APRIL 2023

THEATLANTIC.COM

W A N A RC H Y
THE NE
America faces a type of extremist
violence it does not know how to stop
By Adrienne LaFrance

Mark Leibovich
on Arnold
Schwarzenegger
Amy Weiss-Meyer
on Judy Blume
Patricia Lockwood
on Virginia Woolf
George Packer
on forbidden words
Jennifer Senior
on the weirdness of aging
Nicole Chung
on an adoption experiment
Plus: Fiction by Mona Simpson
 O F N O PA R T Y O R C L I Q U E
VOL. 331–NO. 3 APRIL 2023 CONTENTS

Features

22 58

38
COVER STORY Judy Blume Goes
The New Anarchy All the Way
By Adrienne LaFrance By Amy Weiss-Meyer
America faces a type of extremist A new generation
violence it does not know how to discovers the poet laureate
stop. of puberty.

50
ELLIOTT ERWITT / MAGNUM

Arnold’s Last Act

America’s Future Is at Sea
By Mark Leibovich By Jerry Hendrix
What happens when the The nation is ceding the seas
Terminator turns 75 to its enemies. It’s not too late
to avoid catastrophe. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1977

3
APRIL 2023

Front Culture & Critics Back

6
The Commons
68
OMNIVORE
76
BOOKS
88
FICTION
Discussion & Debate In Their Feelings The Scandalous, Clueless, Second Life
The indelible, indomitable Irresistible Oscars By Mona Simpson
voices of Miley Cyrus and How the Academy holds on
Lana Del Rey to its prestige despite a history
Dispatches
By James Parker of embarrassment
By Dana Stevens 96
Ode to Nicknames

9
OPENING ARGUMENT
70
BOOKS 80
By James Parker

The Moral Case We’re All Invited to BOOKS

Against Euphemism the Lighthouse Love Annihilated
Banning words won’t make the On the Isle of Skye with The Irish writer Sebastian
world more just. Virginia Woolf and my mom Barry’s great subject
By George Packer By Patricia Lockwood By Adam Begley

14
HUMAN NATURE
84
BOOKS
The Age in Your Head “Two of Every Race”
I’m 53 years old. I feel 36. A family’s impossible quest
By Jennifer Senior to erase prejudice through
transracial adoption
By Nicole Chung

18
VIEWFINDER
“We Belong Here”
Photographs by
87
Nomenclature
Wesaam Al-Badry A poem by Clint Smith On the Cover

PHOTOGRAPH BY
NATHAN HOWARD /
GETTY

4 APRIL 2023
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Behind the Cover: In this month’s cover story, Adrienne LaFrance argues that the Portland protests demonstrat-

THE
LaFrance reports on political violence in the United ed how willing some radicals are to use violence—and
States. We sought to convey the era’s “new anarchy” that it may take a generation for their fervor to subside.
with a photo of an anonymous figure emerging from a — Luise Stauss, Director of Photography;
cloud of smoke at a 2020 protest in Portland, Oregon. Genevieve Fussell, Senior Photo Editor

of divisiveness, we need to
remind everyone that govern-
ment policy and invention, like
the internet, can benefit society
as a whole.
Reginald I. Berry

The Eureka Invention alone can’t

Annandale, Va.

change the world, In light of Thompson’s discus-

Theory of Derek Thompson wrote
sion of the importance of
leadership and culture for an
in the January/February invention’s implementation, I
History Is issue. What matters most
wanted to point out that one of
the earliest supporters of small-
pox inoculation in Europe was
Wrong is what happens next. Catherine the Great, of Russia.
Her bravery in receiving the
inoculation in 1768, 28 years
before Edward Jenner invented
the first vaccine, narrowed
the trust gap significantly
in 18th-century Russia—no
small feat, given the slow pace
Letters of communication. She used
her status as empress to make
Derek Thompson makes a gaming the system rather than the issue nonpartisan and
number of insightful arguments doing something useful. non classist. She established

D
about the decline in American Restoring public trust will inoculation clinics in several
progress. But in citing 1980 require recognizing that selfish- cities, and by 1800, 2 million
as the end of “building,” he ness is not a virtue, and that Russians had been inoculated.
glosses over an important point: responsible business leadership Robynn Jensen
1980 is not a random year in requires more than maximizing Savage, Minn.
U.S. history—it is the dawn of shareholder value.
the Reagan era. The shift that Regan Whitworth As an engineer, I agreed with
began then—declaring a quest Missoula, Mont. much of Thompson’s article.
for personal advantage to be a But he errs in describing the
driving force of progress, or, Part of what stymies innovation pitfalls of nuclear power. I am
to use Ayn Rand’s phrasing, in the U.S. is our culture’s focus an antinuclear activist, but I
declaring selfishness to be a on individualism. The collective can assure you that the reason
Derek Thompson’s conclusion virtue—is central to the decline good of the country has not we don’t have more nuclear-
that societal progress depends Thompson describes. Corpo- been important to industrial power plants isn’t the success
on trust is profound and should rate strategies and business- and corporate leaders. If the of the tiny antinuclear move-
be shouted from the rooftops. I school curricula rarely encour- U.S. as a nation is to progress, ment. It is because investors
am a rabbi, and I may make it age thoughtful investments that there has to be concern for have been unwilling to finance
the topic of my High Holiday yield reasonable returns for an society in its entirety; there an industry that for 50 years
sermon this coming year. extended period. Instead they needs to be an understand- has overpromised and under-
Rabbi Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon emphasize strategic behav- ing that government is for delivered. Every nuclear plant
Palo Alto, Calif. ior that at times amounts to all of us. During this period built in the past half century has

6 APRIL 2023
 C OM MONS
DISCUSSION

&
DEBATE

suffered massive cost overruns caught on widely—the number What’s missing from Thomp- be ugly and still have a bad repu-
and schedule delays. In 1985, of advocates in this country son’s otherwise compelling argu- tation, however unwarranted.
Forbes famously called nuclear would fill only a modest audi- ment is consideration of whether Where’s the novelty, the beauty?
power “the largest managerial torium. Second, the degrowth any proposed material progress How excited can we become
disaster in business history.” And movement is about policy inter- offers something sensationally about what amounts to new
nothing has changed since then, ventions to reduce inequality. desirable to citizens. If progress batteries in the same old gadgets?
as the only two nuclear plants It centers ideas such as replac- isn’t novel and pleasing to our To build a broad coalition of
now under construction in the ing GDP with a metric that senses, then arguments against support, progress needs to look,
U.S., in Georgia, are projected measures actual progress and implementation— however smell, sound, and feel exciting—
to cost at least $30 billion— advocates for trust-busting spurious, and from which- little else has so powerfully
more than double the original and more public investment ever band of the ideological united the American people.
estimate—and are more than in the commons. The real spectrum—are far more likely Allen Farmelo
six years behind schedule. Two cause of unaffordable housing to convince those on the fence. Hopewell Junction, N.Y.
reactors that had been under is inequality. My mother was born in
construction in South Carolina 1929. She grew up in rural Derek Thompson
Robert Montroy
were canceled, wasting billions Rockford, Mich. Pennsylvania without electricity. replies:
of taxpayer dollars. If electricity had brought only I’m pleased that readers seem
Jeff Alson Though I enjoyed his article, heat and light, it may have been to have concluded that culture
Ann Arbor, Mich. I believe Thompson has over- easy to sway my poorly educated is paramount to progress. Espe-
looked the core paradox of and conservative grandparents cially trust. It simply doesn’t
I saw merit in Thompson’s argu- human progress: that things to oppose its broad implementa- matter what we invent in our
ment until I reached the final generally get worse before tion across rural America—after laboratories if scientists, compa-
section. The great problem of they get better. Specifically, I all, they already had fire and gas nies, and governments are met
today’s world is not economic feel Thompson misinterpreted lamps. But electricity could also with widespread distrust by the
but ecological, and Thompson’s our political discourse around power radios, kitchen appli- public, making it impossible to
idea of “build, build, build” climate change and the ances, tools, and countless other implement what we discover.
won’t solve it. We live on a COVID-19 vaccine as evidence useful and exciting gadgets. Life And I deeply appreciate Allen
planet with limited resources. of our failures, when they could would change and improve at Farmelo’s point—progress ought
Our economic system is depen- in fact augur periods of substan- the sensory level with the flip to feel beautiful. I tend to think
dent on our ecological system, tial progress on the horizon. of an actual switch. about new ideas through a
not the other way around. The United States has at times Perhaps with the exception utilitarian filter: Will this new
We think our technology will been even more polarized than of high-speed rail, nothing in the thing help more people? I’ll do
protect us and therefore feel we it is today, yet our country still current array of tech proposals my best to add Farmelo’s Corol-
can continue expanding our made significant progress. At has especially novel or aesthetic lary to my arsenal: Will this
impact ad infinitum. the peak of our rancor, we appeal. As Thompson notes, new thing make the world
Jack M. Pedigo fought a civil war—and it some technologies are repel- more beautiful?
Lopez Island, Wash. brought about the end of the lent. Apartment buildings are
archaic atrocity of slavery. old news. Solar panels can be To respond to Atlantic articles or
submit author questions to The Commons,
Derek Thompson misunder- Nathaniel Barrett eyesores that supplant natural please email [email protected].
stands the degrowth movement. Manchester, N.H. landscapes. Nuclear reactors can Include your full name, city, and state.

Degrowth isn’t the reason for

America’s housing shortage. Correction: “The Eureka Theory of History Is Wrong” (January/February 2023) stated that the United States
First, the degrowth idea hasn’t advanced airplane technology during World War I. In fact, the U.S. advanced airplane technology after the war.

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7
 


The
Atlantic
Festival
Returns
September 28 & 29, 2023
Live at The Wharf in Washington, D.C.
D I S PAT C H E S
OPE NING A RGU M E N T

THE MORAL
CASE AGAINST
EUPHEMISM
Banning words won’t make the
world more just.
BY G E ORG E PAC K E R

T
The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide
discourages using the words stand, Ameri-
cans, blind, and crazy. The first two fail at
inclusion, because not everyone can stand
and not everyone living in this country is a
citizen. The third and fourth, even as figures
of speech (“Legislators are blind to climate
change”), are insulting to the disabled. The
guide also rejects the disabled in favor of
people living with disabilities, for the same
reason that enslaved person has generally
replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of
what’s called “people-first language,” that
“everyone is first and foremost a person, not
their disability or other identity.”
The guide’s purpose is not just to
make sure that the Sierra Club avoids

9
Dispatches

obviously derogatory terms, organizations that adopt it to the university announced, of words that are available to
such as welfare queen. It seeks mainstream publications, such for being “broadly viewed as everyone (one suggests a sixth-
to cleanse language of any as this one. counter to inclusivity.” to-eighth-grade reading level),
trace of privilege, hierarchy, Although the guides refer In general, though, equity their glossaries read like tech-
bias, or exclusion. In its zeal, to language “evolving,” these language invites no response, nical manuals, put together
the Sierra Club has clear-cut a changes are a revolution from and condemned words are by highly specialized teams of
whole national park of words. above. They haven’t emerged almost never redeemed. Once insiders, whose purpose is to
Urban, vibrant, hardworking, organically from the shift- a new rule takes hold—once warn off the uninitiated. This
and brown bag all crash to ing linguistic habits of large a day in history can no longer language confers the power to
earth for subtle racism. Y’all numbers of people. They are be dark, or a waitress has to be establish orthodoxy.
supplants the patriarchal you handed down in commu- Mastering equity language
guys, and elevate voices replaces niqués written by obscure is a discipline that requires
empower, which used to be “experts” who purport to effort and reflection, like learn-
uplifting but is now conde- speak for vaguely defined ing a sacred foreign tongue—
scending. The poor is classist; “communities,” remaining ancient Hebrew or Sanskrit.
battle and minefield disrespect unanswerable to a public that’s The Sierra Club urges its staff
GOOD
veterans; depressing appropri- being morally coerced. A new WRITING— “to take the space and time
ates a disability; migrant—no term wins an argument with- VIVID IMAGERY, you need to implement these
explanation, it just has to go. out having to debate. When STRONG recommendations in your own
Equity-language guides are the San Francisco Board of STATEMENTS— work thoughtfully.” “Some-
proliferating among some of Supervisors replaces felon WILL HURT, times, you will get it wrong
the country’s leading institu- with justice-involved person, BECAUSE or forget and that’s OK,” the
tions, particularly nonprofits. it is making an ideological IT’S BOUND National Recreation and Park
TO CONVEY
The American Cancer Society claim—that there is some- PAINFUL Association guide tells readers.
has one. So do the Ameri- thing illegitimate about laws, TRUTHS. “Take a moment, acknowledge
can Heart Association, the courts, and prisons. If you it, and commit to doing better
American Psychological Asso- accept the change—as, in next time.”
ciation, the American Medi- certain contexts, you’ll surely The liturgy changes with-
cal Association, the National feel you must—then you also out public discussion, and
Recreation and Park Associa- acquiesce in the argument. with a sudden ness and fre-
tion, the Columbia Univer- In a few cases, the gap a server, or underserved and quency that keep the novi-
sity School of Professional between equity language and vulnerable suddenly acquire tiate off-balance, forever try-
Studies, and the University of ordinary speech has produced red warning labels—there’s ing to catch up, and feeling
Washington. The words these a populist backlash. When no going back. Continuing to vaguely impious. A ban that
guides recommend or reject Latinx began to be used in use a word that’s been declared seemed ludicrous yesterday
are sometimes exactly the advanced milieus, a poll found harmful is evidence of igno- will be unquestionable by
same, justified in nearly iden- that a large majority of Lati- rance at best or, at worst, a tomorrow. The guides them-
tical language. This is because nos and Hispanics continued determination to offend. selves can’t always stay cur-
most of the guides draw on to go by the familiar terms Like any prescribed usage, rent. People of color becomes
the same sources from activ- and hadn’t heard of the newly equity language has a willed, standard usage until the day it
ist organizations: A Progressive’s coined, nearly unpronounce- unnatural quality. The guides is demoted, by the American
Style Guide, the Racial Equity able one. Latinx wobbled and use scientific-sounding con- Heart Association and oth-
Tools glossary, and a couple of took a step back. The Ameri- cepts to lend an impression ers, for being too general. The
others. The guides also cite one can Cancer Society advises of objectivity to subjective American Cancer Society pre-
another. The total number of that Latinx, along with the judgments: structural racial- fers marginalized to the more
people behind this project of equally gender-neutral Latine, ization, diversity value proposi- “victimizing” underresourced
linguistic purification is rela- Latin@, and Latinu, “may or tion, arbitrary status hierarchies. or underserved— but in the
tively small, but their power is may not be fully embraced The concepts themselves cre- National Recreation and Park
potentially immense. The new by older generations and ate status hierarchies—they Association’s guide, margin-
language might not stick in may need additional expla- assert intellectual and moral alized now acquires “negative
broad swaths of American soci- nation.” Public criticism led authority by piling abstract connotations when used in a
ety, but it already influences Stanford to abolish outright nouns into unfamiliar shapes broad way. However, it may
highly educated precincts, its Elimination of Harmful that immediately let you know be necessary and appropriate
spreading from the authori- Language Initiative— not you have work to do. Though in context. If you do use it,
ties that establish it and the for being ridiculous, but, the guides recommend the use avoid ‘the marginalized,’ and

10 APRIL 2023
 OPE NING A RGU M E N T

don’t use marginalized as an creates an artificial consensus easier to say people with lim- Katherine Boo’s Behind
adjective.” Historically mar- and muddies clear thought? ited financial resources than the Beautiful Forevers is a non-
ginalized is sometimes okay; When a university adminis- the poor. The first rolls off fiction masterpiece that tells
marginalized people is not. trator refers to an individual your tongue without inter- the story of Mumbai slum
The most devoted student student as “diverse,” the word ruption, leaves no aftertaste, dwellers with the intimacy of a
of the National Recreation
and Park Association guide
can’t possibly know when
and when not to say margin-
alized; the instructions seem
designed to make users so
anxious that they can barely
speak. But this confused guid-
ance is inevitable, because
with repeated use, the taint
of negative meaning rubs off
on even the most anodyne
language, until it has to be
scrubbed clean. The erasures
will continue indefinitely,
because the thing itself—
injustice—will always exist.
In the spirit of Strunk and
White, the guides call for
using specific rather than gen-
eral terms, plain speech instead
of euphemisms, active not pas-
sive voice. Yet they continually
violate their own guidance,
and the crusade to eliminate
harmful language could hardly
do otherwise. A division of
the University of Southern
California’s School of Social
Work has abandoned field,
as in fieldwork (which could
be associated with slavery or
immigrant labor) in favor of
the obscure Latinism practi-
cum. The Sierra Club offers
refuse to take action instead of
paralyzed by fear, replacing a
concrete image with a phrase
that evokes no mental picture.
It suggests the mushy protect
our rights over the more active
stand up for our rights. Which has lost contact with anything arouses no emotion. The sec- novel. The book was published
is more euphemistic, men- tangible—which is the point. ond is rudely blunt and bitter, in 2012, before the new lan-
tally ill or person living with The whole tendency of and it might make someone guage emerged:
a mental-health condition? equity language is to blur angry or sad. Imprecise lan-
Which is more vague, ballsy the contours of hard, often guage is less likely to offend. The One Leg’s given name
or risk-taker? What are diver- unpleasant facts. This aver- Good writing—vivid imagery, was Sita. She had fair
sity, equity, and inclusion but sion to reality is its main strong statements—will hurt, skin, usually an asset, but
abstractions with uncertain appeal. Once you acquire because it’s bound to convey the runt leg had smacked
meanings whose repetition the vocabulary, it’s actually painful truths. down her bride price. Her

IL LUSTRATION BY GABRIELA PESQUEIRA 11

Dispatches OPE NING A RGU M E N T

Hindu parents had taken of prose makes clear with true isn’t the job of writers to present than good—not because of
the single offer they got: understanding, true empathy. people as they want to be pre- their absurd bans on ordinary
poor, unattractive, hard- The battle against euphe- sented; writers owe allegiance words like congresswoman and
working, Muslim, old— mism and cliché is long- to their readers, and the truth. expat, or the self-torture they
“half-dead, but who else standing and, mostly, a losing The universal mission of require of conscientious users,
wanted her,” as her mother one. What’s new and perhaps equity language is a quest for but because they make it impos-
had once said with a frown. more threatening about equity salvation, not political reform sible to face squarely the wrongs
language is the special kind of they want to right, which is the
Translated into equity lan- pressure it brings to bear. The starting point for any change.
guage, this passage might read: conformity it demands isn’t Prison does not become a less
just bureaucratic; it’s moral. brutal place by calling someone
Sita was a person living But assembling preapproved locked up in one a person expe-
with a disability. Because phrases from a handbook into PRISON DOES riencing the criminal-justice sys-
NOT BECOME
she lived in a system that sentences that sound like an A LESS BRUTAL tem. Obesity isn’t any healthier
centered whiteness while algorithmic catechism has no PLACE BY for people with high weight.
producing inequities moral value. Moral language CALLING It’s hard to know who is likely
among racial and eth- comes from the struggle of an SOMEONE to be harmed by a phrase like
nic groups, her physical individual mind to absorb and LOCKED UP IN native New Yorker or under fire;
appearance conferred an convey the truth as faithfully as ONE A PERSON I doubt that even the writers of
unearned set of privileges possible. Because the effort is EXPERIENCING the guides are truly offended.
THE CRIMINAL-
and benefits, but her dis- hard and the result unsparing, JUSTICE SYSTEM. But the people in Behind the
ability lowered her sta- it isn’t obvious that writing like Beautiful Forevers know they’re
tus to potential partners. Boo’s has a future. Her book is poor; they can’t afford to wrap
Her parents, who were too real for us. The very project themselves in soft sheets of
Hindu persons, accepted of a white American journal- euphemism. Equity language
a marriage proposal from ist spending three years in an doesn’t fool anyone who lives
a member of a commu- Indian slum to tell the story of or personal courtesy—a Prot- with real afflictions. It’s meant
nity with limited financial families who live there could be estant quest and, despite the to spare only the feelings of
resources, a person whose considered a gross act of cultural guides’ aversion to any reference those who use it.
physical appearance was exploitation. By the new rules, to U.S. citizenship, an Ameri- The project of the guides is
defined as being different shelf upon shelf of great writing can one, for we do nothing by utopian, but they’re a symptom
from the traits of the dom- might go the way of blind and half measures. The guides fol- of deep pessimism. They belong
inant group and resulted urban. Open Light in August or low the grammar of Puritan to a fractured culture in which
in his being set apart for Invisible Man to any page and preaching to the last clause. symbolic gestures are preferable
unequal treatment, a per- see how little would survive. Once you have embarked on to concrete actions, argument is
son who was considered in The rationale for equity- this expedition, you can’t stop no longer desirable, each view-
the dominant discourse to language guides is hard to at Oriental or thug, because point has its own impenetrable
be “hardworking,” a Mus- fault. They seek a world with- that would leave far too much dialect, and only the most fluent
lim person, an older per- out oppression and injustice. evil at large. So you take off insiders possess the power to say
son. In referring to him, Because achieving this goal is in hot pursuit of gentrification what is real. What I’ve described
Sita’s mother used lan- beyond anyone’s power, they and legal resident, food stamps is not just a problem of the pro-
guage that is considered turn to what can be controlled and gun control, until the last gressive left. The far right has a
harmful by representatives and try to purge language until sin is hunted down and made different vocabulary, but it, too,
of historically marginalized it leaves no one out and can’t right—which can never happen relies on authoritarian shibbo-
communities. harm those who already suffer. in a fallen world. leths to enforce orthodoxy. It
Avoiding slurs, calling atten- This huge expense of energy will be a sign of political renewal
Equity language fails at tion to inadvertent insults, to purify language reveals a if Americans can say madden-
what it claims to do. This and speaking to people with weakened belief in more mate- ing things to one another in a
translation doesn’t create more dignity are essential things in rial forms of progress. If we common language that doesn’t
empathy for Sita and her strug- any decent society. It’s polite to don’t know how to end racism, require any guide.
gles. Just the opposite—it alien- address people as they request, we can at least call it structural.
ates Sita from the reader, plac- and context always matters: The guides want to make the
ing her at a great distance. A A therapist is unlikely to use ugliness of our society disappear
heavy fog of jargon rolls in and terms with a patient that she by linguistic fiat. Even by their George Packer is a staff writer
hides all that Boo’s short burst would with a colleague. But it own lights, they do more ill at The Atlantic.

12 APRIL 2023
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 H U M A N NAT U R E

T
This past Thanksgiving, I asked
my mother how old she was
in her head. She didn’t pause,
didn’t look up, didn’t even ask
me to repeat the question,
which would have been natu-
ral, given that it was both syn-
tactically awkward and a little
odd. We were in my brother’s
dining room, setting the table.
My mother folded another
napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.
She is 76.
Why do so many people
have an immediate, intuitive
grasp of this highly abstract
concept—“subjective age,” it’s
called—when randomly pre-
sented with it? It’s bizarre, if you
think about it. Certainly most
of us don’t believe ourselves
to be shorter or taller than we
actually are. We don’t think of
ourselves as having smaller ears
or longer noses or curlier hair.
Most of us also know where our
bodies are in space, what physi-
ologists call “proprioception.”
Yet we seem to have an
awfully rough go of locating
ourselves in time. A friend,
nearing 60, recently told me
that whenever he looks in
the mirror, he’s not so much
unhappy with his appearance
as startled by it—“as if there’s
been some sort of error” were
his exact words. (High-school
reunions can have this same
THE AGE IN YOUR HEAD confusing effect. You look
around at your lined and
I’m 53 years old. I feel 36. thickened classmates, wonder-
ing how they could have so vio-
BY JENNIFER SENIOR lently capitulated to age; then
you see photographs of your-
self from that same event and
realize: Oh.) The gulf between
how old we are and how old we
believe ourselves to be can often

14 I LLUSTRATION BY KLAUS KREMMERZ

 Dispatches

be measured in light-years—or of the story. You could just as answer: 33. Partly bc age of same—they can tell of course,
at least a goodly number of old- well make a different case: that Jesus at crucifixion. But I think so it’s asymmetrical.”
fashioned Earth ones. viewing yourself as younger partly bc it feels like a kind of Yes. They can tell. I’ve had
As one might suspect, there is a form of optimism, rather peak for the combined vigor- this unsettling experience, see-
are studies that examine this than denialism. It says that you maturity index.” ing little difference between the
phenomenon. (There’s a study envision many generative years The combined vigor- 30-something before me and
for everything.) As one might ahead of you, that you will not maturity index: Yes! my 50-something self, when
also suspect, most of them are be written off, that your future Richard was replying to me suddenly the 30-something will
pretty unimaginative. Many is not one long, dreary corridor on Twitter, where I’d tossed out make a comment that betrays
have their origins in the field of of locked doors. my query to the crowd: “How just how aware she is of the age
gerontology, designed primarily I think of my own num- old are you in your head?” gap between us, that this gap
with an eye toward health out- bers, for instance—which, (Turns out I’m not the only seems enormous, that in her
comes, which means they ask though a slight departure from one with this impulse; Sari eyes I may as well be Dame
participants how old they feel, the Rubin-Berntsen rule, are Judi Dench.
which those participants gener- still within a reasonable range Although many hewed
ally take to mean how old do (or so Rubin assures me). I’m close to the Rubin-Berntsen
you feel physically, which then 53 in real life but suspended rule, the replies I got on Twitter
leads to the rather unsurprising at 36 in my head, and if I stop ADULTS OVER were not always about poten-
conclusion that if you feel older, my brain from doing its usual 40 PERCEIVE tial. Many carried with them a
you probably are, in the sense Tilt-A-Whirl for long enough, THEMSELVES whiff of unexpected poignancy.
that you’re aging faster. I land on the same explana- TO BE, ON Trauma sometimes played a
But “How old do you feel?” tion: At 36, I knew the broad AVERAGE, role: One person was stuck at
ABOUT
is an altogether different ques- contours of my life, but hadn’t 20 PERCENT 32, unable to see themselves as
tion from “How old are you in yet filled them in. I was pro- YOUNGER any older than a sibling who’d
your head?” The most inspired fessionally established, but still THAN THEIR died; another was stuck for a
paper I read about subjective brimmed with potential. I was ACTUAL AGE. long time at age 12, the year
age, from 2006, asked this of its paired off with my husband, her father joined a cult. (Rubin
1,470 participants—in a Dan- but not yet lost in the marshes has written about this phenom-
ish population (Denmark being of a long marriage (and, okay, enon too—the centrality of cer-
the kind of place where studies not yet a tiresome fishwife). I tain events to our memories,
like these would happen)—and was soon to be pregnant, but Botton, the founder of Oldster especially calamitous ones.
what the two authors discov- not yet a mother fretting about Magazine, regularly publishes Sometimes we freeze at the age
ered is that adults over 40 per- eating habits, screen habits, questionnaires she has issued to of our traumas.)
ceive themselves to be, on aver- study habits, the brutal folk- novelists, artists, and activists of My friend Alan, who is
age, about 20 percent younger ways of adolescents, the porn a certain age, and this is the sec- in his 50s, told me he thinks
than their actual age. “We ran merchants of the internet. ond question.) Ian Leslie, the of himself as 38 because he
this thing, and the data were I was not yet on the gray author of Conflicted and two still thinks of his 98-year-old
gorgeous,” says David C. Rubin turnpike of middle age, in other social-science books (32 father as 80. The writer Molly
(76 in real life, 60 in his head), other words. in his head, 51 in “boring old Jong-Fast replied that she’s 19
one of the paper’s authors and “I’m 35,” wrote my friend reality”), took a similar view to because that’s the age she got
a psychology and neuroscience Richard Primus, 53 in real mine and Richard’s, but added sober. One 36-year-old woman
professor at Duke University. life and a constitutional-law an astute and humbling obser- told me she thought the pan-
“It was just all these beautiful, professor at the University of vation: Internally viewing your- demic was a time thief—she
smooth curves.” Michigan Law School. “I think self as substantially younger simply hadn’t accumulated
Why we’re possessed of this it’s because that’s the age I was than you are can make for some enough new experiences to
urge to subtract is another mat- when my major life questions/ serious social weirdness. justify the addition of more
ter. Rubin and his co-author, statuses reached the resolutions/ “30 year olds should be chronological years—which
Dorthe Berntsen, didn’t make conditions in which they’ve aware that for better or for made her younger in her head
it the focus of this particular since remained.” So: kind of worse, the 50 year old they’re sometimes, as if she were will-
paper, and the researchers who like my answer, but more opti- talking to thinks they’re roughly ing back the clock.
do often propose a crude, pre- mistically rendered. He con- the same age!” he wrote. “Was When I mentioned to a
dictable answer—namely, that tinued: “Medieval Christian at a party over the summer colleague that I was writing
lots of people consider aging a theologians asked the intrigu- where average was about 28 this piece, he told me he was
catastrophe, which, while true, ing question ‘How old are peo- and I had to make a conscious 12 in his head, not because he
seems to tell only a fraction ple in heaven?’ The dominant effort to remember I wasn’t the thinks of himself as a child,

APRIL 2023 15
Dispatches H U M A N NAT U R E

but because his inner self has we’re so responsive to the music you focus on what’s going on? At first blush, Levy’s scholar-
remained unchanged as he’s of our adolescence—which in That’s the more complicated ship may seem to quarrel with
aged; it’s “the same conscious- my case means my iPhone is question,” says Hans-Werner the literature of subjective age.
ness as always since I became loaded with a lot more Duran Wahl (69 in real life, 55 in his But maybe it’s a complement.
conscious.” His words instantly Duran songs than any dignified head), a co-author of the meta- What underpins them both is
brought to mind a line from the person should admit.) analysis. “A lower subjective an enduring sense of agency:
opening pages of Milan Kun- Rubin and Berntsen made age may be predictive of bet- If you mentally view yourself
dera’s Immortality: “There is a a second intriguing discovery ter health. But there are other as younger—if you believe
certain part of all of us that lives in their work on subjective populations around the globe you have a few pivots left—
outside of time.” age: People younger than 25 you still see yourself as useful;
Of course, not everyone I mainly said they felt older than if you believe that aging itself
spoke with viewed themselves they are, not younger—which, is valuable, an added good,
as younger. There were a few again, makes sense if you’ve then you also see yourself
old souls, something I would had even a passing acquain- IF YOU MENTALLY as useful. In a better world,
have once said about myself. I tance with a 10-year-old, a VIEW YOURSELF older people would feel more
AS YOUNGER—IF
felt 40 at 10, when the gossip teenager, a 21-year-old. They’re YOU BELIEVE treasured, certainly. But even
and cliquishness of other little eager for more independence YOU HAVE A FEW now, a good many of us seem
girls seemed not just cruel but and to be taken more seriously; PIVOTS LEFT— capable of combining the two
dull; I felt 40 at 22, when I in their head, they’re ready for YOU STILL SEE ideas, merging acceptance of
barely went to bars; I felt 40 both, though their prefrontal YOURSELF AS our age with a sense of hope.
at 25, when I started accumu- cortex is basically a bunch of USEFUL. When reading over the many
lating noncollege friends and unripe bananas. Oldster questionnaires, I was
realized I was partial to older In Rubin and Berntsen’s struck by how many people
people’s company. And when 2006 study, socioeconomic said that their present age was
I turned 40, I was genuinely status, gender, and education for whom it is not necessary to their favorite one. A reassur-
relieved, as if I’d finally achieved did not significantly affect feel younger. And they’re not ing number of respondents
some kind of cosmic internal- their data. One wonders if less healthy.” didn’t want to trade their
external temporal alignment. this has something to do with This seems to be the con- hard- earned wisdom—or
But over time, I rolled back- the fact that they conducted clusion of Becca Levy, a pro- humility, or self-acceptance,
wards. Other people do this their research in Denmark, a fessor of epidemiology and whatever they had accrued
too, just starting at a younger country with substantially less psychology at the Yale School along the way—for some
age—25—and Rubin has a income inequality and racial of Public Health. As a young earlier moment.
theory about why this might heterogeneity than our own. graduate student, she went to Recently, I wrote to Mar-
be. Adolescence and emerging The picture changes when Japan and couldn’t help notic- garet Atwood, asking her how
adulthood are times dense with there’s more variety: A 2021 ing not just that people lived old she is in her head. In the
firsts (first kiss, first time hav- meta-analysis of 294 papers longer, but that their atti- few interactions I’ve had with
ing sex, first love, first foray into examining subjective- age tude toward aging was more her, she seems quite sanguine
the world without your parents’ data from across the globe positive—and her decades about aging. Her reply:
watchful gaze); they are also found that the discrepancy of research since have shown
times when our brains, for a between chronological age a very persuasive connection At 53 you worry about being
variety of neurodevelopmental and internal age was greatest between the two. In the intro- old compared to younger
reasons, are inclined to feel in the United States, West- duction to her book, Breaking people. At 83 you enjoy the
things more intensely, especially ern Europe, and Australia/ the Age Code, she describes moment, and time travel
the devil’s buzz of a good, fool- Oceania. Asia had a smaller newsstands in Tokyo lined here and there in the past
hardy risk. The uniqueness and gap. Africa had the small- with manga books filled with 8 decades. You don’t fret
density of these periods have est, which could be read as story lines about older people about seeming old, because
manifested themselves in other an economic sign (poverty falling in love. She reports hey, you really are old! You
areas of Rubin’s research. Years might play a role) but also a wandering Tokyo on Keiro and your friends make Old
ago, he and other researchers cultural one: Elders in col- No Hi, or “Respect for the jokes. You have more fun
showed that adults have an lectivist societies are accorded Aged Day,” and seeing people than at 53, in some ways.
outsize number of memories more respect and have more in their 70s and 80s lifting Wait, you’ll see! :)
from the ages of about 15 to 25. extended-family support. weights in the park. She talks
They called this phenomenon “Could it be that feeling about music classes filled with
“the reminiscence bump.” (This younger is actually dysfunc- 75-year-olds learning how to Jennifer Senior is a staff writer
is generally used to explain why tional and no longer helping play electric slide guitar. at The Atlantic.

