Flash Fiction: "Letting Go"

     Didn’t call it depression at the time. Or anything else, really. As far as I knew, this was just my mental state, the natural result of anxiety, brooding, doubt. Days of inertia. I read. When I wrote, mostly it was in a journal. I tried writing short stories but tended to abandon them once I thought I could see I was building up, in unexceptional or derivative style, to nothing revelatory. I had to find my own approach to writing them and was coming up with nothing. I bingewatched anime, without caring too much about quality. (Well, concept aside, still couldn’t sit through Pokémon. I wasn’t suicidal.) The job search was a struggle: Applications for writing gigs went unanswered, as if I’d sent my resume, an admittedly skimpy document, into a void. Applications for other jobs, though they often required one to submit 75-, 100-question personality tests, would result in automated email replies informing me that they were considering other candidates, at least confirming that someone had actually reviewed the information I’d sent out. I, the college graduate with a loan to pay back, had to find a job and was coming up with nothing. I couldn’t play guitar because nothing had come from the search for my own approach but bad songs. Any pleasure I took was small and fleeting. I was worn out. Droopy. It’s in times like these that one is most likely to neglect oneself. The symbol that best represents this period of my life is a pair of sweats. 

Don’t get me wrong: I never wore them to the grocery store or the rare job interview. But I did wear them until the waist band broke. Then I kept wearing them. I accomplished this feat by balling up the waist in one hand whenever I had to walk around the apartment. Never got around to sewing them or tying them up with a rubber band. It’s as though I were boasting of having lost 200 pounds. My brother facetiously suggested using suspenders or a rope or an extension cord to hold them up. I took no hint and used one hand to hold up my pants until it came to seem normal. Besides, there were so many other things to dither about. 

One day around noon I emerged from the apartment in these sweats, relatively excited to get the mail. What surprises would await me today? At the bottom of the stairs, a father and son appeared. I’d never seen them before and would never see them again. The father gave me the mean mug: You? I continued around the corner, just minding my business, pants in one hand. Don’t worry, I didn’t need two hands to get the mail. I opened our box, placed the mail on top of the unit, closed the box, then grabbed the mail. Opening the gate and closing it again with both hands full was tricky but I managed that too. Took skills to wear these sweats. 

Up ahead, to my surprise, the father and son were standing around. Both looked up as I approached, smiling, muttering to themselves. I suddenly became nervous. Not sure exactly what was going on, I nodded as I passed by. They didn’t nod back. In the middle of the staircase, I glanced over my shoulder. They were watching me go up the stairs. I hurried the rest of the way to the apartment. 

I thought: Ah, the sweats. They were amused by the sight of someone holding up his pants with one hand. I didn’t realize that this would appear comical to anyone who saw it.  

I put the mail down. Then I walked upstairs, to the floor length mirror. I stood before it and stared long and hard, absorbing this shameful sight.  

Then I let go.  

Isn’t that the advice the wind is always whispering? 

 

Let it go? 

My sweats fell, with no resistance, around my ankles. And I was liberated. I stood there like that for let’s say half an hour, gazing at my reflection. 

“Dude, what are you doing in my room?” my brother would have demanded to know if he saw me.  

And I would have said: This is the first step in my recovery process.

Myriam Gurba: Attack Mode

      Writers, out of fear of making (powerful, influential) enemies, can insist too much on politeness. This is one way fear impairs their work until they can’t bring themselves to state an opinion clearly that might offend. Although sometimes blame can be shared with the editor who decides that the intrepid word nerd, one without the privileges bestowed by fame, should go easy. In a world where very few are famous. (Great piece. Now dilute it.) And sometimes the writer is simply trying to maintain a pretend respectability, exclusively for print, which even the most cowardly and despicable can manage. Excessive politeness, wherever it comes from, is stifling, inaccurate or, in its hypocrisy, deserving more of an eyeroll or solemn nodding followed by a jerkoff gesture. Of those I still think kindly of and wish to see have a breakthrough, I feel cheated: let’s hear what you really think and how you really think it. How bout some honesty, huh? Would a 40 or a bestseller help loosen your tongue? But I have no use for empty bravado, either, much less the garbage-clogged sea of social media sneers and jeers. What I seek is an echt writer to give it to me straight, to deal a verbal beatdown when the situation demands, and to do it with some style, some SAUCE!* Baby! Myriam Gurba’s Creep (2023), a corrosive, no-nonsense essay collection at the intersection of memoir, literary criticism, crime, and history, does just that. It’s bracing and all too hard to find. And this isn’t bias for a California writer talking.

