The Juntoo

It was with boyish trepidation, intellectual unease, and an insatiable curiosity from which—despite the nobler pastimes and deeper cogitations by which I might’ve been more happily busied, or fruitfully distracted—I could find no relief, that I cast my eyes upon President Trump’s notorious “1776 Report”. In so doing, I was reminded of a somewhat shameful experience from the distant years of my youth, a time upon which, to the exclusion of this one dark event with which you’ll soon be acquainted, I’m pleased to say that I can look back quite fondly.

My age couldn’t have exceeded eighteen years when I found myself working at a small, humble municipal golf course located in my hometown of New Jersey. It was a chronically under-funded yet stubbornly verdant nine-hole par-three of which—as if attracting to its inexpensive links a certain kindred type—small, humble local residents were the primary patrons. It was there I spent the majority of my summers, a stretch of hot, languorous months away from the university at which I was so inauspicious a student, during which I toiled in my best imitation of a manual laborer.

Often, the days were interrupted by paroxysms of rain, abundant but unpredictable deluges by which my sweaty outside work was either temporarily delayed, or mercifully stopped. At the opening of the stormy, pregnant clouds, and the discharge of the refreshing fluids with which they were so heavily filled, all golfers in the midst of their play were hastened from the course, and two-thirds of all the employees (of which, including myself, there was a total of three) followed them in fleeing the premises. The two older men with whom I worked, by whom, in their combined judgement, I was deemed a rather insignificant minor, made a habit of abandoning the tiny clubhouse and me for the larger shelter of their homes, and the warmer embrace of their wives.

Encumbered by my youth and, thus, reliant on a weatherworn bicycle for the means of my transportation, it was agreed in advance that, should it rain (and, invariably, it did) I would be the one to remain at the clubhouse and endure the tempest’s assault. That small, concrete cottage would become, if only until the renewed brightening of the day, or, failing that, the arrival of night, an important and sanctified place over which, as if a president pro tempore of an ancient Senate, I’d have the great honor to superintend. This paltry palace of which, by the effect of a precipitous line of succession, I’d suddenly become the uncontested lord, would be mine until the evening urged me to “clock-out”.

The majority of these hours I passed in reading. I was, at the time, delighted to have so solitary a moment and uninterrupted an opportunity to devote myself to what had become my life’s great passion—the consumption of books. Outside the confines of a school year’s curriculum, by whose iron fencing, a naturally free, whimsical mind such as mine is uncomfortably bound, I found fantastic works—some fun and trifling, others grave and weighty—with which I passed my stormy days, and colored the dreariness of the world around me.

Upon transitioning from one book to another, I arose to stretch my legs and examine the building of which, as I occasionally had to remind myself, I was the default, if not highly-esteemed, guardian. It was in the process of doing so that I brought myself to an obscure and unvisited closet, a dusty little alcove in which a sundry assortment of broken flagpoles, forgotten nine-irons, and threadbare Titleist hats were haphazardly stowed. Among this grass-stained congeries of golf paraphernalia and neglected sporting attire, I found tucked in the corner, almost wholly concealed from view, a rather suspicious box.

I hadn’t the faintest idea of what lay within. My guess, based on the environment by which I was surrounded, was that there might’ve been more golfing items still, but who could be sure? The mysterious contents of which so quiet and unostentatious a box might be possessed enticed me to no end. My natural curiosity, that deeply-rooted inquisitiveness to which, despite my every effort, I find myself helplessly enslaved, had no difficulty in overwhelming me. It soon became ungovernable, and, now sovereign to my reason, it brought me into a state of complete submission. I was led by its dictate to lift the lid, endure the dust, and peer into that unavoidable box.

The next part of this story is ill-suited for innocent ears, much as it was—in my case at that tender moment of my life—injurious to innocent eyes. Stacked with solicitude within that extraordinary box, organized with the care of a librarian’s touch, were mountains of pornographic magazines. It was a jackpot of smut, a treasure trove of tawdry material at which any other lonesome lad of my age would positively erupt. Much better than the mystic discovery of a fountain of youth, a well of immortality for which so many lives were risked, and fortunes lost, I had before me a fountain of flesh, a puddle of promiscuity in which, if I’m honest, I had very little desire to bathe myself.

Yet there I stood; arrested with those same feelings of boyish trepidation, intellectual unease, and a curiosity that, thankfully, didn’t quite ascend to the level of insatiability. For a moment, I stood paralyzed by the toxin of indecision, an unfamiliar state beyond which I had a complete inability to move. Should I risk my unsullied character and impeccable chastity by gazing upon so bestial and undignified a sight? Should I submit to the prurient whisperings of a nude siren’s call, an enchanting vixen’s song by which all other sounds of virtue were quickly drowned out? Most pressingly of all, should I be doing something so private and detestable while “on the clock” at my place of work?

