For the Afterlife

    She wanted a crypt like the temple of Dendur,
    an enormous monolith unshakeable as their marriage.

    He favored the granite sarcophagus gaily
    decorated with Victorian swirls and oak leaf cornices.

    She wanted poplars tall and straight—leafy and shameless
    as Italian trees of summer, if sadly deciduous.

    He preferred cypresses, their constancy through the seasons:
    shrubs—yew or arbovite—modest, low to the ground.

    She fancied a stone table with seats for friends to come dine
    al fresco. He said a few high-back benches would do.

    She said as long as they’re comfortable, without Hallmark
    card prayers or one-size-fits-all labels like “Father” and “Mother.”

    When they settled on the white granite love seat carved
    from a single block, its elegantly supportive back to the forest,

    they were told it was impossible to order now
    that the factories making them in China and India were closed.

    Everything in the world was closed. Yet they strolled,
    faces masked, every day, in these grounds, secure

    in their solitude, among the decorated dead,
    the veterans from Gettysburg, the Somme, Normandy and
    Saigon

    and all the wars against measles, flu, whooping cough
    and plague,
    whole families wiped out by one contagion or another resting

    now in the rolling hills and burial mounds, under
    marble markers by now mostly effaced, amid medals
    and flags stabbed

    into the earth to celebrate their valor, here among the
    ancient oaks
    and stalwart pines, clustered in stately groves joined
    each to each by pebbled paths and avenues—daily they walked,
    stopped and even sat, feeling strangely welcome and
    terribly alive.

    Invalid Afternoons

    1.
    Precocious in her dotage, she teeters like a top unravelling,
    now spinning, now faltering, now lunging across
    living room carpets, over

    William Morris tendrils and Bokara medallions, past
    the leather sofa and beyond,
    arriving at the south window.

    She stoops over the hope chest with her watering can,
    drenching the amaryllis, dotting orchids and jade with ice,
    then pruning the cactus blossoms.

    One by one, she pulls off their delicate,
    erotic red heads, leaving
    the sheath for the next flower to occupy, and the next.

    She is not dying, she reminds herself, though today she feels
    a sort of emotional anemia come over her, a thinning
    inside, a rising-up of white corpuscles over red.

    There is shame, she thinks, in yielding
    to this voluptuous ennui, shame
    in failing to school the mind past boredom, past

    the exquisite temptation of absolute emptiness.
    Didn’t her mother tell her a commonplace—
    that she had no inner resources?

    To be complacently bored, she preached, is to be
    an ill-bred donkey:  Solo los burros se aburren,
    the refrain of her childhood. Her mother’s go-to line.

    She plays it now, over and over, and almost laughs
    to think somehow it has to do with her
    after a lifetime of ardor and infatuation.

    2.
    In her nostalgia she thinks of snow and snow days,
    of lazy afternoons with children demanding snow
    men and snow balls and snow angels

    and excursions to the park along the majestic snow-laden
    Avenue of Pines, the ancient trees hanging over
    the picture-perfect American families,

    the snow-packed branches
    now protecting, now threatening.
    Now gone.

    Today the March winds cut through a snowless city, a barren
    light over it all, exposing late-winter detritus, impending
    decline, the house silent, as she detects in her lungs

    a breeze, imagines a multitude of voyages, remembers
    landscapes, a lake—near frozen—a boat, a shoreline, the sound
    of waves breaking inside her chest, an impediment, a voice—

    something from deep inside the rim, something
    unreachable, the waters rolling towards her, rolling,
    her briny cough a harbinger

    of who knows what
    in her future, something illegible, distilled,
    a promise in the unfathomable sea of self, of selves.

    3.
    But life is good, she thinks today, as she hears
    the irrepressible cardinal, newly arrived,
    beseeching his mate, sees

    the neighbor’s calico alert, though the bird is out of reach—
    Stubbornly, he waits for some sudden splendor to fall
    into his lap, his tail twitching.

    The bird is immoderate
    in his casual exultances. She loves him
    immoderately, loves the world

    immoderately for all its violence and decadence. Even
    its boredom is lovable. She wants
    never to leave it. Never.

    4.
    Under the yews the tulips push through the loam. Life
    insisting its way back again. Ötzi, the frozen mummy found
    in the Alps, had thirty varieties of pollen in his stomach,
    some ibex meat and two chunks of wild goat.

    There was evidence of arthritis and over fifty wounds, all
    treated with Copper Age acupuncture, tattoo-style,
    from head to toe.
    When they chipped him out of the glacier he was smiling
    his Neolithic smile: what fleeting happiness
    before the avalanche felled and swallowed him?

    Nine Little Girls 

    Some years ago, deep into a confounding research assignment for which I had been combing through the website of the South Dakota legislature, I stumbled upon the recorded testimony of a woman describing in detail her own rape and torture, and the tortures of her sisters by the same hands. In her account the acts, which allegedly took place in the 1960s and 1970s, continued for several years and had begun when they were all children some fifty years earlier. The discovery of that testimony was a thing that happened to me, an event in my life, in the way realizing for the first time that my parents will grow old and die was an event in my life. The sound of her voice, the stories she told, gripped me, and attached me to a group of people I had never met, to a story that, before that evening, had nothing at all to do with me and my world. 

    We are surrounded, of course, by reports of atrocities of various kinds, and the mass of them often has the unfortunate effect of inuring us to many hells. But on that day I encountered a human voice and, despite our cultural preoccupation with trauma, which should have readied me to understand what I heard, I did not know how to think about what the woman’s voice was saying. In a confrontation not with data points, but with a personal account of extreme cruelty, I was without adequate resources. I recognized the problem of my human unpreparedness. 

    The horrors needed to be studied and reflected upon over time. There were implications that I needed to work out, and understandings that I needed to develop. Framings that had seemed sturdy and fundamental now felt flimsy. I experienced the testimony of those abused women as new knowledge, which ruptured trusted conceptions of justice and duty. It was not obvious to me that justice was possible here, or that this evil could be punished. My strongest sensation was of having been inducted into a darker acquaintance with the world.

    The story stayed with me. What follows is not an attempt at investigative journalism or historical scholarship. I wish only to share what I discovered, in order to give an account of how I tried to find a mental and social context for certain acts, and to offer some reflections about how to think about them. Much of the grisly information relayed here is in the public domain. It turns out that there is a lot that we do not know, and do not comprehend, about the public domain. 

    Geraldine Charbonneau believes that the scars from her abortion must have been there since just before her seventeenth birthday, though for most of the intervening decades she couldn’t remember the procedure that left them, or the rape that she says necessitated it. Like all eight of her sisters (Louise, Francine, Mary, Barbara, Joann, and three others who wish to remain anonymous), and like most victims of childhood sexual assault, she claims that she repressed memories of the abuse that she sustained while a child and a teenager. Louise, Geraldine’s older sister, alleges that she was in third grade when she became the first of her family to be abused by the priests and nuns at St. Paul’s Mission School (now called Marty Indian School), a Catholic school in Marty, South Dakota. The nine sisters were born and raised in Olga, North Dakota into a tribe of the Anishinaabe people known by the federal government as the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, to a strong-willed matriarch, the mother of seventeen children. They were among those Native toddlers whose parents had willingly sent them to Native boarding school in order to secure an education that could supply the skills necessary to thrive in this country. Others across the country were ordered from their homes by government officials, still others were allegedly forcibly taken from their families. 

    Both Charbonneau parents died without ever hearing their daughters’ stories. Like other children at similar boarding schools across the country, the nine sisters say they were warned not to tell anyone about the abuse they alleged took place there. When the nuns at St. Paul’s discovered that Geraldine was pregnant, they warned her that if she revealed her condition to her parents, all three of them would burn in eternal hell. In a clandestine operation in the school’s infirmary, Geraldine recalls, her fetus was aborted and forced into the incinerator in the basement. “They always kept a fire burning in the incinerator room,” she said. “ I know now that’s where they put the unborn child. They burned it.” 

    Since the inception of the Native American boarding school movement, the goal of these institutions has been the deracination of young Native Americans and their assimilation into American life. The schools were considered a potential solution for the “Indian Problem” beginning in the 1870s. They were conceived as a progressive alternative to the reservation policy, which had long been the favored policy in America. In 1869 the New York Times declared that “the only possible method [with which to keep Indians from hindering American growth] would seem to be to rigidly confine Indians to certain specific localities, until by their good conduct or progress in civilization they can be allowed perfect freedom.” Two and a half decades later, in an article entitled “Senator Dawes Talks to the Cambridge Indian Rights Association” the Times reported favorably about Dawes’ support for the reservation policy: “ [The Indian] is losing the last acre of his heritage. He can no longer retreat from the advance of civilization. We must either support him in idleness or else devise some way to make him a part of us and absorb him into our body politic. As we cannot exterminate him, we must make something of him.” 

    Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, the pioneer of the Native American boarding school movement, and the founder of Carlisle, the first off-reservation boarding school, delivered a speech in 1892 entitled “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” In it he conceded that the only good Indian is a dead one, a nod to General Philip Sheridan’s infamous evaluation, but he urged the country to commit bloodless — that is to say, cultural — genocide. If granted entry into what he and most other whites of the period considered an indisputably superior way of life, Pratt assured his audience, the Indians would abandon their traditions willingly. This, he thought, was a far more humane and effective method than Jefferson’s reservation strategy, by which Natives were sequestered on patches of land “held apart from all association with the best of our civilization.” Pratt was proposing to erase them with kindness, or at least tolerance. 

    Many Natives agreed with him about the reservations, and about the hope of assimilation. There were Indian teachers and parents who supported Pratts’ schools, and who clung to the chimera of a “white man’s chance.” Pratt’s promise was made at the start of a great wave of immigration that would alter the American sense of belonging and identity. He conjured a future in which it was possible for a Native to become an American in a pre-multicultural context. It was, in essence, a melting-pot argument for America’s indigenous population. What is most unnerving about Pratt’s famous oration is its jumble of progressivism and racism. The speech champions the liberal truth that there is something essential and irreducible in all people that transcends their particularity. Pratt espoused a jarringly humanist argument. It was 283 also a universalist argument, rather like the French view of citizenship since the Enlightenment: erase your difference,
    lose your traditions, and you will be welcomed as members of the general society. 

    This mottledness in Pratt’s objectives, the mixture of good and evil, of benign and malign intentions, is characteristic of much of the Native American experience. It is a messy story, peopled with unlikely alliances and incongruous endings, and whereas the larger moral picture may be clear, and the historical verdict about American prejudice unequivocal, the story closer to the ground is clouded with complexities. There are plainly abhorrent actors whom some Natives defend. For decades after the rumored abuses that took place at Native American boarding schools had become semi-notorious within many Indian tribes, there were Native subcultures in which Carlisle was revered. 

    The first compulsory education clause affecting Native Americans appears in 1858 in a treaty between the United States and the Pawnees. Such clauses would appear in ten other treaties before the end of the treaty period in 1871. In 1891, federal legislation was passed which extended compulsory school attendance to all Indians regardless of tribe. In 1893, for a single year, it was legal for government officials to withhold “rations or the furnishings of subsistence either in money or in kind to the head of any Indian family” for failure to send Indian children between the ages of eight and twenty-one to school the previous year (this legislation and its revocation the following year can be found in chapter 7 of the US Code title 25). Nonetheless, there are cases of children being forcibly separated from their families well into the twentieth century. Consider the case of Dennis Seely, who was removed from his home and sent to the Tekakwitha Indian Mission in Sisseton, South Dakota in 1946 (further horrifying details of the Seely case, which have been made public, are of a piece with those of the nine sisters). In 1929 much of the authority to enforce Native school attendance was given to the states. The Meriam Report, commissioned by the Department of the Interior and published in 1928, focused on reservation and boarding school poverty. All 847 pages of the report, detailing a truly appalling episode in our nation’s history, are easily accessible online. Regarding the Native American boarding schools, it reads in part: 

    For several years the general policy of the Indian Service has been directed away from the boarding school for Indian children and toward public schools and Indian day schools…. It is, however, still the fact that the boarding school, either reservation or non-reservation, is the dominant characteristic of the school system maintained by the national government for its Indian wards. 

    The survey staff finds itself obliged to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate. 

    The outstanding deficiency is in the diet furnished the Indian children, many of whom are below normal health. The diet is deficient in quantity, quality, and variety……. 

    The boarding schools are frankly supported in part by the labor of the students. Those above the fourth grade ordinarily work for half a day and go to school for half a day…. The question may very properly be raised as to whether much of the work of Indian children in boarding schools would not be prohibited in many states by the child labor laws. 

    Just ten years after Carlisle’s founding, 10,500 of the roughly 36,000 Native student population went to Native boarding schools shaped by Pratt’s social-evolutionary philosophy. A web of these schools spread across the country over the course of the next century. 

    Allegations about the mistreatment of Native students at these establishments are as old as the schools themselves. Children were allegedly forced to eat lye soap for speaking their native tongue, whipped for running away, and beaten simply for holding one another’s hands. Some died from malnourishment. Disease due to overcrowding was rampant. Richard Monette, professor of law at UW-Madison, former president of the Native American Bar Association, and a graduate of a boarding school in North Dakota (and former chairman of the Turtle Mountain Tribe), put it this way: “Native America knows all too well the reality of the [Native] boarding schools, where recent generations learned the fine art of standing in line single-file for hours without moving a hair, as a lesson in discipline; where our best and brightest earned graduation certificates for homemaking and masonry; where the sharp rules of immaculate living were instilled through blistered hands and knees on the floor with scouring toothbrushes; where mouths were scrubbed with lye and chlorine solution for uttering Native words.” 

    Still, as always, the history is complicated. Not all student experiences at Native boarding schools are alike. Some former students recall their time at these schools fondly. For many it provided an education and an opportunity to develop inter-tribal Native identities, since schools often mixed students from different tribes. Michelle Dauphinais Echols, the Charbonneau sisters’ cousin and lawyer, is one such alumna. Like her cousins, she attended St. Paul’s. Even after spending the better part of the past decade pursuing justice on the nine sisters’ behalf, she describes the years she spent at the school happily. It was with her help, patience, and example that I was able to explore this episode. 

    What follows are the accounts that the nine sisters have given about their time at St. Paul’s in the 1960s and 1970s. These stories have been edited for brevity and clarity. 

    On the first Monday of every school year all of us would undergo the same initiation ritual: Straight off the bus we’d be organized into one long line and then stripped naked. Once we reached the front of the line, nuns would pour DDT powder, a poisonous insecticide, over our heads and bare bodies [for delousing]. We were told this was because we were dirty Indians and had to be debugged. If we tried to wash the powder off, we’d be forced back in line and the process would simply be repeated. Every single year, the first Friday evening at the end of that first week the entire school would assemble, and they would screen films of Jews in concentration camps lined up towards the gas chambers. The next morning all of us would be led into group showers where we would finally be permitted to wash off that powder. After washing each child would stand naked in front of the nuns waiting for us just outside the bathroom in order to inspect our bodies. They would  bend us over and touch us before finally permitting us to collect our clothes and redress. From that very first week, that fear of being put into the gas chamber was instilled and remained throughout our time at St. Paul’s. 

    There were all kinds of horrors awaiting us after that initial trial. Some of us suffered permanent frostbite, some still bear physical scars from the beatings administered by the nuns and priests. Some of us were beaten so badly we had to be hospitalized for up to ten days. Some of us were sodomized. Some have scars from births and abortions from being raped by our caretakers. Once, on an outing to a lake, one of the boys went into the water and started to drown and we were all screaming asking them to help him but the priests and nuns just ignored us and he died. No one took care of us. We had no mother or father figures. There were no toys. We made friends quickly. We had to — friendship was a form of protection. We always had our cliques. We had to have our cliques to look out for one another, or we would have been severely beaten on a daily basis. The staff hated us. They made us know they hated us in no uncertain terms. They gave us no affection. We wouldn’t have known what a hug was or how to have a bond with anybody if it hadn’t been for the summers back home with our mother. We were the lucky ones because we got to go home. There were students there who couldn’t afford the trip back, and they had to stay at that place the whole year round. 

    School was 700 miles away from our hometown. There was no way to connect with family. They made sure of that. Even our aunt and uncle, who lived on the grounds because they worked at the school, never got to see us. From the moment you got there it was total isolation at Marty. They enforced it by beatings, strappings, shaving heads, by saying “You’ll go to hell. Your parents will die and they’ll go to hell.” If one of us was at one table and we saw our sisters at another we didn’t dare say hello, just made eye contact. No talking at all. Sometimes when they fed us that mush we’d put it in our hands and go wash them at the sink, and that was the only time we’d be able to lean against a friend or touch their shoulders. If you were caught touching you got the worst beating of your life. 

    There was always the lurking of a priest or of this one man, the groundskeeper, who worked there and who also molested us. It was like they had different signals that they gave each other. Like for instance, the man who molested Louise would hold her to a chair by the front of her clothes and use his finger on her. And sometimes a few of his fingers. And then he would leave her there and we would see him making a motion with his hand to one of the priests and he would come over and do what he wanted with her. Was the hand motion a sign that she was ready for intercourse? We couldn’t be sure. But we remember definitely the secret looks they gave each other, and the snide remarks they’d make about young girls becoming women. Geraldine says her sexual abuse started when she was eight. Father George began to try and touch her and kiss her. Father George kissed her several times which made other children tease her and say that Father George was in love with her. Father Francis was in the room when Father George 289 kissed her. He laughed and accused Father George of saving Geraldine all for himself. 

    Father Francis was clever. He tricked Barbara into trusting him. The way he did it was, he knew that our aunt and uncle lived on the grounds and that we couldn’t go see them on our own, and we were so desperate for some connection with family. Father Francis would say ‘Come with me, I’ll take you to visit your uncle.’ And she missed our mom and dad so much so she’d go with him. And then after he’d gained her trust he would take her to the church basement and force her to fondle him and perform oral sex. Once there was a coffin in the church basement, maybe they were preparing the body for burial in there, and he lifted her up and showed her, there was a dead woman in it and he put her in that coffin next to the corpse and said if Barbara ever told anyone he’d lock her up in there. So we learned to keep quiet. 

    The groundskeeper who abused Louise had a big ring of keys with him all the time. When we were in the little girls dorm, so we must have been about fourth graders, we would say to each other “did you hear some keys? Some keys clinking in the night?” Because we used to hear them jingle. And on the nights that we heard them jingle, we’d see a priest in the dorm at night. We learned to pull the blankets up over our heads and hold our breath so he wouldn’t pick our bed to climb into. Once Louise went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and came back and found a man in her bed. This man with the keys was letting them in through the tunnels that run under the school, for the pipes, you know. The tunnels are still there now. They run underground connecting every building in the school — the rectory, the church, and the dorms. That’s how the priests got in. 

    The nuns were in on it, too. They let the priests do what they wanted, and they abused us too. They used to pull our blouses down, making believe that they thought we’d hidden something in our bras, but knowing full well we hadn’t. They just wanted to humiliate us. It was a team effort. We were handed around like used clothing, and nobody cared. Even the missionaries who worked at the school were in on it. There was no one to turn to and we knew it. We were told that we would be hurt if we told anybody, that they would kill our parents and our parents would go to hell. We certainly couldn’t turn to our parents so we buried it so deep inside that there was no way it would ever surface. 

    For many years none of the sisters spoke of their alleged abuse to each other or to anybody else. This is not uncommon. According to CHILDUSA, if child victims of sexual assault disclose at all, they do so during adulthood. The median age of disclosure is 48, the average age is 52. Of those who do disclose, only 6% to 15% contact authorities, while most others confide only in friends. That is why many state statutes of limitations for cases of childhood sexual assault, if they exist at all (some states have no SOL and permit plaintiffs to come forward at any time), provide timeframes for plaintiffs to bring their case after memories are likely to have resurfaced, rather than immediately after the incident occurred. 

    Geraldine Charbonneau was alarmed when asked by her gynecologists, who recognized the scarring, if she had gotten an abortion early in life. She had buried the memory of the procedure since it had happened. It was not until a family gathering in 2009 that one of the sisters, Louise, told the others that she had been abused at St. Paul’s and asked if they had been too. Barbara Kay Charbonneau recalled that “We all cried but nothing was said. It was so traumatic, so incomprehensible. But the memories came back one right after the other…. It was like Pandora’s Box was opened.” 

    The sisters had been approached in 2006 by other alumni who were members of a class action suit seeking recompense for abuses sustained by students at boarding schools such as St. Paul’s. Between 2003 and 2010, over a dozen alumni of South Dakota’s Catholic boarding schools filed civil lawsuits against the federal government, the Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls, and various religious orders operating the schools. The following descriptions of abuse are from the Complaint for Zephier, et al. v United States of America (2003): 

    a. Plaintiff, Sherwyn Zephier, attended Boarding School at St. Paul’s at Marty, South Dakota, in the Yankton Reservation, where he was beaten and witnessed nuns regularly commit sexual assaults on boys; 

    b. Plaintiff, Adele Zephier, attended Boarding School at St. Paul’s at Marty where she was sexually abused by a priest, who would put his hands under her dress and fondle and penetrate her. She was also physically abused by the nuns, one of whom would pick her up by her hair, shake her, and lock her in a closet for hours. 

    c. Plaintiff, Roderica Rouse, also attended St. Paul’s at Marty Boarding School, and was physically beaten and sexually abused by a priest in the same manner as Adele Zephier. 

    d. Plaintiff, Lloyd B. One Star, attended the St. Francis Board School in South Dakota, on the Rosebud reservation. He was physically beaten and sexually abused from the age of 6 to age 10 by multiple priests and nuns, which included oral sex and sodomy. He was threatened physically by the priests if he told about the abuse. He was beaten and tortured continuously for a week, including head slappings and paddlings, for telling his father about the abuse. 

    e. Plaintiff, Edna Little Elk, attended the St. Francis Boarding School on the Rosebud reservation in the period 1921-24. She was locked in an attic for days because she did not speak English. She was beaten and stripped by both nuns and priests. She witnessed her cousin, Zona Iron Shell, beaten to death in front of her. She also witnessed other girls being sexually fondled by priests. 

    f. Plaintiff, Christine Medicine Horn, attended the St. Pauls Boarding School at Marty. Because she did not speak English, she was thrown down a three-story laundry chute. She was also stuffed in a trash can and locked in an incinerator for not speaking English. She was forced to strip to her underwear, when she was whipped with a leather strap. 

    g. Plaintiff, Lois L. Long, attended the Holy Rosary Boarding School in the Pine Ridge Reservation. Because she was left-handed, her educator accused her of Satanism and attempted to “cure” her by tying her left hand which caused permanent physical injuries. She was repeatedly stripped and beaten by nuns. During baths, the nuns would fondle her and attempt to “wash the devil out” of her. 

    After memories of their alleged abuse resurfaced, the sisters joined Bernie v Blue Cloud Abbey, a class action suit that was a consolidation of eighteen cases. In 2010, days before the case was scheduled to go to trial, the South Dakota Statute of Limitations (SOL) for childhood sexual assault (SDCL 26-10-25) was amended to bar claims against entity defendants after plaintiffs reach the age of 40. (Recall that the average of disclosure for cases of childhood sexual assault is 52 and the median age is 48.) 

    The amended SOL was drafted and introduced by Steven Smith, a lawyer for the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart, the religious order that operates St. Joseph’s Indian school. At the time the bill was drafted, Smith was the lawyer for the defendants in about a dozen pending cases of abuse alleged to have occurred at St. Joseph’s Indian School. The judge applied the new statute of limitations retroactively, and dismissed the case. About the amended SOL and the judge’s decision to retroactively apply it just days before the suit went to trial, Joelle Casteix, western regional director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, observed to WOMENSENEWS: “you bet the South Dakota legislation was designed to keep Native American lawsuits out of the courts. The Church has a hard time defending itself because it has the proof. It keeps a paper trail on sexual-abuse complaints.” And indeed during discovery for the case letters surfaced in which, for example, Abbot Thomas Hillebrand wrote to a victim and former student, in November 2008, “[Denis Quinkert] does know that he was going through a crisis in his vocation and a deep struggle with his own sexuality. And he is deeply sorry for the hurt that he caused you…. The favor that I want to ask is that you do not mention that incident outside of the sacrament of Confession. It causes a lot of damages to his character and sets off all sorts of alarms in the official Church.” 

    Every year since 2010, the Charbonneau sisters and their families return to South Dakota to lobby for a change in legislation that would allow them to bring their case to trial. In 2015 Michelle Dauphinais Echols drafted an amendment to the South Dakota SOL which would permit the sisters to reopen their claim and allow other survivors to bring forward their claims as well. The bill failed. After conversations with opponents of her original amendment, Dauphinais Echols drafted a new proposal which, if passed, would create a two-to- three year loophole in the 2010 Statute of Limitations, during which time plaintiffs would be permitted to bring their case to court. This bill failed as well. In 2018 Dauphinais Echols created the advocacy group 9littlegirls, dedicated to bringing awareness to child sexual abuse and to pursuing justice and healing. Every year she and her cousins, with bipartisan support from South Dakota representatives, present the bill to the legislature, and every year it is defeated. 

