If we let these kids have their way, soon there will not be danger anywhere. They will be able to go to school in the morning and feel confident that they will be able to come home in the evening. This is a radical thing to ask. I remember no such certainty. It is, therefore, undesirable. These children are weak. I do not want my children to live in a better world than the world that I grew up in, or the one we live in now. That would be to admit that things have progressed, and I do not admit that.
That is what conservatism means to me: the ability to pass the dangers and privations of my life on to the generation that will come after. The hope that their lives will be, if not actively worse than mine, then certainly no better. The idea that I suffered not because there were no better choices but because the suffering was inherently good.
If anyone were to think differently, that would be the real tragedy. Children are weak. They are whiners. They deserve my mockery.
If I were forced to spend a single day in which I did not insult youth, that would be the real tragedy. If I had to let any argument I disagreed with go unanswered, because attacking a child would be ghoulish—that would be letting them win.
I am sick of these children and their demands for safe spaces. Safe spaces! I refuse to modify my argument in any way to reflect the fact that what they are asking to be kept safe from is not words but bullets. I refuse to be silent even for a moment.
When I was young, children were seen but not heard. If children suddenly started to be heard, that would be the greatest tragedy of all.
March 29, 2018
This Magic Is Too Strong to Stop
IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT it was to begin with. A wallet. A pipe. A cellphone. It makes no difference. The phenomenon remains the same every time.
In the morning, it is very clearly a cellphone. Anyone who looks at it can see it.
In the afternoon, it is still very clearly a cellphone. It sends texts. It makes calls. Its screen lights up.
But in the evening, the transformation occurs. A police officer sees the cellphone, sees that the hand holding it belongs to a black man, and suddenly, quite without warning, it becomes a gun.
This keeps happening.
Suppose we close all the gun shows. Suppose we close all the loopholes. Suppose we take guns off the shelves at sporting goods stores. It will not matter, because of this mysterious phenomenon (observed mostly by police officers in the moments before an “officer-involved shooting”) where a completely innocuous object becomes, for a moment or two, a gun. It can even be a child who picks it up.
It cannot be that police officers do not know what guns look like. They seem perfectly capable of wielding them themselves. It is not that they do not know what cellphones look like. It can only be magic, and the magic does not change.
On April 4, it was a metal pipe. The man who held it was named Saheed Vassell. He was the father of a teenage son. It scarcely took twenty-seven seconds for officers to see the pipe transform into a gun. By the time he was dead, it had already changed back.
Later, when officers are called on to justify their actions in these deaths, what matters is not whether their fear was reasonable, but whether the fear was real. And what is more frightening than impossible sorcery? Fear brings a magic all its own, by which cellphones become guns and people “bulk up” to run through bullets. It transforms teenagers into Hulk Hogan, into demons. You cannot say for certain what object will mutate next. It could be a Bible. It could be a hand in a pocket. With a fear so immense, you are right to act no matter how harmless the target may seem—whether it is a cellphone, or a pipe, or a father, or a child.
That is what makes these deaths justified: that moment of fear, that transforms something ordinary—a father, an iPhone—and makes it deadly. If these things could not be, if there were no fearful magic involved, these deaths would be utterly senseless.
No, it certainly cannot be that it is not happening at all.
So it is clear we can never solve the gun epidemic in this country. It is not because we cannot pass the laws. It is because there is sorcery happening, and until we stop this sorcery, there can be no progress.
April 5, 2018
How to Sleep at Night When Families Are Being Separated at the Border
THE TRICK IS FORGETTING THAT they are children.
If you remember that they are children, you will not be able to go on with any of this. If you remember when you were a child, and frightened, and everything seemed impossibly big and loud and sharp and hard except a certain pair of familiar arms, this will have to stop.
The trick is forgetting that there is such a word as “child.” To remember words like “bad hombre” and “thug” instead. You do not have to say “animals,” if you do not want to. There are other ways. “To assume that just because of someone’s age or gender or whatever that they don’t pose a threat would be wrong,” Sean Spicer bumbled last year.
“Deterrent” is a good word, too. “Zero-tolerance” is even better. And no one likes the idea of a “human shield.”
The trick is to wrap this up in words so tightly that you cannot see the child inside.
The trick is to reassure yourself that this is what they deserve, that what makes you different, that what makes your children children and not threats or thugs is something within your control. That the fact that you have nothing to run from is because of your particular virtue. (“You’re a parent. Don’t you have any empathy? Come on, Sarah, you’re a parent!” Brian Karem tried during the White House press briefing last Thursday. “Brian, God, settle down. . . . I know you want to get some more TV time, but that’s not what this is about.”)