Exhale, dear reader, and suffer through the stress of my predicament no more. To each of the three questions listed above, upon which my subsequent dignity hinged, I answered then, as I would again, in the negative. I was reminded of the moral precepts by which, since my youth, I was unerringly guided, and the high standards of conduct to which I’d accustomed myself. I heeded the words not only of my loving parents, but of the prudish teachers and religious elders by whom, depending on the occasion, I was either gently steered or sternly warned.

I was told of how offensive, degrading, self-serving, terrible, indecent, distorted, artificial, un-real, nefarious, and foul these magazines are and, acting in accordance with this damning consensus, an opinion on which everyone I respected seemed to concur, I refrained from looking at them any further.

I was startled, then, when I heard the President’s short-lived “1776 Project” being similarly described. Indeed, none of the epithets listed above was thought too vehement or abusive for the commentariat’s review of so well-intentioned a work. By the current President, Mr. Joseph Biden, it was dismissed as being “offensive” and “counter-factual”, and in urgent need of an enlightened replacement. By various media outlets, it was called, among other things, a “sheer absurdity”; a shameless “hack job”; a bundle of “outright lies”; a “misrepresentation of fact”; and an ugly “distortion of truth” with which we, as a nation of readers, ought not debase ourselves.

As I held in my hand the forty-five-page packet, that incendiary booklet into which I was now so anxious to dive, my mind leapt back to the contents of that mysterious, porn-filled box. Having been warned of the dark themes and deranged morals of the “1776 Report” as I had, some time ago, of the lascivious filth with which those adult magazines abounded, I thought it wise to ignore the former, as I’d once rejected the latter.

Decisively, I tossed it on my desk, banished it from my attention, and determined to divert myself in healthier ways. I instead raised my eyes to the television screen, on which a candid, well-dressed MSNBC anchor spoke of “de-programming” seventy-million people and the blessed age of “unity” to which this national cleansing would doubtless yield. Later, I picked up a copy of the New York Times, that most eminent of papers by which my antipathy for this cruel land was properly reinforced.I congratulated myself on having twice avoided a curious reader’s fate, a literary destiny to which so many miserable bibliophiles are prone to succumb. Rather, I filled my time with more agreeable forms of media, and more veracious depictions of the truth.

For a while, at least, I succeeded in this way. With the passage of time, however, and after every left-leaning libation had been drunk, and every drop of Democrat opinion imbibed, my curiosity revisited me. Curse my desires! I was thirsty still. Heedless of the lessons of the past by which, having shielded me from the error of looking at naughty magazines, my innocence was preserved, I grabbed the “1776 Report”. Voraciously, I consumed its contents, as if, at any moment—like the fleet but powerless cheetah from whom fresh prey is rudely stolen—I’d be stripped of them and left hungry for intellectual satisfaction.

What I discovered was a work quite undeserving of those mean epithets with which it was so abundantly showered. Indeed, so great was the incongruity between the noble, unexceptionable words of the “1776 Commission” authors, and the vitriolic insults with which they were so relentlessly treated, that I was compelled to read the work yet again. It was though I were visiting the “mysterious box” twice. Perhaps, with the forgivable carelessness of a first glance, I’d failed to see the Commission’s blatant revisions of history, unacceptable manipulations of fact, ugly promulgations of white supremacy, and total abandonment of truth in favor of a prejudiced political agenda.

I was assured, by every decent outlet to which, owing to their fidelity to the truth, my confidence is wed, that these were the sins, among others, of which this odious report was guilty. I’m happy to inform you, the charge is misapplied. I was told that it was on these grounds, so strong and unyielding, that the report should be rejected. That soil, upon the acceptance of an inquisitive mind’s weight, and the heavy force of scrutiny by which it makes itself felt, immediately crumbles under foot.

In a word, I say, indulge your curiosity and read the “1776 Report”. Fear not the insalubrious effects about which you’ve been warned. Treat it not as a dirty and offensive work into which your unblemished eyes ought not to probe. Don’t accept the strange contention that it’s “counter-factual” and, therefore, undeserving of academic merit and popular attention. It is not, if you’ll excuse the term, a type of political pornography or campaign smut by which only rigid Republicans and stiff conservatives will be aroused.

Unlike my box of old, it’s a trove of patriotic wisdom and honest learning into which every curious eye should probe. You’ll be gratified for having done so.

Intermittently during his campaign, and repeatedly during his Inaugural Address, Mr. Joseph R. Biden—that celebrated under-study to Barack Obama and beloved son of Delaware to whom, as of Wednesday, the honorific “president” now formally applies—emphasized the need for “unity”.

While speaking from the Capitol Building before a vacant Washington Mall, an eerily quiet, yet still majestic corridor from which, in light of an ongoing pandemic, thousands of enthusiastic supporters, curious onlookers, and aggrieved partisans were prudently barred, Mr. Biden repeated the word “unity” a total of eight times. The devoted team of speech writers with whom the aged and—for this and other reasons—often ineloquent Biden doubtless conferred, feigned no reservation in the repeated use of the word. The bland scribblers by whom his lifeless oration was crafted, from whom every thinkable political platitude seeped, intended the word to flow into the ears of a listening republic over and again.  

