What I see on the faces and hear in the voices of so many of the people around me is sheer disbelief about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a brutal war in Europe: Aren’t we supposed to be past this? Didn’t history move on? The Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and democratic liberalism was the wave of the future, which wouldn’t be so kind to strongmen like Vladimir Putin.
Well, Putin didn’t get the message. Nor did plenty of others around the world. Our notions about history were innocent and disregarded most of it. They also depended on a solipsistic projection of Western — and, especially American — culture and beliefs onto nations that share neither.
I don’t know if it’s a boomer thing, a modern thing, an elite thing or some other thing, but in my lifetime, in this country, among many of my generational peers, there has been a sense that people had learned particular lessons and were evolving past extremes of pettiness and barbarism, certainly in the corners of the globe deemed more enlightened.
In Europe, so devastated and so educated by World War II, sovereign nations wouldn’t be invaded just because their neighbors were mightier, meaner and more rapacious. That was a grandiosity and folly of the past — before the European Union and before all of our “advances,” a word we’ve used so frequently and clung to so tightly, as if the accretion of knowledge and the epiphanies of science were guarantors, or at least harbingers, of affluence and peace.
This perspective wasn’t just overly optimistic about history’s arc. It was blind to the present — to the unabated factionalism in the Middle East, to the blood spilled on borders all around the world, to the enduring and enduringly potent strains of territorialism and tribalism, to human nature. We are creatures of magnificent grace, capable of extraordinary altruism and empathy, and I usually choose to focus on that. But we are also acquisitive, aggressive, envious, suspicious. Look no further than the theaters of political warfare here in the United States — exemplar and tribune of the West — for evidence aplenty of that.
Knowledge is no antidote to the most destructive human qualities. It’s no vaccine. To wit: vaccines. As my Times colleague Bret Stephens recently noted about conspiracy-minded Americans of the current moment: “Here we are with a vaccine that can save you from dying or going to the hospital with Covid, and tens of millions of people refuse to help themselves by taking it. Which goes to prove that no pandemic is deadlier than stupidity.”
We scale fresh zeniths of sophistication; we tumble into the same old savagery. We devise technologies to usher us into a new information age; they become tools of misinformation. Three steps forward, two steps back, because, as my colleague David Brooks wrote last week, we’ve been cavalier about the constant hard work of progress and inadequately mindful of the full, messy spectrum of human tendencies. It’s not just that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; it’s that the past repeats itself, not precisely but to a significant degree, because the psychologies that shaped it survive it.
I was struck by a passage in Madeleine Albright’s excellent guest essay yesterday about Putin and her first impressions when, as the U.S. secretary of state, she met him in 2000. In the notes that she wrote down of their encounter, she remarked not only that he was “small and pale” but also that he was “embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.”
He has stewed in that embarrassment ever since. He has grown more intent and less inhibited. And now the small and pale man has struck. He announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine today. He ordered and commenced a sweeping invasion by land, air and sea. By late this morning there were already reports of dozens of Ukrainian casualties, and there were explosions not just near the Russian border but also in cities all across the country, whose citizens find themselves at the mercy of Putin’s megalomania.
Embarrassment, vanity, viciousness: History never moves on or gets past these forces, which drove invasions and conquests in centuries past and will drive invasions and conquests in years to come. There should be no great shock about Russia’s audacious attack on Ukraine — only profound sadness and painstaking thought about what to do and what’s to come.
For the Love of Sentences
It’s only fitting that tributes to a gifted wordsmith include gifted wordsmithing, and that was the case last week with articles about the death of the writer P.J. O’Rourke.
Christopher Buckley’s take, which appeared in The Times under the headline “P.J. O’Rourke and the Death of Conservative Humor,” included this passage: “Humorlessness has crept in its petty pace to the right, where it is conducted with North Korean-level solemnity by the bellowing myrmidons of MAGAdom. A sense of humor, much less self-awareness, is not a trait found in cults of personality. If Tucker Carlson has said anything advertently funny, witty or self-knowing from his bully pulpit, I missed it. Maybe you had to be there.” (Thanks to Jonine Collins of Aurora, Colo., and Jeff Merkel of Fairbanks, Alaska, among others for nominating this.)
Buckley later added: “P.J. wasn’t the only conservative pundit to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but he didn’t try to spray Febreze on his ballot.” (Keith Bernard, Charlotte, N.C.)
The Times book critic Dwight Garner added his own two cents on O’Rourke’s luster and legacy — and, Dwight writing like Dwight, it was more like two hundred bucks: “O’Rourke’s death matters not just because he was a lively presence, a cranky original. His absence leaves a martini-glass-size gap in what remains of conservatism’s huddled and surrounded intellectual and cultural wing.” Also: “Tucker Carlson stole O’Rourke’s preppy look (khakis, blue blazers) but not his wit, his cool or his intolerance for the barking mad.” (Those nominations come from me.)
Here’s Dwight again, reviewing a collection of essays and speeches, “Burning Questions,” by Margaret Atwood: “I kept reading. Hope springs eternal across a crowded table of contents. And there is some smart material and pawky wit in ‘Burning Questions,’ even if they huddle, trembling, like ferns behind a waterfall.” (Jonathan Gerard, Durham, N.C., and Betsy Snider, Acworth, N.H.)