    II 

    A person raped can never be unraped. They will have those scars inside themselves until they die. The sisters’ pain is the silent, festering pain of overlooked people. It is not exquisite, glamorous, articulate, or redemptive. Nobody marches to denounce it. They suffer in obscurity, and the obscurity, the indifference of their surroundings to their story, compounds the suffering. They live with their understanding of all that was done to them and all that has not been done for them. 

    We have been taught that the knowledge of tragedy can transform societies. There are victims, such as Raphael Lemkin, coiner of the term “genocide,” who are able to salvage dignity from their personal tragedies by forcing others to be transformed by their experiences and the knowledge they managed to harvest from them. Lemkin, whose mother, father, and forty-seven other relatives were killed in Treblinka in 1943, dedicated most of his life to this effort. But there is nothing about victimhood that confers a capacity to do such work. The general truth is that tragic circumstances do not make ordinary people into extraordinary people. And people with the internal resources to bring tragedy eloquently and affectingly to our attention are rarer than tragedy itself. There were the slaves and there was Frederick Douglass. It is not the responsibility of a victim to know how to make use of her pain or give it lasting voice. Pain grants no wisdom, only the need for it. 

    No consolation will come to the nine sisters, but their stories should be known anyway. There are practical reasons for this, and I will list and explain them, but first I must say that the primary effect of their story is to explode our faith in happy endings. By telling their story or arguing for reform we can fulfill the duties of ethical beings and that is some comfort, but the sisters are themselves beyond the reach of solace. For them, the horror is irreversible. It is essential that we grasp this about all victims of atrocity — we must understand the aftermath in which they are condemned to live. 

    The South Dakota legislature will not give these sisters their day in court, and even if they did, the law still would have little capacity to enforce justice in their case. The scars will stay, they are indelible. The cultural genocide will not be undone, despite the astonishing power of Native cultures to sustain and to flourish. In 1975 St. Paul’s School, like many of these institutions, was transferred from the church to tribal control and became Marty Indian School. There is no one left even to punish. The alleged rapists and sadists are long dead: their mortality, and popular indifference, protected them. There should be monuments in the streets in South Dakota commemorating the horrors that were done there. High school students throughout this country should know the disgraceful history of these boarding schools. But if all this were to happen, by some social miracle, still justice would not be done. The wounded will remain the wounded. 

    And we do not have the luxury of saying that we tell these stories to stop evils like them from happening again. Our cultural obsession with utility, our impulse to respond always with practical steps, misleads us. This will happen again. Such horrors will be repeated. We know too much about human nature to believe only in human goodness, and in the efficacy of historical lessons. One of the essential characteristics of humankind is that it contains evil. There will always be evil people, and many of them will escape punishment, and there will always be an overwhelming majority of disinterested onlookers, a mass of unmoved movers, who will facilitate that evasion. 

    In this story the onlookers play a particularly disturbing part. After all, as people like to say, the story is complicated. Not all the students were brutalized. Many enjoyed their time at the Native boarding schools. Should the alleged tragedies of some overshadow the normalcy of others? Many Native survivors with the strength to seek justice are asked this question. Why soil the reputation of whole groups and whole institutions by making them known only for their crimes? Aren’t they much more than the darkness they harbor? These are questions that have been asked also about the rapes and abuses that were perpetrated against other students at different sorts of schools in America. The question is basically an invitation to lie or to look away, and in so doing to damage the victims and distort the history still further. In the protracted wrestling with these issues in many Catholic dioceses in America, the path of truth was eventually chosen. If children in Boston deserve truth and protection, so do children in South Dakota. Perhaps we feel awkward about intruding upon the privacy of another community, but all ethical criticism and action is a kind of intrusion. 

    Most victims will not be rescued, and their aftermath will stretch on, and those who could have saved them, or ameliorated their conditions, but did not, will not be absolved of complicity. Yet we must be careful not to tell these stories in order to absolve ourselves. The act of telling the story redeems no one — not us, not the victims. The tales may increase the ethical sensitivities of the hearers — or they may be treated only as stories, a passing disturbance of our minds with a beginning and an end, a structure which has the effect of abrogating shock. As an incentive to change, narrativity’s power may be exaggerated. These stories must be inducted into our national collective memory, alongside every other significant episode in our national history, the magnificent and the repugnant, for another reason: because America should know what America is. 

    There is a pop-therapeutic axiom that talking through pain or anxiety will diminish its power. Americans believe in the salvific power of speech. One long heart-to-heart and the world is already a better place. Let’s talk it out. That platitude is actually a sugary dilution of The Talking Cure, which has an interesting origin. It was first conceived by Bertha Pappenheim and inducted into our lexicon by Freud, who included hers as the first of six case studies in Studies on Hysteria. But it is worth noting that Pappenheim did not talk through her pain in the way that contemporary mental health advocates seem to think she did. She found, in consultation with her doctor, Josef Breuer, that her somatic disorders — headaches, partial paralyses, loss of sensation — would begin to weaken if she could recall aloud to him the repressed traumas and emotions related to the initial manifestations of each symptom. This process has little to do with let’s talk it out, with the theory that assumes that there is something inherently healing for a survivor about telling others their stories. Pappenheim wanted Breuer to fix the symptoms of a wound that itself could not be fixed. She wanted respite, not consolation or redemption. And respite was the most that the discursive therapeutic setting could offer her. 

    Talking it out is not always healing. It certainly has not been so for the Charbonneaus. Recalling their childhood, which they had for years done their best to forget, is excrucating for them. Silence is a natural reaction to the experience of horror, and a dignified one. Within the Native American community, the sisters are among many who have withdrawn into silence. Children of the survivors of the Native boarding schools were told by their parents not to go looking for clues about what happened in those places. Often this silence is an expression of shame, which many of these descendants say colored their childhoods, and was bequeathed to them. The shame makes the heavy memory heavier. 

    Some say it is fatal. The sisters who survive her believe that Louise Charbonneau, who died suddenly in 2020, just three weeks before she and her sisters planned to return to the South Dakota Legislature once again, could not bear to retell her story. They say that the looming burden, the annual pilgrimage back in time, hastened her death. During testimony for the proposed amendment, Geraldine told the legislators: “I feel the Creator took her home so she didn’t have to come here again, so she didn’t have to be raped all over again by your ‘no’ vote.” Is it ever a victim’s responsibility to relive her trauma? 

    In cases of atrocity, it is essential that the onlookers, and not just the victims, bear the burden of remembering. For over two centuries, since Carlisle’s founding, these stories have remained outside our national collective memory. It is a moral imperative that this willed amnesia be cured — not just among the tribes, and not just in South Dakota and North Dakota, and all the other states in which the boarding schools stood. These atrocities deserve to be incorporated into the shared past of the country, out of respect for the humanity that was desecrated and as an impediment to future desecrations. I say impediment advisedly. Collective memory, and even historical knowledge, certainly cannot preclude the recurrence of injustice. One of the saddest and most erroneous claims of the post-Holocaust sensitivity to atrocity is its confidence that the remembrance of past evil will prevent future evil. Survivors and victims bet a lot on the power of memory to dissuade people from violent action. But by now we ought to know better. “Never Again” did not prevent Bosnia, or Rwanda, or Syria. The destruction of the concentration camps built for Jews in Europe did not prevent the construction of the concentration camps built for Uighurs in Xinjiang today. 

    Evils must be remembered by people to whom they did not happen. We must remember other people’s histories. It is reasonable to wonder whether people can remember things that they have not experienced. Doesn’t that defy the nature of individual memory? But we do so all the time. We call this ubiquitous and mysterious phenomenon collective memory. Descendants of slaves never experienced slavery, and yet they are right to say that they remember it. The children of Holocaust survivors never experienced the Holocaust, and yet they are right to say that they remember it. It is possible to achieve great proximity to the experiences of other people. 

    In order to remember what did not happen to you, you have to immerse yourself so completely in the knowledge of the past that an inner intimacy with it is achieved and it takes on the sensation of personal acquaintance. The instrument of this intimacy, of this acquaintance, is the imagination — not the imagination of fantasy but the imagination of fact. Every year on Passover every Jew is enjoined to conceive of herself “as if she herself had left Egypt” two thousand years before her birth. That “as if” is the ancient rabbinical euphemism for the imagination. Even remembering episodes of one’s own group’s history is a creative exercise which requires an imaginative leap. The imagination is an ethical instrument. It has to be such: if the only evils one could conceive, abhor, and fight are those one has experienced oneself, then fortunate people would be useless against injustice. Which, for this reason, they often are. 

    The women of Olga, North Dakota are not like anyone I have ever known. Their personal histories are quite alien to me. We are children of different Americas, and I have no natural understanding, based on my own life history, of how these Ojibwe women lived and what they endured and how they interpreted it, though it may be easier for me to incorporate their stories into my collective memory because my own tradition supplied a training course in the importance of such strenuous empathy. (I have thought many times while researching the story of the Charbonneaus that the Jewish tradition’s emphasis on memory was essential preparation for this work.) But despite the differences between us, the distance in space and in background, the emphatic otherness, these women have haunted me, have been with me, since that night three years ago.

    In the space of an evening, I went from knowing almost nothing about these stories to becoming familiar with myriad specific details, and then to imagining minutes and hours that occurred decades ago in strange places where I have never been. By becoming aware of them, and by extension of all the men and women like the nine sisters whose lives were permanently mutilated by similar ordeals, these stories became in some sense also mine. I say this humbly. Again, I am not like them, and I have not suffered anything like what they have suffered. But it would be wrong to turn away from them for that reason, to invoke “alterity” and try to forget what I have learned. Difference should not be an excuse for indifference. If one does the work of study and imagination, the arduous and respectful work, then the gulf can be adequately traversed — certainly enough to impose moral and social and political responsibilities. Strangely, solemnly, in ways totally unlike the victims and their communities, I remember. They are a part of me. Now they are a part of you. 

    “The Wise, Too, Shed Tears”

    I

    How close to the world can one be? How far from the world should one be? Those questions represent two mentalities, two doctrines — the aspiration to nearness, the suspicion of nearness; engagement as a form of strength, engagement as a form of weakness; the hunger for reality, the horror of reality; the nobility of belonging, the nobility of alienation. We begin with the world and we end with it, and we spend our mortal interval ascertaining what to do about the relation, and how to get it right. There are some who draw close because they seek pleasure, or because they seek pain; there are some who fear pain, or fear pleasure, and pull away. Charity, and moral action, demands proximity, but proximity also narrows and deceives and corrupts — and immoral action requires it, too. Beauty enchants, and absorbs, and overwhelms, but it is not obvious that the dissolution of the self is its highest fulfillment, or that sublimity is our best level. And love — does anything imperil the heart more? Love, the commonplace miracle, is the cradle of anxiety; its fragility casts a shadow over the very happiness that it confers. The truly happy man, it would seem, is the man who lives only in the present and alone, which is to say, the man who is without a father or a mother, a son or a daughter, a lover or a spouse or a friend, which is to say, almost no man, really. A man with a memory is hardly alone. Even solitariness is a kind of social relation, which may be refined into solitude. The world comes with terms.

    One of the greatest satisfactions in the history of philosophy is the inconsistency, even the hypocrisy, of the Stoics. For as long as I have studied them, I have quarreled with them. Like the late Tolstoy, they get into your head. The Stoics were meticulous students of human breakability and raised it into a subject for philosophy. Nobody in the West ever pondered more rigorously the actualities of pain. The integrity of their ideal — tranquility of mind achieved by the stilling of strong feelings — is incontrovertible. Who lives too serenely? And incontrovertible, too, is their portrait of the assault of the world upon the soul, and of the soul’s consequent dispersal by stimulations and attachments. Experience is the enemy of composure; poise must be wrested from circumstance; we are taught by being troubled. When I encounter equanimity, then, I feel envy. And yet I have always believed that the price of Stoic equanimity may be too high. The virtue that it recommends is achieved by an ordeal of paring down and stripping away and pulling back that looks to me like a process of dehumanization. What is the self-sufficient self, if not the self that exaggerates its own resources? Where is the line between self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction? This is why the inconsistencies of the Stoics delight me, why I even gloat in their failures. And this is why the literature of Stoicism — and of Pyrrhonism and Epicureanism — is riddled, when read closely, with exceptions to the lofty rule of wise retirement.

    Stilpo was a philosopher in Megara in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C.E. and the teacher of Zeno, the Cypriot thinker who founded Stoicism. Seneca relates that “Stilpo’s homeland fell to invaders; his children were lost, his wife was lost, and he alone survived the destruction of his people. Yet he emerged happy; and when Demetrius, who was called Poliorcetes, or City-Sacker, asked him whether he lost anything, he replied: ‘All my goods are with me.’” Seneca extols him for thinking that “nothing is good which can be taken away.” He “conquered even his enemy’s conquest. ‘I have lost nothing’, he said. How amazing is this man, who escaped fire, sword, and devastation, not only without injury but even without loss!” Nothing is good that can be taken away: was this man a saint of indifference or a monster of indifference? There are other testimonies, other ancient exempla, equally stirring or shocking, in praise of imperturbability. The father of this tradition of virtuous passivity was Pyrrho, who began as a painter and founded the school known as Skepticism (which is not to be confused with skepticism). He outfitted indifference with an epistemology. In the company of his teacher Anaxarchus, he travelled to India with Alexander the Great, where no doubt he encountered Eastern varieties of philosophical quietism. It is said that Anaxarchus once fell into a ditch and Pyrrho walked right past him, without any offer of assistance, as evidence of his immunity to attachment. Diogenes Laertius relates that when Pyrrho was attacked by a dog and recoiled in fright, he apologized for his panic, pleading that “it was difficult entirely to strip away human nature,” which was otherwise his goal. According to Diogenes, Pyrrho’s principled obliviousness was perfect: “avoiding nothing, taking no precautions, facing everything as it came, whether wagons, cliffs, or dogs.” 

    The problem with Pyrrho’s extraordinary consistency is not only that it was fanatical, and like all fanaticism intellec-tually facile. It was also a little fraudulent: Diogenes further reports that “he was kept safe, as Antigonus of Carystus says, by the friends who accompanied him.” A detachment of attached people to protect his detachment. How could they stand him? Places, everybody! Pyrrho needs to be alone! A reputation for holiness is the best protection. The conclusion that must be drawn from Pyrrho’s amusing arrangement is that the values of apatheia, or freedom from strong feeling, and of ataraxia, or tranquillity of mind, the magnificent ideals of the ancient proponents of withdrawal and placidity, are not magnificent after all; or if they are magnificent, they are not practicable; or if they are practicable, they are premised on the worldly involvements of others, on a surrounding population of perturbables. The sight of equanimity should inspire not only envy, then, but also doubt. Seneca produced his elevating letters to Lucilius in the same years in which he stooped to the lowest court politics in Rome, with catastrophic results. Was he a hypocrite, or merely a human?

    There were thinkers who codified the inconsistencies of the wise man and conceptually extenuated his philosophically embarrassing needs. In his life of Zeno, Diogenes offers a brief analysis on the ways in which objects and qualities may be classified as indifferent. “Of indifferent things they say that some are preferred, others rejected. The preferred have value, whereas the rejected lack value.” The delicious notion of preferred indifferents is the backdoor through which the commitments of existence re-enter the Stoic life. “Of the preferred things, some are preferred for their own sake, others for the sake of something else, and still others both for their own sake and for the sake of something else.” It is hard not to smile at this casuistry of humaneness. There is something affecting about its intellectually tortured way of rehabilitating imperfection and vindicating the unlikelihood of a complete escape from the human muddle.

    The preferred indifferents include other people. Whereas Epictetus warns that the good supersedes all ties of kinship, and Cicero argues against Camus that parricide is justifiable because the son of a tyrant may “prefer the well-being of his fatherland over that of his father,” and Seneca cites approvingly the case of a good man who murdered his own sons, there is in Stoic writings a kind of creeping reconnection of the sage to others, a restoration of the human bonds that have just been deplored, a recognition of the intrinsic value of certain social relationships. Having been demoted as impediments to the development of the rational and virtuous individual — Philo of Alexandria, in one of his least Jewish moments, declares that a man who takes a wife and has children “has passed from freedom to slavery” — there is ample discussion of the merits of marriage, on the assumption that, in the words of scripture, it is not good for man to be alone. The proper qualities for a spouse are deliberated upon, and fertility is not primary among them. Arius Didymus, also of Alexandria, who was Augustus’ teacher, stated that the sage should marry and have children because “these things follow from the nature of a rational animal designed for community and mutual affection.” It would appear that we have left behind the war on worry. 

    So detachment is not all, and disruptions of serenity are admitted. The sociable Stoic: is he a contradiction, or one of culture’s great tributes to complexity? In the literature of friendship, certainly, the Stoics are among the founders. Friends are highly preferred indifferents; they are even instances of the good. Many eloquent passages could be cited. Seneca writes to Lucilius with passion about this passion, thereby doubling the sin. “The wise person loves his friends very deeply,” he says, explicitly joining wisdom to emotion. He calls the Stoic sage an “artist at friend-making” and proclaims “the grandeur of friendship.” He is offended by friendship that is based on expedience or utility. “What brings [the wise man] to friendship is not his own expediency but a natural instinct.” Seneca’s description of the motive for friendship is not only rational, it is almost romantic: “Why make a friend? To have someone I can die for, someone I can accompany into exile, someone whose life I can save, even by laying down my own.” The world has its hooks in this man. Not for him a callous walk past that ditch. And more: “One could even say that love is a friendship gone mad.” (One could also say that friendship is a love gone sane.) “Friendship is choice-worthy in itself,” Seneca explains, “and if friendship is choice-worthy in itself, then it is possible for one who is self-sufficient to pursue it.” A splendid result. In my tradition this sort of category-split-ting, of dialectical rigging, is known, not altogether favorably, as pilpul — but this is pilpul against the impoverishment of life, pagan pilpul, beautiful pilpul. One of the purposes of pilpul was anyway to make life more livable.

    The self-sufficient individual with needs and with bonds: this is not an anchorite dream, and it harbors no longing for the desert. Do such individuals exist? The truth is that the streets may be full of them, in differing degrees of inner strength and outer connection; not sages, exactly, but men and women surprised by events and beset by hardships and summoning the reason and the solidarity that is necessary to endure them, fighting off fear and struggling with dread, ordering feelings or choosing a dignified way not to order them, reckoning with the limitations of their wills, ruefully noticing transience, answering to some conception of the good life; not Stoics, exactly, but neither thoughtless nor helpless, and not without the capabilities of self-possession, and of understanding, and of courage. Here is Seneca’s characterization of the Stoic at home: “He is self-sufficient, and yet takes a wife; self-sufficient, and yet raises children; self-sufficient, and yet would not live at all if it meant living without other people.”  

    The ataraxic hearth? At this point the reasonableness of the picture becomes irksome, and the initial radicalism of the recommended discipline begins to seem implausible. Can the Stoic have it all? Is no significant renunciation necessary? If nothing is good that can be taken away, how can family and friendship be good? For they will be taken away from me as surely as I will be taken away from them. The original objection against the dependency of human affections, the warning against caring, is still valid: it is indubitably an invitation to pain. Good morning, heartache, sit down. Loss is the end of the story of every bond, and also the condition of its urgency. Eternal life, were it possible, would be no guarantee of eternal love, because eternity is the enemy of love. In our enthrallment to our vision of the good life, have we forgotten what we know about the lived life? There are not many things we can confidently foretell about the future, but it is safe to prophesy that it holds bitterness. It holds bitterness because it holds loss. Loves and friendships provide the specifications of our eventual bereavements.

    This is morbid, but every effort to prepare for mortality is morbid. For this reason, one of the central exertions of Stoic spirituality is the attempt to separate bitterness from loss — to preempt sorrow with reflection. “The wise person,” Seneca writes, “is not afflicted by the loss of children or of friends, because he endures their death in the same spirit as he awaits his own. He does not fear the one any more than he grieves over the other.”  For “all anxiety and worry is dishonorable.” Dishonorable! I scan those words and I grant the rationality in them. It may be that one day I will be able to regard the prospect of my own death with equanimity, not only so as to die freely, as the philosophers say, but also so as to find the words and the glances that will ease the sorrow of my mourners. But the death of my family and the death of my friends? I cannot do this. I will not do this. I will mourn. It is the failure to mourn that is dishonorable: a treason, a misrepresentation. The abrogation of grief by reason looks to me like the violation of a duty, and like an imperialism of reason. My tears will flow as a sort of somatic entailment, a physical proof, of my interrupted attachment. Perhaps I am soft, or insufficiently logical; or it may be that I hold a different view. 

    I was rudely thrown into these matters when, in the space of a week, two of my most preferred indifferents, two of my most cherished friends, died.

    II

    I met Adam Zagajewski in Paris three decades or so ago and it was love at first sight, or at least at first sound. Since that lucky day our conversation was constant, in every medium, until last spring, when he selfishly died. We were introduced by Tzvetan Todorov, a mutual friend, a sterling man with a soft, hopeful voice and curly silver hair, a radical who became a liberal, a Maoist who became a humanist, a rarity. Tzvetan and Adam and the American poet C.K., or Charlie, Williams were a circle of fellowship and cultivation in Paris, all of them expatriates, all of them serious but none of them earnest, offering ideas the way people used to offer cigarettes, sharing new work, merrily mocking cant, scouring the world for things to admire. They did me the honor of allowing me in, and Joseph Frank too, Dostoevsky’s sweet and bearish and masterly biographer: Charlie once joked that Joe and I were corresponding members of the little academy. 

    Adam was the first person I ever met who disliked Paris: except for Tzvetan and Charlie and a few others, almost all of them gone now, Adam was lonely there, and his poems were not read. It was in Paris that we began our history of walks — of the reveries of unsolitary walkers, in Paris and in Krakow and in Amsterdam and in Chicago and in New York. We wandered aimlessly, talking and laughing and reciting — “poems from poems, songs/ from songs, paintings from paintings,/ always this friendly/ impregnation…”  There was usually a museum on our itineraries. Once we had three whole hours together at the Rijksmuseum, which under each other’s influence became an afternoon of shared trances. I recall how we stood before Vermeer’s milkmaid, transfixed in a unitary focus upon the gentle pour of milk from her pitcher to her bowl, which is the heroic action of the picture, the spill leaving the red clay above in a delicate spout-shaped triangle and becoming a sure white line, a gentle vertical crux, as it falls into the red clay below. We agreed that this small passage was nothing less than a portrait of time. This most humble of scenes broached this least humble of subjects. We watched the liquid flow but not move, and we agreed that the painter had found a retort to Heraclitus’ river. Then we walked on, in a happy aesthetic daze, and trained ourselves on the stupendous facture in The Jewish Bride (now properly re-named Isaac and Rebecca), perhaps the greatest parcel of painted canvas in the world. In unison we were utterly bored by the notion that what Rembrandt had accomplished was an exciting anticipation of abstraction. For us the excitement lay in the fact that the glittering mess of pigments before our eyes was a representation. At Adam’s request, I recited a few verses of the story of Isaac and Rebecca in Hebrew, for the music of it, a story that is noteworthy because the furtive sex that it depicts is not forbidden; it is secret, but it is not illicit. The secret is that the lovers are husband and wife. A wholesome scandal, we chuckled, and strolled to the next gallery. (Years later Adam wrote to me: “The Rijksmuseum: I remember exactly those beautiful moments in front of the masterpieces. Very elitist.”) 

    The walks I treasured the most were in Krakow, because Adam lived there. I came once to give a lecture in memory of Czeslaw Milosz at the Jewish Cultural Center, which was run by a kind soul named Joachim Russek, a “righteous Gentile” if ever there was one. It was located in Kazimierz, the old Jewish district that is home to a large and venerable population of ghosts. One afternoon I was drawn by the window of an antiques shop on Josefa Street, which had been the main thoroughfare of the neighborhood, but I fled the shop immediately when I realized whose salons those elegant objects had once adorned. I was especially glad to have Adam’s company, because my trip was a disquieting one: a few days after my lecture I was to cross the border at Przemysl into Ukraine and visit my parents’ hometowns, in the region of Galicia that is soaked with my family’s blood. I needed a friend. 

