Archives for September 2020

The ancient standards of political discourse, over which none but the hoary classicist bothers himself, must appear to modern judgments impossibly high. They were, so many years ago, the lofty expectations to which public men affixed themselves, the strict criteria from which they, in the pursuit of high office, dared not swerve. The congested assemblies before which they spoke, the bustling citizens upon whose suffrage they relied, expected political discourse to be not only elevated, but inspired, not only penetrating, but sharp. That which was base and dull would be rejected and ignored. That which was inarticulate or vulgar would be condemnable by death.

No greater shame could befall a politician than a failure to speak clearly and to reason well. No greater loss was to be had than an inability to persuade not by actions, but by speech, and to lift oneself upon the wings of rhetoric, to which one’s own brilliance might give flight. That, after all, was the purpose for his being, without which his destiny aligned with that of an obscure and uncelebrated man. Speech, for him, was a vehicle toward the acquisition of power. Yet it was also a journey by which he was delighted and engaged.

Thus, these men ensured the unerring eloquence of their tongues and the keenness of their wits, with which they might vanquish an opponent, and secure a fickle mass. They refined their every argument and festooned their every flourish, knowing that as the latter pleased, the former would convince. They prepared themselves for every rebuttal with which they might have to contend, to which, unhesitatingly, they’d issue a profound and dazzling response. This was the work of the public man. It required of him an immense agility of mind and a formidable strength of will. It demanded that he be light on his feet and heavy in his thinking, as there’d be hostile volleys to evade, and pin-point missiles to discharge.   

To the enticements of inconsistency, he offered no quarter. Every line of which he was the author was scrupulously considered and carefully expressed. All was set in proper arrangement, as though a straightened arrow, to which the clouded air, filled with so many windy words, would always give way. There would neither be, in the course of his speeches, things adventitious nor unwanted. Everything was natural, political, deliberate, and clear. Digressions were very seldom to be heard, as they’d not be tolerated by an audience impatient of fluff. Non sequiturs were impermissible, for the very reason that they were illogical, and a history of great speakers avoided them like the plague.

Such standards produced a class of orators to whom the millennia haven’t yet produced an equal. Scan the recent hours of our national life, and you’ll doubtless agree. Peruse the fading decades upon which a twilight of good speaking has descended, and you’re vision of this truth will be clear. So impatient in our desperate search to find a man to whom the title, orator might apply, we feel the compulsion always to return to the past; we know, after all, that we won’t find him on these ubiquitous television screens to which we’ve become so inseparably glued. There, back then, we encounter the likes of Pericles, Demosthenes, Caesar, and Cicero, of whose force of eloquence and weightiness of soul, our own age of talking hasn’t even offered a cheap imitation.

We, unfortunately, live in an age of ineloquence. We reside not amongst harmonious Greeks, but inarticulate Americans. We listen not to rigorous Romans, but to half-educated English rubes. Ours is an era from which sublimity of thought, nuance of insight, euphony of language, dexterity of words, and rigidity of reason have all been barred—so far as it concerns our political discourse, and those by whom it’s communicated.

Tonight, the two men doing that communicating will be Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Combined, their ages exceed one hundred and fifty years (a number to which their combined IQs wouldn’t dare aspire). They’ll meet each other, for the first time under such tense and meaningful circumstances, on a stage on which they’ll proceed to debate. The moderator will be Chris Wallace, from whom the epithet of “impartial” has lately been rescinded. At best, his former claim to that title has been brought into question; at worst, he’s voluntarily discharged it. The world, then and there, under his guidance and moderation, will recognize just how far from eloquence our political talk has fallen.

In the words of the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson, while the incumbent is ungrammatical, the former Vice President and Senator is agrammatical. The one suffers from a penury of diction, the other from its complete absence. The former at least approximates the English language, while the latter’s utterances, when intelligible, must be translated from an alien to a more familiar tongue.

Trump has an anfractuous, meandering style of speaking, to whose oratorical north star, it’s often difficult to orient oneself. More than often, one will be lost in a sea of aborted thoughts, fragmentary feelings, run-on sentences, and every species of superlative known to man. It’s not a hospitable, much less a navigable world through which the unprepared traveler might venture, but he does so with some hope of the discovery of firm land.

