Last week, President Trump held a summit with Xi Jinping of China. (“Summit” is probably too grand and serious a word for what took place.) Also, Trump has invited Vladimir Putin to the meeting of the G20 in Florida this December.

I will have more to say about these things soon. For now, I would like to recall Nancy Astor, who, on meeting Stalin in 1931, said, “When are you going to stop killing people?”

That, to me, seems the best question for Xi and Putin.

***

Here is a statement from Daniel Hannan, the British Conservative, and conservative:

The US wages economic war against Canada while cosying up to Russia and, now, China. There was a time when this would have shocked the world. How our expectations have sunk.

Yes. To regain a sense of shock—the ability to be shocked—is a high aspiration. Numbness is an enemy.

***

I sometimes forget that 25-year-olds were born in the 21st century. To me, it seems like the 21st century started yesterday. Young Americans have known no Republican Party except Trump’s, and barely any conservatism except for the Trumpified one.

Before 2016, we often decried “moral equivalence,” by which we meant a false moral equivalence—between democracy and dictatorship, aggression and defense, right and wrong, good and evil.

I thought of this when listening to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—a Republican who holds the position that Jeane Kirkpatrick, Vernon Walters, and distinguished others once held:

There is a difference between invader and invaded, persecutor and persecuted, occupier and nation, murderer and murdered.

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***

The American president is now circulating material that labels the Strait of Hormuz “Trump Strait.” (For a news story, go here.) Trump is an inveterate renamer.

Instead of renaming the strait, or doing push-ups in front of our troops, as the secretary of defense does, or quoting Scripture at them, as he also does—how about winning the war?

Of course, Trump, his officials, and many other Republicans won’t even call it a war. One curious thing about this is that the secretary of defense insists on calling himself the “secretary of war.”

Well …?

***

This is Trump, speaking in Ireland: “We had a rigged election. As you know, it was totally rigged. Because I won three times. I didn’t win twice. I won three times.”

If the American president himself is saying that our democracy is a sham—and saying it on foreign soil, no less—what need is there for the propaganda of our enemies, such as Russia, China, and Iran?

***

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani circulated something bizarre: this video. It shows Mamdani and the prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, shooting crumpled-up pieces of paper into a wastebasket. The caption reads, “Being a leftist means taking big shots. And making them.”

A lot depends on what you mean by “leftist.” Medicare for All? “Free false teeth,” as Bill Buckley would say? When I was coming of age, Mao, Brezhnev, Castro, and Pol Pot were taking “big shots” and piling up the corpses.

Elie Kedourie told David Pryce-Jones, who told me: “Keep your eye on the corpses.”

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***

You may know this expression: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” The headline reads, “Germany’s AfD partners with radical Italian ‘sister party.’” For the article, go here.

That sister party, in Italy, is the Futuro Nazionale, meaning “National Future.”

Uh-huh. There is a song from a musical: “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” Let’s hope it doesn’t—belong to them (again).

***

As I and many others have noted, Republicans have come up with a technique for criticizing President Trump, if such criticism is ever strictly necessary, in mildest form: they blame his advisers. “The president is getting bad advice.” “The president has not been well advised.”

Some refer to this technique as “Good czar, bad boyars.”

I think of a story from William Safire. Nixon liked to say, “Some have counseled that I take the easy way. But …”

His staff used to joke, “Maybe a few of us should counsel the easy way, so that what he says is true.”

***

The Bayeux Tapestry has arrived in London, making a big splash. I have been splashing in the history of the Norman Invasion and Conquest. And I would like to make one point, here and now. (It is a point that has been made by many over the years.)

If Winston Churchill had not spent one day in politics, he would still be known as a great—truly great—writer. (I’m thinking in particular of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.)

His Nobel prize, in literature, was well deserved.

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***

This is a story that a lot of people would snort or snicker at. “Do-gooders.” “What about all the human needs? The needs of people?” But I think it says something remarkable, and great, about our species:

Muddy, sweat-soaked and occasionally bloody, the dedicated staff at a Mississippi wildlife center are drill sergeants. And their soldiers? Baby raccoons.

Welcome to raccoon boot camp, where the goal is to help sick or injured animals learn to survive in the south Mississippi wilderness—a skill set they would have learned from their mothers, most of whom died or were separated from their kits by storms, traffic accidents or other traumatic events.

***

A little language? I have written to Santa—months in advance:

Dear Santa,

All I want for Christmas is that people stop saying—and professional writers stop writing—“the reason is because …” (instead of “the reason is that …”). I don’t ask for a shiny red fire truck or a baseball mitt or anything else.

Thank you!

***

This is mighty good:

***

I had a very strange encounter a few days ago. I was leaving a medical center, having visited a friend. This was in New York. And a little girl was standing outside the entrance—by herself.

She said, “Hi, would you like to buy some lemonade? Or maybe you’d like to contribute a couple of dollars to get me closer to my goal?” Obviously, she was repeating lines that she had been given. I did not see any lemonade. I was confused, frankly—but I decided against asking any questions.

I reached into my wallet. She was looking at something in her hands—it might have been a piece of discarded costume jewelry. Like a hair clip. A little rusty. She said, “My brother found this in the park.” She said it in her genuine, little-girl voice—not the voice in which she had spoken her lines.

I said, “It’s sparkling and nice, just like you.”

I gave her a couple of dollars and looked around. She joined a group that was probably a family—her family. Couple of adults, a few kids. The mother was holding a gross-looking jar of lemonade. The group spoke in what might have been an Appalachian accent.

Man, was it bizarre. I wonder what will become of those children.

This week, President Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping. U.S. presidents have met with leaders of “the People’s Republic of China”—bosses of the Chinese Communist Party—since 1972. In February of that year, “Nixon went to China,” to use a phrase that soon entered our language. His days in that country were “the week that changed the world.”

That was a popular phrase for some time. President Nixon himself used it.

I have been writing about U.S.-China “summits” since the Clinton years. I wrote about Trump and Xi last May, here. In October 2020, as Trump’s first term was winding down, I wrote a general piece called “Trump and Dictators”: here.

Let me quote the opening of that piece from last May:

Since we are adults, let us stipulate that democracies often have to engage with dictatorships, and that foreign policy is not for the pure. A lot of nose-holding is involved. Paramount is the national interest, and realism is required.

There is a “but” coming—or rather a “yet”:

Yet America has long been a nation apart—not merely “another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.”

That was a line from the first President Bush.

Today, I would like to spend some time on 1972 and William F. Buckley Jr.—who went along on that trip, when Nixon traveled to China and “changed the world.”

WFB “went along” in only one sense, the physical.

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I will quote from an article published by the Richard Nixon Foundation (without signature) in 2008:

[Buckley] had been invited to join the trip largely through the influence of Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, who himself had serious reservations about the whole initiative. Apparently the idea was to somehow bring Bill Buckley, and by extension the conservative movement, into the China card fold.

It didn’t work. Buckley didn’t budge. In fact, quite the contrary—he was emboldened in his anti-communism.

WFB did a lot of writing from China, in February 1972, and kept writing about these matters after he got home. Some of the issues are still very fresh: the relationship between the United States and Taiwan; the whys and wherefores of U.S. foreign policy.

To put it mildly, WFB thought that the U.S. had given up too much. What had the PRC given up, in return? Virtually nothing (and maybe we can do without the “virtually”). Henry Kissinger, WFB wrote, “recited Chinese obeisances to the good international life. He might as well have cited the Soviet Union’s guarantee of civil liberties as listed in its constitution.”

Kissinger, in 1972, was Nixon’s national security adviser, soon to be secretary of state. WFB was very critical of “HK” when the latter was in government. Later they became fast friends. I myself was at several Buckley social gatherings at which Kissinger was the honored guest.

In 1972, WFB said that we had, in short, sold out Taiwan. The U.S. and the PRC “issued a communiqué in which the Red Chinese asserted and re-asserted their absolute right to conquer Taiwan.” Meanwhile, we Americans “uttered not one word” on “the applicability of our principles of self-government and independence to the people of Taiwan.”

It was a “staggering capitulation,” said WFB.

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But there was worse—the “atmospherics,” if that is not too light a word. We were treating a monstrous, murderous regime as we would a decent, civilized country. Buckley:

We have lost—irretrievably—any remaining sense of moral mission in the world. Mr. Nixon’s appetite for a summit conference in Peking transformed the affair from a meeting of diplomatic technicians concerned to examine and illuminate areas of common interest, into a pageant of moral togetherness at which Mr. Nixon managed to give the impression that he was consorting with Marian Anderson, Billy Graham, and Albert Schweitzer.

(Everyone reading Bill’s words in 1972 would have known those names. They can be Googled today.)

When Nixon toasted “the bloodiest, most merciless chief of state in the world”—namely, Mao—“he did so in accents most of us would reserve for Florence Nightingale.”

One more blast from Bill (the inimitable):

It is unreasonable to suppose that anywhere in history have a few dozen men congregated who have been responsible for greater human mayhem than the hosts at this banquet and their spiritual colleagues, instruments all of Mao Tse-tung. The effect was as if Sir Hartley Shawcross had suddenly risen from the prosecutor’s stand at Nuremberg and descended to embrace Goering and Goebbels and Doenitz and Hess, begging them to join with him in the making of a better world.

