhood and social circle overwhelmingly voted against Trump, it is easy to assume that white women did the same. Your experience confirms your understanding of white women as a political group. The polling data remains outside that experience.

The sentence every white woman I know hates him is therefore revealing in a way its speaker may not intend. Perhaps everyone she knows really does hate him. But that social world is not the country.

The white women who voted for him were not some remote or obscure population. They were in families, churches, workplaces, neighborhoods and government offices. Some were among Trump’s closest political allies. Some helped govern.

Bubbleland does not require ignorance. It requires a social world in which the people around you see much the same political reality.

And once that becomes your reality, millions of white women voting differently can remain almost invisible — even when pollsters have been reporting the pattern for decades.

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Outro: In Gounod’s Faust, Marguerite looks into the mirror and is enchanted by her transformation. Adorned with the jewels left for her by Méphistophélès, she laughs at her own beauty and imagines herself “the daughter of a king,” no longer the modest girl she was. But the glittering surface conceals something far uglier: the jewels are bait, and her sudden vanity makes her vulnerable to Faust’s seduction and Méphistophélès’s darker purpose. The scene is a neat inversion of appearances—beauty on the outside, corruption and destruction gathering underneath.

Faust, Act 3: “Un bouquet!” - Air des bijoux. “Ah, je ris de me voir si belle” (Marguerite) · André Cluytens · Victoria de los Ángeles

Sources:

American Enterprise Institute. “The Exit Polls.” AEI Public Opinion Studies, 2022.

Associated Press. “How 5 Key Demographic Groups Voted in 2024: AP VoteCast.” Nov. 2024..

National Archives. “Women’s Rights and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Supreme Court of the United States. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, June 29, 2023.

Associated Press. “As Medical Perils From Abortion Bans Grow, So Do Opportunities for Democrats in a Post-Roe World.” 2024.

Reuters. Simon Lewis and Ted Hesson. “Ousted Homeland Security Chief Noem Begins New Envoy Role With Tour.” March 25, 2026.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Attorney General: Pamela J. Bondi.” Updated May 28, 2026.

CBS News. Kathryn Watson. “Who Is Natalie Harp? Trump Aide Suddenly in the Spotlight.” Aug. 18, 2026.

The Washington Post. Violet Jira and Sammy Westfall. “What to Know About Natalie Harp, the Trump Aide Whom Ossoff Put in the Spotlight.” Aug. 18, 2026.

People. “The View Extends Invite to Karoline Leavitt as She Exits Trump Administration During FCC Feud.” Aug. 28, 2026.

A skeleton stands where an emperor should. It wears an ermine cloak and a crown of jagged iron, not gold. With the back of one hand it tips over a throne.

Hermione von Preuschen painted this in 1887 and titled it Mors Imperator: Death is the Ruler. The Berlin Academy refused to exhibit it. Kaiser Wilhelm I was ninety that year and dead within twelve months, so the jury feared the painting would provoke too much emotion for a dying monarch to bear. Wilhelm himself, told of the controversy, said he had no objection. The Academy rejected the painting anyway, which tells you more about the fragility of unearned authority than the canvas itself needed to.

It took me a long time, looking back, to recognize how subversive an education I received before I ever started school. Many people know the line “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” It is usually attributed either to Aristotle or to Ignatius Loyola, but neither attribution is secure. The larger point, that what we absorb in childhood can leave a remarkably deep imprint, holds up even if the quotation itself does not.

My first teacher was my grandmother. I hesitate to call it homeschooling; there was no curriculum. There were simply books and time together. She worked full-time while we lived in Taiwan; when we moved to Rio de Janeiro, my formal schooling began, precisely, at seven.

By then something had already taken root: a resistance to taking hierarchy at face value.

My grandmother loved reading fairy tales to me almost as much as I loved hearing them and studying their illustrations. I didn’t know it then, but many of those stories were subtly undermining one of the assumptions societies are built on, that people who occupy the highest places are somehow more worthy humans.

The Eastern European tales of my childhood were particularly good at disabusing me of any notions about the distinctiveness of monarchs or the “aristocracy” in general. Kings and queens were often foolish, or simply ordinary. The person with no title at all, the peasant, the orphan, the youngest child, the clever girl, was often the one who possessed the courage and judgment that society taught many to associate with the crown.

Pushkin’s The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish offered a particularly memorable lesson in the absurdity of status. An old woman, dissatisfied with what she has, keeps demanding higher rank: noblewoman, Empress, then ruler of the sea. Her appetite for status destroys what she already had. The joke, if there is one, is that becoming more exalted never once makes her more worthy.

In The Peasant’s Wise Daughter, a peasant girl repeatedly proves more perceptive than the king; he has authority, she has judgment. Cinderella stories reverse the hierarchy differently: the supposedly insignificant girl proves more deserving than those who hold wealth or rank. Even when she ends up a princess, nothing essential about her has changed.

That lesson came from outside Eastern Europe too. Aesop’s frogs who demand a king get one, and discover too late that he isn’t benign. In Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, the emperor’s magnificence exists only because everyone has agreed to pretend it does, until a child punctures the illusion with a plain statement of fact.

Looking back, I can see what these stories were teaching me. Fairy tales run a kind of childhood experiment in legitimacy: who actually deserves respect, the person with the title, or the person with the virtues? Again and again, the answer was the second one.

Kings and queens needn’t have been villains. Their crowns simply conferred no special wisdom or moral authority. A king could be foolish. An orphan could be more deserving than the heir beside her. A crown does not make the person beneath it any more human, or any less, than anyone outside the palace gates.

That may have been the beginning of my lifelong suspicion of people who mistake the accident of their position for evidence of their superiority.

There was no Bible in my childhood homes, ever. My three-generation family observed Easter and Christmas, but not overwhelmingly. As émigrés, my mother and maternal grandparents worked full-time and had little time, and perhaps little interest, in getting into Bible stories. I lucked out. My grandfather was essentially a non-believer, and when my mother and grandmother decided I should attend “Russian school,” where religion was taught, I was promptly expelled for asking impudent questions. I was eleven, or twelve. There were no Rusalkas in Scripture. No Firebirds, no Baba Yagas, no Ivan the Fool, no Koschei the Deathless. I learned some things from the Bible by osmosis. It was just another set of stories that never once let the servant outwit the king.

The subject about our species’ shared commonality ordinarily percolates on the back burner in my life. This week, however, the sheer volume of coverage devoted to “the Sussexes” returning to the UK has activated my iconoclastic nature.

What, exactly, is anyone owed for having been born into a particular house? How many times do we read about this privileged royal or another marrying a “commoner”?

As if we’re not all such. Common as dirt, in fact, to the place we return.

The current occupant of the White House offers an American variation on the same instinct, minus even the fig leaf of inherited legitimacy. He has gilded the Oval Office, torn up the Rose Garden’s lawn for a white stone patio modeled on Mar-a-Lago, and lined the result with statues of the men he’d like history to file him alongside. There’s less monarch in it than housecat: an animal working every corner of a new territory until the smell of him is on all of it.

Britain once did this across an empire that covered roughly a quarter of the world’s land area at its height, sending flags and administrators ahead to make the claim official. The modern version settles for real estate and gold leaf, but the underlying sentence, “To have, hold, occupy, and possess,” hasn’t changed, only the size of the territory on which it is being enacted.

Silicon Valley exhibits a similar manifestation of this very same underlying motivation. This week Mark Zuckerberg bought Strancally Castle, a Gothic-revival pile in County Waterford built in the 1830s for a Conservative MP, most recently restored over twenty years by a couple who called it home. He and Priscilla Chan already own a compound in Kauai, an estate in Palo Alto, and a home in Miami’s aptly named Billionaire Bunker; the castle reads less like shelter than like acquiring a title the old-fashioned aristocracy would at least have had to be born into. Wealth now buys the crest without the bloodline, the folly without the feudal obligations that used to come attached to it.

Material assets leave human biology completely unaltered. Strip away the myth and the mechanism is uniform: bone and tissue return to mineral and organic matter, no more and no less than what any peasant leaves behind.

The idea of returning to dust predates every monarchy still standing, and the ritual of throwing dirt on a casket makes the same admission the aristocracy myth exists to prevent us making: whatever a person accumulates in life is on loan, and the debt comes due to the ground. Recompose, in Seattle, has made the metaphor literal, composting the dead into soil for next season’s planting.

Thus, our shared biology dismantles every illusion of superiority; beneath the gold and the titles, we belong to the same species, subject to the same biology, and destined for the same return to the earth.

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Outro: Gérard, once a servant, now a revolutionary tribunal official, sits down to falsify charges against the poet Chénier out of jealousy. Dismissing “enemy of the fatherland” as an empty phrase the credulous still believe, he writes the accusation anyway, then breaks down over what he’s lost: the man who once dreamed of liberating humanity now serves nothing but his own appetite. Same servitude, new master. Andrea Chénier - ‘Nemico della patria?’

Sources:

Associated Press. “Prince Harry and Meghan are returning to the UK with their children.” Aug. 20, 2026. AP News

Associated Press. “Inside Trump’s remake of the White House Rose Garden.” Aug. 23, 2026. AP News

Reuters. “Meta’s Zuckerberg buys 19th-century castle in southeast of Ireland.” Aug. 20, 2026. Reuters

The Verge. “Mark Zuckerberg bought an Irish castle.” Aug. 2026. The Verge

Library of Congress. Fables of Aesop, including “The Frogs Desiring a King.” Library of Congress

Recompose. “Recompose 101: In-Person Tour.” For the human-composting process and Seattle facility. Recompose

It happened to me again. I’d been writing about an entirely different subject in my last essay — the stuff we carbon-based bipeds are made of — and closed it, as I usually do, with a musical coda. What I didn’t expect was to spend the next several days being pulled along by that coda rather than being done with it.

The piece I chose for “The Matter of Age” was the andante sostenuto, the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-flat Major, D. 960, played by Sviatoslav Richter. Sometimes I pick a coda before I’ve written a word of the fledgling essay. Other times it picks me, arriving unannounced partway through. This was the second kind. It happened five days ago, while I was in the middle of writing, when I found myself remembering how slowly Richter played that Schubert. It had once put me into something close to the trance Glenn Gould describes in the 1998 documentary Richter: The Enigma — a hypnotic state, he said, that dissolved his old impatience with Schubert’s repetitious grandiosity. Gould died in 1982, sixteen years before the documentary was finished, so the archival footage of him had to be dubbed by Bruno Monsaingeon, the director of Enigma. The original audio track was lost, but the words themselves were Gould’s own.

I hadn’t watched Enigma in nearly ten years and was glad to find it online. Over the next two days, my husband and I watched the film from start to finish, both parts, all two hours and thirty-eight minutes. There was far more in the documentary than we could absorb in a single viewing, and I suspect it still only grazes the surface of who Richter actually was.

He was born in 1915 in Zhytomyr — then part of the Russian Empire, today a city in Ukraine — the son of a German-descended pianist and organist who gave him his first real exposure to music. He grew up mostly in Odessa, and by his own account hated practicing piano scales, spending years teaching himself how to play before anything formal took hold. He didn’t enter the Moscow Conservatory until he was twenty-two, unusually late for a career that would be spoken of in the same breath as the century’s greatest. There he found Heinrich Neuhaus, the teacher who shaped him more than any other. Richter was still in his twenties when the Soviet Union first took notice, awarding him the Stalin Prize in 1945, though the wider world didn’t hear him until 1958, when he was finally permitted to perform in the West, followed by an American debut in 1960 that critics still describe as a revelation. He played nearly everything — Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Handel, Schubert, Brahms, Liszt, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky — and became famous, almost stubbornly, for wanting none of the attention that came with playing so extraordinarily well. What people remember isn’t the technique alone, but the seriousness he brought to the instrument, an intensity that made every performance inimitably his own.

What the Documentary Left Out

A pianist’s hands are among the few things an audience is permitted to watch without disguise. The face composes itself into professional stillness, but the hands do the actual work of the evening, and there is no way to perform that work indirectly.

Sviatoslav Richter and Vladimir Horowitz spent their public lives inside this arrangement, in which the most demanding and revealing part of them was also the most visible. Audiences knew the hands, the sound, the repertoire, the mannerisms. The rest of their lives were considerably more guarded. Both men were understood by people who knew them well to be gay, although neither publicly identified himself that way. What survives instead is an extraordinary body of recorded work and two private lives shaped by the need to protect something the societies around them regarded as dangerous or forbidden.

The Terms of Concealment

The two men lived under different versions of the same historical pressure. In Richter’s case, the constraint was written directly into Soviet law. Male homosexual conduct was criminalized in 1934 under Article 121, punishable by up to five years in prison or forced labor. The provision remained in the Russian criminal code until 1993, almost six decades after Richter’s youth had become his adulthood.

Richter had reason to take the Soviet state seriously as a personal threat. In 1941, when he was twenty-six, his father was arrested, convicted of espionage and executed. Richter rejected the accusation, and the experience left him with an intimate knowledge of what could happen when the state turned its attention toward a private citizen.

His companion for the rest of his life was the soprano Nina Dorliak, nearly seven years his senior. They met in 1943, began living together around 1945, performed together and remained devoted companions for more than fifty years. The relationship is often dated to a 1946 marriage, but Michel Krielaars and other biographers report that the two never formally registered one; some accounts describe a certificate surfacing only after Richter’s death, though the circumstances remain disputed and probably unresolvable at this distance. What can be said with more confidence, from people who knew Richter well, is that he was gay, and that his life with Dorliak functioned as companionship rather than marriage in any conventional sense.

There was a psychological cost to living this way. Paul Moor, an American journalist who knew Richter over many years, described the pianist’s recurring periods of depression and withdrawal. Richter could disappear from the piano for extended stretches, retreating into himself without offering much explanation. The circumstances of his life provide one possible context for that withdrawal, though it would be too easy to assign every episode of depression to his sexuality or to Soviet repression.

Richter’s personality was famously private, but his reserve had its limits. He could be warm with people he trusted, and his musical relationships sometimes created an intimacy that ordinary conversation did not. His friendship and collaboration with Benjamin Britten is especially striking.

Britten, a gay man who lived for decades with the tenor Peter Pears, met Richter in the 1960s, and the two performed together at the Aldeburgh Festival. They played Schubert’s music for piano four hands, including the Fantasy in F minor, the Variations on an Original Theme and the Grand Duo. Recordings from the 1964 and 1965 festivals survive, as does footage of the two men playing together in Richter: The Enigma. There is no evidence that their friendship was sexual, and none is needed. What the footage shows is the ease of the encounter — two exceptional musicians sharing a keyboard, listening and responding without explanation. Britten never had to hide what Richter spent his life concealing, and something in that difference seems to have made Richter’s own guard easier to set down, at least for the length of a piece of music.

Richter was baptized in an Orthodox church as an infant, but he was not raised or known as a practicing Russian Orthodox Christian. Photographs from Richter’s later years, including one taken during a 1990s Moscow Conservatory rehearsal, show him wearing an ankh — the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for life. What drew him to the symbol specifically isn’t well documented; some accounts attribute it to a personal interest in ancient Egypt, though that claim rests on thinner sourcing than the photographic evidence itself.

Near the close of Monsaingeon’s documentary, Richter reads from his own journal, then falls silent and says, simply, in Russian: Ya sebe ne nravlyus. Vse. (“I do not like myself. That’s it.”) Some scholars caution that the line is better understood as dissatisfaction than despair — closer to “I am not satisfied with myself” than to clinical self-loathing — and it is consistent with a man who spent decades in his notebooks marking down every performance he felt had fallen short of what the music demanded. His perfectionism was, by every account, a fixed feature of his temperament, but a man required to conceal something essential about himself for eighty-two years, under a state that could have ended his life for the concealment failing, is not likely to arrive at self-judgment from music alone. Whatever the balance of causes, the final image Monsaingeon leaves us with is of a man who, at the end of an extraordinary public career, still could not offer himself the ordinary mercy of being satisfied with who he was.

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Vladimir Horowitz was born in Kyiv in 1903, when the city was part of the Russian Empire. Today, Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine. Horowitz left the Soviet Union in 1925, at the age of twenty-one, to pursue a career in the West. His American debut followed in 1928, and he became an American citizen in 1942. By the 1930s, he was one of the most celebrated pianists in the world and, by most accounts, one of the least guarded about his private life among those who actually knew him.

Emigration carried its own complications, however. Horowitz was Jewish as well as gay, and the Europe through which he moved in the following decade was becoming increasingly dangerous for both identities. In 1933 he married Wanda Toscanini, the daughter of conductor Arturo Toscanini. They had one daughter, Sonia, born in 1934. Wanda remained an important figure in his life and career. Lea Singer, drawing on Horowitz’s surviving letters, has described the marriage less as a partnership than an arrangement of mutual convenience — status and access exchanged in both directions.

Within musical circles, Horowitz’s attraction to men was closer to common knowledge than rumor. Arthur Rubinstein later recalled that everyone simply accepted Horowitz as homosexual, and friends including Josef Hofmann, Serge Koussevitzky and Nathan Milstein are reported to have known as well. Horowitz denied it when asked directly, but he was also capable of naming it himself, in his own dry fashion — he was fond of joking that there were three kinds of pianists in the world, Jewish, homosexual, and bad, and that he qualified under two of the three headings. In later decades he moved more openly through gay social circles, including the world around the director George Cukor, whose Sunday gatherings in Hollywood were widely understood among insiders as a meeting point for gay men in the industry. Both of the standard biographies of Horowitz, by Glenn Plaskin and by Harold Schonberg, document this side of his life at length.

The clearest documentary evidence, though, comes from a relationship rather than an anecdote: his involvement with Nico Kaufmann, a young Swiss pianist who became his student in 1937 and then his lover. Their relationship lasted roughly two years. They maintained an intense correspondence, and Kaufmann preserved Horowitz’s letters despite an agreement that the letters would be destroyed after reading. The surviving correspondence, now held in Swiss archival collections, contains intimate material and provides unusually direct evidence of a relationship Horowitz had intended to keep private.

The relationship became dangerous when one of the letters came into Kaufmann’s father’s possession in 1938. Kaufmann was subjected to family intervention and psychiatric scrutiny, and Horowitz became more cautious about seeing him. The two continued to meet secretly for a time, but the relationship ended when Horowitz left Europe in 1939. For a Jewish musician whose family remained exposed to Nazi persecution, the decision to leave had stopped being optional.

Horowitz’s own psychological history suggests how deeply the expectations of the period could reach even a man who was, in practice, fairly well known to be gay among the people around him. His first major depression began in 1933, the year he married Wanda, and he subsequently underwent psychoanalysis with Lawrence Kubie. A modern psychiatric account of Horowitz’s life suggests the treatment may have included an attempt to change his sexual orientation. That conclusion should be treated cautiously, but it belongs to the history of the man and the period: homosexuality was still regarded by psychiatric authorities of the era as something to be corrected rather than lived with.

Knowledge Without Acknowledgment

What makes both cases stranger than ordinary secrecy is that neither secret was, in practice, much of one. Richter’s homosexuality was widely understood among people who knew him in Russia; the critic David Fanning could write in International Piano Quarterly, without hedging, that it was common knowledge despite Richter’s decades with Dorliak. Horowitz’s was treated the same way in musical circles, as a matter requiring no further comment. The arrangement was not really a closet, since a closet implies that what is inside it is unknown, and in both cases it plainly was not. It is closer to a form of knowledge that circulates everywhere except in the official record — a fact people relied on privately while no one was ever required, or permitted, to state it publicly.

The women who shared their names deserve to be treated as more than props in this arrangement. Dorliak’s decades with Richter appear, by every account, to have involved genuine loyalty and mutual devotion, whatever its romantic or sexual content; she outlived him by less than a year. Horowitz’s marriage to Wanda produced a daughter and outlasted, on paper, whatever it may or may not have been to either of them privately — which is closer, in Lea Singer’s reading of the letters, to a negotiated deal than a romance.

What Outlasted the Law

The story does not end with either man’s death, because the state that once criminalized Richter’s private life did not disappear so much as change its methods. Article 121 was repealed in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and for a period it was reasonable to think that the older machinery of legal persecution had retired along with the government that built it. The Russia that emerged under Vladimir Putin found a different use for the same prejudice. Homosexuality no longer needs to be prosecuted as a crime to be useful to the state; it can instead be presented as evidence of Western decadence, a marker separating an authentic Russia from a corrupted one.

The Russian Orthodox Church, under Patriarch Kirill, has supplied much of the vocabulary for this argument. Kirill, who has led the Church since 2009, has repeatedly described the legalization of same-sex marriage in the West as a sign of moral collapse, and under Putin the Church and state have converged around a shared language of “traditional values” that scholars have described as an emerging civil religion for the country. That convergence became explicit, and militarized, in March 2022, when Kirill, preaching on Forgiveness Sunday shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, described the war as having a metaphysical dimension and pointed to gay pride parades as a test determining which side of a civilizational divide a society belonged to. The people of Donbas, in his telling, were resisting the side that had failed that test. A private matter of whom a person loves had become, in the space of a sermon, a line on a map.

Kirill has continued developing this argument as the war has continued, framing the invasion in spiritual terms, telling Russians in September 2022 that soldiers who died fighting could have their sins forgiven, and in 2024 issuing, through the World Russian People’s Council which he chairs, a decree describing the war as a “Holy War” within a larger struggle against a corrupted West.