With unity, he proclaimed, “we can do great things, important things”, a somewhat trite and flavorless statement, to which he quickly appended the “great things” he had in mind: “we can right wrongs”, he said; “put people to work in good jobs”; “teach our children in safe schools”; “overcome this deadly virus”; “reward work, rebuild the middle class, and make health care secure for all”; “deliver racial justice”; and “make America the leading force for good in the world”.

The greatness and the importance of these enumerated “things” is, I think, frightfully susceptible to dispute. For instance, one might strain himself in trying to imagine exactly what repugnant “wrongs” cry out for correction, for whose prompt amelioration, a renewed sense of unity is all that’s really needed. It seems as if the valiant exhortation to “right wrongs”, and to remedy unidentified ills, were but an empty and anemic aspiration, one to which we’re all welcomed to add a dash of our own color.

As for the placement of people in “good jobs”, occupations for which they’re inarguably qualified, and from which they stand richly to profit, I’m not quite sure how unity contributes to that end. That which is known, however, albeit very seldom openly acknowledged, is that unemployment levels for the past few years (a time during which, as we’ve been reminded countless times, we were most definitely not unified) have been delightfully low. Across all segments of the population, among whom, universally, a higher income and an elevated chance of prosperity are boons hungrily to be desired, this is an encouraging statistic. Indeed, it’s one of which the prior president (never bashful in his boasts of market success and economic victory) was persistent in reminding us, about which, if only quietly, we might look back and be somewhat grateful.

In haste, one might skip ahead on this list of great and important “things” to that of “delivering racial justice”, to which unity, no doubt, can apply its indefatigable effort and insuperable strength. The presupposition of this shocking aim, of course, is that racial justice is currently being withheld. It’s as though it were stuck at the warehouse of ideals and fundamental rights, a bigoted storage unit in which such things are trapped while impatiently awaiting their conveyance to your door. Unity, you see, is the sturdy vehicle atop which such a heavy thing as “racial justice” will eventually ride, a currently languid car by which, propelled by the gasoline of unity, it’ll be delivered on the glorious morning of a new day.

As you can well see, unity is the answer to all things. As Mr. Biden proclaimed, with Ciceronian confidence and the type of resolve of which only the elder statesman is possessed, “unity is the path forward”.

To what remote destination, you might ask, one can’t yet know. What’s clear, however, is that in its absence, “there is no peace, only bitterness and fury”, two ugly characters by which so frightening a void will most certainly be filled. Indeed, every important field of learning—to which the intellectual triad of history, faith, and reason distinctly contribute—show the way, “the way of unity”. Unity, so it appears, is the obvious answer upon which so many beclouded philosophers failed to gaze, and the consummation of all purpose and striving onto which innumerable divines failed to grasp. If only they’d known, everything in the world of ideas points to unity (an insight upon which, thousands of years ago, the recondite Pre-Socratic, Parmenides, might’ve been the first mystically to have stumbled).

I fear, with but a mention of Parmenides, I risk sliding down a metaphysical path up which, once at the bottom, I’ll never be able gracefully to climb. Let me stop there, then, if that be the embarrassing, precipitous fate against which I’m destined to struggle. I’ll avoid the fall, re-trace my step, and find again the road of political philosophy along which we jointly walked, within whose limits, we felt the embrace of a firmer security.

It’s there we find Mr. Biden pronouncing what I considered to be his speech’s most puzzling line. To overcome such flagitious and, in his opinion, systemic problems as “political extremism, white supremacy, and domestic terrorism”, that “most elusive of things in a democracy” is required. That thing, as you might’ve guessed by this point, is nothing other than unity.

The problem is that unity and democracy, so far as we understand them, are not merely unharmonious, but utterly incompatible. In their awkward search for a relationship, the closest intimacy to which “unity” and “democracy” can aspire is that of strange bedfellows. They’re neither natural friends nor enamored lovers, acquaintances nor paramours between whom congenial feelings exist. They tend rather toward repulsion than attraction, distance than proximity, and it’s only by the most artificial and coerced of means by which they’ll finally be brought together.

Democracy, at least as we understand it in its liberal form, is seldom known to cultivate a unified spirit. It’s as fragmentary and diverse as the number of citizens upon whom it bestows the holy gift of suffrage, and shines the luminous glare of political recognition. Democracy, rightly understood, is a form of government whose power flows directly from the people by whom the particular state is composed. Between it and them, there is no mediating force, no sieve of aristocratic representation or intellectual mesh by which countless inane whims and ignoble suggestions might be filtered out. Each person has the unique ability to offer an opinion and argue for a position with which, in all likelihood, not even his closest neighbor will completely agree. There is, at its heart—indeed, at our heart—a fundamental and ineluctable disunity.

