Upon learning that Bill Clegg has recieved a Man Booker long list nod for a book that hasn’t even been published yet, I thought I’d resurrect this 2010 review of his earlier memoir. -JB

The downfall of Bill Clegg’s Portrait of An Addict As a Young Man is contained in the following sentence from the book: “There is only $9,000 and change in my back account, and the end is in sight.” Only nine grand? We should all have such a commanding height from which to survey our own approaching doom.

Clegg’s memoir—it is resolutely a memoir; it eschews reportage, forgets dates, and deliberately suffuses everything with a haze of uncertainty—is by no means the worst thing ever written about addiction. Simply by grace of its modest ambitions and abject tone it towers, morally and artistically, above the macho posturing of James Frey or the overwrought quirk-porn of Augusten Burroughs. It portrays a sordid episode without prurience, although it is sometimes discreet to a fault, and its occasional shyness about the author’s sexual debauches feels calculated and off-putting. Its prose is sharp and well-handled, if fairly quotidian, and the present-tense narration, which bothered me at first, works, establishing an intimacy and immediacy to events that occurred nearly a decade ago.

And yet as a “Portrait of an Addict” it is a failure, and it should probably have been titledPortrait of a Rich Dude on a Bender. The author begins with $70,000 in his checking account. Seventy thousand bucks! He ends with about a tenth of that, which is still more than most of us can claim. The timeframe is deliberately obscure, but seems to take place over just a few months, with several forays back to an appropriately traumatic childhood and to some undergraduate party days. During his swift decline-and-fall, Clegg does spend a brief moment in a crack-house with a woman whose possibly Caribbean accent he never manages to place, but otherwise his tale of depredation and woe seems to take place principally at chi-chi downtown hotels and airport Marriotts.

If it were a celebrity biography or a gossip-rag bit on Lindsay Lohan, we would feel less pity than gleeful contempt. How bad can you have it when your come-to-Jesus moment involves getting kicked out of the Soho Grand? Clegg is a sufficiently skillful author to make himself into a more sympathetic main character, but his story still never transcends its own most basic premise: a rich, privileged guy on a path of self-destruction.

Of course, addiction is an affliction without regard for race or class or sex. If we were better people, we would feel pity rather than contempt for poor Miss Lohan, and we should feel it likewise for Bill Clegg. Still, though he admirably captures the dullness and monotony of an addict’s substance-seeking, how many times can you hear about the problem posed by $200 ATM withdrawal limits in the course of trying to get a thousand bucks in cash before you throw the book across the room. Oh, boo-hoo! How seriously can you take a crackhead who, when he exhausts the holes on his belt, thinks only that he will have to find a leatherworker when he gets to Rome to punch new ones. A leatherworker in Rome? I suppose it beats shoplifting a grommet-punch from the Home Depot.

Clegg keeps his book self-focused, which is true to the fact and spirit of addiction, and most of the other characters are peripheral, including his own dying mother. Only one emerges in his own right: the boyfriend, Noah, who is invariably described in reviews of the book as “long-suffering.” That is one way to describe him. A more accurate would be to call him a terrible enabler. Whether or not Clegg intended it as such, his depiction of Noah is a teary-eyed dope whose infinite forgiveness only fuels the author’s decline. There is a particularly awful scene where Noah literally lays on a hotel bed holding Clegg’s hand while a cracked-out Clegg gets screwed by a male prostitute. He tells Clegg that it’s okay. He loves him. That’s a lot of things, but it isn’t exactly love.

Eventually Clegg gets shipped out West, gets into rehab, and seems to find sobriety. It occupies only a few pages, and is very oblique. There is an obscure suggestion that he is in a twelve-step program (“days are just days”), but it is tossed off. He reconciles with his father. He moves back to New York, where he immediately moves into a light-filled terrace apartment with views of the Empire State building. He does not work for a year. This is more or less the end of the book, and once again its crippling flaw. The bottom of Clegg’s barrel looks an awful lot like a kind of success. He may have fallen from his social class, but there is always someone with a wallet to make certain he doesn’t have to live like it.