Usually, there’s a point around which the current president is beating, on which he can’t compel himself to focus, at which the listener can only guess. It’s not completely terra incognita, and it takes a bit of inference, and a lot of patience to find the solidity of footing on which any understanding of his meaning can rest. Thus, he’s a speaker to whom you must listen carefully and charitably, if you’re to understand his intent. It’s there to be found, but only beneath a pile of vulgarity and confusion.

Biden, in his brighter moments of lucidity, is very close to being incomprehensible. It’s a line he likes to toe and, sadly, a precipice over which he invariably trips. Despite the vain contentions of his close advocates and supporters, the former Vice President is obviously in state of mental disrepair. Those who contest the informality of my diagnosis might join him in being so. The mental infirmity, if not the pathologic senility that’s become increasingly difficult to conceal, is evident to all who’ve spent time with people of this type. It’s an unhappy station to which age, so callous of old accolades and previous success, tends to dispose most men. Certainly, it’s not one to be encumbered by the exigencies of a brutal political fight.

It’s Biden’s tendency to slip into a language with which only those in the grips of dementia are fluent. In a posture of drooling vapidity, they nod along in blind agreement and quiet consent. As for the rest of us, we’re left scratching our heads at the words coming out of his mouth. His thoughts are half-baked, if the oven is even turned on at all, and what’s produced is little better than the bland pabulum we’re being fed.

So, with that said, enjoy the debate tonight. Don’t despair in this age of ineloquence. It soon shall pass.  

There’s a technique often used, though never endorsed, by those engaged in the contest of logical debate. While much attempted, it’s seldom supported by those to whom the rules of disputation still retain some hint of their original meaning, and a spark of their ancient import. It’s a technique for which, like the scout perched high atop the hill, all vigilance is on the lookout, and all diversion suspended. As such, once felt, it’s seen to be an attack against which all powers of rational argument must levy their joined defense, to which they must respond with a volley of their own, if only to repulse the crazed salvo of an enemy’s emotional thrust.

The reason for this assiduity, by which intrusion of this technique is, with any luck, detected and stopped, is that this kind of fight, in which the divine calm of logic replaces the iron fist of Mars, and the steady hand of reason the wings of Mercurial caprice, offers no quarter to emotion. That, in a word, is the “technique” of which I speak, to whose tear-soaked, doleful invasion, our fellow on the mountain is so acutely attuned. He, and by extension, the rest of us, permit no access to those passions by which, upon the moment of their unsolicited arrival, all strength of persuasion is enfeebled, and all conquest of genius lost.

This technique is known by a deliciously Latin term: argumentum ad misericordiam. Known to us less formally, and therefore far better, as the “Galileo Fallacy”, it is, in a word, an appeal to pity. It’s a recourse to misery, to compassion, to sadness, or to any of the lugubrious passions by which the lofty strength of reason, so vigorous with its might, is weighed down. It’s the infringement of passion in a realm admissible only to reason, the attempt to make another feel that of which you’ve been incapable of making him convinced. That mustn’t be allowed. Fortunately, in the course of debate, only the force of conviction matters; only the latter will win the day, much though the former might try.

More than anything else, though, an appeal to pity is irrational. It’s illogical, senseless, unbecoming to the wisdom of man and, for all those reasons, fallacious. When used, it gives birth to a fallacy, a large, still-born stumbling-block in the middle of a living debate. We reject it on those grounds alone, refuse it parental care, and deny it entry to the party of the mind, around whose stolid, robust, and expansive table, the figures of deliberation and brilliance sit. Emotion is but Eris, a scorned visitor on the outside looking in. She tosses to us her golden apple, by which, in a state of weakness, we might find ourselves enticed. Not so, however, when we content ourselves with reason, by whose nourishment and glory, we’re satiated and filled.

We might, today, replace the name “Galileo” with that of “Ruth Bader Ginsburg”, without loss of the meaning for which the original term was known. Of course, the latter was no renegade scientist, by whose cosmological heresies, a stubbornly Earth-bound Church wished no longer to be bothered, but a judicial activist, of a very modern and secular type. Yet upon her recent death, by which the political world has been utterly shocked (yet, it should be said, by which that of biology—she was eighty-seven years of age, very much in failing health, and in the final throes of a pancreatic cancer diagnosis for which there was no cure—has been quite unsurprised, if not unfazed), an argumentum ad misericordiam has been issued in her name.

