This class is heavy on the reading, and we are going to move quickly through history to get to the present. Although, really, why rush? Look where we wound up.
February 22, 2018
Part IVMODEST PROPOSALS AND OTHER COMMENTARY
AH, THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS! COME TO this wonderful bazaar and inhale a deep whiff of all the magnificent flavors that have been prepared for your delectation! These are the ideas that are best and strongest! They have beaten all the other ideas that tried to stand against them. They have stabbed them with their long, forked tails and bellowed with triumph. You will be very pleased with these ideas, which are the best of their type and smell delicious! Yes, these are ideas that are thriving! These ideas are the best! It is good to hear them. None of them are parodies.
A Good Time to Talk About Gun Laws
We’ ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by.
—DONALD TRUMP
AS TIME GOES BY.
There will be time, of course, to have this discussion. “Not now” is not the same as never.
It must be on a day when there has been no recent gun violence. So not today, and not tomorrow, and not the day after that. But someday. There is no Catch-22 here, where because there are not sensible gun laws, it is always too soon after a major gun tragedy to talk about sensible gun laws. No.
There is a perfect moment that exists for such a conversation, just after the moment of silence and just before life resumes. If you slice time thinly enough you will find it, like plucking an atom of gold from the air. It lasts only a millisecond, but it is the right time, and words spoken then will not fall on deaf ears. (The discussion must be brief. Just a second too late and it will be the wrong time again.) But it is possible.
When the time arrives, we must come to the issue without politics. (Politics have seeped into our chicken and our Pepsi, and our late-night talk show hosts give addresses after tragedies that ought to come from the president. Politics is football and wishing people a happy holiday and ordering a coffee.) We must avoid politics. We must approach it with a perfectly blank slate, as blank and void as Megyn Kelly’s new NBC show.
There will be a day, and we will know. It will be when there is a president in power whom everyone likes and respects. When Congress is no longer beholden to the National Rifle Association for ever-more-baffling sums. When we have ended gerry-mandering and taken action on climate change. After we amend the electoral college. Right after the last of the Confederate statues comes down, maybe a week or two after we have fixed sexism. It will be three or four days after we look around and notice we are living in a truly postracial society. The day after your Beanie Baby collection finally accrues its full expected value. One brisk afternoon, you will get into an argument on the Internet, and it will make you change your mind about something and feel better about humanity. And then you will know: Today is the day for the conversation about gun laws.
It will be before the sun burns out and all human life is extinct, probably.
So we must wait at least until then, to avoid politicizing the issue. That is only reasonable and fair. That is quite a different thing from “never.”
October 3, 2017
I Am Sick of These Children Demanding Safe Spaces
The left’s propaganda shaped a new generation of young adults, who then parroted all that malarkey about the “patriarchy” and then they came up with their own new phrases like “microaggressions” and “safe spaces” and “white privilege.”
—LAUR A INGRAHAM, AFTER COMING UNDER FIRE FOR MAKING FUN OF A PARKLAND SHOOTING SURVIVOR
I AM SICK OF THESE children and their demands for safe spaces.
Safe spaces! Back in my day, all we had were dangerous spaces. People would call you names that would turn your ears blue. Everyone had measles, mumps, and rubella, just as a matter of course, and we did not go crawling to our family physicians for so-called vaccines. Disease was a ritual of childhood. We toughed it out. We built character.
We did not have satellite radio or the Internet. We had to make our own electricity by rubbing sticks together. Everyone had six guns apiece, which we used to fight world wars. (There has not been a good world war for too long, and kids have gotten needlessly soft.) When children misbehaved, their parents were strongly encouraged to hit them with a rod.
Nobody wore safety belts. The water was full of mercury. The fish were full of sewage. Nobody recycled ANYTHING. When someone fell ill, you just hoped and prayed. (More things should be resolved that way: not with regulations or attempts at solutions but by wishing and hoping and thinking and praying. That was good enough for us, and any change in the world since then has been a change for the worse.)
We used to crawl to school uphill both ways in blinding snowstorms. We used to drink water from lead pipes. Some children still do this, but not nearly enough of them. There was smog in the air as thick as a man’s fist. You could smoke on airplanes. In fact, you were encouraged to do so. It was this pointless suffering that made me who I am.
Dare I deny these benefits to the children of today?
I look at kids these days and I despair. They need to man up and solve their own problems. They need to stop demanding to be coddled. Children now are wimps, and far too few of them have experienced the grit developed by being exposed to communicable diseases, or