16 APRIL 2O23
 Five years ago, I would have never
imagined my life would be like this.”
— UMA SINJALI MAGAR

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 VIE W FIN DER

This page, clockwise from top left: Wesaam Al-Badry’s mother at home in Lincoln, Nebraska;
high-school wrestlers in Dearborn, Michigan; the photographer’s niece Amirah Al-Badry; a family birthday
celebration for Al-Badry’s daughter. Opposite page: Mya Al-Badry, a niece, in Lincoln.

18
18 APRIL 2023
 Dispatches

“We Belong Here”

Photographs by Wesaam Al-Badry

Wesaam Al-Badry was born in Iraq, where you come in as a refugee, you think every- clash—but his work asks you to focus on
he and his family might have stayed if not for thing is beautiful. You think you made it the individual, the intimacy of daily life.
the Gulf War, which began when he was 7. to the promised land; everybody’s equal,” The people in these photos are rarely smil-
In 1991, the family landed at a refugee camp he said. “But then you realize there’s ing. Al-Badry’s aim is to present them as
in Saudi Arabia. There, Al-Badry got his first little hints.” As he grew up, Al-Badry resilient and dignified, even if it makes
camera, a Pentax K1000. “I didn’t under- became more aware of racism. Teenagers the photos less immediately inviting to his
stand the numbers on top, shutter speed, mocked his mother’s hijab; many Ameri- audience. His allegiance is to the people
and aperture, but I understood, over time, cans, he realized, had been conditioned he is photographing; he wants his sub-
CONTACT PRESS IMAGES

composition,” Al-Badry told me. Even with- to see Arabs and Muslims as intrinsically jects to see themselves in the absence of
out regular access to film or any reliable way strange, angry, or violent. imposed stereotypes. “We belong here,”
to develop what he shot, he saw in his hands The images in Al-Badry’s series “From he said. “We bring this very rich culture
a tool for telling his story as it unfolded. Which I Came,” many of which feature with us. But we’re not archaic figures;
Eventually, Al-Badry’s family was his own family and friends, might eas- we’re not stuck in the past.”
relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska. “When ily be marshaled to represent a cultural — Aymann Ismail

19
Dispatches

20 APRIL 2023
 VIE W FIN DER

Left: The photographer’s mother (right) and a close friend.

The two met in 1996, shortly after arriving in the United States.
Above: The owner of a gym in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Most
of her clients are women of Middle Eastern origin.

21
 AMERICA FACES A T YPE OF
EXTREMIST VIOLENCE
IT DOES NOT KNOW
HOW TO STOP.

THE NEW
22 APRIL 2023
 By ADRIENNE LAFRANCE

ANARCHY 23
 “Blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds
and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be
first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this … may be among honest men only.
But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.”

— Abraham Lincoln, letter to the Missouri abolitionist Charles D. Drake, 1863

600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters rode into Portland

waving American flags and Trump flags with slogans like Take

I.
America Back and Make Liberals Cry Again. Within hours,
a 39-year-old man would be dead—shot in the chest by a self-
described anti-fascist. Five days later, federal agents killed the
suspect—in self-defense, the government claimed—during a
confrontation in Washington State.
What had seemed from the outside to be spontaneous pro-
tests centered on the murder of George Floyd were in fact the
culmination of a long-standing ideological battle. Some four
years earlier, Trump supporters had identified Portland, correctly,
as an ideal place to provoke the left. The city is often mocked for
its infatuation with leftist ideas and performative politics. That
reputation, lampooned in the television series Portlandia, is not
completely unwarranted. Right-wing extremists understood that
Portland’s reaction to a trolling campaign would be swift, and
would guarantee the celebrity that comes with virality. When
ON THE BRINK Trump won the presidency, this dynamic intensified, and Portland

LEWIS-ROLLAND / AFP / GETTY; ALEX MILAN TRACY / AP; MICHAEL NIGRO / SIPA USA / ALAMY; MICHAEL NIGRO / SIPA USA / AP;
became a place where radicals would go to brawl in the streets.
In the weeks before Labor Day 2020, Ted Wheeler, the mayor of By the middle of 2018, far-right groups such as the Proud Boys

OPENING PAGES, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: KATHRYN ELSESSER / AFP / GETTY; MICHAEL NIGRO / SIPA USA / ALAMY; MATHIEU
Portland, Oregon, began warning people that he believed some- and Patriot Prayer had hosted more than a dozen rallies in the
one would soon be killed by extremists in his city. Portland was Pacific Northwest, many of them in Portland. Then, in 2020,

MATHIEU LEWIS-ROLLAND / AFP / GETTY; MARK DOWNEY / ZUMA / ALAMY; MATHIEU LEWIS-ROLLAND / AFP / GETTY
preparing for the 100th consecutive day of conflict among anti- extremists on the left hijacked largely peaceful anti-police pro-
police protesters, right-wing counterprotesters, and the police tests with their own violent tactics, and right-wing radicals saw
themselves. Night after night, hundreds of people clashed in the an opening for a major fight.
streets. They attacked one another with baseball bats, Tasers, bear What happened in Portland, like what happened in Wash-
spray, fireworks. They filled balloons with urine and marbles and ington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, was a concentrated mani-
fired them at police officers with slingshots. The police lobbed festation of the political violence that is all around us now. By
flash-bang grenades. One man shot another in the eye with a political violence, I mean acts of violence intended to achieve
paintball gun and pointed a loaded revolver at a screaming crowd. political goals, whether driven by ideological vision or by delu-
The FBI notified the public of a bomb threat against federal sions and hatred. More Americans are bringing weapons to
buildings in the city. Several homemade bombs were hurled into political protests. Openly white-supremacist activity rose more
a group of people in a city park. than twelvefold from 2017 to 2021. Political aggression today is
Extremists on the left and on the right, each side inhabiting its often expressed in the violent rhetoric of war. People build their
own reality, had come to own a portion of downtown Portland. political identities not around shared values but around a hatred
These radicals acted without restraint or, in many cases, humanity. for their foes, a phenomenon known as “negative partisanship.”
In early July, when then-President Donald Trump deployed A growing number of elected officials face harassment and death
federal law-enforcement agents in tactical gear to Portland— threats, causing many to leave politics. By nearly every measure,
against the wishes of the mayor and the governor—conditions political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was
deteriorated further. Agents threw protesters into unmarked five years ago. A 2022 UC Davis poll found that one in five
vans. A federal officer shot a man in the forehead with a non- Americans believes political violence would be “at least some-
lethal munition, fracturing his skull. The authorities used chemi- times” justified, and one in 10 believes it would be justified if
cal agents on crowds so frequently that even Mayor Wheeler it meant returning Trump to the presidency. Officials at the
found himself caught in clouds of tear gas. People set fires. highest levels of the military and in the White House believe
They threw rocks and Molotov cocktails. They swung ham- that the United States will see an increase in violent attacks as
mers into windows. Then, on the last Saturday of August, a the 2024 presidential election draws nearer.

24 APRIL 2023
 In recent years, Americans have contemplated a worst-case
scenario, in which the country’s extreme and widening divisions
lead to a second Civil War. But what the country is experiencing
now—and will likely continue to experience for a generation or
more—is something different. The form of extremism we face is a
new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized indi-
viduals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political
enemies. Unchecked, it promises an era of slow-motion anarchy.
Consider recent events. In October 2020, authorities arrested
more than a dozen men in Michigan, many of them with ties to
a paramilitary group. They were in the final stages of a plan to
kidnap the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and
possessed nearly 2,000 rounds of ammunition and hundreds of
guns, as well as silencers, improvised explosive devices, and artillery
shells. In January 2021, of course, thousands of Trump partisans
stormed the U.S. Capitol, some of them armed, chanting “Where’s
Nancy?” and “Hang Mike Pence!” Since then, the headlines have
gotten smaller—or perhaps numbness has set in—but the violence
has continued. In June 2022, a man with a gun and a knife who
allegedly said he intended to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kava-
naugh was arrested outside Kavanaugh’s Maryland home. In July, a
man with a loaded pistol was arrested outside the home of Pramila
Jayapal, the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She
had heard someone outside shouting “Fuck you, cunt!” and “Com-
mie bitch!” Days later, a man with a sharp object jumped onto
a stage in upstate New York and allegedly tried to attack another
member of Congress, the Republican candidate for governor. In
August, just after the seizure of documents from Trump’s Mar-a-
Lago home, a man wearing body armor tried to breach the FBI’s
Cincinnati field office. He was killed in a shoot-out with police. In
October, in San Francisco, a man broke into the home of Nancy
Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, and attacked her 82-year-old
We face a new
husband with a hammer, fracturing his skull. In January 2023, a
failed Republican candidate for state office in New Mexico who
phase of domestic
referred to himself as a “MAGA king” was arrested for the alleged
attempted murder of local Democratic officials in four separate
terror, one
shootings. In one of the shootings, three bullets passed through
the bedroom of a state senator’s 10-year-old daughter as she slept.
characterized
Experts I interviewed told me they worry about political vio-
lence in broad regions of the country—the Great Lakes, the rural
by radicalized
West, the Pacific Northwest, the South. These are places where
extremist groups have already emerged, militias are popular, gun individuals with
culture is thriving, and hard-core partisans collide during close
elections in politically consequential states. Michigan, Wisconsin, shape-shifting
Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia all came up again and again.
For the past three years, I’ve been preoccupied with a ques- ideologies
tion: How can America survive a period of mass delusion, deep
division, and political violence without seeing the permanent
dissolution of the ties that bind us? I went looking for moments
willing to kill
in history, in the United States and elsewhere, when society has
found itself on the brink—or already in the abyss. I learned how
their political
cultures have managed to endure sustained political violence,
and how they ultimately emerged with democracy still intact.
enemies.
enemie s.
Some lessons are unhappy ones. Societies tend to ignore the
obvious warning signs of endemic political violence until the

ILLUSTRATIONS BY PAUL SPELLA 25

situation is beyond containment, and violence takes on a life of its businessmen, and clergy in Chicago; he reportedly used so much
own. Government can respond to political violence in brutal ways that people immediately vomited, which saved their lives. Months
that undermine democratic values. Worst of all: National leaders, later, a shrapnel-filled suitcase bomb killed 10 people and wounded
as we see today in an entire political party, can become complicit 40 more at a parade in San Francisco. America’s entry into World
in political violence and seek to harness it for their own ends. War I temporarily quelled the violence—among other factors, some
anarchists left the country to avoid the draft—but the respite was far
from total. In 1917, a bomb exploded inside the Milwaukee Police
Department headquarters, killing nine officers and two civilians.

II.
In the spring of 1919, dozens of mail bombs were sent to an array

PAUL AVRICH COLLECTION, RARE BOOK AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS,

of business leaders and government officials, including Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
All of this was prologue. Starting late in the evening on June 2,
1919, in a series of coordinated attacks, anarchists simultaneously
detonated massive bombs in eight American cities. In Washing-
ton, an explosion at the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BETTMANN / GETTY

Palmer blasted out the front windows and tore framed photos off
the walls. Palmer, in his pajamas, had been reading by his second-
story window. He happened to step away minutes before the bomb
went off, a decision that authorities believed kept him alive. (His
neighbors, the assistant secretary of the Navy and his wife, Frank-
lin and Eleanor Roosevelt, had just gotten home from an evening
out when the explosion also shattered their windows. Franklin
ran over to Palmer’s house to check on him.) The following year, a
SAL AD-BAR EXTREMISM horse-drawn carriage drew up to the pink-marble entrance of the
J. P. Morgan building on Wall Street and exploded, killing more
If you’re looking for a good place to hide an anarchist, you could than 30 people and injuring hundreds more.
do worse than Barre, Vermont. Barre (pronounced “berry”) is a
small city in the bowl of a steep valley in the northern reaches of
a lightly populated, mountainous state. You don’t just stumble
upon a place like this.
I went to Barre in October because I wanted to understand
the anarchist who had fled there in the early 1900s, at the begin-
ning of a new century already experiencing extraordinary violence
and turbulence. The conditions that make a society vulnerable to
political violence are complex but well established: highly visible
wealth disparity, declining trust in democratic institutions, a per-
ceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based
on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy
theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the “other,”
a sharply divided electorate, and a belief among those who flirt
with violence that they can get away with it. All of those condi-
tions were present at the turn of the last century. All of them are
present today. Back then, few Americans might have guessed that
the violence of that era would rage for decades.
In 1901, an anarchist assassinated President William
McKinley—shot him twice in the gut while shaking his hand at
the Buffalo World’s Fair. In 1908, an anarchist at a Catholic church
in Denver fatally shot the priest who had just given him Commu-
nion. In 1910, a dynamite attack on the Los Angeles Times killed
ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

21 people. In 1914, in what officials said was a plot against John

D. Rockefeller, a group of anarchists prematurely exploded a bomb
in a New York City tenement, killing four people. That same year,
extremists set off bombs at two Catholic churches in Manhat-
tan, one of them St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In 1916, an anarchist
chef dumped arsenic into the soup at a banquet for politicians,

26 APRIL 2023
 From these episodes, one name leaps out across time: Luigi illusion that all of the color has suddenly vanished from the world.
Galleani. Galleani, who was implicated in most of the attacks, Across the street, at city hall, I wandered into an administrative
is barely remembered today. But he was, in his lifetime, one of office where an affable woman—You came to Barre? On purpose?—
the world’s most influential terrorists, famous for advancing the generously agreed to take me inside the adjacent opera house,
argument for “propaganda of the deed”: the idea that violence is which, recently refurbished, looks much as it did on the winter
essential to the overthrow of the state and the ruling class. Born night in 1907 when Galleani appeared there before a packed
in Italy, Galleani immigrated to the United States and spread house to give a speech alongside the anarchist Emma Goldman.
his views through his anarchist newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva, Galleani almost certainly could have disappeared into Barre
or “Subversive Chronicle.” He told the poor to seize property with his wife and children and gotten away with it. He did not
from the rich and urged his followers to arm themselves—to want that. In his own telling, Galleani’s anger was driven by how
find “a rifle, a dagger, a revolver.” poorly the working class was treated, particularly in factories. In
Galleani fled to Barre in 1903 under the name Luigi Pimpino Barre, granite cutters spent long hours mired in the sludge of a
after several encounters with law enforcement in New Jersey. He dark, unheated, and poorly ventilated workspace, breathing in
attracted disciples—“Galleanisti,” they were called—despite shun- silica dust, which made most of them gravely ill. Seeing the town,
ning all forms of organization and hierarchy. He was quick-witted, even a century after Galleani was there, I could understand why
with an imposing intellect and a magnetic manner of speaking. his time in Vermont had not altered his worldview. In the fore-
Even the police reports described his charisma. word to a 2017 biography, Galleani’s grand-
The population of Barre today is slightly son, Sean Sayers, put a hagiographic gloss on
Opposite page: Mug shot
smaller than it was in Galleani’s day—roughly Galleani’s legacy: “He was not a narrow and
10,000 then, 8,500 now—and it is the sort of the anarchist leader callous nihilist; he was a visionary thinker with
of place that is more confused by the pres- Luigi Galleani, 1919. a beautiful idea of how human society could
ence of strangers than wary of them. The first Below: The aftermath of be—an idea that still resonates today.” For
thing you notice when you arrive is the gran- Galleani and other self-identified “commu-
the Wall Street bombing
ite. There is a mausoleum feel to any granite nist anarchists” like him, the beautiful idea was
city, and on an overcast day the gray post- outside the J. P. Morgan a world without government, without laws,
office building on North Main Street gives the building, 1920. without property. Other anarchists did not
ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

27
share his idealism. The movement was torn by disagreements— countering extremism through ordinary debate or persuasion, or
they were anarchists, after all. through concession, is a fool’s errand. Extremists may not even
In Galleani’s day, as in our own, the lines of conflict were know what they believe, or hope for. “One of the things I increas-
not cleanly delineated. American radicalism can be a messy ingly keep wondering about is—what is the endgame?” Mary
stew of ideas and motivations. Violence doesn’t need a clear McCord, a former assistant U.S. attorney and national-security
or consistent ideology and often borrows from several. Federal official, told me. “Do you want democratic government? Do you
law-enforcement officials use the term salad-bar extremism to want authoritarianism? Nobody talks about that. Take back our
describe what worries them most today, and it applies just as country. Okay, so you get it back. Then what do you do?”
aptly to the extremism of a century ago.
When Galleani had arrived in America, he’d encountered a
nation in a terrible mood, one that would feel familiar to us today.

III.
Galleani’s children were born into violent times. The nation was
divided not least over the cause of its divisions. The gap between
rich and poor was colossal—the top 1 percent of Americans pos-
sessed almost as much wealth as the rest of the country combined.
The population was changing rapidly. Reconstruction had been
defeated, and southern states in particular remained horrifically
violent toward Black people, for whom the threat of lynching
was constant. The Great Migration was just beginning. Immigra-
tion surged, inspiring intense waves of xenophobia. America was
primed for violence—and to Galleani and his followers, destroy-
ing the state was the only conceivable path.
The spectacular violence of 1919 and 1920 proved a catalyst.
A concerted nationwide hunt for anarchists began. This work,
which culminated in what came to be known as the Palmer Raids,
entailed direct violations of the Constitution. In late 1919 and
early 1920, a series of raids—carried out in more than 30 Ameri- CREEPING VIOLENCE
can cities—led to the warrantless arrests of 10,000 suspected
radicals, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants. Attorney General In another country, and in a time closer to our own, a sustained
Palmer’s dragnet ensnared many innocent people and has become outbreak of domestic terrorism brought decades of attacks—and
a symbol of the damage that overzealous law enforcement can illustrates the role that ordinary citizens can sometimes play, along
cause. Hundreds of people were ultimately deported. Some had with deterrence, in restoring stability.
fallen afoul of a harsh new federal immigration law that broadly On Saturday, August 2, 1980, a bomb hidden inside a suitcase
targeted anarchists. One of them was Luigi Galleani. “The law blew up at the Bologna Centrale railway station, killing 85 people
was kind of designed for him,” Beverly Gage, a historian and the and wounding hundreds more, many of them young families setting
author of The Day Wall Street Exploded, told me. off on vacation. The explosion flattened an entire wing of the station,
The violence did not stop immediately after the Palmer demolishing a crowded restaurant, wrecking a train platform, and
Raids—in an irony that frustrated authorities, Galleani’s deporta- freezing the station’s clock at the time of the detonation: 10:25 a.m.
tion made it impossible for them to charge him in the Wall Street The Bologna massacre remains the deadliest attack in Italy
bombing, which they believed he planned, because it occurred since World War II. By the time it occurred, Italians were more
after he’d left the country. Nevertheless, sweeping action by law than a decade into a period of intense political violence, one that
enforcement helped put an end to a generation of anarchist attacks. came to be known as Anni di Piombo, or the “Years of Lead.”
That is the most important lesson from the anarchist period: From roughly 1969 to 1988, Italians experienced open warfare
Holding perpetrators accountable is crucial. The Palmer Raids are in the streets, bombings of trains, deadly shootings and arson
remembered, rightly, as a ham-handed application of police-state attacks, at least 60 high-profile assassinations, and a narrowly
tactics. Government actions can turn killers into martyrs. More averted neofascist coup attempt. It was a generation of death
important, aggressive policing and surveillance can undermine the and bedlam. Although exact numbers are difficult to come by,
very democracy they are meant to protect; state violence against during the Years of Lead, at least 400 people were killed and
citizens only validates a distrust of law enforcement. some 2,000 wounded in more than 14,000 separate attacks.
But deterrence conducted within the law can work. Unlike As I sat at the Bologna Centrale railway station in September,
anti-war protesters or labor organizers, violent extremists don’t a place where so many people had died, I found myself thinking,
have an agenda that invites negotiation. “Today’s threats of vio- somewhat counterintuitively, about how, in the great sweep of
lence can be inspired by a wide range of ideologies that them- history, the political violence in Italy in the 1970s and ’80s now
selves morph and shift over time,” Deputy Homeland Security seems but a blip. Things were so terrible for so long. And then
Adviser Josh Geltzer told me. Now as in the early 20th century, they weren’t. How does political violence come to an end?

28 APRIL 2023
 No one can say precisely what alchemy of experience, tem-
perament, and circumstance leads a person to choose political
violence. But being part of a group alters a person’s moral cal-
culations and sense of identity, not always for the good. Martin
Luther King Jr., citing the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote
in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” that “groups tend to be
more immoral than individuals.” People commit acts together
that they’d never contemplate alone.
Vicky Franzinetti was a teenage member of the far-left mili-
tant group Lotta Continua during the Years of Lead. “There was
a lot of what I would call John Wayneism, and a lot of people fell
for that,” she told me. “Whether it’s the Black Panthers or the
people who attacked on January 6 on Capitol Hill, violence has
a mesmerizing appeal on a lot of people.” A subtle but impor-
tant shift also took place in Italian political culture during the
’60s and ’70s as people grasped for group identity. “If you move
from what you want to who you are, there is very little scope for
real dialogue, and for the possibility of exchanging ideas, which
is the basis of politics,” Franzinetti said. “The result is the death
of politics, which is what has happened.”
In talking with Italians who lived through the Years of Lead
about what brought this period to an end, two common themes
emerged. The first has to do with economics. For a while, vio-
lence was seen as permissible because for too many people, it
felt like the only option left in a world that had turned against
them. When the Years of Lead began, Italy was still fumbling
for a postwar identity. Some Fascists remained in positions of
power, and authoritarian regimes controlled several of the coun-
try’s neighbors—Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey. Not unlike
the labor movements that arose in Galleani’s day, the Years of
Lead were preceded by intensifying unrest among factory workers
and students, who wanted better social and working conditions.
The unrest eventually tipped into violence, which spiraled out of
control. Leftists fought for the proletariat, and neofascists fought
During the to wind back the clock to the days of Mussolini. When, after
two decades, the economy improved in Italy, terrorism receded.
Years of Lead, The second theme was that the public finally got fed up. People
didn’t want to live in terror. They said, in effect: Enough. Lotta
at least 400 Continua hadn’t resorted to violence in the early years. When it
did grow violent, it alienated its own members. “I didn’t like it,
people were and I fought it,” Franzinetti told me. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi,
a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara who lived in Rome

killed and some at the time, recalled: “It went too far. Really, it reached a point
that was quite dramatic. It was hard to live through those times.”

2,000 wounded But it took a surprisingly long while to reach that point. The vio-
lence crept in—one episode, then another, then another—and
people absorbed and compartmentalized the individual events,
in more than as many Americans do now. They did not understand just how
dangerous things were getting until violence was endemic. “It
14,000 separate started out with the kneecappings,” Joseph LaPalombara, a Yale
political scientist who lived in Rome during the Years of Lead,
aattacks.
attack
att
at
tt
ttack
ttack
acks.
s. told me, “and then got worse. And as it got worse, the streets
emptied after dark.”
A turning point in public sentiment, or at least the start of a
turning point, came in the spring of 1978, when the leftist group

29
known as the Red Brigades kidnapped the former prime minister ignored the violence now paid attention; people who might have
and leader of the Christian Democrats Aldo Moro, killing all five been tempted by revolution now stayed home. Meanwhile, the
members of his police escort and turning him into an example of crackdown that followed—which involved curfews, traffic stops,
how We don’t negotiate with terrorists can go terrifically wrong. Moro a militarized police presence, and deals with terrorists who agreed
was held captive and tortured for 54 days, then executed, his body to rat out their collaborators—caused violent groups to implode.
left in the back of a bright-red Renault on a busy Rome street. In a The example of Aldo Moro offers a warning. It shouldn’t take
series of letters his captors allowed him to send, Moro had begged an act like the assassination of a former prime minister to shake
Italian officials to arrange for his freedom with a prisoner exchange. people into awareness. But it often does. William Bernstein, the
They refused. After his murder, the final letter he’d written to his author of The Delusions of Crowds, is not optimistic that anything
wife, “my dearest Noretta,” roughly 10 days before his death, was else will work: “The answer is—and it’s not going to be a pleasant
published in a local newspaper. “In my last hour I am left with a answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a
profound bitterness at heart,” he wrote. “But it is not of this I want containable cataclysm.” What if, he went on—“I almost hesitate
to talk but of you whom I love and will always love.” Moro did not to say this”—but what if they actually had hanged Mike Pence
want a state funeral, but Italy held one anyway. or Nancy Pelosi on January 6? “I think that would have ended it.
The conventional wisdom among terrorism experts had I don’t think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm. I
been that terrorists wanted publicity but didn’t really want to think, absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two gen- ADRIANO ALECCHI / MONDADORI PORTFOLIO / GETTY

kill people—or, as the Rand Corporation’s Brian Jenkins put it erations.” Bernstein wasn’t the only expert to suggest such a thing.
in 1975, “Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of No wonder some American politicians are terrified. “We’ve
GIANNI GIANSANTI / GAMMA-RAPHO / GETTY;

people dead.” But conditions had become so bad by the time had an exponential increase in threats against members of Con-
Moro was murdered that newspapers around the world were gress,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota,
confused when days passed without a political killing or shoot- told me in January. Klobuchar thought back to when she was
ing in Italy. “Italians Puzzled by 10-Day Lull in Terrorist Activ- standing at President Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, two
ity,” read one headline in The New York Times a few weeks after weeks after the attempted insurrection. At the time, as Democrats
Moro’s murder. “When he was killed, it got a lot more serious,” and most Republicans came together for a peaceful transfer of
Alexander Reid Ross, who hosts a history podcast about the era power, she felt as though a violent eruption in American history
called Years of Lead Pod, told me. “People stopped laughing. It might be ending. But Klobuchar now believes she was “naive” to
was no longer something where you could say, ‘It’s a sideshow.’” think that Republicans would break with Trump and restore the
The Moro assassination was followed by an intensification of party’s democratic values. “We have Donald Trump, his shadow,
violence, including the Bologna-station bombing. People who had looming over everything,” she said.

30 APRIL 2023
 Left: A bodyguard
slain by the Red
ed
Brigades
rigades during
the kidnapping of
former Italian
talian
Prime Minister
inister Aldo
Moro, 1978. Right:
Graffiti in Milan
ilan
supporting
ting the Red
Brigades,
rigades, 1977.

This past February, Biden sought to dispel that shadow as he indicated hatred for the targeted group—fatal attacks at super-
stood before Congress to deliver his State of the Union address. markets and synagogues, as well as assassination attempts such as
“There’s no place for political violence in America,” he said. “And we the shooting at a congressional-Republican baseball practice in
must give hate and extremism in any form no safe harbor.” Biden’s 2017. Less visible is the far more extensive mindset that underlies
speech was punctuated by jeers and name-calling by Republicans. them. “There are a lot of people who are out for a protest, who
are advocating for violence,” Erin Miller, the longtime program
manager at the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Data-
base, told me. “Then there’s a smaller number at the tip of the

IV.
iceberg that are willing to carry out violent attacks.” You can’t get
a grip on political violence just by counting the number of violent
episodes. You have to look at the whole culture.
A society’s propensity for political violence—including cata-
clysmic violence—may be increasing even as ordinary life, for
many people, probably most, continues to feel normal. A drum-
beat of violent attacks, by different groups with different agendas,
may register as different things. But collectively, as in Italy, they
have the power to loosen society’s screws.
In December, I spoke again with Alexander Reid Ross, who in
addition to hosting Years of Lead Pod is a lecturer at Portland State
University. We met in Pioneer Courthouse Square, in downtown
Portland. I had found the city in a wounded condition. This was
tragic to me two times over—first, because I knew what had hap-
pened there, and second, because I had immediately absorbed
A BROKEN SOCIAL CONTRACT Portland’s charm. You can’t encounter all those drawbridges, or
the swooping crows, or the great Borgesian bookstore, or the
The taxonomy of what counts as political violence can be com- giant elm trees and do anything but fall in love with the place.
plicated. One way to picture it is as an iceberg: The part that But downtown Portland was not at its best. The first day I was
protrudes from the water represents the horrific attacks on both there I counted more birds than people, and many of the people
hard targets and soft ones, in which the attacker has explicitly I saw were quite obviously struggling badly.

