Personal Recollections of the War on Terror (by a member of the State Department)

As a career civil servant I always try to keep partisanship out of my analysis -- even in a private and anonymous memoir of this sort. However, I am sure it is safe to declare as a certain truth, across the three administrations in which I have served, that the events of 9/11 fundamentally reshaped the politics of our globe.

This is not to say that there had not been warning signs earlier. Small scale attempted bombings -- as well, of course, as the far more serious and costly attacks that our allies the United Kingdom had endured, long before the violence reached our shores.

At the time, though, none of us appreciated the magnitude of the new threat facing our shared civilization. The Cold War had been won. Our nation enjoyed unrivaled supremacy of military and economic power, and our values of democracy, prosperity, and industriousness -- the heritage of those immortal theses that had once been nailed to the door of a cathedral in Wittenberg -- appeared to be triumphant.

Akbar Ahmed's "The Thistle and the Drone" (2013): A Review

Akbar Ahmed's The Thistle and the Drone: How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam is a potentially life-transforming book. It is a book so instantly persuasive and recognizably honest that its findings should be described as obvious -- yet its ideas have never been allowed a foot in the door of post-9/11 U.S. policymaking, and they took me and I expect many others wholly by surprise. It is a book whose insights are reached almost entirely by synthesizing information many of us already half-knew, or quarter-remembered; yet they are insights that -- taken together -- provide a comprehensive reinterpretation not only of the "War on Terror" -- but of modern global history as a whole.

And it is a book, finally, whose conclusions -- though published five years ago now -- have only been borne out since.

Novels of Renunciation

The Mill on the Floss may be the perfect novel. Not my favorite novel. Not the best novel. But the novel that does most classically and quintessentially that which novels -- of all forms of literature -- are best at doing. After all, other kinds of books - ones that aren't novels -- can tell you what to do. They can explain why and how. But novels are the most equipped to accompany you with sympathy when you discover how very little aid this purely preceptial morality is when faced with actual adult human life, with all its passions and incompatible values.

Knowledge v. Acquisition

Human beings are distinctly averse to acknowledging that anyone else might ever (a) know anything that they don't know, or (b) be more skilled at any given cognitive task than they are; thus, the devices for avoiding any such acknowledgement have always been many and ingenious. One of the classic maneuvers is to bite the bullet -- to say, in effect, that yes, someone else might "know" something, but that there is an all-important difference between "knowing" something and really knowing it, you know?

A friend and I were using this tactic the other day on a talk we heard that appeared to contain information that was new to us. This caused a momentary ripple in our self-satisfaction. It was quickly calmed, however, once we discovered that most of the information in the talk had been lifted "straight from Wikipedia." Phew! We breathed a sigh of relief. That person didn't really know it, they were just pulling from an outside source.

Hemingway again...

Having completed Green Hills of Africa, I now feel I have well earned another hiatus from Hemingway. At it couldn't come too soon. I am officially at a surfeit. Hemingway's safari book is objectionable, it turns out, in all the ways one might anticipate -- and in some unexpected ones too. There is the anti-Black racism typical of the would-be gentlemen hunter in Africa; the off-hand demeaning of the humanity of the African trackers who make his visit possible and who seem to be the only ones showcasing any real skill (skinning, carving, tanning, etc., while Papa just points and shoots); the mad rage every time a servant mildly inconveniences him in his pursuit (with much -- thankfully un-enacted -- fantasizing about shooting "bastards" who "run their mouths" and corporal punishment).

The Sun Also Rises

These past few weeks -- prodded by that aforementioned and all-too-true warning I found in Florence King (about would-be clever people who only ever read obscure books and thereby end up as ignorant of cultural touchstones as the unlettered) -- I have been making somewhat of an effort (probably a short-lived one) to finally "get around" to some indisputably famous novels that never in the past aroused much interest in me. The works of Hemingway have long been in this category.

And while I thought I might make an approach to this immovable mountain of literary boredom by starting with The Torrents of Spring -- Papa's 90-page parody of Sherwood Anderson that is not really as droll as it ought to be (though it's funny in places) -- I realized afterward that this is just another version of the Florence King syndrome -- simply a means of sucking the nectar of obscurity from even such an overgrown husk as Hemingway. I had to face my fears head-on, I decided. Like a matador. I opened The Sun Also Rises. 