I suspect anger is what, in part, allowed her to remove the shackles other writers are resigned or content to wear. In essay after essay, as her targets started piling up, I came to realize that there’ll be no letup, she’s in attack mode. Her nominee for folk sainthood: Lorena Leonor Gallo aka Lorena Bobbitt. She provides ample reasons why. When she talks about misogyny and sexual violence, she draws on so many sources, from stories of the most infamous killers to dubious legends to failures of the justice system to Bobbitt’s history as a victim of abuse to personal experience, she proves, if #MeToo has somehow dimmed in the mind after all these few years, that they’re pervasive. One appalling fact: “Fewer than 1 percent of rapes lead to felony conviction.” Tone matches subject. It’s revolting, terrifying, especially considering the common reaction: willed ignorance, silence, glibness, indifference, victim-blaming and -shaming.

In the past, I’ve expressed doubts about the value of anger. Based on my own experience, I can recall quite a few examples of people saying or doing dumb shit out of anger, lashing out at those who didn’t deserve it, making a bad situation worse. Exuding anger, forcing everyone to step lightly or else. Road rage. Anger as a justification for anything (including violence, of any sort). Becoming consumed by anger. Blinded by anger. Gurba, however, shows that it can be harnessed: the book is heated without being written in ALL CAPS. It’s approachable and persuasive. And for her, it’s a catalyst. “It seemed to me that making room for rage was the compassionate thing to do. Without rage, how do people heal? Without rage, how does one produce dignity?”

Family isn’t safe from her ire. Based on what she writes, it couldn’t be. As she points out: those closest to girls and women tend to be the most likely to inflict misogynistic views and sexual violence. Fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins. In one essay, “Mitote,” she destroys the myth surrounding her own abuelito, Ricardo Serrano Ríos, a myth trumpeted most of all by abuelito. It’s partly the pathetic tale of a man obsessed with a former classmate of his he never appeared to be especially close to, Juan Rulfo, writer of the landmark novel Pedro Páramo. Ricardo (as Gurba refers to him) made his money as a publicist but he’s also a journalist and a mediocre poet. Among the many stories he puts his listeners to sleep with concerning his “friend” is one about how he lifted from Ricardo’s poetry to write the novel. And yet Ricardo, mysteriously, never received anything close to the praise and adulation Rulfo did for his work. At the same time, Gurba highlights how Ricardo would grow up to reject his parents, with their humble background and means of making a living - the sort of humble background that served as grist for Rulfo’s novel. With so much bitterness toward the famous Mexican writer, one would expect Ricardo to regret the connection and scorn any thought of associating with him. But after Rulfo dies, he sees a money-making opportunity and embarks on a lecture tour centered around his “friend.” A grim reminder that such characters always haunt the high-minded world of literature. Aside from that, Ricardo also declined to pay his wife for her contributions to his work, thwarted her artistic ambitions, and, on the side, had a family with his mistress. In this instance, rage leads happily to ridicule. Not that abuelito thought much of women writers, anyway.