31
 On the gray afternoon when we met, Ross and I happened The morning after I met Ross, I drove across the river to
to be sitting at the site of the first far-right protest he remembers Vancouver, a town of strip-mall churches and ponderosa pine
witnessing in his city, back in 2016; members of a group called trees, to meet with Lars Larson, who records The Lars Larson
Students for Trump, stoked by Alex Jones’s disinformation out- Show—tagline: “Honestly Provocative Talk Radio”—from his
let, Infowars, had gathered to assert their political preferences home studio. Larson greeted me with his two dogs and a big
and provoke their neighbors. Ross is a geographer, a specialty mug of coffee. His warmth, quick-mindedness, and tendency to
he assumed would keep him focused on land-use debates and filibuster make him irresistible for talk radio. And his allegiance
ecology, which is one of the reasons he moved to Oregon in to MAGA world helps him book guests like Donald Trump Jr.,
the first place. After that 2016 rally, Ross paid closer attention whom Larson introduced on a recent episode as “the son of the
to the political violence unfolding in Portland. We decided to real president of the United States of America.” Over the course
take a walk so that Ross could point out various landmarks from of our conversation, he described January 6 as “some ruined
the—well, we couldn’t decide what to call the period of sustained furniture in the Capitol”; suggested that the city government of
violence that started in 2016 and was reignited in 2020. The siege? Charlottesville, Virginia, was secretly behind the violent clash at
The occupation? The revolt? What happened in Portland has a the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally; and made multiple references
way of being too slippery for precise language. to George Soros, including suggesting that Soros may have paid
We walked southwest from the square before doubling back for people to come to Portland to tear up the city. When I pressed
toward the Willamette River. Over here was the historical society Larson on various points, he would walk back whatever he had
that protesters broke into and vandalized one night. Over there claimed, but only slightly. He does not seem to be a conspiracy
was where the statues got toppled. (“Portland is a city of ped- theorist, but he plays one on the radio.
estals now,” Ross said.) A federal building still had a protective Larson blamed Portland’s troubles on a culture of lawlessness
fence surrounding it more than a year after the street violence fostered by a district attorney who, he said, repeatedly declined to
had ended. At one point, the mayor had to order a drawbridge prosecute left-wing protesters. He sees this as an uneven applica-
raised to keep combatants apart. tion of justice that undermined people’s faith in local government.
On the evening of June 30, 2018, Ross found himself in the It is more accurate to say that the district attorney chose not to
middle of a violent brawl between hundreds of self-described antifa prosecute lesser crimes, focusing instead on serious crimes against
activists and members of the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, a local people and property; ironically, the complaint about uneven
pro-Trump offshoot. Ross described to me a number of “ghoulish” application comes from both the far left and the far right. When
encounters he’d had with Patriot Prayer, and I asked him which I asked Larson whether Patriot Prayer is Christian nationalist in
moment was the scariest. “It’s on video,” he told me. “You can see ideology, the question seemed to make him uncomfortable, and
it: me getting punched.” I later watched the video. In it, Ross rushes he emphasized his belief in pluralism and religious freedom. He
toward a group of men who are repeatedly kicking and bludgeoning also compared Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer marching on Port-
a person dressed all in black, lying in the street. Ross had told me land to civil-rights activists marching on Selma in 1965. “What I
earlier that he’d intervened because he thought he was watching heard people tell Patriot Prayer is ‘If you get attacked every time
someone being beaten to death. After Ross gets clocked, he appears you go to Portland, don’t go to Portland,’” he told me. “Would
dazed, then dashes back toward the fight. “That’s enough! That’s you have given that same advice to Martin Luther King?”
enough!” he shouts. Gibson’s lawyer Angus Lee accused the government of “political
By the time of this fight, Patriot Prayer had become a fixture in persecution”; Gibson was ultimately acquitted of the riot charge.
Portland. Its founder, Joey Gibson, has said in interviews that he Patriot Prayer, Lee went on, is “not like these other organizations
was inspired to start Patriot Prayer to fight for free speech, but the you referenced that have members and that sort of thing. Patriot
group’s core belief has always been in Donald Trump. Its first event, Prayer is more of an idea.” Gibson himself once put it in blunter
in Vancouver, Washington, in October 2016, was a pro-Trump terms. “I don’t even know what Patriot Prayer is anymore,” he said
rally. From there, Gibson deliberately picked ultraliberal cities such in a 2017 interview on a public-access news channel in Portland.
as Portland, Berkeley, Seattle, and San Francisco for his protests, “It’s just these two words that people hear and it sparks emotions …
and in doing so quickly attracted like-minded radicals—the Proud All Patriot Prayer is is videos and social-media presence.”
Boys, the Three Percenters, Identity Evropa, the Hell Shaking Street The more I talked with people about Patriot Prayer, the more
Preachers—who marched alongside Patriot Prayer. These were it began to resemble a phenomenon like QAnon—a decentralized
people who seemed to love Trump and shit-stirring in equal mea- and amorphous movement designed to provoke reaction, toler-
sure. White nationalists and self-described Western chauvinists ant of contradictions, borrowing heavily from internet culture,
showed up at Gibson’s events. (Gibson’s mother is Japanese, and overlapping with other extremist movements like the Proud Boys,
he has insisted that he does not share their views.) By August 2018, linked to high-profile episodes of violence, and ultimately focused
Patriot Prayer had already held at least nine rallies in Portland, on Trump. I couldn’t help but think of Galleani, his “beautiful
routinely drawing hundreds of supporters—grown men in Boba idea,” and the diffuse ideology of his followers. One key differ-
Fett helmets and other homemade costumes; at least one man ence: Galleani was fighting against the state, whereas movements
with an SS neck tattoo. In 2019, Gibson himself was arrested on a like QAnon and groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys
riot charge. Patriot Prayer quickly became the darling of Infowars. have been cheered on by a sitting president and his party.

32 APRIL 2023
 When I met with Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, at city hall,
he recalled night after night of violence, and at times planning for
the very worst, meaning mass casualties. Portlanders had taken
to calling him “Tear Gas Ted” because of the police response in
the city. One part of any mayor’s job is to absorb the commu-
nity’s scorn. Few people have patience for unfilled potholes or the
complexities of trash collection. Disdain for Wheeler may have
been the one thing that just about every person I met in Portland
shared, but his job has been difficult even by big-city standards.
He confronted a breakdown of the social contract.
“Political violence, in my opinion, is the extreme manifesta-
tion of other trends that are prevalent in our society,” Wheeler
told me. “A healthy democracy is one where you can sit on one
side of the table and express an opinion, and I can sit on the
other side of the table and express a very different opinion, and
then we have the contest of ideas … We have it out verbally.
Then we go drink a beer or whatever.”
When extremists began taunting Portlanders online, it was
very quickly “game on” for violence in the streets, Wheeler said.
In this way, Portland stands as a warning to cities that now seem
calm: It takes very little provocation to inflame latent tensions
between warring factions. Once order collapses, it is extraordi-
narily difficult to restore. And it can be dangerous to attempt
to do so through the use of force, especially when one violent
faction is lashing out, in part, against state authority.
Aaron Mesh moved to Portland 16 years ago, to take a job
as Willamette Week’s film critic, and since then has worked his
way up to managing editor. He is sharp-tongued and good-
humored, and it is obvious that he loves his city in the way
that any good newspaperman does, with a mix of fierce loyalty
Portland stands and heaping criticism. Like Wheeler, he trained attention on
the dynamic of action and reaction—on how rising to the bait
as a warning: not only solves nothing but can make things worse. “There was
this attitude of We’re going to theatrically subdue your city with
It takes very these weekend excursions,” Mesh said, describing the confronta-
tions that began in 2016 as a form of cosplay, with right-wing
little provocation extremists wearing everything from feathered hats to Pepe the
Frog costumes and left-wing extremists dressed up in what’s
to inflame
inflame known as black bloc: all-black clothing and facial coverings. “I
do want to emphasize,” he said, “that everyone involved in this
latent tensions. was a massive fucking loser, on both sides.”
It was as though all of the most unsavory characters on

Once order the internet had crawled out of the computer. The fights were
enough of a spectacle that not everyone took them seriously

collapses, it is at first. Mesh said it was impossible to overstate “the degree

to which Portland became a lodestone in the imagination of
a nascent Proud Boys movement,” a place where paramilitary
extraordinarily figures on the right went “to prove that they had testicles.” He
went on: “You walk into town wearing a helmet and carrying a
difficult
difficult big American flag” and then wait and see “who throws an egg
at your car or who gives you the middle finger, and you beat
ttoo rrest
esttore.
or
ore.
e. the living hell out of them.”
Both sides behaved despicably. But only the right-wingers
had the endorsement of the president and the mainstream
Republican Party. “Despite being run by utter morons,” Mesh

33
said of Patriot Prayer, “they managed to outsmart most of their waned very quickly in the 1990s not because of anything we
adversaries in this city, simply by provoking violent reactions did, but because of Oklahoma City. That bombing really put
from people who were appalled by their politics.” The argument the movement on the back foot. Some groups went under-
for violence among people on the left is often, essentially, If you ground. Some groups dispersed. You also saw that happen with
encounter a Nazi, you should punch him. But “what if the only white-supremacist groups.”
thing the Nazi wants is for you to punch him?” Mesh asked. A generation later, political violence in America unfolds with
“What if the Nazis all have cameras and they’re immediately little organized guidance and is fed by a mishmash of extremist
feeding all the videos of you punching them to Tucker Carlson? right-wing views. It predates the emergence of Donald Trump,
Which is what they did.” but Trump served as an accelerant. He also made tolerance of
The situation in Portland became so desperate, and the ideolo- political violence a defining trait of his party, whereas in the past,
gies involved so tangled, that the violence began to operate like its both political parties condemned it. At the height of the Patriot
own weather system—a phenomenon that the majority of Port- movement, “there was this fire wall” between extremist groups
landers could see coming and avoid, but one that left behind tre- and elected officials that protected democratic norms, according
mendous destruction. Most people don’t want to fight. But it takes to Gallaher. Today, “the fire wall between these guys and formal
startlingly few violent individuals to exact generational damage. politics has melted away.” Gallaher does not anticipate an out-
break of civil strife in America in a “classic sense”—with Blue and
Red armies or militias fighting for territory. “Our extremist groups
are nowhere near as organized as they are in other countries.”

V.
Because it is chaotic, Americans tend to underestimate politi-
cal violence, as Italians at first did during the Years of Lead.
Some see it as merely sporadic, and shift attention to other
things. Some say, in effect, Wake me when there’s civil war. Some
take heart from moments of supposed reprieve, such as the poor
showing by election deniers and other extremists in the 2022
midterm elections. But think of all the ongoing violence that at
first glance isn’t labeled as being about politics per se, but is in
fact political: the violence, including mass shootings, directed
at LGBTQ communities, at Jews, and at immigrants, among
others. In November, the Department of Homeland Security
issued a bulletin warning that “the United States remains in a
heightened threat environment” due to individuals and small
groups with a range of “violent extremist ideologies.” It warned
of potential attacks against a long list of places and people:
THE COMPLICIT STATE “public gatherings, faith-based institutions, the LGBTQI+ com-
munity, schools, racial and religious minorities, government
America was born in revolution, and violence has been an facilities and personnel, U.S. critical infrastructure, the media,
undercurrent in the nation’s politics ever since. People remem- and perceived ideological opponents.”
ber the brutal opposition to the civil-rights struggle, and recall The broad scope of the warning should not be surprising—
the wave of terrorism spawned by the anti-war movement of not after the massacres in Pittsburgh, El Paso, Buffalo, and
the 1960s. But the most direct precursor to what we’re experi- elsewhere. One month into 2023, the pace of mass shootings
encing now is the anti-government Patriot movement, which in America—all either political or, inevitably, politicized—was
can be traced to the 1980s and eventually led to deadly stand- at an all-time high. “There’s no place that’s immune right now,”
offs between federal agents and armed citizens at Ruby Ridge, Mary McCord, the former assistant U.S. attorney, observed.
Idaho, in 1992, and in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Three people “It’s really everywhere.” She added, “Someday, God help us,
were killed at Ruby Ridge. As many as 80 died in Waco, 25 of we’ll come out of this. But it’s hard for me to imagine how.”
them children. Those incidents stirred the present-day militia The sociologist Norbert Elias, who left Germany for France
movement and directly inspired the Oklahoma City bomb- and then Britain as the Nazi regime took hold, famously
ers, anti-government extremists who killed 168 people at the described what he called the civilizing process as “a long
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. The surge in militia sequence of spurts and counter-spurts,” warning that you can-
activity, white nationalism, and apocalypticism of the 1990s not fix a violent society simply by eliminating the factors that
seemed to peter out in the early 2000s. This once struck me as made it deteriorate in the first place. Violence and the forces
a bright spot, an earlier success we might learn from today. But that underlie it have the potential to take us from the demo-
when I mentioned this notion to Carolyn Gallaher, a scholar cratic backsliding we already know to a condition known as
who spent two years following a right-wing paramilitary group decivilization. In periods of decivilization, ordinary people fail
in Kentucky in the 1990s, she said, “The militia movement to find common ground with one another and lose faith in

34 APRIL 2023
 New from Princeton University Press

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—Financial Times this vital and nigh-miraculous act.” —Nicholas Kristof, New York Times
—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning
author of An Immense World

“[This is] a book that documents and “Merchants of the Right will change the “[A] wide-ranging investigation into efforts by
explains the very worrisome trends in way we think about guns in America. scientists to create digitised ‘twins’ of human
American democracy in real time. . . . Truly a must-read.” beings that promises a future of predictive
Highly recommend.” —Jonathan M. Metzl, author of medicine, but also ethical challenges.”
—Carol Graham, author of The Power of Hope Dying of Whiteness —Financial Times
institutions and elected leaders. Shared knowledge erodes, and anti-Semitism and voting for the Nazi Party by going back to
bonds fray across society. Some people inevitably decide to act the anti-Semitism across those same regions in the 14th century.
with violence. As violence increases, so does distrust in institu- You can trace it city to city.”
tions and leaders, and around and around it goes. The process Three realities mark the current era of political violence in
is not inevitable—it can be held in check—but if a period of America as different from what has come before, and make deal-
bloodshed is sustained for long enough, there is no shortcut ing with it much harder. The first—obvious—is the universal
back to normal. And signs of decivilization are visible now. access to weaponry, including military-grade weapons.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / GETTY

“The path out of bloodshed is measured not in years but Second, today’s information environment is simultaneously
in generations,” Rachel Kleinfeld writes in A Savage Order, her more sophisticated and more fragmented than ever before. In
2018 study of extreme violence and the ways it corrodes a society. 2006, the analyst Bruce Hoffman argued that contemporary
“Once a democracy descends into extreme violence, it is always terrorism had become dangerously amorphous. He was referring
more vulnerable to backsliding.” Cultural patterns, once set, are to groups like al-Qaeda, but we now witness what he described
durable—the relatively high rates of violence in the American among domestic American extremists. As Hoffman and others
South, in part a legacy of racism and slaveholding, persist to this see it, the defining characteristic of post-9/11 terrorism is that
day. In The Delusions of Crowds, William Bernstein looks fur- it is decentralized. You don’t need to be part of an organization
ther afield, to Germany. He told me, “You can actually predict to become a terrorist. Hateful ideas and conspiracy theories are

36 APRIL 2023
 to bolster authority—a characteristic of what Kleinfeld, in her
2018 book, calls a “complicit state.” This is a well-known tactic
among authoritarian incumbents worldwide who wield power
by mobilizing state and vigilante violence in tandem.
Complicity is insidious. It doesn’t require a revolution. You
can see complicity, for example, in Trump’s order to the Proud
Boys to “stand back and stand by” in the months ahead of Janu-
ary 6. You can see it in the Republican Party’s defense of Trump
even after he propelled insurrectionists toward the U.S. Capitol.
And you can see it in the way that powerful politicians and tele-
vision personalities continue to cheer on right-wing extremists
as “patriots” and “political prisoners,” rather than condemning
them as vigilantes and seditionists.
Americans sometimes wonder what might have happened if
A pro-Trump the Civil War had gone the other way—what the nation would
demonstrator at be like now, or whether it would even exist, if the South had won.
the U.S. Capitol But that thought experiment overlooks the fact that we do know
on January 6, what it looks like for violent extremists to win in the United
2021, when States. In the 1870s, white supremacists who objected to Recon-
struction led a campaign of violence that they perversely referred
insurrectionists
to as Redemption. They murdered thousands of Black people in
stormed the terror lynchings. They drove thousands more Black business own-
building ers, journalists, and elected officials out of their homes and home-
towns, destroying their livelihoods. Sometimes violence ends
not because it is overcome, but because it has achieved its goal.
Norbert Elias’s warnings notwithstanding, dealing seriously
with society’s underlying pathologies is part of the answer to
political violence in the long term. But so, too, is something we
have not had and perhaps can barely imagine anymore: leaders
from all parts of the political constellation, and at all levels of
government, and from all segments of society, who name the
problem of political violence for what it is, explain how it will
overwhelm us, and point a finger at those who foment it, either
directly or indirectly. Leaders who understand that nothing else
will matter if we can’t stop this one thing. The federal govern-
ment is right to take a hard line against political violence—as it
has done with its prosecutions of Governor Whitmer’s would-be
kidnappers and the January 6 insurrectionists (almost 1,000 of
whom have been charged). But violence must also be confronted
not only easy to find online; they’re actively amplified by social where it first takes root, in the minds of citizens.
platforms, whose algorithms prioritize the anger and hate that Ending political violence means facing down those who use the
drive engagement and profit. The barriers to radicalization are language of democracy to weaken democratic systems. It means
now almost nonexistent. Luigi Galleani would have loved Twit- rebuking the conspiracy theorist who uses the rhetoric of truth-
ter, YouTube, and Telegram. He had to settle for publishing a seeking to obscure what’s real; the billionaire who describes his
weekly newspaper. Because of social media, conspiracy theories privately owned social platform as a democratic town square;
now spread instantly and globally, often promoted by hugely the seditionist who proclaims himself a patriot; the authoritarian
influential figures in the media, such as Tucker Carlson and of who claims to love freedom. Someday, historians will look back
course Trump, whom Twitter and Facebook have just reinstated. at this moment and tell one of two stories: The first is a story of
The third new reality goes to the core of American self- how democracy and reason prevailed. The second is a story of
governance: people refusing to accept the outcome of elections, how minds grew fevered and blood was spilled in the twilight
with national leaders fueling the skepticism and leveraging it of a great experiment that did not have to end the way it did.
for their own ends. In periods of decivilization, violence often
becomes part of a governing strategy. This can happen when weak
states acquiesce to violence simply to survive. Or it can happen
when politicians align themselves with violent groups in order Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic.

37
Arnold’s Last Act

What happens
when the Terminator
turns 75

38 APRIL 2023
By
Mark
Leibovich Photographs by Ryan Pfluger
 American celebrity ever forged—can reconnect with something
in the neighborhood of a pedestrian existence. “It’s like a Norman
Rockwell,” Schwarzenegger told me. “We talk to the bus driver.
We do the garbage man, the construction worker. Everyone’s
got their beautiful, beautiful jobs and professions.” These days,
Schwarzenegger’s own beautiful profession is to essentially be an
emeritus version of himself.
We made it intact to Gold’s Gym in Venice, the birthplace of
bodybuilding in the ’60s and ’70s, and a cathedral to the sport
ever since. Schwarzenegger will always be synonymous with the
place, and with the spectacle of specimens at nearby Muscle
Beach. The Venice Gold’s is a tourist attraction but also a serious
gym—loud with the usual clanking and grunting, and redolent
with the pickled scent of sweat.
“Say hi to Heide,” Schwarzenegger told me, pointing to 82-year-
old Heide Sutter, who was working out in a skintight tracksuit.
“She is a landmark,” he said. “She’s actually the girl who is sitting

Arnold on my shoulder in the Pumping Iron book. She was topless in the
shot.” Perhaps I recognized her? Not immediately, no. I didn’t even
realize that Pumping Iron was a book. I knew it only as a movie, the

Schwarzenegger
1977 documentary about the fanatical culture of bodybuilding.
“Everybody wants to live forever,” went the opening refrain of the
title song. Schwarzenegger, then 28, was the star of the film and
a testament to the idea that humans could mold themselves into

nearly gods—bulging comic-book gods, but gods nonetheless.

“The most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym is the
pump,” he says in the movie. “It’s as satisfying to me as coming

killed me. is, as in having sex with a woman and coming … So can you
believe how much I am in heaven?”
Now the aging leviathan jumped into a series of light rep-
etitions. He likes to emphasize a different body part each day
I had joined him one morning as he rushed through his daily of the week. He was focused today (a Thursday) on his back
routine. Schwarzenegger gets up by six. He makes coffee, put- and chest muscles. He did light bench presses, pectoral work
ters around, feeds Whiskey (his miniature horse) and Lulu (his on an incline chest machine, and some lat pull-downs. I did
miniature donkey), shovels their overnight manure into a bar- a few reps myself on an adjacent machine, to blend in.
rel, drinks his coffee, checks his email, and maybe plays a quick For the most part, the muscled minions at Gold’s left the king
game of chess online. At 7:40, he puts a bike on the back of a alone. “This is one of the few places where Arnold is treated nor-
Suburban and heads from his Brentwood, California, mansion mally,” said Daniel Ketchell, Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, who
to the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. From there hovered between us. A few tourists from Germany defied protocol
he sets out on the three-mile bike ride to Gold’s Gym, where he and approached the bench, asking for selfies. “Don’t worry about
has been lifting on and off since the late ’60s. The bike ride is his it,” Schwarzenegger said, blowing them off. “We have a mutual
favorite part of the morning. It is also, I learned while following friend,” tried another intruder, and Schwarzenegger scowled,
behind him on that foggy day in October, a terrifying expedition. muttering indecipherably, possibly in German.
Schwarzenegger can be selective in his observance of traffic As someone who spent years perfecting his body, Schwar-
signals. He zipped through intersections with cars screeching zenegger has always been attuned to the nuances of decline. Paul
behind him. I braked hard and, being neither an action hero Wachter, a friend and business partner, first met him in 1981,
nor a stunt double, barely stayed upright. Drivers honked and when Wachter was about to turn 25. “Arnold said, ‘Once you hit
yelled at the speeding cyclist in the lead until they realized who 26, it’s all downhill with the body,’” Wachter recalled. “He said,
he was. “Heyyyy, Mister Arnold!” the double-taking driver of a ‘You can still be in shape, but the peak is over at 26.’”
landscaping van shouted out his window. Schwarzenegger is now 75. He observed his birthday on
Schwarzenegger does not wear a helmet and seems to enjoy July 30 by trying not to notice it. The only memorable thing
being recognized, startling commuters with drive-by cameos. He about the milestone was that he tested positive for COVID that
describes his ride as a kind of vigorous nostalgia trip, a time when morning. He felt lousy for a few days and recovered.
the former Mr. Universe, Terminator, Barbarian, Governor of I wanted to talk with Schwarzenegger because I was curi-
California, etc.—one of the strangest and most potent alloys of ous about what aging felt like for someone with a name, body,

40 APRIL 2023
and global platform so huge that they hardly seemed subject to of the new Avatar film (directed by his old friend James Cam-
time. What does it feel like to be perpetually compared with eron) and found himself crying in the dark. Someone will tell
your long-ago peak? “They play Pumping Iron in a loop in some a story and he’ll choke up out of nowhere. He asks himself:
of the gyms,” Schwarzenegger told me, grinning at the idea of “Why did this have an impact on me today when it would have
his souped-up old self still presiding over the pretenders. We all had none in the 1970s?”
get soft and dilapidated, but it cuts much harder when you’ve The day before our helter-skelter bike ride, I had caught
been “celebrated for years for having the best-developed body,” Schwarzenegger leaning against a doorway of the Chinese The-
as he put it. “You get chubby. You get overweight, you get older atre, on Hollywood Boulevard. He was waiting to give a brief
and older.” Just imagine, he added wistfully, “the change I saw.” speech in honor of Jamie Lee Curtis, who was about to get
As I watched him complete her hand- and footprints
his workout, Schwar zenegger embedded in cement.
was barely clearing 120 pounds “I was trying to think of
on the bench press. After decades
of abuse, the man’s shoulders are
Schwarzenegger a big word,” Schwarzeneg-
ger told me. “You know, a
toast. His knees are shot, his back forever thing, or something
is sore, and he has undergone mul- isn’t afraid of death. like that.” He kept land-
tiple heart procedures, including ing on verewigt; German
three separate valve-replacement
surgeries, the last in 2020. Two of
“I’m just pissed for “immortalized.” “It
means ‘forever,’ ” he said.
them devolved into 10-plus-hour
ordeals that nearly killed him on off about it.” Ketchell encouraged the
boss to not overthink it.
the table. Still, let it be recorded “Just say ‘immortalized,’ ”
that on a foggy October morning Ketchell told him. This is
at Gold’s Gym in Venice, I was lift- Hollywood—speak in the
ing heavier weights than Arnold native platitude.
Schwarzenegger was. Curtis walked into
After our workout, Schwar- the theater and greeted
zenegger stood a few feet away and Schwarzenegger. They
looked me over, paying particular performed ritual Holly-
attention to my bare legs. wood shoulder rubs on
“You have very good calves,” each other. The two go way
he observed. “Very well defined.” back: Schwarzenegger once
And calves are important, he added: did a Christmas special
“They are one of the muscles that with her father, Tony Cur-
the old Greeks used to idolize.” tis. They have houses near
Big deltoids are also coveted. In each other in Sun Valley. In
addition to abs and obliques. But 1994, Schwarzenegger and
he always takes note of a person’s Curtis co-starred in True
calves. This was easily the highlight Lies, the Cameron action
of my day, if not my five decades comedy. That was the same
among Earth mortals. year Schwarzenegger’s own
massive hands and feet
A c o u p l e o f years ago, How- were set at the Chinese
ard Stern asked Schwarzenegger on Theatre. He mentioned
the air where he thought we all go this more than once.
after we die. “The truth is, we’re six Schwarzenegger intro-
feet under, and we’re going to rot duced me to Curtis, who
there,” Schwarzenegger said. Some other authority gets to play the told me how much she appreciated Arnold’s “showing up” for
Terminator, and on a schedule of their choosing. Schwarzenegger her. “Showing up” was a big part of the job these days. Then
wasn’t afraid of death, he added. “I’m just pissed off about it.” Curtis headed to the stage, while Schwarzenegger stayed behind
Emotionally, Schwarzenegger has always been a padlocked in the doorway, squinting out into the glare. He looked fidgety,
gym. But he’s felt a change lately, a more reflective shift. People maybe bored. He asked me whether I had seen the spot where
close to him have noted a degree of openness, a desire to con- his hands and feet were imprinted.
fide, that wasn’t present back when he was young and invincible. Yes, I’d seen it. I’ll be back, Schwarzenegger had signed in
Schwarzenegger told me that he recently attended the premiere the concrete—his signature line, first uttered in The Terminator,

41
before his character circled back and murdered two dozen police York. It was won, naturally, by the man SI called “enough of a
officers. Schwarzenegger has been tossing out “I’ll be back”s ever legend for his first name to evoke a response wherever a barbell
since. The phrase carries “intimations of the eternal return,” an is picked up with purpose.”
overheated critic once wrote in The Village Voice. But it lands a Schwarzenegger won Mr. Olympia seven times, and
little differently now that the aging gargantuan is inching closer Mr. Universe four. But he is dissatisfied by nature, and from a
to the point of no return. young age not easily contained. At 21, he set out for America.
The reminders are everywhere, the worst one being that He felt alienated by the complacency of his boyhood friends:
Schwarzenegger’s friends keep dying. Jim Lorimer, a sidekick They aspired to a government job with a pension, maybe;
and business partner of more than 50 years, and an early church on Sunday; the usual. “I say to myself, Are we really just
promoter of bodybuilding in America, died in November clowns? And just do the same fucking things as the guy before? …
(Schwarzenegger spoke at his funeral). George Shultz, the And I’m like, What the fuck? I better get out of here.” Standing
Reagan-era secretary of state who became a close mentor, on a stage in South Africa after winning Mr. Olympia yet again,
died in early 2021. The hardest loss was the Italian champion Schwarzenegger felt the same old restlessness. “I looked around
Franco Columbu, another Pumping Iron icon, known as the and said to myself, I’ve got to get out of this.”
“Sardinian Strongman,” who died of an apparent heart attack He charged into showbiz and became similarly huge, making
in 2019. “I love you Franco,” Schwarzenegger wrote in an $35 million a film at his peak. “But then I outgrew that,” he said,
Instagram tribute. “You were my best friend.” Schwarzeneg- mentioning Terminator 3, which brought in a burly $433 mil-
ger listed a roster of other deaths, each depleting him more. lion at the box office in 2003. “And somehow I feel like I was
“It’s wild, because these are not just friends,” he told me. “If standing on that stage again in South Africa.”
people have a tremendous impact on your life, that means Next? Politics! He’d always been intrigued by the business;
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES / GETTY; RGR COLLECTION / ALAMY
that a chunk of you is being ripped away.” he married a Kennedy, and George H. W. Bush appointed him
On the morning when we went to Gold’s, Schwarzenegger chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and
made a small detour afterward to show me the one-bedroom Sports (he claims to have presented 41 with a calf machine). And
apartment he used to share with Columbu at 227 Strand Street, then, oh look, California was about to recall its pencil-necked
in Santa Monica. They lived there for about a year in the late governor, Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger jumped in and won his
’60s, not long after each had landed in the States, while they first attempt at elected office, also in 2003. He loved the job,
were both making a living laying bricks. The dwelling, a blue- telling me that of all the titles he has racked up, Governor is the
and-beige box with institutional windows, betrayed no trace one he cherishes the most.
of the behemoths who’d once resided there. Schwarzenegger was reelected by 17 points in 2006, though
Schwarzenegger stared up at the soulless space. “He was the his popularity cratered by the time he left office, devoured by the
best,” he said of his friend. usual bears of budgets, legislatures, and ornery voters. At that
point he was not only term-limited by California law; he was also
F o r m y n i n t h b i r t h d ay, my parents got me a subscrip- promotion-limited by Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitu-
tion to Sports Illustrated. One of the first issues I received fea- tion. He has often said he would definitely run for president if
tured photos from the 1974 Mr. Olympia contest, in New he could, except he was born in Austria.