It’s been repeated, first by the late justice’s granddaughter, and now by a political correspondent for NPR, that it was Ginsburg’s dying wish, an earnest desire of which her departing soul was emptied, that her successor not be installed until a new president was sworn in (this, of course, presupposes the victory of Joe Biden in November of this year; should the incumbent win, a new president wouldn’t be announced until 2024). We receive her message, at this time, as a posthumous political conceit, a salvo from beyond the grave by which, according to experts, the forthcoming months will be shaken and rocked. Verbatim, we’re told, Ginsburg announced to those by whom her failing state was attended that it was her “most fervent wish” that she “will not be replaced until a new president is installed”.

Fortunately, that of which she was most fervently desirous, be it at the time of her death, or in the middle exuberance of life, is completely irrelevant to us—so far as it pertains to matters of government and state. So far as it was a personal, local concern, it has but familial importance. It extends no farther, and affects us not. It matters not to those of us—indeed, the many millions of us—who sit with detached concern outside the reaches of the Ginsburg estate. Those with whom she was most intimate, in whom she confided and found her last comfort, might regard her final wish in a way that we neither should, nor can. To them, it is of personal, religious note, as if a divine coda on which a cherished prophet’s story ends.

As for the consideration of the public at large, we must treat it as we do every other peculiar revelation, every other deathbed proclamation, to which only a select few are ever wholly privy. We must blink past it, shuffle our feet, and move on with the currents of life. It’s now the precious memory of a distant sect, far removed from the concerns of ecumenical life. We must acknowledge its anecdotal power, but reject the galvanizing influence for which its publication was surely intended. We must steel our reason to the passion—the pity, the misery, the condolence—toward which this dying wish, now a rallying-cry from beyond the grave, inclines us and our mechanism of state.

While this might, on its surface, appear a callous thing to say—especially in light of the fact that she was a judicial icon to whom every honor is owed, by whose recent passing, we’re still gravely affected—it’s eminently reasonable. Indeed, there’s nothing that could be more reasonable, and anything less, would be a great peril to the republic as it currently (albeit tenuously) exists.

The contention, coming from those in opposition to me, that her “dying wish” ought to be one to which we should all be bound, to which the posterity by whom she’s outlived should blindly submit itself, is inane.

Appropriately, as is the case, it’s been made by inane people. Those from whom we’ve come to expect so little in the way of rationality, to whom the language of reason has shown itself to be an alien and unteachable tongue, have forwarded the argumentum ad misericordiam as a means to halt the proper functions of our state. Behind the force of one woman’s dying wish (rather expediently expressed, one might add, as the earliest polls for the election open their tents this week) they hope to arrest the power of a president to nominate a justice for the court. Failing that, they hope to impede the Senate’s ability to confirm said justice, as is their established role. Failing that, they hope to provoke a political backlash, by which said Senate might be overturned.

Ultimately, though, they want to violate the sanctity of the Constitution by which that President is empowered, that role bestowed, and that Senate conceived. They want to “re-imagine” (to use their word) that very document of which, in nearly every other circumstance, they’re so meanly abusive. They want to hold it and—by extension—the rest of us, the very people for whom, so long ago, that Constitution was written, hostage to the despotism of their emotions—for whose legitimate authority, an Amendment still remains unpenned. (I very much doubt that it ever will be written, and so we’re left with the petulant assault of their cries).

Imagine, if you can, a republic conducting itself in such a way, led by the inanity of such a group of people. What if, at the bedside of every dying official, there omnipotence sat? With but an utterance of a dying wish, and a solicitous ear by which it might be heard, the power after which she chased in life, of which, in this world, she was refused, might be granted to her in death. By what power might it be executed? To whom might we, the people, submit our concerns for their redress? There is no end to what might happen, nor to whom we might be compelled to lend an ear. We would cease, very quickly, from being a democracy and become, all at once, a necrocracy—a country operating under the moribund dictates of a queen, or the lifeless whims of a king.

We’d actually set upon living beneath the tyranny of the dead.

Is this really a tradition we’re eager to adopt? Is this really an adjustment we’d like to impose upon our state? I think, by the mercy of reasonable people, it isn’t. Still, those espousing the argumentum ad misericordiam, the Galileo-Ginsburg Fallacy from which there’s been no recent escape, seem assured that it would be a worthwhile thing. They craft their argument from pity and, thus, from irrationality. They retreat to a place of sadness, and expect you to renounce your intelligence and be drawn in. It’s an ugly maneuver in this battle of logic, this fight for the truth, but one, sadly, by which conquest is gained. We must maintain the vigilance of our reason, the strength of our logic, the rigidity of our brilliance, or the hill atop which we stand, toward which, despite the distance, every nation still locks, will crumble and fall.