The trick is to remind yourself that this could be worse. That some of them are, of course, not in cages. (This is a fact of which Breitbart.com is quite proud. They are not all in cages.) When they are literally torn from their mothers’ breasts, which you thought happened only in the careless metaphors of people losing online arguments, they are not also smeared with soot like Dickensian orphans and given coarse rags to wear, at least not on the footage released to media. They are orphans, sure, but there is nothing Dickensian about them.
The trick is not to admit that this is happening. The trick is not to see pictures of it, except the footage the Department of Health and Human Services provides that barely shows any children at all, mostly long shots of murals (a poster of the Justice League; a lingering shot of a seasick-looking Superman, smiling miserably down from a wall) with the occasional glimpse of children that does not show any of the running and screaming and attempting suicide.
None of this requires magic that has never been performed before. We were adept at it for centuries. If we squinted just right, it was possible to look and see not a child but a commodity (“For Sale . . . A Girl, Eleven years old, used to the care of children. A Boy, Ten years old”), or a threat that needed to be locked behind barbed wire (“The whole Japanese population is properly under suspicion as to its loyalties. . . . [T]hey need to be restrained for the safety of California and the United States”).
We are still adept at it when it is convenient. When the alternative would be to admit that we have put a bullet into a child, it is amazing how the child transforms into a man and the toy in his hand mutates into a dangerous weapon. It is only true that we have never done this, that this is not what we do, if you forget that they were children, too, before.
But these are children, now, and they have not been here very long, and they are still learning where everything is. And they are still at an age where something can be unthinkable because there has simply not been enough time to think it yet, where a thing that has only happened for a year can be a thing that has happened for as long as you can remember.
Time is different when you are a child. Every day stretches into forever. New worlds can be invented and discarded in the course of a single afternoon. And America can be a place that has always done a thing or America can be a place that has never done a thing except in stori
es or in nightmares.
If we stop this now, right now, this instant, after a year or two or three there will be children who know that America would never do such a thing. And then we must keep not doing it. We must stop this until they are not children any longer, and then never do it again.
The trick is not forgetting they are children. The trick is never forgetting again.
June 18, 2018
Play the “Woman Card” and Reap These Rewards
Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’ d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card.
—TRUMP, AFTER WINNING FIVE PRIMARIES
AH YES, THE WOMAN CARD.
I have been carrying one of these for years, proudly.
It is great. It entitles you to a sizable discount on your earnings everywhere you go (average 21 percent, but can be anywhere from 9 percent to 37 percent, depending on what study you’re reading and what edition of the Woman Card you have). If you shop with the Woman Card at the grocery, you will get to pay 11 percent more for all the same products as men, but now they are pink.
It’s about more than discounts, though.
Hook up the Woman Card to your TV and you will get a barrage of commercials telling you that you did something wrong with your face and must buy ointment immediately so as not to become a Hideous Crone. Also, you are now expected to spend your whole life removing hair from your body, except for the areas of your body where your hair must be long and luxurious. (Do not get these two areas confused!)
The great news is that if you use your Woman Card to hurt other women, you get access to a special place in hell.
Take the Woman Card on the subway with you, put your headphones in, and you are guaranteed a free, lengthy, one-on-one conversation or lecture from a man who will not leave you alone unless you also remembered to bring your I Have a Boyfriend Card (they accept no substitutes).
Show the Woman Card to your health-care provider and you will enjoy new limits on your reproductive rights, depending on what the legislators of your state have decided is wise. Get ready to have a lot of things about your body explained to you!
The Woman Card is not, itself, a form of birth control (no matter what Todd Akin suggests) but it can prevent you from getting coverage for yours.
Use the Woman Card at the library to get a book with squiggly pastel handwriting on the cover that Gay Talese will not take seriously.
Present the Woman Card to a man you have just met at a party and it is good for one detailed, patronizing explanation of the subject you literally got your PhD in.
Offer it to someone on the red carpet and, instead of any substantive questions about your work, you will get a barrage of inquiries EXCLUSIVELY about what you are wearing.
On the bright side, running for office as a Woman Card–holder is a blast, because it allows people to accuse your female supporters of only liking you because of your gender. Don’t try suggesting the opposite! That doesn’t work.
Show off the Woman Card on your way to work and you will get free comments from total strangers, telling you to smile. Play it in the sciences and you will get to leave the sciences.
Take the Woman Card anywhere and you will instantly be surrounded by men who feel entitled to your time. Also, to your space. Do not take up too much space; the Woman Card does not cover that. It also does not cover female protagonists or not being harassed online. You are on your own for those. The Woman Card doesn’t even entitle you to shorter lines in the restroom. Frankly, as fun as it is to be a member of the exclusive club, and as much as I enjoy the occasional door-holding, I’m not even sure I want to re-up this year.
But it’s not all fun discounts and free experiences!
The Woman Card entitles you to constant scrutiny and judgment from all corners at all times, whether you asked for it or not. Try talking! Or rather, don’t.