On immigration, Democrats and Republicans are nearly indistinguishable. Especially when election season comes round, it’s hard to find any public figure with the spine (or the will) to defend, staunchly, the radical position that immigrants are human beings, that immigration is beneficial to the country, and that it’s a measure of strength and a source of pride to be a refuge for the vulnerable. Doesn’t seem to matter how often it’s pointed out who composes the pool of low-wage labor (that is, who contributes significantly by doing the worst jobs) or that they tend to be more peaceful and law-abiding than native-born citizens. Donald Trump and JD Vance will spread racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets despite repeatedly being corrected. One appalling passage to keep in mind when a candidate asks for your vote or sitting down to your next meal:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently ranks agricultural laborer as one of the country’s most dangerous jobs, more dangerous than policing. Among the occupational hazards are human trafficking, wage theft, and debt bondage. Pesticides seep into the farmworkers’ clothing, skin, and bloodstreams. Farm machinery maims. My dad recalls a mother and father who couldn’t afford a babysitter and so they brought their kids to the fields. One of them got plowed by a tractor. Dad also remembers when there were no porta-potties in the fields and women had to walk in pairs to the eucalyptus groves. As one would squat, the other would do her best to hide her coworker behind an old blanket.

The representative liberal she later gets impatient with is somewhat of a caricature, easily whaled upon: a simpleton who thinks all it takes to defeat Trump is to urge people to vote. What if people take that advice and vote for Trump? It’s one drawback to Gurba’s method: nuance, the right modification or elaboration, gets lost occasionally. She also accuses this liberal of presenting a true but lopsided argument and one could say the same for her. The book is polemical, so she reserves virtually no space for questioning her own position. Other blemishes include the stray awkward line or weak joke. Overreliance on pedestrian insults (the epithet “asshole” refers to everyone and no one). To sum up my criticism of Creep: Perfection has eluded her.

There’s much more to admire. I never used the fugly-looking and -sounding word “Latinx” but I understood the need for a gender-neutral term for our group. And now I’m officially making the switch to a word I’ve discovered in these pages: “Latine.” Along with contributing this small but important change to my lexicon, Gurba is a font of illuminating facts and anecdotes, though she doesn’t exactly lecture. She’s digressive, chatty, has a flair for the dramatic, and, despite the heaviness of her material, regularly displays her humorous side, such as in a piece on a bad relationship. “I considered coming out to my parents again. (The first time I’d told them I was queer, they’d answered, ‘No,’ and we’d left it at that.)” Or, in an ambivalent piece on Joan Didion, when she travels to Quintana Roo:

I was assigned to condominium ocho, where I shared a room with Sara and Thomas. Even more intimately, I shared a bed with Sara. I regaled her with stories that made my wife seem cool while Thomas brought me herbal tea to soothe my melancholy and cramps. I wasn’t hurl-myself-from-the-balcony depressed (which would’ve been fine, we were two stories up and I would’ve landed in plush sand), but I was unable-to-enjoy-the-splendor-of-the-Caribbean blue. Beyond our sliding glass door, the sea twinkled, teasing us with her sequins, and I couldn’t bring myself to honor her with a smile or hello. I couldn’t even muster a wave. I could only offer sighs. The limpest of breezes.

I tested this book against Bolaño’s distaste for memoir: everyone’s been through the eye of the storm. Perhaps I haven’t read enough memoirs - not a favorite genre of mine - to become sick of victimhood. But while there’s a noticeable lack of self-humor in Creep, which tends to throw water on the fire, I can’t say how Gurba would have told her own story to avoid the charge. She’s a woman who’s suffered “innumerable sexual assaults.” Innumerable sexual assaults. And part of the problem is that it largely remains hidden. Ironically, the collection builds to the piece with the least fire, the title essay, in which she numbly describes, in excruciating detail, the sadism of a monstrous boyfriend, a fellow teacher who, at the end, manages to evade justice again, with the backing of the school district, and continues to work with children. Perhaps if she would have amassed more hard evidence…? I thought of Ezra Edelman’s masterful documentary OJ: Made in America: Nicole Brown Simpson documented her abuse.

Myriam Gurba’s farewell: “And to everyone who got in the way of this book happening, fuck you.”