Though we count only few, there are some painful wounds to which even time itself—that patient panacea of most all disease, that quiet medicine for near every person and age—offers but little relief. Insensitive to the salve of time, these are the injuries upon which the subtle, persistent hands of the clock have neither a healing effect, nor an improving influence. While we await the ascent of one sun, to the fall of that by which it’s succeeded, and the transition of the climate from the autumn to the spring, we feel, with sharpened acuity and unsparing pain, the force of their impact through every hour of life.

These, as we might call them, are the non-healing wounds of life, the marks by which an age long, though not always happily lived, is forever spotted. They are the chronic ulcers on the ankles, the ageless bruises on the skin to which time, despite the noble efforts of its minutes and constant industry of its weeks, has failed to offer a real remedy. The body, never for lack of trying, has yet to have completed the re-absorption of these assaults, by which the natural hue of life and ruddiness of vigor take their signal to return. Throughout time’s long duration, it works at this task, for which greater time still is always needed.

These wounds afflict not just the mortal, but the national body as well. Like that of the citizens by whom it’s populated, or that of the generations by whom it’s sustained, the body of the nation is susceptible to damages atop which scars often fail to settle. Absent the cicatrix for which they cry out, the wounds of the nation’s body remain open, and they shriek with discomfort at the approach of another year’s cruel touch.

This nation’s greatest, and by far still freshest wound, is that which was delivered nineteen years ago, on this very day. It was nearly two decades ago, at the youthful, radiant start of a September’s morning, that radical Islamic terrorists executed their unprecedented strike. It was a terrible punch for which this supposedly vigilant, and enviably strong nation was completely unprepared. Three planes over which the terrorists gained full control crashed into their intended targets: The World Trade Center buildings—with which the very skyline of Manhattan was for so long, synonymous—and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The one plane over which their seizure was, thankfully, incomplete, in whose cabin, the very epitome of valor both fought and flew, was brought down, heroically, into the blood-soaked turf of a Pennsylvania field.

This day, more than any other, is the national wound with which we, as Americans, continue to suffer. The passage of time, to which, as of today, nineteen years have now contributed, has done little to relieve us of this deep, insurmountable pain. No scar atop it has formed, and no closure is yet forthcoming. Still, despite the discomfort, it’s a day upon which I often reflect, to whose immediate aftermath, I frequently return. I do so in order to gauge the distance by which that moment and this are separated, during which so much has transpired and the unity of our national spirit has been lost.  

For one, I direct my thoughts toward the nature of terror, on the various lineaments of its carriage, and the frightful varieties of its current use. Now, it seems, the threats by which we’re cruelly afflicted, the anxieties by which our sleep is nightly detained, are rather domestic than foreign. The enemy of whom we’ve become so recently wary, into whose obscure and dark origins, our curiosities have since begun to plumb, are to be found not across distant expanse of the seas, but within the close reach our cities; not in barren, rugged hillsides, between whose arid cracks, terror networks tend to slip and take root, but in bustling centers of finance and trade, around which our twirling economy spins; not in ancient and benighted Arabia, to whom the notion of equality between the sexes remains a radical and fatal idea, but in progressive and new America, to whose likeness the rest of the developing world still strives to affix itself.

The figures by whom our nightmares are visited, to whom our leftist politicians have agreed to prostrate themselves, aren’t the turban-clad, machete-wielding, Hadith-quoting terrorists of old. Though an undying species (killers motivated by political ideology, enflamed by religious zeal, and guaranteed the gifts of an eschatological time to come, will forever remain the nuisance of the world), this is not a group with which, at the present moment, we’re concerned. Such menacing characters, to whom the last twenty years provided so large and inviting a stage, have been replaced in this summer of our disquiet, this annus horribilis that we’ll never forget, by purely homegrown enthusiasts of the most repulsive time.

These are people, caught on the continuum between Bolsheviks and Nihilists, Communists and Anarchists, who are bent on causing destruction, toppling our confidence, inspiring fear, stifling discussion, and physically bludgeoning every opponent with whom they disagree. These are the people, Jacobins from the first to the last, who are determined to intimidate residents, crucify clerics, shatter dreams, burn edifices, stomp out businesses, shoot the police, transgress civility, and oust an incumbent president upon whom, to my great surprise, they’ve not yet ventured a fatal attempt.