Errata and Marginalia 004: Fitzgerald

Using the following edition: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2005). Yes that greatest of all dropped article books. For you see, the title is not in fact "The Beautiful and the Damned," as I had assumed all through my youth -- perhaps on analogy to The Naked and the Dead, or, less creditably, The Young and the Restless -- but rather the Beautiful and Damned, since we are not contrasting two different populations here, as in the sheep and the goats, but rather naming two qualities possessed by our protagonists and their milieu.

In any case, it is an astonishingly cruel, funny, moving, compelling, and evil sort of book, with perhaps the most ice-cold finish I've ever encountered in literature. It is the perfect novel to read while in the twilight of one's twenties (as is yours truly) -- during that brief window of life when it seems a tragedy of romantic proportions to be a "man of thirty-three," still more so to be one who looks like he might be "a man of forty" (horrors!), like our protagonist, and when one seems -- despite all one's half-hearted and quickly abandoned efforts, to always be living just about at the limit of one's income.

Sessions & Richard III

In Shakespeare's Richard III, he has given us a kind of universal syntax of tyranny -- a hidden grammar of villainy, as it assumes its merely superficially different forms in various places and climes. As such, it seems only reasonable that some modern director ought hastily to stage that drama with 21st century costuming, if they haven't done so already, and cast our current governing regime in its chief roles.

Rumination and Avoidance

Amidst this season of heavy losses, I hope I will be forgiven for pausing to mourn one rather more trivial one. At the end of this month, the subscription service Filmstruck will be shutting down forever. Have you heard of it? A kind of golden pass to cinematic pretension, it was a streaming service that exclusively specialized in art house, international, documentary, and classic films -- plus the entirety of the Criterion Collection for good measure.... It had all the makings, in short, of an idea too beautiful for this world.

Apart from the invaluable service this service did in giving me occasional fresh infusions of intellectual vanity of an evening -- as well as a plenteous supply of however many old noirs and Japanese ghost movies -- it was also quite possibly the only reason I was ever exposed to the work of some of the most interesting of contemporary directors. For this I am eternally grateful.

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915)

A justly famous novel can slumber on one's shelves for an astonishingly long time without arousing the slightest interest. Indeed, it can arouse all the less interest for being so famous. There is a wonderfully accurate passage I encountered recently in Florence King, in which she describes a self-defeating trap in which precocious literary youngsters tend to ensnare themselves. Intent upon proving themselves possessed of knowledge undreamt-of by their surroundings -- whatever those may be -- young people desperate to develop a reputation for book learning will avoid all the novels anyone has ever heard of, heading straight for the lesser known works in the canons of the great, or the best-known in the oeuvre of the minor. They "skip Jane Eyre and read The Professor," as King puts it.

And in the very effort to evade knowledge possessed by everyone else, they deprive themselves of the knowledge that would have impressed upon others the idea that they were book-smart. The poison chalice of ignorance, which they were so desperate should pass from them, ends up being the very one from which they drink.

Melancholy Among the Cluster Flies

This summer, in an effort to save myself the expense, time, and worry, I tried to see if I could wait out the entire season without ever fixing the air conditioner in my new living space, which had been busted ever since I moved in. One of the many glorious benefits of living alone is that you can try out experiments of this sort that would be intolerable to any cohabitants -- as well as engage in the kinds of adaptation strategies that might appear odd or unacceptable to any other representatives of human society.

For a good stretch of the summer, therefore, I slept in the basement, where it was slightly cooler. (The only downside to this was my lack of blinds in the lower level -- the windows of which are about chest-level with passers-by outside -- which made for some awkward moments of near-eye contact in the morning.) For even longer, I kept all the windows open. And I nearly made it through the whole accursed three months, I tell you -- helped along by the fact that I was traveling for a good portion of it.

NAFTA, Enclosures, and the Essence of Development

Now that NAFTA is being renegotiated -- or at least, rechristened -- in part by a U.S. president who has threatened to build a wall to keep out some of that agreement's multitudinous victims (and who is threatening to upset these negotiations if Mexico does not violate international law by denying access to Central American asylum seekers at its southern border) --  this is perhaps the season to look back and remember the destruction that NAFTA has sowed in Mexico over the last two decades -- how it is linked to the very mass migration that Trump is trying to stymie -- and how this relates in turn to the broader global patterns of dispossession that lie at the heart of neoliberal capitalism.