Democracy, 4

     It Can’t Happen Here (1935), the novel by Sinclair Lewis, who rejected the Pulitzer and accepted the Nobel, is an early, better known example of the authoritarianism in the USA genre. Michael Meyer, in his introduction, and Gary Scharnhorst, in his afterword, provide context and biographical information. Back then, during the Depression, a time of severe economic inequality and desperation, when extremists found large receptive audiences and fears grew about the rise of an American Mussolini or Hitler, it sold a lot and a stage adaptation, in one instance starring the writer himself, proved just as popular. Nearly a hundred years later, in the summer of 2024, here’s where we find ourselves: A recent Supreme Court decision shields the president from prosecution for official acts without defining precisely what that means, opening up the possibility that he or she could, say, target political enemies without any legal repercussions. It’s a deeply unpopular rightwing court with unelected judges who are appointed for life and obey no binding ethics standards, disregard precedent, and seize power without deigning to provide a halfway convincing argument for doing so. Right now, against the new presidential candidate, current vice president Kamala Harris, Trump is on the back foot. And it’s possible he’ll stay that way until November: Without Joe Biden in the race, attention has turned to his age and the signs of further dullness are unmistakable. Can’t visit a cemetery for fallen soldiers without generating embarrassing headlines for his stupidity and sleaziness and reminding people that he doesn’t think much of fallen soldiers at all. Still lies and moans and blathers relentlessly. Still a rapist, still a traitor, still an aspiring dictator who still claims the last election was stolen from him on no evidence. But he’s the (scowling, orange) face of the Republican Party, he has his financial backers, he isn’t far behind in the polls, and ya never know, there could be a nasty electoral surprise waiting for us again. After January 6th, one expects violence no matter the outcome. Worried readers have been searching out such books for years to see what the future holds, to find plausible solutions for a way out, to be consoled that someone got the hideousness right, and to read them while they can. I want there to be canonical warnings against authoritarianism. I don’t care if Sinclair Lewis predicted the date of Trump’s birth: the Signet Classics label notwithstanding, this novel isn’t one of them.

At times I momentarily forgot why I chose to read it, disgust for the forces of anti-democracy sapped by disbelief and amusement at the shoddiness of Lewis’s writing. He began the novel in May 1935. He finished in August 1935. He revised until September 1935. And it was published in October of the year 1935. Considering that timeline and the book’s length (close to 400 pages), one can guess without reading a single page that it’s going to exhibit all the problems of a rush job. This is the first time I’ve read Lewis. Usually, as an introduction, I seek what’s generally thought to be a writer’s best work, so if I choose to read something else of his or hers later and it turns out to be second- or third-rate, I always have the other book in mind to pull me through, as proof of what the writer is really capable of and as a comparison. A good first impression that lasts. Instead I chose a book that came after Lewis’s major period and, unfortunately, it’s made a rather bad first impression that’ll last just as long.

The story is told mainly from the perspective of Doremus Jessup, a journalist and publisher, who reports on the rise of Berzelius (“Buzz”) Windrip, a demagogue who’s widely despised but manages to win the presidency. Once in office, Windrip begins radically altering society: He seizes dictatorial power. He establishes a paramilitary force composed of thugs and criminals, the Minute Men, his version of the Blackshirts or Brownshirts, who enforce the new order with violence and intimidation. He takes over media outlets and persecutes journalists, judges, and anyone else who isn’t sufficiently loyal to the new president. He opens concentration camps.

Jessup and his family and friends try to survive these changes.