One detail complicates any tidy account of church and state as separate institutions that happen to agree: Putin has said he was secretly baptized as an infant in 1952, since his father was a Communist Party member, and in 2025 Kirill confirmed what Putin had previously described as a belief rather than a certainty — that the priest who performed the baptism was Kirill’s own father, Mikhail Gundyaev. Between them, the priest’s son and the secretly baptized child have spent the last several years constructing a public argument in which Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism are treated as inseparable, with homosexuality serving as one of the more convenient symbols of everything that argument defines itself against.

The apparatus available to Putin’s Russia is not identical to Stalin’s, and it does not need to be: contemporary Russia has built its enforcement out of “gay propaganda” legislation, constitutional language protecting the heterosexual family, and, since 2023, a formal designation of the international LGBT movement as an extremist organization. Where Richter faced a specific criminal statute, today’s enforcement runs through culture and constitution instead — a quieter apparatus, but not a gentler one.

It is tempting, from this distance, to draw the two men’s biographies into a straightforward contrast: the old Russia was repressive, the West was free, and the collapse of the Soviet Union closed the question these two pianists had lived inside. The history since 1993 does not support so tidy a reading. A law can be repealed without dislodging the prejudice it once enforced, and an institution can revise its vocabulary considerably while preserving, more or less intact, the hierarchy of human worth the older vocabulary was built to protect.

Richter and Horowitz lived at a time when disclosure could cost a man his career or his liberty, and under the worst regimes, his life. In Russia today the vocabulary has shifted from criminality to civilizational betrayal, but the underlying function is recognizably the same: homosexuality continues to serve as a symbol against which a supposedly authentic, faithful nation defines itself, against a supposedly decadent and godless West.

What Richter and Horowitz concealed was never a crime or a pathology. It was an ordinary fact of being human, and it remains one. The recordings both men left behind are still there for anyone who wants to hear what their hands were free to say. The rest of what neither man could say belonged to the world that demanded the silence — not to either of them.

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Outro: Tchaikovsky’s “None but the Lonely Heart” (Op. 6, No. 6), composed in 1869, is a deeply melancholy art song setting Goethe’s poem “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (“Only he who knows longing”), expressing profound loneliness and heartache.

Sources:

Bruno Monsaingeon, Richter: The Enigma (1998).

Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Sviatoslav Richter Memorial Apartment.

Michel Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Soviet Union (2025).

Glenn Plaskin, Vladimir Horowitz: A Biography (1983).

Harold C. Schonberg, Horowitz: His Life and Music (1992).

Lea Singer, The Piano Student (2020), and KRWG Public Media interview with Singer.

Kalliope Union Catalogue, Nico Kaufmann collection.

The Washington Post, “Acclaimed Pianist Sviatoslav Richter Dies at 82” (1997

Associated Press, “Russia’s LGBTQ+ community is living in fear following new laws and court rulings” (2025).

Associated Press, “Russia’s Supreme Court in effect outlaws LGBTQ+ activism” (2023).

The Washington Post, “How Putin’s invasion became a holy war for Russia” (2022).

Journal of Church and State, “To Whom Much is Given: The Russian Orthodox Church’s Role in the Russo-Ukrainian War

World Council of Churches, “WCC statement on Decree of XXV World Russian People’s Council” (2024).

There comes a point in some arguments when the facts become inconvenient and the reasoning begins to demand more than the argument can supply. What happens then is revealing: rather than answer the case, attention shifts to the person who has made it.

That simpler response becomes: insult the person.

This is not a new invention. Insults are among the oldest instruments in the human repertoire of disagreement. Fools, liars, idiots, heretics, barbarians, traitors, bastards: the vocabulary has varied with the age and the culture, but the purpose has remained much the same. When an argument cannot be defeated on its merits, attacking the person who makes it offers a convenient substitute. An insult is what remains of an argument when the argument itself has run out.

Today, one contribution to this ancient practice is the word boomer.

Once, it was simply a demographic term: a person born during the postwar population surge, roughly between 1946 and 1964. It described a circumstance of birth, nothing more. There was no particular virtue or vice attached to it. A person was born in a certain period, and therefore belonged to a certain demographic cohort.

The word has acquired another use.

Depending on who is saying it and to whom, boomer can now mean old, privileged, reactionary, clueless, used up, selfish, technologically inept or simply contemptible. It has become a convenient receptacle into which various grievances can be poured. Its use is often simply dismissive or openly hostile. Conveniently, it may show up at precisely the moment when a discussion becomes difficult, serving as a substitute for continuing the argument.

This habit is not confined to one generation. Words like zoomer, snowflake and their assorted relations perform much the same service in the opposite direction. The person’s argument is bypassed and the person is classified instead: placed in a generational box according to the date on a birth certificate, as though chronology were an argument and a birth year a refutation.

Consider the meme circulating on social media. Three older men appear beneath the declaration that most of the world’s unrest over the past five years has been caused by “three 70-something white boomer losers desperate to stay out of prison.”:

There are, obviously, serious things to say about powerful men — and women, for that matter — and about the consequences of their actions. Their age is rarely among the most useful facts. Calling someone a boomer tells us when that person was born; it tells us nothing, by itself, about whether what they have done is right or wrong, intelligent or foolish, humane or destructive. There are many things one might reasonably criticize about the three men in the meme. Their ages are among the least interesting.

Age is not an argument, and youth is no better a credential. I have disagreed with plenty of people my own age, and see no reason to accept an idea simply because its advocate is younger — or older — than I am. What matters is what a person thinks and does, whom their actions affect, and how they justify them. Those are matters to be examined and judged on their merits.

Youth does, however, have one characteristic that can be particularly seductive: it is possible to mistake having arrived later for having arrived wiser. The present generation can look upon its predecessors with the advantage of hindsight, judging decisions made under circumstances that no longer exist and with assumptions that have since changed. At the same time, its own judgments can acquire the flattering appearance of enlightenment simply because they happen to be current. History has a way of curing some of that confidence, although it is a cure rarely administered in advance.

This is not a criticism of young people. It is a feature of being human. Every generation discovers that the previous one got important things wrong; every generation eventually discovers that it, too, has misunderstood some things. The young have reasons for thinking the old have failed to understand the world, and the old have reasons for thinking the young have failed to understand it. Neither conclusion deserves to be converted into a law of nature.

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I have spent much of my life trying to look at our species from that wider perspective: as a humanist, and as someone persuaded that the scientific habit of asking what is actually the case is a useful corrective to the stories people tell themselves about what ought to be the case. It took me some practice to get there. One of the things I learned was that an argument is stronger when it can stand without the assistance of an insult. I have no need of ad hominem; indeed, I have come to regard it as a kind of gift to one's opponent. Once the discussion has been reduced to an attack on the person, the opponent need only point to the attack itself to show that the argument has been abandoned.

That does not mean withholding judgment. Humanism is not moral neutrality, and understanding a person historically does not require excusing that person’s conduct. Years ago, I referred to Thomas Jefferson, among other things, as an enslaver. Some fellow humanists who admired Jefferson for his advocacy of religious liberty and the separation of church and state objected, and one of the responses I heard repeatedly was that he was “a man of his time.”

There is truth in the phrase, but truth can be put to lazy uses.

My response was to point to another Thomas who lived in the same historical time: Thomas Paine. Paine was an abolitionist. He was also radically democratic and socially progressive in ways that remain striking. He argued for measures resembling a basic income, old-age pensions, assistance for families with children and public education; he favored taxation that would prevent inherited wealth from becoming a permanent source of political power. His underlying concern was simple enough: political freedom is of limited practical value to someone whose poverty leaves that person without meaningful choices.

Paine was equally uncompromising about monarchy and religion. He rejected the idea that anyone is born with a natural right to rule another person, and he opposed government establishment of religion. What a person believed — or declined to believe — belonged to individual conscience. His radicalism was not founded upon contempt for humanity but upon a rather more generous assumption: that ordinary people were capable of reason and entitled to liberty, education and the material conditions that make liberty usable.

That exchange led me to read more about Paine than I otherwise might have done, and I am grateful for it. More importantly, it clarified something for me about historical judgment. Calling Jefferson an enslaver was not an ad hominem attack. It was a description of something he actually did. “A man of his time” may provide historical context, but it cannot make the fact disappear. Paine, living at that same time, provides the counterexample that makes the excuse less substantive. Certainly, people are shaped by their circumstances, but they need not be wholly determined by them.

And here the comparison with boomer becomes useful. “A man of his time” and “just a boomer” are, in a sense, the same sentence pointed in opposite directions. One uses chronology to excuse a person; the other uses chronology to condemn one. Both make the calendar do the work that evidence and judgment ought to do.

* * *

The old were once young.

Every eighty-year-old was once twenty. Every sixty-year-old was once thirty. The twenty-year-old of today, if fortunate enough to live that long, is moving toward old age one day at a time. The direction is not negotiable. We call the stages by different names, attach different cultural meanings to them and sometimes behave as though they describe different kinds of human beings. They do not. Age is a condition of a human life, not a species classification.

There is a still more fundamental connection, and it takes us beneath psychology, culture and history altogether.

We are made of cells; cells are made of molecules; molecules are made of atoms. Those atoms have histories vastly older than the human beings who temporarily contain them. Some of the atoms in your body were once in someone else’s body. Some have passed through plants, animals, oceans, soil and the atmosphere. Some may once have belonged to people whose names have survived for thousands of years; others belonged to people whose names vanished almost immediately.

Pharaohs and slaves.

Kings and knaves.

Murderers and lifesavers.

Heroes and villains.

Babies and centenarians.

The material world has made no distinction among them.

An atom does not know whether it once belonged to a king or a beggar. It does not carry a moral biography. It does not retain the virtues of one person or the crimes of another. An atom of carbon that was once incorporated into the body of a person with compassion is not morally superior to an atom of carbon that once belonged to a murderer. Matter has no caste system.

The matter of one living thing eventually becomes part of the world from which other living things draw their substance. Bodies return material to soil, air and water; plants and microorganisms take it up; animals consume plants and one another; human beings participate in the same circulation. The details are governed by science and by the particular pathways through which elements move through the Earth, but the broad fact is wonderfully simple: the material of life is continually passing from one form into another.

We are temporary arrangements of ancient material.

That sounds like poetry because it is a fact with philosophical consequences. The Stoics, without anything resembling modern chemistry, arrived at a related intuition in their own vocabulary. Marcus Aurelius, writing in old age, repeatedly reminded himself that the things of which a person is composed are borrowed for a time and will return to the larger order from which they came. He did not know about atoms in the modern sense. He did understand that possession is a temporary condition.

And there is something quietly humbling in that.

Human beings spend considerable effort constructing boundaries between themselves and others: my generation, your generation; rich and poor; young and old; one race and another; one religion and another; one nation and another. Such distinctions can have historical and social significance, and some of them have been used to organize terrible injustices. But they are not the deepest facts about our existence. Beneath the categories is a continuity that precedes all of them.

We are all carrying pieces of one another.

That does not make us morally identical, nor does it settle any question about who deserves admiration or blame. Jefferson’s atoms do not excuse slavery; Paine’s atoms do not make him virtuous. What matters morally is what human beings do with the brief arrangement of matter that constitutes a life.

But it does put our generational quarrels into perspective.

The person dismissed as a boomer did not suddenly become one upon reaching old age. The demographic category was there from birth; what changed was its cultural meaning. For most of that person’s life, boomer was merely descriptive. Then, in the age of “OK, boomer,” it acquired the additional burden of contempt. By then, of course, the person had already lived through childhood, friendship, ambition, disappointment, love, loss and successive versions of the self. The younger person applying the label is simply earlier in the same human journey.

Both are human beings made of ancient material, living briefly between a past they did not choose and a future they will not completely see.

Perhaps, then, the year in which a person happened to be born is among the least interesting things about them.

What matters is what we make of the time we are given.

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Outro: Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-Flat Major, D. 960: II. Andante sostenuto played by Sviatoslav Richter.

Sources:

Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man, Part II. 1792. Full text: The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. 2, Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org/ebooks/3742.

Paine, Thomas. Agrarian Justice. 1797. Full text: Social Security Administration historical archive, ssa.gov/history/paine4.html.

Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Circa A.D. 170–180. Recommended edition: translated by Gregory Hays, Modern Library, 2002.

Pew Research Center. “The Whys and Hows of Generations Research.” Sept. 3, 2015. pewresearch.org/politics/2015/09/03/the-whys-and-hows-of-generations-research.

“Political Revolution” (@johnbourscheid). Meme image, “three 70-something white boomer losers,” circulated on social media, 2026.

A Nonbeliever Who Doesn’t Look Away

Stephen Fry calls himself an atheist and a humanist. For him, atheism describes the absence of belief in a deity; it does not, by itself, prescribe a politics, an ethics or a philosophy. He has no interest in persuading believers to abandon their faith, and his own disbelief in supernaturalism does not diminish his appreciation of what faith has inspired. A cathedral, Angkor Wat, the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal can all be admired without believing in the religious traditions that surrounded its construction. Bach can be heard without believing in the God for whom some of his music was written. An opera can move us without our accepting the mythological cosmology of its libretto.

Fry has tested that proposition against the hardest possible case. He is Jewish and lost family to the Holocaust, while the composer he loves best, Richard Wagner, was a virulent antisemite later appropriated by the regime that murdered them. If he can continue to hear Wagner without excusing Wagner, then the moral judgment of an artist and the judgment of his art are not the same thing.

The belief may belong to a religion; the work belongs to human beings. They designed it, paid for it, quarried the stone, composed the music, learned the craft and did the work. Faith may have provided the subject or inspiration, but the impulse to create, to express wonder, beauty, love, grief, or an attempt to understand the world, is not the sole property of religion. Remove God from the equation and the human record stays intact: people build, compose, love, quarrel, raise children, and die, and are then replaced by people who do the same. The humanist position is that meaning need not be discovered in the universe for human beings to make meaning within it.

The more interesting question, then, is not whether religious belief is necessary for wonder, but what human beings are capable of making when they are moved by it. Fry’s own life seems to provide an answer: opera, literature, cinema, comedy, friendship, love. And yet the question of God does not disappear. It becomes a different question.

Fry’s criticism, when it comes, is aimed at the God he’s being asked to imagine, not at the people who believe in one. He is not out to convert anyone. What Fry does, with his characteristic relish, is take the philosopher's question seriously: if such a being existed and were responsible for the world as it is, how could its goodness be reconciled with the suffering we find in it?

“How Dare You?”

In February 2015, Gay Byrne interviewed Fry for RTÉ’s The Meaning of Life and asked him what he’d say if he arrived at the pearly gates and found himself face to face with God. Fry didn’t hesitate. “Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you?” he said. “How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil.” He asked why he should respect a “petty, mean-minded, stupid god” who fills a world with injustice and pain.

When Byrne asked if he expected to get into heaven after that, Fry said, “I wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t want to get in on his terms. They’re wrong.”

Fry contrasted the Christian conception of an all-seeing, all-wise, all-good God with the Greek gods, who made no claim to moral perfection. Their capriciousness and appetites were not a problem in the same way, because nobody had claimed that they were omnipotent and benevolent.

Then came the catalogue: a world that contains parasites whose life cycle involves eating outward through the eyes of children. “Why? Why did you do that to us?”

It was not provocation for its own sake. Fry was putting an old philosophical problem in deliberately blunt terms: if God is good and all-powerful, why does suffering exist at all?

The Outsider Who Found His Way In

Fry grew up at a time when homosexuality was still something to conceal. He spent his adolescence struggling with it, and withstood what he’s described as roughly sixteen or seventeen years of sexual abstinence, driven by fear and shame, and hardened by the AIDS epidemic. Love, rather than any change of philosophy, eventually flicked the switch, as he put it.

He has connected that experience directly to his sensitivity toward injustice. Asked whether being gay and Jewish shaped his identification with the gay resistance figures Willem Arondeus and Frieda Belinfante, his answer was essentially yes: standing outside the main run of humanity gives you a particular kind of vision.

That same willingness to stand outside and report back shows up in how Fry talks about his own mind. He has spoken publicly for years about living with bipolar disorder, describing periods of instability that most people don’t have to deal with. There is something clarifying in that candor, not despite it: a man this honest about the unreliability of his own interior life is not pretending to any certainty he hasn’t earned when he makes his case for meaning without anything metaphysical underneath it. Nobody handed him the answers. He found his own way to them.

His real subject isn’t God. It’s how a person constructs a life of wonder, morality, beauty and meaning without one.

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The Great Passion

Fry’s father introduced him to Wagner when he was about ten. It was one of those accidents that can shape a life: a piece of music heard before one is old enough to understand it, but old enough to want to hear it again. For Fry, Wagner became the great passion. He has said that no other music has affected him in quite the same way. The passion eventually took him to Bayreuth and forced a difficult question: how to love Wagner's music while confronting the composer's Judeophobia and the way the Nazis later seized upon his work.

The judgment was never abstract. It played out in Fry’s own house. His mother, having lost family in the Holocaust, never shared the enthusiasm. When young Stephen played Wagner loudly through the house, she’d close her eyes and say: “I know you like it and that’s fine, but really you know, what’s wrong with Mozart?”

His documentary Wagner & Me is that reckoning made explicit. He goes to Bayreuth, walks through Wagner’s antisemitic writings, visits Nuremberg and an Auschwitz survivor orchestra, and asks the question plainly: can he love this music without betraying his own history? His answer is yes, but not by pretending the ugliness away. As he’s put it elsewhere, defending the same position outside the film:

“You can’t allow the perverted views of pseudo-intellectual Nazis to define how the world should look at Wagner. He’s bigger than that, and we’re not going to give them the credit, the joy of stealing him from us.”

Fry resolves it, finally, by refusing to let Wagner be reduced to his worst self. Wagner was a flawed, often hateful man, and the art still belongs to humanity rather than to the people who tried to conscript it. Fry’s broader argument is that great art isn’t reducible to the character or politics of the person who made it. Forcing art into a single ideology, he says, violates the art itself.

That refusal doesn’t make him solemn about the music. When Fry talks about the last five minutes of Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde on her horse, the pyre, the Rhine flooding, Valhalla collapsing, his tone is pure delight rather than reverence. He’s fantasized about someone funding a properly serious animated Ring, on the theory that only animation could do justice to Wagner’s own visual imagination. It’s a very Fry way of loving opera: intellectually rigorous and completely willing to surrender to the ridiculousness of it.

Mozart, and the Champagne Aria

His mother's question wasn't wasted on him. Fry later translated the German libretto of The Magic Flute for Kenneth Branagh's film. Reworking Mozart's words in English forced him to examine how closely the language was fitted to the music, and left him more convinced than ever that Mozart knew exactly what he was doing. Don Giovanni was the first opera he ever saw staged, and it’s the one he now recommends to anyone approaching opera for the first time, believing it did for him what it might do for them.

On Desert Island Discs in 1988, he chose “Fin ch’han dal vino,” the Champagne Aria, calling Don Giovanni one of the towering achievements of man. He picked the aria for its whirling, fantastic frenzy, Don Giovanni’s own invitation to pour the wine and have a good time. It’s not solemn or spiritually searching. Don Giovanni is no model of virtue, and the aria is Mozart at his most witty and wicked. That’s the useful detail: a humanist’s love of opera doesn’t have to come from its religious content at all. It can come entirely from the human invention inside it.

What Came of Loving Life

Fry has never treated any of this as separate from the rest of his life. The libretto he wrote for an opera based on E. M. Forster’s The Life to Come, working with composer Louis Mander, wasn’t a departure from listening to opera. It was what listening to opera, done long enough and taken seriously enough, eventually turned into. He called the experience extraordinary and invigorating, the same words he might use for a good performance he’d just watched. He has always been the kind of listener who hears something vast, a world burning, a river rising to meet it, and asks not who put it there, but what it’s made of.

The same was true of the translation. Taking apart Mozart’s German libretto for The Magic Flute and rebuilding it in English for Kenneth Branagh’s film wasn’t a professional stretch or a new direction. It was a way of getting closer to something Fry already loved, the kind of attention a person pays for no reason at all, except love. Some call this range, across writing, acting, broadcasting, translation, libretto, evidence of a polymath. Maybe. But it reads less like ambition covering several fields than like a single appetite following its own nose wherever the next good thing happened to be.

None of it came from certainty about why the world is built the way it is, or any plan to leave something behind that would prove it. Fry doesn’t believe in God, but he has said what he’d demand to know if he were wrong: why an all-powerful and benevolent deity would create a world in which children die of cancer. No such answer was ever owed to him, and none was coming. He kept listening, kept translating, kept saying yes to whatever arrived next: a libretto, the entrancing aria he first heard at age ten, a documentary made to confront the bigotry of a composer whose music he could not stop loving.

Nobody handed him a reason for any of it. Stephen Fry simply loved the life he’d been given, and let that be reason enough.

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Outro: The first opera Stephen Fry ever saw staged was Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Cesare Siepi, “Fin ch’han dal vino,” from Don Giovanni:

Sources:

Fry, Stephen. “Why Stephen Fry Loves Wagner.” The Guardian, Sept. 23, 2010. theguardian.com/global/2010/sep/23/stephen-fry-wagner.

“Wagner & Me.” Directed by Patrick McGrady, First Run Features, 2010.

RTÉ. “The Meaning of Life,” interview with Gay Byrne, Feb. 2015.

“Desert Island Discs.” Stephen Fry, hosted by Sue Lawley, BBC Radio 4, Nov. 27, 1988.

“The Magic Flute.” Directed by Kenneth Branagh, screenplay and lyrics translation by Stephen Fry, 2006.

Forster, E.M. “The Life to Come.” Opera libretto by Stephen Fry, music by Louis Mander.