The effects of NAFTA on U.S. manufacturing have been generally, if vaguely, acknowledged in this country -- even by the aforementioned mercurially "populist" occupant of the oval office (who, as has been observed, has said a great many things). Far less understood in this country is its more ruinous impact on Mexican agriculture.

Errata and Marginalia 003: Florence King

From the first printed lines on of Florence King's Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, I knew I was in the presence of a kindred spirit. Not, exactly, that we have a great deal in common. She considered herself to be -- or, at least, by the mercenary divisions of print publications, got categorized as -- some sort of conservative. More precisely, as she puts it, "to the right of Baby Doc." The most precise sense in which this is so, however, is at times difficult to pinpoint, as Phyllis Schlafly, Fundamentalist Christians, and the "God 'n' Country Club" all come in for a skewering at her hands -- backed up, as in all the best wit, by a wholly earnest loathing.

Ultimately, if someone has found a way to be a 1980s right-winger while also being a sexually non-conforming bisexual despiser of family values and children, a one-time writer of pornographic "historical" bodice-rippers set in fifth century Christendom, a prophet of the "spinster" lifestyle (read: confirmed bachelorette), and a self-declared "monarchist," you know you are in the company of a sufficiently dedicated eccentric that you can forgive any and all faults -- indeed, can celebrate the faults as essential to the virtues.

Errata and Marginalia 002: Athill

*See below for explanation of this series*

All my life, I have genuinely and unforcedly enjoyed no writers so much as those who happen to be sarcastic, coldly ironical, bleakly sardonic British people. So much so that I am occasionally seized with panic at the thought that I may one day run out of them. After all, how many can there have been, in recorded history?

I take some comfort in the fact that, despite my stated preference, I have not yet chipped the merest shaving from the mordant iceberg that is Ivy Compton-Burnett. I seem, by a kind of subconscious prompting, to be saving her for later. When I know I will need it. Irony is a dish best served cold.

Errata and Marginalia 001: Hoban

I started doing these over at a different short-lived blog of mine, but since I might as well accept the fact by this point that Six Foot Turkey is the only authorial home for me -- the final and comprehensive repository of my personality -- I think I'll move the series here, as well as add the latest entry. So, here it is, entry one:

***

Phoebe Hoban’s Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (London: Quartet Books, 2015 paperback ed., 2008 second ed., 1998 original): Great, great book. In need of a final proofreader. I offer my services free of charge.

Black Water (1992) by Joyce Carol Oates: A Review

Or, "Edward Kennedy Saved from Drowning"

--

Gore Vidal once declared, in a famous bit of nastiness, that the "three saddest words in the English language" are "Joyce Carol Oates." And for all the Senator's grandson could have some real sad-sack moments himself, there is something witheringly apt in the put-down. The underlying idea of Black Water -- Oates' 1992 novella about the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 involving Senator Ted Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne (and the only Oates novel I have thus far in life attempted) -- does seem faintly philistine. Romans à clef about well-known political scandals are not likely to have much of a shelf-life (though they say some of Vidal's writings, in fairness, may not have aged much better).

David Foster Wallace's Math Book, Part I

What would possess me, of all people, to read a book about math, of all things -- even one written by David Foster Wallace? I will leave you suspended over the cliff-face of this question, while I provide some exposition to our thrilling tale. Let me reconstruct the tortured chain of madness that led me to this point.

You may recall, dear readers, that I suffered this past spring and summer from an eruption of an old malady -- my penchant for daydreaming up alternative futures for myself -- oftentimes, ones so alien to my present that they would constitute the creation of whole new personhoods, whole new lives -- even in the midst of living my own. It is the sort of habit that led me in college, every few months, to declare an increasingly improbable major. Archaeology, linguistics, premed...

Damage (1991) by Josephine Hart: A Review

Josephine Hart's Damage (New York: Open Road, 1991) is a novel of astonishing emotional power. Short enough to be read in a single day's confinement to an airplane traveling from Boston to Alaska (the circumstances in which I happened to consume it), it also lends itself well to these cramped conditions-- one's trapped existence on the plane making one feel all the more keenly the doomed claustrophobia of the protagonist, imprisoned by his own deceptions.

In outline an account of a politician who destroys his family and career through an affair with his son's fiancée, this is really not a story about public scandal, but of private disgrace. The fact that the main character happens to be a Tory MP is perhaps conditioned less by any essential role this plays in the novel's plot than the author's own connections to high Conservative circles.

Where is all the political art?