Lewis takes readers to events with and without Windrip, to the streets where his supporters roam, to quieter settings where the individual’s beliefs and background can be ascertained. To ensure that the reader gets to know what Windrip is about while following Jessup, he introduces several chapters with short passages from Windrip’s ghostwritten autobiography. One doesn’t get lost, nor is the novel overstuffed. It’s readable. But, with the exception of overall structure, it’s disappointing by every measure. Largely mirthless satire. Shaky, schematic presentation of the era’s most influential ideas, as if the writer were relying more on hearsay than serious engagement. Tepid scenes even when the intention is to evoke a sense of outrage. Inadequate navigation of emotional terrain, such as when a family hardly mourns the summary execution of a family member. Careless sentences, such as when the reader learns Jessup doesn’t like listening to kids talk and Lewis adds, with unintentional ambiguity: “Few males have, outside of Louisa May Alcott.” Superficial characters. Or, in the case of Jessup’s wife, Emma, an offensive character, nothing more than a dimwit house keeper Jessup sometimes fantasizes about murdering. (A strange marriage, as the narrator doesn’t acknowledge.) It’s Jessup’s daughter, Sissy, however, that has the worst of the book’s cruddy dialogue. As she expresses doubts about having kids in an authoritarian regime, her boyfriend responds with JD Vance-like thoughtfulness:

Julian boasted, in a manner quite as lover-like and naive as that of any suitor a hundred years ago, “Yes. But just the same, we’ll be having children.”

“Hell! I suppose so!” said the golden girl.

(When you put it that way!)

Jessup is clearly supposed to be the hero, an intellectual with decades of experience covering politics, despite his frequently uninspired opinions and even delusions: on the insuperable differences between the middle- and working-class, he says, “‘They want bread. We want - well, all right, I’ll say it, we want cake!’” Hundreds of pages into the novel, well into the Windrip administration, with countless depraved acts already observed or suggested, Jessup, the cake-eating intellectual, solemnly concludes: “It can happen here.” It would have been consistent with Lewis’s writing to punctuate that line with thunder and lightning.

I was able to finish mostly because I was that curious to see what he got right, what he got wrong, and where society would end up, in his estimation. There are more than a few resemblances between Windrip and Trump: Empty promises to the poor. Lies, racism, misogyny, crookedness. Effective public speaking despite obvious deficiencies (verbal blunders like saying “neologies” instead of “neologisms”). Exaggerated crowd sizes. Identification with the crowd (I am you). “Clownish swindlerism,” as Lewis aptly puts it, and a corresponding hatred of the press. Normalization of thuggery in politics. One scene that’s difficult to dismiss as unreasonable speculation is when Jessup goes to New York to report on a gathering of Minute Men at Madison Square Garden. Outside, supporters of Communism gather alongside another political group that isn’t aligned with Windrip, listening to speeches. A group of Minute Men confronts the Communists and starts throwing punches. The Communists, joined by the other group, fight back. What happens next put me in mind of the police officer who encouraged and gave water to Kyle Rittenhouse, a kid who’d taken it upon himself to monitor a protest armed with a rifle and minutes later wound up shooting and killing people: the police break up the melee to save the Minute Men and arrest their victims. One would prefer to think law enforcement would be fair in deciding who should be protected and who should be punished. But what’s the voter suppose to think when, in the first presidential election since January 6th, the National Association of Police Organizations, which represents hundreds of thousands of officers, has formally endorsed Trump? He’s a felon who has promised to free the criminals who attacked their fellow officers en masse because of an election theft lie, with Trump, the election theft liar behind a coup attempt, looking on and tweeting his approval, and has repeatedly threatened to use force to break up protests. (And a couple of years after the publication of It Can’t Happen Here, tens of thousands of Fascists would gather for an event at Madison Square Garden.) We’re agreed, too, on what would happen if the USA became an authoritarian regime: it’d be dysfunctional and, in the confusion, the forces of democracy, whether lying in wait inside the country or outside, could take advantage.

Even so…the relief I’ve derived from this novel is that no matter how dire the times, I can’t lower my standards and recommend it. I will, however, offer a line I’ve chosen to retain: “Russia forbade everything that made his toil worth enduring: privacy, the right to think and criticize as he freakishly pleased.”