There are no tickets for that altitude
once held by Hellas, when the Goddess stood,
prince, pope, philosopher and golden bough,
pure mind and murder at the scything prow–
Minerva, the miscarriage of the brain.

Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

-Robert Lowell, “Beyond the Alps”

 

A little more than a year ago, I wrote a brief piece on the inevitable national expansion of gay marriage, in which I tried to explain to self-described marriage traditionalists that they’d effectuated the inexorable demise of their of civil monopoly by making married people themselves into a special, privileged class:

Legal marriage is larded with all sorts of benefits and privileges, and indeed, it was often the very proponents of marriage as a distinct social good who held the larding needle. Married people are a special class of citizen, and that is the crux of the matter. A society used inheritance incentives and insurance benefits to promote a sacrament; now you want complain that the sacred has been subsumed by the economic, the holy spirit swatted aside by the invisible hand.

Remember, the immediate precursor to Obergefell was Windsor, a case about inheritance. Conservatives like to deride the liberal-ish, technocratic belief that ticky-tacky economic incentives can really drive human behavior, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the huge accretion of exactly such incentives was the driving force and legal foundation of the claim that gays’ inability to marry represented a huge zone of civic exclusion. For all the #lovewins, for all Anthony Kennedy’s charming, if slightly embarrassing, raptures to the blessed dignity of the union of two souls, on a practical level, it was inheritance, tax, adoption, immigration, etc. that undergirded the long-term legal strategy toward marriage equality. With the possible exception (contested, I remind you, mostly by the same people who oppose gay marriage) of redressing severe and historic discrimination, the state shouldn’t confer legal, economic benefits of such scope and magnitude on any one group to the exclusion of another.

I remain ambivalent about marriage as the centerpiece of the struggle for LGBT rights, not in the least because, for all the reasons I mention above, it remains a restrictive and selective civil institution. Why, for example, shouldn’t a single person be able to sponsor the legal immigration of his best friend or an adult caring for an elderly person in her home receive the same tax benefits as a married couple? As of the last census, just 51% of Americans were married, after all. And, as a lot of LGBT activists have long pointed out, issues of discrimination in work and housing, homelessness, mental illness, addiction, etc. persist in the “gay community”—they are no less acute now that some of us are able to marry. None of this is to say that I won’t perhaps avail myself of the option now that it’s available. If I never especially imagined myself standing under a chuppah, I wouldn’t exactly mind, and as for all those benefits, well, the corollary to my old adage that you should never begrudge anyone his successful scam is that you should never turn up your nose at a good discount.

But regardless of my ambivalence—both practical and moral—I find the so-called traditionalist position ever more incoherent the more I encounter its variations.

“Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical,” said the Rev. Wilfredo De Jesús, the senior pastor of New Life Covenant Church, an Assemblies of God megachurch that has nearly 20,000 members on multiple campuses, most of them in Chicago.

“We won’t marry two men. That goes against our beliefs,” said Mr. De Jesús, who is known as Pastor Choco. He, like others interviewed, noted that over 2,000 years of Christian history, the church has often been at odds with the culture.

“We’re prepared to go to prison, or whatever occurs, but the church cannot change,” he said.

I put my head in my hands. Honey, you’re a Protestant. As I’ve written elsewhere, I take a much more sympathetic view toward religious particularism than today’s gaggle of loudly ignorant atheists, but while I can accept theological objections to same-sex marriage and to the so-called “practice of homosexuality,” anyone who wishes to propose “2,000 years of Christian history” as one of uninterrupted uniformity of moral vision and theology should go sit in the lonely chair for the next few hours to think about what they’ve done.