Where is the political art for our times -- art that engages the public and tries to ignite some kind of indignation about our plight? The question disturbs me and seems to grow more urgent. Our age does not lack for horrors. The family separation policy. The "Muslim Ban." The U.S. government's tactical and financial support for a war that is tearing apart a desperately impoverished country -- Yemen -- generating the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, the fastest-growing outbreak of cholera, famine, desperation, violent death from bombs and white phosphorus dropped from above. One would think that such atrocities would birth from themselves some kind of creative response -- that so much unjust suffering can't just pass over the human spirit without producing a ripple of pain that demands sublimation. Yet we are silent.

Cold Reading

William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley (1946) is a book not easily forgotten. Like the horoscope-writer or the cold reader, it leaves you convinced that its words could have been intended for you and you alone. Yes! you think. I too am the sort of obsessive atheist and skeptic for whom the supernatural is always a live and terrifying possibility, and therefore has to be refuted afresh each day -- preferably with instances of spiritualist chicanery, of which this novel is full. I too have peered into pits of nihilism ("the mind has mountains, cliffs of fall" as Hopkins wrote). I also love dogs. Maybe I've never worked in a carnival or suffered from alcoholism, but -- as with the horoscope -- the mind finds it easy to brush aside those parts that don't apply and fasten onto those that do.

And so the book is mesmerizing, but it's more than that. It's a pulp art masterpiece, a handbook for the aspiring mentalist, and one of the best studies of the mind of the con artist ever penned -- a real Ten-in-One, folks.

Cross-postings

Check out my two recent book reviews on the American Academy of Religion's Reading Religion website. You will note that both books furnished me with an opportunity to harp on long-standing obsessions:

Review of Race Mathews' Of Labour and Liberty: Distributism in Victoria, 1891-1966

Review of Hugh Urban's Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement

Industrial Democracy

One of the mighty few -- oh, so very few... -- encouraging things to emerge from American politics this past year was surely the introduction of Elizabeth Warren's "Accountable Capitalism Act." Not because it is a flawless proposal. Still less because it is likely to go anywhere as legislation any time soon -- as we all realize it won't. But simply because it is the first flickering I've seen -- maybe in my whole lifetime -- to indicate that some U.S. politicians of any stripe have recognized that the moral problem with capitalism goes deeper than anything that can be fixed purely with more social spending -- but is fundamentally one of a deficit of democracy.

It is one of the first signs that someone in office realizes that the end goal of human justice is not for people to receive a variety of means-tested public benefits that could always be defunded after the next election, but to exercise some real and meaningful control over their own lives and destinies.

This makes it far more interesting than the Sanders campaign ever was. Warren's proposal is simply an inching, an inkling, a nudging toward democracy as a norm of economic -- as well as political -- life.

Various poems, some unfinished, some not really poems

i.

Think not for an instant, child
I ever gave anything up

Two times at least
I told them I’d say yes
If they ever offered me
A seat among
humanity

Do you imagine I’d have said no
If they had ever
Ever pulled out a chair for me?

Restlessness

I sat there poised over the keyboard -- even after writing that Biswas post. Even after proclaiming to myself all that sound, reasonable advice -- there I still sat, contemplating the revocable (but still difficult to undo) plunge.

Spite of everything, that is to say, my finger was still inches away from registering for courses in, yes, the premed post-bacc program.

Why on Earth would I do so? What strange new moral malady was this, to want suddenly -- in my twenty-eighth year -- to take another crack at all the labs and problem sets and stoichiometry that I had only just narrowly escaped in the course of my formal education? No sooner -- hardly -- had I emerged spluttering from the burning lake of such sulphuric acids in my high school years, than I was preparing to plunge into them again?

Families and Homes

In Imre Kertész' eery, mordant novel of the Holocaust Fatelessness, the main character Georg in one scene is working one day in the labor camps when he accidentally cuts his finger. Looking up at the guard and wiping away the blood, he laughs, believing for an instant that they might share between them a chuckle at something plain and human. Instead, he is met with a scowl. Which sets Georg thinking about the situation in which he finds himself:

Refugee Variations

After Ernst Barlach's The Refugee (1920)

(sort of)

Beetlejuice

Growing up as a child in our obsessively self-referential late 20th century culture, I was generally exposed to the ironical mimesis of things long before I knew about the things themselves. And because the things we know first will always be more true for us, my sense of reality while navigating much of pop culture was inverted. I knew about Jellystone National Park, where many a pic-a-nic basket has been filched, long before I knew that a real entity in our world had so nearly stolen the name. I knew about the singer Madonna long before I realized that there was a more famous person referred to by this title. And I knew about the cartoon Beetlejuice, long before I knew that it had been based on a popular 1988 Hollywood movie directed by Tim Burton, longer still before I knew that there was a star in the night's sky called "Betelgeuse."