Above, I mentioned that Bill had addressed “the whys and wherefores of U.S. foreign policy.” Let’s get into it this way:

A reporter seated at the table with me in Hangchow, after listening to Mr. Nixon’s toast to Mao Tse-tung, whose revolution he bracketed with George Washington’s, leaned over and said: “That should dispel the last suspicion that there is a trace of ideological conviction left in Richard Nixon.” He wasn’t suggesting that Nixon is not committed, within the United States, to the usual ideals—self-government, a private sector, a bill of rights. Merely that he is utterly indifferent to whether these ideals are practiced elsewhere in the world: indeed, that he apparently cares not at all if these ideals are persecuted in other parts of the world. How far, far away Nixon is from being the “last Wilsonian” that Garry Wills thought him to be, a year or two ago.

All right, here is WFB on schools of foreign policy:

There is the school of thought that says we should go out with our Marines and make the world safe for democracy. The soldiers in that school are very few, and tatterdemalion, and there are volunteers only when freedom in Israel is jeopardized.

That is the kind of barb you can hear today (sometimes with justice, usually not).

Continues WFB,

There is the school at the other extreme, which is quite simply indifferent to the practices of other governments—the school in which Richard Nixon has apparently enlisted.

And in between?

In between there is the main army, composed of those who, while not prepared to go to war merely to relieve an oppressed people, are prepared to distinguish between those governments that make an effort, however clumsy, to acknowledge the role of the individual, and those others that make the individual the objective of their extirpative passions.

Lately, I have been quoting from a speech that President Reagan gave in 1987. He gave it during Captive Nations Week at the Ukrainian National Catholic Shrine in Washington, D.C.:

Our global commitment to freedom does not mandate the sending of arms or troops, but at the very least it means that any people whose liberty is denied or whose independence is violated—that these people know we Americans are on their side.

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On March 1, 1972, two days after Nixon’s China trip ended, the New York Times published a report headed “William Buckley Critical.” WFB was a household name. He made news, and his opinion counted.

The Times’s report, written by Bill Kovach, was filed from Manchester, New Hampshire, where WFB was endorsing a candidate in that state’s Republican presidential primary, to be held on March 7. That candidate was John Ashbrook, a congressman from Ohio. Ashbrook was mounting a challenge to Nixon from the president’s right.

(We had different ideas of “left” and “right” in those pre-Trump days.)

The Times report begins,

William F. Buckley Jr. charged today that President Nixon’s desire for political publicity at home had forced him into concessions in Peking that undermined the “whole moral basis” of United States treaty commitments in Asia.

In a scathing commentary based on his observations as a member of the press party on the trip, the columnist, publisher of the influential conservative magazine National Review, accused President Nixon of making consort with the devil and “doing it with the excessive moral enthusiasm that marks Mr. Nixon’s approach to all problems.”

Before we end, I’d like to fast-forward to December 1972, when WFB made an appearance at Harvard. Here is the Crimson (the student newspaper):

A crowd of 400 filled the Currier House Fishbowl last night to hear William F. Buckley Jr. state that Nixon’s trip to China marked an historic turning point in American values.

At a talk originally scheduled for a 25-member Institute of Politics seminar, Buckley said that Nixon “managed first to explain, then to tolerate, then to apologize for that which was formerly thought axiomatically repugnant.”

Buckley said the United States had shown for the first time a willingness to grant totalitarian systems moral parity with Wilsonian democracy. The change may have augured the end of “the Wilsonian idea” in this country, which prescribes limits to state intervention in the lives of citizens, he said.

Pause for a moment. Today, “Wilsonian” is a swear word on the American right. This was not always so.

A bit more, from the Crimson’s report:

Asked if the United States should have continued to ostracize China instead, Buckley replied, “No, I was trying to suggest that the Chinese leaders have not earned our admiration.”

This week, President Trump will meet with the leader of a one-party dictatorship with a gulag (laogai, in China). That dictatorship is committing genocide against the Uyghur people.

I will quote Roger Wicker, the senior senator from Mississippi. He is a Republican of the pre-Trump variety (and thus rare). Yesterday, Wicker said the following:

I know the president intends to discuss trade and AI with the Chinese leadership—and rightfully so. Perhaps some progress will be made. But, during every minute of dialogue, our commander-in-chief should keep in mind that his guest is a brutal, unelected, and oppressive dictator who seeks to dominate his neighbors and whose military arsenal is aimed directly at the United States of America.

The Ukrainian military has revealed Operation Vivaldi—a series of counterattacks against the Russian invader and occupier. The operation is called “Vivaldi” because it will take place over four seasons—and The Four Seasons is a famous work by that composer, Antonio Vivaldi. It is a group of violin concertos, expressing the various seasons.

To read about the Ukrainian operation, go here.

And I can tell you this: I like Operation Vivaldi a lot better than I do the Wagner Group, which is a Russian “private military company” that complements the official Russian military. Both the official and the unofficial militaries commit barbaric acts in other people’s countries.

***

When I made this point on Twitter—when I stated a preference for Operation Vivaldi over the Wagner Group—Doug Heye replied, “The most Jay Nordlinger tweet possible!”

I guess that is so …

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***

Did you hear this story recounted by Mike Pence? He told President Trump he was praying for him. Trump looked at him and said, “Don’t bother.”

I thought of President Wilson. When he was very ill, a group of Republicans went to see him. Albert Fall (a particular antagonist) said, “We’re all praying for you, Mr. President.” Wilson murmured, “Which way, senator?”

***

Yesterday, I was talking with a young friend of mine, with whom I used to discuss language—the finer points of English. In the course of our conversation yesterday, he said, “The reason is that …” Then he paused. He said, “Did you catch that, Jay?”

What a moment. I had drummed out of him “The reason is because …” I could have shed a tear. My living has not been in vain.

Do you know that song?

If I can help somebody as I pass along,
If I can cheer somebody with a word or a song,
If I can show somebody he is traveling wrong,
Then my living shall not be in vain!

To hear Bryn Terfel sing it, go here.

***

Evidently, The New Yorker has fallen for “to advocate for” and “to advocate against.” The mighty, august New Yorker—Mr. Shawn’s magazine—has succumbed.

There is worse news: in the same article, the word “reticence” is used to mean “reluctance.”

Lights out, my friends. We’re finished.

William Shawn is long gone, and so is William F. Buckley Jr. (who esteemed Mr. Shawn).

***

On the street in New York, one young man was thanking another—he said, “You’re a real one.”

I loved that. (Must relate to “keeping it real.”)

***

I once said to the father of a girl I was seeing, “She’s something else.” He said, “True. But I can’t figure out what.”

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***

In the Senate, members of the Judiciary Committee were having a discussion with the FBI director about—sorry—bestiality. To read about this, go here.

I have just one, simple point to make: They were all saying “beast-iality.” In truth, that word is pronounced “bess-chee-ality.”

***

Our president likes to call Democrats “Dumocrats”—he’s like that. He also says, repeatedly, “Nobody knows there’s a ‘b’ in ‘dumb.’” He said it again, on the stump, the other day.

For a populist, he takes a very, very dim view of the people. (Or should that be “dimb”?)

***

On the street, I heard a young woman say, “He got off scotch-free!” That’s a variation (on “scot-free”). A legitimate one? No, but I found it charming …

***

Eons ago, when I was a kid, I heard that comedians like to use funny-sounding place-names, the more consonants the better. The two examples most commonly given were “Poughkeepsie” and “Schenectady.”

Yesterday, I was listening to a routine by Aziz Ansari. And he used … Poughkeepsie. He used it in the phrase “kimchi in Poughkeepsie,” which is really inspired.

The better comedians take great care with language. There is poetry in their work. Or: They have a natural, unconscious feel for language.

***

Maria Elvira Salazar has cut a campaign ad. She is a congresswoman from Miami—a Cuban American and a Republican. In her ad, she lightly criticizes President Trump for ICE tactics. She is in a competitive race.

I have a lot to say. But I’d like to confine myself to a point about her name, and its pronunciation. She has a Spanish way of saying it and an americano way. At the end of this new ad, she says it American-style.

Back in 2018, when Salazar first ran for Congress, I went down to Miami to report on the race and to interview her. The candidate, I said, is

known universally by her first name alone—or rather, by her first and middle names together: “Maria Elvira.” She has been a television journalist for 35 years. She is a striking woman with a big personality. How do you pronounce “Elvira,” by the way? Well, in Spanish, it’s “El-vee-rah.” But for Anglo audiences, the candidate goes with “El-vie-ruh.” This name is established in American culture, she points out to me. Think of the country song, a hit for the Oak Ridge Boys in 1981: “Elvira, Elvira, my heart’s on fire, Elvira.” Think, too, of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the horror-movie hostess from the 1980s. She brought serious cleavage to television, as the candidate notes.

That was an enjoyable conversation.

***

A quick word about Salazar’s opponent this year, the Democratic nominee: He is Eliott Rodriguez, and he, too, is a Cuban American, and he, too, was for many years a television journalist.

Gives a person a leg up, you know?

So, we have “Eliott,” and “Elliott,” and “Eliot,” and “Elliot”—have I missed one? I wish they could agree, I swear …

***

It is a pleasure, an ongoing pleasure, to read Henry Oliver, of The Common Reader. He has written (once more) about Samuel Johnson. Let me quote from the subheading of his post: “I am unashamed to call him a great man, to say that he is my hero.”

As they say on social media, “Endorsed.” Or “+1.”

***

Did you see this story? Holy cow.

For more than two decades, truck driver Joe Macken spent his free time building a massive scale model of his native New York City out of balsa wood and foam board.