Easy enough to pick on American Evangelism, which has never been the most . . . learned of faiths. But even among the much, much smarter, I’m at once troubled and relieved by the weakness of the counterargument. My friend Wesley Hill, for instance, who has written frequently and movingly about his own choice to live as a celibate, gay Christian, has now written a couple of posts recently where, in regretting the decision—not so much gay marriage qua gay marriage as gay marriage as a symptom of a broader drift from what he believes to be a truly Christian sexual ethics—he places a great deal of the blame on his fellow Christians:

I think that for many, many (not all) gay people in America today, the options have not been (1) belong to a healthy, vibrant Christian community in which celibacy is held in high esteem and deep spiritual friendships with members of the same sex and opportunities for loving service and hospitality abound or (2) be in a romantic relationship with a partner of the same sex. That has not been the choice facing many gay and lesbian people. Instead, for many (not all) today, the options have been (1) be ostracized (or worse) in church and effectively live without meaningful same-sex closeness of any kind or (2) be in a romantic relationship with a partner of the same sex.

In short: traditional Christian communities have failed to offer gay people fellowship, spiritual belonging, spiritual friendship, and have therefore put themselves in a position where they are not so much in opposition to the moral choices of LGBT people but utterly and starkly irrelevant to them, except perhaps as a bad memory.

I think this may be true, but I think that Wesley’s (and other’s) notion that while historic Christianity (or Judaism, or any of the major religions for that matter) condemn certain sex acts as wrong, it doesn’t necessarily follow that those people “or their partners are somehow irretrievably perverse and that all their longings and loves are any further removed from God’s design than their heterosexual neighbors’ are,” is frankly anachronistic and does a great disservice to the—I’ll use the silly phrase—practicing homosexuals who laid all, all, the foundation blocks of a modern society, including its Christians, that views people of minority sexual and gender identities as anything other than irretrievably perverse; that the back-reading of the Biblical focus on acts, not identities, ignores the plain fact that, for Paul or for the authors of Leviticus, those identities did not exist; that it was only the persistence of people engaging in those acts who, centuries later, said forcefully and at great personal peril, we do these things because of who we are, and that in so doing established a who for society to accept. Orthodox religion simply did not arrive, a priori¸ at the conviction that gay people were fine as long as they refrained from sex. The long tradition of what we’d probably call homosocial friendship notwithstanding, I defy anyone to claim that any modern Christian acceptance of gay identity, whether or not it also accepts gay sexual acts, was the proximate result of anything other than the social and political activities of men and women who did, in fact, have sex with people of the same sex. These impermissible acts were, in addition to being expressions of love and desire, inherently political and inherently moral; gay sex expanded the moral imagination. Put that in your Pride parade.

I should note that this isn’t meant as a criticism of those gay Christians who do choose to live celibately in their faith, a form of spiritual asceticism that I admire, and I also rather admire the open grappling with the idea that perhaps religion must abandon political opposition and turn inward in order to shine outward:

What I am interested in is Griffiths’ final sentence from this old blog post, which has haunted me ever since I first read it: The church’s calling now, and all the more so now that Griffiths’ hypothetical legalization of same-sex marriage is now the law of the land, is to burnish the practice of marriage until its radiance dazzles the pagan eye.

(Although I admit, my Jewish self can’t help but laugh incredulously at the idea of being called a pagan by a Catholic. LOL.) But in this very abandonment, the Christian case admits its inadmissibility in the present circumstance.

Any way you look at it, the religious case against civil marriage is very weak, ultimately little more than question-begging with an admixture of solipsism. It asks that its own moral prejudices be rewarded, literally, in the form of money and legal status but retreats into semantic obscurantism when confronted with the inequity of such an arrangement in a plural society. In a way, the opponents I most respect are the silly Southern judges now proclaiming that they’ll stop marrying folks altogether. It is the only actually morally consistent opposition position, although they arrive at it wholly by accident. Either civil marriage is secular, or sacramental marriage has no civil form. Choose.

“We look at teaching literature as teaching particular concepts and skills. So we maybe aren’t teaching an entire novel, but we’re ensuring that we’re teaching the concepts that that novel would have gotten across.”

