There’s a kind of holiday-season letter — I’m sure you’ve received one — that isn’t so much an update from the family who sent it as an advertisement for the brood’s glory.
The children are typically the stars of it. One of them just got into Princeton at 13. The other climbed Kilimanjaro. There’s a photo of the two in just the right outfits against just the right backdrop at just the right time of day. They’re beatific in the late afternoon light.
And the hagiography is sweet in its way. But humble? Hardly. That’s why I’m puzzled by Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s assertion last month that having children tempers a persons’s ego. And that’s why I’m glad that Kamala Harris — at whom that remark was directed — finally put Sanders in her place this week.
Sanders made her comments when she was onstage in Flint, Mich., on Sept. 17 with a father of five whose ego has, by her moral arithmetic, been quintuply tempered. I speak of course of Donald Trump. Sanders once propped up his presidency for a salary, as the White House press secretary. Now, as the governor of Arkansas, she shills for him for free.
She was introducing him to a crowd, and after telling a cute story about one of her own three children, she said: “My kids keep me humble.” Then — because it’s the logical segue? — she added, “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.” For good measure, Sanders mispronounced Harris’s first name. Because that’s what a humble person does: shows phonetic respect. You can take the woman out of the Trump administration, but you can’t take the Trump administration out of the woman.
Later, when people less petty than Sanders expressed offense at her swipe, her spokesman said that the humility deficit she had in mind was Harris’s “claiming she alone can solve America’s problems.” Whoa. Hold on a second. “I alone can fix it” — that’s indeed an infamous boast, uttered at the Republican National Convention in 2016 by one Donald J. Trump. Sanders and her minions need to hit the history books. They’ve got their egoists all mixed up.
Although Harris’s allies and many other Democrats immediately called Sanders out — and noted that Harris has two stepchildren to whom she is close — Harris herself didn’t respond until her media blitz this week. On an episode of the podcast “Call Her Daddy” that was released on Sunday, she suggested that Sanders avail herself of a calendar.
“This is not the 1950s anymore,” Harris said, after noting that “family comes in many forms.”
So does arrogance, and one form — which was personified by Sanders when she oxymoronically preened about her modesty and is perfected by JD Vance pretty much anytime he opens his mouth — is the attitude that yours is the only righteous way of living. Another form is the insistence that being fruitful and multiplying is some singular service to God and country.
My fruitlessness — I’m a childless dog laddie — is its own contribution. I pay (gladly) for public schools that I don’t use. I participate (again, gladly) in health insurance plans that are more generous to colleagues with children than they are to me. Even at my most profligate, the one of me doesn’t leave a carbon footprint as broad and deep as a gaggle of mini-me’s would.
Those aren’t complaints, just observations, offered in the context of Sanders’s apparent belief that those of us without progeny swagger through our days with egos unchecked by diapers, “Goodnight Moon,” tonsillitis and soccer practice.
I’m in fact in awe of parents. I don’t know where they find the time and energy that doing right by a child or children demands. I can barely remember and carve out the two minutes to tug the trash and the recycling to the curb every Friday morning. I don’t know how parents calibrate the correct balance of sternness and lenience, of admonition and adoration. I don’t know how they manage their sorrow when they see their offspring in pain.
And they are seasoned — and in many cases humbled — by all of that.
But there are humbling experiences aplenty outside the realm of parenting, and in my observation, many people’s decisions to become parents aren’t acts of self-effacement and generosity, at least not solely or principally.
Their reasons for having children may include the emotional rewards of those relationships, the hope that their children will someday watch after them, the glimmer of immortality achieved by passing on their genes, the fascination of watching their own flesh and blood navigate the world.
All of those motivations are recognizably and touchingly human.
Not one of them is humble.
For the Love of Sentences
Let’s do politics first. In her Men Yell at Me newsletter, Lyz Lenz observed that in last week’s debate, JD Vance “let the lies flow freely and smoothly, like he’d taken some sort of verbal Miralax for villains.” And Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who reportedly enjoyed watching pornographic videos of transgender women, “isn’t the only man to try to have it both ways — to eroticize in the sheets the same people he oppresses in the streets.” (Thanks to Rebecca Ditmore of Bainbridge Island, Wash., and Jeff Nathan of Chicago, among others, for spotlighting Lenz’s words.)
In The Los Angeles Times, Robin Abcarian distinguished Trump from lesser liars: “While other presidential candidates have stretched the truth, only one has kidnapped it, bound and gagged it, put it in a barrel and tossed it into the East River.” (Robert Meadow, Los Angeles, and Tim Vivian, Bakersfield, Calif., among others)
In his newsletter, Political Wire, Taegan Goddard surveyed that fabulist’s unfabulous merch: “The constant stream of Trump infomercials — hawking watches, silver coins, sneakers, bibles, coffee table books, NFTs — is beginning to feel like a going-out-of-business sale.” (Nancy Jones, Iowa City)
At Defector, David Roth recapped The Washington Post’s interviews with Trump rallygoers who weren’t staying for the whole show: “Some of the people The Post spoke to left because they were sick of ‘the insults,’ which feels a bit like storming out of a steakhouse dinner just before dessert because you don’t eat meat.” (Matt Keenan, Sharon, Mass.)
In The Washington Post, Kate Cohen theorized why there’s less talk about Harris potentially shattering the highest glass ceiling than there was about Hillary Clinton’s chances of that in 2016: “This time, we’re quiet — from superstition, maybe, or from knowing how hope can plant a land mine in your heart.” (Ann Marie Joyce, Braintree, Mass.)