As the staunchest advocate of his own peculiar thought, an idiosyncratic conviction to which, if he be enflamed by the example of the shameless demagogue or the silver-tongued senator, he may hope to attract adherents, but never perfectly simpatico friends, the man in a democratic society acts independently of all others. Though he may seek and eventually discover a majority by which, given the rules of the game, his preferred policies might be better advanced and his desires for an agenda satisfied, he begins as an atomized being. He begins liberal, unencumbered, and free. As such, he’s someone whose mind is so different in scope, and whose passions so various in temper from those of his fellow neighbors, that unity, wherever found, will be both fleeting and rare.

Thus, in a democracy, a broad, latitudinous, swelling unity is all but a dream. If, god forbid, so many sentiments did manage to converge and recognize their collective will, and begin to flex the gathered strength their burly weight, a despotism of the majority would quickly ensue. “Unity”, in adopting the strange image of this hideous, muscular form, would no sooner yield to tyranny, the inherent vice into which this particular form of government is known sometimes to transmogrify. When it does, as Aristotle, Polybius, and Tocqueville have warned us, it proceeds to crush all minority dissent by which it might be threatened or, failing that, merely bothered. It becomes an insufferable, violent state by which the obstinate “un-unified” are not only occasionally mistreated, but brutally oppressed.  

We witness, then, the development of a different species of unity, what we might call “conformity”. A shiver overtakes us with the mere passing mention of so detestable a word. Conformity is the inherent vice with which unity is associated, by which it can often be corrupted. With little exaggeration, conformity is the end of liberal society, the darkening of enlightened thought, the cessation of free expression, and the death-knell of the republican spirit. Its mere suggestion is the dangerous first step along a path at whose end democratic despotism waits. It guides us toward a perilous and slippery slope down which too many well-intentioned polities have fallen. We must learn from their painful injuries and recognize their unwholesome results as possible ends about which ever genuine liberal, and every watchful conservative, ought to be anxious.

The type of abstract, ambiguous, somewhat vexed unity to which Mr. Biden made continued reference is, I think, possible only through conformity. For this reason, despite the sincerity with which his talk of wanting to be a president not only for the exclusive enjoyment of his Party, but for the collective happiness of all was adorned, the notion must be rejected.

Better would it be for him and, more importantly, for our nation as a whole, if he were to humble his aspirations and reduce in number, audacity, and scope the ideals around which he wants an increasingly-divided population to unify. The fewer these things, the better. The strength of our unity increases in proportion with the smallness of their quantity. We seek the precious few, but splendid and concrete things around which we’ll all gladly unify, not the progressive abstractions of which our clouded, embittered minds can’t hope to draw an image.

Such things as the maxims of our Declaration of Independence, the immortality of our inalienable rights, the beauty of our tripartite polity, the constraints of our Constitution, and the wisdom of our Founding Fathers should not only suffice, but sustain us through these turbulent and rather dark times. These are the things, the “great and important things” (to use the current President’s words) around which we’ll never hesitate to unify, by which our ship of state will be forever ballasted.

Mr. Biden would do well to promote them, as they’ll lose neither the tight grip of our attachment, nor the undiminished ardor of our love.

An encomium, I think, so long as it be conceived with sincerity, expressed with warmth, and articulated with an eloquence by which the memory of its subject is not only raised, but adorned, can never be thought inopportune. We’re told, and not without wisdom, that one should never hesitate to extend to his fellow man an honest, kind, and thoughtful word, nor to withhold from so exceptional a person the type of praise of which he’s so clearly deserving.

In other words, one should never be so miserly in his disbursement of praise as to wait for the time when its payment is past due, and, having ignored that burdensome “sell-by” date, that distant age after which all good things tend naturally to spoil, its inherent value is cheapened. We must act, or, as is the case, speak when, in whatever moment it finds us, we’re blessed with the divine opportunity to celebrate a distinguished name. Thus, are we discouraged to reserve in life the flowers by which the dead, once dead, and because dead, are so munificently covered. We should rather give to them, the fellows of flesh and blood beside whom we live, the people in whose bodies the soul, unseen yet undying, still vigorously spins, all of the lilies, roses, and violets with which our fertile, elegant gardens abound.

We should commend with promptitude, and praise with alacrity, those for whom an encomium is called—even if such a call finds us today. We should neglect with keenness and drop with glee the other lesser activities by which we might be diverted. We should never be reluctant to distribute those sweet, iridescent flowers with which our subject ought to be festooned, or to encircle his head with those same wreaths of laurel with which only the greatest of men have been crowned.  

With that perhaps too-florid introduction out of my system and behind me, by whose humble, honeyed words, the pleasant thoughts of your winter’s day might be happily warmed and gently sweetened, I must proceed to a brief encomium of the current Vice President of the United States of America, Mike Pence.

