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Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kidding on the Square
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch An odd quirk of this era is that the free world is led by a pair of clowns. The actual leader of the free world is a comedian by trade. The nominal leader of the free world is a troll by disposition who delights in 'jokes' that may or may not be jokes. (And who, in another quirk, is prone to wearing more face make-up than the entire Ringling Bros. roster.) The subject of Donald Trump's clownery came up at the end of the latest episode of The Dispatch Podcast. This tweet from the White House press shop caught Sarah Isgur's attention as an especially obnoxious example of Trumpist trolling. When the president circulates an image of himself wearing a crown with the caption, 'Long Live the King,' is he joking? Or is he 'joking'? The term for jokes that aren't quite jokes is 'kidding on the square.' It was popularized years ago by yet another comedian who ended up in politics, Al Franken. 'Kidding on the square' is when you present an idea as a joke—but you mean it. An example. Recently, at the end of their speeches to two different right-wing audiences, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon made gestures resembling a Nazi salute. Whether they were misinterpreted, were trolling, or were in earnest is unclear, but this prediction about how the dregs of postliberal populism will respond to the controversy seems dead-on to me. They're going to start doing the gesture themselves. And when they're challenged on it they'll laugh and claim to be trolling, spiting the same hysterical libs who criticized Musk and Bannon. It's a joke! But it isn't, really. It's kidding on the square. 'Trumpism has always been a combination of menace and absurdity,' a wise man once wrote … er, four days ago. Menace and absurdity are also the recipe for kidding on the square, not coincidentally. When White House flacks tweet out footage of illegal immigrants being shackled ahead of a deportation flight and present it as an 'ASMR' video, they're inviting viewers to relish a human being's misery while diluting the cruelty by framing it as an absurdist goof on a silly internet genre. It's a joke, but it isn't. Many Trumpist policies are presented in absurd terms in order to water down their menace. When Trump refers to Canada as 'the 51st state' and to its prime minister as 'Gov. Trudeau,' it sounds like a trollish gag. Is it? When he talks repeatedly about running for a third term notwithstanding what the 22nd Amendment has to say about it, does he mean it? Or is he joking, as nervous congressional Republicans insist? The defining image of his first month in office was Elon Musk swinging around a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week like Leatherface on a ketamine bender. Musk and his 'disreputable little gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers' are doing a lot of indiscriminate damage to the federal government, Kevin Williamson noted in his Wanderland newsletter today, and are discrediting the long-term cause of bureaucratic reform in the process. But how menaced by it can the average American truly feel as they giggle at the absurdity of the richest dork in history, chainsaw in hand, preening for an audience like a pro wrestler before a big match? We have rule by trolls. It won't end well. Rule by trolls is demoralizing. Unless you're very young or have already sacrificed the last bit of your dignity to populism, you can't listen to the president try to insult Canada into submitting to annexation without feeling embarrassed for your country. America is now governed by juvenile bullies—by choice. We didn't used to be. Rule by troll may achieve some policy successes, but no one can sincerely mistake the current trajectory for a return to 'greatness.' On some level, the point of the nationalist project is to teach American citizens to feel contemptuous of America. (It has that in common with its far-left counterpart.) When Trump and his cronies treat government like a literal joke and pay little or no price for it among the population, one can't help but feel that resistance to idiocracy is futile. And that's to the advantage of authoritarians: The less patriotic classical liberals become, the less likely they are to oppose postliberal efforts to undo the constitutional order. Why bother? Why fight for a people that no longer takes the governance of its own country seriously? These demoralization tactics have worked like a charm on me. Never have I been more skeptical of 'American exceptionalism' than I am right now. My fellow citizens don't care if their government sounds like 4Chan? Fine. They don't care, I don't care. The whole world is stupider because of Trump's trollishness. Ken Dryden made a trenchant point in an essay for The Atlantic about the wound Trump has inflicted on Canadian pride: To even engage with his trollishness, as Justin Trudeau did in declaring that Canada won't join the U.S., is to be demeaned by the process. 'By answering at all,' Dryden wrote, 'you end up making any slur sound slightly, disturbingly legitimate, and you make yourself look weak.' Don't feed the trolls has been good online practice since the internet began; it's now become an issue for international diplomacy thanks to the United States. A deeper problem with rule by troll is that it's desensitizing. 