–Kimberly Skillen, the district administrator for secondary curriculum and instruction in Deer Park, N.Y

In the tenth grade, my English teacher Ed
“God’s Gift to Warthogs” Cupp, who hated
teaching, though he loved to teach, awaited
with a hungover sense of flush-inducing dread
the answer to this question: “Having read
the brief excerpt from Melville’s Moby-Dick,
complete the sentence: Call me [blank].” Some prick
whose name I’ve now forgotten coughed and said,
“Crazy!” Now, I give the kid some props:
illiterate though he was, it was a joke
with a certain literary sense:
Melville’s underrated comic chops
do suggest you read a vast, baroque
jest, unless it’s stupidly condensed.

That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.

-Elon Musk

You can’t invent it; you can only co-
incide with its arriving, further be
confounded by its arrival’s constancy:
it can’t retreat, nor rush ahead, nor slow
itself; the subdivided moments go
careening, literally history;
the past is actual; the future’s only
concept and tense: it’s all verb and no
noun. A paradox of will is that
the will confuses being for becoming;
well, we presume that we can shape the next
from now’s conditions, the laboratory rat
assuming the food caused the maze, the numbing
shock. The food’s removed. The rat’s perplexed.

One of the great curiosities of our age is the uniform and universal commitment of so many of the enemies of America to bring about the end of the world. How exactly so geographically, linguistically, ethnically, historically, racially, politically, etc. diverse a group of bad guys ever managed this feat of doctrinal harmonization is one of the great mysteries; yet ever does it give me faith that all our schisms and differences may one day likewise be mended. Truly, for all our myriad differences and divisions, we are, each and every one of us, just dumb humans beneath the skin.

The latest of these is the Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL, or Da’ish, or DAESH—while our enemies all agree that the millennium is arriving any day now, our own deep thinkers are unable to agree on acronyms. ISIS—I’ll just use the commonest name for convenience—is the deadliest and most terrifying thing since the last deadliest and most terrifying thing, and the most recent edition of The Atlantic includes a long, dire, and encyclopedic treatment of all of the obscure religious beliefs that supposedly animate the group, which “already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom.” The Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas also rule areas larger than the United Kingdom, and are just as insanely violent, if not more so, but no one seems to believe this can be traced back to all those Santa Muerte candles. That cult, I think we’d all agree, is symptomatic rather than causal. But then again, those guys aren’t . . . The Muslims . . .

I’m going to skip to the end of a long essay to get to the meat of the matter. Graeme Wood, clearly worried that the obscurity of the foregoing theological exegesis and disputation will have failed to impress the casual reader with the magnitude of the threat, rummages around in the Serious Journalist toolkit before settling on the familiar hammer and nail, Hitler and Orwell. Which is which is really up to you. He finds Orwell confessing in 1940 that had “never been able to dislike Hitler,” then averring:

Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

Orwell wrote at least three good books and a number of fine essays, but much of his political writing has come to seem, in retrospect, quite facile, and this brief analysis of the rise of Hitler is the kind of contemporaneous analysis that subsequent history and historiography rendered questionable and incomplete at best. And in any event, for all his other merits, are we really going to ground our Nazi analogy on the pre-Blitz musings of a man who says he’s never been able to dislike Hitler?

The analogy becomes more tenuous when you consider that a couple thousand words earlier, the same author now spooking us with the bloody ghost of Hitler said:

The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State’s existence is high. But its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest.

Which renders it rather lesser in either its ideological import or its historical significance or, God knows, even its “humanitarian cost” than the Third Reich, and I’m reminded, as I so often am when I read alarmist Anglo-American narratives of the rise of this or that existential enemy of the ever-beleaguered yet somehow still-standing West, of the charmingly sincere Charlotte York of Sex and the City:

Harry Goldenblatt: [talking about his mother’s insistence that he marry a Jewish woman] Keeping tradition alive is very important to her. She lost family in the Holocaust.