The Betrothed

An unbeliever reads a canonical religious novel

Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, published in its final form in 1842, is the foundational Italian novel, has the rare distinction of being a work that standardized a language, is assigned reading in the writer’s native country, and I’ve barely ever heard anyone mention it. Michael F. Moore’s translation, from 2022, was the first in English in about 50 years. In his introduction, he speculates about the reasons behind this neglect: It’s long, over 600 pages. And it’s religious, which I was unaware of when I chose to give it a go. Sounds right to me. Every canonical 19th century writer who remains relatively popular in English that I can think of has estimable books of an approachable length that aren’t nearly so steeped in religion as this one is. As a boy I was baptized as a Catholic and, in my early years, taken to church. I’ve never been more bored in my life. One Sunday, my mother came downstairs and asked us if we were going to get ready to attend services. My father, brothers, and I exchanged looks. And we never joined her again. Lapsed, to say the least. As an adult I made it official, deciding I was an unbeliever, an atheist with anti-theist sympathies, stoked further in recent years by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Narendra Modi and the BJP, the Taliban. A stout democracy, the best system we’ve got until something better comes along that hasn’t already been discredited by accurate history or the daily reports on today’s various antidemocratic regimes, is one that’s, among other things, secular. (Otherwise: consider the above examples, to start with.) This year I read a piece by Joy Williams in Harper’s in which she says, without support, that people who aren’t believers are “timid and middling.” Rather than recapitulate the many arguments against it I’ve picked up through the years, none of which, as far as I can tell, evince those qualities, I simply thought: I don’t feel the presence of god. I feel no void that god might fill. And I can’t bring myself to spend time I don’t have forcing the issue. (Yet I don’t see the need to make a sweeping generalization about the personal attributes of the believer.) Frankly, had I known The Betrothed would be so religious, it’s possible I would have put off reading it for another time, thinking it would have more appeal to an observant Catholic. Soon after I started, however, I became absorbed.

Renzo and Lucia, two young peasants from an unnamed village circa 1628, are on the verge of getting married. Don Rodrigo, a noble with a gang of thugs at his disposal and no fear of the law, decides he wants Lucia for himself, to do with as he pleases. He sends his men to intercept the priest who’s scheduled to marry them, Don Abbondio, and threaten him to put off the wedding indefinitely. Don Abbondio cravenly complies, pretending to take ill. From then on, the obstacles to (holy) matrimony keep coming. In telling this story, Manzoni’s reach extends to every rung of society. Men and women, rich and poor, devout or not all get their say. He roves from backwater to big city. He alternates fluidly between distance, providing the reader with relevant history of the period, and closer study of the travails of his characters’s lives, with a sense of comedy or tragedy, as the situation demands. Working on such a large scale, one would expect superfluous material, loose ends, some difficulty keeping names straight. But the novel is remarkably controlled too: the plot is easy to follow and digressions are purposeful and kept to a minimum. No doubt this is a result of the additional time the writer spent tweaking it and also, I’d argue, a measure of self-consciousness. Wherever a structural flaw may appear, such as during stretches to cover background information, the narrator interjects to comment on the flaw, to demonstrate his awareness of it and reassure the reader that there’s a point or that we’ll be returning to the main story shortly. Sit tight.

Nevertheless, some flaws do escape Manzoni’s notice. For instance, given the title of the book, one would think the love story would be imbued with more feeling. But Renzo and Lucia are missing an element of personality, the strange and unpredictable side of the self, which is almost entirely reserved for minor characters and always manifests as a quirk to poke fun at in a few rather than accept as discernible in all. So they’re more like peasant types and no scene strongly establishes their particular connection. The delayed marriage’s primary function, then, is to set the book in motion. Real potency lies in the way Manzoni acutely shows people coming to religion and struggling with the word of god. My favorite character, Fra Cristoforo, humble saintly figure with humble lifestyle, tirelessly dedicated to protecting the poor, is the subject of one of the book’s best sections. In his youth, he gets into a dispute with a nobleman over who should move aside for whom on the sidewalk. A fight breaks out. One of the men he’s closest to gets mortally wounded defending him and he, in turn, mortally wounds the nobleman. The young man, shaken by both deaths, vows to give his life over to the church, adopting the name of his fallen comrade, Cristoforo. His first act is to visit the nobleman’s family and beg for their forgiveness. Back then, some donned the cloth to escape justice, so he enters their home under suspicion. But Cristoforo’s act of abasement, the sincerity of his guilt, moves them, dissipating the family’s bloodthirstiness. Fra Cristoforo discovers his path and starts off by ending the cycle of violence. I didn’t need to be further convinced of his piety or legendary status in the community.