    The subject of my lecture was Jewish messianism, which I had been studying for a long time and arriving at unconventional conclusions, and Adam was in attendance. After the lecture we set out across the city and he wanted to know more about a distinction that I had made between the messianic predicament of the Jews and the messianic predicament of the Christians. For the Jews, I said, the problem is that the redeemer does not arrive and the world stays the same; but for the Christians, the problem is that the redeemer did arrive and the world stays the same. They each have theological traditions of adjusting to the eschatological flaws in their respective situations. I suggested that I preferred what the Jews do not yet know to what the Christians already know. Who wants to wake up the morning after redemption? The coffee will still have to be made. The internet will be ablaze with the advent, but injustice will still abound and banality will still threaten everything. Adam wondered whether this was not similar to a dilemma that we had been discussing for years, which we called “after ecstasy.” It was a dilemma broached by mysticism and by eros and by music — by Mahler especially, for Adam. How can Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, that monument to the limitless-ness of yearning, end? How dare it end? And in what spirit does one breathe when it is over? Can memory adequately contain ecstasy? Or does the quest for ecstasy doom us to a grim alternative between frustration and repetition, with its deadening consequences, the way the search for love can come to ruin in chastity or promiscuity? By now we were in the rynek, the city’s grand square. The hour was late and it was deserted; the open market, where I had been dismayed, but not surprised, to discover tiny wooden figures of Jews with a beard and a penny attached to them, was gone, and the cafes were closed. “Do you want to visit the ermine tomorrow?” Adam cheerfully asked.

    I wanted to visit the ermine. In a small museum that houses the various collections of the aristocratic Czartoryski family, there hangs a strange and important picture by Leonardo called The Lady with the Ermine. The weasel-like creature held closely by the noble lady is an allegory for certain virtues, and the painting had many adventures during the world wars. But it was not the main event for the morning. There was something else that Adam wanted to show me, an object that for him was the secular equivalent of a religious relic. We walked over to the Collegium Maius, which is the museum of the Jagellonian University, where we visited a stuffy green room in the middle of which stood, in bright wood on a bright wooden floor, one of Chopin’s pianos. He used it on a concert tour of Scotland in 1847, and he inscribed his name inside it. If Adam had a god, it was Chopin. He always pronounced the name with reverence. He found the cosmos in Chopin’s pieces. He had highly developed views about the interpreters; I never squandered an opportunity to listen to any interpretation with him; I learned so much. Ekphrasis is the ancient literary technique of making poetry out of painting, by describing in verse a particular work of visual art. Adam was an ekphrastic poet — I especially adore his poem about Morandi — but the inspiring art was usually music. Ut musica poesis. When he died, at a wretched loss for how to grieve for him, I began to listen to Chopin, and Schubert, and Scarlatti, over and over again, with a ritual intensity, and Bach (“das Wolhtemperierte,” he exclaimed in an email, “it’s the whole world”), and Chopin again, and all the Edwin Fischer I could find, until I began to feel not only that I was listening for him, that I would be his ears the way we had together been each other’s eyes, but also that I was consoling the composers for his loss. The poor bereft geniuses, they will never be heard by him again.

    We left the holy piano for a leisurely walk in the Planty Gardens, one of the largest parks in Krakow, which traces the contours of the medieval walls of the old city. Here, too, I was haunted: I have a photograph of my parents in the Planty Gardens in 1945, immediately after their liberation. My father briskly wears a Polish officer’s uniform and my mother, an elegant woman even when shattered, appears in a smart dark coat with a hat tilted stylishly above her graciously smiling face. They had been in hell only months before. Now they were living under fictitious names, my father masquer-ading as a military man, because it was dangerous for Jews to become known to their Russian liberators; and when someone recognized my father on a reviewing stand and threatened to inform on him, they jumped a train and left the curse that was Poland. I told Adam the story, and our conversation turned to an early poem in which he compared Celan’s “Deathfugue” to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, until finally we arrived at our next destination, which was Boguslawskiego Street. Milosz had lived and died in an apartment in number 6, and Adam had arranged for us to visit it. 

    He gave me a great gift. That huge man, that giant redwood of a man, that man of infinite and indestructible spirit, that writer before whom tyrants eventually fell, that poet who wrote imperishably about the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto from the other side of the ghetto wall —  he had been both our friend. Adam was his spiritual son. I earned Czeslaw’s friendship in 1981 with a piece in The New Republic, of blessed memory, in which I was harshly critical of certain American intellectuals who were advising the American government to do nothing about General Jaruzelski’s crackdown on Solidarity, and our friendship lasted until he was too weak to pick up a pen. His flat was as small as he was large. His slippers were still in place, and some of his books still stood next to his nondescript desk; and on a wall in the living room was a painting by his old friend Josef Czapski, who survived the Katyn massacre to become a profound painter, a profound writer, and by all accounts a saint. (The last gift I received from Adam, only a few months before he died, was a handsome monograph on Czapski’s art, to which he contributed one of the finest essays he ever wrote.) From the apartment we found our way to the Basilica of St. Michael the Archangel, specif-ically to its crypt, one of Poland’s pantheons, where Czeslaw is buried. Adam asked a stranger to take a photograph of us standing next to the heavy marble sarcophagus. On our faces is an unmistakable look of gratitude.

    “Now again in Krakow, trying to encourage my soul to emerge from its hiding place.” “The London Derek Walcott evening was very moving, but of course a soccer match would draw a hundred thousand more people.” “The other day I heard the first Violin Concerto by Shostakovitch by the Krakow Philharmonic. And then you remember how he waited for the NKVD by the elevator.” “I’m writing again (I attach a recent elegy for Charlie) and I keep my anger alive, the anger at our stupid nationalistic government. Instead of Lenin and Stalin we now have Mary, Jesus, and Pilsudski.” “I know that not everyone is keen on spiritual life. I noticed it some time ago and I can still barely believe it.” “My voice is gone and my higher mind too. Do you ever have weeks when your higher mind disappears? But what a joy when it returns.” And there were the inscriptions: “to my younger brother, able to combine wit and metaphysics (what’s better than that?)…”; “to my brother in the seeking business…” Every word I ever had from Adam, in his letters and in his books, no matter how sad or dour, was fortifying. As in his poems, so in his emails: he had an uncanny way of mingling the lyrical with the mordant, the magically dreamed with the keenly observed, the fanciful with the true, the elegiac with the risible. It was all done without raising his voice, even in his courageous anti-communist essays of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He spoke slowly, as if to leave time for his meaning to reach you before his irony. He loved mystery but he hated obscurity. His work carried the patrimony of European humanism into an allegedly post-humanist era. He was crazy about Billie Holiday. He was a great boon for the seeking business.

    III

    I met Larry McMurtry in 1989, at the public meeting of solidarity and protest that PEN tardily organized in New York in support of Salman Rushdie, who had recently gone into hiding to escape the fatwa against his novel and his life. I say tardily, because in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian outrage against freedom and literature many of the literary titans of the city were scared into silence, flattering themselves that sleeper agents were coming for them too, as if the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic had strong feelings about, say, Billy Bathgate. Rushdie’s publisher was also running for cover. But finally the event did take place, in an empty store-front not far from PEN’s offices at Broadway and Prince. The space filled quickly; people spilled out into the street. The cramped and rushed scene suited the emergency, which was real. The speakers included Sontag, who was president of PEN at the time, Mailer, Doctorow, Diana Trilling, Said, Talese (who bizarrely chose to honor the moment by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, which was sort of what had gotten us into this mess), McMurtry, and myself. When it was over, Larry came over to me and said: “You’re in Washington and I’m in Washington. Come to the bookshop next week.”

    The bookshop was Booked Up, one of four antiquarian bookstores that Larry owned around the country. He was not only a writer, he was also a “bookman”; he was narcotically addicted to books, high and low, old and new, he loved unpacking them and shelving them and pricing them and reading them and writing them, all in great numbers. His personal library in Archer City, Texas held more than thirty thousand volumes, and was a personal library, that is, the books on those floor-to-ceiling shelves were, in their genres and their subjects, expressions only of what most interested him. A library is not a bookstore. A true library excludes things, because nobody can care about everything. Nobody should care about everything. Larry had the entirety of the bibliographical map in his head, but he lived most fully in certain precincts of it. In Georgetown, Booked Up occupied both corners of Wisconsin and 31st Street. There were treasures there. The ones that moved me most were original copies of Mont-St. Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams, privately printed in the first years of the twentieth century by their increasingly incandescent author, in a large format bound in blue cloth, legendary books, and both of them signed by their author, the greatest writer who ever lived in the capital. The signatures themselves told the story of Adams’ last years: the first in a confident hand, the second in a hand that shook with the results of a stroke. I recall that each of them was priced in five figures, though I never believed that Larry, or his shrewd and charming partner Marcia Carter, would sell them.

    For me, they glowed in the dark. So did other volumes, some of which I was able to afford by the kindness of the house: the 1669 edition of Thomas Browne, complete with portrait and quincunx and urns, and the jewel-like first edition of The Black Riders and Other Lines by Stephen Crane, published in Boston in 1895, a book the size of your hand, its verses printed all in capital letters, its cover decadently illustrated by a black vine creeping across the cream-colored boards. Over the years Larry generously sent me books that reminded him of my obsessions, usually as they came out of the boxes which libraries and collectors had shipped to him. The most spectacular offering of all was Eliezer ben Yehuda’s vast dictionary, in eight huge volumes, of the “modern and ancient” Hebrew language, which he began to publish in 1910, complete with its “Great Introduction.” I was a little delirious when I saw the spines. This was the epic work of erudition and fanaticism that re-established — no, established, since no Jew ever spoke Hebrew before Ben Yehuda the way an entire Jewish society spoke Hebrew after Ben Yehuda — the language of the Jewish people. “I figure if you can’t use this, you’ll know someone who needs it,” Larry’s letter said. “Me in my role as the Last Bookman.” He went on to lament the decline of the trade in his time. “It’s come down to me, Peter Howard, and Bill Resse. When this generation wastes….”

    Anyway, we agreed to meet at Booked Up in Georgetown the following week. He was waiting for me at the bottom of the rickety metal staircase that ran up the side of the building to the second-floor entrance. He was holding a key. “This is for you”, he said and placed it in my hand. “You might need a place to write. I write on the second floor. Your desk is on the third.” He was like that. The place became my lair, especially when Larry was in town. He worked and slept in a tiny room just off Philosophy and Theology, with a small writing table and a monk’s bed. The clacking of his old typewriter downstairs rattled me, but not because of the noise. It was the reproving sound of his preternatural productivity. As I sat above him pondering the shape of an essay, or more often, losing myself in another book that I found on another shelf, the typed pages were piling high on his desk below — novel after novel, Some Can Whistle, tap tap tap, The Evening Star, tap tap tap,  The Streets of Laredo, tap tap tap, Duane’s Depressed, tap tap tap. He had so many stories in him. More, he relished the company of his characters. To paraphrase the screenplay for which he accepted an Oscar in jeans, he didn’t know how to quit them. Sometimes we unpacked boxes together — I remember a long night excavating all of Huntington Cairns’ library, a humanist’s candy store. Like anyone who appreciates the erotics of browsing, I was helpless there. One night I went up to the roof for some air, only to find a wooden structure that contained the contents of the Phoenix, a renowned and recently shuttered poetry bookshop in Greenwich Village. It was there that I discovered, in many copies, The Platonic Blow by W.H. Auden, published in 1965 (without the poet’s permission, I later learned) by The Fuck You Press, a work with which I was not familiar. A man’s education never ends. 

    When Larry was invited to a fancy dinner in Georgetown or at the White House, he would return to Booked Up to write a hilarious account of what he had seen and heard — and in the morning I would find those anthropological reports from the field faxed to my office at my magazine. (Those were the days of glossy paper and fading ink, and I did not have the sense to copy them.) He was the most perspicacious fly on the wall who ever lived. If Larry was taciturn, it was usually because he was taking notes. About people, he missed nothing, as his novels show. He had Balzac’s appetite for types and temperaments. In the years when he was president of PEN — a cultural comedy of the first order, though he was diligent in his duties and they brought him east more often — Larry regaled me, usually at a French restaurant up the street over his favorite Montrachet, with his impressions of the solemnities of Manhattan. (Some of this delightful material appears in Literary Life: A Second Memoir.) These were followed by the inanities of Hollywood. The business of Washington rarely figured in our conversations; politics interested him only as another spectacle of human idiosyncrasy. We also pondered the devastating emotional effects of a heart operation that he underwent a few years after we became friends. He never completely escaped its shadow. 

    Yet our many meals together were also something else, for me: a long course in the American West. Larry was supremely a man of his place. He was a scholar of it; his text was the land and its vicissitudes, its people and their scars, which he knew with as much authority as any scholar I have ever known has ever known anything. I admired Larry for his immersion: it is good not only to come from somewhere, but to know well from where one comes. In the tradition of writers who are universal but not cosmopolitan, Larry’s corner of the earth sufficed to fascinate him forever. This is evident in his books: they are full of detail but they are not made of research, as so many American novels are. (Richly imagined, those novels are usually called.) Gore Vidal once said, about his novel Lincoln, that he would read the historians in the evening and write the chapter in the morning. Not Larry; he came fully and naturally prepared. The history, the geography, the mythologies, the facts: he commanded them all. About his subjects he was sovereign. This freed him for imaginative play and social criticism. He once wrote a little book called Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen in which he pretty much sided with the Dairy Queen.  

    At one of our dinners we were talking about Native Americans, and he was introducing me to the tribes of the Southwest and telling me what to read for further instruc-tion, when he came to the tale of an American scout, I think it was Kit Carson, who had a famous fight with an Indian chief. According to legend, they met in the middle of a creek and fought mano a mano until the American hero vanquished his opponent in a fine spirit of manifest destiny. “Well, the truth isn’t that,” Larry said. “The truth is that Carson waited for the Indian to show up and shot him in the back.” Manifest destiny, indeed. And then Larry added: “Which is exactly what he should have done.” I was startled, of course. But I learned some things about my friend from his laconic and unsentimental remark. There was nothing triumphalist about his defense of Carson’s ambush. Larry was a man without prejudice, and his down-to-the-ground Americanism was utterly devoid of the ugliness that mars American identity in his parts of the country. He merely understood that the world, and the West, is harsh, and he liked that the American scout knew the score. Larry once showed me an old photograph of the women in his family in Archer County a few generations back – I think it is reproduced in one of his books — because he wanted me to see the toll that life on that unforgiving territory had taken on their faces and their bodies. He had little patience with unreality and much patience with reality. 

    Larry admired many people but he idealized nobody. He was the sworn foe of Liberty Valance-ism: he never printed the legend. Instead, in his writing and in his demeanor, he was a remorseless demythologizer. He often brought to mind a precious sentence from Hawthorne: “Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive genera-tion thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.” His critical essays about Texas irritated many of his readers because he insisted that the beating heart of the state is to be found in its cities. In his “lecture” to me on Buffalo Bill and the transformation of the old West into entertainment, he concluded that “the old West” existed only for twenty years or so, but I heard no disenchantment in his voice. He was pre-disenchanted, which is what made The Last Picture Show a great film and Lonesome Dove a great book. 

    Archer City is a two-hour drive northwest from Dallas. It is a small town with a small population, the county seat, a place for roads to meet, with no feeling of a future. Jesse James hid out there. When I used to visit, it looked exactly as Peter Bogdanovich had filmed it. The movie house was a poetical ruin, as if it had been built to be best enjoyed in memory and most truly seen in a rearview mirror. The hospital that appears in the film became the Lonesome Dove Inn, where I enjoyed the blandishments of the Terms of Endearment suite. Larry had transformed four large buildings in the center of town into four large bookshops. Book Town, it came to be called. (Some years ago, as his health began to fail, he threw a big party and auctioned off three shops and three hundred thousand books.) The main store was down the street from the courthouse. The rarest holdings were there, and some literary memorabilia. From a comfortable chair in a corner in the front room Larry would greet visitors — bibliophiles and book dealers and locals looking for old books about Texas and writers from all over the country who heard that it was very cool. There was almost nothing to do at night in Archer City. At the American Legion hall I learned the Texas two-step and was regaled by the inebriated reminiscences of a toothless old oilman named Green. When Larry had guests, however, he provided for their nights: he kept the bookshops unlocked. So when sleep failed, as it often did, I would leave my bed for the deserted streets, where the only activity was the changing light at the crossroads, and ramble in the entirety of our literary civilization until dawn. Sleeplessness was never sweeter. My only responsibility was to turn the lights off. On my walk home my head swam with the rewards of serendipity, with the unexpected phrases and images and names and ideas that I encountered in the nocturnal sanctuary that my friend had created for people like us, but mainly I thought: I love this man, who keeps the lights on.  

    IV

    Seneca’s ninth letter to Lucilius treats the loss of a friend. It begins by clarifying that his hostility to emotionalism does not require the elimination of emotion. “Our position differs from theirs in that our wise person conquers all adversities, but still feels them; but theirs does not even feel them.” The sage is stringent, not grotesque. Yet even this concession to human frailty is limited: whereas the sage acknowledges feeling, because feelings are natural and the Stoic aspires to live in accordance with nature, Seneca advises Lucilius that his ideal should nonetheless be “the invulnerable mind.” This insistence upon invulnerability must have originated in an exceptional vulnerability. Only someone who feels deeply would be so alarmed by depth of feeling. 

    Yet the antidote to tender-heartedness cannot be hard-heartedness. Seneca compares the loss of a friend to the loss of a limb — it is an amputation. But the comparison is surprisingly unsympathetic: it is designed to minimize the injury, not to magnify it. “There are times when he is satisfied with just part of himself. He will be as happy with his body diminished as he was with it whole.” Surely there will be other times too, when he will be unsatisfied with his mutilation, but the philosopher continues in the same toughening spirit: “He is self-sufficient, not in that he wants to be without a friend, but that he is able to — by which I mean that he bears the loss with equanimity.” It is certainly the case that the maimed man has no choice: he will use his good eye or his remaining hand. (If you have ever seen a three-legged dog enjoying an afternoon in the park, you have seen this equanimity, and you have been touched by its unreflectiveness.) But do not approach the maimed man with solace, the Stoic counsels. It would be a philosophical error. In this account, the death of a friend is not an occasion for consolation, because reason will have obviated the need.

    The philosopher goes further, into the farther reaches of detachment where Stoicism becomes obnoxious. No consolation for the loss of a friend will be required, Seneca adds, because the sage turns out to have picked up a certain emotional efficiency. “In truth he will never be without a friend, for it rests with him how quickly he gets a replacement. Just as Phidias, if he should lose one of his statues, would immediately make another, so this artist at friend-making will substitute another in place of the one who is lost.” All he has to do is swipe right! In passages such as this one, the consolatory tradition of the Stoics, to which Seneca also contributed, begins to look a little phony. The death of a friend is quite obviously not the death of friendship. When my friend dies, I do not miss friendship, I miss my friend. All of Phidias’ statues may have been alike, but no two individuals are the same. And even Phidias might have noted that his reproductions were not perfect, and that there are no exact equivalences in human affairs. It should not take a sage to recognize that there are no “replacements.” The uniqueness of what has disappeared, its gorgeous specificity, is precisely the source of the pain. And the avoidance of the pain, the tranquility of mind that is the increasingly desperate master of these proceedings, has been accomplished by means of a shallow notion of human commensurability. 

    As James McMurtry, of Archer City and Austin, likes to sing, “I don’t want another drink, I only want that last one again.” There is the problem of sorrow. The general awareness of our mortality may be of limited value in summoning the courage to confront individual mortalities. Human finitude is universal, but Adam Zagajewski and Larry McMurtry were particular. No one like them will ever live again. Of course we do not expect our friends to live forever, but such “stoicism” is useless when the wounding day arrives, because we cared too much before to care less, or not at all, now. There is no profit in the attempt of the philosopher of indifference to defend the heart with definitions. One more text, then, this one from Epictetus, which I offer in praise of all the actually existing people whose specificities refute it: “In the case of everything attractive or useful, or that you are fond of, remember to say just what sort of thing it is, beginning with the least little things. If you are fond of a jug, say, ‘I am fond of a jug!’ For when it is broken you will not be upset. If you kiss your child or your wife, say that you are kissing a human being; for when it dies you will not be upset.” It! But not even two jugs are identical, if they were made by human hands, and if you think they are identical then you have no eye for jugs. The collapse of such discernment should not be dignified as wisdom. The differences between people are what draw them to each other. If there is such a thing as species-love, it is not the highest love, or the most strenuous love, or the love that gets one through the night. 

    “Anyone who complains that a person has died is complaining that that person was human,” Seneca snaps. He takes mourners for fools. Their dejection is an intellectual misunderstanding. “Nothing is more foolish than seeking a reputation for sorrow and giving one’s approval to tears.” Are tears in need of approval? The disapproval of them seems so haughty, so cold. Whereas “the wise, too, shed tears,” this is only because “one can be tranquil and composed even in the midst of tears.” Seneca does not say how. But is there really nothing worse than a lapse of composure? Surely rationalists, or especially rationalists, may break down, and have their outlook tested by the tremendous unreason of experience. Were Mill’s tears bad for him, or for philosophy? Reason will not gain followers by attempting to recruit them where it does not belong. There will be time enough for argument when the tears dry. Like other thinkers in other traditions, Seneca warns against the excesses of grief, but his warning is hollow because he derides grief. He believes it is chiefly a social performance: “The show of grief demands more of us than grief itself requires. Without a spectator, grief comes to an end.” Yet the opposite is more often the case: it is when the others leave, when the spectators and the consolers are gone, that the quiet ravages of sorrow begin. 

    And then one learns, in desolation, not about the limits of sorrow but about the limits of solace. If consolation is difficult, it may be because consolation is impossible. When a person dies the world changes, once and for all, for those with whom, closely or distantly, he lived. The world is the people with whom one goes through the world. The emotional efficiency of the philosophical Stoics, which bears a resemblance to the emotional efficiency of the unphilosophical Americans, scants the finality of what has occurred. Religions seek the same evasion with their fantasies of resurrection, but resurrections and replacements are equally outlandish responses to the circumstance in which (as the Talmud says) something has been lost which shall not be found again. Too much grieving is hardly our problem. We can anyway count on the world for distractions from it. But respites may be the most we can hope for. There is nothing temporary about mourning; it is an essential view of an essential characteristic of human life. Since ephemerality is permanent, so is sorrow. We may set it aside, we may diversify it with lighter emotions that are warranted by lighter incidents, but it is never wrong. Sorrow befits the sage. Anyone who has ever loved may speak in praise of inconsolability.

    The Murder of Samuel Paty

    I

    It was Friday, October 16, 2020, the last day of school before the All Saints’ Day break at the Bois-d’Aulne middle school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on the outskirts of Paris. In front of the school, a man named Abdullakh Abouzeidovich Anzorov decapitated Samuel Paty, a professor of history, geography, and civics. The knife-wielding executioner was an eighteen-year-old Chechen born in Moscow who had been granted political refugee status with his family in France. In the minutes following the brutal act, the killer posted on his Twitter account a photo of the victim’s severed and bloodied head on the pavement, along with this prepared comment:

    In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Merciful. From Abdullah, the Servant of Allah, to Marcon (sic), the leader of the infidels, I executed one of your dogs from hell who dared to belittle Muhammad (Sal’am); calm those like him before you are severely punished.

    The teacher had already been the subject of an online harassment campaign that was begun on October 7 by Brahim Chnina, the father of a girl in one of his classes. The reason was that Samuel Paty had shown the students in his civics class a cartoon of the Prophet, depicted naked, that appeared in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. It was a pedagogical exercise designed to stimulate reflections on freedom of expression and blasphemy. Paty had been careful to excuse anyone likely to be offended by the picture on religious grounds from the classroom. The father, however, accused him of singling out Muslims and ejecting them. With such an interpretation, clearly designed to be prejudicial, he wanted to prove that they had been purposely discriminated against. It turned out later that his daughter had not even been in class that day. 

    Chnina senior, born in Oran, Algeria, drawing in-work welfare and child subsidy payments for his six daughters, had a following on the Islamist web as an organizer of pilgrim-ages to Mecca and charitable activities connected to mosques. His half-sister had joined ISIS in Syria in 2014 and at the time was still detained in the Al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria at Rojava, a territory controlled by Kurdish forces, from which he had tried to repatriate her. His several hundred social media friends included many well-known activists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamo-leftist movements who lost no time sharing his message. In his first video on Facebook, posted on October 7, Chnina urged his Internet audience to mobilize — to ensure that, as he put it, “this scoundrel does not stay in public education.” He also advised them to protest if they became aware of similar cases. The video was rebroadcast on the website of the Pantin Mosque, located in a large banlieue in Paris, to its nearly 100,000 subscribers, on the orders of its president, M’hammed Henniche. It went viral as far as Algeria and the rest of the Maghreb.