In The Times, Bret Stephens noted: “In an era that stresses sensitivity to every microaggression against nearly any minority, macroaggressions against Jews who happen to believe that Israel has a right to exist are not only permitted but demanded.” (Peter Schmolka, Ottawa)
Also in The Times, Ligaya Mishan described the taming of chiles: “A cook tumbles them in a wok over a roaring burner, flames racing up to the ceiling like freed souls.” (Marc Grobman, Fanwood, N.J.)
Kwame Anthony Appiah cautioned a reader about deciding to tell a woman that her romantic partner is cheating on her: “The fact that someone shouldn’t be left in the dark doesn’t mean that just anybody is entitled to turn on the lights.” (Tom Knapp, Windsor, Conn., and Robert Koenig, Bartlett, Tenn.)
And Willy Staley went on a brave expedition: “If you take a journey deep within Netflix’s furthest recesses — burrow past Bingeworthy TV Dramas and 1980s Action Thrillers, take a left at Because You Watched the Lego Batman Movie, keep going past Fright Night — you will eventually find your way to the platform’s core, the forgotten layers of content fossilized by the pressure from the accreted layers above. Down here, if you search hard enough, you will eventually find your way to ‘Richie Rich.’” (Bob Howells, Culver City, Calif.)
In Literary Hub, Elias Altman remembered that Lewis Lapham — a renowned magazine editor who died in July — did more than lavish food and drink on the people he mentored: “The real heart of his generosity was the trick he pulled with time. He gave it away freely, as if he were Prince Gautama and it a worldly possession in need of renunciation.” (Jim Gasperini, Berkeley, Calif.)
In an article in The Washington Post’s series of unsung heroes in government, Geraldine Brooks profiled a law enforcement official with the Internal Revenue Service: “I am a novelist; I make things up for a living. In my trade, it would be considered malpractice to make up Jarod Koopman. You just do not give your protagonist a set of attributes that includes black belts, vintage trucks, sommelier certificates, tattooed biceps, a wholesome, all-American rural family and a deeply consequential yet uncelebrated and under-remunerated career in global cybercrime. But as Mark Twain said: ‘Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.’” (Deborah Skozek, Chetek, Wis.)
Also in The Post, Alex Falcone identified the online review sweet spot: “We all know that one- and five-star reviews are useless; those are just crackpots and bots. Three stars are for cowards, obviously; if you can’t be bothered to have a courageous opinion, I can’t be bothered to read it. And four stars are for liberal arts majors who had a three-star experience but grew up with grade inflation. But a two-star review, that’s a thing of beauty. Somebody who goes through the trouble of logging into an app and typing full sentences on a keyboard to give a place exactly two stars has a story to tell.” (Kathie Lynch Nutting, Mashpee, Mass.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Writing, Reading and Watching
The brutal economics of opening and running an ambitious restaurant have prompted a surprising number of talented chefs to express their creativity and ply their trades in other settings and other ways. I interviewed several of them for “Why So Many Chefs Don’t Want Restaurants Anymore,” published today in T Magazine.
Hurricane Helene’s devastation of western North Carolina illustrated not only our vulnerability to natural disasters but also the ease and unscrupulousness with which merchants of grievance try to profit — politically, financially — from such tragedies. I explored that in this contribution to the Times Opinion blog, The Point.
Two recent articles by North Carolina journalists also touched on how much false information and how many conspiracy theories those merchants peddled. In The Assembly, Eric Johnson took stock of the damage — and delusions — in Chimney Rock, N.C. And in the PoliticsNC newsletter, Thomas Mills chronicled how Republicans had to implore fellow Republicans to stop lying. His sadly apt headline: “When Your Moral Compass, or IQ, Points South.”
I’ve previously confessed my weakness — and persistent hunt — for original, ingenious horror movies, which led me to “Oddity” and “Strange Darling,” both of which garnered terrific reviews and became available for streaming recently. “Oddity” fits snugly in the horror genre, while “Strange Darling” is more Tarantino-esque thriller, chatty and cheeky. Both are excellent when they’re excellent — “Oddity” with its creepy fillips, “Strange Darling” with its use of color and several gorgeously staged and shot scenes — and letdowns in the end, more impressed with their labored cleverness than you will be.
Retire These Words!
While a sense of community is missing from many of our lives these days, the word “community” is ineluctable. It’s as if the less we have of the former, the more we prattle about the latter.
There’s talk of “the Black community,” mention of “the Jewish community,” reference to “the “L.G.B.T.Q.+ community,” each of those phrases connoting a nonexistent unity, an imagined unanimity.
Some Black Americans want to defund police departments, but other Black Americans see more policing as the best answer to crime. An overwhelming majority of Black Americans vote Democratic, but there are signs that among younger Black voters, the Republican minority is growing. And Black Americans live in urban areas and rural ones, spread across the country. How are they a community?
Jewish Americans include students who joined the protests against the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and students who felt that protesters’ language and behavior were antisemitic and threatening. How are all of them a community?
Or take my own supposed community, the L.G.B.T.Q.+ one. That plus sign and all those consonants reflect how many groups are being scrunched under one banner and how unwieldy the result is. As I wrote in a column in 2017, there are fissures galore in what is often cast as an alliance. They belie that designation.
In all of those cases and more — “the disability community,” “the immigrant community” — “community” isn’t merely inaccurate. As the newsletter reader Debbie Fox of Penn Valley, Pa., pointed out to me in a recent email, it’s reductive.
It elevates one aspect of a person’s identity over the rest and sorts us into corresponding categories. It makes assumptions and predictions about us based only on certain evidence. It erases our individuality, downgrades our agency. If people uncomfortable with that constitute a community, I belong to it.
“Retire These Words!” is an occasional feature about overused, oddly used, erroneously used or just plain annoying locutions. It appears every few months. Its previous installment was in this newsletter.
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