The Betrothed may be labeled as a historical novel but I think Manzoni does something that’s more interesting: it’s a meta-historical novel. He never lets the reader forget that his story derives from particular sources. And he comments on those sources, from the authoritative to the speculative (he suspects that Renzo is chiefly responsible for preserving his own story). He’s even openly skeptical of his approach: “Well, what exactly he did no one knows, since he was alone, and history can only guess. A practice, luckily, to which history is accustomed.” It would lead Manzoni, finally, to reject his masterwork. Not that it seems to have hurt its reputation. Manzoni doesn’t try to transport the reader to another time and still manages to incorporate history to expand the novel’s scope. He provides the text of the law and contrasts it with how infrequently it’s upheld in practice, especially on behalf of the poor. He delineates government policy, such as that which leads to a famine, and, with exasperation, the illogic of the masses and the reckless decisions made to appease them. (Here, the future politician speaks up, and one that is perhaps not a fierce proponent of democracy.)

And he shows the calamitous effect of the plague on society at large. I don’t recall the Betrothed mentioned in any list of books to read to understand our recent pandemic but it does offer a discomfiting lesson: 400 years later, hardly anything changed. Public health experts attempt to warn about the dangers of the disease. The people respond initially with “dumb and deadly confidence.” Then it starts to kill off whole families and panic spreads. The experts take measures to contain the spread of disease. The people resist. Meanwhile, superstition and conspiracy theory lead to misguided fear and senseless acts of violence against imagined perpetrators. Experts are threatened and forced to act based on whatever seems to mollify the public: “Good sense did indeed exist, but it stayed hidden for fear of common sense.” As a result, scores of people die. This resembles what occurred in countries like the US and Manzoni sides with those in power (even as he compassionately describes suffering and death). Ian Johnson, however, writing about the Chinese government’s response to the pandemic in his recent book Sparks, emphasizes the abuses of those in power: from detaining an apolitical ophthalmologist for warning his friends about a disease going around and forcing him to sign a statement that doing so is illegal to harsh lockdown measures once the government decided to publicly acknowledge the danger and persecution of those who eventually protested against them. I’m not confident that the ideal balance between responsiveness and decisiveness will be struck next time. Despite advances in medicine and technology, Manzoni’s book is an early example of what we already know can easily happen to us in the same situation: chaos.

A difference: Back then, they didn’t have healthcare workers dealing with the worst cases. They had priests who, in Manzoni’s telling, risk their lives to serve others. A heroic act, one of many they perform—so many that I’m prompted to ask: Is the novel religious propaganda? It takes place within a context of religious belief, where it’s an unquestioned good. But the church has its gray shades, seen in authority figures who don’t exemplify the highest virtues: Don Abbondio, the Signora. Even Renzo has to be guided back from conduct that’s unworthy of his religion to meet Fra Cristoforo’s approval. Although Cardinal Borromeo, another legendary figure, is revered by the narrator even after noting that he would go on to endorse burning “witches” at the stake. Manzoni’s defense: nobody’s perfect.

I look forward to the day The Betrothed becomes a permanent part of my library. For its aesthetic merits.

Well, That's It For "Weird"

On switching to "eldritch" this election season

Two writers, Jessica Bennett of the New York Times and Scaachi Koul of Slate, express approval for Democrats finally going "low" and hurling insults at their opponents. They hope that the trend continues. And they especially enjoy the unrestrained use of “weird,” in the pejorative sense. For a few reasons, I don’t share their enjoyment.