'Trial balloons' is the term Jonah Goldberg aptly used on The Dispatch Podcast to describe the sort of half-jokes to which Team Trump is prone. Whether it's leaning on Canada to join the U.S., broaching the possibility of an unconstitutional third term, teasing the idea of monarchy, or some such fascist proposition, trollish provocations are the way Trump and his cronies nudge the Overton window toward their political program without rattling it so loudly as to frighten Americans. If he were to turn around and say, 'I want to be king,' the stock market would tank. (I hope!) But if he says, 'Many people are saying I should be king. Mar-a-Lago would make a hell of a palace!' then, eh. You know how he is. Kidding on the square is how postliberals inject taboo ideas into the bloodstream of public opinion without causing a sharp reaction, like administering a small dose of poison to build up a tolerance to higher doses later. Incremental corruption, I'd call it. If you're giving a Nazi salute 'ironically,' you're still giving a Nazi salute. And the more normalized the 'ironic' salute becomes, the more normalized the salute becomes, period. Jonah laid out the three familiar steps of right-wing rationalization when Trump floats a trollish-sounding policy idea, like wanting to take over Greenland. First comes 'He's joking! Can't you take a joke?' Then he doubles down: 'Fine, he's serious, but I disagree.' Then he triples down, making his position official MAGA dogma in the same way that the Pope speaking ex cathedra sets doctrine for the Catholic Church. By that point, the shock among his supporters has worn off and it's time to rejoin the team: 'He's right!' That tactic doesn't always take the form of jokes or even half-jokes. Trump and cronies like Steve Bannon were deadly serious when they began laying the rhetorical groundwork before Election Day 2020 to cry 'rigged' if he ended up losing to Joe Biden. They recognized that asking for support in overturning an election would be asking a lot even of a movement as morally and civically degraded as the American right. You can't just spring 'we're doing coups now' on 75 million Republican voters. The poison needs to be administered thoughtfully, with care. Kidding on the square is an effective salve for guilty consciences. If you're a partisan Republican who retains some dim, atavistic loyalty to the Constitution, watching Trump flirt with monarchy should induce at least a mild ideological immune reaction. After all, there's no idea that's more clearly anti-American; the cognitive dissonance involved in posturing as super-patriots, as Trump voters routinely do, and then suddenly being asked to line up behind monarchy would be agonizing. Offering the idea as a 'joke' first is the easiest way to introduce it to the right and center-right without causing a backlash. And insofar as liberals are sure to react with horror, the tactic ends up enlisting Republican voters in the supposed gag. Look at Democrats clutching their pearls at this silly 'Long Live the King' tweet! By rallying the right to defend him in the sub-debate over whether he was kidding or not, Trump makes his supporters feel like they're in on the joke. Then, if it turns out not to be a joke, they've invested too much of their own credibility to turn around and say, 'We've been had.' Better at that point to pretend that you knew he was serious all along, like Pee Wee Herman tumbling off his bike and declaring that he meant to do that, than admit that your hero is a villain who fooled you—and that the left understood him a lot better than you did. So much of fascism is about face-saving. The worst thing about rule by trolls, though, is that trolls are provocateurs whose interest in politics derives mainly from the opportunities it provides to scandalize or wound their adversaries. That mindset is antithetical to good government. You would never enlist trolls to write a piece of legislation meant to improve the general public welfare, for instance, as they wouldn't understand the concept. There is no 'general public welfare,' only their tribe versus enemy tribes and a battle of all against all for dominance. But if, like Donald Trump, you're a provocateur by nature and admire fellow provocateurs willing to display a trollish ruthlessness toward enemies, that's the sort of person to whom you'll be drawn in filling out vacancies for high government positions. Take, for instance, Don Bongino, who until Sunday evening was a surly right-wing podcaster but today is the second-most powerful official at the world's most famous law enforcement agency. Bongino is a former cop and Secret Service agent so he's not without any relevant experience, but that's not why he landed on Donald Trump's radar. He landed there because, after leaving the Secret Service, he remade himself as a populist media star and Trump sycophant. A really trollish one too. He's been known to wear 'Socialist Tears' T-shirts and say cringy things like, 'My life is all about owning the libs now.' In a media universe of pugnacious Trump apologists, he's distinguished himself by his pugnacity. Less than two weeks ago, he complained about federal judges ruling against the president and fantasized about Trump setting up a courtroom in the White House and rendering his own decisions about executive branch controversies. Was he making a rhetorical point? Trolling? Kidding on the square? Who can say? Whatever the case may be, he's now the deputy director of the FBI, Kash Patel's new right-hand man. Having a belligerent populist troll in charge of federal law enforcement is terrible for the general public welfare but terrific if your priority is using the bureau to persecute enemy tribes. And as a matter of owning the libs, which is now the highest calling of a Republican Party led by and for trolls, it almost can't be topped. The only surer way to evoke 'socialist tears' would be, uh, making Matt Gaetz attorney general. The news of the Bongino appointment last night left me wondering: How would the pundit class have reacted last year if candidate Trump had announced his intention to make Dan Bongino No. 2 at the FBI? What would the evening roundtable on CNN have sounded like that day? I suppose I'll never know for sure, but my guess is that Trump apologist Scott Jennings would have rolled his eyes nearly out of his skull at the credulousness of his easily-baited liberal colleagues. Obviously Trump wasn't really going to appoint Bongino to help lead the world's most famous law enforcement agency, he would have said. He was trolling to throw his left-wing opponents into a tizzy and to give his base the pleasure of watching them freak out. 