A couple of weeks before a recent lunch with my friend and neighbor Melanie Reynolds, my husband and I watched a segment about the Hoover Dam. It was in the third episode of a travel series, Alexander Armstrong Across America, timed to America’s approaching 250th anniversary. The episode covered the dam’s role in water and power, the more than 20,000 men who worked on the dam, its unlikely history, and glimpses of its Art Deco plaques and statues. This one took my breath away:

The section on the dam was too brief for me. I was disappointed when Armstrong moved on to explain how the dam transformed the surrounding region, namely the rise of Las Vegas.

The Hoover Dam had been at the back of my mind since I first heard of it. I knew it was tangled up somehow with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, though the dam was actually authorized under Coolidge and construction began under Hoover himself, years before Roosevelt took office. By the time Roosevelt dedicated it in 1935, however, the enormous project had become an emblem of the kind of federal ambition and public works that would come to define the New Deal. I spent my preteen and teenage years in San Francisco, where I grew up hearing about the Golden Gate Bridge and its own construction history. I suspected the dam had a history of its own worth investigating. It took Armstrong’s episode to send me looking for it.

Then I followed other rabbit holes, as I’m wont to do, and the project got set aside.

It took that lunch with Melanie to bring my curiosity back. One of the things we talked about was finding family members in old publications. I mentioned that my newborn brother, my mother, and I, not yet two years old, once turned up in an old Life magazine without any of us knowing about it. Some three decades ago, a relative of mine was flipping through old magazines at San Francisco’s Main Library and found that picture of us.

Then Melanie mentioned her grandfather.

Her grandfather was Rev. Charles Sumner Reynolds — Charles, on paper, but everyone called him Sumner. In the photograph she sent me, he’s the man in the top hat and the Masonic Lodge apron, standing among a small group of men on a wooden platform built out over the construction site. At the time he was pastor of the Las Vegas Methodist Church, though the Masonic regalia, as it turns out, fits a construction project rather well. Melanie later found herself wondering which role got him invited that day: the minister called on to give a prayer, or the Mason standing alongside a major public works project. Possibly both.

The photograph is preserved in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections, where a notation identifies it as the groundbreaking ceremony for Boulder Dam, held February 22, 1930. Boulder Dam was the structure’s name for its first fifteen years, from the start of construction until Congress renamed it for Hoover in 1947, and Melanie herself hadn’t known this until she went looking. The archive identifies the man in the Masonic apron as Rev. Charles Sumner Reynolds, pastor of the Las Vegas Methodist Church, and credits the photograph to Oakes Photo. Seeing the archival description made the photograph more than a family curiosity. It placed Melanie’s grandfather, however briefly, inside the recorded history of the dam itself, not just inside her family’s private one.

Melanie wrote to me afterward:

“The picture is great not just because it notes my grandfather, but because it is such a slice of history. I love seeing the construction elements behind all the men standing on the platform... Relevant to that, it is interesting to note that my grandfather is wearing his Masonic apron... (and the top hat cracks me up!).”

Even a memoir-like piece, in my hands, tends to end up somewhere political. That’s less a habit than a fact about the subject: almost anything is political, because politics is really just history, power, resources, and values working themselves out over time. Education, religion, language, art, food, a photograph of a man in a top hat on a construction platform — all of it can carry those concerns, whether or not anyone intended it to.

Not everything is political, of course. A sunset, a symphony, friendship, grief, love, a picture of one’s cat — these hold meanings that don’t answer to ideology or partisan argument.

So I went hunting for some history, and I like history unexpurgated. It’s been decades since I sat in a history class, so I can’t speak to what schools are teaching now, but I’ve always thought that the more real history is presented — the good, the bad, and the ugly — the more interesting and dynamic it becomes. Not to mention more honest.

So what did I find?

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The Good

In 1922, seven states signed the Colorado River Compact, an agreement to divide a river that hadn’t yet been dammed at all. It was negotiated by Herbert Hoover, then Commerce Secretary, years before he became the president the dam would later be named for. Congress authorized construction in 1928, and ground was broken in 1931, which meant the dam rose during the Depression. Tens of thousands of men, many of them out of work and out of options, came to the Nevada desert hoping for a job.

The dam contains roughly 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete, enough to pave a two-lane road from San Francisco to New York. At 726 feet, it was the tallest dam in the world, with a base about 660 feet thick. The dam was completed ahead of schedule; concrete placement finished in May 1935, and the entire project was completed in March 1936. The concrete was poured so quickly that engineers had to run 582 miles of cooling pipe through the structure to keep it from cracking as it cured. Franklin Roosevelt dedicated it in September 1935, before it was fully complete, even though it had been Hoover’s project first.

The design itself was not left plain. The architect Gordon Kaufmann shaped it in the Art Deco style, and the sculptor Oskar J.W. Hansen was hired to add figures to the structure. His Winged Figures of the Republic are two 30-foot bronze statues flanking a 142-foot flagpole, cast from more than four tons of bronze and set on polished black stone. Hansen conceived the figures as embodiments of intellectual resolution and physical strength, symbols of the collective genius and labor behind the project. At their base is a terrazzo floor mapping the exact night sky over the dam on the date it was dedicated, checked against records from the Smithsonian and the Navy. Visitors still touch the statues’ toes, which over the decades has worn the bronze there to a bright gold against the darker patina of the rest of the figures.

The Bad

Summer temperatures in Black Canyon regularly passed 120 degrees, and inside the diversion tunnels workers sometimes faced heat closer to 140. The Bureau of Reclamation’s official count lists 96 deaths during construction, from 1931 to 1936 — falls, blasting accidents, rockslides, drowning, carbon monoxide poisoning in the tunnels. The first man associated with the project to die, surveyor J.G. Tierney, drowned in the Colorado River in December 1922. The last man on the official list, his son Patrick, fell from an intake tower in December 1935 — thirteen years later, to the day.

In August 1931, five months into construction, workers went on strike over the heat, unsafe conditions in the tunnels, and a reassignment of tunnel workers to lower-paying jobs. The strike failed. Six Companies, the consortium building the dam, had thousands more men waiting outside the gate for work, and everyone involved knew it. That imbalance shaped the pace and cost of construction throughout the project.

The Ugly

Six Companies’ original hiring did not include a single Black worker among its first thousand employees, and its contract explicitly barred hiring Chinese laborers. Only after pressure from the NAACP and a federal ultimatum did the company begin hiring Black workers, starting with about ten in 1932. Only a few dozen Black workers were eventually hired out of a workforce that peaked above 5,000. Black workers were barred from living in the main workers’ camp and instead commuted 30 miles from Las Vegas by segregated bus to work the Arizona side of the site, one of its hottest sections, where they were made to drink from separate water buckets. A smaller number of Native American workers were hired as high scalers, working suspended by rope on the canyon walls to clear loose rock ahead of construction.

The exclusion went beyond hiring. The 1922 Colorado River Compact, which made the dam possible, divided the entire river among seven states while addressing Native nations in a single sentence stating that nothing in the compact would affect the federal government’s existing obligations to tribes. In practice, however, that sentence resolved none of the underlying questions about tribal water rights. Tribal water rights, some of which predate every claim the compact divided up, went unquantified for decades, and some remain unresolved today. The rising waters of Lake Mead also submerged archaeological and cultural sites, many of which were documented only hastily before the reservoir filled. Downstream, the vast wetlands of the Colorado River Delta have lost more than 90 percent of their historic extent, and in most years the river no longer reaches the sea.

Holding It Together

What the dam’s history makes clear is that it holds more than one truth at once. It is a structure built with genuine skill and, in the Hansen statues, real artistry. It is also a project that cost the lives of workers, excluded Black and Chinese laborers by policy, and rested on an agreement that left Native nations’ water rights unresolved for generations.

Melanie’s grandfather, in a photograph taken on a temporary wooden platform built out over the excavation on February 22, 1930; the Armstrong episode that sent me looking further; the gold worn into two bronze statues by a century of hands reaching for luck — all of it sits on the same foundation as a segregated water bucket in an Arizona gravel pit, and a sentence in a 1922 compact that promised something and delivered nothing.

That platform is long gone, dismantled or built over as construction moved forward. What stands there now is the finished dam itself, and people still come to walk across it, to look up at the angels, to take the tour.

But the dam doesn’t ask to be forgiven for what it cost, and it doesn’t need to be. It is simply both things at once: a genuine feat, and a project that ran on exclusion and unfinished promises. History like this doesn’t resolve into one verdict, and this essay isn’t going to manufacture one.

The dam still holds back a river and lights homes across three states. It also still owes something it never paid. Both of those are true on the same afternoon, in the same photograph, in the same sentence, and neither one cancels out the other.

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Outro: Itaipú: III. The Dam · Robert Shaw · Atlanta Symphony Orchestra · Atlanta Symphony Chorus · Philip Glass

Sources:

• U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. “Hoover Dam.” U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation.

• U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. “Fatalities at Hoover Dam.” U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation.

• National Park Service. “Hoover and Davis Dams.” Lake Mead National Recreation Area, U.S. Department of the Interior, 8 Jan. 2026.

• National Archives. “Safeguarding Hoover Dam During World War II.” Prologue, U.S. National Archives.

• PBS. “Hiring African Americans.” American Experience, PBS.

• Richter, Brian D., et al. “New Water Accounting Reveals Why the Colorado River No Longer Reaches the Sea.” Communications Earth & Environment, vol. 5, 2024.

Blanche DuBois’s famous line — “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” — is often remembered as an expression of vulnerability, but in A Streetcar Named Desire it is really an admission of surrender: the moment when illusion gives way to dependence. Todd Blanche is asking the country for a comparable act of trust, except that the “kindness” in question is not personal generosity but the coercive power of the state, exercised on behalf of one religious tradition.

During a call with the White House Faith Office, Blanche dispensed with the usual euphemisms. He went straight into:

“God is front and center again ... being a Christian in this country is no longer something I should not only not be ashamed of, it’s actually a benefit because that’s exactly what this country was founded on.”

Shame, as it happens, is exactly the right word — just aimed at the wrong target. What Blanche should be ashamed of is his record as a leader in efforts to whitewash the violence of January 6. And what he should be ashamed of implying is that Christianity lacks equal standing in this country, when the truth runs the other way entirely: Christianity here already holds an enormous edge.

Blanche’s claim is extraordinarily dishonest because Christianity is the most culturally and politically privileged religion in American life. Presidents end speeches with “God bless America.” Congress opens with prayer. Christian holidays define the national calendar. Churches enjoy extensive tax exemptions, and politicians routinely invoke Jesus and Scripture as sources of public authority. To speak as though Christians are a persecuted minority awaiting official recognition is not an argument grounded in reality, but willful ignorance in its attempt to convert longstanding cultural dominance into explicit governmental preference.

The attorney general of the United States is the guardian of the Constitution, not of Christianity. His obligation is to ensure that Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, and everyone else stand equal before the law. A justice system that confers advantages on Christians ceases, by definition, to be impartial.

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Blanche’s claim that Christianity deserves special status because America was founded upon it is equally fallacious. The Constitution contains no reference to Jesus Christ, invokes no biblical authority, and explicitly forbids religious tests for public office. Not only does the First Amendment not establish Christianity as the nation’s guiding creed, it prohibits Congress from establishing any religion at all. While the Founders disagreed profoundly about theology, they agreed that liberty of conscience lay beyond the state’s authority.

That is precisely why Blanche’s remarks alarm critics of Christian nationalism. The issue is not private faith. Millions of Americans draw meaning and moral guidance from religion, and millions of others find it in philosophy, literature, science, or human solidarity. The problem arises when government itself begins to define civic belonging in religious terms — when the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer speaks of Christianity as something from which citizens ought to derive special insight and benefit.

What words and phrases invoke are hugely important to observe because they reveal intentions. Under Blanche’s leadership, the Department of Justice has already embraced a “history and tradition” framework that critics argue expands the role of religion within government while discouraging officials from resisting religious-exemption claims.

It is worrisome that the new guidance goes further than rhetoric, for it directs agencies to treat religious accommodation claims more favorably across the board, while exposing individual federal officials to personal legal liability if their official decisions are later found to have burdened someone’s religious exercise. Results count more than rhetoric. It doesn’t just instruct agencies to bend toward religious claims, but makes bending the safe choice and resisting a professional risk, for every civil servant who might otherwise stand between a religious exemption and the person it burdens.

That person is usually not a Christian. Expanded religious-hiring exemptions mean a taxpayer-funded religious contractor can decline to hire the Muslim applicant, the atheist applicant, or the gay applicant, and call it liberty. A public school employee newly emboldened by DOJ guidance to bring more religious expression into the classroom is not, in practice, going to be reciting the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita to a captive audience of children. A civil servant weighing whether to enforce an antidiscrimination law against a religious objector, now personally exposed to liability for getting it wrong, has every incentive to let the objection stand and the complainant — usually a woman seeking care, an LGBTQ+ person seeking service, a non-Christian seeking equal treatment — absorb the cost instead. None of this requires new legislation. It requires only that officials know which way the department wants them to lean, and Blanche has now told them, twice: once in a memo, once on tape.

Nor is this concern confined to church-state doctrine. Blanche has also spoken ominously about citizenship itself, warning that there are “a lot of individuals who are citizens who shouldn’t be.” Combined with his insistence that Christianity should carry civic benefits, the implications are difficult to ignore. History offers examples of governments that divided the population into those who truly belonged and those who merely resided there. Liberal democracy was supposed to reject that distinction.

The question before the country is therefore larger than Todd Blanche or religion. It is whether equal citizenship means what it says. A constitutional republic cannot survive if rights and privileges depend on whether one subscribes to the majority faith. The Department of Justice exists to uphold the law impartially, not to place God “front and center” or to reward those who profess the correct theology.

A free society asks something far more demanding: that citizens with radically different beliefs accept one another as political equals. The moment the state decides that Christianity is a benefit, it has already decided that someone else is less than fully included.

Senator Raphael Warnock summarized the problem succinctly when he announced his opposition to Blanche’s nomination:

“The president’s personal lawyer should not be America’s lawyer.”

Share The Bond-Fire: Stories That Connect, Ideas That Transform

Outro: Philip II’s aria comes just before the Grand Inquisitor confronts him — Verdi uses the king’s private despair to set up a public humiliation. Philip rules an empire but cannot command a single human conscience, not even his wife’s; that helplessness is what leaves him exposed to a cleric who informs him the throne itself answers to the Church. It’s the fusion of state and dogma staged as tragedy: the king who invites religious authority into government doesn’t gain power from it, he loses what sovereignty he had. Verdi’s target was the Inquisition, but the logic holds for anyone convinced that marrying government to one faith leaves them in charge of the marriage. Verdi himself was famously anticlerical,

Outro: Verdi: Don Carlo - Ella giammai m’amò - Cesare Siepi; Herbert von Karajan (live Wien, 1958)

Sources:

White House Faith Office call, July 30, 2026. Remarks by Todd Blanche: “God is front and center again ...” and “being a Christian in this country ... it’s actually a benefit because that’s exactly what this country was founded on.”

U.S. Constitution, art. VI, cl. 3 (prohibiting religious tests for public office).

U.S. Const. amend. I (”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”).

Treaty of Tripoli, art. 11 (1797), ratified by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams (”the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”).

U.S. Department of Justice, guidance memoranda on religious liberty and religious accommodation issued under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, 2026.

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014).

Pew Research Center, surveys on religion and public life in the United States.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, analyses of church-state jurisprudence and religious-liberty policy.

Freedom From Religion Foundation, commentary and legal analysis concerning the Establishment Clause and federal religious-liberty policy.

Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Todd Blanche, 2026.

Sen. Raphael Warnock’s statement on Substack opposing Blanche’s confirmation: “The president’s personal lawyer should not be America’s lawyer.”

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1947).

A longtime friend sent me the attached image earlier today — a small illustrated card defining nagori, the Japanese term for savoring something you already know is ending.

I read it the way I read most things: as a pattern-seeking animal, unable to help myself. Before I’d finished the second paragraph, I was already running comparisons against a philosophy I’ve been oriented toward for as long as I can remember, long before I knew it had a name or a history: Stoicism. While not twins, the two views turned out to be close cousins. Both ask you to hold impermanence in view rather than look away from it. But where Stoicism trains the mind toward equanimity — toward loosening your grip on what you can’t keep — nagori asks you to tighten it, briefly, on purpose. It doesn’t want you calm about the ending. It wants you present for it. The Stoic trains himself to accept the fading light, while nagori lingers beside it.

What draws me to Stoicism, and what I suspect draws most people to it, isn’t an appetite for grim resignation. It’s closer to the opposite. It takes the things that are undeniably shared across the species — pain, pleasure, fear, the persistent hunger for something that outlasts us — and treats them as material to work with rather than problems to be managed away. We are, admittedly, an uneven species. We produce miscreants and cowards on a reliable schedule. But we’re also the species that wrote fugues, raised towers no engineer had any real business believing would stand, unraveled the code written into our own cells, and produced acts of courage that cost the person everything and gave back nothing they lived long enough to collect. Those aren’t evidence that we’re exceptional so much as evidence of what’s possible in creatures who know, at some level, that the clock is running. That’s the part I keep coming back to: how a person arrives at a view of life that is genuinely optimistic without being naive about any of it — a philosophy that looks straight at the facts and still comes out affirmative on the other side. And once that view catches you, in my experience, it tends to catch you for good.

Stoicism begins with a simple but unsettling reminder: memento mori — “remember that you will die.” Yet for the Stoics, this was never meant as a morbid obsession. It was a way of waking up to life. Marcus Aurelius urged himself to think, speak, and act as though each day could be his last, while Seneca observed that death is not merely an event waiting at the end of life; in a sense, we die a little every day as time passes beyond our reach. The lesson was not despair, but clarity. Time is finite, and recognizing that fact strips away trivial anxieties and forces us to ask what truly deserves our attention.

For the Stoics, the answer was virtue. To live well meant living in accordance with nature: using reason to understand the world honestly and cultivating wisdom, courage, justice, and self-restraint. Wealth, status, and public approval were secondary concerns at best. Human beings, they believed, are deeply interconnected, and a meaningful life is measured not by what one possesses but by how one serves others and fulfills one’s responsibilities with integrity.

This outlook depends on a clear distinction between what is within our control and what is not. Our judgments, choices, and actions belong to us; the opinions of others, the outcomes of events, and the passage of time do not. Peace comes not from mastering the uncontrollable, but from directing our energy toward the things that genuinely lie within our power and accepting the rest with dignity rather than resentment.

The older I get, the more radical this distinction seems. It does not deny loss, sorrow, or the certainty of death. Instead, it treats mortality as the thing that concentrates the mind — not the source of life’s value, but the reminder that value, wherever it exists, has to be enacted now rather than banked for later. Because nothing lasts forever, kindness should not be postponed, gratitude should not be deferred, and the work of becoming a better person cannot wait for some imagined future. Every passing day is a reminder not merely that life ends, but that life is happening now.

A life well lived, in the end, may be a Stoic’s discipline practiced with a nagori eye — assembling dignity from what’s actually here, rather than borrowing meaning from what’s promised elsewhere.

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Outro: Richard Strauss’s Breit über mein Haupt reads, on its surface, as a song of longing between lovers. But from the first time I heard it, I sensed something larger inside it — not simply a desire for another person, but an existential affirmation of life itself. Its lyricism has a way of turning private affection into something closer to an embrace of existence, trading the cold immensity of the cosmos for the warmth of a single, immediate human presence. Read this way, the beloved becomes less an object of desire than a refuge from the universe’s vastness and indifference—a reminder that meaning tends to live in the intimate textures of a life actually lived, not in the abstractions hovering above it. [

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It never ends, does it? So here we go again.

In December 1973, the American Psychiatric Association’s Board of Trustees reversed a position it had held for nearly a century and declared that homosexuality is neither a mental illness nor a sickness. The resolution’s language was almost apologetic in its restraint: the APA would no longer insist on “a label of sickness for individuals who insist that they are well and demonstrate no generalized impairment in social effectiveness.” Fourteen months later, the American Psychological Association followed, affirming that homosexuality “implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social and vocational capabilities.” Two of the country’s largest mental health institutions, working independently, reached the same conclusion within a year of each other:

There was nothing to cure.

That was over fifty years ago. It is not ancient history. Many people who were adults when the APA made that vote are still alive, still voting, in some cases still preaching.

And yet in 2026, in Bluefield, West Virginia, a pastor named Alvin Christian let the freezers at his own food bank run empty rather than accept donations routed through Feeding America, because Feeding America partners with organizations that support LGBTQ+ people. Eight hundred families a day had been relying on that food. Christian filmed himself standing in front of the empty shelves and explained, with evident sincerity, that he would rather stand in righteousness than take a box of cereal that had passed anywhere near a gay rights group. When a caller told him this wasn’t the message of Jesus, his response wasn’t an argument. It was an accusation: “You must be gay.”

That was the whole rebuttal.

This behavior reflects a broader behavioral pattern among certain right-wing circles. In June, Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted, then deleted, “Homosexuality has no place in America,” a claim he had rehashed months earlier when he said Muslims do not belong in America either. That suggests his objection is not really theological so much as opposition to anyone who is not like him. Ogles has called publicly available HIV and trans health information “a grave moral evil” and introduced legislation to prevent the federal government from acknowledging the existence of more than two genders.

Even Ted Cruz found Ogles too much, telling a reporter that what consenting adults do is their own business. That there exists a line even Ted Cruz can recognize is its own small, grim data point.