42 APRIL 2023
 Instead, upon leaving Sacramento, Schwarzenegger was From left to right: He led exercise tutorials and taught
greeted by scandal. He admitted to fathering a son in the 1990s Schwarzenegger at age 11 proper hand-washing techniques.
with Mildred Patricia Baena, a family housekeeper for 20 years. in art class in Thal, Austria, “I wash my hands a minimum of
Mildred and Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver, had been in 1958; at the Mr. Steiermark 50 times a day,” he blustered into
the house pregnant with his children at the same time. competition in Graz, the camera from the kitchen sink.
After the story came out, Schwarzenegger retrenched for a Austria, 1963 or ’64; An ensemble of whimsical pets
while, tried to repair relations with his five kids, including his performing in “Articulate roamed in and out of the frame—
no-longer-secret teenage son, Joseph Baena. He and Shriver tried Muscle: The Male Body in Whiskey, Lulu, an assortment of
marriage counseling. It did not suit him, and it did not save the Art” at the Whitney Museum tiny and massive (Twins style) Yor-
marriage. “I think I went two or three times,” Schwarzenegger in New York, 1976; and kies and malamutes.
told me. He dismissed the therapist as a “schmuck” who was “def- with Jamie Lee Curtis in Suddenly, Schwarzenegger
initely on her side.” He admitted that he’d “fucked up” but did True Lies, 1994 was enjoying one of those ran-
not believe the situation required any deeper exploration. “The dom social-media moments—
fucking weenie gets hard and I fucking lose this brain and this quarantined and yet everywhere at
happened,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest mistakes that so many once. He was a goofball colossus
successful people make, you know, so what am I going to say?” called back into action. People loved
What to do next? Susan Kennedy (no relation to Maria), the role: Arnold in winter. Conan
Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff during the Sacramento years, told the Septuagenarian. I watched the
me that he missed his position as governor. “He had to learn a clips again and again. Wear a mask!
new role as a senior statesman”—one who was no longer in office. Don’t party with your friends like a
He took on a few film projects and did his various events and dumbass! Exercise! The videos were
causes and summits. His friends saw that he was struggling. “To an escape from my remote-work
wake up without a purpose is a dangerous place to be,” Jamie quicksand. The protagonist looked
ELLIOTT ERWITT / MAGNUM; COLAIMAGES / ALAMY

Lee Curtis told me. unsettled but also purposeful. Or

Meanwhile, another celebrity tycoon, Donald Trump, jumped maybe I was projecting. I very well
into politics and landed in the White House on his first try, leav- could have been projecting.
ing Schwarzenegger with the dregs of The Celebrity Apprentice. Then Schwarzenegger watched
Arnold’s Apprentice went about as well as Trump’s presidency. the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol
“Hey, Donald, I have a great idea. Why don’t we switch jobs?” by Trump’s supporters on Janu-
Schwarzenegger tweeted in response to the president’s taunting ary 6, 2021. He was horrified, and
of the show’s ratings, before it was killed in 2017. felt moved to make a different kind
During the scary early months of the pandemic, Schwarzeneg- of video. Flanked by American and
ger began posting homemade PSA videos on social media as a Californian flags, he talked about
lark. They showed him drowsing around his 14,000-square-foot coming as “an immigrant to this
mansion in Brentwood, smoking cigars and sitting in his hot tub. country.” He compared January 6

43
to Kristallnacht, the “Night of police chief in Graz, Austria, and fought for the Nazis. Schwar-
Broken Glass,” in 1938, which, zenegger has spoken more freely of late about his father’s activities
he said, had been perpetrated by and his own attempts to reconcile with them. History need not
“the Nazi equivalent of the Proud repeat—that has been his essential theme. Hatred and prejudice
Boys.” According to Schwarzeneg- are not inevitable features of humanity. “You don’t have to be
ger’s team, the video was viewed stuck in that,” he told me. Humans “have the capacity to change.”
80 million times. It was the biggest When Schwarzenegger first made it big in Hollywood,
thing he’d done since he’d left office. he approached the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Holocaust
“You never plan these things,” he research and human-rights group, seeking to learn about his
told me. father’s complicity. Gustav’s record came back relatively clean.
As he ended the message, He “was definitely a member of the Nazi Party, but he worked
Schwarzenegger brandished his in areas like the post office,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder
famous Conan sword. Because of and CEO of the center, told me. Researchers there found “no
course he did. evidence whatsoever about war crimes.” But it may be more
“The more you temper a sword, complicated than that. According to Michael Berenbaum, a
the stronger it becomes,” he said, Holocaust scholar at American Jewish University, records sug-
suggesting that the same was true gest that Gustav was “in the thick of the battle during the most
of American democracy. “I believe difficult times,” when some of the “most horrific military and
we will come out of this stronger, nonmilitary killings” occurred.
because we now understand what Schwarzenegger rarely spoke publicly about his father’s past
can be lost.” I remember thinking until Trump became president and emboldened a new generation
this was a hopeful take. of white nationalists. “Arnold always told us the goal after he left
office was to stay out of politics and focus on policy,” Ketchell told
S c h wa r z e n e g g e r was born me. “But when the president is calling neo-Nazis good people,
two years after World War II ended it’s hard to just focus on gerrymandering.”
and grew up, as he put it, “in the Governor Schwarzenegger After the violent march on Charlottesville, Virginia, by torch-
ruins of a country that suffered the celebrating his victory bearing white nationalists in 2017, Schwarzenegger went hard
loss of its democracy.” His father, on Election Night in Los at the neo-Nazis in a video. “Let me be just as blunt as possible,”
Gustav Schwarzenegger, was a Angeles, 2006 Schwarzenegger said. “Your heroes are losers. You’re supporting a

DAVID M C NEW / GETTY

44 APRIL 2023
lost cause. And believe me, I knew the original Nazis.” The video He was hard to get to, though. Beginning in May 2022, Schwar-
drew nearly 60 million views. zenegger had cloistered himself in Toronto for several months film-
Schwarzenegger can be a bit of a brute and a pig and could ing a spy-adventure show for Netflix called FUBAR. While there,
easily have been canceled half a dozen times over the years. Just he was informed that he had won a prize for his work combatting
days before the special election for governor in 2003, several prejudice. The first annual Award for Fighting Hatred was given by
women came forward to say that Schwarzenegger had groped the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation (AJCF). Schwarzenegger
them, and a few other accusations of sexual misconduct followed. is a sucker for such prizes and displays the biggies in his home and
He denied some and didn’t directly office alongside his gallery
address others, but he issued a of bodybuilding trophies,
blanket apology for his behavior. sculptures of himself, busts
“I have done things that were not
right which I thought then was
When Schwarzenegger of Lincoln, nine-foot repli-
cas of the Statue of Liberty,
playful,” he said at the time. “But I
now recognize that I have offended first made it big and whatnot. He couldn’t
receive his AJCF award in
people. And to those people that person because he was tied
I have offended, I want to say to
them, I am deeply sorry.”
in Hollywood, he up with FUBAR, but vowed
to visit the Auschwitz-
The stay-at-home Arnold char-
acter from the pandemic videos
approached the Birkenau State Museum in
Poland as soon as he could.
changed how people viewed him, Filming wrapped in
he believes. “The whole fitness thing Simon Wiesenthal early September, and
was mostly guys, the movie thing Schwarzenegger went
was mostly guys, the Republican
thing was mostly guys,” Schwar-
Center, the Holocaust home to Los Angeles for a
few days before heading off
zenegger explained. “Then you
had the fucking affair, and now of research group, seeking to Munich to meet some
people at Oktober fest.
course the guys are on your side, From there, the plan was
and the girls are saying, ‘Fuck this, to learn about his to make a quick day trip
fuck this, I’m out of here, this guy to southern Poland before
was a creep all along … I hope
Maria leaves him,’ and all that.” But
father’s complicity. returning to Germany to
shoot an ad for BMW.
the videos—those turned things He would be at Ausch-
around. “Now, all of a sudden, I witz a few days after Rosh
have all these broads coming up to Hashanah, the Jewish new
me saying, ‘Oh, you won me over year. Schwarzenegger’s
with this video.’” people encouraged me to
After Russia invaded Ukraine, in be there.
early 2022, Schwarzenegger made a I arrived at the town
video urging Vladimir Putin to call of Oświęcim, the site of
off the war and the Russian peo- the camp, with a group of
ple to resist their government. He donor and publicist types
said those who were demonstrat- who were connected with
ing on the streets of Moscow were AJCF. We were met at the
his “heroes.” And he once again entrance to the Auschwitz-
invoked his father, likening Gustav’s Birkenau State Museum
experience fighting with the Nazis in Leningrad to that of the Rus- by staff members, Arnold appendages, and a few strays, includ-
sian troops fighting in Ukraine. His father “was all pumped up by ing a woman in a Good Vibes sweatshirt. No one seemed to know
the lies of his government” when he arrived in Leningrad, Schwar- quite how to act. Distinct layers of surreal piled up before us.
zenegger said. He departed a broken man, in body and mind. Let’s stipulate that celebrity visits to concentration camps can
be tricky. Schwarzenegger appeared mindful of this as he rolled up
A f t e r C O V I D re s t r i c t i o n s were relaxed and the world in a black Mercedes. He stepped gingerly into a thicket of greet-
reopened, Schwarzenegger receded again from the daily scenery. ers, and tried to strike a solemn pose. Originally, the thought was
He had provided guidance and diversion during those rud- to do a standard arrival shot for photographers. But the keepers
derless months, and I had begun to miss him. I wanted to see of the site are sensitive to gestures that might convey triumphal
how he was doing. stagecraft or frivolity. “There are better places to learn how to

45
walk on a balance beam,” management was moved to tweet after Some have committed egregious faux pas. Donald Trump at Yad
visitors kept posting selfies on the railway tracks leading into Vashem, for instance: “It’s a great honor to be here with all my
the camp. Every visit here is something of a balance beam, but friends,” the then-president wrote breezily at the Israeli Holocaust
especially for the son of a Nazi. memorial and museum in 2017. “So amazing and will never
“Not a photo op,” a staff member reminded everyone as forget!” This was judged to lack gravity.
Schwarzenegger began his tour. Photographers clacked away But it was not nearly as bad as Justin Bieber’s blunder at
regardless. Schwarzenegger wore a blue blazer and green khaki the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. “Anne was a great girl,”
pants, and appeared to have had his hair tinted a blacker shade the pop star wrote in 2013. “Hopefully she would have been
of orange for the occasion. He flashed a thumbs-up—always a Belieber.” Hopefully Schwarzenegger would attempt nothing
the thumbs-up. like this.
“No autographs please!” a ran- Schwarzenegger has
dom Voice of God from within worked hard to place him-
the entourage called out. “Please
be respectful.”
The last thing self on the right side of the
genocide. Auschwitz offi-
Schwarzenegger was accompa-
nied by his girlfriend, Heather Mil- Schwarzenegger cials were glad to have him
visit, because he brought
ligan; his nephew, Patrick Knapp with him media attention
Schwarzenegger; and Knapp
Schwarzenegger’s Texan wife, Bliss.
did before leaving and the gift of global aware-
ness. “I have been fighting
They toured the grounds like stu-
dents. “What happened here?”
Auschwitz was step this cause … for years and
years and years,” he said in
Schwarzenegger asked his guide, a brief statement to the Pol-
Paweł Sawicki, pointing up at a toward a black ish press at the end of his
watchtower. Sawicki delivered a tour. “I’ve been working
recital of unimaginables: 1.3 mil-
lion people were exterminated at
desk where a guest with the Jewish Center of
Los Angeles … I celebrated
the 500-acre camp, about 1.1 mil-
lion of them Jews. Victims were book awaited his Simon Wiesenthal’s 80th
birthday in Beverly Hills.
pulled from cattle cars and triaged We all have to come col-
by SS doctors deciding who among inscription. lectively together and say
them was fit to work, who would ‘Never again.’”
be used as guinea pigs for Nazi sci- Photographers posi-
entists, and who would be mur- tioned themselves around
dered immediately. the register as Schwar-
Nearly all of those “spared” zenegger approached.
upon arrival would eventually die Clearly, the safe play
of starvation, exhaustion, hypo- would be to simply sign his
thermia, or random beatings. They name. Please be respectful.
were gonged awake at 4:30 a.m., Nothing cute, if only as a
then fed rations of moldy bread, humanitarian pausing of
gray soup, and dirty water. “The The Brand. But no.
word I will use a lot today is “I’ll be back,” Schwar-
dehumanization,” Sawicki said. zenegger scrawled.
Schwarzenegger viewed the gal-
lows where the camp commandant, A f t e r l e a v i n g the
Rudolf Höss, had been hanged. He complex, Schwarzenegger
asked questions about the complicit visited a small synagogue
enterprises—whether the firm that in Oświęcim, an other-
made the crematoria ovens had known what they would be used wise charming village if not for, you know, the history. There,
for (it had). His retinue was led into Block 4A, to a room that he met an 83-year-old Jewish woman, Lydia Maksimovicz, who
contained eyeglasses, dishes, and prosthetics that had belonged to as a toddler had spent 13 months at the camp as a “patient” of
the victims. Another exhibit featured piles of their hair. the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. She told him about
The last thing Schwarzenegger did before he left was step how Mengele had performed experiments on her: drained her
toward a black desk where a guest book awaited his inscrip- blood, and injected her with solutions in an effort to change
tion. Visitor registers can present a special hazard for celebrities. the color of her irises. Mengele apparently had taken a liking to

46 APRIL 2023
young Lydia and privileged her life above the other children’s. as did Seal and Heidi Klum (also in better days). Maria used to
Now, eight decades later, Arnold Schwarzenegger was engulf- live here too, in the mansion with Arnold (ditto).
ing her in a bear hug. I waited for Schwarzenegger on the patio where he smokes
“People like Lydia show us how important it is to never stop his cigars. He walked in and Whiskey and Lulu greeted him with
telling these stories about what happened 80 years ago,” Schwar- a maniacal duet of braying. Two dogs wandered over to nuzzle
zenegger said in brief remarks. “This is a story that has to stay him. An attendant brought him a cigar and a decaf espresso,
alive.” He vowed to “terminate” hate and prejudice once and and some treats for his dog-and-pony show. He took incoming
for all. “I love being here!” he gushed. “I love fighting prejudice FaceTime calls and kept raising his voice and shoving his face
and hatred!” A woman connected with the AJCF tried to hand up into his iPad like my mother does.
him a special box of cigars, but was intercepted by an aide. He Milligan, Schwarzenegger’s girlfriend, called to see how his day
reiterated that he would be back. had gone. They have a comfortable, domestic vibe. She had been
The Auschwitz visit left Schwarzenegger feeling depressed. He Schwarzenegger’s physical therapist, helping him through rehab
stopped off in Vienna afterward to receive a lifetime-achievement for a torn rotator cuff about a decade ago. Ketchell, who had
award from some Austrian sports outfit, and the friends who accompanied Schwarzenegger to the interview, wanted to make
saw him there kept wondering if he was okay. He seemed dazed. it clear that the pair had not become romantically involved until
“We were sitting on the plane, and we both just shook our after Milligan stopped working with Schwarzenegger professionally.
heads and were like, ‘Wow, can you imagine?’” Knapp Schwar- Schwarzenegger and I hadn’t had a chance to talk much in
zenegger, his nephew, told me. “It was a somber mood for sure.” Poland, save for a brief kibitz outside one of the gas chambers.
Knapp Schwarzenegger is an entertainment lawyer in Beverly I wanted to debrief him. What had it been like to witness the
Hills, and was the only child of Schwarzenegger’s only sibling, death camp firsthand?
his older brother, Meinhard, who died in a drunk-driving acci- “We know people were killed there and exterminated and
dent when Patrick was 3. Schwarzenegger brought Patrick to blah blah blah.” (He has an unfortunate tic, when speaking about
America as a teenager and effectively adopted him; they remain grave topics, of trailing off his sentences and adding filler words
exceptionally close. like blah blah blah and all that stuff.) It’s one thing, he said, to be
Knapp Schwarzenegger said their family history added a told about “all the gassing, the torture, all this misery, and all that
fraught dimension to the experience of visiting Auschwitz. They’d kind of stuff. You can read about it, see documentaries about it,
been particularly struck by the tour guide’s stories of how the see movies—the Schindler’s List, all this stuff.” But actually see-
Nazis committed atrocities at the camp and then went home to ing the eyeglasses, the hair—that added a dimension of reality.
their families. “That was the hard part,” Knapp Schwarzeneg- “I’m a visual person; it’s one of my things,” Schwarzenegger said.
ger said, thinking of Gustav, “the loving grandfather,” who died “When I was walking around, I was going back to that era.”
when Knapp Schwarzenegger was 4. “How can ordinary people Did he have any regrets about signing “I’ll be back”? Some
like that do such a thing? … It hits much closer to home when social-media congregants had criticized the message as “tacky”
you’ve had personal experience with that.” and “flippant,” among other things. Schwarzenegger said that
Gustav was haunted by the war, his body racked with shrapnel he had been made aware of the blowback and had meant no
and his conscience with God only knows what. He “would come offense. “I wanted to write ‘Hasta la vista, baby,’” he said. Another
home drunk once or twice a week, and he would scream and hit signature line, this one from Terminator 2. (Yes, he was serious.)
us and scare my mother,” Schwarzenegger said in the January 6 “I meant, you know, ‘Hasta la vista to hate and prejudice.’” But
video. Somehow, Schwarzenegger emerged intact. “My grand- then he worried that Hasta la vista might come off as glib and
mother did the best she could,” Knapp Schwarzenegger told me, dismissive—as in “Buh-bye, I will never come back here again.”
“but that affects you as a child. For Arnold, it made him stronger So he opted for the more forward-looking “I’ll be back.”
and more determined. And for my dad, it crushed him.” His hosts had felt the need to tweet a defense: “The inscription
Rabbi Hier, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, speculated that was meant to be a promise to return for another more indepth
Schwarzenegger’s visit to Auschwitz could have been driven by visit.” In other words, Schwarzenegger was speaking literally, and
shame, by a desire “to repent for the embarrassment of having such did in fact plan to return. “That is what he said, so we expect
a father.” But Schwarzenegger does not concede to this narrative— Mr. Schwarzenegger will come back,” Paweł Sawicki, his tour
to feeling guilty or embarrassed. His recurring message is more guide, who doubles as Auschwitz’s chief press officer, told me.
upbeat, if a bit deflecting. “We don’t have to go and follow,” I wondered if this had always been the plan, or if he had I’ll-
Schwarzenegger told me. “My father was an alcoholic. I am not be-backed himself into a corner and now had to schlep all the
an alcoholic. My father was beating the kids and his wife, and I’m way to Poland again to prove his sincerity.
not doing that. We can break away from that and we can change.” Definitely, it was the plan. In fact, he said, he was thinking
about an annual road-trip-to-Auschwitz kind of thing. “I already
A f e w w e e k s after the trip to Auschwitz, I visited Schwar- told Danny DeVito and some of my acting friends that we’re
zenegger at his mansion in Brentwood, located in an extravagant going to take a trip next year,” he said. “Maybe Sly Stallone. I’m
hillside cul-de-sac of celebrity homes. Tom Brady and Gisele going to find a bunch of guys and we’re going to fly over there,
Bündchen used to have a place down the road (in better days), and I want to be a tour guide.”

47
 He contemplated the possibilities: “Imagine bringing business- win. This is hard to imagine—a moderate Republican prevailing

RYAN PFLUGER FOR THE ATLANTIC

people.” Maybe they could auction off some seats on the plane and through the MAGA maelstrom of the GOP primaries? And he’s not
give the proceeds to the museum. “We have to figure out something about to become a Democrat, either. (“I don’t want to join a party
that is a little bit snappy and interesting,” he mused. Afterward, they that is destroying every single fucking city,” he told me. “They’re
could go to Munich for Oktoberfest, or something fun like that. screwing up left and right.”) Still, if they tweaked the Constitution,
he told me, he would love to run, even at 75, which he insists is
I n e a r ly 2 0 2 1 , a few days after Schwarzenegger made his Janu- “just a number” and not that old. It’s not like he’s 80 or something!
ary 6 video, then-President-elect Joe Biden FaceTimed to thank In the meantime, what if Biden asked him to be secre-
him. They spoke for a few minutes, and at one point, Schwar- tary of state? I admit, it was me who raised the possibility. But
zenegger offered his services to the
incoming administration. “I told
Biden that anytime he needs any-
thing, he should let me know, abso-
lutely,” he said. He’s heard nothing
from the White House since. It’s
complicated, he figures. Schwar-
zenegger, who is still a Republi-
can, is not without baggage. The
housekeeper-love-child-divorce
episode remains a blotch. Celeb-
rity politicians in general have seen
better days: The likes of Trump and
Dr. Oz have not exactly enhanced
the franchise. In any event, Schwar-
zenegger gave no impression that
he’s waiting by the phone.
But in the conversations I had
with him, he betrayed a strong
whiff of existential stir-craziness.
“I felt like I was meant for some-
thing special,” Schwarzenegger
told me that first morning after our
workout, while we talked about his
childhood in Austria. “I was a spe-
cial human being, meant for some-
thing much bigger.”
At his bodybuilding peak, in
Pumping Iron, Schwarzenegger
spoke with a kind of youthful
yearning—or megalomania—of
enduring through time: “I was
always dreaming about very
powerful people. Dictators and
things like that. I was just always
impressed by people who could
be remembered for hundreds of
years, or even, like Jesus, be for
thousands of years remembered.”
If only he could have run for pres-
ident. That remains his recurring
lament. Entering the Mr. Universe
of political campaigns would have
been the logical last rung of his life’s
quest for something bigger. Schwar-
zenegger said he thinks he could

48 APRIL 2023
Schwarzenegger warmed instantly to the idea, listing several reasons (Blinken, who is leading U.S. efforts to contain Russia and China,
he would want the job and be perfect for it. George Shultz was one could not be reached for comment.)
of his idols, and pretty much lived forever too (he died at 100). Schwarzenegger told me he really does want to live forever.
Schwarzenegger is a big believer in celebrity as a global force, in Not everyone would, at his age. But not everyone has had his life,
the power of being so widely, unstoppably known. Who would be either. “If you have the kind of life that I’ve had—that I have—
bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger? Who could possibly compare? it is so spectacular. I could not ever articulate how spectacular
“I mean, look at the guy we have now,” Schwarzenegger told it was.” He was trying to project gratitude, but something else
me. Antony Blinken “is, like, a clearly smart guy, but, I mean, on came through—a plaintiveness in that gap between the tenses.
the world stage, he’s a lightweight. He doesn’t carry any weight.”
I had a final visit with Schwarzenegger in late December,
this time at his Santa Monica office suite. He wore a bright-red
atrocity of a Christmas sweater and took a seat next to me at
a conference table. Schwarzenegger has always been a creature
of obsessive routine, dating to the strict training regimens of
his bodybuilding days. But he emphasized to me that he is
following no grand plan in this final stage. “The truth is that I
am improvising,” he told me. He is trying to pass on what he
knows, and just signed a deal to write a self-help book that will
codify his advice for life. The working title: Be Useful.
The next morning, I was walking to a Starbucks near Santa
Monica Pier, when who should dart by on his bike? “Hey,
Arnold,” I called out.
He pulled over and accused me of being a “lazy sonofabitch”
for not riding with him. He wore sunglasses emblazoned with
I’ll be back, and his white beard glowed in the dawn sun.
We chatted on the street, and Schwarzenegger suggested that
I talk to a friend of his named Florian for this story. Florian,
who sometimes stays in Austrian monasteries, apparently, has
some elaborate theory of Arnold. “He would have an interest-
ing perspective,” Schwarzenegger said. “He’s 6 foot 10, has big
hair, and he FaceTimed me last night while he was shaving at
11 p.m. Who the fuck shaves at 11 p.m.?”
Florian does. His full name is Florian Henckel von Donners-
marck, a German and Austrian filmmaker who won an Oscar for
his 2006 thriller, The Lives of Others. Later, I emailed him. He
declined to share any grand theories. “These thoughts are very
personal,” he explained. “At some point soon, I’ll turn them into
a book myself. Hopefully to coincide with the release of a movie
I direct with Arnold in the lead.” He made sure to mention that
Schwarzenegger was his hero.
In the meantime, the hero was idling on his bike, telling me that
he has more things in the works—retrospective things (a Netflix docu-
mentary about his life) and new adventures (Return to Auschwitz! ).
He was also planning a trip to Ukraine; in late January, an invitation
would arrive from the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky, prais-
ing Schwarzenegger’s “honest stance and clear vision of good and evil.”
I imagined Schwarzenegger dropping into Kyiv, unarmed
except for the Conan sword. He would drive out the Russians,
end the war, and detour to Moscow to take down Putin. At least
that’s how the Hollywood action version would end.
“There will be more,” Schwarzenegger promised that morning. I
kept expecting him to ride off, but he seemed to want to linger.

A bust of Schwarzenegger in
his office in Santa Monica Mark Leibovich is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

49
 PHOTO-ILLUSTRATIONS BY OLIVER MUNDAY

50 APRIL 2023
AMERICA’S
FUTURE IS
AT SEA
The nation
is ceding the
seas to its
enemies.
It’s not
too late
to avoid
catastrophe.
BY
JERRY
HENDRIX

51
 around the world for their lifestyle, their livelihood, even their
life. In 2021, the grounding of the container ship Ever Given
blocked the Suez Canal, forcing vessels shuttling between Asia and
Europe to divert around Africa, delaying their passage and driv-
ing up costs. A few months later, largely because of disruptions
caused by the coronavirus pandemic, more than 100 container
ships were stacked up outside the California Ports of Long Beach
and Los Angeles, snarling supply chains throughout the country.
These events were temporary, if expensive. Imagine, though, a
more permanent breakdown. A humiliated Russia could declare a
large portion of the Arctic Ocean to be its own territorial waters,
twisting the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to
support its claim. Russia would then allow its allies access to this
route while denying it to those who dared to oppose its wishes.
Neither the U.S. Navy, which has not built an Arctic-rated surface
warship since the 1950s, nor any other NATO nation is currently
equipped to resist such a gambit.
Or maybe the first to move would be Xi Jinping, shoring up
his domestic standing by attempting to seize Taiwan and using
China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles and other weapons to keep
Western navies at bay. An emboldened China might then seek

V
to cement its claim over large portions of the East China Sea
and the entirety of the South China Sea as territorial waters. It
could impose large tariffs and transfer fees on the bulk carriers
that transit the region. Local officials might demand bribes to
speed their passage.
Once one nation decided to act in this manner, others would
follow, claiming enlarged territorial waters of their own, and
extracting what they could from the commerce that flows through
them. The edges and interstices of this patchwork of competing
claims would provide openings for piracy and lawlessness.
The great container ships and tankers of today would dis-
appear, replaced by smaller, faster cargo vessels capable of moving
rare and valuable goods past pirates and corrupt officials. The
cruise-ship business, which drives many tourist economies, would
falter in the face of potential hijackings. A single such incident
might create a cascade of failure throughout the entire industry.
Once-busy sea lanes would lose their traffic. For lack of activity
Very few Americans—or, for that matter, very few people on and maintenance, passages such as the Panama and Suez Canals
the planet—can remember a time when freedom of the seas was might silt up. Natural choke points such as the straits of Gibraltar,
in question. But for most of human history, there was no such Hormuz, Malacca, and Sunda could return to their historic roles
guarantee. Pirates, predatory states, and the fleets of great pow- as havens for predators. The free seas that now surround us, as
ers did as they pleased. The current reality, which dates only to essential as the air we breathe, would be no more.
the end of World War II, makes possible the commercial ship- If oceanic trade declines, markets would turn inward, perhaps
ping that handles more than 80 percent of all global trade by setting off a second Great Depression. Nations would be reduced
volume—oil and natural gas, grain and raw ores, manufactured to living off their own natural resources, or those they could
OPENING PAGES: TEAMDAF / GETTY

goods of every kind. Because freedom of the seas, in our lifetime, buy—or take—from their immediate neighbors. The world’s
has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it—if oceans, for 70 years assumed to be a global commons, would
we think of it at all—as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of become a no-man’s-land. This is the state of affairs that, without
gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made a moment’s thought, we have invited.
construct that needs to be maintained and enforced.
But what if the safe transit of ships could no longer be E v e r y w h e r e I l o o k , I observe sea power manifesting
assumed? What if the oceans were no longer free? itself—unacknowledged—in American life. When I drive past
Every now and again, Americans are suddenly reminded of a Walmart, a BJ’s Wholesale Club, a Lowe’s, or a Home Depot, in
how much they depend on the uninterrupted movement of ships my mind I see the container ships moving products from where

52 APRIL 2023
they can be produced at a low price in bulk form to markets where All of this has depended on freedom of the seas, which in
they can be sold at a higher price to consumers. Our economy turn has depended on sea power wielded by nations—led by the
and security rely on the sea—a fact so fundamental that it should United States—that believe in such freedom.
be at the center of our approach to the world. But the very success of this project now threatens its future.
It is time for the United States to think and act, once again, Seablindness has become endemic.
like a seapower state. As the naval historian Andrew Lambert has
explained, a seapower state understands that its wealth and its T h e U n i t e d S tat e s is no longer investing in the instru-
might principally derive from seaborne trade, and it uses instru- ments of sea power as it once did. America’s commercial ship-
ments of sea power to promote and protect its interests. To the building industry began losing its share of the global market in
degree possible, a seapower state seeks to avoid direct participa- the 1960s to countries with lower labor costs, and to those that
tion in land wars, large or small. There have been only a few true had rebuilt their industrial capacity after the war. The drop in
seapower nations in history—notably Great Britain, the Dutch American shipbuilding accelerated after President Ronald Reagan
Republic, Venice, and Carthage.
I grew up on a dairy farm in Indiana and spent 26 years on
active duty in the Navy, deploying in support of combat opera-
tions in the Middle East and Yugoslavia, both at sea and in the
air. I did postgraduate work at several universities and served as
a strategist and an adviser to senior officials in the Pentagon. Yet
I have always remained, in terms of interests and outlook, a son
of the Midwest. In my writings I have sought to underscore sea
power’s importance and the reliance of our economy on the sea.
Despite my experience, I was never able to convince my mother.
She spent the last years of her working life at the Walmart in my
hometown, first at the checkout counter and then in accounting.
My mother followed the news and was sharply curious about the
world; we were close, and spoke often. She was glad that I was
in the Navy, but not because she saw my work as essential to her
own life. “If you like Walmart,” I often told her, “then you ought
to love the U.S. Navy. It’s the Navy that makes Walmart possible.” “IF YOU LIK E
But to her, as a mother, my naval service mostly meant that, unlike
friends and cousins who deployed with the Army or Marine Corps
WA LM A RT,”
to Iraq or Afghanistan, I probably wasn’t going to be shot at. Her I OFTEN TOLD
perspective is consistent with a phenomenon that the strategist
Seth Cropsey has called seablindness. M Y MOTHER ,
Today, it is difficult to appreciate the scale or speed of the
transformation wrought after World War II. The war destroyed “ THEN YOU
or left destitute all of the world powers opposed to the concept
of a mare liberum—a “free sea”—first enunciated by the Dutch
OUGHT TO LOV E
philosopher Hugo Grotius in 1609. The United States and Great THE U. S. NAV Y.
Britain, the two traditional proponents of a free sea, had emerged
not only triumphant but also in a position of overwhelming naval IT ’S THE NAV Y
dominance. Their navies were together larger than all of the other
navies of the world combined. A free sea was no longer an idea. TH AT M A K ES
It was now a reality.
In this secure environment, trade flourished. The globaliz-
WA LM A RT
ing economy, which allowed easier and cheaper access to food, POSSIBLE.”
energy, labor, and commodities of every kind, grew from nearly
$8 trillion in 1940 to more than $100 trillion 75 years later,
adjusted for inflation. With prosperity, other improvements
followed. During roughly this same period, from the war to the
present, the share of the world’s population in extreme poverty,
getting by on less than $1.90 a day, dropped from more than
60 percent to about 10 percent. Global literacy doubled, to
more than 85 percent. Global life expectancy in 1950 was 46
years. By 2019, it had risen to 73 years.

53
took office, in 1981. The administration, in a nod to free-market Navy to 600 ships, nearly did so under the able leadership of his
principles, began to shrink government subsidies that had sup- secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. During Reagan’s eight years
ported the industry. That was a choice; it might have gone the in office, the size of the Navy’s fleet climbed to just over 590 ships.
other way. Aircraft manufacturers in the United States, citing Then the Cold War ended. The administrations of Presidents
national-security concerns, successfully lobbied for continued, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton slashed troops, ships, air-
and even increased, subsidies for their industry in the decades craft, and shore-based infrastructure. During the Obama adminis-
that followed—and got them. tration, the Navy’s battle force bottomed out at 271 ships. Mean-
It is never to a nation’s advantage to depend on others for cru- while, both China and Russia, in different ways, began to develop
cial links in its supply chain. But that is where we are. In 1977, systems that would challenge the U.S.-led regime of global free
American shipbuilders produced more than 1 million gross tons trade on the high seas.
of merchant ships. By 2005, that number had fallen to 300,000. Russia began to invest in highly sophisticated nuclear-powered
Today, most commercial ships built in the United States are con- submarines with the intention of being able to disrupt the oce-
structed for government customers such as the Maritime Admin- anic link between NATO nations in Europe and North Amer-
istration or for private entities that are required to ship their goods ica. China, which for a time enjoyed double-digit GDP growth,
between U.S. ports in U.S.-flagged vessels, under the provisions expanded both its commercial and naval shipbuilding capaci-
of the 1920 Jones Act. ties. It tripled the size of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy and
The U.S. Navy, too, has been shrinking. After the Second invested in long-range sensors and missiles that could allow it to
World War, the Navy scrapped many of its ships and sent many interdict commercial and military ships more than 1,000 miles
more into a ready-reserve “mothball” fleet. For the next two from its shores. Both Russia and China also sought to extend
decades, the active naval fleet hovered at about 1,000 ships. But territorial claims into international waters, the aim being to con-
beginning in 1969, the total began to fall. By 1971, the fleet had trol the free passage of shipping near their shores and in their
been reduced to 750 ships. Ten years later, it was down to 521. perceived spheres of influence. In short: Autocratic powers are
Reagan, who had campaigned in 1980 on a promise to rebuild the trying to close the global commons.

ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

Alfred Thayer Mahan

54 APRIL 2023
 Today the United States is financially constrained by debt,
and psychologically burdened by recent military conflicts—for
the most part, land-based actions in Iraq and Afghanistan fought
primarily by a large standing army operating far from home—
that turned into costly quagmires. We can no longer afford to be
both a continentalist power and an oceanic power. But we can
still exert influence, and at the same time avoid getting caught
up in the affairs of other nations. Our strategic future lies at sea.