If ever a man was deserving of the uncommon praise to which—either because of his Party affiliation, religious commitment, or the character of the boss under whom, for four years, he’s sedulously and thanklessly worked—he’s likely to have become unaccustomed, it would be Mike Pence. In his capacity as Vice President and, as such, second-in-command to a figure for whom vast swathes of America feel nothing but detestation and scorn, and in that of a pawn in the hand of the Democrat-led Congress, a collection of legislatures by whom every political gambit is being played, he’s been forced to tread a thin and frangible line.

On the one side of that line clamors President Trump, a man quickly disappearing in the solvent of the delusions beneath which he’s now fully submerged. Trump is the man, much more than the many sycophantic pundits and clever talk-radio hosts with whom he consorts, by whom Pence has been persistently urged to subvert the results of a duly-certified and irrefragable national election. In his role as president of the Senate, he’s been advised unilaterally to declare victory for President Trump—an act that would make himself a usurper, and Trump a king.

On the other side of that line, the Democrat Party—led in the Congress by California’s Nancy Pelosi—demands his participation in a politically-daring, but ultimately unconstitutional stunt. In what would be the most extraordinary final act of an administration to which our captivated nation’s yet borne witness, an ending at which the very stage of drama itself would stare in utter disbelief, Pelosi has called for Pence to put into use the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. This, you’ll recall, is the Amendment—drafted in the wake of the terrible stroke by which the ageing, over-taxed Woodrow Wilson was suddenly enfeebled—by whose invocation, an ailing president can be involuntarily removed.

Thus sat Vice President Pence: on the one side, he was lured to an unconstitutional act, and, on the other, he was enticed to do the same. With the chilling recognition of a Scylla on his left, and a Charybdis on his right, he sailed a middle passage, as once Odysseus did.

In his passage through the menacing Strait of Messina, that frightfully narrow body of water by which the island of Sicily is separated from the Italian coast, a troubled mariner is made to contend with nothing but difficult options. One the one side, he can steer closer to Charybdis, the Sicilian whirlpool by which whole ships are not infrequently swallowed. On the other, he can list toward dread Scylla, the rocky Calabrian shoals (or, in the fantastic imagination of the poets, a six-headed monster) from which, completely unscathed, no boat is given the chance to emerge.

Despite the intimations of the myth, and contrary to the similar situation of being “stuck” between a rock and a hard place, it’s not inconceivable to tread an absolutely medial line, one by which the awful positions of the two aquatic beasts are perfectly bisected. Should this be a path to which the dauntless sailor can adhere, and should the caprice of the wind prove conducive to so careful a movement, Scylla and Charybdis might, with any luck, be avoided altogether. One can then expect, having eluded their rapacious hunger and deadly embrace, calmer waters through which to sail, and friendlier shores upon which to alight.

As though a masterful navigator, guided not by the glimmering constellations above, but the unbending integrity and radiant light of a strong conscience within, Mike Pence conducted himself along this very fine line. On the one side—to his right, let’s say—he was threatened by the very man upon whom his own unexpected political ascent was dependent. This was President Trump, at first coaxing, and later demanding him to perform an unlawful and treasonous act. He wanted him to take a page from the book of the despot by which, for all time to come, his own reputation would be blackened, and the legitimacy of our government damaged. He repudiated him with a wave of the hand.

On the other—to his left—Pence was intimidated by a Congress suddenly eager to over-step the wide girth of its bounds. The Legislative Branch sought not only to suggest, but openly coerce a purely Executive action over which the Vice President alone exercises control. It wanted him to invoke an Amendment somewhat inapplicable to the peculiar time, situation, and place: to declare Trump non compos mentis and, as such, unsuitable for the further discharge of his many important duties. Deemed as having been bereft of all reason, and dispossessed of a properly-ordered and functioning mind, his office would be stripped of him, and the dubious state of his psychiatric health would forevermore be questioned. Tactfully, Pence declined to pursue this route as well.

By opting for a straight and middle path, one neither obsequious to the President of whom, through countless tempests, he’d proven himself so unwavering an ally, nor submissive to a Congress by whom he was not only challenged, but coerced, Pence was able to emerge a man uninjured by the baleful flanks of the narrow strait. For this, he deserves an encomium, a favorable place in the memory of our nation, and a safe harbor upon which to disembark. I hope to have provided him with at least two of these three desirable things.

Looking back through the course of our nation’s history, and adjusting our gaze from the sublimity of a past to which, despite our failing efforts of a happy mental transport, we can’t hope to return, to the nightmare of the present moment from which we can’t escape, we notice that no President of this country has been twice impeached. To be met with so unusual a fate, and brandished with so ineffaceable a mark, would be as ignominious as it would be singular, and as disgraceful as rare.

Yet it might be, should the promises of the Democrats ripen beyond that stage of pregnant rhetoric at which they’re so often prematurely aborted, and—having survived that perilous and uncertain state—proceed to a harvestable bearing of fruit, the peculiar distinction by which Donald J. Trump will forevermore be remembered. He might receive that strange and ignoble honor, that of a president twice impeached, by which none before him was ever blemished and, assuming the return of our normal politics, none after him will be confronted.