Charlotte York: [makes a face]

Harry Goldenblatt: What?

Charlotte York: Well, now I can’t say anything because you’ve brought up… the Holocaust.

***

Wood makes a few other risible historical analogies, perhaps the silliest of which is:

[ISIS]’s rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.

This is silly, first and primarily, because it splashes like a tossed pebble into a lake of assertions about the zealously historical Islamism of ISIS; the article’s primary thesis is that we commit an egregious analytic error in assuming that ISIS’s fanaticism is somehow un-Islamic. Wood endeavors over thousands of words to convince us that, quite to the contrary, ISIS is very, very, very, like, very Islamic. Jones’s Peoples Temple had some prior antecedents and influences, but was largely sui generis; the Branch Davidians, meanwhile, were a 1950s offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, themselves a product of the foment of goofy Christianity in mid-19^th century America. No one would ever think to write an article pointing to the Davidian Seventh-Day Adventist belief in a Saturday Sabbath as proof that it represented a pure strain of undiluted Christianity, although Graeme Wood doesn’t appear to hesitate before he informs us that ISIS’s allusions to the renewed practice of slavery represent a truer interpretation of Islam than that of the 1.6 billion other Muslims who say that this is not the case.

Incidentally, Koresh isn’t only a silly example, but an ironic one. The Branch Davidians were a natty, perverse little cult of guns and polygamy, but they didn’t really trouble anyone outside their own tiny compound until the United States Government went in, guns a-blazing. Remind you of anything?

Every few paragraphs you run across similar boners, designed to shock presumably secular-ish Americans, for whom religiosity outside of the bland, summer-camp sing-alongs that constitute most church- and temple-going among us anymore is dreadful and primitive:

These forefathers are the Prophet himself and his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for all behavior, including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry.

Even dentistry! These little OMG moments, along with the supposed Muslim propensity for conspiratorial thinking, are the bright acid in the otherwise mundane braise; they get the saliva glands going. Those crazy Arabs! We live in a country in which millions of people believe they can improve their health by flushing imaginary “toxins” out of their systems, a nation in which health insurance pays for chiropractors, and we are supposed to murmur in disbelief at a bunch of primitives who turn to religious sources on proper dental hygiene? But what do they think about MMR vaccines?

In fact, accusations of millennial religious motivation have been applied to the American project in the Middle East. There was General Boykin yammering about the tremendous size and girth of his . . . God; there was George W. Bush nattering about Crusades or telling a bemused Jacques Chirac about Gog and Magog. There is a whole subset of conspiracy theorizing that proposes everything from 9/11 (an inside job!) to the Iraq War to US support of Israel is in the direct service of immanentizing some particularly hocus-pocus brand of New-Age Christian eschatology. You will note that these views are not frequently published in The Atlantic.

Finally, and as we inevitably must, we return to Hitler. “Centuries have passed,” Wood tells us,

since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.

The so-called wars of religion in Europe were no more simply men “dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes” than were the tens of millions slaughtered in the arcane theological conflict between Hitler and Stalin, which, by the way, occurred in the 1940s. Theological and ideological differences were in every case bound up with questions of politics, economics, land ownership, dynastic succession. How might we put it for the Facebook epoch: It’s Complicated.

And this, finally, is why analyses like Wood’s are so prominent (though they always claim to be voices in the wilderness), frequent (though they purport to be singular), and popular (though they imagine themselves boldly iconoclastic). Though they make every possible rhetorical gesture to suggest that their purpose is to discomfit their readers with terrifying and uncomfortable truths, they only ever serve to reconfirm what those readers are predisposed to believe: that far from complex phenomena inextricable from America’s—and “the West”’s—own inexorable militarist mucking-about in the Middle East, ISIS or al Qaeda or the Khorosan Group (remember them?), ad inf., each, at the moment of their middlebrow media apogee, represent a unique flowering of utterly alien religious superstition—a primitive evil which must be ultimately eradicated, or else.