A m e r i c a n s u s e d t o know this. The United States began

its life purposefully as a seapower: The Constitution explicitly
directed Congress “to provide and maintain a Navy.” In contrast,
the same article of the Constitution instructed the legislature “to
raise and support Armies,” but stipulated that no appropriation IN THE END,
for the army “shall be for a longer Term than two Years.” The
Founders had an aversion to large standing armies. THE SECOND
George Washington pushed through the Naval Act of 1794,
funding the Navy’s original six frigates. (One of these was the
WOR LD WA R
famous USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” which remains in WAS WON NOT
active commission to this day.) In his final address to the Ameri-
can people, Washington advocated for a navalist foreign policy, BY BULLETS
warning against “attachments and entanglements” with for-
eign powers that might draw the young nation into continental OR TOR PEDOES
European wars. The strategy he advised instead was to protect
American trade on the high seas, and advance America’s interests
BUT BY THE
through temporary agreements, not permanent alliances. This A MER ICA N
seapower approach to the world became the sine qua non of early
American foreign policy. M A R ITIME
In time, conditions changed. The U.S. was preoccupied by
sectional conflict and by conquest of the continent. It turned INDUSTR I A L
inward, becoming a continental power. But by the end of the
19th century, that era had come to a close.
BASE.
In 1890, a U.S. Navy captain named Alfred Thayer Mahan
published an article in The Atlantic titled “The United States
Looking Outward.” Mahan argued that, with the closing of the
frontier, the United States had in essence become an island nation
looking eastward and westward across oceans. The nation’s ener-
gies should therefore be focused externally: on the seas, on mari-
time trade, and on a larger role in the world.
Mahan sought to end the long-standing policy of protection-
ism for American industries, because they had become strong powers. Leaders in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy had also
enough to compete in the global market. By extension, Mahan read Mahan, and they wanted to protect commercial access to
also sought a larger merchant fleet to carry goods from American their overseas empires. The resulting arms race at sea helped
HUM IMAGES / UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP / GETTY

factories to foreign lands, and for a larger Navy to protect that destabilize the balance of power in the years leading up to the
merchant fleet. In a few thousand words, Mahan made a coher- First World War.
ent strategic argument that the United States should once again This is not the place to relate every development in the evolu-
become a true seapower. tion of America’s naval capability, much less that of other nations.
Mahan’s vision was profoundly influential. Politicians such Suffice to say that, by the 1930s, new technologies were trans-
as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge advocated for forming the seas. Aircraft, aircraft carriers, amphibious assault
larger merchant and naval fleets (and for a canal through Cen- craft, and submarines had all been developed into more effec-
tral America). Mahan, Roosevelt, and Lodge believed that sea tive weapons. During the Second World War, the oceans once
power was the catalyst for national power, and they wanted the again became battlefields. The fighting proceeded in a way Mahan
United States to become the preeminent nation of the 20th himself had never envisioned, as fleets faced off against ships they
century. The swift expansion of the Navy, particularly in battle- could not even see, launching waves of aircraft against each other.
ships and cruisers, paralleled the growing fleets of other global In the end, the war was won not by bullets or torpedoes but by

55
the American maritime industrial base. The United States began new great-power competition, primarily with a rising China but
the war with 790 ships in its battle force; when the war ended, also with a diminishing and unstable Russia. We will need heavy
it had more than 6,700. industry in order to prevail. The United States cannot simply rely
No nation could come close to challenging the American fleet, on the manufacturing base of other countries, even friendly ones,
commercial or naval, on the high seas after the war. So great was for its national-security needs.
its advantage that, for decades, no one even tried to match it. In In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry invited
concert with allies, the United States created an international the executives of leading defense contractors to a dinner in
system based on free and unhindered trade. It was the culmina- Washington—a meal that would enter national-security lore as
tion of the Mahanist Age. the “Last Supper.” Perry spelled out projected cuts in defense
For the first time in history, open access to the seas was spending. His message was clear: If the American defense indus-
assumed—and so people naturally gave little thought to its impor- trial base was going to survive, then mergers would be required.
tance and challenges. Soon after, the Northrop Corporation acquired the Grumman
Corporation to form Northrop Grumman. The Lockheed Cor-
A n ew s e a p o w e r strategy involves more than adding ships poration and Martin Marietta became Lockheed Martin. A few
to the Navy. A new strategy must start with the economy. years later, Boeing combined with McDonnell Douglas, itself
For 40 years, we have watched domestic industries and blue- the product of a previous merger. Among the shipbuilders,
collar jobs leave the country. Now we find ourselves locked in a General Dynamics, which manufactures submarines through
its Electric Boat subsidiary, bought Bath Iron Works, a naval
shipyard, and the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company.
These mergers preserved the defense industries, but at a price:
a dramatic reduction in our overall industrial capacity. During
World War II, the United States could claim more than 50 graving
docks—heavy-industrial locations where ships are assembled—
that were greater than 150 meters in length, each one able to build
merchant craft and naval warships. Today, the U.S. has 23 graving
docks, only a dozen of which are certified to work on Navy ships.
The United States will need to implement a seapower indus-
trial policy that meets its national-security needs: building steel
plants and microchip foundries, developing hypersonic glide
bodies and autonomous unmanned undersea vehicles. We will
need to foster new start-ups using targeted tax laws, the Defense
OURR ECONOM Y
OU Production Act, and perhaps even a “Ships Act” akin to the
A ND SECUR IT Y recent CHIPS Act, which seeks to bring back the crucial semi-
conductor industry.
R ELY ON THE We also need to tell the companies we once encouraged to
merge that it’s time for them to spin off key industrial subsidiaries
SEA—A FACT SO in order to encourage competition and resilience—and we need
to reward them for following through. In 2011, for example, the
FU NDA MENTA L aerospace giant Northrop Grumman spun off its shipbuilding
TH AT IT SHOULD holdings to form Huntington Ingalls, in Newport News, Virginia,
and Pascagoula, Mississippi. Adding more such spin-offs would
BE AT THE not only increase the nation’s industrial depth but also encour-
age the growth of parts suppliers for heavy industries, companies
CENTER OF OUR that have endured three decades of consolidation or extinction.
Shipbuilding, in particular, is a jobs multiplier. For every job
A PPROACH TO created in a shipyard, five jobs, on average, are created at down-
THE WOR LD. stream suppliers—well-paid blue-collar jobs in the mining, manu-
facturing, and energy sectors.
Most of the civilian merchant ships, container ships, ore carri-
ers, and supertankers that dock in American ports are built over-
seas and fly foreign flags. We have ignored the linkage between
the ability to build commercial ships and the ability to build
Navy ships—one reason the latter cost twice as much as they did
in 1989. The lack of civilian ships under our own flag makes us
vulnerable. Today we remember the recent backlog of container

56 APRIL 2023
ships in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but tomor- smaller sizes, could be dispersed to smaller shipyards, including
row we could face the shock of no container ships arriving at all yards on the Gulf Coast, along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers,
should China prohibit its large fleet from visiting U.S. ports. and on the Great Lakes, where ships and submarines were built
Today we’re proud to ship liquefied natural gas to our allies in for the Navy during World War II. These types of ships, combined
Europe, but tomorrow we might not be able to export that energy with advanced submarines, will allow us to exert influence and
to our friends, because we don’t own the ships that would carry project power with equal vigor.
it. We need to bring back civilian shipbuilding as a matter of
national security. A c r o s s t h e 5 0 y e a r s of my life, I have watched the impor-
To revive our merchant-shipbuilding base, we will need to tance of the oceans and the idea of freedom of the seas largely
offer government subsidies on a par with those provided to Euro- fade from national awareness. The next great military challenge
pean and Asian shipbuilders. Subsidies have flowed to commercial we face will likely come from a confrontation on the sea. Great
aviation since the establishment of commercial airlines in the powers, especially nuclear-equipped great powers, dare not attack
1920s; Elon Musk’s SpaceX would not be enjoying its present one another directly. Instead, they will confront one another in
success were it not for strong initial support from the U.S. gov- the commons: cyberspace, outer space, and, most crucially, at sea.
ernment. Shipbuilding is no less vital. The oceans would be battlefields again, and we, and the world,
Reindustrialization, in particular the restoration of merchant- are simply not ready for that.
shipbuilding capacity and export-oriented industries, will sup- Some voices, of course, will argue that America’s interests,
port the emergence of a new, more technologically advanced diffuse and global, might best be served by expanding our
Navy. The cost of building Navy ships could be coaxed down- commitments of land forces to places like Eastern Europe, the
ward by increasing competition, expanding the number of Middle East, and South Korea as demonstrations of American
downstream suppliers, and recruiting new shipyard workers resolve, and that air and naval forces should be diminished to
to the industry. pay for such commitments. Others—those in the “divest to
Wherever American trade goes, the flag traditionally follows— invest” school—believe in the promise of future technology,
usually in the form of the Navy. But the new Navy must not arguing that more traditional warfare platforms and missions
look like the old Navy. If it does, we will have made a strategic should be phased out to fund their newer and more efficient
mistake. As rival powers develop ships and missiles that target our missiles or cybersystems. The first approach continues a path of
aircraft carriers and other large surface vessels, we should make unnecessary entanglements. The second proceeds along a path
greater investments in advanced submarines equipped with the of promise without proof.
latest in long-range maneuvering hypersonic missiles. We should A seapower-focused national-security strategy would give new
pursue a future in which our submarines cannot be found and advantages to the United States. It would not too subtly encour-
our hypersonic missiles cannot be defeated. age allies and partners in Eurasia to increase investment in land
The Navy, however, is not just a wartime force. It has a peace- forces and to work more closely together. If they build more tanks
time mission unique among the military services: showing the and fully staff their armies, the United States could guarantee
flag and defending American interests by means of a consistent transoceanic supply lines from the Western Hemisphere. The
and credible forward presence. Commanders have identified 18 70-year practice of stationing our land forces in allied countries,
maritime regions of the world that require the near-continuous using Americans as trip wires and offering allies a convenient
deployment of American ships to demonstrate our resolve. Dur- excuse not to spend on their own defense, should come to an end.
ing the Cold War, the Navy maintained approximately 150 ships A seapower strategy, pursued deliberately, would put America
at sea on any given day. As the size of the fleet has fallen—to its back on course for global leadership. We must shun entangle-
present 293—the Navy has struggled to keep even 100 ships at ments in other nations’ land wars—resisting the urge to solve
sea at all times. The service’s admirals recently suggested a goal of every problem—and seek instead to project influence from the
having 75 ships “mission capable” at any given moment. Right sea. We must re-create an industrialized, middle-class America
now the fleet has about 20 ships going through training workups that builds and exports manufactured goods that can be carried
and only about 40 actively deployed under regional combatant on U.S.-built ships to the global market.
commanders. This has created vacuums in vital areas such as the We knew all this in the age of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The
Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea, which our enemies have been Chinese are showing us that they know it now. The United States
eager to fill. needs to relearn the lessons of strategy, geography, and history.
The chief of naval operations recently called for a fleet of some We must look outward across the oceans, and find our place
500 ships. He quickly pointed out that this would include about upon them, again.
50 new guided-missile frigates—small surface vessels able to oper-
ate closely with allies and partners—as well as 150 unmanned
surface and subsurface platforms that would revolutionize the way Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain, is a senior
wartime naval operations are conducted. The frigates are being fellow with the Sagamore Institute, in Indianapo-
assembled on the shores of Lake Michigan. The construction of lis, and the author of To Provide and Maintain
the unmanned ships, owing to their nontraditional designs and a Navy (2020).

57
 Judy Blume Goes
All the Way
A new generation discovers
the poet laureate of puberty.

By Amy Weiss-Meyer

58 APRIL 2023
PHOTOG RAPH BY ERIKA LARSEN FOR THE ATLANTIC 59
 Like tens of thousands of young women before where Blume raised her two children in the ’60s and ’70s, though

L
me, I wrote to Judy Blume because something she admitted that the author would have no reason to know her
strange was happening to my body. personally. “Well hello, and welcome!” Blume said.
I had just returned from visiting the author Blume loves meeting kids in the store too. Usually, though, she
in Key West when I noticed a line of small, avoids making recommendations in the young-adult section—not
bright-red bites running up my right leg. I was because of the kids so much as their hovering parents. “The parents
certain it was bedbugs—and terrified that I’d are so judgmental ” about their kids’ book choices, she told me.
given them to Blume, whose couch I had been “They’re always, you know, ‘What is this? Let me see this.’ You
sitting on a few days earlier. want to say, ‘Leave them alone.’” (Key West is a tourist town, and
I figured that if the creatures had hitched not everyone knows they’re walking into Judy Blume’s bookstore.)
a ride from my hotel room, as I suspected, Such parental anxiety is all too familiar to Blume. In the ’80s,
the courteous—if mortifying—thing to do her frank descriptions of puberty and teenage sexuality made her
would be to warn Blume that some might have a favorite target of would-be censors. Her books no longer land
stowed away in her upholstery, too. on the American Library Association’s Top 10 Most Challenged
In Key West and in Brooklyn, beds were stripped, expensive Books list, which is now crowded with novels featuring queer
inspections performed: nothing. After a few days, I had no new and trans protagonists. Yet Blume’s titles are still the subjects of
bites. I was relieved, if further embarrassed. I apologized to Blume attempted bans. Last year, the Brevard County chapter of Moms
for the false alarm, and she responded with a “Whew!” I hoped for Liberty, a right-wing group based in Florida, sought to have
we had put the matter behind us. Forever … taken off public-school shelves there (the novel tells the
The next morning, another email appeared in my inbox: story of two high-school seniors who fall in love, have sex, and—
spoiler—do not stay together forever). Also in 2022, a Christian
Amy—When I am bitten by No-See-Ums (so small you can’t even group in Fredericksburg, Texas, called Make Schools Safe Again
see them and you were eating on your balcony in the evening)—I targeted Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (it mentions masturbation).
get a reaction, very itchy and the bites get very red and big. They These campaigns are a backhanded compliment of sorts, an
often bite in a line. acknowledgment of Blume’s continued relevance. Her books
remain popular, in part because a generation that grew up read-
It was “just a thought,” she wrote. “xx J.” ing Blume is now old enough to introduce her to their own
Here was Judy Blume, the author who gave us some of Ameri- children. Some are pressing dog-eared paperbacks into their kids’
can literature’s most memorable first periods, wet dreams, and hands; others are calling her agent. In April, the director Kelly
desperate preteen bargains with God, calmly and empathetically Fremon Craig’s film adaptation of Blume’s 1970 novel Are You
letting me know that an unwelcome bodily development was There God? It’s Me, Margaret will open in theaters. Jenna Bush
nothing to be ashamed of or frightened by—that it was, in fact, Hager is bringing Blume’s novel Summer Sisters to TV. (Hager
something that had happened to her body too. Maybe, on some and her twin, Barbara Pierce Bush, have said that Summer Sisters
level, I’d been seeking such reassurance when I emailed her in is the book that taught them about sex.) An animated Superfudge
the first place. Who better to go through a bedbug scare with? movie is coming to Disney+, and Netflix is developing a series
For more than 50 years, Blume has been a beloved and trusted based on Forever … . This winter, the documentary Judy Blume
guide to children who are baffled or terrified or elated by what is Forever premiered at Sundance Film Festival (it will be streaming
happening to them, and are trying to make sense of it, whether it on Amazon Prime Video this spring).
has to do with friendship, love, sex, envy, sibling rivalry, breast size Today’s 12-year-olds have the entire internet at their disposal;
(too small, too large), religion, race, class, death, or dermatology. they hardly need novels to learn about puberty and sex. But kids are
Blume’s 29 books have sold more than 90 million copies. The still kids, trying to figure out who they are and what they believe in.
New York Daily News once referred to her as “Miss Lonelyhearts, They’re getting bullied, breaking up, making best friends. They are
Mister Rogers and Dr. Ruth rolled into one.” In the 1980s, she looking around, as kids always have, for adults who get it.
received 2,000 letters every month from devoted readers. “I’m They—we—still need Judy Blume.
not trying to get pity,” a typical 11-year-old wrote. “What I want
is someone to tell me, ‘You’ll live through this.’ I thought you I g o t m y first email from Blume two weeks before my trip.
could be that person.” “Hi Amy—It’s Judy in Key West,” she wrote. “Just want to make
Blume, now 85, says that she is probably done writing, that sure your trip goes well.” I hadn’t planned to consult the subject
the novel she published in 2015 was her last big book. She doesn’t of my story on the boring logistics of the visit, but those details
get many handwritten letters anymore, though she still interacts were exactly what Blume wanted to discuss: what time my flight
with readers in the nonprofit bookstore that she and her husband, landed, where I was staying, why I should stay somewhere else
George Cooper, founded in Key West in 2016. Some fans, women instead. Did I need a ride from the airport?
who grew up reading Blume, cry when they meet her. “Judy, hi!” The advice continued once I arrived: where to eat, the impor-
one middle-aged visitor exclaimed when I was there, as if she were tance of staying hydrated, why she prefers bottled water to the Key
greeting an old friend. She was from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, West tap. (Blume also gently coached me on what to do when,

60 APRIL 2023
at dinner my first night, my water went down the wrong pipe and I said, ‘It better be five four.’” It was 5 foot 3 and a quarter.
and I began to choke. “I know what that’s like,” she volunteered. “I said, ‘No!’ And yet, I have to tell you, all this year I’ve been
“Bend your chin toward your chest.”) I’d forgotten to bring a hat, saying to George, ‘I feel smaller.’ It’s such an odd sensation.”
so Blume loaned me one for rides in her teal Mini convertible She knows it happens to everyone, eventually, but she thought
and a walk along the beach. When I hesitated to put it on for the she’d had a competitive advantage: tap dancing, which she swears
walk, eager to absorb as much vitamin D as possible before a long is good for keeping your posture intact and your spine strong. Her
New York winter, she said, “It’s up to you” in that Jewish-mother favorite teacher no longer works in Key West. But some nights,
way that means Don’t blame me when you get a sunburn and skin Cooper will put on Chet Baker’s fast-paced rendition of “Tea
cancer. I put on the hat. for Two,” and she has no choice. “I have to stop and tap dance.”
Blume and Cooper came here on a whim in the 1990s, dur-
ing another New York winter, when Blume was trying to finish Before she was Judy Blume, tap-dancing author, she was Judy
Summer Sisters. “I would say to George, ‘I wonder how many Sussman, who danced ballet—“That’s what Jewish girls did”—and
summers I have left,’” Blume recalled. “He said, ‘You know, you made up stories that she kept to herself. She grew up in Elizabeth,
could have twice as many if you lived someplace warm.’” (Coo- New Jersey, where her father, Rudolph Sussman, was a dentist, and
per, a former Columbia Law professor, was once an avid sailor.) the kind of person everyone confided in; his patients would come to
Eventually they started spending most of the year here. his office just to talk. Her mother, Esther, didn’t work. Her brother,
Blume enjoys a good renovation project, and she and Cooper David, four years her senior, was a loner who was “supposed to be
have lived in various places around the island over the years. They a genius” but struggled in school. Blume distinguished herself by
now own a pair of conjoined condos right on the beach, in a 1980s trying hard to please her parents. “I knew that my job was making
building whose pink shutters and stucco arches didn’t prepare me the family happy, because that wasn’t his job,” she told me.
for the sleek, airy space they’ve created inside, filled with art and She felt that her mother, in particular, expected perfection.
books and comfortable places to read while watching the ocean. “I didn’t doubt my parents’ love for me, but I didn’t think they
In the kitchen, a turquoise-and-pink tea towel with a picture of an understood me, or had any idea of what I was really like,” she has
empty sundae dish says I go all the way.
At one end of the apartment is a large office where Blume and
one of her assistants work when she’s not at the bookstore. Her
desk faces the water and is littered with handwritten notes and
doodles she makes while she’s on the phone. She plays Wordle
every day using the same first and second words: TOILE and SAUCY. Blume speaks
Usually, Blume told me, she sleeps with the balcony door open
so she can hear the waves, though she’s terrified of thunderstorms, about her
so much so that she used to retreat into a closet when they arrived.
This condo has thick hurricane glass that lessens the noise, and anxieties, and
now, with a good eye mask, Blume can bear to wait out a storm.
Blume spoke about her anxieties, and her bodily travails, with- her bodily
out a hint of embarrassment. When I visited, she was still recover-
ing from a bout of pneumonitis, a side effect of a drug she’d been travails, without
prescribed to treat persistent urinary-tract infections. It had been
months since she’d felt up to riding her bike—a cruiser with bright a hint of
polka dots painted by a local artist—or been able to walk at quite
the pace she once did (though our morning walk was, in my estima- embarrassment.
tion, pretty brisk). Lately, she had been snacking on matzo with but-
ter to try to regain some of the weight she’d lost over the summer.
Blume’s fictional characters are memorably preoccupied with
comparing height and bra size and kissing techniques, as Blume
herself was in her preteen and teenage years. Nowadays, when she written. “I just assumed that parents don’t understand their kids,
has lunch with her childhood friends Mary and Joanne, with whom ever. That there is a lot of pretending in family life.”
she’s stayed close, the three talk about things like hearing aids, which As a child, Blume read the Oz books and Nancy Drew. The
Mary had recently argued should be avoided because they make first novels she felt she could identify with were Maud Hart
one seem old. But Joanne said that nothing makes someone seem Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. When she was 11, the book she
older than having to ask “What?” all the time, and Blume, a few wanted to read most was John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live, but she
weeks into using her first pair, was glad she’d listened to Joanne. wasn’t allowed (it has a lot of sex, as well as an awkward mother-
Her body is changing, still. “I’m supposed to be five four. I’ve daughter conversation about periods). She did read other titles
always been five four,” Blume said during breakfast on her bal- she found on her parents’ shelves: The Catcher in the Rye, The
cony. “And recently the new doctor in New York measured me, Fountainhead, The Adventures of Augie March.

61
 In the late 1940s, David developed a kidney condition, and to her face and scalp—and “down there,” as she put it. “I asked my
help him recuperate, the Sussmans decided that Esther and her father how I was going to tell the doctor that I had it in such a
mother would take the children to Miami Beach for the school private place,” Blume has written. “My father told me the cor-
year (Rudolph stayed behind in New Jersey so he could keep rect way to say it. The next day I went to the doctor and I told
working). Blume’s 1977 novel, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Her- him that I also had it in my pubic hair.” Blume “turned purple”
self, is based on this time in her life. Its protagonist, 10-year-old saying the words, but the doctor was unfazed. She learned that
Sally, is smart, curious, and observant, occasionally in ways that there was power in language, in knowing how to speak about
get her into trouble. She asks her mother why the Black family one’s body in straightforward, accurate terms.
she befriends on the train has to switch cars when they arrive in She went to NYU, where she majored in early-childhood
the South, and is angry when her mother, who admits that it education. She married her first husband, a lawyer named John
may not be fair, tells her that segregation is simply “the way it Blume, while she was still in college. For their honeymoon, Blume
is.” She has vivid, sometimes gruesome fantasy sequences about packed a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that her brother had
personally confronting Hitler. brought home from Europe. It was still banned in the United
When Sally finds out that her aunt back home is pregnant, States. “That book made for a great honeymoon,” she has said.
she writes her a celebratory letter full of euphemisms she only Blume graduated from college in 1961; that same year, her
half-understands; her earnest desire to discuss the matter in adult daughter, Randy, was born, and in 1963 she had a son, Larry.
terms even as she professes her ongoing fuzziness on some key She’d always loved babies, and loved raising her own. But being
details makes for a delicious bit of Blume-ian humor: “Con- a Scotch Plains housewife gave her stomach pains—a physical
gratulations! I’m very glad to hear that Uncle Jack got the seed manifestation, she later said, of her discontent.
planted at last.” What Sally really wants to know is “how you “I desperately needed creative work,” Blume told me. “That
got the baby made.” was not something that we were raised to think about in the ’50s,
Blume, who hit puberty late, had similar questions at that the ’40s. What happens to a creative kid who grows up? Where

COURTESY OF JUDY BLUME; SIMON & SCHUSTER

age. She faked menstrual cramps when a friend got her period do you find that outlet?”
in sixth grade, and even wore a pad to school for her friend to Blume spent “God knows how long” making elaborate decora-
feel through her clothes, as evidence. When she was 14 and still tions for dinner parties—for a pink-and-green-themed “evening
hadn’t gotten her period, Esther picked her up from school one in Paris,” she created a sparkling scene on the playroom wall
day and brought her to a gynecologist’s office. Blume later recalled complete with the River Seine and a woman selling crepe-paper
that the doctor barely spoke to her at all. “He put my feet in stir- flowers from a cart. She was never—still isn’t—a confident cook.
rups, and without warning, he examined me.” She cried all the “I used to have an anxiety dream before dinner parties that I
way home. “Why didn’t you tell me he would do that?” she asked would take something out of the fridge that was made the day
her mother. “I didn’t want to frighten you,” her mother replied. before and I’d drop it,” she told me.
Blume was furious. “I didn’t fit in with the women on that cul-de-sac,” she said. “I
Her father, the dentist, was slightly more helpful. When she just never did. I gave up trying.” She stopped pretending to care
caught impetigo at school as a teenager, she developed sores on about the golf games and the tennis lessons. She started writing.

Selected Blume novels, in order of publication. At far right, a 2014 reissue of Are You
There God? It’s Me, Margaret, repackaged for the digital age.

1970 1972 1973 1974

62 APRIL 2023
T h e f i r s t t wo short stories Blume sold, for $20 each, were asked Jackson what he’d seen in the book. “I saw the next book,
“The Ooh Ooh Aah Aah Bird” and “The Flying Munchkins.” and the book after that,” he said.
Mostly, she got rejections. After Iggie’s House, Blume published the novel that would,
In 1969, she published her first book, an illustrated story that more than any other, define her career (and earn Bradbury its
chronicled the middle-child woes of one Freddy Dissel, who first profits): Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
finally finds a way to stand out by taking a role as the kangaroo Margaret Simon is 11 going on 12, newly of suburban New
in the school play. She dedicated it to her children—the books Jersey by way of the Upper West Side. She’s worried about find-
she read to them, along with her memories of her own childhood, ing friends and fitting in, titillated and terrified by the prospect
were what had made her want to write for kids. of growing up (the last thing she wants is “to feel like some kind
Around the same time, Blume read about a new publish- of underdeveloped little kid,” but “if you ask me, being a teen-
ing company, Bradbury Press, that was seeking manuscripts for ager is pretty rotten”). When Margaret came out, the principal
realistic children’s books. Bradbury’s founders, Dick Jackson of Blume’s kids’ school didn’t want it in the library; he thought
and Robert Verrone, were young fathers interested, as Jackson elementary-school girls were too young to read about periods.
later put it, in “doing a little mischief ” in the world of children’s I remembered Margaret as a book about puberty, and Mar-
publishing. Blume sent in a draft of Iggie’s House, a chapter book garet’s chats with God as being primarily on this subject. Some
about what happens when a Black family, the Garbers, moves of them, of course, are. (“Please help me grow God. You know
into 11-year-old Winnie’s all-white neighborhood. Bradbury where. I want to be like everyone else.”) But reading the book
Press published the book, which is told from Winnie’s perspec- again, I was reminded that it is also a thoughtful, at times pro-
tive, in 1970. found meditation on what it means to define your own relation-
Today, Blume cringes when she talks about Iggie’s House— ship to religious faith.
she has written that in the late 1960s, she was “almost as naive” Margaret’s Christian mother and Jewish father are both
as Winnie, “wanting to make the world a better place, but not proudly secular. She fears that if they found out about her pri-
knowing how.” In many ways, though, the novel holds up; inten- vate prayers, “they’d think I was some kind of religious fanatic
tionally or not, it captures the righteous indignation, the defen- or something.” Much to their chagrin, she attends synagogue
siveness, and ultimately the ignorance of the white “do-gooder.” with her grandmother and church with her friends. She’s trying
(“I don’t think you understand,” Glenn, one of the Garber chil- to understand what her parents are so opposed to, and what, if
dren, tells Winnie. “Understand?” Winnie asks herself. “What anything, these institutions and rituals might have to offer.
did he think anyway? Hadn’t she been understanding right from Several Blume fans I talked with remembered this aspect of
the start. Wasn’t she the one who wanted to be a good neighbor!”) the novel far better than I did. The novelist Tayari Jones, whose
The major themes of Blume’s work are all present in Iggie’s career Blume has championed, told me that the way Margaret is
House : parents who believe they can protect their kids from every- torn between “her parents’ decisions and her grandparents’ cul-
thing bad in the world by not talking to them about it, and kids ture” was the main reason she loved the book. “I’m Black, and
who know better; families attempting to reconcile their personal I grew up in the South. Being raised without religion made me
value systems with shifting cultural norms. Years later, Blume feel like such an oddball,” Jones told me. “That really spoke to

1975 1977 2014

63
me even more than the whole flat-chested thing, although there what people say when they can’t explain something to you,” Karen
was no chest flatter than my own.” thinks. “I can understand anything they can understand.”
The writer Gary Shteyngart first encountered Margaret as a Blume’s mother, Esther, was her typist up until Blume wrote
student at a Conservative Jewish day school. He found the ques- Forever …, her 1975 novel of teen romance—and sex. The book is
tions it raised about faith “mind-blowing.” “I think in some ways dedicated to Randy, then 14, who had asked her mother to write
it really created my stance of being apart from organized religion,” a story “about two nice kids who have sex without either of them
he told me. (The book stuck with him long after grade school; having to die.” Forever … got passed around at sleepovers and
Shteyngart recalled repeating its famous chant—“I must, I must, I gained a cult following; it is a book that women in their 50s can still
recite the raciest page numbers from (85 comes up a lot). It’s also
practical and straightforward: how to know if you’re ready, how to
do it safely. The protagonist’s grandmother, a lawyer in Manhattan,
bears more than a passing resemblance to her creator, mailing her
The letters granddaughter pamphlets from Planned Parenthood and offering
to talk whenever she wants. “I don’t judge, I just advise,” she says.
started right The same year Forever … came out, Blume got divorced after
16 years of marriage, and commenced what she has referred to as
after Margaret. a belated “adolescent rebellion.” She cried a lot; she ate pizza and
cheesecake (neither of which she’d had much interest in before,
The kids wanted despite living in New Jersey). Within a year, she had remarried.
She and her children and her new physicist husband—Blume
to scream. They calls him her “interim husband”—landed in Los Alamos, New
Mexico, where he had a job. Blume knew from the start that the
wanted to die. marriage was a mistake, though she didn’t want to admit it. “He
was very much a know-it-all,” she told me. “It just got to be too
They knew much.” She was unhappy in Los Alamos, which felt like Stepford,
but she kept writing. By 1979, she was divorced again.
Judy would In the midst of this second adolescence, Blume published
her first novel for adults. Wifey, about the sexual fantasies and
understand. exploits of an unhappy New Jersey housewife, came out in 1978.
She never intended to stop writing for children, though some
assumed that Wifey’s explicitness would close that door. After
the novel was published, Blume’s mother ran into an acquain-
must increase my bust!”—with a group of female friends at a rave in tance from high school on the street. Bess Roth, whose son was
New York in the ’90s. “I think we were on some drug, obviously.”) Philip Roth, had some advice for her. “When they ask how she
Margaret was not a young-adult book, because there was no knows those things,” she told Esther, “you say, ‘I don’t know,
such thing in 1970. But even today, Blume rejects the category, but not from me!’ ”
which is generally defined as being for 12-to-18-year-olds. “I was In December 1979, George Cooper, who was then teaching
not writing YA,” she told me. “I was not writing for teenagers.” at Columbia, asked his ex-wife if she knew any women he might
She was writing, as she saw it, for “kids on the cusp.” want to have dinner with while he was visiting New Mexico,
where she lived with their 12-year-old daughter. Cooper showed
T h e l e t t e r s s ta r t e d right after Margaret. The kids wrote his daughter the four names on the list. His daughter, being 12,
in their best handwriting, in blue ink or pencil, on stationery told him he had to have dinner with Judy Blume.
adorned with cartoon characters or paper torn out of a notebook. Dinner was Sunday night; Monday, Blume and Cooper saw
They sent their letters care of Blume’s publisher. “Dear Judy,” most Apocalypse Now. He called and sang “Love Is the Drug” over the
began. Girls of a certain age would share whether they’d gotten phone (Blume thought he was singing “Love is a bug”). Tuesday
their period yet. Some kids praised her work while others dove night, Blume had a date with someone else. Cooper came over
right in, sharing their problems and asking for advice: divorce, afterward, and he never left. They got married in 1987, to cel-
drugs, sexuality, bullying, incest, abuse, cancer. They wanted to ebrate their 50th birthdays.
scream. They wanted to die. They knew Judy would understand. “The enjoyment of sexuality should go for your whole life—if
Blume responded to as many letters as she could, but she was you want it to,” Blume told the writer Jami Attenberg, in a 2022
also busy writing more books—she published another 10, after conversation at the Key West Literary Seminar. “If you don’t, fine.”
Margaret, in the ’70s alone. It’s Not the End of the World (1972) took I don’t judge, I just advise. She had a product endorsement to share
on the subject of divorce from a child’s perspective with what was with the audience: George had given her a sex toy, the Woman-
then unusual candor. “There are some things that are very hard for izer, and it was fabulous. “Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that great? He
children to understand,” an aunt tells 12-year-old Karen. “That’s got it for me and then I sang its praises to all of my girlfriends.”