A Crisis for Mr. Biswas

If Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh was the great book of my -- and everyone else's -- 25th year, then V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas is just the book to read three years afterward. If the happy ending of the first sees our hero Ernest safely ensconced in a state of delicious autonomy, having attained self-sufficiency away from his family of origin -- the goal of the student stage of life -- then the second tells us what comes immediately after -- the difficulties and angst of the householder stage (and, as if by design, I noticed that the IKEA in Massachusetts -- a place where every person who is transitioning from one phase of life to another will likely find themselves -- is using copies of the Swedish translation of the book as shelf decoration in its model showrooms). It reveals that the quest for autonomy is not in fact the final struggle. Rather, once obtained, it contains the seeds of its own crises and self-doubts.

If The Way of All Flesh is the great epic of young adulthood, then, Biswas is a tale for those experiencing the first intimations of middle age.

Reading Poetry

As a teenager and college student, fear of cultural inadequacy was a powerful motivator for me, and I suspect it was a major factor in my initial adoption of certain intellectual habits that have since become constant features of my life. One of these is reading poetry, which I first began to do self-consciously, and maniacally, some time in late high school.

As with many of the obsessions we decide upon at that age, I at first -- and for a long time -- derived no intrinsic joy from it. A vast portion of the poetry I consumed meant nothing at all to me. Nor could I figure out why exactly it seemed to mean something to other people -- I just knew that it did, and that it would be a shameful sign of inferiority if I confessed that I did not have the same reactions. The advice of the critics, who claimed to find mysterious resonances in sounds and meters, rather than what was actually being said, was of no use. I never could hear whatever it was they were talking about -- and for the most part I still can't.

Three Poems

Second fig

I was burning pretty brightly there

Like a year would last a night

What I fear, before it guttered,

Is that no one saw the light

Anpanman

As previously mentioned, my sister is a fanatical devotee of the K-pop group "BTS." (Apparently the rest of the world is too, unbeknownst to me, since I learned today that there is a store in the middle of Times Square -- the most coveted retail space on planet Earth -- that is devoted solely to selling -- wait for it -- not even BTS merchandise, but merchandise about a group of fictional stuffed critters who are indirectly associated with BTS.)

As a result, these seven Korean men have become a part of all of our lives, at least in my family. Not an album is "dropped" that I will not eventually become acquainted with its contents.

Experience

After spending four years of college at an institution that teasingly encouraged me in my belief that life is a purely theoretical matter, I have been confronted at every turn since by the alternative dogma -- the cult of personal experience.

As soon as I came to divinity school, I was told that I actually would be learning nothing important in the classroom (a shame, since this was the only part I was looking forward to) -- and that the only real lessons would come from the aspects of ministerial training I most dreaded -- the ones that were "hands on." When I first started writing sermons, likewise, the first feedback I received was that they would be more interesting "if they came less from things you read and more from your life experience."

Purity

I will not be the first to point out the eery similarities between the militarization of the U.S. southern border and that of Israel's various boundaries -- notably Trump himself made a similar point, though he of course intended something very different by it. However, in a week that began with Israeli troops firing live rounds on demonstrators in Gaza and killing fourteen people (who were either wholly defenseless or armed at the very most with rocks and implements that posed no serious threat to the heavily equipped IDF) --and which concluded with Trump ordering the National Guard to patrol the nation's boundary with Mexico-- the parallels are particularly hard to miss.

Um...

After Robert Motherwell's Elegies for the Spanish Republic

So... I should explain -- how the above work of aesthetic genius, that is, came to be on my living room floor.

Due to a recent change of residence, as you know, I have had to spend an unusual percentage of my time the last few months on tasks that I find intrinsically boring. Like cleaning. Like moving. And like decorating.

In order to feel that my life still had meaning and volition, I decided that -- to the extent I could not absolutely avoid any of these activities -- I would at least insist upon doing them in a way that fed my core underlying obsessions.