    But this was just the beginning. Henniche, himself of Algerian origin, the son of a senior gendarmerie officer in Algeria and an erstwhile student at a suburban Parisian university, controlled the umbrella group for this mosque that had been founded in 2013. In 2001, in the Seine-Saint Denis department north of Paris, he had established the Islamic political lobby UAM 93 (Union of Muslim Associations, the numeral 93 being the postal code for Seine-Saint Denis), which claimed to be the first of its kind. Having claimed that the area’s population consisted mostly of his coreligionists, he hit on the idea of creating a political pressure group modeled on CRIF, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France. He used it to “monetize” Muslim votes in elections by pressuring candidates to take positions favorable to various Islamic causes in return for the group’s support. It gave him control or influence over the issuance of building permits to mosques, the granting of subsidies to “cultural” or charitable associations endorsed by his group, the opening of Islamic charter schools, and more. The group even staged an annual UAM 93 iftar to break the fast of Ramadan, in imitation of the annual CRIF dinner. Local politicians rushed to it as if to some kind of halal popularity contest. UAM had an opportunistic attitude towards right and left, socialist, centrist, or communist ideologies. Patterned on the way Israel’s Orthodox Jewish religious parties horse-traded their votes in the Knesset in return for subsidies to their yeshivas, Henniche could boast of making or unmaking mayors, department councilors, or members of Parliament in the “most Muslim department in France.” 

    In October 2020, the Pantin Mosque occupied temporary quarters in a former sports hall that could accommodate up to 1,300 people. The cornerstone for a permanent building had been laid on Saturday, February 29, 2020, just prior to the municipal elections of March 15, in which the incumbent Socialist mayor Bertrand Kern was reelected during the first round. Close to Henniche, he had signed off on a long-term leasehold for the mosque as early as 2013, conditioned on its being open to all ethnic components of the local Muslim population. Hence the Friday imam, Ibrahim Doucouré, also known as Ibrahim Abou Talha, was of Malian origin, and had been educated in Dammaj, in northern Yemen, an area now occupied by Houthi rebels. This was where the principal local Salafist ideologue, Muqbil al Wadi’i, a lapsed Zaidi (local Shiite), had established his seminary, Dar al-Hadith, after he had joined the most virulent current of Wahhabism in neighboring Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. In Yemen, he preached an ultra-rig-orist doctrine with a new convert’s zeal, attracting many foreigners, including French-speaking converts. The rebel Houthi movement in fact was created in reaction to Muqbil’s brand of fanatical proselytism. In 2015, when the rebels took over the area and then the capital at Sanaa, they destroyed the seminary’s buildings and hunted down its students. Many of Muqbil’s French-speaking disciples today are refugees in Birmingham, the nerve center of the main Islamist power networks in the United Kingdom. It also spawned a group of activists who edit the “Islamologists of France” website, on which they regularly pillory French academics in this field when they take a critical approach to their subject. Thus, on October 9, 2020, two days after the Paty affair burst into the headlines, the site inveighed against two alleged academic “Islamophobes” as “ideologues of the new fascism” in the service of France’s department of education, which was described on the website as “a secular Gestapo.”

    Another one of UAM 93’s preoccupations was schools. On August 27, 2018, Hassen Farsadou, Henniche’s heir-apparent in the Islamist lobby, which was now very active in Pantin, had made headlines of his own with a post on his Facebook page. It was a cut-and-pasted message from Davut Pasha, an Alsatian convert to Islam in Erdogan’s Islamic AKP party in Turkey. Based since 2019 in the vicinity of Ankara, he acted as the chief drumbeater for Erdogan and his party’s networks in the French-speaking Islamosphere:

    In 2004, the secularists removed the hijab from the school = you left your children in them.

    Between 2004 and 2015, the secularists launched a vendetta against bandanas, long skirts, school outings = you continued to leave your children to them.

    In 2015, secularists put eight-year-olds in front of prosecutors and implemented the ABCD [of equality, as opposed to gender stereotypes] = you continued to let them have your children.

    In 2018, the books to teach them masturbation are ready = you will continue to leave your children with them.

    Are you waiting for the school outings in Gay Pride to get your act together?

    After his conversion, Davut Pasha, born David Bizet, had risen to become a high-ranking member of the European networks of Milli Görüş, or National Vision, a religious- political movement and the leading Turkish diaspora organization in Europe, and a key element of the Brotherist-Islamist network from which Erdogan issued. It is highly influential in Strasbourg’s Turkish Eyüp Sultan mosque. Davut Pasha, who ran unsuccessfully in the municipal elections in Mulhouse in 2014 and in the parliamentary elections in 2017, can lay claim to having invented the “Islamic revisionist history of France,” according to which the Muslim invasion of Provence from Andalusia, and the many subsequent raids between the eighth and tenth centuries, were the cornerstone of the modern French state, one allegedly hidden by Christian “falsification.” He even claimed to have excavated its supposed remains, especially at Narbonne, the seat of a short-lived emirate. A video posted on many platforms under the title When the Islamic State Was in France illustrated this revisionism as early as 2015, when ISIS was at its peak. It was an attempt at fitting the quest for re-Islamizing France into the longue durée of a grand historical saga. Davut Pasha defines himself as “caliphalist.” He regards Erdogan as the ideal contemporary incarnation of the Commander of the Faithful, exhorting him to invade Syria and Libya and thereby restore the Ottoman Empire within its erstwhile most extensive perimeter.

    Farsadou, who, with the support of his mentor, provided a somewhat muddled justification for the posting of Davut Pasha’s message, also presides over the Muslim association called Hope of French Youth based in the town of Aulnay-sous-Bois, also located in postal code 93. It sponsors a private charter school named after Philippe Grenier, a nineteenth-cen-tury physician who converted to Islam. In 1896, Grenier was elected the first Muslim member of the National Assembly, serving in that capacity until 1898. His career is ritually highlighted by the Islamist movement as prefiguring the inevitable conversion of the French, including the political elite, to Islam. The school opened its doors for the first time in premises rented from the municipality’s right-wing and center-right local majority, headed by Bruno Beschizza, a hardline former police union official. Farsadou and Henniche had campaigned for him in the municipal election in 2014, helping him to defeat the socialist incumbent Gérard Ségura. UAM 93 had sanctioned the latter for reneging on his town’s commitments to rent school premises to them.

    This mixing of departmental policy and Islamist lobbying came to a halt, at least temporarily, on October 19, 2020, when the prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis department, Georges-François Leclerc, decreed a six-month closure of the Pantin mosque. The decree implemented a request by the Minister of the Interior, in reaction to Henniche’s spreading Chnina’s post about Samuel Paty. The Salafist imam Abu Talha, who had enrolled some of his children in an underground Islamist school in Bobigny that was closed on October 8 by the police, announced a few weeks later that he was “stepping back from [his] “activities” while “rejecting the complaints articulated in the prefectural decree.” The decision was upheld three days later by the Administrative Court at a hearing attended by Leclerc. The Council of State gave its imprimatur for the decision. On November 25, 2020, Leclerc issued this statement: “The words of the leaders of the Great Pantin Mosque and the ideas or theories disseminated within it constitute a provocation linked to the risk of inciting acts of terrorism, violence, hatred or discrimination and are of a nature to justify closing the place of worship.”

    On the defensive in the face of an outcry, Henniche removed the Chnina video and deplored the teacher’s beheading. He pointed out to the press that he had not relayed a second video that had been posted the following day. The previous evening the student’s father had tried to stoke the Islamist mobilization and focus it on Samuel Paty by posting two statements in succession. They called for “contacting the CCIF” and doxing the “professor’s address and name to tell him STOP.” The CCIF, or the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, was founded in 2003. Its aim was to weld Muslims into a community solely defined by the discrimination to which its members would be subjected because of their religion — in a word, Islamophobia. This notion, characterized in CCIF propaganda campaigns as a “crime,” is strangely based on the Islamist understanding of anti-Semitism.  The Islamist movement considers anti-Semitism a strategy according to which Jews cleverly play the victim card to fend off any criticism of Israel and its policies. In one respect, though, the two cases differ: anti-Semitism advocates hatred of individuals, whereas “Islamophobia” — an English word that was manufactured in the wake of the Rushdie affair in the United Kingdom — works by stigmatizing and prohibiting any criticism of Islamic dogma — particularly its Brotherist, Salafist, and even jihadist interpretations. 

    The CCIF raised the victimization strategy to an art form in putting French society on the defensive whenever jihadist crimes or attacks were committed. A case in point was the attack in Nice on July 14, 2016, Bastille Day, when an Islamist terrorist killed eighty-six people by plowing into the celebrating crowd on the seaside Promenade des Anglais with a truck. The CCIF promptly mounted an intense campaign denouncing the “discrimination” suffered by Muslim women for wearing a burkini on the beaches of the Riviera within a stone’s throw of the killing committed a few weeks earlier. The aim clearly was to divert attention from the massacre. After the murder of Samuel Paty, CCIF similarly weaponized the publicity generated by the incident at the school: in order to arouse a victimization reflex in the Muslim community, it spun what happened in the classroom as an Islamophobic act.

    It was aided in this effort by the political context, which was dominated by news of several major trials incriminating jihadism that were about to begin. These trials promised to expose how the ideology related to, and had benefited from, a much larger movement. The court cases included those pertaining to the Charlie Hebdo massacres, the killings at the Jewish HyperCacher supermarket, and the murders of two police officers of West Indian and Maghrebian origin, all on January 7-9, 2015. Two other courts would have Algerian nationals in the dock. In one, a student named Sid Ahmed Ghlam would go on trial for the murder of a young woman and an abortive plan instigated by ISIS to attack churches in Villejuif in April 2015. In the other, a former journalist, Farid Ikken, was charged with the attempted murder with a hammer of a policeman outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2017. In addition, the trial of the terrorist in the abortive attack on the Thalys Brussels-Paris train in August, 2015 was scheduled to begin on November 16: it would see the Moroccan jihadist Ayoub al-Khazzani prosecuted for planning to assassinate passengers with an AK-47. The orders for this operation had come from the main actor behind the November 2015 attacks, the Belgian-Moroccan ISIS operative Abdelhamid Abaaoud. It was against this background that the Ministry of the Interior moved to dissolve CCIF by November 19. The association preempted the ministry’s move by announcing on October 27 that it was disbanding and redeploying its activities abroad.

    On October 8, the senior Chnina, accompanied by the veteran Islamist agitator Abdelhakim Sefrioui, met with his daughter’s school principal to lodge a complaint against Samuel Paty for “spreading child pornography.” The libel would earn the latter a summons to the police station. This meeting between a school headmistress and a well-known activist recalls one that took place when the issue of wearing the hijab in a public school first erupted in September, 1989 at the Gabriel-Havez middle school in Creil, another small town on the outskirts of Paris. There, too, the school’s headmaster, Ernest Chénière, had been paid a visit by a delegation from the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, an association with Brotherist leanings, which advocated for the students in question and their parents. This campaign subsequently brought UOIF considerable fame in the French Islamist movement. 

    Sefrioui, a sixty-year-old born in Morocco, had staged multiple spectacular provocations starting in the 1980s. His goal, according to Tareq Oubrou, the imam of Bordeaux, also originally from the Alawite kingdom, was “fortifying the most fragile minds by systematically making Muslims victims of the Republic. These victimology theses managed to convince the most reckless who, as foreseeable, took action.” In particular, Sefrioui created the Sheikh Yassine collective, named after the founder of Hamas killed in 2004 by Israel. He campaigned for Dieudonné, the anti-Semitic comedian and pro-Iranian regime activist, in his presidential run in 2007, as well as for the conspiracy theorist Alain Soral, and he harassed Hassen Chalghoumi, the imam of Drancy — another city in 93 — for his closeness to Jewish institutions. He also had agitprop experience in protests relating to schools on his resume: he had led the revolt against the administration of Saint-Ouen High School when it tried to prohibit the wearing of jilbeb, a garment with which Salafi women must cover themselves (a case also cited by Davut Pasha and Farsadou).

    After the meeting on October 8 with the headmistress, Sefrioui taped an interview in the wooded environs of this suburban school, in which he claimed membership in the Council of Imams of France, an association founded in 1992. Its secretary-general, Dhaou Meskine, a preacher of Tunisian origin himself and close to the Brotherist movement, denied that Sefrioui was authorized to speak on the Council’s behalf. He cited “differences over methods” and indicated he had ceased all contact with him ages ago. Sefrioui further announced that he had insisted to the headmistress on the need for “the exclusion of this scoundrel,” meaning Samuel Paty. He threatened a mass protest outside the school to make his demand stick. He had already protested the humili-ation of “Muslim students,” which he described as a system-atic policy in place “for five years.” The involvement of this nationally known Islamic online agitator — with an “S” card on file, designating him as a serious threat to national security — escalated the incident to a higher level than the student’s father alone could have achieved. It is true that Chnina was active on the Islamist web, but he had a less extensive following. On October 12, Sefrioui raised the heat even more when he broadcast a video of himself in front of the school, in which Chnina’s daughter gave her version of events. Her story did not hold up under scrutiny: she displayed no first-hand knowledge of the events that she described.

    II

    The murder of Samuel Paty should be properly understood as an expression of what might be called atmospheric jihadism. Such terrorism dispenses with the murderer’s prior member-ship in an al-Qaeda-type pyramidal organization or with affiliation with a network-based structure such as ISIS. It is galvanized instead by the spread of mobilization messages on social media: they trigger the crime. Atmospheric jihadism crystallizes in the encounter of a demand for action spread online by “entrepreneurs of rage” — in Bernard Rougier’s phrase — and a terrorist offer in response to it. The connections no longer need to be formalized, notwithstanding that in Paty’s case the police investigation revealed telephone contacts between the student’s father and Abdullakh Anzorov. The parent posted the teacher’s contact information on his Facebook page and the assassin found it. Reporting in Le Monde showed that the young Chechen had been combing through social networks since September 25, searching for someone who merited punishment for disrespecting Islam.

    As it happened, on that date a certain Zaheer Hassan Mahmood, another refugee, this time from Pakistan, entered the picture. He came from a family sympathetic to a Pakistani radical Islamist organization back home, and was collecting public assistance after having falsely claimed to be an “unaccompanied minor” upon his arrival in France. He spoke no French and only broken English. He had been incensed by what he saw on the cover of Charlie Hebdo on the first day of the trial of the perpetrators of the massacre of the magazine’s staff. Below the headline “All that for this,” he saw, re-published, some of the offensive drawings that had set the attack in motion in 2015. Mahmood obtained a meat cleaver shaped like the cutlasses brandished in viral videos on social media by Urdu- language protesters in Karachi and Lahore who had marched to demand the beheading of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. Of low intellect and means, Mahmood neverthe-less had managed to go online and find the address where the attack on the weekly’s office had taken place (the editors had moved since then to a secret location). Having made his way to the building, he randomly singled out two people working in a film production company on the premises, neither with any connection to the case. He grievously injured them by blows to the head, without killing, much less decapitating, them. With no escape plan, stunned by his own act, he was easily and quickly apprehended. Subsequent investigation into his Parisian surroundings, where he lived in a crack house while awaiting an order expelling him from French territory, failed to uncover any accomplices or network affiliations.

    Abdullakh Abouzeidovich Anzorov, Paty’s killer, turned out to have more elaborate jihadist connections. The testimonies taken in his circle indicated that he had gravitated to a radical Salafist vision. He had openly proclaimed it on his Facebook page and Twitter account at least six months, if not a year, before the crime. He evinced a horror of all promiscuity with the other sex; he hated atheists, Christians, and “deviant” Muslims, such as Sufi mystics or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman; he took an interest in international Islamist issues. He admired the Taliban and he worshipped Erdogan. The latter was swathed in a nimbus of neo-caliphate glory after recently ordering Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia to be converted into a mosque. Moreover, in the Chechen’s native Caucasus, Erdogan had also just sided with Azerbaijan in its war against Christian Armenia.

    Anzorov was also plugged into the French online Islamist milieu. On October 7, on the day that Chnina posted his first video, Anzorov voiced his support for Idriss Sihamedi, the founder and president of BarakaCity, an Islamist NGO in France, who had been indicted for cyberstalking and threatening the former Charlie journalist Zineb El Rhazoui. The NGO would be dissolved by the Council of Ministers on October 28. Its demise was affirmed by the Council of State on November 25, on the grounds that “the words of its president may be attributed to it and constitute discourses fomenting discrimination, hatred or violence sufficient to justify dissolu-tion.” Anzorov kept silent on the early developments of the Conflans affair, probably because he wanted to keep his murderous plot away from police surfing the web, and deleted his posts starting on October 11. Yet he and Chnina were said to have exchanged phone calls, their substance still shrouded in mystery. He also had online contacts with two jihadists in the Idlib zone in Syria. Between the moment he cut off Samuel Paty’s head and when the police shot him dead, he messaged one of them in Russian.

    He seems to have been spurred into action by Zaheer Mahmood’s attack. At first, he cyberstalked young people suspected of mocking the Prophet or Islam on social media. In all probability, this is when he stumbled on the accusations leveled against his future victim. He nurtured his own plan to “avenge the Prophet,” drawing on the means with which his specific cultural tradition had equipped him. In the monstrous execution of his crime, two actions were particularly telling: first, his bribing, with three hundred euros, of some of the middle school’s students to identify their teacher, so that he could be sure of his victim; second, the terrifyingly professional way in which he carried out the beheading, and, without missing a beat, messaging the Russian-speaking jihadist in Idlib. The first act links the murderer more to the criminal underworld than to standard jihadist practice; the second, to a rite of passage by Chechen teenagers for whom cutting off a sheep’s head opens the door to manhood (as opposed to slaughtering it the way Muslims generally do). It explains how someone like Anzorov could perform the counterintuitive motions inflicted in this particular kind of savagery. This skill cannot be acquired only by watching the many beheading videos that ISIS had been putting online since 2014. At most, these might have proved addictive, or may even have trivialized this killing method in the collective Islamist consciousness. (A Tunisian jihadist named Brahim Issaoui, who struck in Nice thirteen days later, failed in his attempt to behead his victims.)

    The Chechen population in France, estimated at nearly 50,000, arrived mainly as political refugees after the war of 1994-1996 and especially after the war of 1999-2009. Both of those bloody conflicts had pitted local separatists, whose ranks jihadists had gradually come to dominate, against Russian troops. Despite its relatively small size compared to other segments of the Muslim immigrant population, the French Chechen community made headlines. Some were frequently employed in “security” and known for extreme violence. Others controlled narcotics trafficking (and security for the properties of Russian oligarchs) on the French Riviera, one of their major stomping grounds. Some Chechen “protectors” took the drug business over by preying on the traditional Maghreb drug-trafficking channels, a phenomenon that gradually spread across France.

    In the week of June 16, 2020, for example, this takeover spiraled into four days of spectacular clashes in Dijon, the Burgundian metropolis. It began with a raid on Moroccans in the context of a conflict of honor. It brought together hundreds of Chechen thugs mobilized on social media from all over France and neighboring countries. In their muscle cars, they patrolled an entire working-class neighborhood, while the police kept its distance. The press was dumbfounded. The frenzy of violence came as a major shock to most of Dijon’s citizenry, who were exposed for the first time to these mores and habits of some of the people in their midst. The explosion happened just four months before the beheading of Samuel Paty in ConflansSainte-Honorine. Mediation between these two Sunni communities that totally shut out the French state authorities in charge of public order finally took place at the local “Fraternity” mosque. It was provided by its imam Mohammed Ateb, the regional representative of the Brotherist UOIF, in concert with his Chechen counterpart from Dole, a city in the nearby Jura department. The reconciliation was sealed against the backdrop of the Eid-el-Kebir holiday by the Chechens offering the Moroccans three sheep, transactional gifts immediately put to the sword in sacrifices of atonement.

    Abdullakh Anzorov, disqualified by a record of delinquency from working as a security guard like his father, was barely of age when he committed his crime. One of his countrymen, Khamzat Azimov, under “radicalization” watch since 2016, had previously carried out a jihadist knife attack in the Opera district in Paris on May 12, 2018. He killed a passerby, only to be shot dead by police. ISIS, which still had a spokesman then, claimed “credit” for his act, despite the absence of any affiliation. In any case, the Chechen jihad, less notorious than its Afghan parallel, has an equivalent claim to fame in Islamist hagiography: in the opening pages of Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, the manifesto that he published online around 1997, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s successor as the head of what was left of al-Qaeda in 2020, had put the Taliban and these fighters in the Caucasus on the same plane, arguing that both had established the first two “caliphates” on liberated territory, which would eventually extend to the entire planet.

    Before he was shot, Anzorov sent his last message to someone in a Chechen brigade stationed in Idlib under the protection of Turkish forces. The Chechens fighting in the Syrian jihad were notorious for their violence. In Russian folklore, Chechens are known for their fierce secular resistance to St. Petersburg’s troops. From that epoch came the dark legend of the “Chechen villain crawling on the riverbank, sharpening his knife,” as depicted in a poem by Lermontov that was turned into a famous lullaby. The bogeyman of the tchétchènskie golovorezy (Chechen head cutters) runs through the modern history of Russia ever since the Tsarist wars, as described by Tolstoy in his novella Hadji Murad (which also celebrates the chival-rous character of the eponymous hero). A steady drumbeat of beheadings of Moscow’s soldiers also marked Putin’s wars. These unspeakable images were posted in profusion on social media to terrorize the latest Russian adversary.

    After the assassination of the teacher at the school in Bois-d’Aulne, France was in shock. Even Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the leftist La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and a fierce critic of Emmanuel Macron, asserted that there was a “Chechen problem.” It earned him accusations of stereo-typing from his political opponents — despite his having taken part in the “demonstration against Islamophobia” on November 10, 2019 in the heart of Paris, organized by the CCIF. Its ex-director, Marwan Muhammad, had galvanized the crowd at the event on the Avenue de la République with shouts of Allahu Akbar. Mélenchon perfectly exemplifies the problem for the French left: he must support both his MPs from Seine-Saint-Denis who need the Islamic votes mobilized by UAM 93 and an electoral base in which teachers such as their colleague in the Bois-d’Aulne middle school figure heavily. He must find a way to reconcile Islamism and leftism in his movement and in his opposition to Macron. 

    The murder of Samuel Paty buttressed the vision developed by the President of the French Republic in a speech two weeks earlier at Les Mureaux, a commune in the same department of Yvelines. In it, Macron advocated a legislative overhaul to better combat “Islamist separatism.” It was in in the nearby village of Magnanville, on June 13, 2016, that a policeman and his wife were stabbed to death in front of their young child at their home. The crime had been committed by Larossi Abballa, a jihadist of Moroccan origin. Recently released from prison, he was linked to and communicated online with Rachid Kassim, an ex-rapper and social educator born in Oran, Algeria, and formerly based in central France at Roanne, who at this time was running ISIS “external operations” from Raqqa, the erstwhile capital of the “caliphate” in Syria.

    Aside from the similarity between the two murders, even down to the murder weapon, the modus operandi had changed from June 2016 to October 2020. The first killing had been amplified by Larossi Abballa’s calling on his “Muslim brothers” to kill a French academic (more specifically, the author of this essay) and some journalists whose names he exposed to public condemnation on Facebook Live before he, too, was shot dead. With the assassination of Samuel Paty in Conflans, as I noted earlier, the network-based jihad that culminated in ISIS gave way to an atmospheric jihadism, for which it provided a model. To prepare a case against the perpetrators of the attacks of the previous era, which the public discovered only after they were carried out, required lengthy clandestine operations of the police. Such had been the case with the slaughters of January 2015 — whose trial was unfolding in the fall of 2020 and providing the backdrop for the crimes committed first by Zaheer Mahmood, then Abdullakh Anzorov, and then Brahim Issaoui. But today jihadist crimes are preceded by an explicit and public “cultural disavowal” engineered by “entrepreneurs of rage”: they are not prepared in secret, they have already been advocated on social media. This is how a teacher came to be singled out for Internet users as a scapegoat to rage against — and for one of them to assassinate. 

    This change means that the struggle of the secular French Republic must not be limited to after-the-fact criminal justice. It must instead fight an ethical battle against an ideology which rends the very fabric of French society by distinguishing between “believers” (mou’minin) and “nonbelievers” (kouffar), between “Salafist” (salafi) and “infidel” (mouchrik), “apostate” (mourtadd), “hypocrite” (mounafiq), and “deviant” (mounharif). These rigid categories are anathemas of exclusion: they propound a doctrinaire separatism that dehumanizes the designated enemy and forbids making a society with him until he submits to the faith or is put to death. This desire to secede from the surrounding citizenry was the founding impulse of Salafism. Nowadays, five decades after the upheaval of values from nationalism to Islamism, precipitated in the Muslim world by the October 1973 war, this agenda has been taken up by a spectrum of militants ranging from Brotherism to jihadism.