'You're all suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,' Jennings might have declared. Patel as FBI chief, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Fox News weekend guy as secretary of defense—those are insane ideas, blatant trolling. Jokes! You know how he is. And now here we are, with a government of trolls. (So much so that even notorious trolls have noticed!) The most prominent executive initiative of Trump's first month in office is led by a man who recently changed his social media handle to 'Harry Bolz' and who named said executive initiative after a famous internet meme. Is it any wonder that DOGE hasn't done much to reduce federal spending but has done quite a lot to wound federal agencies favored by leftist cultural enemies? Everything's a joke until it isn't. Everything is deadly serious yet not serious at all. There's a method to this madness. Three weeks before the election, the New York Times reported on the curious phenomenon of Trump voters beyond the cultish base of his support who refused to believe him when he said alarming things. Do you fear he'll do what he's threatening to do by purging the government and filling it with conspiracy theorists, the Times asked one supporter? 'I don't,' came the reply. 'It could just be for publicity, just riling up the news.' Another was pressed about his plans for mass deportation and answered, 'He may say things, and then it gets people all upset, but then he turns around and he says, 'No, I'm not doing that.' It's a negotiation. But people don't understand that.' There's a common saying that's abbreviated 'FAFO.' Steve Hayes would be mad at me if I spelled out what that acronym stands for, but suffice it to say that Trump supporters who thought his wackier pronouncements during the campaign were being made 'for publicity' or as a negotiating tactic or as jokes are quickly approaching the 'FO' stage of the process. What makes their incredulity last year so curious is that Trump, of all people, proved in the two months leading up to January 6 that he should be taken seriously even when he sounds like an out-and-out nut. Yet the Times speculated that his fans' resolute denial about his more hair-raising statement isn't so hard to explain: 'It's how they rationalize his rhetoric, by affording him a reverse benefit of the doubt. They doubt; he benefits.' Indeed. But they benefit too, no? If every alarming thing Trump says can be conveniently dismissed as hyperbole or strategy or trolling, then Trump voters need never reckon with the implications of supporting him. Here again is the guilty conscience at work: You can vote for cheaper eggs and a stronger border and ignore all the rest of his fascist nonsense as mere windbaggery. He's serious about the stuff that you care about and not serious at all about the stuff you dislike. His habit of 'kidding on the square' contributes to a perpetual sense of uncertainty about his intentions that lets him and his fans claim he's serious or not as political circumstances require. Or at least it did, until he landed back in the Oval Office and started having to show his cards on policy. The biggest mystery in American politics right now is what happens to the president's support as more of his 'soft' supporters arrive at the 'FO' stage of political disillusionment. Perhaps they'll resolve their cognitive dissonance the way his diehard supporters do, by shifting opportunistically from claiming that he's not serious when he says X, Y, and Z to deciding that, actually, they support X, Y, and Z. (So much of fascism is about face-saving!) But perhaps not: Maybe instead they'll still begin shifting toward the Democrats in protest, as some tantalizing early evidence from swing districts suggests. If the latter, let me be the first to predict that the next round of 'jokes' we'll begin hearing from Trump and his lackeys will be about having to challenge the results of the 2026 midterms, or perhaps cancel them entirely, due to the supposedly high and rising risk of election fraud involved. Funny stuff. You know how he is.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Contempt of the Courts
From the Wanderland on The Dispatch In a recent discussion on The Dispatch Podcast, Sarah Isgur raised the question of which set of pardons and commutations were worse: Donald Trump's pardons of the January 6 criminals or Joe Biden's clemency extended to violent gangsters who had, among other things, tortured people with boiling water in order to extract information about drugs or money they wanted to steal. Neither Steve Hayes nor Jonah Goldberg wanted to answer the question, though Sarah did offer an answer—the wrong one: that Biden's pardons were worse. Sarah offered good, humane reasons for her view, beginning with the often elided (and not infrequently obfuscated) facts about these supposedly nonviolent offenders, who in many cases are anything but that—there is a big, big difference between being a nonviolent offender and being a violent criminal who simply was