You can also use it in fun card games, including but not limited to Go Fish (what your boss says when you ask for a raise), Can You Have It All? (fundamentally identical to War but you can’t win), Sorry! (compete to see who can say this the most in the course of a single meeting), Don’t Wake Daddy (mom has to do all the child-rearing by default), and Five-Card Slut Poker (for men, this is called Five-Card Stud, but this is the double-standard edition).
Unlike Man Cards, Woman Cards do not increase in value as they age. In fact, they depreciate. Do not collect Woman Cards. Even in mint condition, they are worthless.
April 27, 2016
That Five-Year-Old Refugee Has Diabolical Plans
That’s why we slow it down and make sure that if they are a five year old that maybe they’re with their parents and they don’t pose a threat. . . . To assume that just because of someone’s age or gender or whatever that they don’t pose a threat would be wrong.
—PRESS SECRETARY SEAN SPICER, WHEN ASKED ABOUT THE FIVE-YEAR-OLD IR ANIAN BOY WHO WAS DETAINED UNDER PRESIDENT TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER ON REFUGEES
SEAN SPICER IS QUITE RIGHT to be concerned. This five-year-old boy waiting at the airport certainly has a diabolical plan. All five-year-old children do.
When the five-year-old comes to this country, he will begin his hostile takeover almost immediately. He is going to touch everything in the house and his hands will be sticky for some undefinable reason and nothing in the house will ever feel entirely not sticky ever again.
He will sow disinformation. He will run up and down the aisle of the airplane creating chaos and making fake plane noises with his mouth, even though he is clearly not a plane. He will say the floor is lava. He will say he is a dinosaur. He will say he is Batman. He will say he is a doctor who can vaccinate you against cooties. All of these will be lies.
He will commit sabotage. He will knock down his block towers with a thunderous crash when you are on the telephone. He will spill his Legos on the carpet for you to walk across barefoot in the middle of the night and make you blaspheme God.
But he will not stop there. He will tell interminable stories. He will draw horrible propaganda art where your head is too big and both your arms are sticks and your mouth is a horrible pool full of yellow boulder teeth.
He has plans to turn his bed into a spaceship without registering first with NASA. He has plans to invite friends over from school and hold them hostage behind the couch with his whole army of stuffed hippos.
He has plans to carry his sinister associate Bear Bear with him everywhere, to bed and to the dinner table, and even to school, and we know how Betsy DeVos feels about bears in schools. Besides, Bear Bear is a foreign operative with a missing eye and almost none of his original fur, always silent, and his motives cannot be adequately discerned.
He has plans to let go of your hand and run off giggling because he thinks the world is all like him on the inside and there is no one who does not understand that he means no harm—how could they?—and he wants to play.
Oh yes, the five-year-old boy has diabolical plans. Look at him, standing in the airport. He is not even four feet high, but his mind is whirling with plans: to go to a strange new school and learn a strange new language and make strange new friends and teach them to draw all over the walls with crayon. And at recess, he may not share. He has plans to sit up past bedtime in a house where the sound of bombs falling does not keep him awake. He has plans to commit awful acts of sabotage like flushing strange things down the toilet, because here there is a toilet to flush. He has plans to grow up to become the most terrifying thing in the world: an American.
And if you turn him away—you will be very lucky if he does not have other plans.
January 30, 2017
I Will Not Take My Husband’s Name
I WILL NOT TAKE my husband’s name. He uses it for work. It would be cruel to leave him without a name, simply because we have told the world that we are in love.
It would be sad to see him drift listlessly through cocktail parties with an empty name tag. “I’m Dave,” someone would
say to him, “I work in synergies,” and he would pause, and blink, and have no answer. His business cards would be a job description and a void of white space. He would, I suppose, save money on monogrammed towels, as every towel would be, for him, a monogrammed towel, but equally no towel would be a monogrammed towel.
Suppose we were to become separated in a crowd. If I had taken his name, I would have nothing to call. I would have to stand in the middle of the crowd and scream and scream, and perhaps he would not even turn his head. To take his name would be, for calling purposes, functionally to transform him into a cat.
I will not take his name. I think it looks good on him. I am used to it. This precise arrangement of letters and syllables suits him, and without it, how would I send him emails?
I will take neither his last name nor his first name. I contemplated perhaps the last name. He could get by without one, after all. Cher does. So does Bruce (in Jersey, anyway), although it might be difficult on credit cards.
I will not take my husband’s name. It would make him impossible to enter as a contact in my phone; ten digits with no words attached.
I will not take my husband’s name. How could we sing “Happy Birthday” to him? To start and then fall silent at the climax would depress the other patrons in restaurants.
I will not take my husband’s name. Nor will I take his face nor his reflection nor his shadow (though I did consider, for a moment, taking his shadow). And I will not take his voice; I have no shell in which to store it.
Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why Page 11