But I happen to remember that, among other recent events, the United States and a few pals went in and smashed Iraq to smithereens, then warehoused a lot of its very angry young men in hasty prisons, out of which came the kernel of any number of currently belligerent groups, including ISIS. So when I read these inevitable articles, so full of worry about what we should do, I want only to remind everyone that for God’s sake, we made them; might we not make it worse?

If The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or The Financial Times or even The Economist are taken, broadly speaking, as the major organs of the financialized evangel, I still hold that it is The New York Times which best represents the way the rentier class in America self-perceives and self-represents. The former are a sort of priestly class; the Times is a congregant and a believer. It sits in the pews, prays to the gods, and authors the temple newsletter. When some doubt arises about the rightness of global capital, when some evidence appears that the augurs have been diddling the young pigeonkeepers behind the altar, it wrings its hand with worry; fortunately, all depredations are ultimately revealed to be aberrations—indeed, to be extravagantly so.

Signs and wonders! The Times has discovered, mirabile dictu, that “inequality” is not getting worse, as is the conventional wisdom. Not only that: it is getting better. “Inequality” is already a dire euphemism for capital—ownership of and access to—but let’s not reinvent the wheel again. The Times has discovered, or has, more accurately, discovered someone discovering, that if you look at the recent percentage changes in annual incomes, the very, very rich have seen far steeper declines. Ergo, therefore, and hallelujah.

I assume there’s a certain joy in delivering the good news that the world really is, after all, mounted on the back of a turtle. You may all recall, some years ago, that Stephen Pinker delivered the great, good news that the modern world is not only a kinder, less violent, more gentle place than it has ever been, but that it is measurably so. There’s the old saying about lies, damned lies, and statistics, but the last of these should really be percentages. David Bentley Hart was onto him:

Even so, the numbers do not add up. Pinker’s method for assessing the relative ferocity of different centuries is to calculate the total of violent deaths not as an absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global population. But statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens. And even where the orders of magnitude are not quite so divergent, comparison on a global scale is useless, especially since over the past century modern medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically extended life spans nearly everywhere (meaning, for one thing, there are now far more persons too young or too old to fight). So Pinker’s assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless.

In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion.

So too, this idea that a larger percentage change in a very large income number is in any meaningful sense a greater loss or gain than a commensurate change in a very small one. If a investment banker with a base salary of a million bucks makes two million in bonus in a very good year and only a million the next, his income has declined by a full third, but he’s still making two million bucks in a year. If a guy making twenty bucks an hour working 37.5 hours a week for fifty weeks a year has his hours cut back to just thirty hours a week, his income declines only 20%, but it represents the loss of 10 months’ rent. Also, he loses his health insurance. Also, he’s paying about a third of his income in taxes, whereas Joe Millionaire is at half that. Did we mention that the Times is looking only at pre-tax income. We mention it now.

You might argue in good faith that inequality doesn’t matter, that it’s fine and well to have a society in which a very few people are very rich and many people are just scraping by. I’d disagree, but there’s a legitimate argument that, so long as there exists some open path for the guy making forty grand a year to one day make forty million, however unlikely, then there’s not a structural problem. But to say, instead, that because very large incomes are more volatile than very ordinary incomes, therefore their recent declines represent a countervailing trend to the concentration of wealth is to engage in what I choose to interpret as an astonishing stupidity lest I have to believe it an even more amazing dishonesty.

In general, I take it as a wholly salutary sign that something as fundamentally inane as the largely (though not entirely) unofficial speech codes of (some) universities and a small subsection of online discourse might be perceived, for better or worse, as the sort of thing worthy of, what is that charmingly stupid American phrase? A national conversation. In a better world, we would spend a trillion dollars investigating who exactly is silencing whom with their withering verbal disapproval, while conflicts between nations would be fought and settled entirely by pseudonymous tweeters pwning each other for the cost of monthly broadband. Alas, the fallen state of Man, etc. Whatever Weird Physics may murmur in its fever dreams, there is, for us at least, no other world but this one. And hey, is it actually so bad that the merits of, say, intersectionality—as an idea, as a practice—merit discussion, even if only for the purpose of dismissal, in a major magazine? I’d say it’s not.