More noteworthy still, he’ll be the first president twice to have suffered impeachment in half as many years. You’ll recall, the articles of his first impeachment, those rather feebly-drawn accusations on to which well-neigh every Democrat Congressmen signed, weren’t sent through the appropriate channels and, thus, legitimized until 15 January, 2020. At the time of writing, it is the twelfth of that same frigid and tempestuous month upon whose ill-fated Ides, but a year ago, the first articles of impeachment were formally transferred. Should the Democrats take it upon themselves to move with a type of alacrity by which their prior selves failed to be stirred, and accelerate this process toward its completion in the next three days, it’s conceivable that President Trump would be not only the first of his office twice to be impeached, but to have accomplished the unenviable task in less than one year.

Overlooked, of course, is the question of whether or not this is a distinction, or, as I’ve put it, an indelible mark, of which President Trump is fully deserving. Most accept that it is. Perhaps rightly so, they think it a response appropriately made by the body, our Legislature, to which Trump, as the head of the Executive Branch, had become, especially on that dread afternoon of 6 January, an insufferable and immediate threat. His speech on that day was the culmination of a months-long effort to challenge the legitimacy of state election results, to intimidate those by whom they were certified, and, finally, to defame those by whom they were at that moment being counted. If only rhetorically, President Trump mounted a continuous assault on the Legislative Branch, that body of priority, first listed in our Constitution, to which the power of his own office ought always to deign.

While it’s difficult to extract from the now-infamous “Stop the Steal” speech an explicit incitement to violence against the Congress, and to link the kernel of its message to the barbaric actions of those felons upon whom it had so profound and distorted an impact, Trump’s words were certainly unconducive to peace. I think, irrespective of the fidelity you feel toward the man, or the pleasure you derived from the implementation of his agenda, that’s something on which we can all agree. Doubtless, his words did nothing to lower the proverbial temperature, to soften the frayed and excitable passions, or to quiet the heat by which so many of his supporters were irrationally inflamed. He perpetuated the myth that the possibility of his re-election was not yet dead, and that one’s hope in his imminent success was neither misplaced, nor misguided.  

He asserted that the real culprit for this unprecedented electoral theft, this “fraud” of the century of which he was so obviously a victim, was none other than the Congress itself. It was the horrid and incorrigible Congress, he said, that bicameral body of five hundred and thirty-five actors (over whom, it might be added, his erstwhile ally, Mike Pence—now a turncoat in his role as President of the Senate—had the duty to preside), that should be targeted for censure and abuse. It’s to the Congress you should go, he urged, in order to seek redress for the problems by which you’re so painfully aggrieved, for which you’ve not yet been given a satisfactory answer. That was his exhortation to the large and motivated audience upon which his words had so predictably stimulating an effect.

To those reading between its lines, however, he was heard to whisper, not quite sotto voce, go into the Congress, by force if you must, and interrupt that fraudulent process on which I, in my distant capacity as a lame duck Commander-In-Chief, can no longer can exert a meaningful influence. Go there, and deliver to a maltreated but deserving president, an eccentric leader of whom you’ve all grown to be so fond, the office to which I, truly, was elected. Return to me that job of which I, despite the machinations of the Dominion voting software and the unscrupulousness of the corrupt state politicians, will be the occupant for four more years. Do it not only for me, the indomitable, lovable, charismatic figure for whom you’d risk not only job and reputation, but family and life, but for your amor patriae, that unquenchable love for a country presently suffering from a “rigged system’s” terrible abuse.

This, precisely, is what they did.  If not all of them, a pugnacious and fervid bunch took it upon themselves to walk the mile-and-a-half corridor by which the Ellipse outside the White House (the location at which Trump’s speech was held) and the Capitol Building is separated. Discovering at the grounds of the Capitol a police presence inadequate to repulse their swelling force, they charged forth into the building, a beautiful Greek edifice through whose battered doors, they quickly flowed. The barriers receded, the calls for reinforcements bellowed, and the officers unhappily yielded the dwindling ground on which they stood. In a moment’s time, a scene was created of which the brazen insurgents, now confident in the success of their design, took giddy advantage.

In a somewhat desultory fashion, quite at odds with the unblinking focus by which they were initially propelled, the rioters meandered through the Capitol Building to which they’d just gained access. In the course of the romp, they pilfered paraphernalia, hoisted lecterns, posed for selfies, and sat in venerable chairs in which their vulgar bodies didn’t belong. They scattered papers about offices, broke photographs and the frames in which they were hung, and thrust flags into floorboards emblazoned with the name, “Trump”.