Sticking with The Times, here’s Elizabeth Spiers, whose mixed-bag skepticism about human progress clearly matches mine, on workplace romances: “We are a higher species capable of observing restraint, but we are also ambulatory clusters of needs and desires, with which evolution has both protected and sabotaged us.” (Mike Burke, Honeoye Falls, N.Y.)
Here’s James Poniewozik, noting that an appetite for nostalgia helped render aspects of the Super Bowl, especially its rap-centric halftime show, as tasty as they were meant to be: “For the game to finally center America’s biggest music genre in front of America’s biggest audience was overdue and thrilling. But the calendar doesn’t lie. The Super Bowl, as a rule, discovers music when that music’s audience discovers high-fiber diets, and the price of admission was knowing that this revolutionary soundtrack was now dad’s treadmill workout playlist. Snoop Dogg commanded the midfield stage, cool and resplendent in a blue bandanna tracksuit; that afternoon he had hosted the Puppy Bowl with Martha Stewart.” (Max Shulman, Manhattan)
Alexis Soloski, reviewing a new Off Broadway production of “The Merchant of Venice,” called it “a fairy tale with a corrosive center, a chocolate filled with battery acid.” (Leila Hover, Lacey, Wash.)
Melissa Kirsch, pondering “How Life Resumes” after the worst of the pandemic, described a trip out to the movies: “Being in an audience, emoting in concert, even squeezing past the bitter-enders in my row who sat all the way through the credits, felt good. It felt like a two-hour workout for my weakened living-life muscles. (Mary Liz Olazabal, Miami)
Sabrina Imbler and Emily Anthes traced the path of the coronavirus through the animal kingdom: “The virus infiltrated zoos, infecting the usual suspects (tigers and lions) as well as more surprising species (the coati-mundi, which is native to the Americas and resembles a raccoon crossed with a lemur, and the binturong, which is native to Southeast Asia and resembles a raccoon crossed with an elderly man).” (Susan Sawatzky, Colorado Springs, and Bernie Cosell, Pearisburg, Va.)
In The Washington Post, George Will bemoaned the Trump-pleasing somersaults performed by so many Republicans: “Considering the amount of nonsense spoken, it is consoling that so many people mean so little of what they say.” (Arthur Rothstein, San Francisco)
David Ignatius, turning his attention toward Putin’s aggression, wrote: “Perhaps the Ukrainians will be able to field a strong, prickly resistance movement in the weeks ahead. But history teaches that this porcupine may have internal parasites — and that it will be pursued by a very sharp-toothed fox.” (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)
Also in The Washington Post, Robin Givhan reflected on the grief and strength of Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, as she spoke out on Tuesday: “She was the believer in God’s unflinching might. She was the unabashedly determined, stubborn and angry Black woman. Cooper-Jones epitomized all that is beautiful and wondrous in that phrase. Despite the effort society has expended trying to transform that trope into something ugly and hateful, there is no greater salvation than to rest under the protective wing of someone who loves you fiercely and relentlessly, who is enraged by your pain and who will fight your battles when you no longer can.” (MaryBeth Winkworth, Southfield, Mich.)
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 please include your name and place of residence.
On a Personal Note
When readers thank me, it’s often for articulating perspectives that they share, and I understand why that’s meaningful to them. We’re all buoyed by the reassurance that others experience the world in the same fashion that we do.
And we all like leads and tips, so I’m not surprised when readers convey their gratitude for an article that I’ve pointed them toward, a book that I’ve praised or a television show that I’ve recommended.
But from time to time, after I’ve written something especially personal, I get a kind of thank-you email that I don’t expect. A reader will communicate appreciation for my vulnerability.
And I’ll pause over that word, because vulnerability is usually cast in negative terms: To be vulnerable is to be at risk. To be vulnerable is to be exposed. It has connotations of weakness, fragility, danger. Ukraine was vulnerable.
But these readers see another, different kind of vulnerability. Oprah Winfrey does, too, as I learned this week. On her Oprah Daily website, she has begun doing a series of “The Life You Want” classes, and she invited me to join her for one on Tuesday night to discuss my new book, “The Beauty of Dusk.” (The Times ran this excerpt last week.)
I’ll admit to being wowed simply that an advance copy had found its way into her hands, let alone that she’d read and wanted to talk about it. She specifically wanted to discuss its portrait of vulnerability and my description of my compromised and imperiled eyesight not as a diminution but as an education. She wanted to ponder vulnerability as a means of connection, a bridge.
And that is, indeed, how I tend and try to see it. To be vulnerable is to be more alert and ideally more sensitive to what’s going on around you. To be vulnerable is to let others in, and there’s promise as well as peril in that. To admit to vulnerability is to own up to being human. You show me someone who’s alive, I’ll show you someone who’s vulnerable.
There are days, sure, when my vulnerability feels like powerlessness and I tremble inside. There are quite a number of them, and that’s not about my eyesight but about a thousand other things — about the evanescence of pleasures that I so wish I could hold on to, about the inconstancy of people whom I’d prefer to depend on, about my own failure to keep some of the promises that I’ve explicitly or implicitly made, about the limits of my energy, which once seemed boundless.
I’m vulnerable to great disappointment. But that goes hand in hand with being open to great joy.