They go by two names: Antifa and BLM. The former is unapologetically oriented toward terror and violence; the latter, furtively so. Both cloud their antics in the semantic ambiguity of their seemingly noble names: Anti-Fascist and Black Lives Matter—could anything be more unexceptionable? Could one be so indecent as to object to the former and its resistance to fascists, or to the latter’s demand for the confirmation of the vitality of black life?

As it turns out, both employ for the identity of their respective organizations phrases to which, in assessment of their actions as opposed to their titles, neither one honestly subscribes. The Anti-Fascists are anything but; they’ve adopted the techniques of those by whom, if only in opposition, they speciously sought to define themselves. All they lack is a charismatic Mussolini, a twenty-first-century Il Duce, around whom they might flock, and a bundle of sticks surrounding an ax, by which the symbol of their collective strength might be brandished. The Black Lives Matter advocates seem only to care about an exiguous number of carefully-selected “Black lives”, many of whom, often justifiably, were killed by the police. The plight of all Black lives, it seems, isn’t a problem about which they’re very deeply concerned, only those who succumb to the violence of the cops.

During the month of September, in the year 2001, the police were targeted for veneration. Now, nineteen years removed from the trials of that age, they’re the targets of censure, murder, and every species of abuse. Back then, though still in the comfortable innocence of my youth, I remember vividly one scene, perhaps above most others with which I came into contact. That was the ubiquity with which “NYPD” hats were to be found in every segment of society. Every politician, every athlete, every celebrity, every workaday woman and man proudly adorned their heads with this universal, reverential cap. It was a sign of national cohesion, resilience, gratitude, and pride. If not that, then they wore one emblazoned with the letters “FDNY”, or otherwise demonstrated their support for the state’s intrepid first responders in some other sartorial way.

Today, such a scene, and such a wardrobe of dress, would be unimaginable. It would be thought an unenlightened, obsolete, and deliberately provocative display, as if it were an instance of backsliding into an un-progressive and un-woke past. It would be asking for trouble. Indeed, anyone caught wearing such a hat, in a city or town in which such expressions of one’s fidelity to law enforcement was considered passé, might expose him to aspersions, bullying, or—as has become increasingly common—open and gratuitous violence. Instead of thanking these brave police officers, who ran into burning buildings smoldering with jet fuel and flesh, we’ve deemed it wise to defund them. Instead of exalting them, we’ve emasculated them.

While not quite the entire lifespan of a nation, nineteen years is indeed a long time. So much that’s transpired during the course of those years has left me, robust and an optimist, discouraged and chronically ailed. Time, as we know, hasn’t the ability to alleviate all pains. If it did, we’d numb ourselves with idleness and patience. And though the wound of 9/11 will never fully heal, we’re adding to it a masochistic barrage of self-violence. These cuts, while not equally deep, are more numerous and frightful.

I’m not so sure, nineteen years hence, they’ll form the ability to scar.

Perhaps the respect I feel for the police, the quiet veneration I hold for a group of men and women by whom, in the distance of my observation of them as they go about their work, I seem to be overcome, is filial.

My father, you see, was a police officer; my grandfather, an officer of probations. Before him, I lose sight of the lineage from which I descend, but I’d not be surprised to learn of my great grandfather’s professional involvement in the enforcement of the law. Such is the work, after all, toward which so many generations of young Irishmen have tended to be inclined, particularly those to whom the enclaves of the northeast and the coasts of the Atlantic were called home.

This made me, much to the relish of my youthful fancy, and the warm contentment of those Hibernian-American forbears out of whom I sprang, the proud inheritor of the title, “trooper’s son”. I was, not only in their eyes, but in the light of my own, a veritable law enforcement protégé, a kid destined to be a cop, if ever one was born.

Though a job from which my father has since retired, and from which my own ambitions and wanderings have decidedly turned, it was—for the dominant part of my youth—the vocation by which many of his nights, some of his holidays, and all of my dreams were occupied. Regarding the first two, I remember them well, as his absence defined the length of their hours. Those were times during which my mother and sister relied on one another and busied ourselves, awaiting each morning the joy of his return. Back then, as it is today, that was the sacrifice a father paid for the comfort of a family experiencing growth, dreaming of wealth. Material betterment was, and still is, an endeavor to which both time and perseverance were owed, and we paid for them, and he for us, with his absence.