When he finished, his daughter convinced him to show off the sprawling basement creation— encompassing over 800,000 structures—on TikTok. The video clips almost immediately went viral.

Now Macken’s model is on display at the Museum of the City of New York …

Truly wonderful. Hats off, Joe Macken.

***

Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D., Mich.) failed to win her party’s Senate nomination over Abdul El-Sayed, I’m sorry to say—but she is engaged to be married and has hinted that she will honeymoon in her home state (and mine).

Do you know what’s the traditional honeymoon site in Michigan? Saugatuck. (Next time someone quizzes you to that effect, you’ll have the answer.)

***

Here at the end, I’d like to quote from a recent article of mine, then quote a note from a reader.

“Over the summer,” I said,

I spent some time traveling through Italy, and I noticed statues of Verdi—statues in big cities, yes, but also in small towns. There were statues of other composers, too: for example a monumental one of Bellini in his hometown of Catania, Sicily.

And it occurred to me: I have never seen a statue of George Gershwin or Aaron Copland. Or of Charles Ives or Samuel Barber. Or of Stephen Foster or Leonard Bernstein. I live in New York, the hometown of Gershwin and Copland. There is no statue of either of them.

I don’t say this is wrong—a statue is not the only way to honor or appreciate a person—and I don’t say that any of the American composers I have named is the equivalent of Verdi. We’re talking apples and oranges. Still, I find the matter curious.

“There’s a statue of George M. Cohan in Times Square,” says a reader. True, true. The composer of “You’re a Grand Old Flag” (and “Give My Regards to Broadway” and other numbers we could name).

Thank you for reading, my friends, and for subscribing—and for being real ones.

After his governorship, he established his Foundation for Excellence in Education, otherwise known as “ExcelinEd.” He is its chairman today.

We begin our latest discussion with education policy. How did he get into the subject in the first place? I also want to know: Is there a federal role in education, or should it be strictly a state or local matter? How about the teachers’ unions? Are they villains?

Jeb Bush is from old American families, on both sides. His first ancestor in America arrived in 1647. Some would call him a “Heritage American.” He thinks all of this is nonsense, as you can imagine. He has no use for nativism. (And he married an immigrant from Mexico.)

We talk about immigration, and ICE. And about our $40 trillion debt. When it comes to foreign affairs, we talk about the Iran war, Ukraine, and Venezuela. We look back at the Republican presidential primaries in 2016—could anything have stopped the Trumpian wave? We talk about the Bush family.

At the end, I ask Jeb whether he has anything else to say, anything else on his mind. Yes, he says: Don’t let social media get the better of us.

Last week, I wrote about Joshua Wong, a political prisoner in Hong Kong—heroic. Here and now, I would like to mention another political prisoner in Hong Kong—also heroic. She is Chow Hang-tung, who has been imprisoned for five years. She has just been sentenced to another seven, plus three months.

Her crime? They are two. She has commemorated the Tiananmen Square Massacre (carried out by the Chinese government on June 4, 1989). And she has called for an end to one-party dictatorship.

These are indeed crimes in China—very much including Hong Kong.

In court this month, she had an exchange with the judge, Alex Lee. Perry Link has translated this exchange. He is the eminent American scholar of China, who has also been a friend to dissidents. I wrote about Professor Link in 2023, here.

Let me give you a taste of the exchange in that Hong Kong court. And, by the way, when Judge Lee refers to “sentences,” in the plural, he is referring to the sentences of Chow Hang-tung and her fellow prisoners from the Hong Kong democracy movement.

Chow: “If my actions violate the law—if the law truly cannot accommodate my beliefs—then I would rather be a criminal in a prison than a hypocrite groping my way through a sea of lies for the rest of my life.”

Judge Lee: “You’re going to persist in these beliefs?”

Chow: “Yes.”

Judge Lee: “And you believe that what you are pursuing is justice?”

Chow: “More than justice.”

Judge Lee: “You seem to feel no remorse whatsoever … How does this help with the sentencing? Will it make the sentences lighter? Heavier?”

Chow: “Each time you put another of us in prison, or add time to our sentences, you turn up the volume on our microphones. …”

Judge Lee (smiling): “Well, then, you ought to thank us, no?”

Chow: “Yes, exactly. Our thanks to the court!”

Judge Lee: “But this is no joke. We are going to handle this case rigorously.”

Chow: “I, too, am rigorous when I say I should not have been in prison a single day.”

Let me repeat something that this brave woman said: “If my actions violate the law—if the law truly cannot accommodate my beliefs—then I would rather be a criminal in a prison than a hypocrite groping my way through a sea of lies for the rest of my life.”

We are lucky to have people such as Chow Hang-tung among us—in the human race.

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***

Now to the United States. Much has been written about the below message, from a Republican nominee to a statewide office in Texas:

Let me recommend a piece by Nick Catoggio, in The Dispatch: here. I would like to say just a few things about the topic.

1. In my experience, Indian immigrants and their offspring are much better and truer Americans than our nativists. (I have had ample experience with each.)

2. Will that candidate’s message—his tweet—help him or hurt him on Election Day? He must have calculated that. This is sobering, to me, certainly.

3. A friend of mine—an American of South Asian origin—said to me, “Gee. I thought they wanted us to assimilate.” I have noticed a progression, in recent years. Goes like this:

I’m not against immigrants, mind you. Just illegal ones.

What I insist on is assimilation. Being legal isn’t good enough.

Oh, hell, just kidding: I’m against immigration.

4. A critic of mine on social media—one of these people who style themselves “based”—told me I had no idea what it means to be an American.

I think I do. And I will call on President Ford, in a speech he gave on the occasion of our Bicentennial:

To be an American is to subscribe to those principles which the Declaration of Independence proclaims and the Constitution protects—the political values of self-government, liberty and justice, equal rights, and equal opportunity. These beliefs are the secrets of America’s unity from diversity—in my judgment the most magnificent achievement of our 200 years as a nation.

Today, there are people who boast of being “Heritage Americans.” I suppose they are “based,” too. I wonder whether these people are acquainted with our heritage—in particular the Declaration and the Constitution.

I think of Akhil Reed Amar, that son of Indian immigrants, and the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale. He may know more about our Founding and its purposes than all the “Heritage Americans” put together.

(For a podcast I did with Professor Amar in 2022, go here.)

5. Texas Republicans were forced to respond to the noxious tweet. The governor, Greg Abbott, did not criticize the tweet directly, nor did he criticize the tweeter. He opened with “That is not my message.” And he closed by pointing out that he had frozen H-1B visas at Texas universities—a freeze that affects Indians in particular.

Governor Abbott’s response seems to me a perfect snapshot of the GOP in our times.

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***

In recent days, our vice president, JD Vance, has had favorable things to say about Huey Long and unfavorable things to say about Milton Friedman. In 1968, William F. Buckley Jr. had a famous debate with George Wallace. Which way would the Right go? Which would be “conservatism” in the United States?

Today, Long and Wallace have the upper hand. But Friedman and Buckley are waiting—to be rediscovered and returned to.

***

Yesterday, I was thinking about Israel, and … Hang on, let me tell you a story, before I continue.

Once, President Johnson called up Abba Eban and said, “I was a-scratchin’ of my ass and thinkin’ about Is-ra-el.”

How do I know this? Because Eban told David Pryce-Jones—complete with LBJ accent—and David told me.

Anyway, I was thinking about Israel—and wishing for the appearance of a new party. Then I thought, “If I were an Israeli, founding a party, what would that party look like? What would the party stand for?” Then I thought, “Hell, what if I were founding a party right here at home?”

Back-of-the-envelope kind of thing, these would be the party’s leading principles—its planks, its tenets, its raison d’être:

the rule of law
constitutionalism
the separation of powers
federalism
individual rights
a free economy
international trade
fiscal responsibility
personal responsibility
honesty
good character
intolerance of corruption
a strong national defense
the national interest
democratic alliances
championship of human rights
equality of opportunity
equality under the law
colorblindness (not to be confused with naivety)
civil society (its flourishing); endless little platoons
genuine patriotism (free of jingoism)
pluralism—and yet E pluribus unum
ordered liberty (the lodestar)

I will close by quoting Lesley Gore, singing in 1963: “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.”

Bless you all, dear readers. Thank you for reading and subscribing—and being.

… our guest today is one of my favorites: Steven B. Smith, the scholar of political philosophy. He is a Chicagoan—not a North Shore kid but a gritty South Sider, who would earn his Ph.D. at the local school: the University of Chicago. Since 1984, he has taught at Yale, where he is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science.

He is the author of many books, including Modernity and Its Discontents. Back in 2021, we talked about his then new book Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.

He has now written On Statesmanship. It is a beautiful, learned book, which distills years of study and thinking. And raw human experience, I would say.

For Professor Smith, I have many questions, starting with “What is statesmanship? Who is a statesman? Not just any politician or officeholder, right?” We talk about a range of particular statesmen, including Pericles, FDR, and Lee Kuan Yew.

What was the impetus for this book? Why did Smith write it? I will abbreviate and paraphrase his answer:

For two reasons, really. One is relevant to our public life, and the other is more relevant to academic life.

Clearly, we are suffering from a dearth of great leaders—not just in America, but in many other places as well. In the last generation, there has been a rise of authoritarian leaders, but no rise on the other side: no rise of true statesmen.

We have seen a slow degradation of our politics and our public life. This book is an attempt to say, great democracies need great leaders—and we have lost the language for it. We have lost sight of what the qualities for great leadership are. We barely know how to talk about it.