As a general rule, I find the more elaborate rituals of call-outs and trigger warnings as tiresome and banal as the political right, in which I’d include someone like Jonathan Chait. The second, in particular, with a basis in the subtle possibility of “re-traumatizing” the previously traumatized seems to me to suffer from the crystal vibrations of homeopathy and hypnotherapy: no one believes in anything that is actually true with such fervor. Humans surely suffer, and those who deviate from the broad norm suffer more and more deeply, but I think we are far more defined by our resiliency than by our traumas, and I believe in the corollary: that speech itself is what best transmutes the latter into the former. For all the hocus-pocus and pharmacological excess of the modern psychological disciplines, and for all its founders’ silly ideas, there’s some truth to your mom’s old saw. Maybe you’ll feel better if you just talk about it.

On the other hand, the complaints about this minor, if zealous, policing of the boundaries of acceptable discourse are so operatically hysterical (and yes, I’m aware of the irony of using that particular word; sorry), so grossly out of proportion to its actual reach and effect, that I feel compelled to take the side of the language cops—if only because it’s so absurd to call them cops. What you actually see, when the wild-eyed radicals from the gender studies collective, come baying about the Western Canon’s awfulness, is a minor exercise of political power by people who otherwise have very little—because of their age, because of their race, because of their gender, etc. That they so frequently flex this power within the institutions of their universities says little about the nature of their cause or the great meaning and vitality of the university. We all enact our political will within the confines of some proximate community. The staff meeting is closer than city council, which is nearer than Harrisburg, which is a shorter drive than Washington D.C. The dean is more likely to hear your petition than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And, obviously, people outside of the university rarely complain about any of this until, by accident of intersecting institutions, this local kind of politics gravely affronts the prerogatives of exactly such august power. When Condoleeza Rice gets disinvited from giving the same speech she has given ten thousand times before, it’s because that’s easier for some assistant vice provost for external affairs in the grand scheme of his every day at the office dealing with these kids than the opposite. The idea that this has anything to do with discourse, ideas, freedom, liberty . . . for God’s sake, leave the weed-smoking to the youth. No idea has ever been transmitted during a commencement address or convocation series in the history of commencement addresses and convocation series. These are opportunities to mutually burnish reputations by rubbing them against each other in a grotesque exhibit of hierarchical frottage that is itself the dourest form of pornography. In the meantime, what have the students in this example done? Well, they’ve organized collectively toward a mutually desired end and exerted rhetorical and perhaps minor financial pressure in order to achieve it. In other words, they’ve learned-by-doing an important and excellent lesson in the operation of power in an oligarchic democracy. Which ain’t a bad thing.

This, by the way, is why I think that the fear expressed by some more genuine people of the left—that these tendencies toward internecine pissing matches over who has or has not most thoroughly purified themselves of all wrongthink leads to a fractious and disorganized left that will never mobilize against the iniquities of global capital and imperial militarism—are misplaced. First, because, for all their persistence within the cycling generations of universities, these questions are formative, but not necessarily normative, especially for people who leave the academy. I know that I got pretty wrapped up (sometimes for, sometimes against) in speech codes and all that when I was a student at Oberlin College lo these many years ago. I think it made me a better and sharper thinker about questions of equity, equality, and power than I would otherwise have become, even if I now find the particulars of those debates very silly. Second, because I think that people tempered by these debates will—some of them—ultimately develop a subtler understanding of the operation of power within and by global capital, which has, after all, resisted and redirected a hundred years of mass movements and solidarity with hardly a hiccup. In other words, and as I endlessly repeat, I think the kids today are all right. Better, very frequently, than we were.