As for the last, the dreams of which his work was provocative, I recall to mind their vividness less well. This speaks not to their deficiency of color, nor to their proximity to the realness of life, but to my awful inability of retention. Few are the dreams that I can remember. Yet I can say with confidence that I sensed them, nightly, dancing before the sleepy eyelids of my soul.

Nevertheless, it was a job, and—more importantly—he was a man, of which and of whom I was fully enamored. He was, as every father to a child should be, a man in the vibrancy of whose image I tried to color my own, a giant against whose looming example, I measured every inch of my skin. It’s unlikely, then, that the favorable impression that an adoring son has for so beloved a father (and the occupation in which, for the better part of his life, he was employed) will become, in the later reflections of his more mature years, a bias of which he’ll be disabused.

And so, you see, my reverence for the police, inextricably linked to my reverence for my father, is quite deeply ingrained. My analysis of the profession, therefore, might be understandably clouded by my devotion to the man by whom I was sired and raised into the stature of a man. I’ll not hesitate to admit a bias out of which I couldn’t hope, and, frankly, wouldn’t want, to disentangle myself. And so, you’ve been honestly warned.

But first, a bit more on him, as a more thorough explanation of his work will inform your opinion of my thought. He toiled at his work in the notoriously inviting state of New Jersey, the densely-populated, southerly neighbor of New York into which, thanks to the permeability of their shared border, and the venality of its morally impoverished politicians, many of the Big Apple’s criminal misfits were hospitably received. Its sordid reputation, of which all Americans join in making fun, was unfortunately deserved, but there were many qualities by which New Jersey might find herself redeemed. One such quality, I thought, was her long-established and highly-distinguished institution of law enforcement.

Her police officers, I was told, were the crème de la crème, an elite crop of law enforcement professionals to which no other state could produce a superior. They embraced a professionalism by which, in contrast to those cursory appointments of town deputies and local sheriffs of which lesser states made so hasty a use, they found themselves distinguished, and a fidelity to the public’s safety above which they placed no greater priority. That, more than anything else, was the consuming subject of their concern. They were honest, rugged, indefatigable men, uniquely upright and selfless characters to whom the lures of mischief and the bait of coarseness offered but little attraction. Onto these hooks, seldom did they bite. To them, virtue was never an inconvenience, but a constant standard of behavior from which there was no departure. These weren’t great men, but very good men—the type of pillars around whom a community can be built, and by whose continued presence, that same community might be protected and sustained.

I very much doubt, in the days and years to come, that police departments—such as that of which my father was a member, among whose ranks, I once dared to imagined myself —will continue to enjoy the admission of so many good and honorable men. The once esteemed police force of New Jersey, imminently, will be debased. Those of the forty-nine other states will follow suit. The job of a police officer, after all, in the boiling violence of this terrible moment, has gone from respectable, to unenviable, to impossible. Now, it simply can’t be done, and it sadly shows no indication of circling back to the first position from which it’s since fallen. It’s unlikely anytime soon to become, once again, respectable and proud.  

The plight of the police officer, as currently it exists, is as follows:

He’s assumed, without the burdensome accompaniment of proof, to have acted in every instance with malign intent. That’s his original sin, an inescapable demerit from which there’s no remission. A priori, he’s deemed evil, without any opportunity to demonstrate himself good. A cop is never guiltless, after all. He’s to be charged with every crime of which he’s in pursuit, and punished for every offense to which our society has given license.

There’s neither benignity nor caution in the tread of his approach, but an intention to do violence, only. The protestations in defense of his humanity are shouted in vain, as he’s dismissed outright as a barbarian, or worse. More than likely, the categorizations to which he’ll be subject include such titles as sub-human, troglodytic, or bestial, and those by whom said names will be given would rather see him, more than the grunting ape or the snapping crocodile, behind the steel of unbreakable bars.

His every defense, if permitted to be heard, is either inaudible or artificial to the ears of the incurious rabble by whom, ironically, his protection is most needed. Never, in their opinion, is his story to be believed. He’s thought to be a fabulist, a terrorist, an author of horrors uninterested in the tender cries of the sanctity of human life. Any report he gives, even when buttressed by the evidence of film, is categorically to be dismissed. His facts, when unconducive to the growth of the narrative under whose shade we now rest, are to be diverted, suppressed, and ignored.