The most obvious is that, in their enthusiasm, they use the word so much that I'm already sick of it. Here’s Bennett:

Weird and creepy. Simple, gut-punching words. Not a threat to democracy or a menace to the “soul of America,” not even “dangerous.” Nope, in the progressive vernacular of the moment, Mr. Trump and his party are just a bunch of weirdos, making weird policy proposals, weird comments about women, weird fashion choices and weirder shoe choices and promoting even weirder conspiracies. And of course, as any sixth grader who’s been called weird — or worse, “creepy” — by his peers knows, good luck trying to argue your way out.

I cringe at the thought of how many times we’ll hear it leading up to election day, with inordinate self-satisfaction despite the manifest unoriginality and schoolyard source. Unless it’s murdered by overuse before then. A sorry fate for a noble and versatile word.

Bennett recites all the crude insults rightwingers have been hurling for years ("snowflake," "cuck," etc.). I don’t recall my feelings ever having been hurt even slightly by them. Still, they mean to be insulting so it would only be fair to send insults right back at them. I endorse the use of insults, when appropriate. In such situations, though, one would prefer not to resort to: "I know you are but what am I?" That is, one should aim for a higher grade of insult: clever, cutting. "Weird" is not that insult. Nor is another word both writers approve of, "creepy." They're common and already brandished frequently by those who don't know more than 100. If you’re punched in the gut by words like these into adulthood, your short time on Earth will be miserable. Someone who, for instance, is quiet, not sociable enough for others can expect to hear whispers (or shouts) of "weird" and "creepy." (So I’ve heard.) Someone who dresses eccentrically can expect the same. Someone who deviates from the norm in any way, really, can expect the same. As insults, they're about as meaningful and carefully deployed as "asshole" or "retard," two other schoolyard classics for the unlettered. A limited vocabulary fosters inaccuracy. Koul, for instance, describes JD Vance, the perfect foolish Trump running mate, and his attacks on no-fault divorce as "weird." Can’t say that does justice to how revolting and wildly irresponsible it is to suggest that women should be forced to stay with a violent partner.

Koul and Bennett both subscribe to a binary I reject, at least as they frame it. To remain "high," one is required to endure insults with stoic silence or earnest pleas to keep it respectful. But who keeps it respectful in this hostile world? In my experience, insults can and will fly casually anywhere, anytime, unprovoked: grocery stores, bus rides, weddings, restaurants, classrooms, medical care facilities, on the road, in your neighborhood, in your driveway. Anyone who does a customer service job has a chance of getting verbally assaulted while assisting someone. Then there's the internet: when the insults aren't direct, indirect insults will come barely concealed in the form of innuendos, trolling, gaslighting. In such circumstances, what the writers and others consider "low," responding with harsh or derisive language (or, I’d add, considered nonverbal acts of rudeness), is a legitimate form of self-defense. I’m not going to subtract points or assign a technical foul simply for going there, especially when we’re so often there already. When I think of times I’ve chosen the disputable “high” option, it was either because I was caught off guard or because sometimes it feels dirty and wasteful to respond to every single fool who comes along. (Although it may be too much to hope that they’ll even vaguely sense the truth: that they’re beneath response.) I’m also cool with insults when the ideas proposed are abhorrent and sure to cause unnecessary pain to others. Which means, in some instances, one has no right to complain when the insults are returned. The real low, then, is throwing around witless, unjust, and/or ill-timed insults. (As long as I’m defining the boundaries, using chicanery, intimidation, or literal bloodshed to settle the argument is so low as to be disqualifying.)

Koul goes so far as to insist that Trump is “funny.” The first words I think of to describe Trump are: Rapist (or, if the right would prefer, “sexual assaulter”). Traitor. Twice-impeached felon. Business genius with multiple bankruptcies who didn’t get anywhere without daddy’s money and influence. Fan of dictators who, with help from the rightwing Supreme Court, threatens to be a dictator. And, as a recent appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention proved once more, a racist and a moron. There’s a lifetime’s worth of insults in this brief summary. But, as Trump admitted to those journalists, all it takes to offend him are the facts.