Left Jabs

What a wonder is a gun What a versatile invention First of all, when you’ve a gun Everybody pays attention When you think what must be done When you think what it can do: Remove a scoundrel, Unite a party, Preserve the union, Promote the sales of my book, Insure my future, My niche in history, And then the world will see That I am not a man to overlook —    Stephen Sondheim, Assassins (1990)   No, these words weren’t written for Kyle Rittenhouse. Or the Proud Boys. Or the Oath Keepers. They were written thirty years ago, to be sung onstage by an actor playing Charles Guiteau, the guy who shot and killed President James Garfield in 1881. Stephen Sondheim has left us, and it doesn’t seem fair. Given all the public figures we can happily do without, we might have been spared losing someone so irreplaceable. In a year filled with bad news, this is in a special category, leaving as it does a gaping hole in the culture.

  I’m treating myself to a week off — holiday season and all — and so, once again, I’m re-publishing an essay I posted over a year ago, before the November election. The subject is socialism, and as it happens, I just this week used similar themes in a much shorter letter to the New York Times, responding to an article on the same subject. I’ve just been informed that NYT is publishing the letter sometime this week. Meanwhile, the original is, I think, well worth another look.   Call it the S-word, the dirtiest word in American politics. To say that socialism is vastly misunderstood doesn’t begin to state the case. It’s a word that has been cynically manipulated by all manner of right-wing nuts for roughly a century, and it never seems to lose its power to get them worked up. Yet they’ve largely succeeded in villainizing and undermining what is, ironically, a deeply embedded aspect of our society. The usual definitions just confuse the discussion. They tend

One current narrative about the Virginia gubernatorial election is that Terry McCauliffe lost because he spent too much time dwelling on Glenn Youngkin’s Trump-stink, and not enough time on angry mothers. Another narrative says Youngkin was wise to distance himself from Trump. I won’t say either narrative is wrong, but what’s remarkable is how, one way or another, Trump always makes it into the conversation, almost a year after leaving office. Much of that conversation happens on cable news and social media, where he’s either the messiah or a serial killer, depending on the channel. But at the same time, a whole slew of conversations are taking place in congressional committees, courtrooms, grand juries, and prosecutors’ offices in more jurisdictions than I can count. Trump has spawned a mini-industry of criminal and civil litigation, sure to generate terabytes of evidence, testimony, depositions, and indictments from scads of his toadies and hangers-on. Trump-stink — that mias

Can we please stipulate that there is no idea quite so absurd as parents dictating the curriculum of public schools? Sure, parents can — and should — participate in the process. They can organize. They can advocate for change. They can get themselves elected to the school board. But when you consider all the whackos out there raising whacko children, the social contract surely demands that we leave public education in the hands of professional educators. This obvious idea — fundamental to an education system that was once the envy of the world — is currently under assault from the right. And it took a direct hit last week in Virginia. Republicans, as usual, invented a cause they could flog — “parental rights” — which they used as a dog whistle for the advancement of science denial and white supremacy. They managed to get a lot of voters riled up, first about vaccine mandates, then about the teaching of critical race theory. And they convinced too many gullible parents that they

“No twenty-five-year-old thinks they’re going to end up on a ventilator. But tell them they’re going to have erectile dysfunction, their teeth will fall out, and they’ll never go to the gym again? They’ll get vaccinated and they’ll be double-masked.”                            —    Diana Berrent,  of Survivor Corps , a “Long Covid” support group   I’ve recently caught wind of certain semi-educated citizens who consider the prospect of dying of Covid to be some sort of patriotic act. They’ve refused the vaccine for ostensibly political reasons. They’ve been blasé about exposing themselves to the virus. Now they’ve caught it and decided they’ll ride it wherever it takes them, including to the grave. I don’t think they’ve thought this through. Because death, it turns out, could be the least of their problems. They could be looking at chronic disability — a dreary future of lifestyle disruption, family trauma, economic hardship, and long-term relationships with the medical communi