    Known in the West as the Yom Kippur War, since it was launched on that Jewish holiday to maximize the effect of surprise on the Israeli enemy, it was referred to in the Muslim World as the Ramadan War, since it coincided with the month of fasting; and in order for Muslim soldiers to be fed in combat, the ulema pronounced it a holy war — a jihad, which abrogates daytime fast. This theological elevation of the war reinforced the feeling that it was a Saudi and Islamic victory — as the army of the Jewish state had to end its counter-offensive on the order of Western powers who could not withstand the oil embargo decreed at the initiative of King Faysal of Saudi Arabia. From those days came the tilt toward a general Islamization of politics, leading to the use of concepts drawn from the Scriptures to decipher events or engage in action. For instance, what Macron called “separatism” matches what Islamists and jihadists call in Koranic parlance al-wala wal-ba-ra’a’, “alliance and rupture.” In the Salafized patois of the “conquered territories of Islamism,” to use the title of Bernard Rougier’s recent book, it is rendered as “allegiance and disavowal.” It is all about implementing an exclusive and total submission to dogma in its strictest and literal definition, as defined by the self-styled “orthodox.” It means “allying” only with those who share this ideology and breaking with the rest by “disavowing” them.

    The speech in which Emmanuel Macron spoke about “Islamist separatism” caused an uproar in France’s political Islamist movement and in the Muslim world. This happened despite the crime perpetrated in Conflans less than two weeks later, which corroborated Macron’s analysis. Macron’s opponents and detractors used the tactic of shifting the burden of proof back on the French president by accusing him of Islamophobia — of discrimination against all Muslims, while the “separatists” promoted themselves as their represen-tatives par excellence. This move was facilitated by a linguistic peculiarity: the term “Islamist” as such does not exist in the Arabic or Turkish languages, nor is it generally known there. It was originally coined in the 1980s by European scholars of contemporary Islam to describe “political Islam movements” that originated in the aforementioned shift in the wake of the Yom Kippur/Ramadan war in 1973. Its literal translation in Arabic, Islamawi, is understood only by a few intellectuals who manage to distance themselves from the prevalent religious dogma. And so it was that the expression used by Macron came to be falsely rendered as “Islamic terrorism” in the Muslim world, easily letting it be construed by those who had a political interest in such a misunderstanding as an aggression against all of the Prophet’s followers.

    In this charged context, the last week of October in 2020 saw the tensions and the commingling of French and international issues reach a climax. In the forefront was Erdogan’s Turkey. It set the tempo for the pan-Islamic campaign against Macron, to bolster its own president’s neo-caliphal stature after he had rededicated Hagia Sophia as a mosque. Noticeably absent were leaders of the Muslim world, even those participating in the Abraham Accords and opposed to the Brother-ist-Shiite axis. They might have been capable of swimming against the tide, but they held back out of fear of being tagged as Islamophobes.

    Thursday, October 29, 2020, marked the Feast of Mouloud, as the Prophet’s nativity is known in the Maghrebian dialects (al-mawlid an-nabawi, in classical Arabic). Its date is calculated by the Hegirian (lunar) calendar, and thus each year occurs ten days earlier than the previous year. As a symbolic date, it plays a key role in the spirituality of the Muslim masses in North Africa. They revere the figure of the Prophet in particular because it lets them feel charismatically and vibrantly close to him — unlike the scriptural Islam of the scholars (and that of the Salafists, now in digitized form). At 8:29 a.m. on that day, Brahim Issaoui, twenty-one years old, an illegal Tunisian immigrant who had just set foot on French soil after crossing the nearby Italian border, killed three people inside the Basilica of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption in Nice.

    This neo-Gothic building’s portal opens onto the city’s major thoroughfare, Avenue Jean-Médecin, now a pedestrian mall with a streetcar line. Its apses back onto a public garden 

    filled mainly with mothers garbed in jilbeb and their children tagging along. Beyond this garden lies Nice’s “Islamic quarter” of Notre-Dame, which ironically takes its name from the Basilica. Two blocks further, on the ground floor of 12 rue de Suisse, the first mosque opened in the heart of Nice has operated for the past twenty years. In January 2019, the city, which owns the building, issued a notice of non-renewal of the mosque’s lease to the imam of the Chechen community and the president of the management association. This place of worship, too cramped for the crowd of worshippers who spilled over into the street at prayers, was no stranger to contro-versy. In 2011, Nissa Rebella, the rightist group in Nice, whose leader regularly runs in the municipal elections on the National Front ticket, had plastered placards bearing the words “of the Stoning,” “of the Burqa,” and “of the Muslim Brotherhood” over existing street signs. In 2013, he sued the municipality for undercharging rent on the mosque’s lease. In 2020, the prayer hall closed, only to relocate nearby, according to a sign on the door. But the main Salafist stores selling Arabic and French books promoting “allegiance and disavowal,” as well as diverse “Islamic outfits,” and other attire, remain in the area. They equip the movement’s followers with the paraphernalia for flaunting their distinctive identity around the neighborhood. (Alpes-Maritimes, of which Nice is the capital, ranked second among French departments in the number of departures to the ISIS “caliphate” in Syria between 2014 and 2017.)

    The Basilica of Notre-Dame is located a few hundred meters from the main train station, where surveillance cameras captured Brahim Issaoui changing clothes before making his way to the scene of his crime. He was “de-silhouetting,” a common practice in the lead-up to a crime but usually not done in public view. He had slept the night before in a stairwell on a piece of cardboard, which he had shown his mother, at home in Tunisia in the Sfax suburbs, via cell phone video, also telling her that he had made a contact in Nice. Soon afterward he rampaged through the church, slitting the throat of a sixty-year old woman, then striking at the sacristan’s throat, before slashing a young Brazilian mother. All three died of their wounds. Intercepted by the municipal police, Issaoui was shot and wounded while chanting “Allahu Akbar” in a trance before being transported unconscious to the hospital.

    An Italian Red Cross certificate found on him indicated that Issaoui had landed at Lampedusa on September 20 on a boat in distress filled with North African migrants, who had to be rescued by an Italian ship. After a two-week Covid19 quaran-tine on board, an NGO’s boat took him to the mainland, depositing him in the port of Bari, in southeastern Italy. There, on October 9, he was put in a screening center with eight hundred other illegals. Under order to leave Italian territory, he was released from the center due to a lack of space. Here the trail goes cold. There is every reason to believe that, like most Tunisian illegals, he took the train to the border town of Vintimille, sneaked into France, made his way to Menton, and from there proceeded to Nice.

    Little is known of his personal history. He came from a poor family of eleven children, from a village on the outskirts of Kairouan, the Tunisian city that is an Islamic metropolis and the site of its most prestigious and ancient mosque. The family emigrated to an underprivileged suburb of Sfax, the economic capital on the country’s southern coast, where the local Diwan Radio podcast reported on the crime in Nice the day after it was committed. The signs that this is a rough and blighted neighborhood abound: young people in tracksuits emblazoned with counterfeit logos hanging out aimlessly amid unfinished construction projects; the killer’s parents, brothers, sisters, and friends expressing themselves in a thick working-class dialect with rudimentary vocabulary. From them it emerged that Brahim Issaoui, like everyone else, eked out a living in the gray economy, in his case by occasionally repairing mopeds. He later increased his income by smuggling fuel from neighboring Libya and offering it for sale in glass bottles at roadsides throughout the country’s south.

    His family and friends described him as a young man who conscientiously attended the mosque and also had a taste for hashish and alcohol, testifying to the kind of cultural and moral schizophrenia often found in such working-class environments. If his father approved of his leaving for France to escape the misery, his mother worried because he did not “know French.” Nice is in fact France’s “most Tunisian” city, with immigrants from that country constituting the majority among the population of Maghreb nationals. Apart from a claim on the day of the murder that was quickly dismissed as bogus, no jihadist network claimed “credit” for what Issaoui did. Whatever the complicities or the motivations for this act, the Nice attack is one more instance of atmospheric jihadism in Europe after the abandonment of militants by ISIS and its network. This was confirmed when the police announced in mid-November that they had found a photo of Abdullakh Anzorov on Brahim Issaoui’s phone.

    But what to make of this triple murder committed by an individual who had spent just a few hours in France? Clearly he could not have been exposed to any “Islamophobic discrim-ination” in France sufficient to set him off on a murder spree. It conjures up instead a worrisome link between the dynamics emerging from North Africa — poverty brought to a head by the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of the price of oil, the dereliction of the political order, clandestine emigration, the force of an Islamist ideology radicalized by the Salafist doctrine of “allegiance and disavowal” — and those now busily roiling the social and cultural cohesion of Europe.

    III

    On September 10, 2020, in Cairo, the Arab League condemned Turkey’s occupation of parts of western Libya, Syria, and North-ern Iraq, claiming that it evoked the dark hours of the Ottoman colonization of Arab lands prior to 1918. That solemn declaration somewhat tamped down the zeal of the Brotherist-Shiite axis in the Middle East that had been excited by the Turkish president’s bellicose policies. In this situation, Erdogan sought to break his isolation by taking his own turn as an “entrepreneur of rage.” He proceeded to stoke his anti-French campaign, with which he had initially inflamed part of the Muslim world 

    by coming out against Charlie Hebdo’s republication of the cartoons on September 3. He now followed up with broad-sides against Macron’s denunciation of “Islamist separatism” in his speech in Les Mureaux and in his tribute to Samuel Paty on October 21 in the courtyard of the Sorbonne, where the president declared that France would never repudiate the caricatures.

    Erdogan’s self-interested pivot, his renewed campaign against France, was aided by the collapse of Islamic studies in France, which had been reinforced by a cast of senior bureaucrats convinced that, to quote Olivier Roy’s aphorism, “knowing Arabic is of no use in understanding what is happening in the banlieues.” (To which I would add: or anywhere else.) France’s representatives were not up to the task of explaining to the Muslim world what Macron’s envisaged measures actually meant. They stymied the produc-tion of any translation of the presidential words into this “useless” language. None materialized until Macron bravely decided to express himself on Al Jazeera with a quality dubbing in Arabic. But by that time the allegations of Islamophobia had been revved up. Invoking universal principles, a phalanx of critics, ranging from Iran’s Supreme Leader to the Financial Times, had won over international opinion to the view the real problem in France is the hatred of Muslims.

    Yet this consensus of ignorance between the executive and a few asinine academics overshadowed the fundamental problem: as I have noted, the term “Islamist” — which in French connotes political Islam, and particularly the Muslim Brotherhood culturally permeated with a radicalized Salafism — has no functional equivalent in Arabic. The word that comes closest, Islamawi, proved to be useless in the crisis, since it is devoid of shades of meaning that would matter to Muslims. And the notion of “separatism” — for which Arabic actually does have meaningful equivalents, ranging from fitna (sedition, especially of a denominational nature, usually in the phrase fitna ta’ïfiyya) to bara’a (rupture with, or disavowal of, nonbelievers) on which Salafist ideology assiduously bases itself — requires a significant effort of explanation to make the link between the two lingusitic registers. This was why Macron’s criticism of “Islamist separatism” was widely portrayed as a questioning of Muslims generally (“Islamist” being rendered simply and inaccurately by Islami, or “Islamic”). This distortion was originated by political and propagandistic organizations and associations in France, such as the “humanitarians” of BarakaCity and the CCIF beating the drums of “French Islamophobia.”

    After Macron’s speech, and in the aftermath of the murder of Samuel Paty, the Anglo-Saxon press, always anxious about being on the wrong side of identity and inclusion, and always eager to denounce French-style secularism, were quick to chime in. They ignored the momentous fact that the French approach to religious freedom implied also freedom from religion — the emancipation of the individual from clerical domination, which is not a small problem, as honest members of devout religious communities will attest. Instead, in the name of certain Protestant or Jewish perspectives, they accused Macron and his predecessors of acting in the nefarious traditions of the anti-Huguenot dragonnades of Louis XIV or Pétain’s anti-Semitism. According to this view, the freedom to blaspheme, one of the fundamental accomplishments of the Enlightenment and a central feature of any open society, amounted only to the heartless and hegemonic injunction to “spit on the religion of the weak.” This stupidity is now professed by our Islamo-leftists, post-colonials, and intersectionals, who hold the high ground in the universities and interdict any critical approach to Islam — which, like Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism, and for that matter atheism, agnosticism, and freemasonry, is a faith in which one can distinguish denominations and persuasions, many different schools of theology and currents of practice, various forms and styles of piety, including the spirit of confrontation and intolerance as well as the spirit of integration and respect.

    The general ignorance of Arabic languages and cultures, of the diversity of idioms and traditions in Muslim lands and communities, has led to a colossal irony: some on the left have invented an image of Islam with a structure identical to the image propagated by the extreme right, only it is inverted. Where the latter demonize all Muslims and their religion as an ontologically negative religious entity, the former are content to turn such generalizations into a positivity as lenient as it is essentialist. They would be well advised to ponder what happened to their Turkish counterparts, who, at the start of this century, made a hero of Erdogan by crediting him with democratic virtues and cultural authenticity in facing down the “secular fascist” heirs of Ataturk. These partisans ended up rotting in his prisons, suppressed and tortured like Communist fellow travelers of yore — useful idiots whom the Stalinist regime thanked for their willful blindness by locking them up in the Gulag.

    The sensational trial of the murderers of January 7–9, 2015 should have started to heal the deep wounds that they inflicted on French society. It should have been a kind of Nuremberg tribunal for this ideology and its crimes. Unfortunately, it ended up being eclipsed first by the Covid-19 outbreak and the ensuing lockdown, and then by the campaign against “French Islamophobia.” The objective of that campaign was to prevent anybody from shining a light on the continuum between the radical Islamist “entrepreneurs of rage” and the jihadist assassins acting on their ideas. This strategy of diversion was similar to the one that the Collective Against Islamophobia in France successfully employed in the summer of 2016 to becloud the Bastille Day massacre in Nice, when they preferred instead to focus on the hostile “Islamophobic” reactions provoked by burkini-clad bathers on the beach above which the slaughter had taken place.

    All this tumult, all this violence, was provoked by the cartoons of the Prophet that Charlie Hebdo republished at the opening of the trial. And so it is important to add a further reflection. Criticism is not censorship: it is a social and intellectual duty. Once we recognize that there exists a right to blaspheme, nothing prevents us from making an ethical judgment about a drawing. The freedom to publish it, which must be fiercely defended, does not amount to an endorsement of its content. Nor does it prohibit us from criticizing it — no matter the solidarity expressed with the Charlie Hebdo staff that was decimated by the jihadist killers in 2015, and with the victims of those who followed them in 2020.

    A day after the cartoons that became an excuse for murder originally appeared in the September 19, 2012 issue of Charlie Hebdo, I went on French public radio. In a discus-sion with the journal’s lawyer, I expressed my revulsion at this mediocre sketch, and our exchange went downhill from there. Although the journal’s cover title “Muhammad: A Star Is Born” referred to the Prophet, I saw its cartoon less as blasphemy and more as an attack on human dignity in the form of a degrading depiction of believers of whatever kind, whose faith the atheist in me respects even if he cannot share it. Eight years and dozens of deaths later, I take back nothing from my view at the time. Jihadist terrorism and its breeding ground of Islamist separatism pose a serious and wrenchingly complicated problem for our societies that neither foolishness nor ignorance will contribute to solving. We have been called upon to be firm about many things.

    The Unsettled Dust

    SICILIANS AND GREEKS

    To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, the Italian newspaper  La Repubblica is reissuing his books, one a week for twenty weeks. In theory, I have read most of them: when I first lived in Italy, I used to buy them at the newsstand in Rome’s Termini station just before boarding a train to Siena or Florence, back when trips that now take an hour and a half took a good four hours and the conductors would announce our arrival in person, out loud, their Tuscan accent pleasantly interrupting Sciascia’s Sicilian reveries. At that stage of my life, I had never been to Sicily. My Italian was little better than restaurant Italian. It didn’t matter: Sciascia’s ability to evoke an atmosphere and a psychology penetrated all the clouds of unknowing, so that the ugly hotel and corrupt politicians of Todo Modo and the Maltese forger of The Council of Egypt took up permanent lodging in my memories among other fantastic imagined people and places.

    Reading the books again, after years in Italy, is almost like reading them afresh. Most of all, perhaps, Sciascia’s present has become a historical past; for readers in their twenties today, the tangible realities of life in the 1960s and 1970s are no longer accessible experiences, not only the long-altered political and economic situations but also the tiny details of existence: telephones that took special grooved tokens, the smell of tobacco and sweat on a crowded bus, the formality, and the modesty, of everyday dress. And with a knowledge of Sicily, I can see now how Sciascia’s urge to tell a certain kind of story has emerged from the same sere, eroded volcanic landscape as the works of Luigi Pirandello and Andrea Camilleri, a terrain where implacable nature has contended in combat stupendous with deep-rooted culture: the region around Agrigento, once the great Greek city of Akragas, its splendid panorama now blighted by cheap, shoddy high-rises, yet still one of the most beautiful, mysterious places on earth. Now it is easier to catch the barrage of sly, oblique comments Sciascia makes as an author. They passed me by on first reading, and not only because my Italian was so raw; only older people have the restraint to express their insights with such world-weary economy. I missed Sciascia’s caustic wit back then not only because I grew up in another country, but also because I was young, or distracted by the fact of riding on a train: interrupted by the ticket collector, or by the luminous view out the window of twilight in the heart of Tuscany.

    The best books need to be read in a variety of ways, and reward reading more than once: both in a rush of adrenaline and slowly, closely; as a young person and as an older person; when times are hard and when times are hard again, perhaps under different conditions of hardship, perhaps hewing to the same old unchanging patterns. When my professors in graduate school decided to challenge me by giving me four months to study for my doctoral exams rather than the usual year, I had to read one Greek tragedy a day for a month and add in a second tragedy a couple of times a week. (I reserved the double-headers for Euripides’ crazy melodramas.) I split another month between all the comedies of Aristophanes and Thucydides’ history of the war between Athens and Sparta, reading so fast that I began to dream in ancient Greek, and the little words, called particles, that signal the nuances of an ancient Greek sentence took on the vividness of living language. I had been to Athens and Sparta when I read Thucydides in Rome for my exams, in a state of abject panic and manic illumination, not quite aware yet of the extent to which his history finds its real dramatic center in Sicily, in Syracuse, a place as lush as Agrigento is pitiless. One of Sciascia’s Agrigentine characters declares that people from the province of Syracuse are stupid, implying that life is too easy in that southeastern corner of Sicily. But fertility brings its own perils, as Syracuse has discovered time and again: perils like an Athenian fleet appearing on the horizon with plans to invade you before moving on to conquer Carthage, back in the days (415 BCE) when the Athenian fleet was the most powerful in the Mediterranean world. Two years after that glittering epiphany, however, Thucydides shows us the remnants of the Athenian army (the ships of the fleet have all been captured, sunk, or incinerated) as they beat a miserable retreat through the farmlands and gullies to the west of Syracuse. When the stragglers come to the river Assinaros, they are so exhausted and so thirsty that they swarm into the water to drink and there they are cut down en masse by the Syracusan cavalry, greedily gulping down the river’s water even when it turns red with their blood and muddy from the churning of horses’ hooves. Thucydides had long since suggested that the war between Athens and Sparta had become one great atrocity, but this scene is the most atrocious of them all. The survivors of the slaughter were thrown into the quarries of Syracuse, in the shadow of the theatre where Athenian tragedies played, then and now, and prisoners who could quote the latest play of Euripides were allegedly released. Almost exactly two hundred years later, a very smart Syracusan, Archimedes, would be struck down in his home by an invading Roman soldier after holding off the Roman fleet for two years with the world’s most ingenious array of catapults, another utter foolishness of war.

    One of the great joys of rereading any book at a later stage of life is the freedom to draw one’s own conclusions. It is easier to read freely when fortified by the twin bastions of age and familiarity, two immemorial guarantees of authority. (One of the professors who eventually sat on my Ph.D. committee complained that as a graduate student I wrote like someone looking back on a long life in the classics, but I was only twenty-three.) But the only way any of us reads at all is by starting from nothing, and sometimes the absence of preconceptions about what we read can be as liberating as long intimacy. Insight, after all, is unpredictable. Anwar el-Sadat discovered his mission as a statesman with the help of an article he read in a prison copy of Reader’s Digest (see Jehan Sadat, A Woman of Egypt, p. 86).

    Last semester, confronted with Thucydides for the first time, one of my students asked why the ancient Greeks were so violent. That same question has led to one of the most powerful recent retellings of a Greek tragedy: Yaël Farber’s Molora, which appeared in 20007, takes the Oresteia of Aeschylus, transposes its action from Bronze Age Greece to South Africa during the years of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and has a chorus of Xhosa women preempt the trilogy’s climactic act of vengeance, Orestes’ murder of his mother Clytemnestra (but not until Orestes has done a spectacular sword dance around a bonfire). The same motive lies behind Plato’s decision to expel the epic and dramatic poets from his ideal Republic, for by showing the gods and heroes as violent and base, these writers have set a bad example for the young. His discussion has often been condemned as censorship endorsed by a hidebound conservative, though it is hard to see what is conservative about an ideal state that abolishes the family and grants equal rights to women. It may be more useful to read these sections of the Republic as an account of Plato’s own struggles with deciding what and how to write. As a young man, he had composed tragedies, but the political turmoil that engulfed Athens at the end of the war with Sparta drove him to abandon traditional literature. Instead, he invented an entirely new kind of drama: the philosophical dialogue.

    As for the expulsion of the poets, I came over to Plato’s side after hearing a lecture some years ago by a distinguished classicist. He began by conjuring up the climactic scene on which the Iliad hinges: in what is in effect a journey through hell, King Priam of Troy has crept by night across the battle lines to beg the Greek hero Achilles to give up the body of his slain son, Hector, which Achilles has been dragging behind his chariot, an act that even the violent Greeks found repugnant. For a moment Achilles sees his own father mirrored in the elderly king, and agrees to release Hector—but warns Priam to withdraw quickly because he might change his mind at any moment. “This,” proclaimed the venerable scholar, “is what it means to be a man.” Women, it was easy to surmise, were incapable of rising to similar heights of manhood in his view, that is, to attain the twinge of empathy that shot through the shaggy breast of that capricious brute Achilles, and induced him, finally, to leave off mutilating the corpse he had been playing with for days. All I could think of in that instant was Plato imitating my undergraduate classics professor, Harry Carroll, who once shook his finger at a favorite student who had used the word “pissed” in his presence and repeated, “Out, out, out, out, out,” until the student had backed out the door of Harry’s office.

    Like Farber’s Molora, Plato’s Republic suggests that we might hold ourselves, not just men, to a higher standard of existence than Achilles’ temporary exchange of compassion for slaughter, and he does so by wielding the mighty weapon of humor. In the third book of the Republic, Socrates and Plato’s sardonic brother Adeimantus sling an impressive series of poetic quotations at each other, each one beautiful of form and pernicious in its implications for the basic character of gods and mortals. As the crescendo rises, we readers end up being swept along with the two of them into agreeing that Homer’s best — or, better, the atavistic “this is a man” reading of Homer’s best — is simply not a worthy model to live by. Socrates and Adeimantus are men who nurture other aspirations than snatching women, sacking cities, and skewering each other with spears (though they both did distinguished military service for Athens), and they prefer gods who behave in ways more evidently in harmony with the order of the universe than the capricious deities of Homer. Achilles may have sung “the glories of men” to the percussive rhythm of his lyre, but he was mean and slightly slow-witted, and so are the Homeric gods.

    Interestingly, the poetic citations that Socrates and Adeimantus throw at each other often differ from the texts we have now. Did Plato and his contemporaries read slightly different versions of Aeschylus and Homer than we do today, or did the philosopher enjoy catching, and immortalizing, his teacher and his big brother showing off their prodigious memories while slyly noting that memories are fallible? It is tempting to imagine Plato reveling in his elders’ senior moments and Freudian slips as he shares their glee at sending up that dreadful old Homeric model of “what it means to be a man.” All three of them knew perfectly well that the Iliad ends not with Achilles’s fleeting change of heart, but with a funeral: with the women cleaning up the mess the men have made, and weeping at all the useless carnage.

    Asking the ancient questions about who we are, and discovering new answers, are just some of the reasons that everyone, anyone, should be able to read the classic writers, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Babylonian, and read them again and again. For all its cruelties and its limits, neither Plato nor I would ever renounce the reading of Homer’s Iliad, a poem that emerged in its magnificent coherence around 750 BCE, as the relics of the collapsed Bronze Age pulled together to forge another culture of international resonance. As a human being, Achilles is a mass of brutal confusion, but Homer, by contrast, is a storyteller of masterful discipline and ingenuity: he restricts the subject matter of the Iliad to Achilles’ brief temper tantrum toward the end of the ten-year Trojan War, and yet manages to tuck the whole history of that conflict in between the lines. We can easily grow beyond Achilles as an exemplar of “what it is to be a man”; it is much more difficult to grow beyond Homer as an exemplar of what it is to be a poet.