64 APRIL 2023
 B lu m e’s s t e a d fa s t n o n j u d g m e n ta l i s m , a feature of his long-suffering older brother, Peter. Starting that year, devoted
all her fiction, is part of what has so irritated her critics. It’s not readers could purchase the Judy Blume Diary—“the place to put
just sex that Blume’s young characters get away with—they use your own feelings”—though Blume reportedly declined offers to
bad words, they ostracize weirdos, they disrespect their teach- do Judy Blume bras, jeans, and T-shirts. Mary Burns, a professor of
ers. In Deenie and Blubber, two middle-grade novels from the children’s literature at Framingham State College, in Massachusetts,
’70s, Blume depicts the cruelty that kids can show one another, thought Judy Blume was a passing fad, “a cult,” like General Hospital
particularly when it comes to bodily differences (physical dis- for kids. “You can’t equate popularity with quality,” Burns told The
ability, fatness). “I’d rather get it out in the open than pretend Christian Science Monitor. “The question that needs to be asked is:
it isn’t there,” Blume said at the time. She didn’t think adults will Judy Blume’s books be as popular 20 years from now?” Burns,
could change kids’ behavior; her goal was merely to make kids obviously, thought not.
aware of the effect that behavior could have on others. But 20 years later is about when I encountered the books,
In 1980, parents pushed to have Blubber removed from the when my first-grade teacher pressed a vintage copy of Tales of a
shelves of elementary-school libraries in Montgomery County, Fourth Grade Nothing into my hands in the school library one
Maryland. “What’s really shocking,” one Bethesda mother told day. I continued reading Blume over the coming years—as a
The Washington Post, “is that there is no moral tone to the book. city kid, I was especially intrigued by the exotic life (yet familiar
There’s no adult or another child who says, ‘This is wrong.’ ” feelings) of the suburban trio of friends in Just as Long as We’re
(Her 7-year-old daughter told the paper that Blubber was “the Together (1987) and Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson (1993). In
best book I ever read.”) fourth grade, I tried to take Margaret out of my school library
As Blume’s books began to be challenged around the country, and was told I was too young.
she started speaking and writing against censorship. In Novem- I recently went back to that school to speak with the librar-
ber 1984, the Peoria, Illinois, school board banned Blubber, ian, who is still there. The young-adult category has exploded
Deenie, and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, and Blume appeared in the years since I was a student, and these days, she told me,
on an episode of CNN’s Crossfire, sitting between its hosts. tweens and young teens seeking realistic fiction are more likely
“On the left, Tom Braden,” the announcer said. “On the right, to ask for John Green (The Fault in Our Stars), Angie Thomas
Pat Buchanan.” Braden tried, sort of, to defend Blume’s work, (The Hate U Give), or Jason Reynolds (Long Way Down) than
but Blume was more or less on her own as Buchanan yelled at Judy Blume. She implied that the subjects these authors take
her: “Can you not understand how parents who have 9-year- on—childhood cancer, police violence, gun violence—make
olds … would say, ‘Why aren’t the kids learning about history? the adolescent angst of Blume’s books feel somewhat less urgent
Why aren’t they learning about the Civil War? What are they by comparison.
focusing in on this nonsense for?’ ” Blume explained that it Yet Blume’s books remain popular. According to data from
wasn’t either/or—that her books were elective, that kids read NPD BookScan, Margaret tends to sell 25,000 to 50,000 copies a
them “for feelings. And they
write me over 2,000 letters Blume visits with sixth graders in 1977.
a month and they say, ‘You
know how I feel.’ ”
“ ‘I touched my special
place every night,’” Buchanan
replied, reading from a passage
in Deenie about masturba-
tion. (After the bans received
national publicity, the Peoria
board reversed its decision but
said younger students would
need parental permission to
read the books.)
Despite, or perhaps because
of, the censorship, Blume was,
in the early ’80s, at the peak
of her commercial success.
In 1981, she sold more than
JANE TARBOX / GETTY

1 million copies of Super-

fudge, the latest book in a
series about the charming
troublemaker Farley Drexel
Hatcher—a.k.a. Fudge—and

65
 for them to acknowledge
that children were people
too? In her fiction, Blume
had always taken the kids’
side. But as her own kids
got older and she began to
reflect on her experience
raising them, Blume gained
more empathy for parents.
In 1986, she published Let-
ters to Judy: What Your Kids
Wish They Could Tell You,
“a book for every family to
share,” featuring excerpts
and composites of real let-
ters that children (and a
few parents) had sent her
over the years, plus auto-
biographical anecdotes by
Blume herself. “If you’re
wondering why your child
would write to me instead
Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret and Rachel McAdams as her mother, Barbara, in the movie adaptation of of coming to you,” she
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret wrote, “let me assure you
that you’re not alone. There
year; the Fudge series sells well over 100,000. (The Fault in Our were times when my daughter, Randy, and son, Larry, didn’t
Stars, which was published in 2012 and became a movie in 2014, come to me either. And that hurt. Like every parent, I’ve made
sold 3.5 million copies that year, but has not exceeded 100,000 a million mistakes raising my kids.”
in a single year since 2015.) A portion of these sales surely comes When she would describe the project to friends and col-
from parents who buy the books in the hope that their kids leagues, they’d nod and say, “Oh, letters from deeply troubled
will love them as much as they did. But nostalgia alone seems kids.” Blume corrected them. “I would try to explain,” she wrote,
insufficient to account for Blume’s wide readership; parents can “that yes, some of the letters are from troubled kids, but most
only influence their kids’ taste so much. “John Updike once said are from kids who love their parents and get along in school,
that the relationship of a good children’s-book author to his or although they still sometimes feel alone, afraid and misunder-
her audience is conspiratorial in nature,” Leonard S. Marcus, stood.” She admitted in the book’s introduction that “some-
who has written a comprehensive history of American children’s times I become more emotionally involved in their lives than I
literature, told me. “There’s a sense of a shared secret between the should.” Blume replied directly to 100 or so kids every month,
author and the child.” Clearly, something about these stories still and the rest got a form letter—some with handwritten notes
feels authentic to the TikTok generation. at the top or bottom. After Letters to Judy came out, more and
Now that Blume’s books seem relatively quaint, I asked my more kids wrote.
former librarian, can anyone who wants to check them out? Abso- Today, the letters are in the archives of the Beinecke Rare Book
lutely not, she said. Her philosophy is that “the protagonist, espe- & Manuscript Library at Yale. Reading through them is by turns
cially with realistic fiction, should be around your age range.” It’s heartwarming, hilarious, and devastating. Some letter-writers
not censorship, she insisted, just “asking you to wait.” ask for dating advice; others detail the means by which they are
Back in 2002 or 2003, not wanting to wait, I’d bought my planning to kill themselves. Blume remembers one girl who said
own copy of Margaret. I loved that book, all the more so because she had the razor blades ready to go.
I knew it was one adults didn’t want me to read. Blume’s involvement, in some cases, was more than just emo-
For her part, Blume believes that kids are their own best cen- tional: She called a student’s guidance counselor and took notes
DANA HAWLEY / LIONSGATE

sors. In Key West, she told me the story of a mother who had on a yellow Post-it about how to follow up. One teenage girl came
reluctantly let her 10-year-old read Forever … on the condition to New York, where Blume and Cooper had moved from New
that she come to her with any questions afterward. Her daughter Mexico, for a weekend visit (they took her to see A Chorus Line;
had just one: What is fondue? she wasn’t impressed). Blume thought seriously about inviting
one of her correspondents to come live with her. “It took over my
“ I s g row i n g u p a dirty subject?” Blume asked Pat Buchanan life at one point,” Blume said of the letters, and the responsibility
on Crossfire. What were adults so afraid of? What made it so hard she felt to try to help their writers.

66 APRIL 2023
 “Hang in there!” Blume would write, a phrase that might have 1970. The movie, unfolding at what we now know was the dawn of
seemed glib coming from any other adult, though the kids didn’t the women’s-liberation movement, adds another autobiographical
seem to take it that way when she said it: They’d write back to layer by fleshing out the character of Margaret’s mother, Barbara
thank her for her encouragement and send her updates. (Rachel McAdams), who now recalls Blume in her New Jersey–
Her correspondence with some kids lasted years. “I want to mom era. In the book, Barbara is an artist, and we occasionally
protect you from anything bad or painful,” Blume wrote to one. hear about her paintings; on-screen, she gives up her career to be a
“I know I can’t but that’s how I feel. Please write soon and let me full-time PTA mom. She’s miserable.
know how it’s going.” Preteens aren’t the only ones in this movie figuring out who
After spending a day in the Beinecke’s reading room, I began to they are, and what kind of person they want to become. By the
see Blume as a latter-day catcher in the rye, attempting to rescue end of the film, Barbara has quit the PTA. She’s happily back at
one kid after the next before it was too late. “I keep picturing all her easel.
these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all,”
Holden Caulfield tells his younger sister in J. D. Salinger’s novel: I s h o u l d n’t h av e been surprised by how easy it was to con-
fide in Blume. Still, I hadn’t expected to reveal quite so much—I
Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I was there to interview her. Yet over the course of our conversations,
mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy I found myself telling her things about my life and my family that
cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go I’ve rarely discussed with even my closest friends. At one point,
over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where when I mentioned offhand that I’d been an anxious child, Blume
they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. asked matter-of-factly, “What were you anxious about when you
were a kid?” She wanted specifics. She listened as I ran down the list,
Perhaps, through these letters, Blume had managed to live asking questions and making reassuring comments. “That’s all very
out Caulfield’s impossible fantasy. real and understandable,” she said, and the 9-year-old in me melted.
It was easy to see why so many kids kept sending letters all those
W h e n y o u r b o o k s sell millions of copies, Hollywood inevi- years. Even those of us who didn’t correspond with Blume could
tably comes calling. Blume, long a skeptic of film or TV col- sense her compassion. To read one of her books is to have her tell
laboration, was always clear with her agent that Margaret was you, in so many words, That’s all very real and understandable.
off the table. “I didn’t want to ruin it,” she told me. Some books, This kind of validation can be hard to come by. Tiffany Justice,
she thought, just aren’t meant to be movies. “It would have been a founder of Moms for Liberty, has said that the group is focused
wrong somehow.” on “safeguarding children and childhood innocence,” an extreme
Then she heard from Kelly Fremon Craig, who had directed response to a common assumption: that children are fragile and in
the 2016 coming-of-age movie The Edge of Seventeen. Blume had need of protection, that they are easily influenced and incapable of
admired the film, which could have drawn its premise from a forming their own judgments. Certain topics, therefore, are best
lost Judy Blume novel. Its protagonist, Nadine, is an angsty teen avoided. Even adults who support kids’ learning about these topics
who has recently lost her father and feels like her mom doesn’t in theory sometimes find them too awkward to discuss in practice.
get her. Fremon Craig and her mentor and producing partner, Blume believes, by contrast, that grown-ups who underestimate
James L. Brooks, flew to Key West and went to Blume’s condo for children’s intelligence and ability to comprehend do so at their
lunch. (Blume had it catered—no reason to have anxiety dreams own risk—that “childhood innocence” is little more than a pleas-
about serving food on a day like that.) They convinced Blume ing story adults tell themselves, and that loss of innocence doesn’t
that Margaret could work on the screen. have to be tragic. In the real world, kids and teenagers throw up
Blume served as a producer on the film, gave Fremon Craig and jerk off and fall in love; they have fantasies and fights, and they
notes on the script, and spent time on set, heading off at least don’t always buy what their parents have taught them about God.
one catastrophic mistake when she observed the young actors Sitting across from her in the shade of her balcony, I realized
performing the famous “I must increase my bust” exercise by that the impression I’d formed of Blume at the Beinecke Library
pressing their hands together in a prayer position. (The correct had been wrong. Much as she had wanted to help the thousands
method, which Blume has demonstrated—with the caveat that it of kids who wrote to her, kids who badly needed her wisdom and
does not work—is to make your hands into fists, bend your arms her care, Blume was not Holden Caulfield. Instead of a cliff for
at your sides, and vigorously thrust your elbows back.) kids to fall off, she saw a field that stretched continuously from
The result of their close collaboration is an adaptation that’s childhood to adulthood, and a worrying yet wonderful lifetime
generally faithful to the text. Abby Ryder Fortson, who plays of stumbling through it, no matter one’s age. Young people don’t
Margaret, manages to make her conversations with God feel like need a catcher; they need a compassionate coach to cheer them
a natural extension of her inner life.. on. “Of course I remember you,” she told the kids in her letters.
If anything, the movie is more conspicuously set in 1970 than “I’ll keep thinking of you.” “Do be careful.”
the book itself, full of wood paneling, Cat Stevens, and vintage
sanitary pads. Blume told me that Margaret is really about her own
experience growing up in the ’50s; she just happened to publish it in Amy Weiss-Meyer is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

67
 If you’re looking to the stars—and why
wouldn’t you be?—you’ll know that Saturn
has entered the sign of Pisces. It happened
in early March: Shaggy old Saturn, god of
constriction and mortality, lowered his iron
haunches into the Piscean waters. He’ll be
there until May 2025, an intractable lump
in that wishy-washy element. Displacing it.
Blocking it. Imposing his limits. Enough with
the changeability, he says to dippy, fin-flashing
Pisces. Enough with the half-assedness. End-
less mutation is not possible. Now you’re going
to face—and be stuck with—yourself.
This will be a challenge, one senses, for art-
ists in general. And for pop stars in particular.
Who sheds selves, and invents selves, faster
than a pop star? Who defies time and gravity
with more desperation? Something else was
augured for March: the release of new albums
by two of our most continually expanding and
dramatically evolving celestial bodies. I’m talk-
ing about Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey. Two
emanations of the holy city of Los Angeles;
two distinct transits across the firmament.
Cyrus, daughter of the country singer
Billy Ray Cyrus, was a Disney kid, the star
of Hannah Montana, a highly processed pop
prodigy who moved from Tennessee to L.A.
(see: “Party in the U.S.A.”), broke out, and
became a bong-brandishing hip-hop appro-
O M NIVOR E
priator, twerk transgressor, sometime Flaming
Lips collaborator, and pop/country/glam-rock
anarchic aberration obsessed with freedom and
nudity and Molly and “getting some,” chafing
In Their Feelings and rattling in her corporate cage, her magnifi-
cent voice growing steadily/unsteadily deeper
and rougher and omnivorous, from a gurgling
The indelible, indomitable voices of mezzo-soprano to an anthemic libertine roar
Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey to something like Metallica’s James Hetfield
belching flames of pure estrogen, all the while
achieving higher and higher levels of pop vis-
By James Parker ibility until finally, in January, she smashed
Spotify’s all-time weekly-song- streaming

68 ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN TAMAKI

record (and took the top spot on the Billboard charts) People who make their living singing songs tend
with her post-breakup empowerment frolic “Flowers.” to have good voices. Cyrus and Del Rey have great
“I can buy myself flow-uuuuuuhs …” Is it her best voices. Extraordinary voices. Cyrus has made her voice
song? Not even close. But her personality has achieved a drama of experience: the ravagings of good times
some kind of critical mass in the culture. Cyrus has and bad times, the scraping-out of new depths, the
lived several lifetimes, burned through several careers, attainment of raucous new heights. “Man has places
made some beautiful music (“Adore You,” “High,” in his heart which do not yet exist,” wrote the Catholic
“Malibu”) and some not-so-beautiful music, and mystic Léon Bloy, “and into them enters suffering in
still—at age 30—gives the impression of not being order that they may have existence.” Cyrus’s perfor-
able to manage, not quite, her freakish powers, like the mance of her there-goes-my-marriage song, “Slide
pupils at Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Young- Away,” at the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards had me
sters in X-Men, knocking down walls with their elbows reaching for the oxymorons: a rueful shout, a soaring
and accidentally putting people in comas. growl, a rumble on wings of sorrow. Her voice can
Del Rey, born Elizabeth Grant in New York, sound sore, split, like she’s an older, even more time-
weathered a now-incomprehensible controversy damaged pop star doing a guest spot on her own song.
about “authenticity” (a word that, to paraphrase Or it can sound straight-up bacchanalian.
Nabokov, should only ever be in quotes) upon the Out there in YouTube limbo, unreleased as of this
2011 release of her swooning, doomy single “Video writing, is a thundering Cyrus ballad called “Fucked
Games.” “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you / Every- Up Forever.” What a vocal performance this is: Cyrus’s
thing I do …” Romanticism that smelled like nihil- age and youth, her tenderized understanding and her
ism, utterly convincing. Who could have doubted hooligan snarl, in perfect, momentary balance. “We’re
her? Who could have doubted Lana Del Rey? But they holdin’ on the hands of Time / So baby put yours in
did. They arraigned her as the fabrication of (male) mine / I’ll leave this place whenever / And run away
music-biz wizards: a fake, a thing of vapors. Only to together … Can’t stay fucked up forever!” And the
watch her billow unstoppably outward, enveloping The id of oldest wolf in Yellowstone bursts into tears, and wild
her helpless audience in a woozy fantasia of poetry, California— young couples across the nation drive straight into
scandal, profanity, emotional purgation, street talk, the flames of a better day.
and yellow-toothed pianos in decaying Hollywood
the id of Del Rey’s voice is more pastoral, woodwind to
mansions. Dark-blue Americana. A Doorsian West America—is Cyrus’s pedal-stomping power chord: It floats, wafts,
Coast trip. Tambourine-like flickerings of electricity strong in both whispers, swells, flutters, dissociates, as if she’s always
on the horizon. of them. teetering, just teetering, at some grand balustrade of
Her sonic environment is submarine, slow- feeling. She can climb to rapture, as in the storming
blossoming, lavish with dream imagery and orches- falsetto finale of “In My Feelings,” or add an exquisite
tral overkill. When she sang, with a kind of shimmer- detail: “We could get lost in the purple rain,” she sings in
ing solemnity, “My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola” on “Let Me Love You Like a Woman,” and the little accent
2012’s Paradise, it felt like a Frederick Seidel–esque of transport she puts on rain turns it from a shopworn
provocation but also like Patti Smith singing “Jesus Prince reference to a … to a micro-ecstasy. She says
died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Or like Syl- things that a female rapper might say—“Who’s doper
via Plath writing “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m than this bitch?”—but slowly, through a mesh of glim-
through.” In other words, it felt like a breakout, mering reserve. Swagger, inverted. It’s really a unique
one of those lines that instantaneously, heretically, psychic zone, her voice: One breath and we’re in it.
clears the ground in front of it and blasts the artist Their stars are crossing, these two, daughters equally
into free space. After a line like that, you can do in their art of heavy-metal Saturn and of dreamy,
what you want. fleeting Pisces. They’ll ride the transition. The id of
Is she a persona? A sequence of personas? It’s never California—the id of America—is strong in both of
clear. “All these bitches want something from me / them. Cyrus, in my imagination, will keep slinging TVs
Got me fucked up on LA money.” Cyrus, singing out the windows of Chateau Marmont while howling
these lines in a demo version of “LA Money,” sounds at the hills. Del Rey will drift angelically down Sun-
genuinely disgruntled; if Del Rey sang them (as she set Boulevard, singing drug lullabies and tapping dirty
might), hushing the consonants and dilating the vow- skateboarders with her wand. What a rare conjunction,
els, they would be smoking with her special metallic and what a gift. They’re refining themselves, they’re
irony. Then again, she can be utterly naked: “God exposing themselves, and they’re doing it all for us.
damn, man child / You fucked me so good that I
almost said ‘I love you.’ ” (Then again again, maybe
that’s ironic too … See what I mean?) James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

APRIL 2023 69
Culture & Critics

70
70 PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBBIE LAWRENCE
BO OKS for example. I have sometimes, picturing all the
characters in black leotards, found myself laughing
at the first 10 pages of The Waves. But I never have
the sense, opening To the Lighthouse, that it could
have been anything else. It begins with the weather,
just like a real day. It rises to some occasion, wakes
with the lark to meet the weekend—moves “with an
indescribable air of expectation” because it is going
to meet someone around the corner, and, with the
shock of encounter you sometimes feel in reading,
you find that it is you.
“This is going to be fairly short,” Woolf wrote in
1925, “to have father’s character done complete in it;
& mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual
things I try to put in—life, death &c.” A maniac’s
claim, “life, death &c.,” but she actually did it. Vir-
We’re All Invited to ginia Woolf, being one of those who can turn the
Earth with one finger, picked up her own childhood
the Lighthouse summers in Cornwall and set them down intact in
the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye.
When I first read this book, I had not seen this
On the Isle of Skye with Virginia Woolf place; now I have been over every inch of it, eating its
and my mom butter and eggs in the morning, blinking like a light
at its lakes at night, getting backed up the road by
the dense yellow sponge of its sheep in the afternoon.
By Patricia Lockwood We spent a few days on the island in the spring of
2019, my mother, my husband, and I. At dawn we
To the Lighthouse, from the first word of its title, is a drove around the whole perimeter of the novel, over
novel that moves. Here it comes striding across the the heather that keeps a footprint, down by the rock
lawn, with its hair in long, curving crimps and a deer- pools where something might be lost. I felt I could
stalker hat on its head, with a bag in one hand and have been riding in the car that the royalties of To the
a child trailing from the other. It is coming to find Lighthouse bought Virginia and her husband, Leon-
you, its face lights up, there is something in this world ard, as she drove me past all points, on the wrong
for you to do. side of the road and under threat of rain, so that the
I had met Virginia Woolf before I ever opened real scenes blurred with the ones she had transposed
her books. I knew what she looked like and what had on them. Virginia saw the Godrevy Lighthouse in
happened to her; I knew that her books took place St. Ives Bay when she closed her eyes, though Skye,
inside the human mind and that I had my whole life too, has a famous one. She saw her father, Sir Leslie
to enter them. My premonitory sense of what her Stephen, scholar, writer, and mountain climber, and
novels were about—Mrs. Dalloway is about some her mother, Julia Stephen, the tallest thing on the
lady, The Waves is about … waves, To the Lighthouse island, painted here in the black-and-white stripes of
is about going to a lighthouse—turned out to be someone called just Mrs. Ramsay.
basically accurate. Yet I put off To the Lighthouse for It is Mrs. Ramsay herself we are going to meet; it
a long time, in order to live in delicious anticipation is she who could not have been different. She is the
of it. There is a pleasure to be had in putting off the human holiday, the dinner table laid with everything in
classics; as soon as you open Bleak House, you fore- season, and she herself rotating in the center of it—her
close all other possibilities of what it could be, and own face in season, a fruit. She has little time for books,
there sits Mr. Krook in his unchanging grease spot, not even books like this (and there is only one of those).
always to look the same, never to raise a hand differ- She has no foreknowledge, but she has intuitions: an
ently. As long as it remains unread, the story can be impulse of terror when her family ceases to wash her
anything—free, immortal, drowsing between white with the sound of their talk, or when the line “stormed
sheets. Yet if you are a reader, this pleasure can be at with shot and shell” is carried for a moment into
drawn out for only so long. her ear by her husband, the thunderer. Her 6-year-old,
I have beliefs about Mrs. Dalloway—that Clarissa James, wants to go to the Lighthouse tomorrow, but it
Dalloway should have been the one to kill herself, seems there will be weather.

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Culture & Critics

“ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,’ said I interrupted, but he went on. “Everyone knew she
Mrs. Ramsay … ‘But,’ said his father, stopping in was your mother, and everyone knew you were Ameri-
front of the drawing-room window, ‘it won’t be fine.’” can.” Well. I have often called him my Leonard, but
“ ‘But it may be fine—I expect it will be fine,’ I feel he is a little harder on me.
said Mrs. Ramsay, making some little twist of the You could write about Mrs. Ramsay for a long time;
reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impa- anyone could. That is how the world gets a Virginia
tiently.” Along with James, from the first page of Woolf, maybe. Woolf lays her out not like a figure but
the book, you may wish to kill Mr. Ramsay. And like a spectrum. Sitting knitting by the window in the
along with James, looking into the possibility and shabby drawing room, Mrs. Ramsay feels waves, winds,
plenitude of his mother’s face, you may feel that pulses of suspicion about her own nature:
paradise is a refrigerator.
She looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse,
I s i t r i d i c u l o u s that what I remember most the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was
about Skye is wandering the grocery store with my her stroke, for watching them in this mood always
own mother, through the cold breath of the dairy at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to
aisle? My mother is no Mrs. Ramsay—she looks at you one thing especially of the things one saw; and this
not with tenderness, but as if a volcano is exploding thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often
behind you—but she has the gift of putting news- she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and
paper headlines on the day, of setting Tomorrow looking, with her work in her hands until she became
before you as if it were something to eat. We walked the thing she looked at—that light for example.
up and down and we chose, as if we were choosing
each other. Her work was the shape of a stocking, and hospitals,
Ringed by water, things on an island have the and ensuring that the milk came to your doorstep still
halos that objects wear in still-life paintings. Every-
I never have white and clean. And saying tomorrow may be fine;
thing familiar was a bit different there: fruit, flow- the sense, we may yet go to the Lighthouse.
ers, ourselves. Randomly we bought a huge melon; opening You could write about Mr. Ramsay, too, the scholar
maybe this was the place where we would finally To the and professor. The most generous woman of the age,
be the people who would crack open a melon for as Woolf saw it, might be married to the most bottom-
breakfast. Rain began to spatter as we emerged
Lighthouse, less hole, who must regularly be assured “that he too
into the parking lot, which should have worried us that it could lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only,
but didn’t—driving on the wrong side of the road have been but all over the world.” Mr. Ramsay’s light strokes over
through rough weather was an opportunity my anything else. something, but it is not the pageant of people that
mother had waited for her whole life. We pulled surrounds him; it is the alphabet of his own mind,
squealing out of the lot, and we talked of what we which he fears goes up only to Q, while someone else’s
would do, as the melon rolled thunderously from might reach all the way to Z. Indeed, he might have
one side of the car to the other. It was raining steadily made it to Z had he not married, he thinks. Well, a
now. The forecast said it would continue, but my fool might count fruits in paradise.
mother drove us between drops, as if nothing that “He is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical, he is
came from the sky could matter to us. Maybe she unjust,” thinks Lily Briscoe, a friend of the family,
has some Mrs. Ramsay in her after all. with her eyes down, because only when her eyes are
“I remember it a little less beautifully,” my husband down can she see the Ramsays clearly. “Directly one
said tactfully, as those who were not Virginia Woolf looked up and saw them, what she called ‘being in
may have remembered those St. Ives summers. “We love’ flooded them. They became part of that unreal
walked into the grocery store 15 minutes before it but penetrating and exciting universe which is the
closed. We had never been so hungry in our lives, so world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to
time was of the essence, but your mother started to them; the birds sang through them.” Paradise, and a
malfunction, trying to find midwestern treats and fool pacing through it with the sky stuck to him and
bags of ice so that she could formulate the liquid that the birds singing through him, thinking he would
kept her alive and that no one in this part of the have written better books if he had not married.
world would acknowledge: iced tea. You were walk- The Ramsays come to Skye every summer with
ing through the cold breath of the dairy aisle so that their eight children: Prue, Nancy, Rose, Cam, Andrew,
your mother could yell at the unpasteurized milk, Jasper, Roger, and that engine of desire, young James.
which she considered dangerous. Both of you became They are surrounded as much by visitors as they are
deranged in the produce section and started grabbing by the landscape, because Mrs. Ramsay requires
fruits at random”—“That melon had meaning to me,” attendants of varying colors and dispositions; she is a

72 APRIL 2023
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master in the flower-arranging of people, which likes comes from the top of her head. In the 1981 introduc-
a stem or two of something wild. And so we have the tion to the book, Eudora Welty writes that “the novel’s
handful gathered here almost by chance—Lily, who conception has the strength of a Blake angel,” and it
wants to paint and never marry; the widowed bota- is hard to envision this angel without Julia Stephen’s
nist William Bankes; Charles Tansley, a student; the face. If you have seen her, staring with compassion
young couple Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle; Augustus and without mercy in black-and-white, perhaps you
Carmichael, the poet and almost afterthought. They imagine Mrs. Ramsay this way. Perhaps you picture
could have been anyone. Even we, in the right time your own mother.
and place, could have been there. It is the eyes from which Virginia proceeds, and
We are perhaps somewhat like Lily, striving and the nose like an arrow. People really do come from
unformed, a tamer flower than she wants to be, who other people, strange as it might seem. To her chil-
tomorrow may be able to make the paint move, who dren, Mrs. Ramsay said, “You shall go through with
feels the agony of having her painting looked at. She it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that.”
is trying to capture the house, with Mrs. Ramsay and Julia and Leslie had four children. The Woolfs had
James in the window. She is required, through the none, yet to her countless readers Virginia said
long upright afternoon of the novel’s first section, to the same thing, and relentlessly that: You shall go
stand in one place in front of her easel so that she through with it all.
can register the passing of the horizontal through the If you have not read the book yet, stop here and
vertical, the kitchen table through the pear tree, the come back later, because I am going to talk about
march of time through Mrs. Ramsay. Tomorrow, Lily the dinner party. No summary shall ever stand in
tells herself, thinking of her canvas, she must move place of the experience. Rereading the book, I had to
the tree more toward the middle. pause a whole day before that scene, when the book’s
We are perhaps more like the “little atheist” and first day and all the people in it come together. I was
groveling admirer of Mr. Ramsay, Charles Tansley, in an agony of anticipation, as if it were an actual
who quite swiftly finds himself shunned by the chil- party. I had to choose my jewels! Would I be able to
dren and in uncomfortable thrall to Mrs. Ramsay, TO THE converse? Would the boeuf en daube be overdone, or
LIGHTHOUSE
under whose influence “he was coming to see himself, properly timed? Would the right words come to my
and everything he had ever known gone crooked a V i r g i n i a Wo o l f lips? Then tomorrow came and the worst happened: I
little. It was awfully strange.” He grew up without was reading it badly, in scraps and fragments, nothing
enough love or money and so, as a man, does not coming together. I was failing—along with the little
know how to cry out “Let us all go to the circus!” with atheist, I wanted to get back to my work. But I had
any spontaneity, which causes Mrs. Ramsay consider- PENGUIN CLASSICS forgotten that this was how it was written, to make
able wonder. It is not difficult at all to go to the circus! you feel this way. It was written so that when the
It is not difficult to go to the Lighthouse. If other candles were lit, “some change at once went through
people would only stop saying it were not possible, them all.” Suddenly,
she would carry them there.
Mrs. Ramsay’s work is to make people they were all conscious of making a party together
magnificent—to make them believe in themselves, in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause
make them think they can do anything, which is also against that fluidity out there. Mrs. Ramsay, who had
how you get a Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Ramsay’s work been uneasy, waiting for Paul and Minta to come in,
is to make people fall in love with her, so that they and unable, she felt, to settle to things, now felt her
can marry other people. “William must marry Lily,” uneasiness change to expectation.
she thinks, and such is the force of green sap in the
thought that it almost comes to flower. (Not really, The dish of fruit, of people, is intact, the party all
but there is a moment when we think, Maybe? ) of a kind for a moment, until a hand reaches out to
take a pear. And I was sad; I had not said what I’d
W o o l f ’s m ot h e r, Julia Stephen, was an extraor- wanted to say.
dinary woman, with eyes like cups and a mouth that You cannot ever replicate your first reading of this
turned down and a chin you have seen in a dozen scene. But once you have read it, you have it, and it
paintings. She was a model for the artists Edward goes on forever in a room inside of you: the low lights,
Burne-Jones and George Frederic Watts, and her aunt the faces sparkling in their sugar, the carrying of the
Julia Cameron, a photographer, made more than 50 boeuf en daube to the table. It is where the movement
portraits of her. In her pictures she presides, as if you of the title finally sweeps you up and makes you a part
are looking at her from the child end of a very long of it. You, too, were invited, despite your imperfec-
table. Her hair streams and a light glow sometimes tions and your pretentious dress; your bad ideas about

73
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art and your inability to paint the world as you see it; frightening Cam swings to and fro like Time. The
your choice of husband or wife; the fact that you will war has happened, and Mr. Carmichael has written
never marry, that you will die in the war, that your his poem. Lives—the Ramsays’, and our own—have
mind cannot make it all the way through to Z. You eroded; a few more grains of us are gone, after we
were asked to come and you are there. have finished reading.
Woolf notes, after finishing To the Lighthouse,
that hardly a word goes wrong in this scene, and it B y t h e t i m e my mother and I had unloaded
is true. The things of the Earth float in orbit around our armfuls of insane groceries at the Wee Croft
Woolf; they proceed one from the other in a montage House—we were actually staying at a place called
of transformation. “It could not last,” Mrs. Ramsay the Wee Croft House, on a picturesque finger of
knew, “but at the moment her eyes were so clear that land known as Sleat—it was too late to cook, so we
they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of found ourselves driving back into town, back again
these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, toward the sea. When we got to the restaurant, the
without effort like a light stealing under water so that rain had stopped and light and shadow moved in
its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balanc- great mammalish shapes outside. The melon was
ing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit still intact, as it would remain for the rest of the
up hanging, trembling.” trip, never touched or tasted; we do not live the lives
Virginia Woolf is not like her mother, not like that we mean to live, in those elevated moments in
Mrs. Ramsay. But she has the center that holds, and the produce section when we reach out a hand to
you feel with full force what she declared in 1925, not Mrs. Ramsay’s choose. It ended up in a Dumpster, in a chapter I
long after she first saw To the Lighthouse in her mind, work is to like to call “Time Passes.”
circling like a fin far out at sea, that she was “the only make people When we sat down near the window that gath-
woman in England free to write what I like.” The churn ered up the view, a murmur rose all around us, so
of paint that will take over The Waves entirely begins magnificent— that the room was united in its theme and purpose.
here. To the Lighthouse asserts the abstract painting as to make them Fried fish and hamburgers in their halos were set
figural: Here are the mother and child, a triangle on believe in down in front of people almost unnoticed. We
Lily Briscoe’s canvas, among curves and arabesques. themselves, looked around uneasily, not yet a part of things. It
What Lily wishes for is what Woolf must have wished was the day when Notre Dame was burning, and
for, what every artist must wish for before they begin: make them at every table a child was showing the videos to his
“that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has think they can parents on his phone.
been made anything.” do anything. The fathers were impatient; either they were fire-
It is characteristic of Woolf that you could use fighters in their own minds, or else to them, Notre
nearly any elemental metaphor to describe her effects. Dame had burned down a long time ago. The mothers
Shall I speak of paint and canvas, or the tick of min- took the phones and cradled them, lighting candles
utes in an empty room, or the wind in a hollow with their eyes. Perhaps they were not really hearing
shell? Anything is possible. You have only to choose, the news; perhaps the voices came to them as they
as she chose from among her people. Shall I look came to Mrs. Ramsay that night when everything
now through the painter, the student, the child? It is surrounded her, flowers and fruit and family: “very
she who likes a stem of something wild, she who has strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a cathe-
invited one of every kind to come to the table, in case dral.” I knew that if I showed my mother a video of
she needs their eyes, their ears, the clear water running a burning church, she would scream out loud—we
through their mind. don’t all have a Mrs. Ramsay—so at our table we sat
“I have an idea that I will invent a new name for listening to the wholeness of the scene, its color and
my books to supplant ‘novel,’ ” Woolf wrote in her its pattern and its music, while a single rhythm swept
diary while working on To the Lighthouse. “A new — our faces from far out at sea. We talked of whether
by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” tomorrow would be fine, when we would rise, what
In the novel’s short interlude—“Time Passes”— we would do that day. Outside the window, at the end
before the family returns to the island 10 years later, of a long spit, stood the Lighthouse.
Mrs. Ramsay dies in brackets, Mr. Ramsay’s arms
reaching out for her. Prue is given in marriage and
dies in brackets. Andrew is blown sky-high in them;
the brackets are the arms where we are not. The Patricia Lockwood is the author, most recently, of the
house is left empty, and molders. The skull of an novel No One Is Talking About This. This essay
old pig still hangs on the wall, and the shawl that was adapted from the foreword to a new edition of
Mrs. Ramsay wrapped around it to keep it from To the Lighthouse.