On to academia:

From the beginning, philosophers have discussed the concept of the statesman. The history of philosophy is replete with profound reflections on statesmanship.

Think of Plato’s philosopher-king. And Machiavelli’s prince. And Rousseau’s lawgiver. And Weber’s thoughts on charisma, etc.

That has all but disappeared from the academy. We think a lot about democracy, and the problems of democracy, but not very much about leaders in a democracy. If you think that democracies don’t require great leaders—think again.

If there is one thing that keeps Steven Smith from despair, it’s this: you never know who will rise, and how. You never know who’s out there, to save the day—or at least to make the day better than it would have been.

Who would ever have identified Lincoln? Yet “he both rose and mastered the occasion,” says Smith.

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He also talks about de Gaulle:

Nobody had any idea who he was. He was a military officer, with no public visibility. When he spoke over the BBC from England, people didn’t even believe that that was a real name: “de Gaulle.” They thought it was made up. Yet through force of his personality and intellect, he created Free France and then the modern state.

At the end of our Q&A, I bring up a mysterious and touchy subject: “American exceptionalism.” I have always believed in it, and counted on it, but my faith is waning. And I’m not even sure what it is.

I will give Smith’s (excellent) answer—again, in my abbreviation and paraphrase:

I’m a little bit hesitant to put it this way, but I’ll go ahead: I believe that, in many ways, “American exceptionalism” is our foundational myth.

The Founders believed that they were creating something new and different. Hamilton said, We’re going to prove that a society doesn’t have to rely on accident and chance. It can be created through reflection and choice. This will be a different kind of society from others in the past.

There’s an old joke. Someone asks a philosopher, “Do you believe in free will?” He answers, “Of course I do. I have no choice.”

I feel a bit that way about American exceptionalism. Of course I believe in it—we have no choice. We have to regard ourselves as an exceptional people who are engaged in a mission that is a light unto the nations. We are a city on a hill …

This is a long conversation—like a seminar—but I feel it is not long enough. You can learn a great deal from Steven Smith, without paying Yale tuition. And the price of the book, On Statesmanship? Worth every penny.

If you haven’t heard, the midterm elections are coming—and they are important (all too). This distresses me. I think midterm elections ought to be yawneroos.

The older I get, or the more I experience, the more I like “boring.” I don’t think elections ought to be death struggles—not in a constitutional republic such as ours.

Does politics played “between the 40-yard lines” sound boring to you? It sounds optimal to me: where left-of-center Americans and right-of-center Americans agree on our basic constitutional order.

Two cheers—no, a full three—for “boring.”

***

I was thinking of an expression the other day—an expression that many of us conservatives used, way back: “social engineering.” (We were against it.)

Let me link to a news article, headed “Trump Officials Draft Plan to Pay At-Home Parents, Using Funds for Working Ones.”

I have read a fair amount of commentary about this, and I have one dominant thought:

I never liked social engineering from the left; I don’t much like it from the right. There is no end of people who are loath to let others live their own lives in an atmosphere of ordered liberty.

This is an ongoing problem, a pebble in our national shoe.

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***

Alexander Dugin is a leading Putinist ideologue in Russia, admired by many in the Free West, I’m afraid. (Of course, Putin is too.) Here is a statement from last Tuesday:

Kate Bohuslavska, a Ukrainian blogger, had the following reply: “ ‘Why doesn’t Ukraine just negotiate peace?’ they said.”

Yes. And they are still saying it. The recognition that Putin and his allies desire the erasure of Ukraine is the beginning of realism.

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Did you see this, by chance?

I think of an expression I grew up with: “Famous last words.”

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“Elections have consequences”—there’s another expression. The election last April in Hungary was hugely consequential. Under its new government, Hungary has departed from Putin and rejoined the West.

A story from last week begins,

A new government in Hungary formed after the election defeat of the country’s Russia-friendly former prime minister, Viktor Orbán, ordered the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats on Tuesday, signaling a sharp turn away from previously cozy relations with Moscow.

Hungary’s foreign minister, Anita Orbán, said without elaborating that the diplomats had been told to leave because they had “engaged in activities in Hungary that are unacceptable for diplomats under the Vienna Convention.”

Uh-huh.

Yes, Hungary’s new foreign minister is named “Orbán.” When she was introduced to Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, he said, with understanding, “My name is Donald.”

A neat response.

(By the way, Anita Orbán’s predecessor, Péter Szijjártó, who served Viktor Orbán for twelve years, is now working for a Chinese military company, as I discussed in an article earlier this month: here.)

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***

Elections have consequences, indeed—and Germans are electing members of the AfD, the populist-Right party (to characterize that party as politely and generously as possible).

Peter R. Neumann, a German academic who teaches at King’s College London, makes an interesting point: “If you think the AfD is a ‘normal’ party, look at who’s just been elected.” You’ve got neo-Nazis, porn producers, Putinists, “a former full-time Stasi officer”—quite an assemblage.

This leads me to an old point of mine: The terms “Left” and “Right” make little sense these days. We have many proud right-wingers who admire the KGB colonel in the Kremlin.

What we are seeing, I think, is simply the age-old conflict between freedom and unfreedom.

***

“Wow!” said our president. I will quote him in full:

“Make Germany Great Again!!!”? Hmmm. We’d better talk about the meaning of “great” …

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Back to Dugin—who last year said,

Swell.

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On Friday, I received the below text. Did you get one?

Unfortunately, I was a few minutes late …

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Daniel Hannan, the sterling British Conservative, had a perturbed and forlorn comment:

For better or worse—and I say, often worse—language belongs to the people. But if our nat-pops—our nationalist-populists—are conservative, then I’m Tiger Woods.

***

I’m sometimes accused of being a “zombie Reaganite.” Well, when I saw this story, I thought back to the Reagan administration.

The story? “In Major Leak Hunt, Pentagon Gives Polygraph Tests to Joint Staff Members.” The subheading of the article reads, “About 50 people were tested, an unparalleled inquiry that comes in the wake of news reports about the war with Iran and the U.S. military’s diminished stocks of munitions.”

I realize that a polygraph test can be a useful, justifiable tool. I also know that such tests can indict the honest and exonerate the lying.

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Bill Casey—William J. Casey, the director of the CIA—used to amuse guests by tricking the polygraph.

And George Shultz, the secretary of state? He felt strongly. Let me call on a news article from December 20, 1985:

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said today that he had ‘”grave reservations” about polygraph tests and would resign “the minute in this Government I am told that I’m not trusted.”

His open dissent from a directive signed by President Reagan requiring polygraph, or lie-detector, tests by officials with access to highly sensitive information touched off an unusual public debate in the Administration.

A “senior White House official” was quoted as saying, “Shultz has strong feelings. This is one thing that sends him through the roof. It touches a nerve.”

These issues perdure.

And I think that the Trump administration should concentrate on winning the war—the war against Iran—and making sure our defenses are adequate, rather than playing these games.

***

Some sports news—actually, more like social-policy news:

Aryna Sabalenka finally found something that could stop her at the U.S. Open: the smell of marijuana.

The two-time defending champion complained to the chair umpire that it was bothering her early in her third-round victory over Kamilla Rakhimova on Friday. Sabalenka said she had never smelled the odor so strong as she did while serving early in the match.

Those are the opening paragraphs of a report from the Associated Press. And Ms. Sabalenka is singing my song—a song I sing almost every day, although I am not on a tennis court but out on the streets.

To be continued (the issue, that is) …

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Care for a language item? It comes courtesy of another tennis player, and I will again quote an AP report:

Naomi Osaka may not have gone out of the U.S. Open with much of a bang. But she surely went out with a burst—of color, and a bit of swag. …

… she arrived on court Monday in a coat of many colors: a fur-trimmed cloak designed by Brooklyn-based label KidSuper.

“I felt really swaggy when I put it on,” Osaka said after the match.

That’s a new one on me—“swaggy,” meaning, I gather, confidently stylish, or stylishly confident.

***

More language? Have a look at the below, and then let me scold:

No, no, no. There is no such thing as “caffé.” “Café,” yes, “caffè,” yes. But “caffé,” no.

And let’s not even get into the second word …

***

This got my goat even worse:

In the 1990s, President Clinton and others started talking about “growing the economy.” It was wrong then, and it is wrong now.

While you’re growing soybeans, you can make the economy grow, but …

“Grow Your Mind”? Oh, grow up!

***

A Longhorn friend of mine—an alumna of the University of Texas—said, “Jay, we have a player with a name you’ll love.” She meant a player on the UT football team.

She was, of course, right. Hollywood Smothers.

(The Smothers Brothers, Tom and Dick, were entertainment stars for years.) (A nice rhyme, right? “Smothers Brothers.”) (Then there was Dr. Joyce Brothers, but that was something else.)

***

A speck of music? Slightly more than a speck? Here is my “New York chronicle” in the September New Criterion. Various composers, performers, and issues are under discussion.

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So, I’m at the golf range. In the stall immediately to the right of mine is a kid, a lefty. Therefore, we’re facing each other as we swat away. Turns out he is ten years old and that his name is Calvin.

We talk for a minute or two about lefty-righty issues. A short while later, he calls out, “You want to play Bay vs. Bay?” “Huh?” I say. Well, as Calvin explains, there is a computer system at the range that allows people in different stalls, or bays, to play a little competitive match: “Bay vs. Bay.”

“Sure,” say I. And as we part, I say to Calvin, “Look forward to seeing you on the Tour.”