    This freedom, this curiosity, this search for wisdom wherever it might be found, does not have to imply the moral or political endorsement of the societies that produced these works of literature — writers themselves are often the most trenchant critics of their own societies. Homer provided the model for Greek education in Plato’s childhood, and Plato, as an adult, overthrew that model, along with much of the rest of the Athenian social structure as he knew it. From the standpoint of justice, all societies have been to some degree culpable, there is evil everywhere, and all cultures have shown prejudice and ignorance and intolerance (including the cultures of the oppressed). Should we, then, study nothing and rely only on our wonderful selves? Both Homer and Plato may have known slavery first-hand: homeros in Greek means “hostage,” and Plato, in his thirties, was sold on the slave market by a treacherous Syracusan sea captain. His purchaser knew who he was and set him free immediately, but he never forgot the experience. It may be one of the reasons that neither he nor Homer could imagine a human society free from slavery or war.

    When Socrates and Adeimantus decide to expel the poets from their Republic, they do so from intimate knowledge, and they are fantasizing. But when the communications office of my university insisted in a recent mass email that education went beyond “dusty archives,” they were using an empty cliché, like “dead white males” to refer to immortal authors whose skin was mostly Mediterranean brown, and, in such cases as the Roman playwright Terence and St. Augustine, may have been considerably darker than that. There are few experiences more intoxicating than being in a place like the Vatican Library amid relics of millennia of human endeavor. The dust has not settled on those old tomes. They are as volatile and subversive now as ever — which is exactly why certain kinds of putative “educators” want to keep them out of your hands.

    We should be able to read, and reread, whatever helps us wind our way through the labyrinth of life. Thucydides helps me through humanity’s worst precisely because he endured the worst: plague, exile, war, the degeneration of democracy into tyranny. Plato, who saw these same terrible things in his own life, and many more, including treachery and slavery, provides unflagging hope that we can do better. And he hands the ultimate spiritual revelation of his intoxicating dialogue, the Symposium, to a woman, the priestess Diotima. Despite the fact that generations of self-absorbed men have continued to misread Plato in search of “what is it to be a man,” more careful reading will reveal a visionary of a far more lofty order.

    THE NAZGÛL

    I first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a thirteen-year-old. It was an unsettling tale for a teenager: unlike fairy-tale heroes, Frodo Baggins returns from his quest physically and psychically damaged, and the world he has struggled to save is no longer the same world at all. Tyranny has degraded its wild lands, erected monstrous buildings, and eroded the souls of every kind of living thing: birds, horses, spiders, trees, knights, kings, gossipy neighbors. For a young person, the end of the books presented a troubling anti-climax, but there was no way to stop reading before that puzzling end — the suspense was too unbearable.

    Thirteen-year-olds are unlikely to bother with literary analysis, but they are certainly susceptible to a well-structured plot. Tolkien’s epic tale begins in the exact antithesis to an epic setting: a placid village in the comfortably named Middle Earth, a fantasy version of the classic English countryside, green, prosperous, isolated from any forces more complex than the occasional tensions of village life and the round of the seasons, inhabited, as the English countryside always has been, by fantastic little people of human form but not quite human customs. In the 1930’s Tolkien invented his own set of little people for his three young sons: hobbits were child-sized individuals who walked about on large furry feet and lived in burrowlike houses, conservative in their ways and scrupulously tidy in their lace-curtained housekeeping. He enshrined them first in a charming book about a more adventurous member of the breed, the Hobbit, which appeared in 1937 and was immediately regarded as a classic. 

    The hobbits in the Lord of the Rings, the much longer narrative that he published in three volumes in 1955, became more complex as its target audience, the Tolkien boys, grew into adult readers. These hobbits are revealed as naïve isolationists in a much larger real world, and they ignore the forces beyond their borders at their own peril. Tolkien may have been writing in the mid-twentieth century, but, given the opportunity, his hobbits in their pastoral Shire would have voted eagerly for the equivalent of Brexit, with the same devastating results. As a South African who moved to England in childhood, Tolkien knew that the world was vast and that he was different from most of his neighbors.

    The hobbit stories address a child’s contradictory longings for stability and adventure, like the children in the Narnia series by Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis, who can climb through a wardrobe and become kings and queens on the other side. There is something eminently twentieth-century about the idea of launching an epic tale from the midst of middle-class comfort.  Most heroic sagas begin in the midst of hardship: Virgil’s Aeneid with a shipwreck, Homer’s Iliad with a battle-field, Dante’s Divine Comedy in a darkened forest. Both Tolkien and Lewis are clearly inspired by the Odyssey, an epic that is driven by a similar longing for home, and reveals, like the Lord of the Rings, that home will require a good scouring before it truly becomes home again. Yet after it has been well and truly scoured, home will still be forever different from what it  was, and the hero will leave again for yet another quest. The Odyssey provides its own trenchant critique of the Iliad’s version of “being a man.” Jean Cocteau’s twentieth-century Orpheus walks through a bourgeois bedroom mirror into  the netherworld.

    What I remember most about that adolescent reading  of the Lord of the Rings is a feeling of dread that quickly turned  into abject terror. Like that first dying rat in Camus’ The Plague, the initial seed of foreboding is planted by an apparition that, as the hobbits put it, seems “queer” rather than openly menacing. In chapter three of the Fellowship  of the Ring, the first volume in the series, Frodo Baggins and  his friends have taken to the road when they realize that they are being followed:

    Round the corner came a black horse, no hobbit-pony but a full-sized horse; and on it sat a large man, who seemed to crouch in the saddle, wrapped in a great  black cloak and hood, so that only his boots in the  high stirrups showed below; his face was shadowed  and invisible. When it reached the tree and was level with Frodo the horse stopped. The riding figure sat quite still with its head bowed, as if listening. From inside the hood came a noise as of someone sniffing to catch an elusive scent;  the head turned from side to side of the road. 

    The hidden face, the doglike sniffing, the odd posture, and the swaying motion already give the Black Rider an unearthly aura. Shrewdly, however, Tolkien fleshes out that intimation of wickedness without rushing the pace of his ample narrative. We assemble information about the Rider from brief glimpses, sometimes when he appears in person, sometimes, to great effect, when we only hear of him by rumor. We learn at second hand that he has been searching for “Baggins,” and that he has a foul temper: “He seemed mighty put out, when I told him Mr. Baggins had left his home for good. Hissed at me, he did. It gave me quite a shudder.” The Black Rider is almost animal at times, sniffing like a bloodhound, hissing like a snake. In his second appearance, he stoops down and crawls on all fours:

    The sound of hoofs stopped. As Frodo watched, he saw something dark pass across the lighter space between two trees, and then halt. It looked like the black shade of a horse led by a smaller black shadow. The black shadow stood close to the place where they had left the path, and it swayed from side to side. Frodo thought he heard the sound of snuffling. The shadow bent to the ground and began to crawl towards them. 

    At the sound of voices, the shadowy horseman retreats again, but by this time we know he will be back — as Chekhov warned, that one must never place a loaded rifle on stage if it isn’t going to go off. Tolkien places his loaded rifle early, and returns to his Black Rider, to increasingly terrifying effect, throughout the course of his epic tale. Soon that literary loaded rifle turns out to be a whole arsenal: that first, evil-tempered “he” is quickly revealed as a “they” when a Black Rider appears dramatically on an isolated crag, and lets forth an eerie scream — answered in kind by another scream. The dark horses start out as earthbound creatures, and then take to the skies. Bit by terrifying bit, the Black Riders shed their earthbound qualities of snake and bloodhound to resemble, more and more vividly, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Conquest, War, Famine and Plague) — but there are nine of them, who serve the Prince of Darkness (under the reptilian name Sauron) as loyally as the four horsemen in the Book of Revelation.

    In Tolkien’s world, the Black Riders are finally identified as “ringwraiths” or Nazgûl, once noble knights who have sold their souls for the sake of power and have existed ever after in a border zone between life and death.  They have bodies, but those bodies are utterly invisible; their lust for dominion has literally turned them into servile nobodies. When I was thirteen, the stealthy irruption of these frightening half-men into the apparent peace of the hobbits’ comfortable Shire scared me as much as the prospect of a California earthquake in my placid Corona del Mar, and no rereading of the Lord of the Rings has ever matched the sheer thrill of that primal terror. The Black Riders are one of Tolkien’s most enduring creations. Their power of suggestion has been so great that an ant, a crustacean, and a wasp all bear Nazgul as part of their scientific names, and at least one respectable American historian’s panoply of extracurricular talents includes a Nazgûl scream that she perfected in adolescence.

    I was not perfecting my Nazgûl scream; I was looking skyward for flying horses. When I first read the Lord of the Rings in Southern California in the mid-1960’s, my own skies were filled with amphibious helicopters, bound for Vietnam from the El Toro Marine Air Station, and undoubtedly my own imaginary picture of the Nazgûl was conceived in their image. When Frodo complains about having a Black Rider upset his peaceful travels within “my own Shire,” Gildor the elf retorts that the Shire is not his at all, and furthermore, “The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in: but you cannot forever fence it out.” The Marine helicopters that chopped their way westward from El Toro reminded everyone in their path that the wide world reached deep into our sleepy beach town, and it was that same idea of connection with the outside world and the immanence of its tribulations that made the Nazgûl so scary for an adolescent. For most readers of the Lord of the Rings, the Black Riders lodge in the imagination in their final airborne form, screaming back and forth as their steeds flap leathery wings; it is hard to remember how slowly and cleverly Tolkien builds up this dread vision across hundreds of pages before he completes it.

    Thirty years after that first reading, I began to wonder whether the scream of the Nazgûl might really be the scream of the V-2 rockets that rained down on Britain in 1944-1945. Tolkien himself rejected any simple connections between his work and the Second World War. In his foreword to the second edition of the Lord of the Rings, he protested that his “prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.” But the screaming rockets of Wernher von Braun must have crossed his mind, for in the same foreword he describes his process of composition: “It was during 1944 that, leaving the loose ends and perplexities of war which it was my task to conduct, or at least to report, I forced myself to tackle the journey of Frodo to Mordor [that is, his hobbit hero’s confrontation with absolute evil, with all nine Nazgûl zipping about in full regalia, mounted on pterodactyls]. These chapters…were written and sent out as a serial to my son, Christopher, then in South Africa with the RAF.” Still, he also warns that “an author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous.” Whatever sound the Nazgûl scream made inside Tolkien’s head, it was no less effective inside mine at the age of thirteen, piercing through the staccato whap of the rotors of Boeing CH-46 Sea Knights.

    I have reread the Lord of the Rings at least three times since that first immersion, and the Black Riders have never stirred up such vividly immediate fears as they did in my adolescent imagination. The fear they inspire now is a thoroughly adult fear, because the Nazgûl still move among us, creeping, snuffling, hissing, foul of temper and fouler of temperament. Today they tend to be dressed in suits rather than cloaks, with names like Mitch and Ted and Mike rather than Khamûl, with titles like The Senator from Kentucky and The Former Vice President rather than The Witch-King of Angmar, but their story is always the same, and sadly eternal:

    They were once men. Great kings of men. Then Sauron the deceiver gave to them nine rings of power. Blinded by their greed, they took them without question. One by one, they fell into darkness and now they’re slaves to His will. They are the Nazgûl, Ringwraiths. Neither living nor dead.

    And unfortunately, our Nazgûl, unlike Tolkien’s cloaked and crowned voids, show us the faces on which their iniquity has been written.

    THE PRANCING PONY

    One of the reasons that the first Star Wars film left my youthful self unimpressed was the obvious derivation of its bar on the edge of the galaxy from the bar in one of the most famous episodes of the original TV show Star Trek, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” The futuristic furniture, the customers from all corners of the galaxy exhibiting every variety of body type and speaking every kind of language, these had already been done to brilliant and humorous effect, and the fact that they were done for a tiny screen in cheap materials in black-and-white had made no difference to me: the idea was the thing. Star Wars, of course, meant to restyle the intergalactic bar for eyes accustomed to color, wide screens, and digital special effects; in the eyes of a moviemaker, these matters of superficial form defined an absolute distinction where my censorious young self saw an act of plagiarism. I was too young then to recognize that in any case the intergalactic bar was only a recent manifestation of an immemorial archetype, the inn at the border between one place and another, the diversorium, the caravanserai, the frontier saloon.  Douglas Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe is no different in its way from the tavern on the River Mincio where Verdi’s Rigoletto meets the assassin Sparafucile to plot the death of the Duke of Mantua, who appears at the same inn in disguise to sing “La donna è mobile.” Inns have always catered to different social strata as well as different geographies, and there is often something disreputable about them because they exist where the usual limits that define society turn flexible.

    In both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, that border saloon is a pub called the Prancing Pony, situated just over the human side of the border between the Shire of the hobbits and the world of men, in a village called Bree. The Prancing Pony caters to guests and animals who come in two different sizes: hobbit and human, pony and horse, and, on one memorable occasion, a hit squad of Nazgûl who end up stabbing pillows rather than Frodo and his friends. The Nazgûl, it seems, have not only surrendered their souls to greed, but also a good bit of their common sense. They are a singularly dimwitted lot — but then they had to be dimwits to sell off their principles in the first place. As Thucydides, Dante, and Machiavelli will happily remind us, people who choose to keep their souls and their principles also tend to keep their intelligence as well, albeit at the price of exile.

    Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and a group of literary friends who called themselves the Inklings used to meet at an Oxford pub called the Eagle and Child, at the edge of town on the road from Oxford to Woodstock. Just beyond this establishment (wags call it the “Bird and Baby”), a little farther up the road out of Oxford, is the Catholic church of St. Aloysius, where Tolkien was a parishioner. Built by the Jesuits in 1875 to serve the city’s Catholic community, St. Aloysius faces an explicitly anti-Catholic monument erected in 1843 to commemorate three bishops of the Church of England, all burned at the stake in Oxford during the reign of the Catholic queen Mary Tudor. Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley died as heretics in 1555 in the city’s Corn Market. A third, heretic, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, watched their excruciating demise (Ridley took a long time to ignite) from a tower prison nearby and was burned himself the following year. As he mounted the scaffold, Latimer is said to have exhorted his friend, “Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” The Martyrs’ Monument on the road out of Oxford rose as a local protest against the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement that had begun to flourish in the 1840’s; in effect, it marked the border between town and country by affirming Oxford’s Protestant identity, secured when Elizabeth I succeeded “Bloody Mary” in 1558, and resisting any attempts to heal the centuries-old hostilities between Catholic and Anglican.

    But if the Martyrs’ Monument and the church of St. Aloysius represented an ancient Oxonian religious conflict, Somerville College, a little farther out than the Catholics on the road to Woodstock, presented an entirely new challenge to Oxford when it was founded in 1879: the college admitted women, for the first time in the eight hundred years since the university was founded.

    A few years ago, at a conference at this same Somerville College, a Danish friend and I went out to find some dinner. We walked the length of Somerville, passed St. Aloysius, passed the Martyrs Monument, and turned into the first pub we saw: none other than the Eagle and Child. We were thrilled to sit with our pints where the Inklings had once sat before us, there on the borderland between traditional Oxford and the wild unknown of Catholics, women, and countryside. He suddenly grinned and exclaimed, “We’re in the Prancing Pony!” And of course we were. Physically, the Prancing Pony of Bree is said to be have been modeled on the Bell Inn of Moreton-on-Marsh, where Tolkien was also a regular, and the town of Bree is itself a thin disguise for the village of Brill, which stands on the border between Oxford and Buckinghamshire, but there is no doubt that the Eagle and Child (at least up to its present remodeling, now in progress), is, or has been, a classic Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where minds meet and ideas fly free on wings of conversation.

    In ancient times, travelers arriving in Athens from the south passed by a verdant grove, dedicated to the hero Hekademos, before reaching the city walls. Eventually Plato took over responsibility for this property, and turned it into a school, his Academy, a Prancing Pony whose Inklings included, among many others, his nephew Speusippus; Dion, a Sicilian prince; two women students, Axiothea and Lastheneia, and a flashily-dressed, bejeweled beach boy from the north of Greece named Aristotle. No one could enter without knowing geometry, Plato’s idea of what it meant to be — not a man, but human.

    Putin’s Poisons

    Russia is a country of symbols. Major political shifts here are always accompanied by a change of outward trappings, as a graphic demonstration of a rupture with the old. In March 1917, as the Russian throne stood empty after the abdication of the last Czar, the crowned double-headed eagles — the symbols of the fallen empire — were being toppled all over the country: thrown down from the façades of government buildings, bridges, theaters, department stores, and spectacularly from the rostrum in the State Duma’s hemicycle in Petrograd. The new currency printed by the provisional government featured the eagle without the crowns or the scepter — a rare collector’s item as it only lasted a few months, until the eagle was eliminated altogether when the Bolsheviks seized power in a coup d’état later that year.

    Trying desperately to cling to power as the country — and the world — was changing around them, a new generation of Communist leaders attempted another coup d’état in August 1991. It seemed bound to succeed — after all, the leaders of the coup, who tried to stem a democratic tide provoked both by the half-hearted reforms of the 1980s and by the deteriorating woes of the socialist economy, held all the levers of power. The self-proclaimed “emergency committee” included the USSR’s vice president, prime minister, ministers of the interior and defense, and the chairman of the KGB — the top brass of the regime which had control of the party and state machinery, the propaganda apparatus, and all branches of the security forces, from the regular army to the secret police. And they had tanks, which they sent to occupy downtown Moscow.

    What they failed to account for was a changed Russian society: people who had tasted a sampling of freedom, however imperfect, were not prepared to give it up. The Muscovites who went into the streets — initially in the thousands, then in the hundreds of thousands — were not armed with anything except their dignity and a determination to defend their freedom. They came and stood in front of the tanks, and the tanks stopped and turned away. A mighty totalitarian system that had held the world in fear for decades went down in three days, defeated peacefully by its own citizens. I was a ten-year-old boy in Moscow — too young to join my father at the barricades by the White House (the seat of the Russian parliament that became the center of resistance to the coup) but certainly old enough to grasp the lesson of what was happening: that however strong a dictatorship, when enough people are willing to stand up to it they will succeed. The tanks will stop and turn away.

    The fall of the Soviet regime was followed, inevitably, by the overthrow of its symbols. On August 22, as the Russian republic’s president, Boris Yeltsin, who had led the opposition to the coup, addressed a huge victory rally from the White House balcony, thousands of Muscovites went over to Lubyanka Square, the site of the KGB’s headquarters, to tear down the monument to its founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky. The nineteen-foot bronze statue of the Soviet secret police chief hanging from a noose as a crane lifted it from its pedestal remains among the most enduring images of Russia’s democratic revolution. That same evening, a memorial plaque honoring Yuri Andropov was dismantled from the façade of the KGB building. Andropov was someone who had epitomized both the domestic repression and the external aggressive-ness of the Soviet system. As ambassador to Budapest, he was among those who oversaw the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. As longtime chairman of the KGB, he made a priority of targeting political dissent, setting up a special directorate to fight “anti-Soviet activities” at home and expanding the gruesome practice of punitive psychiatry in which dissidents were confined to torturous conditions of forced psychiatric “treatment.” A plaque honoring this man as a “distinguished statesman” was inconceivable in a democratic Russia.

    In December 1999, President Yeltsin was preparing to hand over power to a former KGB operative by the name of Vladimir Putin — a relatively obscure apparatchik who had recently been appointed prime minister and enjoyed a meteoric political rise on the back of mysterious apartment bombings blamed on Chechen terrorists and a brutal military campaign in Chechnya that culminated in his newly formed party’s victory in parliamentary elections. Much of the world media, pundits and foreign leaders everywhere, wondered who this Mr. Putin was and what they should expect from him, domestically and in the realm of foreign policy. For anyone willing to notice, however, the answer was already there. On December 20 — the anniversary of the founding of the Soviet secret police — Putin held a low-key ceremony on Lubyanka Square, attended by a few former colleagues and a handful of journalists, to unveil the restored memorial plaque to Andropov, the “distinguished statesman.” It was the same one that had been dismantled in August 1991, carefully preserved and waiting for its moment.

    In this country of symbols, Putin could not have chosen a more potent one to mark the start of a new political era. As if in confirmation of his intentions (if one were needed) he proceeded, in the first year of his presidency, to reinstate the Soviet-era national anthem once personally selected by Stalin. “A national anthem is a symbol,” Boris Strugatsky, a celebrated Russian science fiction novelist, wrote in 2000. “What can be symbolized by a return to the former Communist Party anthem except a return to the former times? This is frightening… It seems we are destined for a new spiral of suffering: a rejection of democracy, a return to totalitarianism and great-power games, an inevitable failure — and then another perestroika, democratization, freedom, but in the context of a total economic collapse and an impending energy crisis. I would very much like to be wrong.”

    Alas, he wasn’t. Symbols were followed by substance. On the fourth day after Putin’s inauguration as president in May 2000 — in keeping with the Russian saying that “those who will offend us won’t survive three days” — he dispatched armed operatives from the prosecutor-general’s service and the tax police to raid the offices of Media Most, Russia’s largest private media holding and the parent company of NTV, an influential television network. For years, NTV had been a staple in millions of Russian households, carrying critical news coverage, unfettered talk shows, and hard-hitting political satire — including the weekly program Kukly (Puppets) that did not shy away from deriding Russia’s most powerful politicians. Former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov once recalled how President Yeltsin, during one of their meetings in the Kremlin, remarked that he was tired of constant criticism on NTV and asked for the remote so he could turn off his television set.

    For Putin, turning off his own TV was not enough — he had to silence everyone else’s, too. NTV was destroyed within a year as its studios were seized in an early dawn raid on Holy Saturday in April, 2001. Within three years of Putin’s coming to power, by June 2003, all the other private television networks were silenced too, with the state regaining its Soviet-era monopoly on the most important source of public information. And though there was no single “moment” that could be said to mark Russia’s transition from its imperfect democracy of the 1990s to the perfect authoritarianism overseen by Putin today, the year 2003 was an important turning-point. After pulling the plug on Russia’s last private TV network in June, Putin went after a prominent rival in October — the oil tycoon and Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had the tenacity to accuse the government of corruption and funded opposition parties and civil society groups. Khodorkovsky was arrested in a raid on his private jet by FSB operatives while on a trip to Siberia, brought back to Moscow, and displayed on television sitting in a courtroom cage.

    The goal was not only to silence Khodorkovsky but to send a message to the rest of Russia’s business community: stay out of politics or end up like him. The message was heeded. (Khodorkovsky would spend a decade in Putin’s prisons before being expelled to the West, Andropov-style, on the eve of the Sochi Olympics.) Finally, in December 2003, Russia held a parliamentary election that, for the first time since the end of Soviet rule, was assessed by international observers as “not fair,” with the effect of banishing genuine opposition voices from the Duma and turning it into a rubber stamp. “Parliament is not a place for discussion” — this imperishable observation by Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the Duma and Putin’s party colleague, would be a fitting epitaph for future history books on Russia under Putin.

    Corruption has always been a feature of Russian life, but the removal of checks and balances and the institutionalization of authoritarian rule under Putin enabled kleptocracy on a scale never seen before. Putin’s personal friends — from his childhood, from his KGB days, and from his stint at the St. Petersburg mayor’s office in the 1990s — sprung from obscurity to join the ranks of Europe’s richest men, helped by lucrative no-bid government contracts and requisitioned private assets. Names like Arkady Rotenberg, Gennady Timchenko, and Igor Sechin have come to symbolize the crony capitalism of the Putin era. The much-maligned “oligarchs” of the 1990s paled in comparison. From time to time, glimpses from that world would come into public view, as with the contract to build a thirty-mile road for the Sochi Olympics that exceeded the cost of NASA’s Mars exploration program; a $2-billion offshore account belonging to a cellist friend of Putin’s, found among the Panama Papers; a $1.3 billion Italian-style palace reportedly constructed for Putin’s personal use on the Black Sea coast. For evident reasons, such stories never become subjects of tame parliamentary debates or state-controlled television programs.

    As the screws tightened and conventional channels of political activity and public communication were shut off, Russians — especially the younger urban middle classes — began taking to the streets to voice opposition to Putin’s rule. The protests snowballed in the winter of 2011–2012 as tens of thousands filled the streets of downtown Moscow to denounce a blatantly fraudulent parliamentary election, in which Putin’s party secured “victory” through large-scale ballot-stuffing. Among the leading voices at those rallies was Boris Nemtsov, who — unlike many of his former colleagues in the Yeltsin-era establishment — was not willing to be complicit in Russia’s turn to authoritarianism. “Putin, leave! You don’t know your own people,” he said, addressing a 100,000-strong crowd on Bolotnaya Square, across the river from the Kremlin, in December 2011. “You don’t even understand why we are here. We are here because we have a sense of dignity. We are here because we are not slaves.” Once the face of Russia’s hopes for democracy in the 1990s — a successful regional governor, deputy prime minister, and presumed heir to the presidency — Nemtsov emerged as the most prominent opponent of Putin’s corrupt and despotic rule, leading street protests, organizing local election victories for the opposition, successfully advocating for targeted Western sanctions on Putin’s cronies and oligarchs.