convicted on charges separate from the violence. E.g.: [Genesis] Whitted, 28, of Fayetteville, was found guilty in October. [Robin Pendergraft, criminal chief of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh] said Whitted and his associates engaged in drug trafficking, home-invasion robberies, car hijackings, shootings and financial fraud. Their crimes sometimes involved innocent victims, she said. Twice, Pendergraft said, Whitted and his accomplices poured boiling water on people until they disclosed the locations of drugs or money. On one occasion, she said, a Taser was used on a woman's genitals. On at least one other occasion, she said, Whitted's gang put a plastic trash bag over someone's head until that person lost consciousness. A woman who became a victim of the gang 'described it as witnessing evil,' Pendergraft said. Whitted trafficked in cocaine for nearly 10 years before he was caught by Fayetteville police and the FBI, who formed a joint task force. The task force spent months staking out the car wash and using an informant to buy cocaine from Whitted and his associates. Almost all of the cars that left the car wash were not cleaned, Pendergraft said. Pendergraft said Whitted was able to escape punishment for years by obstructing justice and intimidating witnesses. In 2009, Whitted was accused of murdering Kenneth Benjamin Underwood at a house on Wilma Street in Fayetteville. A main witness was set to testify against Whitted in 2011, until he claimed that he had been drinking the night of the murder and couldn't identify Whitted as the shooter. The witness later died of a heart attack in jail, and Whitted went free. Police say his reputation on the streets grew after that. His reputation on the streets was not that of a nonviolent offender. Whitted wasn't serving a long sentence for violent crimes—he was serving a long sentence for drug crimes. But that does not make him a nonviolent offender. It just means he was convicted on drug-conspiracy charges while his associates were convicted on those and additional charges, such as carjacking. As Sarah points out, there were people who testified against this guy, and I wouldn't sell any of them life insurance. These are not trivial crimes. But the crimes of January 6, 2021, are far worse crimes. Ordinary murder has been with us since Cain, and the sorts of crimes undertaken by Genesis Whitted and his associates are, while horrifying, common as dirt. In a free republic, crimes against the state (which are crimes against the public order) are much more serious and should be taken much more seriously. A common criminal who steals $500 should probably get a relatively light sentence; a municipal official who accepts a $500 bribe should do real prison time. A man who kills another man in a fight over drug turf or a woman or an insult is a common criminal; a man who assassinates a judge or murders a witness in a political-corruption case is an extraordinary kind of criminal. The common criminal victimizes one person at a time; the political criminal victimizes society as a whole, undermining its institutions and—not incidentally—making it more difficult to deal effectively with the common sort of criminal. While the riot and the vandalism at the Capitol were the less-important half of Donald Trump's attempted coup d'état following his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, they were nonetheless part of a wider effort to negate the election and illegally install Donald Trump in the White House instead of the man elected president. That was, to put it in the plainest possible terms, an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States of America. That was the goal of January 6 and the end game of Trump's various pretextual challenges to the legitimacy of the election. Trump's sycophants and apologists wave their hands and wanly offer that he did not get very close to achieving his goal—but a stupid and incompetent coup-plotter is, in addition to being stupid and incompetent, a coup-plotter. Every member of the Trump administration, from J.D. Vance to Pam Bondi to the lowliest appointed flunky, all of the administration's congressional allies, its enablers in the Republican Party, and every poor excuse for a citizen who voted to return this would-be caudillo to office in 2024 is, at some level, an accomplice to that crime. But we operate, for now, under the rule of law in these United States, and, while guilt by association is a perfectly valid way of looking at the world in certain circumstances, we don't put people in jail for that. We put them in jail after they have been investigated, charged, and convicted in a court of law, with all the benefits and privileges we rightly give to the accused in our system. The people Trump has pardoned or offered commutations to were convicted, by real juries in front of real judges in real courts, of real crimes, not of having bad political opinions or disreputable associations. As it happens, they committed these violent crimes on behalf of Donald Trump, whose contempt for the law is comprehensive. And his contempt is nowhere more evident than in these pardons. A free society has to defend itself with the means it has at its disposal. Just as we have elections as a substitute for war, we have criminal trials as a substitute for vendettas, private revenge, and freelance political violence. And freelance violence, on a larger scale, is what we are going to end up with if people lose confidence—for good reason—in the credibility of our criminal-justice system. From that point of view, Biden's pardons related to political corruption (involving his family members) were worse from a republican perspective than were his acts of clemency