To be asked by a spirited ten-year-old, “You want to play Bay vs. Bay?”—that is really a day-maker.

And I hope you have a good one—day, that is. Thanks for reading, subscribing, and “keeping it real,” to use some old slang, which is the only slang I have, except for, now, “swaggy.”

“The very least important thing about 9/11 is how I, personally, spent that day. But you may find it interesting, and I can certainly vouch for it.”

That is the opening of a piece, published yesterday at The Dispatch. The magazine (for I think of The Dispatch that way, whether it is published in physical form or not) asked me to write a piece about 9/11 and New York. That piece is mainly personal, though it also has general applications.

Today, I would like to say a little bit more, mainly about the GWOT—the Global War on Terrorism, as we used to call it. (The term now sounds antique, doesn’t it? Almost like “Peloponnesian War” …)

I have no intention of rearguing it all—Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. That would take a series of pieces, or a series of books.

Speaking of books, I recommend Decision Points, by George W. Bush. He explains what he was facing, step by step. He tells you what it was like to “sit at the desk,” meaning the one in the Oval Office—the desk at which the buck stops (or is supposed to).

The highest praise for that book came from the author’s immediate predecessor as president. Bill Clinton said that Bush “gives readers a good sense of what it’s like to be president, to take the responsibilities of the office seriously, do what you think is right, and let history be the judge.”

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***

In my Dispatch piece, I have a couple of paragraphs about Bush—in relation to New York, specifically.

On September 14 (i.e., three days after the attacks),

Bush came to town to speak to the rescue workers at Ground Zero. He was speaking through a bullhorn. One of the men called out, “We can’t hear you!” Bush answered, “I can hear you. I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

A second paragraph:

In late October, Bush came back to New York to throw out the first pitch in a World Series game at Yankee Stadium. He appeared confident. Though encumbered by a bulletproof vest, he fired a strike. The effect on the crowd, and the city in general, was oddly inspiriting, close to electrifying.

Let me quote a commenter at The Dispatch: “The account of the conversation between GWB and the rescue workers brought some tears to my eyes.”

Well, I have a confession. When I was preparing my piece, I watched a video of Bush at Ground Zero—and the same happened to me. (What I mean is, my face might have been slightly wet.)

It was rather emotional to prepare that piece anyway—to relive 9/11 and its aftermath.

***

Bush spoke at Ground Zero on the 14th. On the 17th, he went to a mosque in D.C., to say that we were not at war with Muslims at large. No, we were at war with Islamist terrorists, or rather, they were at war with us, as they had long been, and we were now fighting back.

Some people thought that Bush was being “politically correct.” (That was the term we used before “woke.”) Others thought he was being prudent, practical: we would need the help of a helluva lot of Muslims in the days, months, and years ahead.

That was right.

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***

My sense is, people have forgotten the atmosphere after 9/11, if they ever knew it. People were screaming at Bush to DO SOMETHING. They said that he and his administration had failed to “connect the dots.” That was the buzz-phrase: “connect the dots.” They should have known that these attacks were coming, in precisely the way they came!

No, wait a minute: they knew all along! And decided to let the attacks happen!

Here was the New York Post, in full tabloid mode:

“9/11 Bombshell”! Yeah, right.

Hey, did you know that 9/11 was an “inside job”? Lots of people believed it, and believe it still. They include a dear friend of mine. Some things cannot be talked about.

***

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Bush said that he had to weigh “the risks of action and the risks of inaction.” People tended to know the risks of action. But did they consider the risks of inaction? Of doing nothing?

The president had to, even if the rest of us didn’t.

***

Some of us thought that the 9/11 attacks required a response more comprehensive than we had entertained, or carried out, before. Something beyond police work and counterterrorism. We spoke of a “9/10 mentality”—a mentality we could not afford, a mentality that was dangerous, actually.

More on this in a moment …

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On the first anniversary of 9/11—now we’re up to the 25th—I gave a speech in Salonika, Greece. Under State Department auspices, I spoke at a conference called “September 11: Media and Terrorism.” That speech can be read here. And I would like to quote a single paragraph:

Above all, I think that covering and commenting on this war has meant an end to pretending—an end to pretending that everyone’s a friend, or potential friend, that every grievance is just, that a certain kind of hatred can be appeased, that America is to be blamed for humanity’s woes, that radical Islam is just another viewpoint, that there is never right and wrong, only personal subjectivity. When the prime minister of Italy said that a free, open, pluralistic society is better than a closed, stifled, lied-to one, everyone professed shock and indignation. This is the kind of pretending that gets harder to do.

Later that day, an American diplomat, a Foreign Service officer, shook my hand and said, “I think the primary message of your speech was: Time to cut the shit.”

I appreciated that, and still do.

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***

As some of us saw it, 9/11 was the latest and worst—not the first. Let me explain what I mean.

In fact, I’d like to quote again from that speech in Greece:

In 1993, the World Trade Center itself was bombed, but only a few died. Everyone kind of shuddered, and then promptly forgot about it. Our men were murdered in the Khobar Towers, on Saudi soil. Many more people were murdered at the U.S. embassies in Africa. Then, the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen, was attacked. And yet these incidents were far away, and, besides, weren’t most of the dead soldiers? They were in a dangerous business anyway.

At the World Trade Center, in 1993, six people were killed—seven if you count an unborn child.

In Khobar Towers, 19 were killed.

At our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, 224 were killed.

On the USS Cole, 17 were killed.

I will continue to quote that speech of mine, starting with a couple of sentences already quoted:

And yet these incidents were far away, and, besides, weren’t most of the dead soldiers? They were in a dangerous business anyway.

But this thinking itself was dangerous. Some people said, at the time of the Cole, that this was not an act of terror—there’s a vague word, “terror”—but an act of war, and ought to be treated as such. And yet the U.S. did little; there was a collective shrug. And that undoubtedly emboldened America’s enemies for more. A colleague of mine pointed out the old French expression, “L’appétit vient en mangeant.” Appetite comes with eating. So it proved.

That colleague, by the way, was David Pryce-Jones.

How do you declare war, or wage war, against a terror group? Isn’t that kind of gauzy, like declaring and waging war against poverty? It’s easier—more logical—to deal with a state, right?

Yes. And what George W. Bush said was: If you arm, shelter, or otherwise abet terrorists, you are the equivalent.

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It is important to remember: Most of us assumed that 9/11 would not be a “one-off.” We did not think our enemies would say, “That was nice. Murdered a few thousand of the bastards. We’re done now.” No, we figured they would do it again and again, as long as they could.

Here is a paragraph from my Dispatch piece:

Lots of people were on alert, nervous. I had a friend who was reluctant to travel to or from Grand Central Terminal, because the building made an inviting target for terrorists. Some people wondered, “Will anyone rent office space in the Empire State Building again?”

I liked what Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, said on different occasions. I will paraphrase him:

Look, we’re not going to bring the dead of 9/11 back. And we’re not going to war in order to avenge them. This is not about retaliation, retribution, or revenge. Those are three wrong R’s. It’s about self-defense. They have pledged to hit us again and again, and we can either defend ourselves or not. We vote: yes.

***

Shortly after 9/11, I happened to moderate a panel that included Vernon Walters, the distinguished Army general, CIA man, and diplomat. I asked, “What do we owe the dead? What do we owe the murdered of 9/11?” Walters answered, “That it never happen again.” In other words, we had to do the necessary to ensure, to the extent possible, that there would not be a repeat.

Amazingly, there has not been. There have been close calls, however. There was a string of close calls on the heels of 9/11.

An attack in Singapore was foiled. An attack on our embassy in Rome was foiled. Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” failed. José Padilla, the “dirty bomber,” failed.

Were we lucky? Or good? Some blend?

I can tell you this: On 9/11, 9/12, 9/13, etc., few of us could imagine that we would not be hit again, in something like a protracted, bloody struggle.

I am grateful to everyone—in the military, in the CIA, in the FBI, in elected offices—who has worked and sacrificed to keep our country safe, or as safe as possible. God bless them.

And God bless you all.

“Flicka” is Frederica von Stade, the great mezzo-soprano, and she is the subject of a new documentary: Flicka: A Love Letter. How does she feel about this?

Well, there’s a certain amount of embarrassment, but basically pure joy. It was a wonderful experience. I was treated royally and spoiled incredibly, and it gave me a chance to look back. It was a wonderful, wonderful trip down Memory Lane, and I’m so grateful.

(I have paraphrased—tightened—but only slightly.)

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Flicka is an octogenarian, but she is also, if I may, an eternal babe. She is always involved in projects of a charitable nature. On September 26, she will be giving a benefit concert in Fairfield, Iowa.

In our Q&A—not our first and I hope not our last—we cover a range of issues. We talk a fair amount about repertoire: songs and operas.

I say to her,

Flicka, it occurs to me that you are a singer without specialty. You may be known for French songs and French opera roles, and for Mozart, but you have sung pretty much everything under the sun, song-wise and opera-wise. You have done Italian, French, German, English. Any Russian or Czech? Have you done those?

Czech, yes, she answers, but Russian, no. Also: she has sung in Yiddish.

Are there songs she would have liked to sing, but didn’t, or opera roles she would have liked to have, but didn’t? Any “omissions,” any “lacunae,” as Bill Buckley would say?

No.

I feel maybe a little bit arrogant saying so, but I feel that my life has been blessed by opportunity, and I’m grateful for every song I sang and every aria I sang. Every performance I did. I couldn’t want for more, I just couldn’t. It would be indecent, in my mind.

