Forgive the voice-to-text historians who hear German whenever President Trump speaks, who see a madman with bad hair, who see the open hands of benevolence toward a master race, who see the closed hands of belligerence toward a specific race. Forgive these self-anointed Murrow Boys who mistake the sight of smoke and the sound of
One bullet can start a war, but no rifle has enough bullets to end a war. To know this truth is to see our troops in Syria, where peace with honor is improbable and the freedom of a just peace is impossible, because we are belated bystanders—we are witnesses after the fact—to a treaty between
In a windowless room whose layout is as familiar to lawyers and judges as it is foreign to American ideals of justice, where judges act like clerks and justice feels as cold as it looks, where the powers of the state belong to a mallet too small to be a murder weapon but strong enough
When Tom Friedman feels the urge to type, when he acts according to type, when he ties his hospital gown and wears his slippers, when he writes PRESS on the back of his paper prescription, when he appears with a wirebound steno pad in one hand and an Esso travel map in the other, when
To see the speck in your brother’s eye, to see your brother as guilty of the highest crimes and the lowest deeds, to see so little and condemn so much, to hate to see your brother make war, to accept war until your brother sees the wrongness of the oldest hatreds, to see yourself as
Bill Weld is as much a constitutional scholar as I am a geneticist. His maddening cry for the execution of President Trump is no better than my non-informed diagnosis of Weld’s case of acute madness: that he has the WASP equivalent of Tay-Sachs disease, minus the covenantal nature of Judaism and the high intelligence of
To see the campus of Williams College is to read the story of America. To see the beauty of brick and gold yield to the banality of steel and concrete is to read a story about the decline and fall of both a college and a country. It is a story about the deconsecration of
Stop the video. Rewind the clip. Watch the steam go from the ears to the head, forming a crown, not of apostolic succession but apocalyptic surrender. Picture, too, a trio of technicians off-camera: engineers in white coveralls—men pacing inside a 1967 Ford Econoline—struggling to grab the toggles on a remote control, while the man in
What politics forbids, politicians foment—namely, absurdity. The absurdity of uniforms. Absurd uniforms born of uniformity of thought, of Blackshirts and Brownshirts, of jodhpurs and jackboots, of green robes and black masks. The absurdity of maniacs writ short and tall, from the exuberance of a little Caesar to the exaltedness of the Führer to the exaggerations
Imagine the body confounding the language of life, while the mind continues to consecrate the Word of God. Imagine the body conflating the words of the Bible, reducing the Five Books of Moses into biological babel. Imagine the body biting itself like a serpent and stinging itself like a viper. Imagine the body as an