toward more ordinary drug dealers and gangsters; by the same token—and Sarah's sentimentalism notwithstanding—Trump's pardons of the January 6 criminals were far worse than his predecessor's last-minute coddling of the leaders of a Bloods faction in Fayetteville, North Carolina. We're always going to have gangsters—the question is whether we are going to have a credible means of dealing with them. Trump's actions are an assault on the legitimacy of American governance per se and on the state per se. This should be something like Dennis Miller's description of U.S. national security policy: an incredibly long fuse at the end of which is a very big bomb. Americans have freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, the ability to petition their government for redress of grievances, the vote. That's a very large field for political action. This isn't some repressive backwater where people have to wage literal war against the state to reform anything. And when Americans resort to political violence, the full force of the state should come down on them. Even heroic practitioners of civil disobedience expect to go to jail—that is part of the civil-disobedience deal. And yet our rioters and coup-plotters walk free—indeed, one of them inhabits the highest office in the land. That is some shameful stuff. One brief observation this week. When it came to energy policy, the Biden administration was extraordinarily hostile to U.S. oil and gas interests. I'll have a good deal more to say about that in a future report. But, hostile as it was, the Biden administration was also generally incompetent. It was able to inconvenience the fossil-fuel companies and cost them a great deal of money, but, as I noted last week, the interesting fact is that more people were employed in oil and gas at the end of Biden's term than at the beginning of it. I am indebted to my old friend and colleague Charles C.W. Cooke for reminding me of the term 'Gish gallop' on a recent edition of The Editors podcast over at National Review. What's a Gish gallop? Wikipedia knows: The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality. The term 'Gish gallop' was coined in 1994 by the anthropologist Eugenie Scott who named it after the American creationist Duane Gish, dubbed the technique's 'most avid practitioner.' The Gish gallop is a close cousin of the Hannity litany, which will be familiar to (for our sins) viewers or listeners of Sean Hannity's programs, in which the Fox News host will, when there is a conversational lull or the need for something resembling a thought—both prospects clearly horrify the man—begin reciting a list of the sins, real or supposed, of his target. It is really something to listen to: If he doesn't know what to say in a discussion of, say, climate policy, he'll just start listing Democratic misdeeds, and suddenly, we're on 'Russia Russia Russia.' This is the Golden Age of the Gish Gallop, I suppose. It is, as Charles notes, Donald Trump's political strategy: Just keep throwing stuff out there and trust that the volume of stuff—the 'avalanche of bulls—t,' as Marla Singer put it—will overwhelm critics' ability to respond to it. I have noted a similar phenomenon from time to time when reviewing books. I trust John Podhortez and Commentary will not mind my quoting at length from a years-old review, in this case of Bootstrapped by Alissa Quart. There are a few different ways to go about reviewing a book as ignorant and illiterate as Alissa Quart's Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. The first and easiest would be simply to catalogue its errors, which are not incidental but fundamental to its argument: namely, that Americans are in thrall to a national myth of extreme individualism, which distorts our culture and produces bad public policy. That myth, Quart writes, 'has fed into the extreme rhetoric and actions of everyone from robber barons of yore'—of yore, of course, because the author will forgo no cliché—'to Reagan Republicans.' Extreme rhetoric and actions? Quart quotes Ronald Reagan in the next sentence and offers an example of the cruelty she is talking about: ''The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience,' Ronald Reagan said, as he used his metaphorical buzzsaw to take apart welfare, coming up with a whole language to demean those who were dependent on state monies, including 'welfare queens.'' I suppose that there is some difference of opinion possible in the question of whether the cited rhetoric is really extreme, though 'the size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience' seems to me pretty mild stuff. But there isn't really any room for difference of opinion when it comes to whether Reagan should be credited with 'coming up with' the term 'welfare queen.' It seems to have first appeared in Jet, a black-oriented magazine that used the term in a story about a white woman, the infamous Linda Taylor of Chicago. She was investigated for welfare fraud in the early 1970s after reporting the theft of $14,000 in cash and furs to police detectives, who were 'intrigued,' as Jet put it, 'by the fact that she owned three apartment buildings, two luxury cars, and a station wagon.' Taylor was a practically cinematic character, and her story did very much suggest that oversight of welfare programs in the 1970s was, precisely as Reagan charged, something less than robust. We also may consult the historical record to answer the related question of whether Reagan did, in fact, 'take apart welfare.' Never mind that presidents have very little control over federal spending or that it was, in fact, Democrats who controlled the House and its appropriations powers for the entirety of the Reagan administration, as