The presumption is that he’s not just ruggedly callous, but deliberately cruel. He’s thought to be a predatory beast, a blue-emblazoned tiger to whom all life—but especially that dressed in the hide of brown or black skin—has neither meaning nor value. Upon them, he’ll pounce with the breeze of a sniff, the flicker of a sight, if only to devour whole the delight of their bodies. The badge by which his chest is adorned serves only as a concealment of this savage heart. The belt by which his waist is girded restrains the fires of his murderous bowels, insatiably seeking for the nourishment of a kill. The night stick by which his thigh is rubbed incites a primordial, sexual arousal, and the gun for which he too eagerly reaches is but the culmination of his tumescent desire to slay.

While he’s never to be welcomed, all promptitude is expected of him in the event of a crisis. He’s at once banished and demanded, excommunicated and beckoned, as if both devil and saint. He’s the figure upon whom curses are rained, of whom, just a minute later, salvation is expected. Those rioting for the elimination of his livelihood will, the very instant a belligerent comrade falls, call immediately for his presence and the solicitude of his help. They’ll bludgeon with bricks those protesting in defense of his value and then, once the tables have turned, retreat behind the protection of that same authority for which they’ve hitherto shown nothing but contempt. He’s the scapegoat of the politician, the pariah of the community, the persona non grata of the rioting class, yet all depend on his service every single day.

The same Black Lives Matter advocate, after confessing to his spellbound listeners his desire to put police officers “in their graves”, will, upon the endangerment of his own person or property, call for those same officers’ posthumous help. Should his worldview succeed, their return of his call will be somewhat unforthcoming. A number of Chicago gangs, in what appears to be a joint-pact of lawlessness, if not a murderous manifesto, have announced their intention openly to target the police. Members of that same cabal, in the bullet-torn exigencies of a troubled moment, will be just as likely as any to forget the sincerity with which their original commitment was made, and dial those three familiar numbers, 9-1-1.

The most populous, “progressive” cities of which this nation was once so boastful, from which it now averts its gaze, have declared their intention to “defund” the police. Often, the term is used with deliberate ambiguity—a tacit acknowledgement of the distaste with which, when described to the suffering residents whom it’ll most intimately affect, it’ll likely be met—but always involves the re-allocation of funds away from the police. The cities by which this “defunding” agenda is to be effectuated include Austin, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and—of course—Portland. Others are adding their names to this list. Yet still, as they do, those very same legislators by whom these initiatives are enacted, to which they hope to attach the advancement of their careers, go out and enclose themselves with—you guessed it—none other than hordes of disrespected city police. It would be madness, after all, to walk outside among the rioters (whom they represent) without the endless security of their vigilant presence.

Openly, I confess my bias—I’m sympathetic to the police. There’s nothing implicit in the frank acknowledgement of my feelings, no shade by which my true sentiments might be concealed. And so, I can’t help but pity their current situation, while dreading the future into which they’ll be pushed. By so many forces—be they gangs, BLM activists, Antifa rioters, or myopic and hypocritical politicians—they’re being hastened to the edge of a cliff. Cops like my father, and my grandfather before him, will no longer risk their lives, nor sacrifice their tranquility, to protect and serve a city from which they receive no support. They’ll jump off that precipice, never to return. They’ll neither pledge an oath, declare their fidelity, nor commit their allegiance to a people by whom they’ll only be relentlessly prodded and condemned. Worse individuals, if any individuals at all, will replace them instead.

These are my thoughts, though few and ill-formed, on the state of the police.

Few are the subjects upon which, without abusing the patience of the reader, or the charitable goodwill of a dear friend, I’m able to expatiate. While I might talk extensively on any number of topics, to which the paucity of my competence is almost always unequal, I do so meaningfully on only a few. One subject to which the former camp is home, over which I feign no mastery and onto which my narrow abilities can’t hope but grip, is the cinematic work of the estimable Christopher Nolan, the English-born, Hollywood-beloved artist by whom the recent film Tenet was both written and directed.

I’ll not here attempt an exegesis of a film whose stated intention was not to be understood. To do so would be folly, and those critical writers committed to so airy a task are putting their pens to the winds and scribbling in vain. That Nolan wished Tenet to be unintelligible and, for that reason, incompletely enjoyed, was quite clear from the outset of the film. From that point until its end, the action was vigorous but desultory, the dialogue intricate but inaudible, the plot partially developed, the score wholly overwhelming, and the characters frankly superficial. Not even the intrepid “protagonist” (literally titled as such) proved a figure into whom much emotion could be invested. Such was the experience of an audience member who, in desperation, was looking for solid ground on which to stand, and a tangible character with whom to connect.