    He was too principled to be bought, too bold to be frightened, and too dangerous to be tolerated. On the evening of February 27, 2015, Nemtsov was gunned down, five bullets in the back, as he walked home across a bridge in front of the Kremlin. It was the most high-profile political assassination in the modern history of Russia. To this day, its organizers continue to be protected by the highest levels of the Russian government. An oversight report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2020 has concluded that the reason for this continuing impunity is “not the capabilities of the Russian law enforcement, but political will.” After all, one cannot be expected to investigate oneself.

    The last public demonstration Nemtsov had led was against Putin’s war against Ukraine. In September 2014, tens of thousands marched down Moscow’s boulevards in protest at the Kremlin’s aggression against Russia’s close neighbor and traditional ally. Earlier that year, following a popular “revolution of dignity” that ousted a corrupt and authoritarian Ukrainian leader, Putin moved full-scale against that country, starting an unannounced but deadly war in eastern Ukraine under the guise of a phantom “separatist” conflict and formally annexing the Crimean Peninsula for Russia. This was the first time one European nation seized territory from another since the end of the Second World War. It was not the first time Putin crossed another country’s borders, though: in 2008 his forces had attacked the former Soviet republic of Georgia, occupying (but not formally annexing) some twenty percent of its territory.

    To Western leaders, the war on Ukraine came as a shock: one official statement after another derided Putin for “breaching international law,” “violating commitments,” and “passing a point of no-return.” The only cause for shock, though, should have been how long the leaders of Western democracies had not only tolerated but enabled Putin and his regime — by lending him much-needed international legitimacy and by allowing his cronies to use Western countries and financial institutions as havens for their looted wealth. The late Vladimir Bukovsky, a famed Soviet-era dissident, once remarked that for many Western politicians the ability to fry their morning bacon on Soviet gas trumped any concern for human rights.

    In this respect, not much has changed since the 1970s. In 2001, weeks after Putin’s government seized control of NTV, President George W. Bush famously stated that he had “looked the man in the eye… [and] was able to get a sense of his soul.” (An impossible feat, given Putin’s remarkably soulless eyes.) Later he praised Putin as “a new style of leader, a reformer… a man who is going to make a huge difference in making the world more peaceful by working closely with the United States.”

    Barack Obama continued this line of rapprochement, beginning his presidency with a “reset” in relations with Putin following the Georgia war; trying (unsuccessfully) to block Congressional passage of the Magnitsky Act that imposed targeted visa and financial sanctions on Kremlin officials involved in human rights abuses; and publicly praising Putin for his “extraordinary work… on behalf of the Russian people.” On March 5, 2012 — the day after Putin “won” an election characterized by what OSCE observers described as a lack of “real competition” and “abuse of government resources” — the Obama administration announced that “the United States congratulates the Russian people on the completion of the presidential elections, and looks forward to working with the president-elect.” I vividly recall that we in the Russian opposition received the news of this endorsement as we stood in Moscow’s Pushkin Square with thousands of people who came out to protest the sham vote. It was difficult to say whether the people on that square — and the millions around the country who shared their outlook — felt more mocked or insulted.

    Glaringly, the next American president, Donald Trump, professed his personal admiration and even reverence for Putin, invited him back into the Group of Eight (from which he had been expelled after the annexation of Crimea), and appeared to equate Russian intelligence officers accused of meddling in American elections with Americans who had helped craft the Magnitsky Act. In a pointed episode in 2017 — remember how much symbols matter for the Kremlin — the Trump administration, acting through a friendly senator, tried to block the effort to name a street in front of the Russian embassy in Washington D.C. after Boris Nemtsov. The administration’s attempt failed as the D.C. Council stepped in to legislate the street naming — the first commemoration of Nemtsov anywhere in the world — but the intention  was telling.

    In fairness, the policy of accommodation toward Putin (in a different historical era it would have been called “appeasement”) was not limited to the United States. With rare exceptions, European leaders did little better. I will never forget a lavish banquet honoring Putin during his state visit to the United Kingdom in June 2003 (which I was covering as a journalist), with champagne toasts and merry renditions of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” — literally days after his government pulled the plug on Russia’s last independent television network. The banquet was held at the London Guildhall, not far from the spot where, three years later, Russian agents, likely acting on Putin’s personal orders, would poison Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned political émigré, with radioactive polonium: an attack against a NATO citizen on NATO soil.

    As history has repeatedly shown — and very clearly so in the case of Vladimir Putin — appeasement is not only morally wrong but also practically ineffective. By turning a blind eye to Putin’s domestic abuses in the hope of being able to “do business” with him in international affairs, Western leaders ignored a fundamental maxim of Russian history: foreign policy is a reflection of domestic policy. Repression at home and aggression abroad follow each other. This interrelationship has been manifested throughout Russia’s history, but perhaps never as pointedly as in the past three decades. Democratic aspirations at home in the 1990s were duly translated into progressive international posturing, from President Yeltsin’s support for the independence of the Baltic States and Poland’s NATO membership to Russia’s own accession to the Council of Europe and the Group of Eight and its cooperation treaty with NATO that affirmed a “shared commitment to build a stable, peaceful and undivided Europe, whole and free.” With Putin’s authoritarian turn, Russian foreign policy was redirected to supporting dictators and rogue regimes all over the world, often through confrontation with democratic nations — including a direct military collision with U.S. forces in Syria in February 2018. Putin’s national security strategy has designated NATO actions as “a threat”; one of his state-of-the-nation addresses featured a computer animation of a ballistic missile attack on Florida; Russian military exercises have included simulated nuclear strikes on NATO countries and allies; and state propaganda chief Dmitri Kiselev has boasted on the air about Russia’s ability to “turn the U.S. into radioactive ash.” Alongside the actual wars against Ukraine and Georgia, Putin’s aggression has come in “hybrid” forms designed to undermine the security and sovereignty of others, from as near as the neighboring Belarus to as far as the Central African Republic.

    There is no reason to expect a regime that violates its own laws and tramples on its own citizens to respect international norms or the interests of other nations. History, as they say, knows no “if,” but one can only wonder what the world would look like today if Western leaders had taken a more principled stand against Putin’s attacks on democracy early on.

    The main purpose of historical analysis is not the study of the past — however fascinating it may be — but the preparation for the future. History has not been kind to Russia, but it has given it a number of openings for democratic change — and, no doubt, there will be another. To avoid repeating past mistakes, it is important to learn from them. The main reason for the failure of Russia’s transition to democracy in the 1990s lay in the inability — or the unwillingness — on the part of its new democratic leadership to fully break with the Soviet past. While Russia moved toward free elections, media pluralism, open borders, and a market economy, it never went through a process of public reckoning with the crimes of the former regime. There was nothing like the Stasi Records Agency in the former East Germany, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, or the Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism in the Czech Republic. Some of the Soviet archives were briefly opened — and quickly shut again.

    Russia’s Constitutional Court did rule in 1992 that “the governing structures of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been the initiators of repression… directed at millions” — but no practical consequences followed. A lustration bill restricting former Communist and KGB officials from positions of power was introduced in the Russian parliament, but was never adopted. The old regime remained only half-condemned. “Be careful, it’s like dealing with a wounded beast,” Bukovsky warned members of Yeltsin’s government in the early 1990s. “If you don’t finish it off, it will attack you.” His warning came sadly true with Putin’s political rise just a few years later. The lesson for those who will shepherd Russia’s next transition to democracy is clear: symbols are not everything. It is not enough to shed the outward trappings of a dictatorship, not enough to change national anthems, topple monuments, and remove memorial plaques. The underlying problems must be identified and addressed — and only such a process of atonement and reform can guard against an authoritarian resurgence. The successful experience of many emerging democracies, from Chile to South Korea, testifies to this.

    But the West should learn its lessons, too. Although the main reasons for Russia’s botched democratic transition of the 1990s were undoubtedly domestic, the reformers could have been greatly helped by a promise of European and Euro-Atlantic integration — a promise that played such an important role in incentivizing successful post-communist transitions in other countries of Eastern and Central Europe. In February 1990, in his historic address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Václav Havel, the dissident playwright and new president of Czechoslovakia, framed that entire transition in terms of his country “returning to Europe.” For many former Warsaw Pact states, this return meant not only a symbolic affirmation of their status as “fully” European but also tangible practical benefits to their citizens in the form of open markets, free trade, and visa-free travel. In many cases, this prospect provided a crucial impetus for policymakers to stay the course in the face of acute economic and social challenges.

    No such prospect was given to Russia in the 1990s. Indeed, overtures from Moscow were often met with silence. On December 21, 1991, as NATO diplomats gathered at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels to meet with their counterparts from former Warsaw Pact countries, Russian Ambassador Nikolai Afanasyevsky read out a letter from President Yeltsin to NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner vowing to work toward “strengthening stability and cooperation on the European continent” and “raising a question of Russia’s membership in NATO … as a long-term political aim.” According to contemporary press accounts, “NATO officials, from Secretary-General Wörner on down, seemed too taken aback by the Russian letter to give any coherent response.” By the time Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev finally received assurances from the Clinton administration that the United States would be open to Russian membership in NATO in 1995, the democratic window in Russia itself was rapidly closing. As for potential accession to the European Union — which, under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, was supposed to be open to “any European state,” Russia being the largest one — that prospect was not offered to Yeltsin’s government even as a distant possibility. Western reluctance to accept the nascent democratic Russia as one of its own would later be skillfully played by Putin’s propaganda to portray the community of democracies as inherently anti-Russian.

    Many of those mistakes came not from malice but from unpreparedness, both in Russia and in the West. For many Western policymakers in the late 1980s, the very prospect of democratic changes in Russia seemed to be in the realm of fantasy — whether because of confident predictions by Kremlin-watchers that the Soviet regime was secure and stable, or because of the misguided (and offensive) stereotype that Russians are somehow inherently unsuited for democracy — a stereotype that Ronald Reagan had described in his Westminster speech as “cultural condescension, or worse.” In fact, it is a matter of historical record that when Russians were able to choose their fate in a free election — be it the State Duma election in 1906, the Constituent Assembly vote in 1917, or the presidential election in 1991 — they chose democracy over dictatorship, and by a landslide. Democratic reformers in Yeltsin’s government were equally unprepared for the momentous task before them, making mistake after mistake and ignoring advice from those who knew better, including Bukovsky and the prominent pro-democracy lawmaker Galina Starovoitova, the author of the unsuccessful lustration bill. Honest mistakes were compounded by cynical schemes by those more interested in personal enrichment than in the success of Russia’s democratic experiment. That unprepared-ness of the early 1990s came with a high cost — primarily for Russia but also, eventually, for the West.

    It is imperative that we not repeat this error. If Russian history is any guide, big political shifts in our country come unexpectedly — including for their own participants. It is unlikely that the Czar’s interior minister, Vyacheslav von Plehve, a fervent advocate for a “small victorious war” with Japan in 1904, expected that war to result in Russia’s first revolution a year later. In a speech in Zürich in January 1917, the exiled Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin told a group of Swiss social democrats that “we of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution,” but the revolution in Russia began six weeks later. In early August 1991, as I remember myself, no one predicted that the Soviet regime would not survive to the end of the month — and the Soviet Union itself to the end of the year.

    Today we hear familiar tunes, both from Kremlin propagandists and from their apologists in the West: that Putin’s regime is secure; that he is popular among Russians; that any alternative would be worse. As proof we are supposed to accept the results of bogus elections, with opponents disqualified from the ballot, and Putin’s public approval numbers in an unfree society where people are hesitant to share political opinions with strangers; and the false image of unanimity carefully crafted by state media. “There is no Russia without Putin,” as Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Duma, has said publicly — perhaps the biggest insult to my country I have ever heard.

    In truth — and despite the coercion and the pervasive propaganda — there are millions of Russians who have a different vision: one of a modern country that would respect its laws and play a constructive international role; that would be accountable to its own citizens and be respected rather than feared in the world. This Russia can already be seen — not in the dour halls of the rubberstamp legislature or in the staged shouting matches on state-run television, but in the hopes and the aspirations of Russia’s youth, the people who never witnessed any political reality except Putin’s but who are growing tired of a two-decade rule by one man whose circle increasingly resembles Leonid Brezhnev’s ageing Politburo. Even with the inevitable skewing of public opinion, surveys conducted by the independent Levada Center in the run-up to Putin’s sham plebiscite waiving presidential term limits in 2020 showed that the prospect of his continued rule split Russians fully in half, with most of those below the age of thirty in opposition. Perhaps more tellingly, a clear majority of Russians of all ages, 62 percent of them, wanted to age-limit Putin out of the presidency, while 59 percent said it was time for “decisive, large-scale” change in the country.

    The signs of this coming change are unmistakable. In local elections across the country — most spectacularly in Moscow in 2019 — pro-regime candidates have been losing to technical spoilers and political no-names even after real opponents had been disqualified from running. It should be difficult to lose elections when the opposition is not on the ballot, but such is the growing public fatigue with the system that Putin’s party is managing it — and this is likely to be repeated nation-wide in the parliamentary election in September. In a realization of the Putin’s regime’s greatest fear — its phobia after a series of “color revolutions” toppled authoritarian leaders in other post-Soviet states — Russians are increasingly willing to go to the streets to challenge the system — as hundreds of thousands did across the country, defying official threats and police violence, to protest the arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in January.

    With his skillful social media outreach, his unique appeal to the young generation, and his organizational prowess, Navalny has emerged as Putin’s most dangerous challenger, attacking the regime not only over its repression, but also over its weakest spot: corruption. His investigative video detailing Putin’s lavish palace on the Black Sea has been viewed by a hundred million people, more than the combined audiences of Russia’s state television networks. The Kremlin has tried to silence Navalny in traditional ways: first, by an attempted poisoning, a method borrowed from the Soviet KGB and increasingly popular under Putin (it was tried — twice — against the author of this essay), then by arrest and imprisonment. The effect, it seems, has been the opposite, only strengthening Navalny’s public appeal and moral clout. As history shows, most dictatorships fall not under the power of their opponents but under the weight of their own mistakes. It seems Putin’s will not be an exception.

    Boris Nemtsov had long predicted that demands for change in Russian society would reach a critical point around the mid-2020s — and while no one can say exactly when or how this will happen, the more far-sighted are already preparing: organizing grassroots campaigns; building, despite the regime’s best efforts, a vibrant civil society on the ground; running in municipal elections to gain invaluable experience; learning to stand up for themselves in the face of police brutality during street demonstrations. Needless to say, any change in Russia can and should — and eventually will — come from Russians themselves. It is important, however, that Western democracies stay true to their values by refusing to accept or legitimize Putin’s attempts at further usurpations of power (including an extension of his rule, in violation of the term limit, in 2024); by stopping the import of corruption into their markets and financial institutions and finally targeting the Kremlin’s dark money abroad; by resisting calls for yet another “reset” or “détente” with an abusive and aggressive regime; and, above all, by engaging in dialogue with Russian society in anticipation of the task of integrating a post-Putin Russia into the community of law-abiding democracies — this time, for everyone’s sake, successfully. Just imagine the difference a democratic Russia would make for the world. Sooner or later, that day will come. With the right efforts and a shared commitment, it may come a little more quickly.

    Reckoning with National Failure: The Case of Covid

    Epidemics are not part of America’s collective memory. The colonial era’s smallpox and yellow fever epidemics, the three cholera epidemics of 1832, 1849, and 1866, the great flu pandemic of 1918 — none of these left a deep imprint on the national consciousness. None fit into a larger national story, at least none that Americans cared to tell. If the polio epidemic of the early twentieth century is remembered, it is mainly because it led to the polio vaccine and fits into a story about the triumph of medical science and American know-how. The AIDS epidemic is still a vivid memory in part because of its effect on the mobilization of the LBGT movement and an expanded vision of human rights. We Americans like our tragedies to have a happy ending. 

    A practical, inventive, yes-we-can people: that is the version of America many of us remember hearing about and believing in from childhood. Until recently, contagious disease has not troubled that understanding, and for good reason — experience has given us grounds for confidence. Advances in medicine have subdued the most lethal contagions. Disease hangs over all of us individually, but it has not threatened our collective life, much less our sense of ourselves.

    The Covid19 pandemic, however, will likely figure in our history in a way no previous national encounter with disease in the United States ever has. It is too big and disturbing a horror to be forgotten — not merely a medical story but also a social and cultural one: a story about a country unable to contain the forces of unreason within it. The American response to Covid19 has encapsulated an era when a nation that has always thought of itself as a success has had to confront the possibility that its luck has run out. At moments of crisis, from the Revolution to the Civil War and two world wars, the United States has not only benefited from its institutions and its wealth. It has also been exceptionally fortunate in political leadership. But it was America’s distinct misfortune in 2020 to confront a new and deadly virus at a time when a plague was already consuming its political life. Politics always matters for health and disease. Political decisions shape social structures and the allocation of resources, which in turn influence who gets sick and dies. Ordinarily, however, the chains of causality from politics to disease are long and complex. Not so this time. The impact of politics on the Covid19 pandemic was immediate and direct. 

    If Covid19 had struck in the decades before Donald Trump became president, it probably would not have mattered whether the administration in office was Republican or Democratic. The president would have turned to the nation’s leading experts in public health and medicine, relied on their counsel, and rallied the nation to cooperate in stopping the spread of the disease. Unlike AIDS in the 1980s, Covid19 did not inherently provoke culture-war divisions. A minimally rational president of either party would have seen the pandemic as an opportunity of the same kind that presidents have had in wartime to rise above partisanship and become the nation’s defender. 

    That is not to say the American response would have been ideal. It would have had to overcome the longstanding inequities of its healthcare system and its underinvestment in public health. And because Covid19 was a new threat, any administration might have made mistakes, especially at the beginning of the pandemic when critical scientific questions about the disease were clouded in uncertainty. But Trump did not simply make mistakes stemming from inadequate scientific knowledge or other factors beyond his control. He deliberately misled the public. He promoted bogus cures. He modeled antisocial behavior. He held rallies that put his own supporters and their communities at risk of infection, and he turned the White House itself into a superspreader venue. To suit his political interests, his aides muzzled scientists in the government and overruled the public health guidelines they developed. Above all, Trump so thoroughly politicized measures such as the adoption of masks and social distancing that he made the denial of scientific evidence and the defiance of scientific judgment into emblems of Republican identity. Sucked into Trump’s world of “alternative facts” or lacking the courage to speak up, other national leaders of his party either supported him or kept silent.

    Much of the historical significance of the Covid19 pandemic would be lost, however, if we reduced it to Trump and the Republicans who buckled under him. The failure in the national response to the pandemic is a larger story and a longer one. The forces of unreason in American politics have been building up on the right for some time. Talk radio, cable news, and social media have provided new channels for disseminating conspiracy stories and other falsehoods. Polarization has become a road to power. The “infodemic” that accompanied the pandemic reflected a prior pattern, a wider pattern — a pre-existing condition, you might say: the growing use of the internet and social media for disinformation and the desperate countervailing efforts to bring the technology under control to serve rational interests in wellbeing.

    The Covid19 virus came to our shores when we were already in the throes of a different sort of virality. Contemporary changes in information technology have affected the pandemic in many ways. Technology has divided Americans along class and racial lines. People who could do their jobs online have been generally safe, healthy, and even prosperous, while those who have to do their work in person have been exposed to higher odds of infection and unemployment. The disparities in who got sick and died partly followed from that objective difference in risk. Covid19 entered a politically polarized and economically divided America, and it intensified the divisions.

    As 2020 ended, the United States counted nearly 350,000 deaths from Covid19, putting it fourth among the world’s large, high-income countries in deaths from the disease per 100,000 population, surpassed only by Belgium, Great Britain, and Italy. (The toll in the United States may reach 600,000 deaths in 2021, according to projections in late January.) The East Asian societies that successfully controlled the pandemic offer a stark contrast. While the United States had 100.6 Covid19 deaths per 100,000 population in 2020, Japan had a rate of 3 per 100,000, South Korea 2 per 100,000, and Taiwan and Thailand under 1. If the United States had been able to keep its rate to South Korea’s 2 per 100,000 in 2020, we would have had only about 7,000 deaths instead of almost 350,000. In 2019 a survey of international experts in health security had rated America the best prepared nation in the world to deal with a pandemic. But those experts had overlooked a critical factor. They overlooked politics. The United States has been dealing with a pandemic in a time of political derangement.

    Everything about the Covid19 pandemic, including where it struck first, came to be seen through the prism of parti-san politics. The virus arrived early in 2020 in the blue states and had its most severe impact on Democratic constituencies, a pattern that influenced how Trump and other Republicans framed the crisis. The disease then spread into the red states and by the November election was taking its highest toll in those areas. But by then Republicans had so successfully excused Trump from responsibility and minimized the suffering from the pandemic that its rise in the red states appeared to have little or no impact on Trump’s support there.

    The early outbreaks of the virus in coastal cities had nothing to do with their Democratic politics. A contagious disease originating abroad and spreading through contact was bound to arrive first in metropolitan centers with international connections and spread most rapidly through densely populated urban areas. The demographic profile of the victims was also predictable, since those areas had large numbers of low-income racial minorities who suffered from high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions that made them especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. In the early months of 2020, no one had drugs or other means of treating the virus itself. As the numbers of patients surged during March and April, medical facilities in New York and elsewhere also lacked critical resources such as testing capacity and personal protective equipment. Instead of a coordinated national response, however, the Trump administration left the problem largely to state governments, forcing them to compete with one another as they sought out resources in short supply.

    What would have happened if Covid19 had struck the red states first? While it is impossible to know for sure, Trump might well have responded with more urgency and been less inclined to say — as he did to a rally last year — that the pandemic was the Democrats’ “new hoax.” The early geography of the pandemic allowed the president and other Republicans to suggest that the problems of the blue states were their own fault, the result of their own leadership, indeed, their whole governing ethos. The president made it clear that he did not regard the cases and the deaths in politically hostile regions as his responsibility: “If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level.” This was false: by September, when he made those remarks, the rate of new cases in the red states was substantially higher than in the blue states — and it was about to go much higher still.

    The federal government’s failure to stem the pandemic began with the delayed development of a test for the virus and a disorganized response to travelers from China and Europe. On January 13, two days after Chinese scientists published the genome for the novel coronavirus, the World Health Organization issued a protocol for creating a diagnostic test. (The virus would later be named “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2,” or SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the disease Covid19.) While several countries immediately deployed a test using those instructions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta was unable to do so until February 28, a full forty-six days later. As the Washington Post subsequently reported, “The agency squandered weeks as it pursued a test design far more complicated than the WHO version and as its scientists wrestled with failures that regulators would later trace to a contaminated lab.” The Food and Drug Administration, which could have approved alternative tests, also failed to act expeditiously. Even after a workable test was approved, the government failed to ramp up testing at commercial and university laboratories, and testing shortages persisted for months. Although evidence began emerging in January that people who had no overt signs of illness could transmit the virus, CDC officials were slow to acknowledge that possibility and, with testing kits in short supply, did not recommend testing individuals who had been exposed but reported no symptoms.

    Although the testing failure originated within the CDC, the delay in correcting it and the persistent testing shortages reflected a failure of leadership at the highest levels of government. In 2018, Trump had shut down the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense in the National Security Council, which is part of the White House. (President Biden has restored it.) When problems developed in global supply chains for N95 masks, chemical reagents for tests, and other resources, Trump turned instead to an ad hoc White House team of business consultants assembled by his son-in-law, which proved unequal to the task.

    The delay in both testing and recognition of asymptomatic transmission contributed to the failure to identify foreign travelers carrying the virus into the country in early 2020. From mid-January to the end of February, while other countries began identifying and isolating carriers of the virus, the United States did not have the requisite diagnostic technology. On January 31, the day after the WHO declared a global health emergency, Trump announced restrictions on travel by non-citizens from China. But during the next two months, an estimated 40,000 returning citizens and others who fell under various exceptions to the travel ban arrived from China, and were often subject to nothing more than cursory questioning before being sent on their way and told to quarantine voluntarily for two weeks. Although local public health authorities were supposed to check with them later, the follow-up was haphazard. In any case, the virus had already entered the country during January, when at least 13,000 travelers a day had been arriving on flights from China. Trump announced restrictions on European travel on March 11, but as later genomic tracing would show, travelers had already brought a European strain of the virus to New York at least a month earlier. Although the travel restrictions may have bought some time, they were too little and too late, and enforcement was too lax and disorganized, to prevent the virus from gaining a foothold.

    The United States could still have kept infection rates low if in the early spring it had adopted policies that reflected the evolving scientific understanding of the virus and its transmission. Those policies would have included the general promotion of masks and social distancing and the development of the three-part regime that other countries established for extensive testing, isolation of the infected, and systematic tracing of their contacts. Instead, the White House followed an erratic course from February to April before turning against a national public health effort and undermining a rational response to the pandemic.