They sprayed irritants, threw punches, and pushed furniture at those gathering officers by whom, now more equally numbered, they were freshly opposed. Conceivably, clad with zip-ties, incendiaries, and knives furtively concealed in the pockets of pants and the sleeves of shirts, it was their ultimate goal to detain, by violent means, if needed, any Republican congressmen by whom Trump’s legitimacy was opposed. Doubtless, they would’ve satiated their morbid zeal by harassing any like-minded Democrats by whom, similarly, the president’s rightful claim was thwarted. Most frightening of all, however, it’s possible their design might’ve taken them so far as to capture Mike Pence, that same man whose injured name joined Trump’s on their waving flags.  

As we know, they failed to accomplish the end to which they were so balefully committed. Their reckless adventure was eventually stopped, though not before the death of five people. One police officer, a New Jersey native, a heroic man upon whom a flurry of punches was unleased, tragically succumbed to his wounds. Another perished, at his own hand in the wake of the trauma of the events, the weekend after. Others died of undisclosed “medical emergencies” at the scene of the tumult, and a female protestor was fatally shot through the neck.

While all this transpired, President Trump issued messages of appreciation from his soon-to-be-deactivated Twitter account, that great megaphone of his feelings and direct line to his soul to which, at the time of writing, his privileges still haven’t been restored. In a string of rather nebulous tweets, by which his rabid supporters might be understandably confused, he advised them against committing further violence, promoted respect for the police over whom they’d just recently stormed, and insisted that the Congress was still, despite their best efforts, in the process of abetting an historic fraud.

Does not this final line negate the two by which it’s so incongruously preceded? Having read it, could his supporters really be blamed—given the ambiguity of all his earlier promptings—to carry on with their effort to “stop the steal”? Is it any wonder, then, that they continued with their assault on the Congress and, through the Congress, on the rest of us, a population viewing this vandalism in a state of utter disbelief?

This, ultimately, is the sin for which our untamable President, our peccant Commander-In-Chief, ought to be impeached. He offended, as none has before, not only the dignity of a co-equal branch of government, but the safety of the members by whom it’s composed. Indirectly or not, he imperiled those same representatives to whom we, as the most important aspect of this free and peculiar state—the people—have extended our suffrage and in whom we’ve planted our trust. The Legislative Branch, that great body through which our democratic voice most loudly echoes, and our republican enthusiasm most actively flows, must, in this case, reassert itself.

Impeachment of the Executive is its means to that worthwhile, neigh, Constitutional end. The members of the Congress, despite the constraints of the dwindling time in which they have to work, would be wise to pursue it.

The real consequence of censorship, of the quiet, though deliberate concealment of an uncomfortable truth, or the heavy-handed bludgeoning of an invidious opinion, is, more often than not, unintended.

Instead of achieving the suppression of the scandalous work against which it’s been employed, or limiting the reach and influence of the perspective for which it clearly hasn’t any tolerance, censorship usually falls far short of its aim. Indeed, so short does it fall, that the contrary effect is often invited, and nearly always arrives. The relationship is, in a word, both inevitable and inverted, and the phenomenon is an interesting one to behold.

The further a work’s concealment and suppression is pursued, the wider its popularity and fame expands. The more vehemently its author’s character is abused and her motives distorted, the more sympathy and latitude she’s granted. The more refractory the censor stands in his decision to shield from the public’s view the novelty of her work, the less controllably the lower class’ curiosity simmers. While he tries to lessen that type of thinking by which ideological temperatures are raised, and difficult questions provoked, they begin to boil.

The more the censor tries to darken those contents to which none but he is deemed privy, of which none but he can be judge, the brighter the light of inquiry will shine forth on its truth, and the greater the number of people who will flock to seat themselves in the warmth of its heat.

In most cases, or at least those to which our recent history can point, the censor fails to catch the object by which his enmity was provoked, it being, remarkably, the far nimbler of the two. Ideas, as they turn out, are rather evasive things. They’re lithe, wriggling creatures onto which none can hold, while he who seeks their destruction is a different beast. Ponderous, hidebound, illiberal, and dumb, he’s suspicious of every novelty, and intolerant of all diversity. Yet at times, he can be enflamed with bursts of energy and torrents of zeal by which his lumbering heft is hastened toward its goal.

But should he, like the dog and the car after which he gives so relentless a chase, succeed in catching the shiny jewel of his pursuit, and touch with tongue outstretched the distant bone by which so many canine teeth are tempted, its retention is never so secure.

Having now touched the object by which his censorious efforts were once aroused, he’ll be met with a larger difficulty still: to persist in holding beneath his thumb, or, as is the case, his dagger-laden paw, the book, the article, the comment, or the annoying idea atop which he wants nothing better than to force his imperious weight, and into which he’d enjoy nothing more than to thrust his flesh-cleaving teeth.

But, frustratingly, the object of his censorship won’t sit still. With a shake of its hips, and a turn of its feet, and a vigorous thrust of its indomitable spirit, it quickly dances out of his grip, and declares itself forevermore, free. It won’t submit to the censor, for it knows not how.