The bigotry isn’t confined to the culture-war microphones of American Christian nationalism, either, however much they dominate the conversation. A chief rabbi in Jerusalem has told an interviewer that gay people cannot truly be religious and shouldn’t pretend otherwise, remarks he made while recommending conversion therapy, before walking the recommendation back under public pressure. Islamic scholarly bodies, including national imams’ councils, continue to hold that homosexuality is categorically forbidden — a position with life-and-death stakes in the countries where clerics also hold political power, and one for which an openly gay imam and ally to LGBTQ+ Muslims was shot to death in South Africa. And in Russia, Patriarch Kirill has called Western recognition of same-sex marriage a sign of the apocalypse, compared LGBTQ+ acceptance to Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, and put the Russian Orthodox Church’s full institutional weight behind a law criminalizing even the discussion of “non-traditional” relationships — theology conscripted, with Kirill’s evident enthusiasm, into a justification for a war of conquest.

Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox. The theology differs, the hierarchy differs, but the animating impulse is the same. There is something especially dispiriting about seeing it emerge from a pulpit rather than a comment section. Cruelty from a stranger is painful enough. Cruelty clothed in divine authority asks its victims to believe that their suffering is not merely tolerated but somehow woven into the moral order itself.

It would be easy to view Alvin Christian and Andy Ogles as proof that America has remained frozen in 1973. The reality is more complicated. The country has changed, often dramatically. What has remained is concentrated within a particular corner of mostly white America that still exercises influence far beyond its numbers, especially through churches, evangelical networks, state legislatures, school boards, conservative media ecosystems, and voter mobilization groups.

It’s the same corner of white identity politics that produces “trad wife” influencers, white-grievance media, and nostalgia for a hierarchy this country has spent the last sixty years dismantling. The resistance to LGBTQ+ equality and racial equality are not separate movements that merely happen to share a demographic. They are expressions of the same belief about who belongs, defending an imagined version of America against anyone who challenges it.

Start with the numbers. Two-thirds of Americans identify as Christian today, and religious affiliation in the country has held essentially flat for the past several years — this is not a nation mid-revival, whatever cable news suggests. And most of that Christian population is not where Alvin Christian is. Among white Christian groups, white evangelical Protestants are the least likely to support LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination protections, at just 54% — roughly twenty points behind white mainline Protestants and white Catholics, both at 74%. Even that 54% is a majority. The pastor in Bluefield isn’t representing American Christianity. He’s representing its most resistant, shrinking corner — white evangelical Protestants make up 13% of the country, down four points over the last decade.

Compare that to Black Protestants, who favor LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination protections at rates ten to twenty points higher than white evangelicals, survey after survey, year after year — a gap that has held steady since the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) started tracking it in 2015. This was never really a story about faith producing resistance to change. It’s a story about which faith, and — more precisely — whose.

The refusal data tells the same story with an added wrinkle: even the most resistant subgroup has been getting less resistant, not more. Opposition to religiously based service refusals declined among most religious groups from 2015 to 2024, and majorities of religious minorities — Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Unitarian Universalists — oppose such refusals outright, alongside the religiously unaffiliated. Alvin Christian isn’t just out of step with the country. He’s out of step with his own denomination’s trajectory, standing on ground that’s still shifting away from him.

There is a second, subtler fact buried in this data. LGBTQ+ Americans are twice as likely as straight Americans to be religiously unaffiliated — 51% versus 25% — and less than four in ten LGBTQ+ Americans identify as Christian at all, against nearly seven in ten straight Americans. This is what happens when an institution spends fifty-plus years telling a group of people, with escalating specificity, that their existence is a moral emergency.

People leave.

Alvin Christian’s food bank isn’t just failing to feed hungry families — it’s a small, perfect illustration of why half the LGBTQ+ population in this country has already concluded that organized religion doesn’t want them badly enough to be worth staying for.

This isn’t the whole country stuck in 1973. It’s a faction — vocal, well-funded, and disproportionately represented in Congress and in pulpits — refusing to adapt to social change. Which raises the real question: not why hasn’t America changed, but why does a shrinking minority still get this much leverage over hungry families in Bluefield, West Virginia?

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We need to be clear about what actually happened at that food bank, because accountability begins with accuracy. Alvin Christian did not run out of food; he turned it away. Eight hundred families a day were not failed by scarcity but by a man who decided that his own moral comfort mattered more than their next meal and then portrayed that decision as courage. There is nothing sacrificial about choosing one’s own moral purity over another person’s hunger. To knowingly starve families in the name of God is not virtue but cruelty cloaked in religious language, indifferent to human suffering and the possibility of death.

This is where religion earns its share of the blame. Faith is not merely a private conviction; in cases like this, it can become a mechanism for sanctifying prejudice and transforming harm into a perceived moral duty. Strip away the invocation of Jesus and what remains is a person choosing to punish a group he has decided to despise. The cruelty does not disappear when it is wrapped in religious language; only the justification changes. Once the act is described as “a man of God standing in faith with God,” it becomes, in his own mind, a stand, a sacrifice, a righteous cost he is willing to bear.

Religion doesn’t just fail to restrain this cruelty. It launders it. It converts a petty, self-serving grudge into a testimony — the same conversion that lets Andy Ogles post “homosexuality has no place in America” and still get invited to the prayer breakfast, the same conversion that let Kirill bless a war. Once cruelty is baptized, it stops needing to defend itself.

And none of this happens in a vacuum. Alvin Christian doesn’t hold institutional power. Andy Ogles does, because voters gave it to him. That’s the part of this essay that is harder to confront, because it implicates something beyond one pastor’s food pantry.

The Republican Party has been, with real consistency since the civil rights era, the party willing to house the country’s ugliest impulses when it was politically useful to do so: the Southern Strategy, Jesse Helms, the last generation of segregationists who found a new home once the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights left them politically stranded, a president who called neo-Nazis “very fine people” in his first term and stocked his coalition with people like Ogles in his second.

A great many Republican voters would raise an objection at this point: that they vote as they do for tax policy, or gun rights, or some other consideration they weigh as more important than any of this. The difficulty is that this objection was anticipated, and to a considerable extent engineered, by the party’s own strategists. In a 1981 interview, Nixon’s operative Lee Atwater described, with a candor he evidently did not expect to become public, how the party’s appeals had evolved since the mid-twentieth century: explicit racial language became untenable by the late 1960s, so the vocabulary moved to busing, then to states’ rights, then further still, to cutting taxes — positions abstract enough, in his own account, that their disproportionate cost to Black Americans could be delivered as an incidental effect rather than a stated aim. The abstraction, on his telling, was the design.

This does not require believing that every voter who cites lower taxes or gun rights is consciously motivated by racism. It does require acknowledging that, for decades, racial resentment has been the principal force in Republican politics, often recast through arguments about crime, culture, tradition, or individual liberty. A voter may cast a ballot based on a single issue, but that vote also empowers the broader agenda and coalition attached to it. The tax-policy voter may not be Alvin Christian or Andy Ogles. But his ballot carries the same weight as theirs, and the party he helps empower has repeatedly shown how it chooses to use that power.

A party’s character cannot be found solely in its declarations of principle. It is also revealed by the conduct it tolerates, the voices it amplifies, the people it chooses to keep within its ranks, and the standards it is willing to enforce.

So the accountability doesn’t stop at Alvin Christian, or Andy Ogles, or a rabbi who floated conversion therapy before backlash made him reconsider, or a patriarch blessing a war in the language of sin. It extends to everyone who looks at that record and votes for it anyway.

You don’t get to hand a man power and call yourself innocent of what he does with it.

Alvin Christian’s freezer is empty because of choices he made. Andy Ogles says what he says because bigoted voters repeatedly chose him. The hunger in Bluefield and the vote in Tennessee reveal the same moral failure: a refusal to recognize the humanity and dignity of others.

Only one of those choices is on the ballot.

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…Your head on my arm just for an hour.
You and me and the moon.
Stay here in the shadows.
Matching plates.
A bed.
A bookshelf.
We’re not that.
We’ll never be that Skippy.
We can’t be that Skippy
Just let me hold you.
That’s what we get.
For an hour.
Just for an hour.
Outro: Joseph Lattanzi and David McDade | “Our Very Own Home” from Fellow Travelers

Sources:

American Psychiatric Association. “Position Statement on Homosexuality and Civil Rights.” 1973.

American Psychological Association. “Policy Statement on Discrimination Against Homosexuals.” 1975.

Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). American Values Atlas and related surveys on religion, LGBTQ+ rights, and religious exemptions, 2015–2025.

Feeding America statements and reporting on the Bluefield, West Virginia, food-bank controversy, 2026.

Atwater, Lee. Interview with Alexander P. Lamis, 1981.

Pew Research Center. Surveys on religious affiliation and white evangelical demographics, 2015–2025.

Ogles, Andy. Public statements and congressional records, 2025–2026.

Cruz, Ted. Interview remarks concerning Andy Ogles, 2026.

Reporting on remarks by Patriarch Kirill concerning LGBTQ+ issues and Russian law.

Reporting on statements by Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar concerning homosexuality and conversion therapy.

Reporting on the murder of Imam Muhsin Hendricks in South Africa.

Martha C. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law. Oxford University Press, 2010.

In November 2015, Donald Trump stood before a campaign audience and mocked Serge Kovaleski, a reporter for The New York Times who lives with arthrogryposis, a congenital condition affecting the movement of his arms. The moment was unmistakable. One might reasonably have expected it to end his candidacy. Public figures have seen careers cave in for remarks less conspicuously cruel than publicly ridiculing a disabled person before millions of viewers.

It did not.

The remarkable fact is not that one politician behaved callously. Politicians have done that. The remarkable fact is how many people either persuaded themselves they had not seen what they plainly had, or decided that mocking disability simply did not rank very high among the sins a public figure could commit.

Trump would go on to win the presidency the following year — aided, that first time, by the peculiar arithmetic of the Electoral College — and later returned to office in 2024 having won the popular vote outright. The electoral history is less important than what the episode revealed.

That response says something uncomfortable about the place disability occupies in our moral imagination.

Over the past half-century, Western societies have become steadily more sensitive to language and conduct that demean people because of their race, religion, sex, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Imperfectly and unevenly, we have come to understand that reducing entire groups of people to caricatures diminishes both the target and the speaker.

None of this means the old prejudices vanished. They learned to dress differently. A congresswoman agrees on air when a host says a Black colleague should keep his “cotton-picking hands” off her state, then insists afterward she meant only the underlying point about him staying out of state politics — as though a phrase steeped in slavery’s imagery could be that easily separated from what it summons. A president’s account posts a video rendering the first Black president and first lady as apes, deletes it by morning, blames a staffer. A congressman calls Latino farmworkers “wetbacks” and rides out the news cycle. A comedian opens for a presidential candidate by calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” A sitting representative posts that “homosexuality has no place in America,” deletes it hours later, blames a staffer. The world’s richest man calls his own transgender daughter “dead,” “killed” by something he terms the “woke mind virus.” Racism and homophobia went underground more than they went away — coded and deniable when convenient, avowed openly when not.

Disability has not even been granted that cover, and remains, in a sense, the one exception to that reckoning: acknowledged in law, occasionally commemorated in awareness campaigns, but occupying remarkably little space in our ethical imagination. We often notice disability only when it inspires us or furnishes us with a metaphor.

That is an odd blind spot, because disability is neither rare nor remote.

We tend to imagine disability as belonging to a small, identifiable group of people: someone using a wheelchair, someone signing in American Sign Language. Those images are real enough, but they barely scratch the surface. Disability includes blindness and deafness, certainly, but also autism, cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, traumatic brain injuries, chronic pain, epilepsy, dementia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and countless other conditions, many of them invisible to the casual observer.

A 2023 study using World Health Organization survey data found that roughly half the world’s population will experience a mental health disorder by age 75. Millions more live with physical, neurological, developmental, or sensory disabilities. Taken together, disability is not a marginal phenomenon. It is one of the defining features of the human condition.

Those of us not yet touched by disability flatter ourselves by imagining it happens to other people.

It does not.

We are an astonishingly fragile species. A fall from a ladder, a microscopic clot, an inattentive driver, an unlucky gene, an infection, a degenerative disease, or simply the accumulation of years can redraw a life in an afternoon. Disability is not an exception to humanity, but one of its constant possibilities.

More than that: disability is unique among minorities. Ethnicity does not change. Religion and even, for some people, gender may be renounced or reconstructed — chosen and unchosen in ways the others are not. Disability is different still: it is the one minority nearly everyone joins eventually, not by choice but by attrition, since aging itself is a slow accumulation of disability by almost any clinical definition. It is less an identity than a forecast of what the body and mind do to nearly everyone who is spared an early death.

Perhaps that helps explain another curious fact.

Did you know that July is Disability Pride Month?

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Many people do not. Every July, someone posts a reminder commemorating the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and someone else expresses mild surprise, having spent the month thinking July belonged to blueberries, grilling, National Ice Cream Month, or one of the dozens of other observances competing for public attention.

The confusion is understandable. Awareness months are not decreed by any central authority. They emerge through advocacy, institutional memory, corporate sponsorship, and sustained public attention. Some become cultural fixtures. Others quietly disappear beneath the weight of better-funded campaigns. Disability Pride Month has never enjoyed the visibility of Breast Cancer Awareness Month or Black History Month, despite representing a population that touches virtually every family.

That, too, is revealing. Disability remains strangely easy to overlook until it becomes impossible to ignore.

It is overlooked in another way as well.

Ours is a culture that routinely borrows disability whenever it wishes to express contempt: ideas dismissed as “stupid,” arguments as “lame,” meetings as “crazy.” These expressions have become so habitual that most speakers no longer notice what gives them their force.

Yet their force comes from somewhere.

Many of these words were once clinical descriptions rather than insults. “Moron,” “imbecile,” and “idiot” were formal classifications in early twentieth-century psychology. “Lame” referred to impaired mobility. “Dumb” originally meant unable to speak. Over time, their medical meanings faded while their moral freight remained. The words survived because disability itself became the universal metaphor for deficiency. Long after society abandoned the classifications, it retained the assumption behind them: that disability signifies something less than fully human, less worthy of respect.

Most people who use these words harbor no conscious prejudice against disabled people. That is precisely why the habit is so revealing. Language often preserves assumptions long after their origins have been forgotten. We inherit expressions whose histories we no longer recognize, and in using them we quietly reinforce judgments we would likely reject if they were stated explicitly.

Consider how often political arguments rely upon this borrowed vocabulary. A commentator condemns a policy as “stupid” when what is really meant is that it is racist, dishonest, authoritarian, or cruel. The substitution is rhetorically convenient. “Stupid” expresses outrage without requiring precision. It borrows emotional force from disability while avoiding the responsibility of making the accusation one actually intends.

This habit is hardly confined to one political tribe. Conservatives and liberals alike employ ableist language with remarkable ease. It has become one of the few forms of casual prejudice that still passes almost unnoticed among people who would recoil from nearly every other variety.

That inconsistency deserves reflection.

We have largely accepted that racial identities should not serve as insults, that women should not stand as shorthand for weakness, that religious identities should not become casual metaphors for ignorance, and that jokes about sexual orientation carry a cost most people are no longer willing to pay. Yet disability continues to perform precisely that work. Even those who consider themselves deeply committed to equality routinely recruit disability whenever they need a convenient symbol for incompetence, irrationality, or failure.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of a prejudice surviving after its intellectual justification has disappeared.

Years ago I bought an old “joke” book in an antique store, published sometime during the 1940s. It was arranged in chapters, each devoted to a different class of people supposedly fit for ridicule. Because those kinds of books contained explicitly racist language and hate speech, they are rarely kept in print by modern commercial publishers. Reading such a book today would feel like examining an archaeological specimen. Most of its categories have vanished from respectable public life.

The chapter devoted to disability never entirely disappeared.

This is not an argument for linguistic purity. Language changes slowly, habits change more slowly still, and everyone — including this writer — has used words without considering their history. The purpose is not to police conversation or to demand impossible standards of verbal hygiene.

It is, rather, to encourage precision and, with it, a measure of moral imagination.

If a policy is racist, call it racist. If it is dishonest, call it dishonest. If it is cruel, call it cruel. Those words are not weaker than “stupid”; they are stronger because they identify the wrong that has actually been committed. They do not require borrowing disabled people as unwilling participants in someone else’s argument.

A civilization reveals itself not by how it treats the fortunate, but by how it regards those whose bodies or minds depart from whatever passes for normal. We have congratulated ourselves, often justly, for abandoning many ancient prejudices. Yet disability remains the one human difference we routinely recruit as a metaphor for everything we despise.

Perhaps that is why Disability Pride Month still arrives each July with so little notice. It is difficult to celebrate the dignity of people with disabilities while continuing to use disability itself as our most convenient vocabulary of contempt.

Until we learn to see disability not as a symbol of deficiency but as one of the ordinary conditions of being human, our language will continue to reveal assumptions that our principles insist we have already outgrown.

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Outro: Luther Vandross - The Impossible Dream

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Pub. L. No. 101-336, 104 Stat. 327 (1990).

American Association of People with Disabilities. “Disability Pride Month.” https://www.aapd.com

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Disability and Health.” https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia University Press, 1997.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1–32.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Revised and expanded ed., W.W. Norton, 1996.

McGrath, John J., et al. “Age of Onset and Cumulative Risk of Mental Disorders: A Cross-National Analysis of Population Surveys From 29 Countries.” The Lancet Psychiatry, vol. 10, no. 9, 2023, pp. 668–681.

National Center on Disability and Journalism. Disability Language Style Guide. https://ncdj.org/style-guide/.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2018.

The New York Times. “Donald Trump Mocks New York Times Reporter Serge Kovaleski.” November 2015.

World Health Organization. Mental Health. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders.

A former Republican political and corporate strategist who spent decades working for George W. Bush and steering John McCain’s 2008 campaign, Steve Schmidt renounced his membership in the Republican Party in 2018 over Donald Trump. The following year, he co-founded the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump super PAC that became the most successful fundraising operation of its kind in American political history, built to help defeat Trump’s re-election bid. He registered as a Democrat not long after.

So why is he trashing the Democratic Party?

Steve Schmidt is running off at the mouth again, and lately the Democratic Party is receiving nearly as much of his fire as Donald Trump. His latest broadside is directed at the Democratic National Committee, which he portrays as broke, badly managed, ineptly led, and institutionally incapable of meeting the historical moment. The DNC, he argues, is failing at the very time when the country is confronting MAGA and what he calls American fascism. It is an argument with which one can agree in part. Political parties need money, competent leadership, effective organization, good candidates, and the ability to win elections. A party that cannot manage its finances or persuade enough voters to support it should not be congratulated for its moral intentions. There is no virtue in losing simply because one’s opponents are worse.

But Schmidt’s criticism appears to go beyond the ordinary and necessary criticism of a political organization. He seems to regard the Democratic Party itself as the principal problem: too divided, too undisciplined, too ineffectual, too tolerant of failure, too internally contentious. He describes its leaders in terms of contempt rather than criticism, and the party as an institution as though it were not merely failing to perform certain functions but had become fundamentally defective.

Schmidt has made the Democratic Party’s institutional failure a central explanation for MAGA’s continued power. He does not merely say that Democrats need to improve; he presents the DNC as, in effect, an ally of MAGA and repeatedly describes the Democratic Party in terms that risk making its own voters regard it as hopeless.

What is striking is that Schmidt seems to have little difficulty extending the failures of a national party committee into a broader indictment of the political coalition itself. One is left wondering whether something of his conservative political background remains visible in the way he sees the problem. Not necessarily in the sense that he secretly wishes the Republican Party well, or that his criticisms are insincere, but in the sense that he seems to approach politics with a distinctly conservative understanding of what a successful political organization should look like: disciplined, ideologically coherent, hierarchically organized, ruthless about winning and intolerant of internal dissent.

That is a perfectly recognizable model of political organization. It is also a model that the contemporary Republican Party has increasingly adopted. But the Democratic Party is not the Republican Party, and it cannot be understood as a defective version of it. The Republican Party has become, with increasing intensity, a political movement organized around a relatively coherent cultural and national identity: principally anti-Black racism and broader racial resentment, as well as nationalism, hostility to immigration, cultural traditionalism, resentment of demographic change, suspicion of liberal institutions, and personal allegiance to Donald Trump.

The Democratic Party, by contrast, is a coalition of people who do not naturally agree on everything: Black voters, white voters, Hispanic voters, Asian American voters, LGBTQ+ voters, young people, older people, working-class voters, college-educated professionals, labor voters, urban voters, suburban voters, secular voters, religious voters, liberals, moderates, socialists, centrists, environmentalists, feminists, immigrants, and people whose principal political agreement may be that they do not want to live under MAGA authoritarianism. It is not always a comfortable coalition. It is not always an efficient coalition. It is not always a coalition that knows what it thinks about everything. But that is because it represents a complicated country rather than a single political identity.

This is why the question of what Schmidt actually wants is so important. It is easy to say that the Democratic Party is failing, that the DNC is broke, badly managed, poorly led, and insufficiently aggressive. It is easy to say that Democratic politicians are mediocrities and hustlers.

But what is the solution? Does Schmidt want the Democratic Party to move further to the right? If so, in what respects, and at whose expense? Does he want it to become more culturally conservative, more restrictive on immigration, more hawkish in foreign policy, less committed to abortion rights, more cautious about LGBTQ rights, less ambitious economically, or more willing to abandon the progressive voters who have pushed it toward the positions he now appears to regard as politically dangerous? Or does he simply want the Democratic Party to remain broadly what it is while becoming more competent, better funded, better organized, and more effective at communicating with voters?

If the latter is his argument, there is much to agree with. But if the implicit argument is that the Democratic Party must become more like the Republican Party in order to defeat the Republican Party, then the argument becomes considerably less persuasive. The United States already has a Republican Party. It is already occupying the right side of the political spectrum.