She works with many young singers, at conservatories as far away as New Zealand (where her friend Kiri Te Kanawa, the soprano, lives). “I’m so glad that none of these kids were around when I was beginning,” says Flicka, “because I would never have had a job. They are out of this world.” But “I tremble for their future.”

Why? Because there ain’t jobs. They are getting scarcer and scarcer, as the opera world and the recital world shrink and shrink. Some young singers are starting their own programs, their own series. There is a return to house concerts—music in the parlor.

No matter what, “we have to keep on trekking,” says Flicka. I love this variation on “keep on trucking.” I hope always to remember “keep on trekking,” and to do it.

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Are there composers she feels especially close to? Composers who really speak to her? Yes, and one is a living composer, and, not only that, a friend of hers: Jake Heggie. Flicka also names Poulenc, famously (and accurately) described as “half rascal, half monk.”

Frederica von Stade is one of the most recorded artists of our time. She has over a hundred of them—over a hundred recordings. Does she ever listen to them? No, she says (as I thought she would). She does not like to listen to her recordings. She’s apt to feel that her intention—her musical, emotional, or theatrical purpose—does not come through.

It should be a consolation, I tell her, that she’s the only one who knows …

Before Flicka rose to prominence, there was a triumvirate of great mezzo-sopranos (in my mind): Janet Baker, Christa Ludwig, and Marilyn Horne. Could she say something about each of them? She does indeed.

She has sung with many famous singers—as famous as she. Can she give me the name of a singer, a colleague, who is underrated? Who should be a bigger deal than he or she is? Yes: Richard Stillwell, the American baritone.

How about younger singers—singers now in their primes? Who stands out? Von Stade cites, among others, Sasha Cooke and Quinn Kelsey. The former is a mezzo-soprano from Texas and the latter is a baritone from Hawaii (yes, Hawaii, our 50th state).

I can second those nominations if a second is needed, which it isn’t.

At the end of our podcast, I give Flicka a little quiz: When did she first appear in Carnegie Hall? She whiffs the question (as I figured she would). (This woman is not self-absorbed.) The answer: February 1973, with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.

In the new documentary, Jake Heggie says, “When Flicka walks into a room, it’s like your best friend just walked into the room—although you may be meeting her for the first time.”

True, so true. Enjoy your friend Flicka.

A couple of weeks ago, I was writing about Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Florida. I said I didn’t like her politics (at all). But I liked the way she spoke.

“Her voice is redolent of the American South, and of the black American South in particular,” I said. “Ms. Nixon was born and raised in Jacksonville.”

I proceeded to say the following:

I love English, wherever it is spoken—and there is a huge variety of “Englishes.” In our own United States. In Great Britain, of course. In India, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere.

What is your favorite English, or your top three, say, “Englishes”?

Before I gave others a chance to weigh in, I weighed in myself (which is different from weighing oneself):

I love the varieties of Irish English. Once, I interviewed Ann Murray, the mezzo-soprano. (Not to be confused with Anne Murray, the wonderful pop singer, who is Canadian.) Ann Murray is a Dubliner. She speaks the most beautiful English—it sounds a bit like singing.

But my favorite English—the English closest to my heart, I think—is that of black American southerners. (True, there are different types of such English, even as there are different types of English in Dublin, to say nothing of the whole of Ireland.) In the black American South, you find my favorite “English music,” so to speak.

Anyway, “What are your ‘Englishes’?” I asked. “If you’d like to let me know, please do.”

Well, thank you to all who let me know.

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One reader votes for the English of Newfoundland—its “rural bay communities,” in particular.

“The Rock,” he writes (meaning Newfoundland), “was settled by Irish, Welsh, and English. They went there for the fishing.” And the speech that developed “is the most enchanting English I have ever heard.”

Makes me want to take a trip.

I also received a note from Donald Mace Williams—the poet, novelist, journalist, etc. (I podcasted with him last March, and you can listen to him here.) Writes DMW,

In a small Colorado town—Pagosa Springs, I think—about 25 years ago I was talking about bears with a hardware store owner named Henry. He told me that one day his employee, a woman from Texas, came to the back of the store where he was working and calmly informed him: “Hinry, there’s a bea-yer in the sto-wer.” He said he scooted out the back door. She went back to the front and shooed the bear away.

That woman, in what must have been his perfect imitation, was an aunt I loved, or a nice neighbor lady in one of the small Central Texas towns I grew up in. I seldom hear such an accent these days, and I miss it.

In the last few years it has also come to me that what she said was a rather unusual thing in English poetry, a perfectly trochaic line, DUM-dee, DUM-dee, etc., all the way through. (Partly trochaic lines, with the last dee missing, are common enough.) Maybe it takes a bea-yer and a nice Texas lady to make it work.

I agree with you, by the way, about the beauty of southern black people’s accents, though those, too, are getting scarce.

A lady writes,

The soft country voices of central North Carolina hypnotize me.

(That itself is a beautiful, almost hypnotizing, sentence.)

Says a different reader,

I’m enamored of British voices, especially the wild Englishes of Mike Leigh’s films. At times, they’re almost unintelligible. David Thewlis’s in Naked, Katrin Cartlidge’s in Career Girls, Gary Oldman’s in Meantime—these Englishes are provocative, almost entrancing, to my ears. I recognize something plaintive, lyrical, and old in them that my English, withered by “Newspeak” and “bureaucratese,” regrettably lacks.

Here is an example from Naked (and pardon their French).

A reader writes,

About a year ago I attended a funeral service conducted by a minister who was a native of India. I would guess he was middle-aged. After the service I commented to him about his British accent. His response: “Ah, yes. The British educational system.” The entire experience was wonderful for me.

But then again, I once was a regular viewer of PMQs on C-SPAN.

Oh, yes. (Those letters stand for “Prime Minister’s Questions.” You can hear the most diverse and wonderful Englishes in those sessions.)

Another reader:

During my IT career, many of my colleagues were from India. I grew fond of their musical accent and their turns of phrase such as “do the needful” and “I have no doubt.”

My late friend Paul Johnson, the great historian, knew a lady from the Caribbean who lived in London and whose children were sometimes embarrassed by her “old-fashioned” phrases. For example, instead of saying “Hurry up,” she’d say “Make haste.”

Johnson loved that.

Says a reader,

My personal favorite English is the Scottish variety. Such a treasure trove is Scottish TikTok, I can practically hear it. “Aye, he’s oan the protein.”

(In other words, he’s getting bigger.)

Finally, a colorful, lively letter from a colorful, lively reader:

Hi, Jay,

… After living in a total of eight states so far, I have to say that I find a southern drawl charming, though that may be because my wife spoke that way when I met her. Alas, 42 years of exposure to me and the states we’ve lived in has eroded her drawl to the point of non-existence.

Not to mention the determination of some of her supervisors to eliminate that drawl at work.

(When she started dispatching at the police department, after a few years working for the sheriff’s office, her bosses, not being able to find anything else to criticize, settled for harassing her about saying “yalla” for “yellow”—yellow frequency being one of two main frequencies at the PD. She asked me what to do about it and I suggested thinking “Jello/yellow” before she spoke.)

(One day, she slipped and said “yalla,” then corrected herself to “Jello.” Hilarity ensued.)

I find that I have adopted a lot of regionalisms or localisms into my routine speech, having acquired them from various places. I tend to say “Flah-ri-da” and South “Kah-lina.” When someone makes a mistake, I’m likely to say, “Why’d you did dat?” This comes from my time in New Orleans. My speech is dotted with, interchangeably, “y’all” and “youse guys.”

But I do like a southern drawl, and the “yat” dialect of Orleans and Jefferson parishes [in Louisiana] amuses me. A Michigan accent is immediately identifiable and puts me in mind of the coney joints on Jefferson Avenue near the federal courthouse.

That’d be Detroit—or “Dee-troit City,” as we sometimes say (with the accent on the “Dee”).

Great thanks to my readers, who are, to me, a pleasure, a privilege, and a balm.

Jonathan Martin, that ace political journalist, has done an interview with Susan Collins, the senior senator from Maine. She is a Republican. The interview is worth reading in full—or seeing in full—but I’m going to concentrate on a small part of it.

Collins is not a Trump Republican, but she is not exactly a Trump opponent either. She is “navigating the Trump era,” as they say.

Of Liz Cheney, Collins said to J-Mart, “What influence does she have today? Really none.” She further said, “It’s not just that she lost her seat; it’s that she has no impact, in my view.”

Okay. I’m not sure how “impactful” Senator Collins has been. But I want, again, to quote Henry Hyde, the late congressman, a conservative Republican from Illinois. I quoted him in a piece about Lindsey Graham, and I quoted him in a subsequent column.

Hyde had the role of addressing new congressmen at their “freshman orientation.” In 1990, he said,

This may sound odd, even ironic. You are here in the flush of victory. And yet it is precisely now that I ask you to contemplate the possibility of defeat—perhaps even the necessity of defeat.

Further on in his remarks, he said,

I feel obliged to put the matter more sharply still: If you don’t know the principle, or the policy, for which you are willing to lose your office, then you are going to do damage here.

Liz Cheney thought that Trump was unfit to be president—grotesquely so—and said so. This, of course, cost her her leadership position in the House and, soon after, her seat.

But, you know? She stood for something. She took a stand. And she won the admiration, and gratitude, of many of us.

I have an easier time excusing politicians such as Susan Collins than I do their counterparts in the media—Republicans who have swum along with Trump in order to keep their audiences and their jobs.