they did for all but two of the Congresses between the end of the Hoover years and the middle of Clinton's first term. The thing is, there weren't any cuts in welfare spending: The price tag on means-tested social programs (what's usually meant by 'welfare') increased by about 10 percent during the first Reagan term and then by about 14 percent in the second term, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Spending on entitlements such as Social Security grew a little less slowly; Social Security spending grew by about 15 percent across both administrations. Which is to say, programs for the poor saw more robust spending increases than did middle-class programs such as Social Security—as the NBER puts it, the Reagan administration's welfare-reform efforts 'sought to reduce payments to those with relatively high incomes.' The foregoing paragraph illustrates the problem with the catalogue-of-errors method of reviewing such a book. While the author's distortion consists of only nine words ('he used his metaphorical buzzsaw to take apart welfare'), correcting it took, in this case, 364 words. The problem with online disinformation is that you cannot counteract it as quickly as troll farms can manufacture it, and the problem with many modern nonfiction books and much contemporary political journalism is more or less the same. I'd hate to think of our friends over at HarperCollins (which was kind enough to publish one of my books some years ago) as a kind of low-tech troll farm, but they sure as hell don't seem to have a lot of fact-checkers over there. Almost the first checkable major claim made in support of the author's thesis is demonstrably false, obviously false, and, to anybody with even a little bit of knowledge about the era in question, ridiculously false. The enterprise of fact-checking lately has come into disrepute in some quarters—not least those with the least use for facts. And so the galloping nonsense gallops on. You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here. You can buy my other books here. You can see my New York Post columns here. Please subscribe to The Dispatch if you haven't. You can check out 'How the World Works,' a series of interviews on work I'm doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here. Our triplets celebrated their first Christmas and, recently, their first birthday. At some point, I will write up the story of their birth and the pregnancy before it, but, for the moment, I will note only that it was difficult, and that, at one point, the most authoritative medical opinion we had was that we were likely to lose all three boys before birth. Nothing of the sort happened, and they are healthy, thriving, inquisitive, mischievous little men, as is their big brother. We go through a dozen eggs most days and more diapers than I want to think about. My mornings still start before 5 a.m., though the little ones are starting to sleep a bit later more consistently, and my older boy, like his mother, prefers to wake up gently and gradually. For reasons of privacy, I cannot publicly name a few people I would like to thank for their help—from prayers to more practical assistance—over the past year and the nine months before. In particular, the two churches my family has been associated with during that time both have been models of Christian community, even when we were new to one of them and they barely knew us. That mattered enormously to me, personally. I am accustomed enough to most of the hard feelings that are incidental to a life like mine—anger, resentment, disappointment (not least in myself), etc.—but I did not have very much experience with fear. That is not because I am particularly brave but simply because I live in a very prosperous and peaceable country in which real fear doesn't play much of a role in an ordinary man's life. But I was afraid for my sons and, because of that, for my wife and for myself. There are many things I think I could endure, but I am not sure I could have endured that. Fear is, of course, the beginning of wisdom. I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. My Christian friends sometimes tell me, 'God doesn't give you more than you can handle,' but that is—forgive me being plain about it—a lie, and everybody knows it is a lie. People end up utterly crushed by their circumstances and by events beyond their control all the time. It is the most normal thing in the world. I know myself pretty well. (There are other things that would be a lot more fun to know.) I know where to find the fear in this handful of dust. And I know that when people offer you their prayers, it is because that is what they have to offer. It is fashionable to sneer at that just now: 'thoughts and prayers,' etc. But we should not let the banality of verbal expression, which is common to most people, taint the thing being talked about, which is by no means banal or meaningless or pro forma. It is not the case that there are times when prayers are all we have—it is the case that prayers are all we ever have and all we ever have had. 'For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He hath shewed strength with his arm.' (I do not think it is the case that 'all generations will call me blessed,' but they would, if they knew.) Men like to think of ourselves as having and exhibiting strength, but that is another lie we tell ourselves. (I will show you positively neurotic self-delusion in a handful of dust.) Push on that a little bit and you'll find that supposed strength is less solid even than those 'thoughts and prayers' people roll their eyes at. We have very little to get by on beyond grace and the love of our friends and the halting hope that these will be enough.