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There is also a more fundamental problem with the assumption that the Democratic Party can simply move rightward and thereby solve its electoral difficulties. The American electorate is not waiting for the Democratic Party to become a more perfect version of itself, but neither is it necessarily waiting for the Democratic Party to become more conservative. The United States has a political system that gives disproportionate power to rural and sparsely populated states, an Electoral College that can produce a president who has lost the popular vote, a Senate that gives Wyoming the same number of senators as California, gerrymandered congressional districts, and a media environment in which one political party has spent decades teaching its voters that the opposing party is not merely mistaken but evil, criminal, anti-American, and fundamentally illegitimate. It also has an electorate that has contained more people who identify as conservative than liberal.

But the conclusion to be drawn from that fact is not that the Democratic Party should become Republican-lite. Americans who call themselves conservative do not necessarily want the entire Republican program. A person can call himself conservative while supporting Social Security, Medicare, public education, infrastructure spending, environmental protection, abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and a government that does not interfere in his private life. Political labels are not policy platforms.

The difficulty for the Democrats is that they must build a governing majority out of people who are not all liberals and who do not agree with one another. That is the nature of a coalition. The Republican Party’s ideological coherence gives it certain strategic advantages, but that coherence is also the product of a political identity that has become increasingly narrow and increasingly detached from the demographic diversity of the country. The Democratic Party’s internal diversity creates real political difficulties, but it also means that the party represents a much broader cross-section of the United States. The Democratic Party is messy because the country is messy. Its internal arguments are not automatically evidence that it has no purpose.

Black voters, in particular, have understood this for a very long time. They have not waited for the Democratic Party to become perfect before supporting it. They have not demanded a political organization that agrees with them on every issue, every candidate, every policy, every war, every economic question, every cultural question, and every tactical decision before deciding whether to participate in the political process. Nor have they generally treated political disappointment as a reason to destroy the coalition that has been most responsive to their interests.

This is not because Black voters are incapable of criticism. On the contrary, Black Americans have been among the Democratic Party’s most perceptive critics, and they have had every reason to be. The party has taken them for granted, failed to deliver what it promised, moved too slowly, and too often treated Black voters as a reliable constituency rather than as citizens whose interests must be actively represented. But Black voters have generally understood the difference between criticizing the Democratic Party and destroying the Democratic coalition.

They have had to understand that difference because they have had no luxury of political perfection. For most of American history, Black Americans were excluded from the political system altogether. When they fought their way into greater participation, they did not discover a political party that perfectly represented them. They discovered a political system that had never been designed to represent them at all. They had to fight for the right to participate, then fight to make that participation matter, and then fight against the people who wanted to take that participation away. The Democratic Party has disappointed Black voters repeatedly. It has often been too cautious, too compromising, and too slow. But Black voters have generally understood the difference between demanding that a political coalition do better and persuading its members that the coalition itself is so morally and institutionally worthless that it should be abandoned.

This is a distinction that many white political commentators seem to have difficulty understanding. Politics is not the search for a perfect party. It is the struggle over which imperfect political vehicle can be used to move the country in a better direction. Black voters have understood this because they have had to. They have had to navigate a political system in which the difference between an imperfect political alliance and a hostile political force has been the difference between progress and catastrophe. They have not confused political disappointment with political equivalence. They have not assumed that because the Democratic Party has failed to do everything it should have done, the Republican alternative is therefore no more dangerous than the Democratic one. History has taught them otherwise.

This makes Schmidt’s relentless denunciation of the Democratic Party puzzling. If he is trying to help the party, how does his method help?

There is a difference between telling a political party it needs to improve and telling its voters the party is composed of losers, mediocrities, careerists, and hustlers incapable of doing anything right. There is a difference, too, between exposing institutional incompetence and creating the impression that the entire party is so irredeemably dysfunctional that no reasonable person should have confidence in it. Schmidt may believe that he is applying pressure. But pressure can produce improvement, or it can produce collapse. It can persuade an organization to reform itself, or it can convince its supporters that the organization is hopeless.

At some point, therefore, the question is not whether the Democratic Party needs criticism. Of course it does. The question is whether the criticism is building a better political organization or merely adding to the demoralization and internal division that make one harder to build. The Democratic Party does not need protection from criticism. It needs criticism that understands the nature of the institution being criticized.

And here one suspects that Schmidt’s conservative background is showing. There is an underlying assumption in much of the criticism that the Democratic Party would be more successful if it were less Democratic: less internally divided, less ideologically diverse, less responsive to the competing constituencies that make up its coalition, less committed to progressive causes that make some voters uncomfortable, less beholden to the Black voters who have been its most reliable constituency, and more like the political organization Schmidt once belonged to — more disciplined, more ideologically coherent, more ruthless, more willing to sacrifice internal factions for the sake of victory.

But victory for what?

This is where the word winning becomes insufficient. Winning is essential. A party that cannot win elections cannot govern, and a party that cannot govern cannot protect the policies and institutions it claims to value. But winning is not a political philosophy. It is a means to an end. The Republican Party has demonstrated that a political organization can be highly disciplined and highly effective at winning while using that power to advance policies that large numbers of Americans do not support. It can win while restricting reproductive rights, attacking immigrants, weakening public institutions, undermining democratic norms, and turning a political leader’s personal grievances into a governing philosophy. So yes, the Democrats need to win. But the question remains: win in order to do what?

The Democratic Party’s historical record is not a minor footnote to this discussion. The party helped create Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, major labor protections, and the most consequential civil-rights legislation in American history. Its transformation after the civil-rights era was one of the great political realignments of modern American history.

The party that once contained powerful white Southern segregationists became the party most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and the expansion of democratic rights. That transformation cost the Democratic Party much of the white South. It also helped create the multiracial coalition that is now its defining feature.

The Democratic Party did not arrive at its present condition because it suddenly became too progressive. It arrived here through decades of political readjustment, as Black voters moved decisively into its coalition and white voters opposed to the consequences of racial and social change increasingly moved toward the Republican Party.

It is also worth asking what “failing” is supposed to mean when measured against what Democratic presidents have actually delivered. Barack Obama and Joe Biden governed during an era in which the party’s civil-rights coalition had already been built by the generations before them, and they used that inheritance to extend it further than any Democratic president had gone: marriage equality, the first legal recognition of same-sex couples nationwide, the Affordable Care Act, the largest federal investment in climate policy in American history, and — under Biden — the most diverse presidential administration ever assembled. LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, an achievement that reshaped the country. He did so while presiding over an America in which segregation remained the de facto and, in parts of the South, the de jure reality of daily life, and in which gay Americans had no legal standing at all. Measured by what was actually delivered rather than by how bold a president looked against the limits of his own era, Obama and Biden’s presidencies are not evidence of a failing party. They are evidence of one still capable of expanding whom it protects.

The result is a political paradox. The Democratic Party became more representative of the actual diversity of the country, while the Republican Party became increasingly powerful despite becoming less representative of that diversity.

The Democrats therefore face the difficult task of holding together a coalition that is socially and politically heterogeneous, while the Republicans have increasingly organized themselves around a more coherent political identity. Schmidt looks at the Democratic Party’s internal disagreements and sees a failure of leadership. Sometimes that is exactly what they are. But he also mistakes the difficulty of representing a diverse country for the absence of a political purpose.

Black voters, meanwhile, have been more politically realistic than the people now lecturing Democrats about political strategy. They have not been waiting for a perfect Democratic Party. They have been asking which imperfect political coalition can prevent something worse and produce something better. They have not demanded that every Democratic politician pass a test of ideological purity before earning their support. They have understood that politics is not a dating app. The question is not whether a political party is perfect. The question is what happens if the other party wins.

That is not cynicism. It is history.

Black Americans know what happens when democracy is weakened. They know what happens when voting rights are attacked, when the state is permitted to decide who is fully American, and when political power is concentrated in the hands of people who do not believe that everyone should have equal access to it. They understand that an imperfect political coalition can still be a vehicle for progress. They also understand that abandoning that coalition because it has failed to satisfy every demand can have consequences far beyond the gratification of one’s own political purity.

This is why I keep returning to the question of what Steve Schmidt is actually trying to accomplish. He may be right that the Democratic Party needs to be more aggressive. He may be right that it needs to be better organized, better financed, and more capable of recruiting candidates and communicating with voters. He may be right that Democrats cannot continue losing elections and then congratulating themselves for having the better argument. They need to stop treating elections as morality plays in which voters will automatically reward the better candidate. Voters do not do that. They vote out of fear, resentment, hope, identity, tribalism, economic anxiety, cultural anxiety, habit, misinformation, and the desire to punish people they have been taught to blame. Republicans have often been more effective at exploiting those forces.

But Schmidt’s criticism does not become a solution merely because it is forceful. Does he believe that Democratic voters are unaware of their party’s weaknesses? Does he believe that telling them repeatedly that their party is incompetent and pathetic will make them more enthusiastic? Does he believe that a voter who is already disappointed in the Democrats will become more likely to support them after being told that the party is run by losers? Does he believe that Democratic voters should become as politically disillusioned as he is? And if so, what is supposed to happen next?

These are the unanswered questions. A former Republican who spends his time telling Democrats how terrible Democrats are may believe that he is helping them. But he may also be doing precisely what Republican political strategy has long benefited from: demoralizing the Democratic coalition, deepening its internal divisions, convincing its voters that their own party is hopeless, and turning every disagreement into evidence of institutional failure. At some point, the question is not whether the Democratic Party deserves criticism. It does. The question is whether the people criticizing it understand what it is.

The Democratic Party is not a monolith. It is not a church. It is not a corporation. It is not a military unit. It is a coalition. Coalitions are difficult to lead precisely because they contain people who disagree. The solution, then, cannot simply be to make the coalition less democratic until it resembles the political organization from which Schmidt emerged. The solution is to make the coalition more effective without destroying the reasons it exists: build better institutions, raise more money, recruit better candidates, develop better messages, defend its achievements, listen to voters, stop treating the working class as synonymous with white voters, stop assuming that Black voters will remain loyal without being respected, stop confusing progressive ambition with political incompetence, and treat ideological purity as a talking point rather than a governing strategy.

Above all, the Democratic Party must stop allowing the Republican Party — especially former Republicans who have become self-styled perfectionists — to define the political terrain on which every election is fought. It needs to learn how to win in the country it actually has.

It should not allow a former Republican to convince it that the only way to win is to become less like the coalition that made it the party of civil rights, voting rights, social insurance, and the expansion of American democracy.

The Democratic Party does not need to become perfect. It needs to become better. Those are not the same thing.

Perhaps that is the difference between the political wisdom of people who have had to fight for democracy and the political advice of people who have spent much of their lives fighting over who should control it.

The people who have been most excluded from American democracy have understood its realities better than the people who have always assumed that democracy would work for them. They have understood that one does not abandon an imperfect political vehicle simply because it has not taken one all the way to the destination. One repairs it. One strengthens it. One argues with the driver. One demands a better route. One may even threaten to get out. But one does not necessarily hand the keys to the people who have been trying to drive the car into a ditch.

If Steve Schmidt has a better solution than that, I am waiting to hear it. Because “the Democrats are terrible” is not a solution. It is a diagnosis. And even if the diagnosis is partly correct, it does not tell us what to do next.

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Outro: A Change Is Gonna Come — Sam Cooke

Sources:

Steve Schmidt, “MAGA’s best ally? The DNC.”

AP, “Election takeaways: Trump’s decisive victory in a deeply divided nation.”

AP, “Democrats select South Carolina to kick off presidential nominating contest in 2028, leave Iowa out.”

AP, “Protections of the Voting Rights Act are under threat as the law marks its 60th anniversary.”

National Archives, “Civil Rights Act (1964).”

National Archives, “Voting Rights Act (1965).”

Social Security Administration, Social Security History.

HealthCare.gov and the Department of Energy for the ACA and Inflation Reduction Act claims.

I.

Baba Yaga does not usually come to the Skomorokh’s tent. She prefers her hut, her fence of bones, her quiet witching hour times — a pot on the fire, her feet up, the particular comfort of an evening in which no one asks anything of her at all. She had half a mind to stay home this night too. But she had heard that a man calling himself Jedskyi Vantzoff the Highliner intended to stand before the crowd and speak of Ancient Law — her law, or law older than her, law from before the Kingdom of Doomerica had a name. And this she could not let pass without witness.

It is a tiresome duty, being the oldest witch in the room. Every century some new muzhik stands up and calls her kind wicked, backward, unnatural, a threat to decent children — and every century she must set down her tea and go remind him what old actually looks like. She keeps, tucked somewhere in her apron and never shown unless pressed, a small card in Cyrillic identifying her as a dues-paying member of a Society for the Defense of Liberties long enough in the tooth to have defended a witch or two in its time. She does not flash it often. She has found that simply showing up is usually argument enough.

She came in on her mortar, uninvited, and sat in the back row where the shadows kept her company. No one asked her to leave. No one ever does.

Pushkin the Magic Cat came too, though he would rather not have. He is, by his own private count, several lives into his allotment now, and he has noticed — the way old cats do — that the remaining ones seem to spend themselves faster than the first did, the way a coin purse feels heavier when it’s full and lighter with every year that passes, though the coins inside are the same weight they always were. He would have preferred a nap. He would, if asked, always prefer a nap. But he came anyway, sitting in a plush chair near Baba Yaga’s mortar, and reserved judgment, as cats do, until judgment was actually required of him.

ІІ.

Highliner walked into the tent with a representation of the Ancient Law. He stood under the one good light, the kind that hangs low and stays lit too long over men who talk for a living. His suit fit the way suits fit men who are always about to be somewhere else. His eyes — and here the crowd who’d watched him before all these years knew to look — his eyes had spent so many hours under lights that something at their borders had started to give a little. Not visibly. Not yet. Just a softening at the edge, the way a held photograph goes soft at the corners before anyone notices the whole picture’s changing.

He smiled the smile of a man arriving to an easy room.

“Friends,” he said, “I only wish to speak of tradition. Of what this Kingdom was built on. Of the Ancient Law written on stone, and how a poster of it on a schoolroom wall harms no one, and honors much.”

The Skomorokh, tuning his balalaika in the corner, did not look up. “Which Ancient Law?”

“The Ten,” said Highliner. “The Ten Commandments. Eight of the ten, I’d wager, every soul in this tent already agrees with — believer or no.”

From the back row, where the shadows kept their usual company, a voice like a door that had not been opened since the Kingdom was young: “Then name them,” said Baba Yaga.

Highliner’s smile held. It is a professional smile. It does not come off easily.

“Honor your father and mother,” he began, and the room nodded, because who could argue. “Do not kill. Do not steal.” He paused, the way a man pauses who is counting on his fingers behind his back. “Do not — do not bear false witness.” Four. He looked, briefly, toward the light overhead, as if it might hand him the rest.

Baba Yaga rose and moved a little closer to Highliner. She needed to confront him properly, and some confrontations are not meant to be shouted from the back of a tent. “Six more,” she said, “or was it eight of ten you wagered?”

The tent was very quiet. The Skomorokh had stopped tuning.

ІІІ.

The Skomorokh is worth a word here, for those new to the tent. He belongs to no court and answers to no Tzar. His kind used to walk from village to village with a bear on a chain and a balalaika under one arm, welcome at every wedding and suspected by every priest, because a man who sings for his supper cannot afford to only sing what he’s told. The old Church tried more than once to run his kind out of the Kingdom. It never fully worked.

He is not wise. He would be the first to say so. He is only present, and unable to look away, which some mistake for wisdom because it so rarely happens on purpose.

“Six more,” said the Skomorokh, echoing the crone without meaning to take her side. “I’m only counting along.”

Highliner recovered his stage voice, the one built for rooms bigger than this. “Look — the founders of this Kingdom were shaped by the old Christian culture, whether or not they themselves knelt at it. That much is beyond dispute.”

“Is it,” said the Skomorokh, not really asking.

“And every one of the Abrahamic faiths holds the Ten in some regard. This isn’t a Christian imposition. It’s shared inheritance.”

Someone from the front row: “Which of the faiths asked for it on the wall?”

Highliner did not answer that directly. He rarely did. “This is cultural bedrock. Western civilization itself rests on it.”

“Bedrock,” said Baba Yaga, turning the word over the way she turns over bones at her fence, checking which ones will bear weight. “I have stood on bedrock. It does not need an Ancient Law propped against it to hold the house up. Only the house that is not sure of its own foundation hangs a poster on the wall reminding itself what it’s built on.”

Her point made, she withdrew again to the back row, where the shadows had been keeping her seat warm.

ІV.

Highliner tried the older argument next, the one he kept in reserve for rooms that had stopped nodding. “Freedom itself — the freedom to believe as you choose — this was never some secular idea. It came from Christian thought. The dignity of the person, free will, all of it. Take that away and see what’s left holding up your precious neutrality.”

“And if you push faith from the center of the square,” Highliner went on, warming to it now, gesturing at some appellate ghost only he could see, “you haven’t cleared the square. You’ve only put a new faith there. Call it secularism. Call it neutrality. It rules the square all the same, and it was never voted in.”

The Skomorokh’s fingers stopped on the strings. “That’s a tidy trick,” he said. “Empty a room of one thing, and call the emptiness a rival thing. By that math a fast is a feast, and a silence is a shout.”

A small commotion at the tent flap. A young man in a seminarian’s plain coat had let himself in without ceremony, the way certain fools do, certain of nothing except that he was already inside before anyone thought to stop him. The Kingdom calls his kind yurodivye — holy fools, wanderers who give up sense and standing on purpose, so that the plain truth might come out of a mouth no one thinks to guard against. They are tolerated because no one believes a fool can do damage, which is exactly how the damage gets done. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.

“I sat in that same committee room,” he said, “when the bill was written. I can tell you what the men who wrote it said, in their own words, while they thought no one outside would ever read the transcript. They did not say heritage. They did not say bedrock. They said God’s law. They said this is a Christ-centered body. I have it written down, if the room would like to hear a bill’s authors explain themselves honestly, for once, before the cameras arrived and they remembered to say tradition instead.”

Nobody in the tent asked him to sit. Nobody asked him to leave either. He simply stood there, plain-coated, having said the one true inconvenient thing, the way fools in every version of this story always eventually do — and then, having done his part, he let himself back out through the flap as unceremoniously as he’d come.

Highliner did not have a rehearsed line for that. For the first time that evening, the light overhead seemed to notice him back.

V.

Highliner found his feet again, the way men like him always do — not by winning the point but by walking briskly past it. “I only mean,” he said, “that we’ve spent the last thirty, forty years scrubbing faith from the public square. And that’s its own kind of faith, when you think about it. Secularism. A religion with no name that thinks it has no name.”

The Skomorokh let a string ring out and die before he spoke. “I’ve met a great many godless men in my travels,” he said. “Not one of them ever asked me to build him a temple. That’s usually how you tell a religion from the absence of one — a temple gets built, someone collects the tithe.”

“Call it what you like,” said Highliner. “If I lived in a town that was ninety-five percent of one faith, and the council wanted a nativity on the green come winter, I don’t see the harm. That’s just a community being itself.”

“A wolf pack is also being itself,” said Baba Yaga, “when it eats the one lamb that isn’t a wolf. Ninety-five is not one hundred. The five are still owed a Kingdom that does not belong to the ninety-five alone. That is the entire arrangement, written down long before your poster. You did not invent the wheel. You are only asking to be excused from it.”

“No one’s stopping five percent from believing as they like,” Highliner said. “I’ve never once told a man of faith he can’t practice his religion.”

It was the Skomorokh, of all people, who caught it — the balalaika down at his side now, his voice gone quiet in a way that made the tent quieter with it. “Funny thing,” he said. “Every time I’ve heard a man in this Kingdom say ‘man of faith,’ or ‘woman of faith,’ he has meant one faith only. Never once have I heard the phrase spent on a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Sikh with his hair still uncut for God. The words are wide. The way you people use them is not. It’s a curious kind of language — a coin stamped ‘all faiths welcome’ that only ever spends in one shop.”

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VІ.

Somewhere near the tent flap, unnoticed until now, a heavyset man in a plain jacket had been sitting through most of this with his arms crossed and his face doing very little to hide his confusion. He was not of the court. He kept no allegiance to Tzar or Church, and made his living, such as it was, letting other men talk into a microphone in his tent while he asked the occasional question a smarter man might have thought beneath him.

“Hang on,” he said now, to no one and everyone. “I gotta be honest, man — you keep saying nobody’s stopping religion in the square. But then you also said for forty years everybody’s been trying to scrub it out. Which is it? Because it sounds like you’re mad about a thing you also just said never happened.”

Highliner opened his mouth. Nothing arrived to fill it.

“And the eight-out-of-ten thing,” the heavyset man went on, scratching at his beard. “You still haven’t said the other six. I been sitting here waiting.”

A ripple of something moved through the tent that might, in a kinder Kingdom, have been called laughter, though here it came out closer to relief — the relief of an audience realizing the fool in the room tonight was not the one they’d been told to expect.

Baba Yaga, from the back row, allowed herself something almost like a smile. It did not reach her eyes, which had seen too many Highliners come through too many tents to spend a smile freely. “Even the man who plays the fool for coin,” she said, “can hear when the tune goes false. That is the trouble with lying in a room that has music in it. Someone is always listening for the wrong note. Tonight, apparently, it was he.”

The overhead light hummed on, low and steady, doing to Highliner’s eyes what it had been doing all along — softening them, just slightly, at the edge, where no one was quite looking closely enough to call it anything yet.