Said Charles Krauthammer, “You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think—and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.”

Bless him.

When Collins first ran for the Senate, in 1996, she pledged to serve only two terms. “Twelve years is long enough to be in public service, make a contribution, and then come home and let someone else take your place.”

She is now completing her fifth term and running for a sixth.

That’s the way it goes …

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***

I’d like to cite one more thing from J-Mart’s interview of Collins. Speaking about her opponent this year, Troy Jackson, the senator said, “I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin. I don’t know whether people know that or not.”

(1) Classy lady. (2) Do you think the issue will hurt Jackson? I’m not sure.

***

By now, you have probably heard about Pierre Damas Bel. I will not dwell on the details. “Haitian Student, Despondent Over Ankle Monitor, Dies in Apparent Suicide.” That is a headline in the New York Times. The subheading reads, “The 20-year-old was fitted with a tracking device under a Trump administrative initiative targeting Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.”

For the article, go here. In the last two years—since the 2024 presidential campaign—there have been many, many articles about Springfield. Trump and Vance have put it on the map, so to speak. Today, I would like to say just one thing.

“America is great because America is good.” That line has been attributed to Tocqueville, who did not say it. Nevertheless, I have always thought there is some truth in it.

And if America ceases to be good …

What makes America great? Seizing Venezuela’s oil? Threatening Greenland? Renaming Lake Ontario?

For crying out loud.

***

Of supporters of our mass deportations, I ask one thing: that they acquaint themselves with the facts, the details. No matter how discomforting it is.

“Deportees Recount Harrowing Journeys to Africa: Shackles, a ‘Freezer’ and Blows.” That report is here. And here is another report, which begins,

A 37-year-old Cuban man who lived in South Florida and spent seven months in U.S. immigration detention says he was placed on a plane in handcuffs and deported to the Central African Republic—a country he had never heard of.

Most people have not. (I wrote about the country’s onetime dictator, who crowned himself emperor, in a book. A monstrous man named Bokassa.)

Here is another report, headed “Cubans living in Florida are being deported to Africa.” I propose a little thought experiment: What if, say, the Obama administration were doing this? Or an AOC administration? What would the Republican Party and its media say?

I can tell you that, for Cuban Americans in Miami, this situation is mightily awkward. (That community, to which I have long had close ties, is overwhelmingly Republican.)

But back to my point: Support deportations if you will (say I)—but none of us should be ignorant of what, precisely, our government is doing.

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***

Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur, has been deported back to the United Kingdom. He had been all for Trump’s deportations. Had egged them on, cheered them on. Then he himself was arrested and subsequently said,

I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before. I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America. The manner in which they arrest you. They put you in manacles—your hands, your feet, chained together. Everybody is arrested like an MS-13 gang member. …

It was humiliating and it was disorientating, all the rest of it. It was physically degrading. It was frightening.

I’m sure it was. And I think of an aphorism from Ben Franklin: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

I would also like to quote a wise man from our own day, David French:

This is one reason why the attack on empathy is so evil. If we have to wait for person after person to experience the brutality of this administration before we wake up, then we’ll inflict an immense amount of pain on our country. But if, instead, we could place ourselves in the shoes of the immigrant in chains, then we can see the injustice more plainly.

David went on to say,

And no, this does not mean that we can’t or shouldn’t deport illegal immigrants when appropriate. It doesn’t mean we must have open borders. But we can’t lose our own humanity and decency in the process, and we must not use brutality as an instrument of enforcement.

***

Gloria Steinem has died at 92. One line from her sticks out in my memory—not the most important thing she ever said, but something that stays with me: When the New York Times at last relented and accepted the honorific “Ms.,” she said, “I no longer have to be ‘Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.’”

***

“Macron and King Charles III hail their nations’ ties as they view the Bayeux Tapestry in London.” That is the heading over a report from the Associated Press. The reporter, Jill Lawless, had a little fun with words:

The two heads of state viewed the embroidered depiction of the 1066 Norman conquest of England alongside new prime minister Andy Burnham, who is eager to restitch bonds between Britain and its European neighbors that have been frayed by Brexit.

Have one more sentence, after which I will recall an admonition from Churchill:

Charles praised the agreement between Britain and France that brought the priceless, fragile tapestry to London, and called its presence there “a precious symbol of trust at a time when trust seems sadly to be in short supply between nations.”

Churchill despised the phrase “in short supply” (which I think was then relatively new). He said it took three words to say “scarce.”

***

I saw a long line of people on a sidewalk in New York. It turned out to be a line of people waiting to receive free food. Bunch of vagrants, right, most of them black and Hispanic? No. They were people of various races and ages. Some of them were well dressed.

A sight to make one ponder.

***

We have all seen crazy people on the street, talking to themselves, or holding imaginary conversations. These days, however, people might be having phone conversations, hands-free. They may well have buds in their ears.

I was waiting at a bus stop with a man who was having an animated conversation. Something about morality and ethics. I assumed he was on the phone. But there were no buds in his ears.

Oh, dear.

Later on, my friends. Thank you for joining me, and for subscribing if you can or want. Talk to you soon.

Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. Controversial dude. Rightly so. In a TV interview, he said, “It’s about to be football season.” And “I can’t wait to beat Ohio.”

Immediately, this was a controversy, a scandal—ridiculously.

Many, many Republicans across the country, in elective politics and the media, claimed that El-Sayed had committed a laughable blunder. He said “beat Ohio,” when the University of Michigan’s rival is Ohio State University, not Ohio University.

(Actually, our real rival—our fiercest rival—is Michigan State, but we ought to leave that for another column.)

What a stupe! people said of El-Sayed. He’s pretending to know something about football! How can he be a senator from Michigan?!

El-Sayed is not a stupe. (He is other things.) He grew up in southeastern Michigan, he went to the U of M, he went to the university’s med school. He knows exactly what he’s talking about.

And we say “beat Ohio.” (As regular readers may recall, I’m from Ann Arbor, the home of the U of M. I grew up with all things Michigan football, and Michigan sports.)

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The “Ohio” episode illustrates what stinks about our dunk culture. “Here a dunk, there a dunk, everywhere a dunk dunk.” I know people, have worked with people, who live for dunking. It’s their raison d’être.

I owned him. I DESTROYED him.

Even fact-based dunking can be problematic, but ignorant dunking has a special smell.

In 2021, our football coach, Jim Harbaugh, implemented a drill called “Beat Ohio.” And that’s what he did, that year and the next two years.

(Jim is now the coach of the Los Angeles Chargers, in the NFL. He and I grew up together, in Ann Arbor. Jim’s dad, Jack, was an assistant coach at Michigan, under Bo Schembechler. Jim and I went to the U of M. One of us was the quarterback of the football team, one of us wasn’t. Jim went on to play for almost 15 years in the NFL.)

Don’t get me wrong, we also say “Ohio State”—as in “Oh how I hate Ohio State.”

But the Buckeyes, too, refer to their university, and their teams, as “Ohio.” For heaven’s sake, the football stadium in Columbus is called “Ohio Stadium.” Fans chant “O-H-I-O.” This is a call-and-response chant. One person, or section, says “O-H,” and another person, or section, says “I-O.”

For many generations, the OSU marching band has formed “Script Ohio.” I think it’s the most famous marching-band tradition in America. As I understand it, the senior-most tuba player dots the “i.”

Sometimes a celebrity does. In 2006, this honor fell to Jack Nicklaus, the great golfer, who graduated from Ohio State, and, for good measure, is a native of Columbus.

Anyway, this controversy has been so stupid. Our dunk culture, and our political culture more broadly, are so stupid. There are a thousand things to knock Abdul El-Sayed for. He accuses Israel of genocide. (My whole life, people have delighted in accusing Israel of genocide. See?! When the Jews get a state, they do it too!) But “beat Ohio”? These words trip off the tongue of every Michigander.

Idiots, these people are, these dunkers. Stone-cold idiots.

***

I’m sorry that El-Sayed is an ideological nightmare (from my point of view)—because he’s a classic American success story. The son of immigrants (from Egypt). An impressive student.

Hang on, let me quote from the relevant Wikipedia entry:

El-Sayed graduated from Bloomfield Hills Andover High School in 2003, where he was a three-sport athlete and captain of the wrestling, football, and lacrosse teams. He then attended the University of Michigan, where he majored in biology and political science and played on the lacrosse team. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with highest distinction in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree and delivered that year’s commencement speech. …

El-Sayed received a full-tuition scholarship to attend the University of Michigan Medical School, where he completed the first two years of a combined M.D./Ph.D. program …

As a second-year medical student, El-Sayed received a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oriel College, Oxford, where he completed a Doctor of Philosophy in public health in 2011. At Oxford, he earned a full blue as captain of the lacrosse team. In 2014, he completed a Doctor of Medicine degree at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons …

I mean, geez oh Pete, as we’d say in Michigan—what credentials, what achievements.

Still, what a nightmare—a socialist, a leftist, the whole package. Personable, too. (Our mayor here in New York, Zohran Mamdani, is also personable. Kind of a shame.) (I’d better clarify that, Ann Arborite though I am, I’ve lived in New York for almost 30 years.)

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***

Let me turn once more to Israel. Did you see this story, one of many in the same vein?

Masked Israeli settlers attacked and injured a Palestinian woman and members of an NBC News team reporting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday.

I will be blunt: Jackasses such as these are soiling the name of Israel. Then again, you could say that this is what Ben-Gurion and the other founding fathers wanted: a “normal country,” which includes jackasses and everyone else.