While equally as ambitious, it was far more circuitous than his prior work, Inception, with which, for obvious reasons, it’s been widely compared. The comparison, in some ways, is apt. Both films play, more or less successfully, with the theme of time. In both, its ephemerality is suspended, as it comes to be manipulated in the hands of a degenerating, fighting humankind. Both force the viewer to think in a dimension into which he seldom brings himself, yet out of which, upon reflection, he never fully steps. However, its treatment in the earlier film, Inception, must be judged the greater achievement of the two. Tenet dealt with its mergence and simultaneity as the past, with malign and nefarious motives, approached the present, and the present ambled near a future toward which it hesitatingly stepped. Inception relied on the strange a-temporality of dreams, deadly fantasies into which, clouded by an unarousable stupor, its cadre of heroes and villains slipped.  

Tenet ultimately lacked the novelty, cohesion, strength of cast, and unity of action for which Inception—though inscrutable in its own right—was so feverishly celebrated. Tenet may, for those reasons, fail to inherit the plaudits of which its predecessor (released, much to my disbelief, an entire decade ago; the time does fly!) was undoubtedly more deserving.

My sincere analysis of the film, my terse and honest criticism of Nolan’s latest work, must end with that thought. However perfunctorily pursued, and ineloquently stated, that’s all I have to say. It’s not a lack of interest that compels me to abort so prematurely the daunting nature of this theme, but an exhaustion of those meager abilities beyond which, as you can tell, I can’t ascend.

I will append, however, one final note. It pertains to the trite way in which villainous characters are generally cast. In Tenet, Nolan employs as his antagonist the loathsome Andrei Sator, played by the Shakespearean Irishman, Kenneth Branagh. Sator, as his Sovietized name, predilection for strong drink, and coarse accent combine to suggest, is a Russian oligarch of the worst kind. He’s like modern-day Putin, but more combustible, or a resuscitated Stalin, but far more murderous and savvy. Aside from being a dastard son of that flagitious state, Sator is an arms-dealer, nuclear -promulgator, sadist, misogynist, and time-traveler—the eastern menace of whom our diverse lot of heroes are in so constant a pursuit. While the part is played frighteningly well, and the depth of Sator’s turpitude is never completely plumbed, I found myself at once frustrated and bored by the sight of yet another Russian malcontent bent on destroying the world.

Has this figure not yet exhausted his time on the stage, well-spent, doubtless, especially during the height of the Cold War and the perilous aftermath to which it yielded? Have we not seen one bad-guy after another, paraded before our eyes, emerging in sequence as if just released from an annual politburo meeting? Have we not come to associate, as if trained by the eminent Pavlov himself, the sound of a Russian accent with malicious, world-conquering deeds? Those eponymous dogs, whose behavior was conditioned by the sage scientist, knew no better; irrational beasts, they salivated unconsciously with the bell’s every ring. What excuse have we as humans, in whom the sound of a Russian speaker now incites a thoughtless reflex to cringe?

Although Russia persists in the sphere of international relations as a bad and contemptible apple, as a kind of geographically expansive persona non grata to which no Western country wishes to be seen as a friend, so far as the US is concerned, it’s long since forsaken its place as a primary existential threat. Though still bad, it’s far from the worst. New countries, namely China and—to a much lesser extent—Iran, have stepped up to fill that role. It’s time, I think, that our class of filmmakers, daring artists as they proclaim to be, begin to reflect in their movies the reality of this fact.  

I know the reasons why they won’t, as does every viewer whose eyes have become decreasingly glued to the screen. The Russian villain is predictable and hackneyed. We’ve become desensitized to his long-forgotten evils, and he’s no longer a source by whom we’re genuinely intimidated. But the Chinese autocrat or the Iranian mullah? They might very nicely do the trick. When will Hollywood replace our tired Russian with the fresh Chinese despot or the Iranian thug, one whose crimes in this world far exceed those that can be imagined and formatted for a DVD? When will it steel itself to Asiatic criticism, accept the unprofitability of its “offensive” choice, liberate itself of foreign censorship, and draw villains as they ought to be drawn in the current age?

I was hopeful that Tenet might do exactly that. Instead, like all other American films of which the past two decades have been productive, it traveled back in time, yet again, and chose as its villain yet another Russian. Let us, instead, move into the future, boldly into an exuberant and free age, and cease cowering at the threat of the Orient’s genocidal, fascistic, communist regimes.