VІІ.

It was only then that anyone noticed Pushkin.

He had been there the whole time, of course — quietly sitting near Baba Yaga’s mortar since before the tent flap first opened, the way Pushkin is always somewhere before anyone thinks to look for him. He had watched the entire proceeding with the specific patience of an animal who has outlived several Tzars and expects to outlive this one too, though he privately suspects he has fewer lives left in the purse than he once did, and that the ones remaining seem to spend themselves faster than the early ones did — a thing he has noticed but not troubled himself to explain, leaving that particular arithmetic to men, who are worse at it than they claim.

At the mention of the nativity, he had opened one eye. At “man of faith,” he had opened the other. Now, as the heavyset man finished counting Highliner’s Ten Commandments back to him on his own fingers, Pushkin rose, stretched himself the unhurried length of a cat with nowhere urgent to be — and nowhere he would rather be less than here, when a good nap had been sitting right there for the taking — and picked his way across the floor toward the center of the room.

He did not go to Highliner. He went to the space just beneath the one good light, sat, and looked up into it — into the very bulb that had spent the evening softening the edges of a man’s eyes — with the flat, assessing stare of a creature checking whether a thing is food, threat, or simply not worth the trouble.

He decided, visibly, on the third.

Then he turned his back to the light, to Highliner, to the whole tent, and began, with great and total concentration, washing one paw.

“Even Pushkin,” murmured the Skomorokh, picking his balalaika back up, “has heard this sermon before.”

Nobody laughed this time. It was too true for that. Pushkin kept washing, indifferent to the distinction, which is of course the only sensible position for a cat to hold on the subject of Ten Commandments, borrowed bedrock, and men who count to four and call it eight.

VІІІ.

Highliner tried once more to find his footing — “All I am asking,” he began, “is that a Kingdom remember where it came from” — but the sentence had nowhere left to touch down. The room had already decided what it had watched: not a defense of heritage, but a man doing arithmetic in public and stalling at four.

Baba Yaga rose from the back, once again reunited with the shadows that had kept her company all evening and who seemed to rise with her, the way they do. She did not raise her voice. She never needs to; an age like hers reaches every corner of a room on its own.

“You came to speak of Ancient Law,” she said. “I have kept older law than you will ever name, in a hut older than this Kingdom’s want of one, and I will tell you the single thing that law was always for. It was never a wall decoration. It was never a boundary telling five persons in a hundred that the house is not theirs. Law that must be hung on a wall to be believed is law that has already lost the room. Real bedrock does not need a poster. It only needs to be stood on.”

She walked to the tent flap, and stopped there, half in the dark already. She would rather, if the Kingdom would only leave her be for a season, be home with her pot on the fire. But the Kingdom does not leave her be, and so, once more, she had come.

“You are not wrong that this Kingdom has a tradition,” she said. “Only wrong about which one. Its tradition is not the Ten. Its tradition is the counting — each generation of you, standing under the one good light, reciting a foundation you cannot name, hoping the room stops listening before you reach the sixth.”

She went out into the dark on her mortar, and did not look back to see whether Highliner had found an answer, because there had never once, in all the years she’d been coming to tents like this one, been an answer to find.

Pushkin finished his paw, unmoved, and followed her out at his own pace, tail last through the flap, already thinking of the nap he had been owed since the evening began.

The Skomorokh alone remained under the light with Highliner, balalaika in hand, and — because someone always has to close the tent for the night, and it is usually the fool who is left holding that job — he began, quietly, to play.

Tradition.

He did not explain the song. He never has to. He only plays them, and lets the Kingdom decide, walking home in the dark, how many of the ten it could actually have named.

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Tevye: And in the circle of our little village,
We’ve always had our special types.
For instance, Yente the matchmaker, Reb Nachum the beggar...
And most important of all, our beloved Rabbi.
Leibesh: Rabbi, may I ask you a question?
Rabbi: Certainly, Lebisch!
Leibesh: Is there a proper blessing... for the Tsar?
Rabbi: A blessing for the Tsar? Of course! May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us!

Musical Interlude: Fiddler On The Roof – Tradition

“It came upon a midnight clear” — the old carol, unseasonable in the last week of July, written in 1849 by the Unitarian minister Edmund Sears. Its actual message: peace on earth, good will to men.

It surfaced while I was reading about James Talarico, who, at a campaign rally in Plano, Texas, on June 1, 2026, answered MAGA attacks on his masculinity this way:

“Real men don’t lie and cheat their way through life. They don’t enrich themselves by stealing from other people. They don’t sell their soul to the highest bidder. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.”

Damn near two hundred years since Sears wrote his carol, and here we are. Some progress, certainly. As Ibram X. Kendi put it:

“Many people still don’t understand the most basic truth about human beings: our liberation is interconnected.”

Even so, we primates still seem unable to get it together.

Talarico couldn’t have said what I’m about to say without ending his career. I’m not suggesting he wanted to. But there is a line missing from his answer, and I’ll supply it:

Real men are not white supremacists.

Look at this image. Trump posted it himself on Truth Social, without a caption or context: kneeling, wrapped in a flag, the globe balanced on his shoulders. Ah, those Republicans, so apt to portray themselves as victims, burdened by the grievances of the world. Tsk, tsk …

Trump meant the image as a portrait of strength, but he chose the wrong myth. Atlas was one of the Titans who waged war against Zeus and the Olympians — and lost. When the other Titans were banished, Zeus reserved a harsher sentence for Atlas alone: to carry the heavens on his shoulders, forever, so they would not fall to earth. The globe was not his trophy. It was his singular punishment. A man who reaches for cosmic imagery to describe himself, and ends up invoking the one penalty worse than all the others, has said something true about himself that he did not intend to say.

Trump is the clearest example of the pattern this essay explores: the louder the performance of strength, the more precisely it can reveal its absence.

Start with the insults. A secure man does not need a nickname for every rival — “loser,” “low-IQ,” “crooked,” “Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted” — but Trump produces them compulsively, as though the possibility of being diminished himself must be preempted at all costs. Then there is the fixation on physique and virility, the strongmen he admires, the contempt for men he considers unimpressive. A man so concerned with proving that he is not weak has already told you what he fears.

The long table. The choreographed intimidation. The demand that deference be visible and constant. Unquestioned authority does not need an audience.

Then there is losing, which Trump cannot do. Every defeat requires an explanation involving theft, because the alternative — that he simply lost, as people sometimes do — is not survivable for the image he has built. The vendettas follow the same logic. A strong man absorbs criticism, or answers it. Trump has to punish it. The size of the retaliation tells you the size of the wound.

And then there are the people to whom he chooses to be cruel. Not rivals — the disabled, the poor, immigrants, anyone without the power to hit back. Real strength does not need an unequal contest to feel like strength. The counterfeit needs it.

None of this would have surprised Seneca, who understood two thousand years ago that cruelty is not power but the confession of its absence. Trump did not invent the pattern. He is merely its most elaborate contemporary specimen.

The pattern does not remain contained in one man. It becomes policy.

Pete Hegseth wants to measure the testosterone levels of American service members, women included. Ron Reagan — a man well placed to recognize the particular species of manufactured toughness that requires its credentials to be measured — noted as much in a Substack comment. The joke would write itself, were the joke not currently running the Pentagon.

Three times in recent months, Hegseth has intervened on behalf of military aviators caught on camera violating flight regulations. The principle is becoming difficult to miss: if the stunt looks good on camera, the rules are negotiable.

A Blue Angels pilot buzzed Pensacola Beach at dangerously low altitude, a maneuver the team’s own leader acknowledged had put both pilot and crowd at risk. Before the facts were even established, Hegseth announced that the flyovers would continue “until morale improves.”

Two months earlier, two pilots had made an unauthorized low-altitude pass near Kid Rock’s estate in Tennessee. The Army suspended them and opened a safety investigation. The Pentagon then overrode its own Army leadership, lifted the suspension, and killed the review. Hegseth’s message was succinct: “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.”

Then came a third incident: National Guard Apache pilots executing a low-altitude flyover during an anniversary celebration in South Carolina. Suspended, and then reinstated when Hegseth intervened.

Three times. Three opportunities for the Pentagon to let its own safety procedures function. Three times, the leadership intervened to protect the performance instead.

A veteran Navy and Army National Guard aviator, writing about the pattern, put the matter plainly: aviation rules are written in blood. Pilots learn early that ignoring them is how people get killed.

This is counterfeit strength once it acquires institutional power. It ceases to be one man’s insecurity in a suit with a microphone and becomes a governing principle: reward the spectacle, and dismantle the processes designed to prevent the next funeral.

Trump’s Atlas image, the insults, the inability to lose — these belong to the psychology of one man. But watch whom he chooses to protect, and the matter ceases to be merely psychological. It becomes a political ethic: a policy of association.

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In February, Andrew and Tristan Tate — self-described misogynists already facing sex-trafficking and rape allegations in two countries — left Romania and flew to Florida after the Trump administration intervened on their behalf. Five months later, British prosecutors added new charges: rape, sex trafficking, and offenses involving child sexual abuse images, bringing the accusations against the brothers into the dozens.

Andrew Tate had built an entire media brand around the proposition that dominance over women is what real masculinity looks like. The Trump administration, having intervened to help him leave Romania, extended him a hand anyway.

The important question is not merely why certain men mistake cruelty for strength. It is whom the powerful choose to protect when cruelty passes from rhetoric into criminal allegation.

A person’s idea of strength is revealed, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else, by the people on whom he is willing to spend his power.

Which brings us to the 77 million.

It took 77 million votes to return Trump to office a second time — not despite the pattern this essay has been describing, but with full knowledge of it. The voters had already seen the insults, the cruelty, the contempt for weakness, for women, for immigrants, for Black people, for anyone who challenged the hierarchy Trump represents.

They knew. They voted anyway.

Of course, not every one of those 77 million voters is a white supremacist in the narrow sense: a Klansman, a neo-Nazi, someone who would openly proclaim a belief in biological racial hierarchy. But that is not the relevant standard. The relevant question is what a person is willing to overlook, excuse, or rationalize in order to obtain the political outcome he wants.

The outcome Trump represents has never been mysterious. His movement did not emerge from nowhere. It was built around the conviction that the country had been taken away from the people to whom it properly belonged — that Black advancement, immigrant presence, demographic change, civil-rights protections, and the growing political power of women and minorities represented not the ordinary movement of history but a theft requiring restoration.

The message has been repeated for years, sometimes in the blunt language of white nationalism, sometimes in the more accommodating vocabulary of “real Americans,” “our heritage,” and “taking our country back.” The language changes. The grievance does not.

People voted for Trump for many reasons: inflation, immigration, abortion, foreign policy, partisan loyalty, resentment of liberals. Some may have voted for him while disliking his racism, sincerely believing that it had nothing to do with their support. But political identity is not determined by personal intention alone.

A vote is not a confession of one’s entire soul. It is a choice about whom one is willing to empower.

And 77 million people chose to empower a man whose political career had been built on racial grievance, and whose movement had made the restoration of white dominance one of its central emotional promises. They did not need to be card-carrying white supremacists to understand what they were enabling.

That is the point at which individual motive ceases to be an adequate excuse: when what is being tolerated is not an incidental personal defect but the political rehabilitation of racial hierarchy.

Seventy-seven million votes is not a psychological diagnosis. But neither is it an innocent collection of private preferences floating free of consequence. It is an electorate that had every fact available and decided the performance was close enough to the real thing.

And the real thing, beneath the performance of strength, was howling racism.

Talarico named the alternative plainly, in Plano, in June: real men serve others; weak men serve themselves.

The pattern appears in smaller places, too. One final example makes clear that the weakness is not confined to presidents, defense secretaries, or political movements.

Lindsey Graham died on July 11. He had held South Carolina’s Class Two Senate seat since 2003, succeeding Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat segregationist Graham eulogized as a devoted public servant. He inherited more than an office. That same seat had once belonged to John C. Calhoun, the Senate’s leading theorist of slavery as a “positive good,” and to Ben Tillman, an organizer of the 1876 Hamburg Massacre, in which armed white militiamen murdered Black South Carolinians for refusing to yield the road. Two centuries of the seat’s occupants read like a genealogy of the hierarchy this essay is describing.

Graham didn’t extend that legacy through conviction. He extended it through capitulation. He called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic” bigot in 2015 and became one of his closest Senate allies within a decade. He allowed, then disallowed, then half-joked about “the good old days of segregation.” He acknowledged, in a hearing after George Floyd’s murder, that every Black man in America has reason to fear a traffic stop, then refused to call American policing what that admission implied. He was not a man who believed in the hierarchy the way Calhoun did, or enforced it the way Tillman did. He simply never found a hierarchy he was willing to spend his career opposing.

Talarico’s line has a second half that gets less attention than the first: weak men serve themselves. Graham is what that looks like when it lasts thirty-three years in office. Trump performs strength through domination. Graham performed it through survival, bending toward whichever version of power was ascendant and calling the bending pragmatism.

Stephen Miller’s answer to Talarico was not to argue with the proposition. It was to attack Talarico’s manhood instead. Which was, in its way, a small confession. A man confident in what strength actually is does not need to change the subject when someone describes it accurately.

Sears wrote his carol for a country about to tear itself apart over the question of who counted as fully human. He was a Unitarian, which in 1849 was close enough to heresy that “peace on earth, good will to men” was not merely comfort. It was an argument, aimed at people who did not yet agree.

A century and three-quarters later, the argument has not closed.

What connects a man kneeling beneath a globe, a defense secretary protecting stunt pilots, a misogynist celebrity being rescued from foreign prosecution, and 77 million votes is not ideology alone. It is the belief that power is something to be seized and displayed against the people beneath you.

And in America, that belief has always had a racial history.

White supremacy is not only the man in the hood. It is also the voter who does not consider himself a white supremacist but is willing to empower the man who promises, explicitly or otherwise, to restore the hierarchy that white supremacy describes.

It is the person who says, I don’t like everything about him, as though the question were whether he would make a pleasant dinner companion. It is the person who says, I voted for the policies, as though policies arrive at the door in clean little packages, the racism carefully removed.

There are many ways to participate in a hierarchy: to proclaim it, to benefit from it, to defend it, or to decide that its restoration is an acceptable price for getting what you want. The last one is the most common, and perhaps the most useful to understand.

Real men are not white supremacists.

Not because the sentence is clever. Not because it makes a satisfying rhetorical flourish. Because it is true.

And because somebody currently running for office in Texas had to be careful how he said it.

I don’t.

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Outro:
But if in finding you again
My hopes are not in vain,
If the voice of honor
has not completely grown silent in you…
Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Giorgio Germont. La Traviata. Di Provenza il mar, il suol. 1989

Sources:

Sanford, Heather, and Ibram X. Kendi. “Lindsey Graham Occupied the Most Racist Senate Seat in U.S. History.” The Emancipator, July 19, 2026.

Tannehill, Brynn. “Pete Hegseth’s Reckless Message to Helicopter Pilots.” The Atlantic, July 21, 2026.

Romero, Dennis. “Tate Brothers Arrested by U.S. Authorities, Face Additional Rape Charges in the U.K.” NBC News, July 18–19, 2026.

“Andrew and Tristan Tate Arrested in Florida on Charges of Rape and Sex Trafficking.” NPR, July 18–19, 2026.

“Prosecutors Unveil Rape and Trafficking Charges Against Controversial Influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate.” Fox News, 2026.

“Trump Posts Boastful Atlas-Inspired Truth Social Image of Himself Carrying the World on His Shoulders.” Yahoo News, 2026.

Talarico, James. Campaign rally remarks, Plano, Texas, June 1, 2026.

Kendi, Ibram X. Substack post. 2026.

That’s one moonshot. The other is the one reported in the newspaper: two men standing on a surface no human being had ever touched, leaving behind a flag and a plaque that said, We came in peace for all mankind. Neil Armstrong’s boot print is still there. The flag is still there too, though the Apollo 11 flag was probably knocked over when the lunar module lifted off, and decades of unfiltered ultraviolet radiation have almost certainly done severe damage to its colors.

On July 20, 1969, it had been sixty-six years since the Wright brothers had kept a powered machine in the air for twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk. Orville Wright died in 1948, twenty-one years before Apollo 11 reached the moon, but he lived long enough to see the age of the jet aircraft. Had he lived into his late 90s, he might have watched the moon landing on television.

That is the speed of the twentieth century. Twelve seconds of powered flight to human beings walking on another world, within the span of a single life.

And then the achievement was, in a sense, left behind. That is a good place to begin thinking about the fifty-seven years since the photograph was taken: about the two moonshots, the one in the sky and the one represented by the baby in the picture, who has spent all those years discovering what sort of world he was given.

What We Learned to Do

The Apollo program was not merely an expedition to the moon. It was an enormous exercise in engineering, and much of what it produced entered ordinary life almost unnoticed. The integrated circuits developed to make Apollo’s guidance computer small enough to fly helped advance the technology that led toward the modern microprocessor. The satellites that followed made possible GPS and modern weather forecasting, and helped build the communications infrastructure on which the internet depends.

None of this was inevitable. Public money was spent on a project with no plausible economic justification, driven largely by Cold War competition and national vanity. The useful consequences arrived anyway.

The decades since have continued to produce transformations of comparable magnitude, though without the spectacle. In 1977, eight years after the baby in the photograph was born, Frederick Sanger developed a method for reading DNA. It took until 2003 to sequence the roughly three billion letters of a human genome, at a cost of about a billion dollars. Today, sequencing a human genome costs a small fraction of that sum and can be completed in a fraction of the time.

That collapse in cost and increase in speed is part of the reason CRISPR gene editing exists. It is part of the reason some cancers can be matched to drugs according to their mutations rather than simply the organ in which they appear. It is part of the reason an mRNA vaccine could be designed and brought into production with extraordinary speed after the genetic sequence of a new virus became available. Decades of work that had seemed obscure outside laboratories made possible, in months, what previous pandemics had required years to achieve, if they achieved it at all.

The same period saw the global under-five mortality rate fall by about 60 percent since 1990. Extreme poverty also declined dramatically over the decades before recent progress slowed and, in some places, reversed. Such changes rarely receive the attention given to catastrophe. Decline is an event. Improvement is usually a line on a graph.

Space has followed a more peculiar course. No human being has returned to the lunar surface since December 1972. The four astronauts of Artemis II flew around the moon and returned to Earth this April, a mission that Apollo 8 had already accomplished in 1968, before the landing. NASA now aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface with Artemis III, currently scheduled for 2027.

The program has been redesigned and delayed repeatedly. We developed the means to leave Earth and have spent much of the intervening time using them to observe Earth more closely. Given what weather satellites and climate data have taught us, that may prove to have been the more useful achievement.

Who Gets to Be Visible

There was another kind of progress in 1969, occurring at almost exactly the same moment and receiving considerably less attention.

On June 28, police raided the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. This time, the patrons did not simply disperse. The uprising continued for days. While NASA was preparing Apollo 11 for its journey to the moon, a struggle over who was permitted to live openly and without state harassment was beginning in New York.

The moon landing occupied the front pages of newspapers around the world. Stonewall received a fraction of that attention. Yet both events became beginnings, though no one watching either in the summer of 1969 could have known how long their consequences would take to unfold.

It took thirty-four years for the Supreme Court to strike down laws criminalizing consensual homosexual conduct nationwide, and twelve more for it to recognize same-sex marriage. In between came the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the removal of homosexuality from the psychiatric profession’s diagnostic manual, and the gradual, uneven emergence of a society in which gay people could be visible without that visibility itself being treated as a provocation.

The larger picture is less reassuring than the American one. Same-sex marriage is now recognized in dozens of countries, while many more still criminalize consensual sex between people of the same sex. The advance of marriage equality has slowed almost to a halt worldwide. In the United States, the constitutional settlement represented by Obergefell remains politically vulnerable.

Progress was never a ratchet. Gains are not placed permanently beyond the reach of those who oppose them. Each generation inherits the argument and has to decide whether it is prepared to have it again.

The Price of Knowing

Then there is the part of the story that is harder to accommodate.

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The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was roughly 325 parts per million in 1969. It is now above 420. The number is not a matter of political interpretation, and the physical systems governed by it are indifferent to political interpretation.

Trust in major American institutions has also fallen sharply since the Apollo era. Confidence in the presidency, the press, organized religion and higher education has declined, though not in precisely the same way or at the same rate. The general pattern has persisted across administrations of both parties, which suggests something deeper than the failures of any particular president or political faction.

Due to hereditary inequality, the distribution of wealth has approached levels associated with the Gilded Age. The rate at which species are disappearing has led biologists to speak of a possible sixth mass extinction. The current crisis is, uniquely, being driven by a species capable of understanding what it is doing.

The point is not that these facts cancel the others. Nor do the others cancel them.

The fifty-seven years since the photograph was taken have produced the mRNA vaccine and the melting ice sheet. They have brought marriage equality and the political effort to weaken its protections. They have taken human beings around the moon and left a gap of more than half a century between lunar landings.

Progress and its reversal have not arrived in separate historical eras. They have been occurring at the same time.

Armstrong’s plaque said: We came in peace for all mankind. The sentence assumed a we — a single mankind, watching from below with something like a shared consciousness. An estimated 600 million people watched the moon landing. That was real, and remarkable, and perhaps the last time in human history that so many people witnessed the same event together.

Since then, every new screen has offered another way to divide the audience. We are now capable of disagreeing not merely about what an event meant but about what happened. A persistent minority, after all, still believes that the moon landing itself was a fabrication.