When it came to unpacking or swiffering the floor, this was relatively easy to do -- one only had to put on a podcast or audiobook to feel that one was at least not squandering the youthful plasticity of one's brain by failing to spend a few waking hours dribbling new pieces of information into it.

Norman Mailer's "Harlot's Ghost" (1991): A Review

Imagine if you will a novel that's 1,300 pages long, with a killer set-up over the first hundred pages that makes you desperately long to hear the conclusion -- so much so that you are willing to brave all 1,200 pages that remain in order to reach it. Imagine next that this novel -- after all that time -- ends with the words "To be continued..." And imagine, finally, that you discover -- having gotten this far-- that in fact it never was continued. That the promised sequel was never written, and the author is now dead, so it never will be.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Harlot's Ghost, by reputedly great American novelist Norman Mailer. The novel does in fact weigh in at 1,300 pages, and ends in just this way. Brother. There is no excuse for this book, or for my having spent so many stretches of the last year and a half, off and on, gradually making my way through it.

Every Single Use of the Phrase "Open Up" in this Season of the Bachelor

A couple years ago, a friend coaxed another friend and me into watching The Bachelorette. “It’s horrible,” she said. “But that’s the point.” As the three of us watched (this was Jo Jo’s season) we began to notice that there were certain phrases that were used time and again-- by nearly every contestant on the show. It was almost as if they had been handed a manual of clichés they would all be expected to memorize and repeat for the camera.

My friend pointed out that whenever anyone did something the other contestants disapproved of, it was agreed that he was “not here for the right reasons.” Everyone was forever waiting to see whether they might have any “chemistry" with the Bachelorette. There were stock compliments, as well as stock put-downs.

Random Literary References to the U of C and UUism

There are a handful of human institutions with which I have such a strong sense of personal identification that I seem to have an inner homing mechanism, the sole purpose of which is to seek out literary references to them. The University of Chicago is one. Unitarian Universalism is another. Whenever so much as a hint of a mention of either appears in something I am reading, it is as if the words were pre-highlighted, leaping off the page and demanding my attention. (It adds a certain pique too that the first word of each is so similar to start with -- leading to that microsecond's thrill in which my brain has processed the familiar and beloved shape of the word: Uni... but I haven't yet figured out which one it is. Unitarian? University? When, to my horror, it turns out to be something like, say, the University of Connecticut, the disappointment is keen).

The Ernie Advantage

... or, "Bert Like Me."

--

On a work trip to Washington, D.C. recently, I had one off night with nothing much to do, so I gratefully curled up in my hotel bed with a biography of the Haitian-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, written by Phoebe Hoban, and dug in. Hoban, you may recall, is the author of an aforementioned biography of Lucian Freud -- a similarly catastrophic individual who must have been a terror to know, but is a delight to read about.

Basquiat, like Freud the Younger, was one to rather burn his candle at both ends -- to such an extent in his case, however, that he tragically passed away from a heroin overdose at age 27 -- all-but-self-consciously modeling himself in so doing on Charlie Parker and other creative titans who guttered early, but who "gave" while they lasted "a lovely light." (Robert Hughes deemed him the Thomas Chatterton of the 80s art world -- albeit a comparison he did not intend flatteringly.)

The Same Boat

At some point in the past year, I decided that it was time for me to put apartment living behind me, and try to start owning a house. I don’t know why it came over me. It had something to do with approaching my most recent birthday, and realizing that I was now indisputably in my “late twenties.” Not only, to my horror, was I not nineteen any more, I wasn’t twenty-five any more either, or even twenty-seven. Then there was the fact that such a good percentage of my close friends seemed to be getting married or finding long-term partners this year. I felt the need for some equally indisputable outward signifier that I, too, was able to transition into the world of adulthood and responsibility.

Thinking for Oneself

I seem to be told more and more often these days just to take things on faith. Trust, and understanding will follow. Usually, this injunction is laid because of the supposed incomparable wisdom (on the right) or political/moral purity (on the left) of the source of the truth claim in question. And, as some extension of the inevitable corruption and compromises of adulthood, I find I am more and more tempted to follow this advice.

It's partly the despair-inducing situation of these last two years of political life. It's been enough to make anyone want to give up thinking for themselves. No sooner had one discovered the need for a unified opposition to Trumpism in all forms, than one found in oneself and others the same orneriness and competitiveness that always stood in the way of unity in the past, undimmed by the years and the present crisis. Perhaps catastrophe does not, after all, bring out the best in us -- or not enough of it at once.