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Culture & Critics

As a film critic, I have complicated feel-

BO OKS
ings about Oscar season, a baggy calendri-
cal concept that now includes every month
of the year, from the indie-film discover-
ies of the Sundance Film Festival in Janu-
ary to the awards voting by critics’ groups
in December. The complaints about the
The Scandalous, Clueless, Academy Awards are as well rehearsed as
the acceptance speech of a surefire victor:
Irresistible Oscars The most deserving nominees seldom win,
and the most inventive movies of the year
typically get no nominations at all. The vot-
How the Academy holds on to its prestige ing process is so opaque and so subject to
despite a history of embarrassment external influence—barraged by ever more
expensively managed PR campaigns and
buffeted by political and social forces far
By Dana Stevens outside the Academy’s garden walls—that
to say the prize has little to do with the

76 ILLUSTRATION BY LUCY JONES

recognition of artistic merit is to join a weary cho- egotism and pomposity,” as its own frequent host Bob
rus. And yet the whole cinematic world dances to the Hope once described it—may have to tell us about
rhythm of the Oscars’ baton, and I refer not merely to Hollywood and ourselves. Not that we believe in ora-
the film industry itself, but to a sprawling satellite econ- cles, or that the Oscars have ever been one. But the
omy of run-up awards, Oscar-branded media coverage, ceremony and its extended prelude offer us a shared
fashion marketing, and social-media conversation. spectacle that prompts discussion of very American
To scoff at or criticize or even ignore the annual questions. Who’s up and who’s down? Which dreams
ritual that is the Academy Awards is not to escape its and fears are selling this year? In what direction might
hold on our culture. Indeed, the doubters and hat- this mass, and so often messy, medium be headed?
ers make up a crucial part of the system. Resistance
to the Oscars’ outsize influence is what sparked the In O S C A R WA R S : A History of Hollywood in Gold,
creation of alternative prizes such as the Independent Sweat, and Tears, the New Yorker writer Michael
Spirit Awards and the Gotham Awards, now glamor- Schulman provides just what we need as the same
ous institutions in their own right. Some award-giving old love-hate drama plays out yet again for Oscar
bodies, such as the dubious Hollywood Foreign Press fans and shunners alike: a rich array of unflattering
Association, which votes for the Golden Globes, have but spellbinding stories about the feuds and failures
become foils that make the Academy look like a model of judgment that the Academy has thus far managed
of uprightness by comparison. Decades of recurring to weather. Schulman explores nine decades of Oscar-
scandals—including voter-swaying payola campaigns related turf battles, examining the institution’s con-
and an accusation of sexual assault—have destroyed stant missteps and often bumbling self-reinvention as
whatever legitimacy the Globes ever had. (I should it strives to sustain its influence. “If there’s a common
disclose that I’m a member of the New York Film Crit- thread running through the decades of Oscar wars,”
ics Circle, whose annual ceremony—started just six The Oscar he writes, “it’s power: who has it, who’s straining to
years after the first Oscars were handed out—has long ceremony’s own keep it, who’s invading the golden citadel to snatch
been a station of the cross on the awards circuit. So it.” As everyone in the movie business knows, that
even in critiquing the Oscars, I’m one more cog in an
frequent host particular story line appeals to brows high and low.
awards machine that offers no real place for an observer Bob Hope once A sparkling compendium of show-business anec-
to stand outside it: Critics’ awards, reviews, lists, and described it dotes as well-researched as they are dishy, Oscar Wars
rankings are routinely deployed in Oscar campaigns.) as “this farcical reminds us that a power struggle inspired the very
The Academy has managed, somehow, to main- creation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
tain its legitimacy, at least insofar as its trophies have
charade of Sciences. It was formed in 1927, when the silent era
retained their potent symbolic value. But the history vulgar egotism was coming to an abrupt close and the studio sys-
of the Oscars is a history of the struggle to sustain that and pomposity.” tem’s grip on the industry was tightening. As the craft
legitimacy, as scandal, embarrassment, and a remark- guilds formed in the 1920s began to threaten strikes,
able ability to be one step behind the zeitgeist continu- the MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer banded together
ally seem to threaten the entire enterprise. In 2015, with a group of influential industry players, including
one such fracas became a spur for reform: In response producers, directors, writers, and actors, to establish a
to an all-white slate of acting nominees, the hashtag bulwark against growing labor unrest. The following
#OscarsSoWhite, started by a Black activist, quickly year, the Academy introduced the concept of an annual
went viral. When the acting slate was all white again awards ceremony: What better strategy for pacifying
in 2016, a fresh surge of outrage finally shamed the and thereby controlling the talent? “If I got them cups
Academy into recruiting a younger, more diverse mem- and awards,” Mayer crowed in an interview decades
bership. Some dared to anticipate that a watershed was later, “they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted.”
at hand. Notably, the years since have delivered Best For the next few decades, Mayer’s plan worked,
Picture wins to such atypical Oscar fare as Moonlight, at least on the surface. MGM retained its clout in
Parasite, and Nomadland, artful, downbeat films made the yearly Oscar race, right up until the studio sys-
outside the Hollywood system by nonwhite and, in tem finally disintegrated in the 1960s, after nearly
one case, nonmale filmmakers. Results like these, and two decades of slow decline. Yet well before that, the
the reforms that abetted them, are welcome and over- Academy had acquired its own aura of prestige, inde-
due. They are also clearly insufficient. pendent of (and soon much more sought-after than)
Yet once again, like the indestructible star of an the approbation of any individual member of its vot-
action franchise, the Oscars have reemerged, ready ing group. By the mid-’30s, the statuette of a nude
for another sequel. We keep watching, or refusing to bronze man sketched in 1928 by the legendary MGM
watch, even as we can’t resist debating what the lists designer Cedric Gibbons had become the world’s most
and the ceremony—“this farcical charade of vulgar desirable piece of mantel candy.

APRIL 2023 77
Culture & Critics

Of course, just because the awards have long been was presumed to be in contention for the award with
sought-after doesn’t mean they’ve always gone to the Howard Hawks’s widely beloved World War I drama
most deserving recipient. Whether the Oscar merits Sergeant York, the top-grossing film of 1941—until
respect as an arbiter of artistic quality is a debate as both lost to John Ford’s nostalgic Welsh-mining-
old as the Academy itself. Nor was it always the case family drama, How Green Was My Valley. Given that
that the bestowing of “cups and awards” worked to the United States had entered World War II just a few
facilitate the top-down control of talent that Mayer months before the prizes were awarded, the Academy’s
envisioned. Schulman devotes an early chapter called choice to bypass a dark social satire like Kane is under-
“Rebels” in part to the recurring standoffs between a standable. The patriotic Sergeant York’s eclipse was a
fierce, artistically driven young Bette Davis and an surprise, but a welcome one for the Academy, which
Academy already headed, Variety declared, for “the was all too happy to skirt controversy: Isolationists
ash-can of oblivion.” (A resurgence of the Hollywood were threatening a Senate investigation of “war hys-
labor movement in the Great Depression had left the teria” issuing from “non-Nordic” Hollywood. The
power of the Academy looking less secure.) Having Senate probe fell apart after Pearl Harbor, and by the
lost the 1935 Best Actress race despite her widely end of 1943, the war had become, Schulman writes,
admired performance in Of Human Bondage—and “the driving force in American movies.”
having then won in 1936 for a role in what she consid- Citizen Kane’s fate, in Schulman’s telling, was also
ered the “maudlin and mawkish” Dangerous—Davis ensured by the fierce campaign waged against it by
hardly revered the Academy’s standards. But she wasn’t the film’s thinly disguised subject, William Randolph
about to opt out of the game. Leveraging the power Hearst. And Welles’s insistence on complete creative
of the Oscar she disdained, she staged a “one-woman freedom, paired with his developing reputation for
strike,” breaking the terms of her Warner Brothers being behind schedule and over budget, scarcely
contract and signing on to make two films with a endeared him to his higher-ups at RKO Studios.
European production company. She was sued by War- If Kane had won the industry’s most valued prize
O S C A R WA R S :
ner Brothers and lost, but her defiance opened the A H I S T O RY O F despite its failure to recoup the studio’s investment
way for a history-making win by Olivia de Havilland H O L LY W O O D I N in an untried 24-year-old theater director, film his-
G O L D , S W E AT,
in a lawsuit against the same studio a few years later: AND TEARS tory from 1941 on might have looked different. But
Henceforth, studios could enforce exclusive contracts even without the Oscars’ help—or rather, wearing its
for at most seven calendar years, enabling actors to Michael lone trophy for Best Original Screenplay as a badge
Schulman
work as free agents. of anti-establishment pride—Citizen Kane now regu-
By 1939, Davis the rebel was poised to become larly appears on, if not atop, lists of the best and most
an Academy insider. She had another Best Actress HARPER influential films of all time. And Welles did get his
win under her belt (this time for a film, Jezebel, that Oscar payback 30 years later, receiving an honorary
she felt deserved the honor), and her influence had award in the New Hollywood era, when a generation
grown to the point that she had earned the nick- of young directors was on the rise. He didn’t show up
name “the fourth Warner Brother.” She was elected to accept it, though. His cover story was that he was
the Academy’s first female president in November “filming abroad.” In fact, Schulman writes, he was
1941, a leader with her own ideas about the institu- watching from a house in Laurel Canyon. Perhaps
tion’s elite-but-democratic balancing act. Less than Welles was tired from years of battling Hollywood
two months later, she resigned after daring to disagree insiders, and just couldn’t face a fickle awards process
with the board’s view that the ceremony should be that was busy buttressing its own reputation by deliv-
canceled in light of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Davis ering a belated apology.
argued that a toned-down event, staged, in Variety’s Soon enough, the Academy was lagging behind
words, “sans orchidaceous glitter,” could be a boon once again. In 1976, Miloš Forman’s bleak anti-
to American morale. The board, feeling that no event establishment parable One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
would be preferable to an event so modest as to “rob Nest swept all five of the top awards, the first film to
the Academy of all dignity,” was appalled—but ended do so since Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night in
up adopting Davis’s approach for the 1942 awards. 1935. To call the bonanza belated is an understate-
That same year provides one of the most salient ment. Here was the Academy catching America’s new
examples of the by-now-general rule that the Best wave of auteur-driven filmmaking as the wave was
Picture Oscar seldom goes to the movie that, in receding: By then, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate,
retrospect, has the greatest long-term impact on the and 2001: A Space Odyssey, three New Hollywood
motion-picture medium. As Schulman recounts, masterworks that were also box-office hits, had all
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, a box-office flop failed to secure the Academy’s top prize. Meanwhile,
lauded by critics but tepidly received by audiences, Steven Spielberg, whose Jaws had been the box-office

78 APRIL 2023
 BO OKS

Schulman avoids making the parallels among

their very different cases too explicit, but shows
how all three went on to have trouble escaping the
stereotyped roles that had brought them their biggest
success. He writes that McDaniel, who had made her
name as a bawdy vaudeville singer, searched in vain
for films that would let her break out of the “servile,
sexless ‘mammy’ archetype.” Poitier spent most of
his career boxed into the role of upstanding, “excep-
tional” Black man in stodgy if well-meaning liberal
race dramas. Nearly 40 years later, the biracial Berry,
a former pageant queen, struggled to find her place
in the early-21st-century film industry: Just three
years after winning her Best Actress Oscar, she was
awarded the Golden Raspberry (or “Razzie”) Award
for the disastrous Catwoman.
Schulman wisely resists any tidy summary of
the Academy’s long history of internal strife, and
instead closes by giving his readers a surreal behind-
the-scenes glimpse of gleeful celebration after an
Oscar night from hell. Before leaving the Vanity Fair
party following last year’s ceremony, he observes Will
Smith’s triumphant turn on the dance floor, holding
his newly acquired Best Actor statuette for his role
in King Richard, after his much-discussed on-air slap
of the presenter Chris Rock. “In a matter of hours,”
Schulman marvels, “he had assaulted someone on
live television, ripped his soul open while winning
juggernaut of 1975, wasn’t nominated for Best Direc- Hattie McDaniel an Oscar, and written himself a bizarre new chapter
tor, and his film won only for Best Original Score, arose from a segre- in Academy Awards history. Had we witnessed a
Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing. Yet the gated table in psychic breakdown? A husband defending his wife?
mid-1970s would be remembered as the moment 1940 to collect her A jerk? A victim? A monster?”
when summer blockbusters and big action franchises Best Supporting Schulman’s response to the most recent Oscars
Actress award for
started to pump renewed energy and large profits into her role in Gone
dustup feels entirely of a piece with the foregoing
the corporate studio system. With the Wind. 500 pages of skirmishes, upsets, subterfuges, rivalries,
reputational machinations, and unforeseen personal
For anyone eager to think that the #OscarsSoWhite and historical dramas. The trajectory of the Academy,
turmoil just might have marked a decisive swerve in it seems, has always featured just such lurches, usu-
the Academy’s approach to diversity in Hollywood, ally with unintended consequences. First comes what
Schulman’s late chapter “Tokens”—a harsh but accu- looks like a bold breakthrough or egregious oversight
rate title—is sobering. His foray into the history of or violated taboo, followed by controversy and com-
the Academy’s recognition of nonwhite performers plaint and, naturally, intense competition. Last of all
requires a temporal montage, a departure from his comes the self-celebratory spin on the dance floor,
technique of focusing on episodic tales decade by a dizzying commemoration of the Academy’s ever-
decade. Drawing connections among the careers of changing sense of its own meaning, purpose, and
Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, and Halle Berry—the future—however out of sync that sense may be with
first Black actors to win, respectively, Best Support- what the film industry, and the society it aspires to
ing Actress, Best Actor, and Best Actress—Schulman entertain, has in store. On the morning after Oscar
emphasizes the dispiritingly long stretches of time night, ritual preparations for the next year’s dance
between each of these milestone wins: McDaniel for begin again.
EVERETT COLLECTION

Gone With the Wind in 1940, Poitier for Lilies of the

Field in 1964, then Berry for Monster’s Ball in 2002.
(During the nearly four decades that elapsed between Dana Stevens, Slate’s movie critic, is the author of Cam-
the last two victories, four other Black actors won era Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and
Oscars for supporting roles.) the Invention of the Twentieth Century.

79
Culture & Critics

Five years ago, when Sebastian Barry was

appointed laureate for Irish fiction, he deliv-
ered a lecture that began with what he confessed
was a truism: “All things pass away, our time on
Earth is brief, and yet we may feel assailed at
great length in this brief time, and yet we may
reach moments of great happiness.” The whip-
lash repetition of “and yet” is typical Barry, and
so is the stoic resolve behind the truism, a long,
bleak perspective that accedes to the inevitable,
with misery and joy cozying up to each other.
Reading his novels is like braving Irish weather:
You’re chilled and drenched and dazzled and
baked in buffeting succession.
His new novel, Old God’s Time, his ninth,
is a beautiful, tragic book about an “old police-
man with a buckled heart” who’s assailed at
great length and yet enjoys streaks of jubilance,
even after repeated assaults. I find the book
powerful enough to want to bang the drum
and say as loudly and clearly as I can that Barry
ought to be widely read and revered—he ought
to be a laureate for fiction everywhere.
Let’s start with the writing, an unclouded
lens that, yes, occasionally goes all purple. No
surprise to hear an Irish lilt and discover an
unabashed delight in metaphor—paragraphs
without a simile or three are a rarity. Barry
is a poet and playwright as well as a novelist,
and lyricism and drama jostle in nearly all his
sentences, many of which are stuffed to burst-
ing. Prose seems the wrong word for what he
does; paragraphs unspool like spells, dreamy
incantations, words repeated, cadence sum-
moned. A sample plucked more or less at
random from his most resolutely rural novel,
Annie Dunne (2002): “Oh, what a mix of
BO OKS
things the world is, what a flood of cream,
turning and turning in the butter churn of
things, but that never comes to butter.” A
skeptic might dismiss this as a nostalgic ditty
with a clunky ending, but as the eponymous
Annie knows, “there is a grace in butter, how
can I explain it—it is the color we all wor-
ship, a simple, yellow gold.” Barry churns
and churns, and gold comes out. And so
does pitch black. This, from the new novel:
“Tar melting in tar barrels, roadmenders. The
Love Annihilated lovely acrid stink of it.”
Each of his novels stands on its own, but
The Irish writer Sebastian Barry’s great subject many of the characters belong to two inter-
connected Irish families, the Dunnes and the
McNultys, based on the two branches of his
By Adam Begley own clan. Ordinary, inconsequential folk in
sometimes extraordinary, history-defining

80 ILLUSTRATION BY KARLOTTA FREIER

circumstances—soldiers, spinsters, policemen, O L D G O D’ S T I M E , set in the 1990s in Dalkey, a seaside
rogues, fugitives, many of them willing or unwilling suburb south of Dublin, cranks into motion with a
participants in the Irish diaspora—emerge from what comically hackneyed premise: a retired detective visited
Barry calls “the fog of family.” (More Irish weather!) by former colleagues who drag him into a cold case he
They themselves are substantial, flesh and blood, dreads revisiting. Tom Kettle has had nine months of
but drifts of fog cling to them, the secrets and lies, mostly sitting in his favorite wicker chair, gazing out
the hopelessly mixed motives and divided loyalties his window across Dalkey Sound to “stolid” Dalkey
of kinfolk everywhere. The family connections add Island. The sudden intrusion has “unmoored” him—an
a satisfying resonance. Knowing that Annie Dunne “act of terror,” he calls it. A storm is rising outside his
is the sister of Willie Dunne, whose hellish sojourn modest flat; it all seems a bit overwrought, the air of
in First World War trenches is the subject of A Long menace and mystery and guilt thickly laid on. One of
Long Way (2005), seems to give both books greater the younger detectives brandishes a “rumpled sheaf” of
heft. Annie cherishes the sentimental notion that police reports, and Tom seems to know without looking
Willie fought to protect the world of her childhood, that it concerns historic allegations of child abuse lev-
“so that everything could continue as before,” a faith eled at the clergy. His visceral response: “Ah no, Jesus,
painfully stripped from Willie in the mud and gore no, lads, not the fecking priests, no.”
of Flanders. We learn in due course that Tom, who never knew
Family is rooted in history and place. The epi- his parents, was raised in an orphanage run by the
center of Barry’s world, his home turf and time, is the Christian Brothers in Connemara. (The institution
early and mid-20th century in Dublin and County is unnamed, but we can assume it’s the infamous
Wicklow, hilly countryside about 40 miles south of St. Joseph’s Industrial School, in Letterfrack, where
the capital yet somehow excitingly remote. Many of
Prose seems abuse was rampant and extreme.) And we learn that
his characters roam the globe; some turn up in war the wrong Tom’s late wife, June, was also an orphan, raised by
zones. The painful birth of an independent Ireland word for what nuns, and repeatedly raped, from the age of 6, by a
and its ugly and confused sectarian struggles always Barry does; priest. So, yes, the fecking priests.
loom in the background of whatever else happens. An We learn that Tom, too, was beaten and “used” by
exception, the magnificent Days Without End (2017),
paragraphs one of the Christian Brothers, information gleaned
is set in mid-19th-century America and, weirdly, unspool like from hints and asides (“He was the guardian of his
miraculously, resembles nothing so much as a mash- spells, dreamy own silences, had been all his life”). We hear of June’s
up of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Annie incantations, trauma from June herself. “Tom, will you forsake me
Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” if I tell you?” she asks on their honeymoon. “I’d better
Its sequel, A Thousand Moons (2020), is set in Ten-
words repeated, say it now.” The words come out in “her smallest voice.”
nessee in the aftermath of the Civil War and narrated cadences The passage is hard to read, not because it’s graphic,
by Winona, an orphaned Lakota woman who was summoned. which it is, but because Tom feels her words so keenly.
adopted and raised by the narrator of Days Without “Now, Tom, now Tom—you love me now, if you can,”
End, Thomas McNulty, and his “beau,” John Cole. she says, and he does.
New World horrors have proved as fertile to Barry as She also says, “It’s a wonder we’re alive at all, us
Old World horrors. He describes Indian War mas- two.” They raise a couple of children, Winnie and
sacres and the Easter Rising of 1916 with equally Joe. The family, but most especially his love for June
clinical specificity, and yet there’s something beyond and hers for him, is the source of “immeasurable
history, beyond war and politics, beyond America’s happiness.” And then, when the children have barely
manifest destiny and Irish independence that animates reached adulthood, it’s all taken away, item by item.
his novels. This is as close as Tom comes to self-pity:
To pinpoint that something is to risk sounding
mawkish. Annie Dunne, a “humpbacked woman” Things happened to people, and some people were
whose only brush with romance consists of a foolish required to lift great weights that crushed you if you
fantasy, finds other uses for her load of thwarted pas- faltered just for a moment. It was his job not to falter.
sion. A summer spent looking after her young, city- But every day he faltered. Every day he was crushed,
bred grandniece and grandnephew on the tiny subsis- and rose again the following morn like a cartoon figure.
tence farm in Wicklow where she lives teaches her to
see “eternal pleasure and peace in the facts of human Tom has the Road Runner in mind, and Bugs Bunny,
love.” The deepest of the “moiling mysteries of the but the epigraph for Old God’s Time is from the Book
human heart,” human love is Barry’s great subject— of Job: “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee?”
love enjoyed, love tested, love betrayed, love annihi- God, speaking from the whirlwind, contrasting his
lated by human depravity and the suffering it inflicts. omnipotence with Job’s impotence.

APRIL 2023 81
Culture & Critics BO OKS

T h e n a r r at i v e t e c h n i q u e (though Barry is on the page—and remind us that no one, not even

expert enough to make it seem not a technique but poor Tom, has a monopoly on suffering: “There were
an organic element of the story) is close third per- worse things and worst things.” June, who “survived
son: Tom isn’t the narrator, but we’re nonetheless in everything except survival,” dies a death that lies on
his head, often an uncomfortable place to be. Preter- the absolute grievous end of that spectrum.
naturally observant—he’s a detective, after all—he A widower for 20 years, retired from police work for
has moments of startling lucidity, accompanied by a nine months, and now suddenly asked to consult on
heightened awareness of the tragic arc of his existence. a case that dredges up an obliterating load of grief and
Here he’s remembering the rhythm of his day when guilt, Tom veers into fantasy, a dreamworld so lifelike
he was still young, his family still intact, that the reader will only with difficulty separate Tom’s
imaginings from what transpires in reality. The first
the two babies in their beds and June in their own … time this happens, he’s having a drink with his landlord,
Tom would be thinking of the early rise in the morn- Mr. Tomelty, and his wife—or so he thinks. He notices
ing to get out to the bus, and the long trek into town, that in the corner of the room “stood a unicorn, with a
head nodding from the broken sleep, and the passing silver horn, or possibly white gold, raising its delicate
from his character as father and husband into his right hoof, and innocently staring out through quiet
character as policeman and colleague, a curious tran- eyes. Mr. Tomelty and his missis made no reference to
sition that in the evening would be reversed, in the it. It was just there, verifiably.” But we later discover that
eternal see-saw of his life, of everyone’s life. The only Mr. Tomelty’s wife died years ago. Subsequent appear-
thing being missed by him in those moments being ances of the mythical beast signal the recurrence of
the absolute luck of his life, the unrepeatable nature fantasy or a dream sequence: “Mrs. Tomelty’s unicorn
of it, and the terminus to that happiness that was was standing on the little beach. Pay it no heed.”
being hidden from him in the unconsidered future. Tom is a victim, a modern-day Job, but he’s also
the perpetrator of a crime committed two decades
At times this hyperclarity is almost too much to earlier. His fellow detectives might just let him off
bear, as when he describes the devastation caused on OLD GOD’S TIME
the hook, but Barry won’t. He once wrote, in an essay
one Dublin street by the car bombings of May 1974, about his family, “I am honour-bound to judge them
a particularly vicious episode in the long, sad history Sebastian Barry in the round,” and he seems to feel the same about his
of the Troubles. (“Political bombs with personal out- characters. The doomy first chapters of Old God’s Time
comes” is Tom’s bitter understatement.) A sentence that are crammed with clues pointing to Tom’s stricken
in its entirety runs to 256 words takes us from the scene conscience. Looking in the mirror, he sees a criminal:
as Tom imagines it in the seconds before the explosion VIKING “He had no cheekbones, it was suddenly clear, and
to what he actually witnesses as he arrives, galloping in his face just seemed like a flat, failed loaf with dirty
his heavy boots from the nearby police headquarters: knife-holes in it. It looked to him like he had had his
head shaved in a sort of unconscious gesture of atone-
And then the blast, bursting everything known and ment.” The novel’s ending is a dramatic exploration
usual to smithereens, every window in the street of the possibility of atonement. One cannot say for
blown in in a great cascade, and the bomb debris sure whether his putative redemption is “verifiably”
and the looser items of the street, and the window real or fantastical, but there can be no doubt about
glass, all turned into weaponry now, against the soft how Tom feels. The final pages are ravishing.
bodies of the citizens, and rending them, and tearing In A Long Long Way, Willie Dunne listens to a
them, and undoing them, till Tom saw more clearly battlefield sermon and has a minor epiphany: “He
what he had thought were the cuts of meat, black wondered suddenly and definitely for the first time
smoke everywhere and the cuts of meat, some of them in his life what words might be. Sounds and sense
neatly squared, smoking, blackened, but it was sec- certainly, but something else also, a kind of natural
tions of those just recently living souls, oh some still music that explained a man’s heart or heartlessness,
living, a head and a torso with the mouth moving, words as tempered as steel, as soft as air.” The ending
the eyes open in bloodied faces, and some still whole, of Old God’s Time explains Tom Kettle’s heart as truly
in their blast-torn coats, here and there kneeling to and well as can be.
the imploring faces, saying words that Tom could not
hear, prayers maybe, or whispering.

This is shocking but not gratuitous. The gruesome Adam Begley is the author of three biographies, Updike,
details foreshadow June’s equally shocking and violent The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera, and
death—not witnessed and, mercifully, not imagined Houdini: The Elusive American.