I think about this peculiar dance, this frightful game of attack and chase, as I return to my bookshelf Abigail Shrier’s recent work, Irreversible Damage. Normally, this isn’t the kind of book for which I’d willingly pay, about whose contents I’d feel the slightest bit curious, of which I’d care, frankly, to be the owner. Had it made an earlier appearance at the local library to which, as though a religious, hebdomadal hajj, I go every Monday night, and had not the leviathan sellers of such things (namely, Target and Amazon) threatened its removal from their stores and sites, I probably wouldn’t have completed the purchase.

But, as you might’ve guessed, I did. Out of disgust for those by whom she was so rudely censored, and with support for a writer who’ll dare swim against the tide, I enthusiastically purchased Shrier’s work. And now I can say, having completed it, Shrier’s book is one by which, to my continued surprise and satisfaction, a reader will be both unnerved and captivated, startled and enlightened.

With extraordinary insight, laudable boldness, and unexpected empathy, Shrier writes in her book about the strange issue of our time, an issue from which only an exiguous number of people appear to suffer, over which a stridently vocal group of activists clamor, to whom our progressive political class grants every thinkable concession. This issue, of course, is the phenomenon, or craze—to use Shrier’s term—of transgenderism. It’s a word that’s only recently entered the modern, woke lexicon with which we, speakers of English and believers in biology, are only slowly developing fluency. Yet it’s one with which we might do well to become more familiar, as it commands an ever-increasing hold on our attention, and purchase in our politics.

I tend not to regard the perversions of one’s mind an issue about which I, as a free individual wishing myself, as I do others, a life unmolested and unbothered, ought to be concerned. The endless range of sexual identities by which one’s mind might be clouded, and the social pressures to which she’s nearly defenseless to succumb, warrant only my sympathy, never my intervention. Such, generally speaking, was my position on the “transgender issue”, as it’s recently come to be known, until I began noticing some disconcerting events upon which, with great perspicacity, Shrier dauntlessly touches.

In some countries, by the edicts of laws and, more importantly, the muscle of the regime by which they’re enforced, one mustn’t deviate, even unintentionally, from using a person’s “preferred” pronoun. That, for those unacquainted with the idea, is the chosen word by which a person would like, henceforth, to be called, to which her biology (of which we’re now compelled to take no notice) might loudly object. In repudiation of nature—Mother to us all and guide to a balanced life—from whom, in search of tranquility and happiness, we’d do well never to stray, we’re told to disregard Her mandate and embrace the whim of another. To fail to do so would be not only tasteless, but criminal, as is the case.

There are, shockingly, still more phenomena on which to comment, of which Shrier makes a reader aware. Some places of high culture and medical institutions of great merit are advancing the idea that the birth certificate, that first official document by which one’s entrance into the world is marked, should be unblemished by the detestable designation of “sex”. Not wanting to preordain one’s life or complicate the hypothetical, future struggle by which she’ll be vexed, many want this important part of a birth certificate to be expunged. Much as Anabaptists subject not their infants to the early ablutions of the Roman Church, and await their members to choose for themselves a sacrament improved by its acceptance in a state of reason, a baby, perforce, has no ability to agree to the “given” sex with which she’s so hastily stamped. Let lapse a decade, and let her make the decision then.

Most disconcerting of all, we see the phenomenon of transgender women (that is, biological males) tossing their hats into the arena of sports with the sincere intention of competing with their fellow gals. This, obviously, creates a warped scenario by which the transgender women are greatly advantaged, and the biologicwomen with whom they “compete”, largely overwhelmed and, as scoreboards make clear, consistently defeated. How is the natural woman, fit, focused, and twenty years of age, truly expected to compete with her transgender opponent, a being in a state of medical metamorphosis through whom, whether she liked it or not, well-neigh two decades of erection-inducing, beard-growing, muscle-rippling testosterone has already flowed?

Are we supposed to applaud his (or her) accomplishments when they come at the former’s expense, and crown as deserving his disproportionate brawn and the dubious effort through which it was channeled? Are we to subject our young women and girls to the embarrassment and futility of racing, fighting, defending against, or attempting to score on those who play on the “transitioning” team, a clearly superior side to which, thanks to the cruelty of their feminine genes, the “natal” ladies will forever be unequal?

The same people who’d prefer you not to read Shrier’s book—those of the Progressive ilk by whom, to the realization of that aim, our brave authoress has been personally attacked and professionally censored—would wish you not to think about these things. Never mind those nasty questions listed above, by which the conscience is burdened and Leftist outrage enflamed. They ascend not to the heights of polite conversation and genteel inquiry. Indeed, they are, in some way, an expression of or an invitation to “violence”.

It’s for this very reason that I now commit myself to thinking about them all the more, despite my natural disinclination to do so. The censorship of Shrier’s work has only further piqued one reader’s interest, and provoked him to part with the contents of an otherwise unforthcoming wallet. Contrary to its intention, it’s sure to do to others precisely what it did to me. That, I think, is the real consequence of censorship, at least when it occurs in a nation Constitutionally accustomed to being free.