    Trump was so concerned about the appearance of a growing pandemic that he sought to stifle public warnings from health officials that were aimed at persuading Americans of the need for change. Talking privately with the journalist Bob Woodward, Trump clearly recognized the seriousness of the disease: “This is deadly stuff. You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. … It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” Publicly, however, he was saying there was nothing to worry about. On February 25, 2020 Trump said he thought the coronavirus was “a problem that’s going to go away.” So he was enraged when on that same day Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, issued a scientifically warranted warning that community spread of the virus was inevitable and Americans needed to consider drastic changes in their everyday lives, triggering a sharp fall in the stock market. CDC officials were thereafter directed to clear all public statements about Covid19 with the White House, and Messonnier was sidelined. The politicization of the pandemic was complete. Two days later Trump publicly speculated that, “like a miracle,” the virus might just disappear. 

    National politics kept interfering with national competence. Trump also undermined the adoption of masks when the CDC changed its recommendations on their use. At first, partly for fear of exacerbating shortages of N95 and surgical masks for medical use, both the WHO and CDC did not recommend that the public at large obtain masks. Basing their judgment on research on earlier diseases, scientists also disagreed during the early months of 2020 about whether ordinary cloth masks would be effective in preventing transmission of the coronavirus. Some were emphatically opposed. “Stop buying masks!” the Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted on February 19. “They are  not  effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” This was an instance of a legitimate mistake made at a point when knowledge of the virus was just developing. 

    Yet a scientific consensus in favor of public use of cloth masks emerged as evidence began to demonstrate that masks did limit transmission, indeed that they were crucial for the general public because people who contracted the virus were most likely to infect others before they developed symptoms. But when the CDC on April 3 recommended that Americans wear “non-medical, cloth masks” in public places, the president said, “I don’t see it for myself.” Not only did he and other members of his administration ignore the guidance; the president mocked people who did wear masks.

    Trump turned decisively against a concerted national effort during the spring. On March 16, he agreed to adopt federal guidelines for “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” including recommendations for Americans to work from home whenever possible and to avoid discretionary travel and shopping trips, eating or drinking at bars and restaurants, and gathering in groups of ten or more people. Reluctantly, at the end of March he extended those guidelines for another fifteen days. By then a group of states, most of them led by Democratic governors, had issued more comprehensive stay-at-home orders. Research has shown that the measures adopted in March and April prevented millions of cases, “flattening the curve” and thereby, in the short term, preventing hospitals and other facilities from being overwhelmed, as they had earlier been in northern Italy and New York City.

    That delay was supposed to provide time to establish a testing-isolating-tracing regime and to identify targeted measures for limiting spread so as to allow communities in stages to resume normal activities. Targeted measures, such as closing bars, restaurants, and large indoor gatherings, would have had far less cost to the economy than across-the-board lockdowns. But it was not long before Trump became impatient with restrictions at any level. Some of his advisers told him that the pandemic was ebbing, just the rationale he was looking for to abandon all regulation. For a few days in mid-April, it seemed as though Trump was going to insist that the response to the pandemic be entirely under his own control. “When somebody is the president of the United States,” he said, “the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be.” Three days later, however, as part of what aides called a “state authority handoff,” the White House coronavirus task force issued reopening guidelines, and Trump told the governors, “You’re going to call your own shots.” But he didn’t mean that, either. Ignoring his own administration’s criteria for relaxing restrictions, he began tweeting denunciations of Democratic governors who failed to “liberate” their states.

    During the spring, the president was increasingly at odds with the scientific community and his own government’s public health officials. Shunting aside the experts, he took over the daily public briefings on the pandemic, using that platform to make boasts, give false reassurances, and pass along misinformation, most notoriously about an unproven and later discredited treatment (the infamous hydroxychloroquine) and the potential value of injecting disinfectant to kill the corona-virus. In May, after officials including Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recommended greatly increased testing, Trump said that testing was “overrated”: “When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.” Repeatedly, White House aides intervened with the CDC to stop it from issuing public health guidelines that conflicted with Trump’s political message. The CDC’s chief of staff later told the New York Times, “Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won.”

    Trump’s messaging, designed to further his political interests among his base, fostered a narrative among his supporters that the coronavirus was overblown, and that the disease was not nearly as serious or extensive as the media were saying. But the numbers of cases and deaths kept rising through the summer and fall as the virus raged in rural areas and red states that were spared earlier. Some Republican governors finally did adopt regulations concerning masks and social distancing, but others, such as the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, refused to impose any restrictions. In June, at a time when Covid19 cases were still low in South Dakota, Noem invited Americans who liked how well the state was handling the coronavirus to come there. From August 7 to August 16, tens of thousands of motorcyclists arrived, converging on the small town of Sturgis for an annual motorcycle rally and spending time at its bars, restaurants, and tattoo parlors, generally without masks. By November, South Dakota’s rate of cases and deaths was among the highest in the country. 

    Earlier in the year, when Trump and other Republicans blamed the blue states for high rates of Covid19, the leaders of those states were dealing with a crisis that had been thrust upon them by forces beyond their control. But the later surge of the virus in the red states occurred when more was known about limiting transmission, and Trump and Republican leaders such as Governor Noem refused to act on the basis of that knowledge. Indeed, they passed off failure as freedom. Their refusal to require masks and social distancing showed how dedicated they were to freedom and how indifferent to danger. And it worked: the voters of those states did not hold them responsible for being the superspreaders that they were. In the wake of the November election, an analysis showed that 93 percent of the counties in the nation with the highest numbers of new cases per capita voted for Trump.

    While Trump and the Republican leadership were the immediate source of America’s catastrophic failure in the pandemic, they did not act alone or in isolation. They had the active support of right-wing media, and they benefited from the unguarded channels for the dissemination of falsehood created over the preceding quarter-century. In the right-wing world, the coronavirus was not the big problem that it was being made out to be; on the contrary, the mainstream media and the “deep state” were in league with Democrats, deceiving the public about what was generally a mild illness, all in an effort to limit freedom and bring down the president. Hatred of government has long been the basis on which the dissimilar elements of the right — evangelicals, business interests, the anti-vaxxers and anti-taxers — have been able to unite. Now the same hatred was mobilized against public health measures.

    Conspiracy stories are falsehoods of a particular kind, involving claims of massive collaboration in deception. The idea that climate change is a hoax requires believing that scientists all over the world have conspired in making up evidence of rising temperatures, melting polar ice, and other signs of global warming. The idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump requires believing that election officials all over the United States conspired in tampering with the results and that the judges who rejected those claims, including many Republican appointees, were all in on the “steal.” And the idea that the Covid19 pandemic was overhyped requires believing that scientists, front-line health workers, and public health officials joined together in another gigantic conspiracy.

    The attraction of the political right to conspiracy thinking is hardly new. But until the past quarter century, the Republican Party and mainstream media were generally able to limit the reach of the conspiracy-obsessed far right. By Trump’s presidency, however, Republican leaders had mainstreamed the fringe. Figures who used to be consigned to the political wilderness had gained a dominant role in both the party and its principal channels of communication. 

    The effect of that shift on public health was already evident under Barack Obama. In 2009, when scientists warned that the fall would bring a particularly dangerous flu — the H1N1 strain — right-wing media figures opposed Obama’s efforts to persuade Americans to get vaccinated. Glenn Beck, who had a Fox News program at the time, said that “you don’t know if this [vaccine] is going to cause neurological damage like it did in the 1970s” and that he would do “the exact opposite” of what the government advised. Rush Limbaugh told his listeners, “I am not going to take it [the H1N1 vaccine], precisely because you are now telling me I must. . . . I don’t want to take your vaccine. I don’t get flu shots.” According to an October 2009 Pew survey, Democrats were 50 percent more likely than Republicans to say they planned to get vaccinated. Skepticism about the vaccine among Republicans, according to a study by the political scientist Matthew Baum, was concentrated among those who relied on cable news, the internet, and talk radio rather than network television news. Republicans were predisposed against any Obama policy, but the key factor, Baum argues, was the breakup of the earlier “informational commons” that existed when Americans from different viewpoints watched the same TV news programs. The change in communication may have had real-world consequences in 2009: red states had both lower flu vaccination rates and higher death rates from the flu that year than blue states did. 

    By 2020, there was even less of an information commons as a result of the decline of newspapers and network television and the growth of social media and partisan websites. Republicans and Democrats had separate sources of information and often wholly opposed understanding of basic facts. Unlike the much-denounced mainstream news organs, the right-wing media proudly refused to observe such conventions of journalism as checking facts and making corrections. The social media platforms contributed to the spread of misinformation. As studies of online communication have shown, people are more likely to share false information than accurate information. False information has the advantage of triggering more powerful emotions. In addition, the clustering of likeminded people in social networks tends to encourage more extreme views, a process known as “group polarization.” Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media also set their ranking algorithms to maximize “user engagement,” which often meant directing people to extremist and unreliable sources. For example, even when users watched a scientifically reliable video about vaccines, YouTube’s “up next” recommendation algorithm pointed them to an anti-vaccination video.

    Until 2019, the social media platforms rejected any responsibility for the misinformation they were circulating about any subject, including health. Defending themselves as champions of free speech, they did not want to bear the costs of separating fact from falsehood and assuming the role that the press has long accepted. But in the midst of a resurgence of measles in mid-2019, Facebook and Twitter broke from their traditional policy and changed their ranking algorithms on vaccine information to favor authoritative medical sources. When people asked about vaccines, the platforms began directing them to the WHO and CDC, not to anti-vaccination groups with more followers.

    When the Covid19 pandemic began, the social media platforms confronted the same issue. Physicians reported cases of patients taking deadly remedies recommended online, such as bleach and highly concentrated alcohol, or refusing professional advice, citing posts they had seen on Facebook. In late February 2020, however, the platforms began extending to Covid19 the policies that they had already adopted on vaccination. Facebook reported that during March it displayed warnings on about forty million posts related to the pandemic and that by late April had “removed hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm,” such as claims that drinking bleach cures the virus. It was also directing people to reliable sources of information. But despite Facebook’s actions, the sober messages of public health authorities were poor competition for the masters of misinformation. During April 2020, the top ten health misinformation sites on Facebook had four times as many views as the CDC, WHO, and eight other prominent health-care institutions.

    The change in policy at Facebook and other social media platforms represented a major shift, but the companies were unable to stop the spread of misinformation. Repeatedly, claims that appeared first on the political fringe took off when groups or websites allied with the Republican Party shared or repeated them. Political legitimation was crucial to the spread of lies. For example, a video called “Plandemic,” posted by its maker on Facebook and other platforms on May 4, showcased a discredited researcher who claimed that masks could make wearers sick, vaccines for the coronavirus would be dangerous, and Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates were planning to gain money and power through the pandemic. After being promoted by a QAnon page and anti-vaccine activists, Plandemic took off when Trumpian “Reopen America” groups in different states began sharing it. Within a week it had been viewed more than eight million times. Eventually social media platforms began taking it down, but the damage had been done.

    Trump himself played a central role in the spread of misinformation. On July 27 he shared another video peddling misinformation, this one called “America’s Frontline Doctors,” helping it gain tens of millions of viewers for claims that masks did not work and hydroxychloroquine was a cure for Covid19. The video showcased several doctors of dubious reputation, including one doctor-pastor known for arguing that “demon sperm” in nighttime dreams cause disease in women. On September 1, during an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, Trump cited a statistic supposedly showing that only 6 percent of reported Covid19 deaths were in fact due to the virus. That claim had gone from a Facebook post with stops along the way in a QAnon page and the right-wing website Gateway Pundit, eventually reaching a Trump campaign advisor, the president himself, and Fox’s audience. These were not exceptional cases. A study by researchers at Cornell University, which analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic, pinpointed one key driver of the “infodemic”: the president, who was himself the source of 38 percent of what the researchers called the “misinformation conversation.”

    The role of Trump and other Republican leaders in spreading misinformation about the pandemic created what seemed, at the time, to be an impossible problem for the social media platforms and the news media. Although the platforms and the media could indicate the claims were false, they could not suppress them. Claims by a president and leaders of one of the two major parties are inherently newsworthy; the public has a right and a need to know what they are saying, even when what they say is untrue. After the November election, Facebook and Twitter did block Trump from communicating lies that the election had been stolen from him. But he was already on his way out; the companies were unwilling to de-platform him when he was still firmly in power and his lies about the virus aggravated the pandemic. If they had done so at that time, they might have saved many lives. But the largest burden of responsibility for what Trump said and did properly belongs with him and the party that put him in office and continued to support him.

    By any reasonable standard, the United States failed in its response to the pandemic in 2020. Its mortality rate exceeded that of most peer countries in the West, and it was astonishingly higher than East Asian societies such as South Korea and Japan. Changes in life expectancy offer a particularly telling measure of how great a loss Americans suffered, and who suffered the most. According to a preliminary medium estimate (which will probably turn out to be low), the pandemic brought about a decline of 1.13 years in life expectancy for Americans in 2020. Beneath that overall decline lay enormous disparities by race: a decline of .68 years for whites, 2.1 years for African Americans, and 3.05 years for Latinos. The bigger losses in life expectancy for African Americans and Latinos stemmed from greater susceptibility to Covid19 at younger ages in those groups as well as higher mortality rates from the disease. The deaths among whites were disproportionately among the aged, particularly residents of nursing homes. A toxic combination of ageism and racism lay behind the right-wing view that the pandemic was overblown, or that the disease should be allowed to spread until the country reached “herd immunity.”

    The damage from the pandemic goes beyond lives lost. Many survivors suffer from “long covid,” which may impair their physical and mental health for years to come. Other long-term consequences will result from the disparate impact on families of the pandemic recession and the shutdown of in-person education. Whole sectors of the economy have been devastated, including many small businesses that have closed for good. 

    How to explain the catastrophic performance of the United States? A number of commentators have pointed to American individualism. The East Asian statistics that I have cited, for example, draw the response that those societies are too different culturally for a comparison to be valid. Not only did they impose stricter regulations, but their citizens, acting in a more communitarian spirit, also complied. According to the cultural argument, Americans would never have accepted such rules because of a deep-seated individualism that rejects governmental regulation of personal behavior. Individualism used to be an explanation of American achievements; in the pandemic it became an excuse for American failure. 

    Fortunately, we have some empirical evidence on whether regulations requiring masks made a difference in the United States. During the summer of 2020, Kansas conducted what amounted to a test of the efficacy of mask mandates. As a red state that might be presumed to be hostile to government regulation of personal behavior, Kansas is an instructive case. In July, the governor issued an executive order that mandated the use of masks in public places, while allowing counties to opt out. In an analysis of trends before and after the order went into effect, the CDC and Kansas Department of Health found that Covid19 incidence fell 6 percent in counties with the mask mandate and rose by 100 percent in the counties that rejected it. These results, the CDC report noted, were consistent with “declines in COVID-19 cases observed in 15 states and the District of Columbia, which mandated masks, compared with states that did not have mask mandates.” 

    During the same period when Kansas enacted its partial mandate, Trump and his advisers debated whether the president should adopt a mask mandate for the country. According to the Washington Post, internal Trump campaign polling data in July showed that more than seventy percent of voters in states targeted by the campaign favored “mandatory masks at least indoors when in public, and even a majority of Republicans support this.” One of the pollster’s slides read, “Voters favor mask-wearing while keeping the economy open” and support Trump “issuing an executive order mandating the use of masks in public places.” As part of this internal discussion, according to a New York Times report, Jared Kushner argued that embracing masks was a “no brainer” because Trump could say they were a key to enjoying the freedom to go safely to sports arenas and restaurants. But Trump concluded that “I’m not doing a mask mandate” after the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows warned that the base would “revolt” and that the president might not have the necessary legal authority, a point that had not worried Trump when he adopted other policies, such as excluding non-citizens from the Census count used for reapportionment.

     Since a mask mandate by Trump might have had ample public support, including from Republican voters, it seems difficult to argue that America’s individualist culture was the determining factor in the failure to adopt a mandate. Individualism might explain resistance to mask mandates if it had only one possible interpretation, which political leaders are unable to change. But even most libertarians accept a limit on individual liberty when actions threaten direct harm to others, as does the failure to wear a mask during a pandemic. Individualism was not the culprit. Political leaders also have the ability to shape opinion; as president, Trump radically shifted Republican sentiment on some issues, such as trade. As Kushner suggested, Trump could have spun “freedom” in favor of a mask mandate on the grounds that it would enlarge Americans’ freedom to enter public places in safety. The party that bills itself as the “party of life” could easily have found a rationale for Americans to avoid killing their grandparents and their co-workers. Trump may have thought, like Meadows, that his base would not tolerate a shift on masks, and perhaps some of them would not have tolerated it. But he may just have misconstrued his own political self-interest. 

    Another cultural explanation for American behavior during the pandemic points to dominant notions of masculinity. According to this interpretation, the use of masks and other protections run up against the social pressures on men to display fearlessness and a willingness to take risks. Some evidence does support the idea that gender affected the use of masks. During August-September 2020, Gallup asked respondents, “Do you always wear a mask when you can’t maintain social distancing in indoor settings?” Among Democrats, 90 percent of men and 93 percent of women said they did. Among Republicans, 40 percent of men and 56 percent of women said they did. While gender mattered in the responses, political identity mattered more.

    To be sure, gender affects political identity — the gender gap in voting has reached unprecedented levels in recent years — and Trump made use of gender stereotypes in ridiculing masks, just as he drew on anti-government individualism to oppose regulations. But those cultural tendencies did not determine his choices. Even from the standpoint of his political self-interest, Trump could have chosen to pursue power a different way. By the summer of 2020 he may have dug himself in, but if he had acted differently in the early spring, public attitudes and social behavior regarding masks and other protections might have evolved differently despite the individualism and hyper-masculinity championed on the right.

    The role of culture in explaining America’s national failure is similar to that of race and social inequality. American culture did not determine the choices that Trump made, but it allowed him to believe those choices would work. The appeals to individualism and masculinity were resonant enough among Republican voters to be a plausible short-term political strategy, even if ultimately disastrous for the country. Similarly, the racial and other socioeconomic disparities in the pandemic allowed Republican leaders and the right-wing media to say the coronavirus was overblown. After all, they were not talking to the groups who were suffering the most. Republicans had a different frame of reference. Even as millions of Americans lost their livelihoods, Trump kept pointing to the stock market, which hit new highs in 2020. Just as Trump’s response to the pandemic might have been different if the virus had first hit the red states instead of the blue states, his response might have been different if the pandemic had primarily hit a white, affluent population and had a bigger impact on the stock market and corporate America. 

    I do not mean to say Trump drew his support only from a white and privileged base. White working-class voters continued to support him, and while he lost African Americans and Latinos, he did better among them in 2020 than in 2016. People do not necessarily make their voting decisions on the basis of accurate calculations of risk. The virus did not kill or make seriously ill the majority of people who caught it. Individuals might discount the risk of contracting Covid19 if most or all the people they knew who had tested positive had recovered. Moreover, if their understanding of the corona-virus came from right-wing media they might discount the risk entirely, whereas they might worry that Democrats would shut down the economy and put them out of work. During 2020 many people may also have just changed their baseline expectations of risk. The virus may have just become one of many uncertainties in life to be endured as normal, not a reason to change behavior.

    As great a disaster as the pandemic was, it became normalized in a remarkably short time. By the final months of 2020, the number of Americans dying of the virus every day was about what the country had lost on September 11, 2001. But the shock had worn off, and it had become almost unimaginable that the United States would make the necessary changes in society and behavior to control the pandemic. Complacency about the virus had set in. Early failures had narrowed the field of alternatives. The rate of community spread was so high that contact tracing and testing appeared to be futile. The only solution became a technological fix — a vaccine. 

    America’s national failure in the pandemic has ominous implications for other challenges that America faces. Asking people to wear masks was not asking much of them. That many Americans refused to adopt so simple a change is a discouraging sign for how they will respond to demands that require sacrifice, such as reforms that are needed to deal with global warming. Climate change has evoked the same denial and defiance from the right as the pandemic, the same disregard for science, the same attraction to conspiracy stories. And just as Republicans dismissed the virus as overblown even when cases and deaths were growing in the red states, so they seem determined to ignore the realities of climate change even when they strike close to home. Disasters, such as the fires on the West Coast and the hurricanes in the Gulf, may become normalized. Alternatives may become unimaginable. Lying and manipulation for narrow political and economic gain may be become so routine that they no longer cause shock or indignation.

    The United States has had great achievements, but it has also been lucky to have capable leaders when it needed them most. Until 2016, it succeeded in keeping demagogues like Trump away from the presidency. The same forces of unreason were always there, but they now control one of America’s two parties. Although Trump is no longer in office, the political derangement that brought him to power is not yet over. Nor can we count on the supposed genius of our institutions to control it; there is only a hard struggle ahead to save those institutions and to get them to work at least as well as they once did. The pandemic is a warning about looming dangers. It is a cautionary tale that Americans must not forget if we are to escape from the derangement that has already cost so many lives and that threatens everything that we hold dear.

    Lament for the Maker

    At the museum of his life,
    his leather duffle coat is behind glass.
    It felt like a poem-protection center.
    It was my responsibility to go home,
    put food out in the same place every day,
    talk to the people who came to eat,
    then organize them, food and poetry being
    a nourishment that shares a syntax.
    There were many back roads to this far town,
    but at the end of a path over pluff mud
    I lay my shield down and stretched out on a bank.
    Wool-gatherer, day-dreamer, bird-dogger,
    I was sorry to have to leave,
    but my hands felt less tied.

    Like herons in a grove—or rain on mountains
    or in a deep ravine—the realm of the immortals
    releases and renews us. We want to live as if
    we are going to die tomorrow. We want to learn as if
    we are going to live forever. We want our bodies
    to belong to us. Wider seems the path. On the train,
    there was maple viewing and word games: alone, atone,
    bemoan, daemon: “Thy word is all, if we could spell.”
    The sun seemed hush-hush, then later,
    like a sword sinking thru stone. At the hotel,
    there was black tea and murmuring.
    After supper and a bath, I felt glad,
    drinking water at the sink,
    though usually I despair.

    Guns

    Stick in the mud, old fart, what are you doing
    to get the guns off the street? I am not here to pick
    on anyone. But now that they have shot Yosi,
    who ground my meat in Hingham, and his shiny pink
    meat-truck is for sale, I feel desolate. A gun is
    a vengeful machine exacting a price. A gun rejects
    stillness. It wants to get off. A man can be vain—
    almost like a god—but inside him is a carp biting
    the muck of a lake. A man who speaks too softly
    gets hit with a big stick and lopes along behind.
    A gun is minatory. Still, a week of kindness is greater.
    Run, hide, evacuate; don’t fire, duck, take cover.
    At Yosi’s ceremony, his family put a gold cloth on his face.
    Self-reliant, autonomous, tough, he lay in a shroud of silk.

    Glass of Absinthe and Cigarette

    This is a poem about a man who is dead.
    Sodomy laws treated him like a second-class citizen.
    There were ripple effects. With the aid of stimulants,
    he spoke like a truthteller and hungered for touch.
    Even when repugnant, his disinhibition seemed godlike,
    and what came out of him ravished me.
    Alas, tolerance builds rapidly, and many lines must be
    insufflated to produce that all-is-right-in-the-world euphoria:
    “Feeling good. R U there. Come right now.”
    To keep myself sane,
    I fled, dear reader,
    but I’d give my kingdom
    to see myself in those
    dilated black eyes again.

    Slowly in Haste

    Those leaf blowers sure make a lot of noise.
    Since love is the way, we nuzzle in the morning,
    but wake up to high-decibel screaming,
    dust, and exhaust smoke. More and more, being myself
    seems to oppose the nature of the world. I don’t want
    updated privacy statements; I don’t want to accept
    cookies; I don’t want active-shooter drills.
    Lustful, moody, shy, I want to keep revising myself,
    like a protean creature, but in a smart-phone free,
    non-GMO space. Something like the Quiet Car.
    Not hands-free though:
    I want to be adjusting the sails;
    a realist trims the sails
    and doesn’t whine about the wind.

    Don’t get me wrong—my life didn’t turn out as expected.
    Who knows what to expect out there? After
    a wandering path has led over weird abysses,
    I am here at the kitchen table eating cage-free eggs.
    I am a HE still. It would be okay if a horn blared to herald
    a finish, like in a symphony (“slowly in haste”).
    We suffer the ravages of Time & Weather, like trees holding on
    to their leaves for color-change. From spring to spring,
    we eat and avoid predators. The past intrudes,
    the present languishes, the future is uncertain.
    I hate leaving friends when the Here is simple and happy.
    As I put on the radio and drink a ginger ale,
    tanks and missiles surround the garden,
    the wild horses neigh.