82 APRIL 2023
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Culture & Critics

BO OKS
Growing up as the adopted Korean daugh-
ter of white parents in a predominantly
white community, I discovered early on that
my presence was often a surprise, a question
to which others expected answers. I soon
learned how to respond to the curiosity of
teachers at school, strangers at Sears, friends

COURTESY OF MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL; PHILLIP SPEARS / GETTY

who had finally worked up the nerve to
ask Who are your real parents? Why did they
give you up? Are you going to try to find them
someday? I told them the same story my
adoptive parents had told me: My birth par-
ents were unable to take care of a fragile,
premature baby. They believed that another
“Two of Every Race” family would provide me with a better life.
And so I was adopted and became my par-
ents’ beloved only child—a “miracle,” they
A family’s impossible quest to erase prejudice called it, evidence of God’s goodness. When
through transracial adoption your family is formed by divine will, who
are you to question it? To wonder about the
family you never knew?
By Nicole Chung Like Matthew Pratt Guterl, I know
what it is to be raised in the belief that

84 PHO TO-ILLUSTRATION BY TREVOR DAVIS

your family represents something far greater than itself. makeup of their family was partly the point—how
Whereas my parents saw our adoptive family as proof else could they lead by example? Bob’s sermonizing
of God’s handiwork, Bob and Sheryl Guterl saw theirs at the dining-room table introduced the children
as a new kind of “ark for the age of the nuclear bomb, to their parents’ mission and helped indoctrinate
of race riots, of war,” one that could change the world them early on: “We understand that our multira-
by example: They would raise a family of white bio- cial composition is a critique of the present, our
logical children and adopted children of color—“two color-blind consanguinity an omen of the future.”
of every race”—and all would live in harmony behind The children were expected to acknowledge and cel-
a white-picket fence. In Skinfolk, Guterl, a professor of ebrate one another’s differences, and also, somehow,
Africana studies and American studies at Brown Uni- to transcend them.
versity, assigns himself the task of reckoning with the
experiment his white parents confidently embarked on. T h e re a l i t y, of course, is that transracial adoption
He describes them as serious Catholics, loving and has no intrinsic power to heal racial prejudice, and
“big hearted,” convinced of their own good intentions: Guterl and his siblings were never going to neutral-
Bob, a respected New Jersey judge, was “the wild-eyed ize or escape its effects, much less undo the harms of
dreamer”; Sheryl, a teacher turned homemaker, was white supremacy. Young Matthew discovers firsthand
“the practical one.” Reading the brief autobiographies that the world won’t be changed by families like theirs:
his parents submitted to Welcome House, the first He is cornered and terrorized by a group of white kids
international and interracial adoption agency in the because he has a Black brother; he later notices that
United States, Guterl notes that they shared a desire their parents apologize to him, not to Bear. In middle
for a large family, concerns about population growth, school, he is so distressed at being called “N—— Lips”
and the belief that “recycling and adoption are methods (again, he is targeted because he has Black siblings)
of global repair.” that he takes the shocking step of getting cosmetic
As their firstborn son, he grew up alongside his surgery on his lips. By the time he is in college, he
brother Bug (Guterl refers to some of his siblings by knows that he can rebel, play pranks, even get caught
name, others by childhood nickname), who came from speeding, and not worry that the hammer will fall
South Korea as a baby in 1972, two years after Mat- on him the way it might on Bear or Eddie—not that
thew’s birth; Mark, his only biological sibling, born his parents give the boys “the talk,” precisely: “Racial
in 1973; Bear, the son of a Vietnamese mother and a disparities in policing … are regular subjects of con-
Black American-GI father, adopted as a 5-year-old in versation at the breakfast and dinner table. Bob feels,
1975; Anna, a biracial Korean girl, who arrived from though, that there should be no formal, separate syl-
Seoul in 1977 at the age of 13; and Eddie, a Black labus” for his Black sons.
child adopted from the South Bronx in 1983, at the Throughout the book, the sibling we learn the
age of 6. Guterl details the ways in which the siblings most about, and the one Guterl seems closest to, is
were known, observed, and sometimes fetishized within Bear: near enough in age to be his “twin.” Bear comes
and beyond their rural New Jersey town. “The whole to the Guterls with a small bag of belongings and
enterprise, in accordance with Bob’s wishes, is meant a photograph of the family he was separated from
to be seen,” he writes: after leaving Vietnam—his older half brother’s arm
on his shoulder, his mother and half sister to their
We are seen, and we see things … I begin to note a left—an image that leads Guterl to reflect on “the
troubling public surveillance of our whole ensemble, great sorrow that he has been ripped from that set of
our various skin tones on display. I watch as cars drive relations with such tremendous and severing force.”
by, and see how quickly the heads turn to see the wide By high school, Bear is a popular football player and
world of rainbow at play in our picket-fenced front solid student—unlike Guterl, who is aware that he
yard. A game of catch. A throw of the football. Choos- lacks his brother’s star power yet also has an unearned
ing up teams for Wiffle ball. With Blackness added, advantage in his whiteness. Bear may be loved and
our performed comity means something more. widely admired in their small town, but neither his
own successes nor his adoptive family can exempt him
Reading this passage made me think of my own from the racism of their fellow residents. Bear “is a
upbringing in white spaces, constantly watched and Black,” one of Guterl’s white friends says to him dur-
watchful. My parents believed my race was irrelevant, ing senior year—and then comes Eddie’s turn: “But
insisting that people cared only about who I was your younger brother is a n——.” Guterl freezes at
“on the inside”; I didn’t tell them about the slurs
and barbs I heard throughout my childhood. For Opposite page clockwise from top left: Sheryl Guterl,
the Guterls, however, calling attention to the racial Bob Guterl, Bear, Matthew, Anna, and Mark

APRIL 2023 85
Culture & Critics

this “detour into American racism,” unexpected but I tell my adoptive parents that the story they had
not unfamiliar to him. steadfastly believed, the story they had given me, was
The family meets crises that further highlight likely untrue and no longer enough? Who was I if not
their disparities and test their bonds. An adolescent their contented, loyal daughter, their gift from God? I
Eddie begins to “act out” in escalating ways, and Bug might never have searched had I not gotten pregnant
nurses growing anger toward Bob and Sheryl. One with my first child, someone who I imagined would
night, violence erupts between Eddie and Bug, and is one day have her own questions about our missing
“handled” by Bob alone—he calls Eddie’s therapist, history: If I could not look for answers only for myself,
who arranges for his admission to a nearby psychi- perhaps I could search for the two of us. Once I had
atric institution. There, Eddie is observed, tested, begun, I found still more company in a long-lost bio-
medicated: “He fights it, of course, but the plot has logical sister who had believed me dead, and craved
grabbed hold of him,” Guterl writes. “And never, the truth even more than I did.
ever lets him go.” Eddie is in the pipeline, and moves Guterl’s search, perhaps undertaken on behalf of
through one disciplinary institution after another— his siblings, does not shy away from challenging their
“reform schools give way to jails and then prisons”— parents’ mission. That entails examining not just the
while Bug’s alienation from the family intensifies. failure of their experiment, but also the limits of their
Many years later, Bear is the one who assumes father’s ability to grasp why and how the “endeavor
primary support of Eddie, even while himself recov- begins to unravel.” When Bob blames Bug’s estrange-
ering from a violent assault by two white racists. By ment from the family on the adoption agency, the
then, Bob is dead, having spent years consumed by Korean orphanage, everything and everyone beyond
“the need for repair and reconnection,” confused and the white-picket fence—“Not us. Not this place.
crushed by Bug’s resistance to being reincorporated Not what has happened at our home”—Guterl sug-
into the family. Guterl writes that his father regretted gests that this picture is incomplete: For Bug, being
how his choices affected Eddie, and never stopped part of the Guterl clan, and especially accepting
questioning what might have been had he never called Bob’s overpowering vision of what the family repre-
the therapist and enlisted “the world—as uneven, as SKINFOLK sented, seemed to require a painful and, in the end,
broken, as treacherous as it is—in the disciplining of impossible denial of self. The historian of the family,
M a t t h e w P ra t t
his son.” Yet though racked by “considerable, late-in- Guterl
Guterl wants to convey his perspective on the tangled
life anguish,” Bob remained indefatigable in another truth of what has happened to him and the people
sense, a firm believer in the power of their family until he loves, aware from the start that his search—and
the end. Guterl describes his farewell letter to them what he uncovers—may cause him and others pain.
all as a “paean to the foundational, even generic ideas LIVERIGHT Though at times I felt held at a bit of a distance—
of family, togetherness, and solidarity, in which he Guterl is a careful writer and has clearly tried to respect
encourages forgiveness and begs us to stay together.” his relatives’ wishes regarding their privacy—he rarely
tries to protect or exonerate himself. In a late chapter,
I wa s i n t e r e s t e d in reading Skinfolk in part he, his brothers Bear and Mark, and their sister, Anna,
because I believe that the stories of those who have lost reunite in 2002, a year after their father’s death. They
or gained siblings through adoption have much to tell spend the day together, and return to the house filled
us about families—their inner workings as well as the with a sense of camaraderie; as Guterl notes, “some
social expectations and tensions that shape them. As of the old magic is back.” But by now, we understand
a child, Guterl had no more ability than his adopted that this family was never magic.
siblings to determine the structure of their family; his
life, too, was remade and ruled by Bob and Sheryl’s Later that night, the usual racial banter has returned,
experiment. When I began reading his memoir, I did one of the comfortable grooves from our past. Anna
not think that I would find in him, the white son of says something in her sometimes-imperfect English—
white parents he has always known, a fellow seeker. a habit when she is speaking fast, or emotional, and
But his urgent need to probe choices that he had the sort of thing we all made sport of before. I jok-
grown up being told to believe were uncomplicated ingly correct her, the kind of move I made—we all
felt unexpectedly familiar. made—for years without a thought. And that night,
Questioning the family mythology, that bed- when we are all so saturated with feeling and drink,
rock you share with those you are closest to, is no the familiar joke lands all wrong. Anna leans forward,
easy task. For years I had denied my wish to know finger pointing—at me and also at what I signify, at
more about my birth parents and my own past, and the vast edifice behind me.
when I finally admitted it, the depth of my need and
curiosity staggered me. So did the fear: How could “That is racist, and I can’t take it anymore.”

86 APRIL 2023
 BO OKS

The Guterl parents’ view of adoption as an “engine

of ‘reform,’” strong enough to override racism, set up an
Nomenclature
assignment their children couldn’t possibly fulfill. For all By Clint Smith
that Guterl has learned by the time his sister confronts After Safia Elhillo
him, and for all that he has come to question about how
they were raised, he, too, still needs to be disabused of Your mother’s mother came from Igboland
some assumptions. His thoughtless jibe and her pent- though she did not teach your mother her language.
up hurt testify to the complexities and contradictions We gave you your name in a language we don’t understand
of the endeavor their parents enlisted them in. And because gravity is still there
he finds the encounter especially distressing because even when we cannot see it in our hands.
of that tension: His deep love for his sister—for each
of his siblings—is what sometimes prevents him from I ask your mother’s mother to teach me
seeing the chasm between their experiences. “As chil- some of the words in hopes of tracing
dren in a family meant to undo racism, we were asked the shadow of someone else’s tongue.
to learn—and to unlearn—race,” he writes. “To see
one another as siblings—to see beyond our skin—but The same word in Igbo, she tells me, may have four different
also, dissonantly, to see one another as color-coded … meanings depending on how your mouth bends around
Those parallel lessons are, in the end, impossible to each syllable. In writing, you cannot observe the difference.
suture together.”
The scene made me think of my own family, and The Igbo word n’anya means “sight”
one night in particular, when my father and I were The Igbo word n’anya means “love”
watching the 2015 Women’s World Cup. My mother
joined us and asked if the athletes on-screen were Your grandmother said,
Korean or Japanese, and my father replied: “Does it I cannot remember the sight of my village
matter? Who can tell the difference?” I had been their or
child for 30-odd years. I was accustomed to biting my Your grandmother said,
tongue for the sake of family cohesion. I don’t know I cannot remember the love of my village
why I couldn’t do it that day, but I still remember the
trembling anger and anxiety I felt as I called someone I Your grandmother’s heart is forgetting
loved, who loved me, to account. My father, shocked, or
eventually apologized, but not before he told me, “It’s Your grandmother’s heart is broken
just hard for me to see you as Asian.”
Transracial adoption will never empower adoptees Your grandmother said,
of color or our white family members to sidestep the We escaped the war and hid from every person in sight
realities of privilege, bias, and racism; as Skinfolk or
shows, we will meet and experience these things in Your grandmother said,
the most intimate of ways, within the microcosm We escaped the war and hid from every person in love
of our own family. Reading Anna’s challenge to her
brother, one that may have been decades in the mak- Your grandmother was running from danger
ing, I knew where all my natural sympathy as an or
adoptee lay. My response to Guterl’s description of Your grandmother was running from vulnerability
his agonizing confusion and self-doubt, which kept
him awake for hours that night, took me by surprise. Your grandmother said,
It made me catch my breath and wish that I could My greatest joy is the sight of my grandchild
see or speak to my adoptive parents, both of whom or
are now gone, and simply feel close to them again. I Your grandmother said,
know what it is to confront a painful and unwanted My greatest joy is the love of my grandchild
distance between you and those you love; to want to
believe, if only for a moment, that your will alone Your grandmother wants you present
can bridge it. or
Your grandmother wants you home

Nicole Chung is a contributing writer at The Atlantic

and the author of the new book A Living Remedy and Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the
All You Can Ever Know (2018). author of the new poetry collection Above Ground.

87
FICTION During Donnie’s first
week in the mixed unit
(drugs and crazy), a girl
Second Life
threw a TV set out the
By Mona window because she
Simpson
thought it was criticizing
her. Donnie walked to the
window to look. “Prob-
ably was,” he mumbled.
He’d grown up with a
mother who came alive
when insulted. The guy
sleeping across the room,
who’d dealt heroin with his
own now-jailed dad, was
woken up by the noise and
asked, “Are we dead yet?”
88 APRIL 2023
ILLUSTRATIONS BY KATHERINE LAM 89
 “No. You’re just sleeping,” Donnie told wondered if he was their full brother. face-to-face revelations and apologies, not
him, and the boy’s eyes closed again; his Maybe somewhere in the world he had conversations exactly, because they were
thin arm, with a tattoo of a serpent, hung a junkie dad. Would’ve explained a lot. so practiced. You were talking with the
over the side of the bed. In the southwest Everyone in high school had found out people who meant the most to you, who’d
corner of the unit, a girl had turned into what happened to his mother. He’d never now seen into the box of your failures.
a horse. She moved on all fours, neighing. told, but they knew. Girls wanted to talk Your betrayals, your lies, your greed, your
Rearing. You had to walk around her. about it, their voices pitying, hands eager. cheating—they could pick them out one
Donnie had been terrified when his For the first time, he had the impulse to by one to examine.
sister and brother had left him at the hos- punch a person. He never touched those Julie, his mom’s friend from nursing
pital, off in a remote wing of the place girls who wanted to soothe him. He school, owed him nothing, but she still
where their mom had been for years now. turned remote because he would have came for the week. When their mother
The whole first month, the staff wouldn’t liked to hurt them. had gone into the hospital, Walter was
let him visit her. He didn’t want her see- The unit had incredibly glossy floors. already at Berkeley, and Julie took in
ing him like this anyway. He wondered if Public schools used these same tiles, but Donnie and Lina. Julie had laughed with
she knew he was here, or if she still pic- they gave no shine. Donnie asked one of Donnie, told him her daily news, learned
tured him in the town on the hill, fin- the hospital janitors how he kept it up. to cook what he liked. They’d watched
ishing up his sophomore year of college. A block of wood covered with a towel at movies together, eating Jiffy Pop and
Instead, they were together in this run- the end of a pole was all. They let Donnie almond brittle, most nights of the week.
down, not-built-right hospital compound keep one in his room to polish his hall. But then he’d stopped and left her alone
in Norwalk, California, in 1981—the bot- He liked the back-and-forth motion. He to worry while he was out destroying
tom of the world. did the homework here, in a way he hadn’t himself. Not that it had felt that way at
All day, he was herded into groups with in college. the time.
the other drug people, where they told Caseworkers shuffled the group into a He’d prepared a long letter to read to
their stories of how they’d become bad. van bound for a gym, off grounds. After Julie, but she didn’t let him get through it.
They allowed Sylvie, his dog, to accom- the third Thursday, he asked the trainer—a She wanted to take the blame from him,
pany him. Others talked; Donnie kept pert, tiny, muscular mother of three—if to make it all her fault.
quiet. It made sense that he’d ended up she could write down a program for him His brother was a cipher, as always.
here. He’d been aiming at something for a to do by himself. Walter went for a walk with Donnie on
long time—he just hadn’t understood that “Do you ever run? That’s how I get my the grounds, and when they sat down, he
this place was the target. He liked being on cardio. You’re outside; you see things.” said, “You know how when we were grow-
the same grounds as his mom. Even if she He’d hated going around the track in ing up, I was considered, like, at least in
didn’t know he was here. Some moments, school, hated the gym clothes. But now he the family, smart?” Walter said. “When I
remembering that she was less than a mile built the habit every morning and, by the got to college, I found other people way
away, he felt safe. fourth week, felt the return loop of reward. better at school than me. Even Lina. She
The police had found him on the Sylvie began to trot along. Running was likes all that. I’m good at finding things
beach, south of LAX, with a cluster of the first habit he learned in rehab that he that have fallen apart and making some-
homeless people and Sylvie. Months knew he could maintain. thing out of the pieces. I fix up old build-
earlier, he’d followed some kids to the By then he had seen his mom and told ings so they can be used again. Maybe
beach. They taught him to surf. It felt like her that he lived here now too, within the when you’re done with all this, you can
being clobbered in a fight, and then he same chain-link fence. He called it the come work with me.”
washed up onshore, somehow still whole. Humble Place. He told her only what he Later, when Donnie talked to Lina, she
The rest of the day, his body felt looser. knew she could take. He told her how kept trying to jump down into the well of
They made fires at night and, around those Sylvie had saved him. His mother pat- the past with him. She saw them as twins.
circles, a joint traveled hand to hand. Don- ted the dog. Animals had always gone to And she was this goody-goody! He’d never
nie passed it along. Until he didn’t. From her instinctively. been like that.
one toke to being high all the time took
only a heartbeat. H e a n d t h e r e s t of the group pre- A t h i s n e x t m e e t i n g with Trish, his
That was one of the ways to know that pared for family week. Donnie had never caseworker, she wanted to help figure out
he was an addict, they told him in the been part of the drama department in what jobs he should look for; she had a
unit. Most people came from families of high school, but remembering how his list of shops that hired kids from the unit.
addicts, but his had insanity, not addic- classmates had cycled through adrenaline But Donnie hoped to work here, on the
tion. His mother had sipped crème de to exhaustion, he thought this must be hospital grounds.
menthe from a tiny glass once in a blue like what went into the annual Shake- “Because you want to see your mom?”
moon. But he was marked. Lina and speare play, only real, the long rehearsals “Yes. Other things too. I want to be
Walter, his sister and brother, had always culminating not in a performance but in near her kind of people.”

90 APRIL 2023
 Trish seemed to take this as an accept- Horsegirl balanced on two feet, look- said, “See?” and lifted his arm to point out
able answer. A calm seeped into him. ing the way dogs do when they’re made a bird. Until then, Donnie hadn’t noticed
After putting in some calls, Trish found to stand. Chagrined. To go from being a birds, but he now grew attentive to their
only one opening, in geriatrics. The head beautiful horse to a mental patient pulled differences. Eventually he found a book in
nurse there would take him but not up by your parents: talk about a flat world. the hospital library. He pointed out birds
the dog. “We’ve got more than enough He didn’t mind the new place. He to her too. At dusk, he identified owls call-
incontinence,” she said. called this one Humble House, and he ing from a stand of redwoods.
“Sylvie’s house-trained,” Donnie abided by the rules. He ran with Syl- When Donnie or his mom offered a
argued, but the nurse wouldn’t budge. vie, five, sometimes six miles a day. He comment, the other would nod or make
Donnie decided to hike over to the drove his mother’s old car to the hospi- a noise. Their conversations didn’t catch,
adult wards to talk to Shirley, the nurse his tal for work, where he was assigned not the way Lina needed hers to lock and turn
mom liked best. Sylvie folded herself into just to diapers but to help care for a very together. The hour felt like more than an
a perfect triangle at his feet as he spoke. hour. Clouds stretched thinner. They
“She’s my luck,” he said. Shirley convinced washed their hands together in the shed
geriatrics to give them a try. when they finished. He took his mother’s
When he started, the head nurse put hands under the faucet of cold mineral
him on diaper detail. “New person always water and scrubbed her fingernails with a
takes it.” Her profile was like the cut side brush. He always made her a mug of tea
of a key. before he left. He set her up with it on a
Donnie had once told a girl who’d table next to her, in front of the TV.
asked about his mom that it wasn’t all When summer’s end neared, Trish
poetry. The girl had looked at him with decided it was time for Donnie to move
pity and romance. But he knew he could They made fires again, closer to the college. “Sober houses
handle this, with Sylvie looking up at him. at night and, are expensive,” she explained. “You’ll be
He taught Sylvie to sit near the person’s starting school in a semester or two.” She
head. Often a hand would reach down to
around those rested her hands on the mound of her
touch her. circles, a joint now-pregnant belly.
traveled hand to Walter came to help him find a room.
H e w r ot e a letter to the only professor hand. Donnie The 11th place they saw was in a garage,
he’d actually talked to in college. He said overlooking a garden. Donnie liked the
that he hoped to return in a semester, or
passed it along. woman renting it out, an assistant profes-
maybe a year. He was moving to sober Until he didn’t. sor named Caroline. She was young, and
living. It had taken Trish a while to locate her tanned legs sparkled with blond flecks
a place that would allow Sylvie. The house of hair. Her house was orderly and pretty.
she’d found was in the direction of the col- Later, Donnie left his boxes on the
lege. Donnie would have more freedom, swept floor of the new place and went
but with that came responsibility. He was out for a long run. Sylvie stopped after
strong enough to manage, she said. And a few blocks in the August heat, and she
he could always pop in to see her. showed no sign of wishing to resume. So
“You’re going to be dazzled by choices. after he showered, he took her for a walk.
You’ll need your supports. Tell me your Contentment fell over him in the soft air,
dailies.” his body loose, tugged by the gentle, rov-
“I run.” old woman, Ida. He drove out again on ing tension of the leash.
“What else? You’ll find a meeting there. Sundays, to visit his mom. She was used The geri unit celebrated Ida’s 91st
Do you meditate or anything? You know to Sundays. birthday with a cake—but her daughter,
I pray.” whom Donnie had never seen, once again
“I read. I’ve been reading more.” O v e r t h e s u m m e r , Donnie and his didn’t show. He took pictures, the staff
“You’ll need strong dailies to structure mom worked next to each other in the helped Ida blow out candles, and then he
your recovery. Oh, and your house will hospital garden for an hour after his geri walked her to the library, where she could
have its own rules, but one thing we rec- shift. He weeded and turned the hard soil talk to her daughter on the telephone. The
ommend is, and this comes from a lot of with a hoe. He bought fertilizer from a key-faced nurse had given him the code to
experience: For the first year, try to stay nursery, and they scattered the pellets as dial long-distance.
away from any romantic involvement.” if they were feeding ducks. They had done Donnie wandered over to the metal
Donnie laughed. “No problem there.” that together when he was small. They shelves of periodicals to give Ida privacy,
His last day in the unit, he saw talked little. One afternoon, his mother but he could still hear. Ida was keeping

91
the conversation going. She asked ques- through it all. It could have been anywhere, at her hands, not answering. “I don’t have
tions. The answers seemed short. Finally, but it was here that his second life began. to,” he said.
he heard “I love you. I hope so,” and then “I want you to,” she said slowly. “I wish
the phone being put down. W h e n h e ta l k e d to Caroline about I had gone for a higher degree.”
He asked her if she wanted to walk recovery, she asked if he missed drugs. “You have a degree. You’re a nurse,
before going back. She said no, she was He didn’t think so. “I miss the places they Mom. You may not have become what
tired. “She does her best; she tries,” Ida brought me. I don’t have as many revela- you wanted, but what you are gave me
said. “You see, I wasn’t a good mother.” tions.” She also asked about his return to my life.”
school. He had no idea what to major in. When fall classes started, he saw his
F o r a l o n g t i m e , Donnie hadn’t He thought about it while running and mother less often. He was able to drive to
talked about his mother at meetings. She afterward in the shower, the hot water the hospital only on Tuesdays and Sun-
was a box with a lid. But now he began voluptuous on his back. In the mixed unit, days to wash her hair. He told her about
to. The way he wanted to remember her, he’d learned to enjoy restoring order. The his courses. Sometimes he brought his
she was keen-eyed, fun. A very particu- rote work of it. He’d spent hours going books along and did homework, reading
lar person. She didn’t like yellow flowers. back and forth polishing that floor. He little bits aloud. Often he’d come across
“How can you dislike a flower?” some- something and say, “I have no idea what
one asked. But he understood; not much that means,” and they’d laugh. They could
of her time had ever been her own. Her spend an afternoon together without say-
likes and dislikes defined her. She could ing much. When he left, he felt nourished,
turn a small room beautiful. as if he’d eaten a light but healthy meal.
One night—it felt like ages ago—in Donnie started to pick her up after
a dirty sleeping bag by the thundering his classes on Wednesdays to bring her to
surf, Donnie had been alone in the dark, his place. He was planning a winter gar-
high on LSD. The stars sparkled closer. den bed for them to work in together in
He wasn’t afraid to be alone. Then he saw In the hospital Caroline’s backyard. He sat his mother in
a shape that was really there, not a person, unit, he’ d learned a lawn chair while he dug.
just denser air. The height of his mother. to enjoy restoring The second Wednesday she came, he
She had tried to kill herself; that was why and his mother picked up Caroline’s kids
she was in the hospital. The figure stood
order. The rote work from school. Lily and Jasper were sweet
there, the edge of its density waving a of it. He’ d spent with her, taking her hand as she got into
bit in the wind, like the edge of a cloth. hours going back the car. In the yard, they brought things
Nobody told him, but the waves and the and forth polishing over to her in her chair. Tea. A blanket. A
pressing stars and the figure had given him peeled orange. For a while, she slept as the
to understand. She’d wanted to die.
that floor. three of them moved around her. Donnie
Telling these people he barely knew prepared a good dinner, but she didn’t eat
about his mother changed him. His life much. Driving her back to the hospital, he
had broken—he’d broken it—and was asked whether she’d ever considered mov-
nearly healed. Now he could feel him- ing in with Julie.
self trying to grow. Donnie got stuck on “No,” she said.
the Steps. He made inventories without Donnie was surprised.
much trouble, but when he tried to offer “Never.” She shook her head.
amends, nobody wanted them. She could still be adamant. That was
Like Julie, his family refused to forgive a good sign.
him; they blamed themselves instead. knew that there was such a thing as beau- Caroline suggested that Donnie bring
Lina said they were fine when he told tifully clean. Sylvie was always by him. his mother to the house for the week that
her he needed to apologize. The only Donnie made dinner for Caroline and Shirley, his mother’s favorite nurse, would
person who accepted an apology was her kids, Lily and Jasper—soba noodles be on vacation. The kids would be away
his mother. She listened and murmured, every Monday, with a fried egg for each on a school wilderness trip then, and they
“Mm-hmm.” person (over-easy for Jasper) and snipped could clear out Lily’s room. If it went well,
As spring arrived, Donnie felt that he herbs from the garden. He didn’t want the maybe they could reconfigure so she could
would remember this time as the period summer to end. be there more.
when his character was formed. It could His mother was rocking in a chair Donnie spent days preparing. He car-
have happened anywhere, but it happened when he asked, “You going to be okay ried out six bags of trash, took down cur-
here. He was 20 years old, sober, and with me going back to college? I wouldn’t tains and rods, and unscrewed hooks from
employed. He saw his mother every week be able to see you every day.” She stared Lily’s closet. He remembered the phrase

92 APRIL 2023
93
danger to oneself or others, the way he’d hours. His mother didn’t seem happy to all get used to our routines,” she said. “And
stopped the first time he’d heard it. His see Julie, but Donnie excused himself then we end up loving them.”
mother had never wanted to hurt them. for a nap with Sylvie in his room above “I’m so glad you’re here,” Donnie said
She’d only been after herself. She probably the garage. That night, while they sat at to Shirley.
didn’t need these precautions anymore. dinner—Donnie had made risotto with
Still, he thought he would close her into squash from the garden—his mother got D o n n i e s a t with his mother in
Lily’s room at night, with a chair shoved up from the table and put her hand on Ward 301, as he had so many afternoons.
under the knob. Just so she couldn’t roam the wall. She said she had to go to bed. “You were a wonderful mother,” he said.
outside in the dark and trip. It was 5 o’clock. She slept until 10. Then “Thank you.”
Two weeks before Donnie’s mother she was up all night again, wanting to “I did come,” she murmured.
was due to arrive, the next-door neighbor “I love you.”
pounded a For Sale by Owner sign into “That’s all we have to worry about now.
his front lawn. It wasn’t a beautiful house. That’s all that’s important.”
It was right next door, though; a garden Those were the last things she said.
could span both yards. Then she was gone.
But he was getting ahead of himself. Something he hadn’t thought about for
She was just coming to visit. The morning years came back to him. His mother had
he was to pick her up, Donnie rose early. once parked at the end of a dusty road
He diced vegetables for soup and tried to lined with olive trees. This was somewhere
remember the last time he and his mother Telling these in the Central Valley, long ago. A friend
had lived together. He had been 13 when people he barely of hers was there, with a scarf triangled on
she’d stopped going to work. The sound of knew about his her head, tied under her chin. Could that
running water and the clatter of pots in the have been Julie? They’d parked behind a
kitchen that had awakened him most days mother changed flat, one-story building that turned out
of his life no longer did. When he got home him. His life had to be a sanatorium, and his mom was
from school, she would still be in bed. He broken—he’ d walking toward the entrance. Her friend,
would knock on her door and ask if she’d broken it— who was Julie, he was now sure, acted as
like some toast. He made cinnamon toast, if this were a joke, a stunt his mother had
cut in fours, the way she had before. and was nearly cooked up for a laugh. A nun behind the
At the hospital, the paperwork involved healed. desk gave his mom a clipboard, and she
in signing her out overnight was time- started to fill it out. They had her in the
consuming, and he found her sitting on wheelchair already, another nun stationed
the edge of her bed. Shirley had packed behind, ready to push her by those two
her suitcase. Finally, when they arrived at horns down a long, empty hall.
Caroline’s house, she seemed disoriented. Julie said to her, “Come on, let’s go find
She asked where the little girl was, though a place to get ice cream.” And then, at the
she knew Lily’s name. She didn’t want her very last minute, his mother stood up from
soup. She didn’t touch the avocado either, the chair and walked outside with them, a
once her favorite food. That night, she had walk outside. Donnie took her out on person rising from a grave. Exhilarating.
trouble sleeping. She stayed up fretting her their quiet street. She kept turning to go They drove around looking for ice cream
hands as Donnie sat with her. Shirley had the other way. and finally found a stand with strange fla-
given him her medicine for each day in a He wound up driving her back to the vors. Avocado. Date.
Ziploc bag, and she’d carefully written out hospital after her fourth night. She seemed Donnie understood that she’d come
the schedule. Caroline had sleeping pills, relieved to watch her clothes being put back to life for him.
but they didn’t think they could give one back in her cubby. She patted the top of
to her without asking a doctor. her bed. They went to the community
Julie was supposed to visit the next room, and she fell asleep in a chair. Mona Simpson is the author of seven
day. Then, Donnie thought, he could Donnie told Shirley about the visit novels. This story is adapted from her most
rest. He’d been awake for more than 28 when she returned from her vacation. “We recent, Commitment, out in March.

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94 APRIL 2023
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TO M INING

black music
writers tell willard jenkins THE PIVOT Academy
Reenvisioning Rule
their story editor anne allison
ONE PANDEMIC, ONE UNIVERSITY within America’s
Universities

Vanishing Sands The Autocratic Academy

Losing Beaches to Mining Reenvisioning Rule within
ORRIN H. PILKEY, America’s Universities
NORMA J. LONGO, TIMOTHY V. KAUFMAN-OSBORN
WILLIAM J. NEAL,
NELSON G. RANGEL-BUITRAGO, Raving
KEITH C. PILKEY and MCKENZIE WARK
HANNAH L. HAYES Practices

Ain’t But a Few of Us Juggling

Black Music Writers Tell Their Story STEWART LAWRENCE SINCLAIR
WILLARD JENKINS, editor Practices

Being Dead Otherwise Fly-Fishing

ANNE ALLISON CHRISTOPHER SCHABERG
New from

Practices
The Pivot
One Pandemic, One University Running
ROBERT J. BLIWISE LINDSEY A. FREEMAN
Practices

dukeupress.edu

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 guarantees its accuracy: They’re
reporting on angles and aspects
of you that you can’t even see.
No one comes up with their
own nickname. A boxer or a
Here’s what I wrestler might name himself,
glorify himself with some sobri-
think about quet, but that’s different. That’s
branding. Marvelous Marvin
Spare, by Hagler is not a nickname.
There are no bad nicknames
Prince Harry. or wrong nicknames, for the
simple reason that if they’re
bad or wrong, they don’t stick.
If it sticks, like it or not, it’s
your nickname. At school I was
Gobbet—because I was small,
I think it’s a very interesting or goblinlike? Or in some way
book, a feat of psychosensory like a discrete chunk of mat-

ODE
downloading by the master ter? Whatever, it stuck. My
ghostwriter J. R. Moehringer. son was 10 when he first called
But it should have been called me Mr. Personal Pants, for
Spike. “The Spare”—as in, not my habit of taking everything
the heir—is what members of personally. (Reeling with self-
the Royal Family have allegedly recognition, I protested in vain
dubbed the brooding prince. that writers have to take every-
“Spike,” however, is his nick- thing personally. It’s our job.)
name, or his most resonant one. There are ironic nicknames, to
It’s the one used by his more counter-nicknames—the
roistering and familiar chums. Viking-size rugby player known
Spike is who Harry really is. to his teammates as Tinker Bell.
Spike is his punk-rock Eto- But maybe there is something NICKNAMES
nian ginger essence. Spike, as darting and sprightly about
T. S. Eliot put it in “The Nam- him. Insane-seeming nick-
ing of Cats,” is his “ineffable names, deriving perhaps from
effable / Effanineffable / Deep some now-forgotten incident:
and inscrutable singular name.” Another kid at school was called
Your parents named you, Bleh Bleh. Not Blah Blah. Bleh
of course. But bless them, they Bleh. Having trouble remem- By James Parker
had no clue who you were. bering someone’s name? Give
They plucked your name out them a nickname. Sci-Fi Mike.
of the air, for their own rea- Second-Wave Dave. Eugene the
sons, their own sentimentali- Unitarian. As long as some fiber
ties, like they were getting a of their primary nature adheres
tattoo. And a newborn baby to it, you won’t forget it.
has no relationship with its Meanwhile, other people will
name. Next to the exploding, be doing this to you—fixing
barbaric baby-self, its name— you, capturing you. Naming
so thoughtfully chosen, so you. So don’t waste a life-
fondly given—is a nothing. time wondering who you are.
Your friends, however— Listen for your nickname.
and your enemies—they know
who you are. They’ll give you
your real name. Behind your James Parker is a staff writer at
back, sometimes, which almost The Atlantic.

96 APRIL 2023
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