Somewhere up there, the flag remains. Whether the Apollo 11 flag is still standing is not really the question; it was probably knocked over when the lunar module left the surface. The question is what remains of the flag itself after more than half a century of exposure to the lunar environment. The answer is probably not much that resembles the flag that was planted there.

That seems an appropriate monument to the years since Apollo 11. Not to triumph, and not to failure, but to the strange fact that a species can walk on another world and still find it difficult to preserve what it has built on its own.

The newspaper in my photograph has survived better. Newsprint yellows, but it does not disappear beneath the sun.

I took that photograph fifty-seven years ago, and I am still holding on to the picture.

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Outro: Lucia Popp“Song to the Moon,” from Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka.

Sources:

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “Apollo 11.” NASA.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “Artemis II.” NASA.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “Artemis III.” NASA.

National Institute of Standards and Technology. “The Human Genome Project.” NIST.

UNICEF. “Levels and Trends in Child Mortality 2025.” UNICEF.

Gallup. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Remains Near All-Time Low.” July 14, 2026.

National Park Service. “Stonewall National Monument.” U.S. Department of the Interior.

Our World in Data. “CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions.”

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

“Cortigiani, vil razza dannata...”
(Courtiers, vile damned race...)
— Rigoletto, Act II, Verdi

Imagine the most contemptible political figure you can: the one whose name alone produces a visceral reaction, whose voice makes you want to leave the room in which it bellows, whose face you would rather not see, and whose policies you regard as malevolent. Now imagine him suffering. Not defeated. Not imprisoned. Not merely removed from power. Suffering. Does some part of you — small, perhaps, and quickly suppressed — find that satisfying?

Some of you probably said yes. That answer is where this essay begins.

The pleasure of imagining an enemy’s pain is not necessarily a personality defect and it is not a political position. It belongs to something more ancient than either, something that preceded our theories of personality and our divisions into political camps.

Homo sapiens is a social primate, evolved in small groups in which threats to collective survival could be embodied in particular individuals, and in which the removal of such individuals might become a communal act. The neurological machinery that rewarded our ancestors for the elimination of danger did not come with an off switch. Nor was it designed for a world in which the perceived threat may be a face on a television screen and its imagined destruction a spectacle consumed privately, or shared with thousands of others, through a device held in the hand.

The satisfaction is real. So is the primate experiencing it. What comes afterward — the political vocabulary, the moral justification, the social permission to indulge the impulse, and the carefully preserved image of oneself as one of the good people — is the superstructure we have built upon an older impulse.

It is worth thinking about that image: the primate. Not as insult, but as description. Chimpanzees in the wild have been observed throwing rocks, sticks and branches to express agitation, ward off perceived threats and signal aggression. The behavior is communicative before it is anything else: it signals hostility, marks territory and establishes a social position. A great deal of what circulates on social media under the banner of political commentary is, at the level of function, the same gesture. The target is not engaged. The target is marked. What is being communicated is not an argument but a position in a social order. The medium is different. The underlying impulse is prehistoric.

The Exhibit

Consider the following, which circulated widely on social media and was shared approvingly by thousands upon thousands people who would describe themselves as progressive, tolerant, humane and opposed to cruelty:

The question is not whether the sentiment is understandable — it may well be — but what is revealed by the particular word chosen to express it. Trash. Not corrupt. Not cruel. Not dishonest, racist, lawless, or authoritarian. There are words enough to condemn what a person does or believes. Trash does something else. It describes what a person is: disposable, without worth, less than human, fit to be discarded.

The people who shared this image almost certainly regard themselves as opponents of Donald Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric. Some have written thoughtfully about the danger of language that strips human beings of their humanity. Yet they shared this, probably without much thought. Contempt directed at someone we already despise does not present itself to us as contempt. It presents itself as accuracy. The impulse is human, but the language is still dehumanizing. Its target does not alter what it does.

What the Word Does

There is a moral difference between condemning what a person believes or does and reducing the person himself to something disposable. To call someone a racist or an authoritarian, even as an accusation, is not, by itself, to dehumanize him. Such words describe beliefs, commitments, and patterns of conduct. They say what a person thinks or does; they do not reduce the person into those thoughts or actions. The individual remains a moral agent, capable of choosing, responsible for those choices, and answerable for what he has done. That distinction is not semantic. It is the distinction between condemning a human being’s conduct and denying the humanity of the human being who has conducted himself badly.

Dehumanizing language does more than express contempt. To call people trash, white trash, garbage, or filth is not to condemn a belief or a deed. It is to pronounce the person himself worthless. The distinction between what a human being is and what he has done is thereby lost. But that distinction is not a nicety. It is the condition of moral judgment itself. A person who has done something vile may be condemned for the deed and held accountable for it. A person declared vile in his very being is placed beyond moral appeal. There is then nothing to argue with and nothing to correct. The language has done more than express contempt. It has denied the other person the standing of a moral being. And in doing so, it has abandoned the discipline that makes moral judgment possible: the discipline of judging human beings by what they do rather than reducing them to what we say they are.

The target is no longer someone who is wrong or dangerous — both of which still presuppose a human being capable of choosing, and therefore of being held responsible. The target is waste. Waste is not argued with. It is discarded.

The Historical Record

This is neither metaphor nor slippery-slope speculation. It is a matter of historical record. Gregory Stanton, founder of Genocide Watch, places dehumanization third in his ten-stage model of genocide, after classification and symbolization and before organization and persecution. The sequence is important to understand. Before a population can be killed on a large scale, it must first be made, in thought and language, killable. Its members must be removed from the circle of beings to whom ordinary moral consideration is owed. The killing is to come later. The prior work is to make the victims seem less than fully human, and therefore less deserving of the restraints that ordinarily protect human beings from one another.

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The Nazis called Jews vermin. Hutu propaganda in Rwanda called Tutsis inyenzi — cockroaches — before the genocide in which approximately 800,000 people were killed in roughly 100 days. The Khmer Rouge divided Cambodia’s population into categories of revolutionary enemies, reducing individuals to assigned identities before killing approximately two million. In his study of how ordinary people come to commit extraordinary evil, James Waller traces the same psychological preparation across instances of mass violence: the victims must first be depersonalized.

The meme above is not the Holocaust. A social media post fantasizing about a guillotine is not Rwanda. No equivalence is being proposed. But the mental operation is recognizably the same: a category is applied that places the target beyond the limits of ordinary moral regard. That operation does not become harmless because those performing it hold the right political opinions.

History is not persuaded by good intentions.

The Class Confession

"White trash" and "trailer trash" have a history worth noting. They are class terms directed at poverty, place, and a way of life shaped largely by circumstances over which the individual had little control. That history does not excuse what the words do; it reveals that the words carry more destruction than their users intend.

When a progressive calls the Trump family “white trash,” the class meaning of the term becomes incidental. The word is no longer describing poverty or social position, but passing judgment on the people themselves. They may, in fact, have given us ample reason to hold them in contempt. But contempt is not a license to dehumanize. The wealth of its targets does not make the language less dehumanizing. It reveals that class description is no longer what the insult is doing.

And the damage does not stop with the person at whom the word is aimed. The child who has done nothing to deserve disrespect may hear it and understand that the circumstances into which he was born have already been made a judgment against him. So may the older person who has spent a lifetime in poverty, or someone whose hardship has been compounded by illness or misfortune. Circumstance is converted into character, and hardship into evidence of worthlessness. The insult may be directed at one person. Its disdain is heard by many others.

The Mirror

Much has been said, and rightly so, about Donald Trump’s discursive violence. His mockery of disability, his sexism, his racial insults, and his treatment of political opponents as less than fully human are the instruments he uses. Humiliation is the means by which he exercises power.

What is less often examined — and considerably less comfortable to examine — is how readily his opponents can reproduce the same structure while believing themselves to be doing the opposite. There is no semantic loophole by which “white trash” becomes morally different from the terms they condemn. To reduce people to garbage tells us nothing essential about the people being described. It tells us something about the person doing the dehumanizing: the language does not merely diminish its target. It diminishes the moral judgment of the person who uses it.

This is not a question of censorship. Nobody is proposing that the law regulate the epithet or that any external authority intervene between a person and his chosen vocabulary. The question is one of character — of what a person is doing to himself, and revealing about himself, when he reaches for a word whose function is to place another human being outside the category of beings worth considering.

To oppose dehumanization while practicing it is not a contradiction that good intentions resolve. It is a contradiction that good intentions deepen, because the conviction of one’s own righteousness is precisely what makes the practice invisible. The person who would never use such language against a group he considers sympathetic uses it freely against a group he considers deserving, and does not notice that he has accepted the underlying premise — that there exist categories of people to whom the ordinary prohibitions against contempt do not apply. Once that premise is accepted, the only remaining question is who gets assigned to the category. The answer to that question has historically not gone well.

Verdi understood something about this. In the second act of Rigoletto, the hunchbacked court jester confronts the noblemen who have abducted his daughter. He begins in fury: Cortigiani, vil razza dannata — courtiers, vile damned race! He calls them, in effect, what the meme above calls the Trumps. And then the music does what the meme cannot. The rage gives way to grief. The man who was cursing becomes a father begging for his child. The man hurling the epithet and the man weeping are the same man, minutes apart. Verdi understood that contempt is not the opposite of humanity. It is one of its expressions — among the less admirable ones.

The Discipline

There is a case for what might be called moral cold turkey. Not the gradual moderation of a habit but its clean abandonment, on the grounds that the habit has no acceptable uses. The argument against spanking children arrived at this conclusion after decades of qualified guidance — spank only in these circumstances, only with these safeguards — and found that the qualifications were unworkable, because the circumstances always seemed to justify themselves, and the safeguards were always already in place in the mind of the person doing the spanking. The cleaner rule turned out to be the more honest one: not less of this, but none of it, because the habit itself is the problem.

The same logic applies here. The invitation to make exceptions — this target really is trash, this one genuinely deserves it — is the invitation that makes the habit permanent. The exception always presents itself as obvious. It always feels like realism rather than capitulation. And so the habit continues, and the character it forms continues with it.

What is being formed, through the repetition of dehumanizing language, is a particular relationship to other human beings: one in which their full humanity is conditionally granted, subject to withdrawal when they become sufficiently inconvenient or sufficiently wrong. That is not a value. It is the suspension of one. And it is learned — absorbed gradually, reinforced socially, practiced until it no longer requires effort.

It is also taught. Not in explicit instruction, but in the texture of ordinary life — in what the adults around a child treat as acceptable, in what gets laughed at and what passes without comment. A child who grows up watching the people he respects call their political opponents trash is learning something about which human beings count. He may draw a different line than his elders when he comes to draw his own, but he has learned that the circle of moral consideration can be drawn around some people and withheld from others.

Contempt does not persuade. It consolidates. It does not weaken authoritarian politics; it helps to harden it, converting political argument into a struggle of identities in which humiliation replaces reasoning and grievance becomes the only currency. Whenever liberal discourse reaches for a dehumanizing epithet, it lends support to the authoritarian account of politics: that politics is merely domination, that there are no principles at stake, only rival tribes.

That account is nourishment to the movements that claim to oppose it.

The Return

There is also something in it for the person who stops, and it is considerable. The person who refuses to use dehumanizing epithets, not because someone told him to but because he has decided what kind of person he intends to be, has kept his argument and his character in alignment. He says what he actually means about what his opponent actually does, in language that leaves the moral structure of the argument intact. Virtue is its own reward — not as consolation, but as the thing itself. The benefit is immediate: integrity is not a dividend paid later. It is what a person carries out of the exchange, regardless of how the opponent responds and regardless of whether anyone notices.

The Stoics asked a question that has not aged: what does our conduct say about who we are? Not about our enemies. About us.

To hold someone accountable is to acknowledge him as a moral being. Dehumanization is the refusal of that acknowledgment. In a democratic society, the first is the basis of moral judgment. The second is its abandonment.

Contempt is a confession, not a critique.

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Outro: Verdi: Rigoletto - Cortigiani, vil razza dannata - Leonard Warren

Sources:

“Cambodia’s ‘Day of Remembrance’ Marks the 50th Anniversary of the Khmer Rouge Genocide.” May 20, 2025. The Associated Press.

Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; revised edition 2007).

Gregory Stanton, “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” Genocide Watch, 1996 (updated 2016).

“Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations.” United Nations.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Nazi Propaganda.” Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Verdi, Giuseppe. Rigoletto. Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, Act II. 1851.

Shortly after the turn of this century, I was employed as a legal assistant for the lawyer whose name headed the firm’s letterhead. We had just relocated to a different building — down from the top floor of one of Seattle’s tallest to the twentieth floor of the new one.

One day I was summoned into my lawyer’s office. He gestured toward a window washer suspended outside in one of those single-person cages. “Do you think that’s a woman? It looks like a woman,” he said.

Window washing isn’t the sort of occupation that usually enters into discussions of gender equality. We have built an entire vocabulary around the glass ceiling, but not around who cleans the glass from the outside. Few people campaign for equal representation in the most dangerous jobs.

My former boss and I are both retired now, and we’ve become friends. I recently asked him if he remembered that incident. He emailed back: “Don’t recall that at all. Too long ago.”

For me, though, that long-ago moment stayed in my consciousness.

Maybe it was growing up with two women who worked outside the home all their lives that left me attuned to gender issues before I ever heard the phrase. Below is a photograph of my maternal grandmother, taken in pre-revolutionary Russia. In those years, switchboard operators were called baryshnyas — unmarried noblewomen, the word itself declaring the job’s terms. Telephone companies required operators to be young, of a certain height, and well educated, and since formal education in Russia was largely closed to women outside the upper classes, most operators came from noble families fallen on hard times. The position was understood to end with marriage. My grandmother married in 1915, at age 20, so this photo would have had to have been taken a year or two earlier.

My grandmother would tell me she worked so that no one could tell her what to do. Good thing, too, as she went on to marry my grandfather, a match so displeasing to her own mother that my great-grandmother refused to attend the wedding. After leaving Russia when the Bolsheviks took power, my grandmother subsequently went on to work at two businesses in two different countries. Both my grandparents were two of several Shanghai Russian emigres who were business partners in “the first Western-style bakery in Taiwan,” which exists to this day.

She and my grandfather were married for sixty-five years. He died in her arms. He was a man of such intelligence, integrity, and quiet sweetness that he shaped, without my knowing it at the time, the kind of men I would go on to choose in my own life — men whose character was evident in the way they lived rather than in anything they claimed about themselves. My great-grandmother had been wrong about him. My grandmother had known that from the start, which was rather the point: she’d decided, in an era when women mostly didn’t, that her own judgment outranked her mother’s, or society’s, on the question of what made a man worth choosing.

Another moment that seared itself into my memory came when, as a child, I first watched the 1958 film A Night to Remember. The sinking of the Titanic was tragic on a scale I could scarcely comprehend. But another aspect of the story impressed me just as powerfully: the order in which people were permitted to live. Men stood aside on a deck slanting toward the Atlantic, waiting to die so that others might live. I understood enough to feel that their lives were being valued differently because they were men. The sacrifice was described as honorable. Even then, it seemed to me that honor and injustice could sometimes wear the same face.

… so that others might live.

For weeks on and off, my husband and I have been watching the series World War II with Tom Hanks. Each episode opens with a handful of expert commentators setting the stage with brief remarks. These lines, from Colonel Doug Doud, stopped me:

“We see humans at their absolute worst, how they treat other human beings. And we see them at their absolute best, willing to give their lives that others might live.”

It was the second half of that sentence that pulled me back to the Titanic — the same order of sacrifice, decades apart.

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I can’t remember a moment in my life when I’ve ever wanted to be anything other than who I am – a female. I’ve never felt less than men, and that same ease with who I am is why I want it for everyone, whatever their orientation or identity. I’m sympathetic to the struggles women face being women, and just as sympathetic to the unique struggles men face, which is partly why this asymmetry has concerned me long before I had the research to back it up.

A good friend of mine — I won’t use her name, though she’s given me her blessing to use her words — put a finer point on this recently after I’d asked her, in an email, whether she’d ever felt inferior to men in any general sense. This is what she wrote:

“Interesting question about feelings of inferiority. I have been wondering myself about the women who voluntarily subject themselves to men and the resurgence of the male-dominant paradigm. Why is it so many people, maybe especially women, seek an authority that tells them how to value things, including themselves? The familiar becomes the authoritative. Religion is the locus classicus. It has long baffled me that people don’t question religious authority when it is so clearly cultural. Do we do this out of a fear of freedom? Freedom opens up a big unknown and thinking for yourself can feel like falling off a precipice. Scary.

“I don’t honestly remember ever feeling inferior because I was female. I do remember feeling resentment at the preferential treatment of boys and men. My mother irritated me by requiring her daughters do things like daily fixing dinners and doing dishes when all my brothers had to do was take out the garbage once a week. So sometimes I found myself wishing I were a boy so I could garner those benefits; not because I felt myself inferior, but recognizing that other people did because I was a girl. It just wasn’t fair!”

“I learned to read early, and always did well in school, so I never overcame the feeling that I was just as good as any boy (in fact smarter than most of them) — except in sports. I have a lifelong uninterest in sports which may stem from the knowledge that this is an area where women do not have the same capabilities as men. Or it could be cultural upbringing — no one in my family, father and brothers included, took any interest in competitive sports. So probably the latter. My family, like so many second generation immigrants, valued education as the great leveler. We are so shaped by our early environment — what we value, what we believe.”

Before I go any further, that distinction is worth observing: the difference between being treated as lesser and feeling lesser. The first is measurable, at least in the aggregate, and it shows up in vignette studies and custody statistics. It shows up too in workplace fatality numbers, which run overwhelmingly male and rarely register as a gendered harm. The second is closer to self-report, harder to verify from outside, and — as my friend’s answer suggests, as my grandmother’s whole life suggests — shaped early, by whoever happens to be standing nearby insisting a girl is just as good as any boy in the room, or deciding for herself that she is, whether anyone insists on it or not.

What gets measured as “treated as lesser,” though, often smuggles in an assumption: that sex itself is the operative category. That’s a sleight of hand worth noticing. Sex is treated as a stand-in for a hierarchy that is actually shaped by other forces: intelligence, class, attractiveness, confidence, and a host of other traits that determine where people find themselves in the social order. The substitution is repeatedly contradicted by reality, yet the category survives the contradiction. And that is before race enters the picture at all. Once it does, the claim that “men are advantaged” becomes difficult to sustain without careful qualification, because a poor Black man and a wealthy white man have remarkably little in common in their place within the social hierarchy beyond the fact that both are men.

The asymmetries around humor and emotional expression are two sides of one licensing mechanism. Culturally, men are afforded more latitude to express anger without having it read as a character flaw, while women are permitted more latitude to express fear or sadness without having it read as incapacity.

But when the man is not the one expressing emotion but the object of ridicule, the dynamic reverses. A husband portrayed as incompetent, hapless, or simply an impediment to be managed is treated as a harmless target, because audiences generally assume that mockery directed at a group thought to possess structural power carries little social cost, whatever the circumstances of the individual man. Hence the remarkable longevity — and, if anything, the growing prominence—of the greeting-card husband and the sitcom “doofus dad,” whereas comparable caricatures of wives or mothers would provoke immediate and widespread objection.

Parenting assumptions operate according to a related but distinct logic: maternal warmth and competence are treated as the default, paternal detachment or incompetence as the corresponding expectation, unless evidence compels a different conclusion. This shows up in custody outcomes, but more tellingly in the vignette research that holds parenting behavior constant and varies only the parent’s stated sex; even identical caretaking is read as more indicative of good character in a mother than in a father. The presumption cuts in the other direction too, however subtly: fathers are given a lower bar to clear for praise (”involved dad”) for tasks a mother would be expected to do without comment) precisely because so little baseline is assumed of them.

Physical aggression and threat perception provide the clearest experimental evidence of a double standard, though it operates in more than one direction at once, and none of this is to suggest the scale of violence is symmetric between the sexes. Men are more readily perceived as capable of violence and are therefore afforded less benefit of the doubt as potential aggressors. Yet that same presumption also deprives them of the presumption of vulnerability when they are the ones being harmed — whether the harm is physical or the quieter, harder-to-name harm of psychological abuse. Male victims of domestic violence face a related problem: not necessarily disbelief, but the absence of a cultural script that readily recognizes their experience as victimhood at all. Both patterns — the harsher interpretation of male aggression and the weaker recognition of male vulnerability — reflect the same underlying asymmetry viewed from opposite sides.

Physical risk and expendability are where my own experiences find their clearest expression, and they reach further back than most of what I have described above. “Women and children first” as a maritime evacuation norm, and its dramatization in A Night to Remember, reflects an older moral logic in which male bodies were regarded as more expendable in the service of preserving reproductive and caregiving capacity.

That logic has not vanished so much as receded into the background, where it continues to shape the distribution of social obligations without requiring explicit justification. It survived in less dramatic form through conscription: men were drafted into Vietnam under an obligation that never applied to women, and a vestige of the same asymmetry persists today in Selective Service registration, which remains confined to men despite substantial legal and legislative debate over the past decade.

The same disposability shows up statistically rather than dramatically in the modern workplace: men account for roughly nine in ten occupational fatalities in the United States, a gap far wider than the gap in employment share between the sexes. Whether that reflects lingering norms about which lives are worth protecting, occupational sorting by choice, or some mixture of both is genuinely disputed among researchers, but the raw asymmetry in outcome is not. It rarely gets named as a double standard in the way “the wage gap” does, partly because it’s understood as a private arrangement rather than an institutional one, but the underlying logic — that male worth is measured partly by material output and expendability — is continuous with the more visible instances.

I’ve come to think that the “trashing of men” I keep noticing rests on something much older than itself rather than representing a recent invention. The lifeboat and the draft card were never described as slights against men; they were called chivalry, or duty. Today’s version seldom appeals to those ideals explicitly, but it may rest on the same assumption: that male discomfort, exclusion, or sacrifice requires less notice than its female counterpart. The vocabulary has changed; the underlying logic may not have.

The double standards run in both directions; neither sex holds a monopoly on either their benefits or their burdens. Men are granted greater latitude for anger, praised more readily for minimal parenting effort, and presumed more competent in technical and physical domains. In return, they are afforded less presumption of vulnerability, less individualized grief when they die in war or on the job, and less cultural vocabulary for recognizing them as victims when they are the ones harmed. Women are granted greater latitude for fear and sadness, broader social permission to seek support, and, on average, a lighter touch from the criminal justice system. In return, they receive less credit for ambition when it can be construed as neglect, and less benefit of the doubt in positions of technical or financial authority. Each sex tends to notice most readily the asymmetries that disadvantage itself. What is more rarely recognized is that these are distinct social mechanisms rather than entries in a single moral ledger that somehow balances itself in the end.

None of this argues that either sex bears the heavier burden overall — the research does not support such a simple accounting, and I am not sure that accounting is the point. What interests me is how old the pattern is, and how quietly it has been carried forward. Chivalry, duty, common sense: none of those words suggest a burden or a cost. Yet burdens were borne, and costs were paid.

I've never seen another woman suspended outside a high-rise building on a window-washing rig since. I don't know whether any formal barrier keeps women out of that work; I only know that, in all the years since, I have never seen another. What made that moment memorable was not that the job was impossible for a woman, but that I had rarely, if ever, imagined a woman doing it. A man watching male window washers descend the sides of towers might never have registered the sight at all. We tend to notice what contradicts our expectations and overlook what confirms them. In that sense, our attention reveals not only the world before us, but the assumptions through which we have learned to see it.

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Outro: Billy Bigelow spends most of “Soliloquy” imagining a son — someone rough, careless, made in his own image, someone the world will forgive. It’s only when he imagines a daughter that the song changes register. The bravado drops. He stops picturing who she’ll become and starts picturing what she’ll need, and the need is entirely material: sheltered, fed, dressed in whatever money can buy. He has no idea how to provide any of it. He says so. And then he says he’ll do it anyway, by whatever means are available to him, because this obligation was never presented to him as a choice:
”She’s got to be sheltered and fed, and dressed
In the best that money can buy!
I never knew how to get money,
But I’ll try—
By God! I’ll try!
I’ll go out and make it
Or steal it or take it
Or die!”

Sources:

• Bureau of Labor Statistics. Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries Summary, 2024. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/iif/

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS). https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/

• Department of Defense. About Selective Service Registration.

  https://www.sss.gov/

• Eagly, Alice H., and Steven J. Karau. “Role Congruity Theory of Prejudice Toward Female Leaders.” Psychological Review, vol. 109, no. 3, 2002, pp. 573–598.

• FeldmanHall, Oriel, et al. “Action Biases in Moral Judgment: Harm to Men Is Judged Less Harshly Than Harm to Women.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

• Fiske, Susan T., Amy J. C. Cuddy, Peter Glick, and Jun Xu. “A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype Content: Competence and Warmth Respectively Follow From Perceived Status and Competition.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 82, no. 6, 2002, pp. 878–902.

• National Center for State Courts. Trends in State Courts.

• Rudman, Laurie A., and Peter Glick. The Social Psychology of Gender: How Power and Intimacy Shape Gender Relations. Guilford Press, 2008.

• Seager, Martin. The Gender Paradox: Can Suicide Research Help Us Rethink Men’s Mental Health? Samaritans, 2019.

• Swim, Janet K., et al. “Sexism and Racism: Old-Fashioned and Modern Prejudices.”

• United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996).

• Zelin, Madeleine. The Merchants of Zigong.

Imagine you’re sitting in a public high school classroom, and your teacher tells you “… you belong in hell.”

The exact statement was made in a class on September 14, 2006 — the fourth day of the school year — and captured on audio recordings. The full remark, as transcribed from the tapes was:

“[Jesus] did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven. So much so, that he took your sin on his own body, suffered your pains for you and he’s saying, ‘Please accept me. Believe.’ You reject that, you belong in hell.”

In a pleasant surprise a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Paul LaClair. Years earlier, I had been an editor at the Kurtz Institute, where he contributed an article titled Comparing and Contrasting Yuval Noah Harari and Steven Pinker.

Today Paul is a semi-retired attorney. But back in 2006-2007 he was the legal architect of his son Matthew LaClair’s First Amendment challenge to Kearny High School. While Matthew documented teacher David Paszkiewicz’s classroom promotion of Christianity, Paul handled the legal strategy.

This is partly their story, but beyond that a history of the Pledge of Allegiance, and how the problem keeps resurfacing, in different towns, under different names.

When a History Class Becomes a Constitutional Case

Sometimes constitutional law arrives with trumpets and Supreme Court opinions. Sometimes it begins with a teenager quietly pressing “record” on a digital recorder.

In the fall of 2006 at Kearny High School, sixteen-year-old Matthew LaClair, a junior, sat in a U.S. history class and listened to his teacher, David Paszkiewicz, preach. Not metaphorically. Paszkiewicz was a Baptist youth pastor as well as a fourteen-year veteran of the Kearny faculty, and he brought both roles into the classroom. Students heard that accepting Jesus was the only path to salvation, that the Big Bang and evolution were unscientific, that dinosaurs rode on Noah’s Ark. This was not a comparative religion elective. It was American history.

“You Won’t Believe Me”

Matthew anticipated the obvious problem: nobody would believe a sixteen-year-old over a teacher. So on September 13, 2006, he started recording. It was on the next day that he caught Paszkiewicz on tape telling students that if they rejected Jesus, “you belong in hell.”

Matthew brought the recordings to Principal Alfred Somma. The meeting did not go the way a civics textbook would suggest. Paszkiewicz denied ever making the statements and, for close to an hour, was permitted to characterize Matthew as dishonest and out to end a good man’s career. Only then did Matthew produce the CDs.

The Architect

This is where Paul LaClair, Matthew’s father, enters — and his profession shaped everything that followed. As an attorney, Paul treated it as what it was: a First Amendment case waiting to be built. He drafted four formal letters to the district over the following month, demanding a correction of the science and an apology, and received no substantive response. When a school board attorney told him by phone that what happened in his son’s classroom was “none of his business,” Paul had his answer. There was a viable civil rights claim, and he intended to make it.

That legal posture became its own controversy. A letter to the local paper accused Matthew of being coached by his “attorney father” to bait Paszkiewicz into damaging statements — the implication being that the LaClairs were angling for a payout rather than defending a principle. It was a convenient story for a town that had already decided who the villain was. It also ignored that Matthew, raised in the Ethical Culture Society, had arrived at his own objections before his father ever drafted a letter.

From Hallway to National Story

The story broke in the Jersey Journal in mid-November 2006. What followed was less a legal battle than a slow institutional squeeze. Matthew lost friends. He was cursed at in the hallways. He received a death threat. School board meetings filled with Paszkiewicz’s supporters, some of whom made t-shirts on his behalf. In January 2007, the board’s substantive response was to adopt a policy banning students from recording class without consent — a measure that, without irony, would have prevented the very evidence that started the inquiry.

Paul escalated. On Presidents’ Day, February 2007, he and the ACLU of New Jersey held a press conference at the ACLU’s Newark offices, flanked by attorneys from Willkie Farr & Gallagher and a representative from People for the American Way. It was a deliberate show of legal weight, calibrated to move a district that had spent five months hoping the story would go away.

An Uneasy Resolution

It worked, in the muted way these things usually resolve. In May 2007, the district settled — not with a courtroom verdict, but with an agreement that gave the LaClairs what they’d asked for the previous October, and more. Outside experts were brought in to correct the record, among them Kenneth Miller, the Brown University biologist who had testified against intelligent design in Kitzmiller v. Dover two years earlier. Paszkiewicz kept his job. The recording ban stayed on the books.

No trial. No headline verdict. Just a settlement, a policy that outlived the controversy that produced it, and a father whose training as a lawyer turned his son’s objection into something the district couldn’t simply wait out.

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette

In 1943, at the height of World War II, the Supreme Court reversed itself. Three years earlier, in Minersville v. Gobitis, it had upheld a school district’s right to force students to salute the flag. In Barnette, it went the other way: public school students and teachers could not be compelled to salute the flag or recite the Pledge. The state, Justice Robert Jackson wrote, has no authority to “prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion.”

People who have recited the Pledge in an anesthetized fashion all their lives may notice something missing from this wartime recitation:

Yep, there is no “under God” in it. And the war was eventually won without it.

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Harry Belafonte’s film debut was Bright Road, released in 1953. The film included that pre-1954 version of the Pledge, which ended:

“...one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

It did not contain the words “under God,” because those words were not added until June 14, 1954, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a joint congressional resolution into law.

Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge in 1892 as a secular civic passage. The words “under God” were added at the height of the Cold War, part of an effort to distinguish American ideals from Soviet state atheism.

The Pledge of Allegiance: A Continuing First Amendment Conflict

You’d think eighty-some years would be enough. Barnette settled this in 1943: schools can’t force a kid to salute a flag or say a pledge. Case closed, in theory. In practice, the theory keeps needing to be re-explained, one school district at a time.

Indiana got there first, in its own smaller way. On March 22, 2023, a student named Jace Lower kept walking down the hallway at Alexandria-Monroe High School while the Pledge played over the PA system — he didn’t stop, didn’t stand still, just kept walking to class. He got a day of detention for insubordination. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) sent a letter citing the First Amendment’s prohibition on compelled speech. The school reversed course and struck it from his record, which is the closest thing to an apology these cases tend to produce.

Danielle Khalaf’s case started the same way and ended up somewhere else. Fourteen years old, at a middle school outside Detroit, she stayed seated during the Pledge for three days in January 2025, in protest of U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Her teacher told her, in front of the class, that if she didn’t like it here she should go back to her own country. That sentence is what turned a Barnette case into a civil rights one. The ACLU of Michigan and the Arab American Civil Rights League sued. In 2026, the district settled: First Amendment training for staff, Khalaf’s record wiped clean, and a $10,000 payment from the teacher’s insurer.

Colorado’s version didn’t even need a lawsuit. In late 2025, an elementary school student in the Littleton district tried to sit during the Pledge to protest ICE enforcement actions, and was told by a teacher and a paraprofessional that this was disrespectful — pressured, in other words, into standing back up. The ACLU of Colorado sent the district a letter citing Barnette by name, along with Tinker v. Des Moines, just to make sure nobody could claim ignorance of the law twice.

South Carolina’s case was the ugliest of the bunch, because it stopped being about words. Marissa Barnwell, fifteen, was walking to class — not even in the classroom, just walking, past a speaker playing the Pledge — when a teacher yelled at her to stop, then pushed her against the wall. The principal’s response was to ask whether she loved her country. In 2025, the district paid the Barnwell family $75,000, admitted nothing, and Barnwell got about $47,000 of it once she turns eighteen.

Different states, different grievances — Gaza, immigration enforcement, a kid who just kept walking — but the pattern doesn't change. An adult with a little brief authority decides silence is defiance, decides sitting is disrespect, and finds out, again, that the Constitution disagreed with them decades ago. The settlements arrive. The training modules get scheduled. Nobody in charge seems to have read Barnette before the lawsuit made them.

The Kearny case didn’t end anything, and neither will this one. Constitutional victories don’t work like inoculations — you don’t get one shot of Barnette and stay immune for life.

Every few years, in a different classroom, some adult with a badge or a lanyard rediscovers the impulse to make a child perform loyalty on command, and has to be reminded, again, that the loyalty doesn’t count if it’s compelled. The findings never stick. The precedent holds and holds and somehow needs re-litigating anyway, like a weed that keeps growing back through the same crack in the same sidewalk.

Vigilance, in this particular corner of American life, isn’t a virtue so much as a maintenance chore — tedious, recurring, necessary precisely because the thing you’re guarding against has never once stayed dead.

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Little David was small, but oh my!
Yes David was small, but oh my!
He fought big Goliath
Who lay, lay down an’ dieth!
Yes David was small, but oh oh oh oh my!
Outro: It Ain’t Necessarily So · Sammy Davis Jr. Porgy And Bess

Sources:

Supreme Court of the United States. West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).

ACLU of New Jersey. “Kearny High School Student Challenges Religious Instruction in Public School.” (2006–2007 archival materials).

The Jersey Journal. Coverage of Matthew LaClair and David Paszkiewicz controversy (November 2006–2007).

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005).

National Archives. “The Pledge of Allegiance.”

The American Presidency Project. “Statement by the President Upon Signing Bill To Include the Words ‘Under God’ in the Pledge to the Flag” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 14, 1954).

History. “Why Eisenhower Added ‘Under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance During the Cold War.”

Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “Students’ Right to Decline the Pledge of Allegiance.”

ACLU of Michigan / Arab American Civil Rights League materials regarding Danielle Khalaf (2025–2026).

ACLU of Colorado and FIRE materials on recent Pledge disputes (Indiana, Colorado, Tennessee).

І.

It is said, though no one at court could say who first said it, that a man is given roughly one thousand months. Not a day more, as a rule, and rarely a day less than he can bear to notice. A month for each turn of the moon, a thousand turns, and then the lamp goes out whether or not the room was worth lighting.

Pushkin the Magic Cat, who has outlived three tzars, a reign of one monarch and the accession of the next, and the entire province of Novo-Georgia twice over, has by this accounting barely dipped a paw into the first of his nine allotments. He does not say this to boast. He says it only because his friend Mikhail, who is mortal and knows it, likes to be reminded that someone at the table is not in a hurry.

“You have time to be patient,” Mikhail told him once. “I have to decide what patience is worth.”

Pushkin did not answer. A cat who has buried this many friends learns not to answer that particular observation.

ІІ.

Of Count Lindskyi there is much that could be said, and the court said most of it while he lived, usually about someone else’s crisis. He was the perpetually anxious boyar of the Southern provinces, keeper of the samovar, issuer of grave concern. When the Kingdom of Doomerica needed a man to announce that a thing was troubling, Lindskyi was summoned; when it needed a man to do something about the trouble, he was not.

He came to court owning little beyond his own coat and left it many times wealthier, though no record survives of an afternoon he spent enjoying it. The wealth accumulated the way frost accumulates on a window nobody opens.

He had called TzarDon, in his season of clearest sight, unfit to hold the throne — a kook, he said, a man who would bring ruin and deserve the ruin he brought. He said this loudly enough that the whole court heard it, and several boyars wrote it down. Then TzarDon took the throne regardless, and Lindskyi discovered that his own clearest sight had been, on reflection, mistaken. So he took up residence at the Tzar’s card table and pronounced him, within the decade, the finest sovereign the Kingdom had ever produced. The games they played together he called fun. He did not say what the fun had cost him — nor what his hand at that table had cost the people who held no seat there at all, whose fortunes his vote and his silence could reach, and who had no comparable reach into his. That price is not for this tale to set for him.

Twice more he found the clear sight and lost it again. Once after the Uprising at the Gate, when he stood in the Great Hall and said enough, count me out, I hate how this ends — and then, within a season, was back at the card table, explaining that the Kingdom could not move forward without the very man he had just refused to be counted with.

Lindskyi’s contradictions — clear judgment followed by expedient compromise, regret followed by repetition — were not exceptional. They were commonplace. The chroniclers remembered him not because he was uniquely flawed, but because he was an all-too-familiar example of moral accommodation.

ІІІ.

He had just returned from Zhelanograd, the borderland kingdom that had spent years under siege by its much larger neighbor. He had gone, as he often did, to promise support that was not entirely his to promise, and came back having helped broker a fresh round of sanctions against the neighbor doing the besieging. Two days past his own name-day. Eight hundred and fifty-two months lived, by the accounting, out of the thousand he might have hoped for — old age, but not the deep kind, the kind that still has business left undone on the desk.

He died quietly, at home, and his family asked for privacy, which was granted him more readily than he had ever granted it to others.

The Bezmertyi, hearing the news, did what the Bezmertyi do. Some of them wept as if they had lost a brother. Some of them produced, within the hour, a full accounting of every contradiction he had ever uttered, arranged end to end like a ledger closed in his debit column. Both were performances. Neither was owed to him, and neither was owed to the ones performing it.

ІV.

“They are already arguing about how sorry to be,” Mikhail said, watching the Bezmertyi from the tree line.

“That is the part that was never his to control,” said Pushkin. “The praise, the ledger, the name they carve on it. None of it. His judgments were his. What he did with the card table, with the throne room, with his eight hundred and fifty-two months — that much belonged to him and nothing else did.”

“He had a friend once,” Mikhail said. “A real one, by his own account. Told everyone the old captain had taught him how to lose with some grace, how to work across the aisle instead of across a table.”

“He had it,” said Pushkin, “and let it be renegotiated. The healers of your age have only lately measured, with their instruments, what the philosophers of the old classical civilizations already knew without them — that a warm attachment, a hand held from childhood on, predicts a life well spent better than any fortune or any office ever will. He had the hand. He traded it for a seat at a different table, and called the seat fun.”

“You are not going to mourn him, then.”

“I am not going to be glad, either. There is a kind of person who wants murderers put to death and calls it justice, and does not notice that his own hands are the ones that end up wet. I will not be that kind of cat over a death I did not cause and could not have prevented. It is not mine to celebrate or to punish. It was never mine to begin with.”

Mikhail was quiet for a while. He is the age now where the letters that arrive are rarely about weddings, rarely about the newly born. “We don’t talk about who’s getting married anymore,” he said. “We talk about who died.”

“That is what it is to reach your months,” Pushkin said. “Not a tragedy. A bill come due on schedule.”

“Is that supposed to be comforting?”

“No. It is supposed to be true. Comfort is a different animal, and I have never been able to catch it either.”

Pushkin thought about the room where Gannibal’s portrait has hung since before either of them had a name for what a portrait was — his great-grandfather-cat, dark-coated and inscrutable even in oils. The one place, so far as either cat has established, where a life outlasts a body — not by staying, but by getting told well enough that someone keeps retelling it.

“That is the whole trick of my nine lives,” Pushkin said. “Not more time than you have. Better stories. I have been carrying them for two centuries now — the wise ones, the foolish ones, the ones that were mostly about who loved whom and for how long — and I can tell you which kind survives the man who lived it.”

“Which kind is his?”

“Ask me in fifty years, and I still might not know for certain. Most men keep their names only as long as someone who actually knew them is left to say them aloud — fifty years, eighty at the far end — and after that the name passes into the record, and not much later it leaves the record too. Almost no one survives past that. The rare few who do are not remembered for having been themselves. They are remembered because they became the only word anyone had left for a kind of man the world keeps producing more of.”

Pushkin continued. “Baba Yaga was never one witch who happened to live a long time. She is what a forest does with a fear it cannot otherwise name, given a hut and a temper. The same holds for the ones at court, if it holds for them at all. If Lindskyi outlasts the last hand he ever shook, it will not be he outlasting it. It will be the anxious boyar outlasting it — because some court somewhere is still producing one, and still needs an old word for it.”

“So he might be remembered.”

“The type might. I would not wager on the man. Ask me instead whether life was good to him, while he still had a name of his own to be good to. That is the fairer question — fairer than whether he was good to it.”

“Was it?”

“Life is good, Mikhail. Complicated in both directions, unfair more often than it is kind, over faster than anyone budgets for — and still good, on the whole, to the ones who find someone worth holding onto while it happens. He had that, once. A captain who taught him how to lose, how to work a room without selling the room. Whether he kept finding it after is the part I cannot answer for him.”

Mikhail was quiet, and then asked the harder one. “And the people who believed him when he meant it? The ones at the Gate who heard count me out and thought it would hold. The families still waiting on a pathway he almost built for them — twice — before someone talked him out of both.”

“They do not get a portrait on anyone’s mantel,” Pushkin said. “They got the years instead. That is the cost this tale keeps declining to price, and it does not get cheaper because the man who ran it up is gone. That part is not his to settle anymore. It is theirs to carry. It was always theirs.”

V.

Pushkin let himself picture it, while they sat there — the forests of the Northwest, where the Grandmother and Baba Yaga were still trampling around, untroubled, because the business of the season does not pause for any single boyar’s accounting, wherever the season happens to be looked in on from. There was bark to strip and a hut to feed and a great many mushrooms that did not care whose card table anyone had sat at.

Baba Yaga had opinions about the mushrooms — strong ones, delivered at volume, concerning which the hut would tolerate and which it would not — and the Grandmother had opinions about Baba Yaga’s opinions, and between the two of them the argument outlasted the mushroom season by several weeks. Neither of them considered this funny. Everyone else did.

It is not given to every creature to grow old. It was given to Lindskyi, and he spent the privilege the way he spent most things — anxiously, at a table that was never really his, worried about a Doom he never once resolved. What he did with his own character along the way, no one else was ever holding the reins of. That part was his, start to finish, and it is the only part any of them ever get to keep.

Mikhail rose to go. He had his own house to reach before dark, the ordinary kind, with a door that locked and a clock in it that ran out at the ordinary rate. Pushkin watched him take the path down toward the mortal end of the forest, where the light changes faster and the seasons actually cost the ones walking through them something.

— fin —

Skazki of Doomerica VI

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Musical Interlude: Ironic, given how much regretting Lindskyi actually did. “Non, je ne regrette rien” Édith Piaf “Non, je ne regrette rien”

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