“When Israel has prostitutes and thieves, we’ll be a state just like any other,” said Ben-Gurion.

***

Yesterday, I was at the golf range. A grandfather was supervising his three grandsons—whose names were Eli, Jacob, and Levi. (This will be relevant.) Adorable kids. The littlest one asked me, “How old are you?” I told him. I then asked, “How old are you?” He said, “Four and a half”—those halves are very important to little kids.

He referred to the clubs in my bag as my “hockey sticks.” I did not correct him. He’ll learn in time.

Anyway, the grandfather had a British accent and the kids did not. When the kids were occupied with their golf, I said to the man, “So, you’re from Britain?” Yes, he said, from London—“They live here, we live there.” The grandchildren live in New York, the grandparents live in London.

I said, “Tell me, what’s the temperature over there, and I don’t mean the weather.” He thought I meant politics. Things are very bad, he said. He started talking about the effects of Brexit and so on. But I cut him off, making clear that I meant … “How are things for the Jews?”

(The man was wearing a Star of David around his neck and a hat that said “Chabad.”)

Long story short: they’re leaving. The man and his wife are leaving Britain, where, presumably, they’ve lived all their lives. That’s how bad things have gotten.

This is just one story, mind you—but there are many such stories, and they add up, painting a picture.

***

In Washington last week—Washington, D.C.—I passed this fine structure:

“Oh, right,” I thought, sardonically. “They must teach Esperanto there.” Longtime readers are familiar with a complaint of mine: people say “international” when they mean “foreign,” and the two words have different meanings.

“International students,” people now say. Oh, you mean they hold two passports? Maybe they live in Trieste, where they are not quite Italian, not quite Austrian, not quite Slovenian …?

I’m gettin’ cranky, y’all, so I’d better sign off.

Thank you and bless you!

In 2015, I wrote a piece titled “A Question of Honor.” The subheading was: “As the wolves circle, Iraqis who helped us are pleading for visas.” Let me quote the last paragraph of that piece:

Soon, we will have desperate Afghans to think about, or ignore. The Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project helps them, too. IRAP’s website says, “Every day we receive emails and letters from Afghan interpreters and former and active-duty U.S. Service Members concerned about their interpreter’s fate.” IRAP also cites a “recent news estimate,” and a painful estimate it is: One Afghan is killed every 36 hours owing to his affiliation with the United States.

Earlier this month, a news story appeared, headed “They fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan. Now they worry about losing their green cards.”

Again, a question of honor.

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***

In 1982, there was a Time-magazine cover, quickly famous: “Thinking the Unthinkable.” The subject was nuclear weapons, and their use.

I have been thinking about this in recent days. I trust you saw the below, from the president of the United States:

If you were South Korean, or Japanese, would you think about acquiring nuclear weapons, as soon as possible? I bet you would.

In December 2017, I podcasted with Ash Carter, who was the U.S. secretary of defense from 2015 to 2017. I cited this podcast five years later, in an appreciation of Carter, upon his passing. Let me quote:

As of now, there are nine nuclear states—only nine. I regard this as astonishing, given that the relevant technology dates from the 1940s. There are almost 200 nations in the world. And only nine are nuclear? How did we get so lucky?

“It’s a miracle,” said Carter, “and one that we should not take for granted.” Any country, he said, is capable of making an A-bomb once it gets the materials. It doesn’t matter how backward the country is: Just look at North Korea.

We have to be ever vigilant, Carter emphasized. And U.S. leadership is critical. We have alliances with Germany, Japan, others—and they are not nuclear because we are. But if our leadership in the world sagged …

One can imagine a free-for-all.

I think a free-for-all is what we’ll have. And the world will be more dangerous than ever. I hope I’m wrong.

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***

From RFE/RL—our combination of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty—a remarkable report:

For four years in Russian captivity, Ukrainian marine Oleksandr Ivanov retold the entire Harry Potter series from memory to his fellow prisoners. He says the stories gave them something to look forward to.

After his release, Ivanov received a letter from the author of the books, J.K. Rowling.

Can you imagine anything more gratifying for an author? I realize that Ms. Rowling is the best-selling author of all time, or something like that. But can you imagine anything more gratifying than the knowledge that your work meant something, and something important, to those prisoners?

***

Over the years, President Trump has referred to Maggie Haberman, the estimable White House reporter, as “Maggot Hagerman.” Why the American people want such a man to be president, I don’t know, but they do.

And the “conservative movement,” which once emphasized civility, morality, and character … well, we need not get into that just now.

Trump’s latest blast begins, “Maggot Hagerman, the Fake Reporter from The Failing New York Times, an unattractive person both inside and out …”

Haberman’s colleague Jake Tapper had this to say:

As I see it, Tapper has given an example of how a man behaves. A real man, I mean.

***

Below is a message from the White House. Is this the kind of America we want? Is this “who we are”? I suppose it is, yes. But a nation, like an individual, can change, when it wants.

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Here is the U.S. State Department. Is this your idea of how that august department should be? Is Marco Rubio, once a sterling Reagan conservative, proud?

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And now, a word from the Republican Party:

Trump is big into renaming things. Maybe his party can rename itself the “Trump Party,” leaving the name “Republican” available for a new party, reflecting the spirit of Lincoln and Reagan?

***

Let’s turn to a matter musical. About a week ago, I wrote about Alexander Malofeev, the young Russian pianist. I’d like to publish an insightful piece of mail, but first, an excerpt from my article:

Life experiences find their way into musicianship, says Malofeev. He notes that most of the people in his audiences are much older than he (obviously). They bring a wealth of experience to their listening to music. And what does he, the pianist, bring?

“I’ve spent my whole life practicing in a room and basically stewing in my own juice.”

To this, I have two reactions. (1) How in the world did this young Russian learn the expression “to stew in one’s own juice”? He grins. He likes English, and he’s adept in it. (2) He has experienced, emotionally, maybe more than he knows.

A reader of ours says the following:

Reading your piece on Malofeev, I scurried over to YouTube and there he was, playing Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in B-flat minor—at 14 years old! I then listened to more recent videos, which had him playing Medtner and even Purcell.

Clearly, music itself is amazingly and enormously educational. Forget the other circumstances of his growing up. What Malofeev was bringing to the piano at 14, and what he has brought to it since, must have come from the composers and their great music.

Learning also depends on the student, of course. The master—great music—was there, presenting life and reality, and boy did Malofeev learn!

I loved that letter.

***

Care for a review from the Salzburg Festival? This one is of Renaud Capuçon, violin, and Martha Argerich, piano, in a duo recital.

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English can be absolutely murder to pronounce—for us native speakers, not to mention foreigners. The other week, I was talking to a young German. He referred to a youth orchestra—and he pronounced “youth” to rhyme with “mouth” and “south.”

Why wouldn’t he? Oh, English, you vexer!

***

Nancy Kissinger has died at 92. I knew her and her husband a bit, through Bill and Pat Buckley. I’m sure I will have more to say about all this later. But I will relate something amusing now. In politics, Nancy and Pat were probably to the right of their husbands. Henry Kissinger used to refer to those ladies as “my two Irish fascists.” (Nancy Kissinger’s maiden name was “Maginnes.”)

I wish you a happy Sunday, my friends. Thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing—and thanks for letting your lights shine.

Manfred Honeck, I have spoken with several times, and he is a favorite guest of our program. He was once a member of the Vienna Philharmonic—a violist (though his primary instrument had been the violin). He then turned to conducting. He and Rainer and their siblings are Austrian through and through, but Manfred has been in Pittsburgh since 2008, serving as the music director of the PSO, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

At the Salzburg Festival this summer, Honeck has been conducting an opera by Richard Strauss, one of the founders of the festival. That opera is Ariadne auf Naxos. In the pit has been the Vienna Phil, including one Rainer Honeck. So, these have been special days for the brothers.

As I remark to Manfred in our new Q&A, their parents would have loved to be in the house.

I have podcasted with Maestro Honeck, once more, on behalf of the SFS, the Salzburg Festival Society. He and I cover a fair amount of ground—and I begin with an odd question.

Like most people, or many people, I love the music of Richard Strauss: his tone poems, operas, songs, etc. (I especially like his songs. So did he, by the way. Toward the end of his life, Strauss told Hans Hotter, the German bass-baritone, “I like my songs best.”) I must say, I have never warmed up to Ariadne auf Naxos.

Does Maestro Honeck like it?

Yes, he does. And he relates a story.

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Years ago, he was in the orchestra—the Vienna Philharmonic—for Ariadne. This summer, a violist in the orchestra showed him something touching. The violist in question was using the same score used by Honeck himself. It’s a tradition in the orchestra to sign your name in a score. Manfred Honeck and his stand partner did this, all those years ago.

In our Q&A, I ask Honeck when he first started at the Salzburg Festival. It happened in a memorable, even exciting, way. Honeck was a substitute in the Philharmonic, as I understand it—not yet a full-time member. And he got an emergency call: A member of the first violin section had fallen ill. Could Honeck come in and take his place?

Yes, he could. So, that night, he played in Der Rosenkavalier—another Strauss opera—under Herbert von Karajan (a legendary conductor).

In Pittsburgh, Honeck has a contract that runs through 2033. That would be a 25-year tenure. Such longevity is rare in a music directorship these days. Honeck and I discuss this issue.

We also discuss differences in audiences—Europe vs. America. Europeans tend to applaud on an on. The performers come back for several curtain calls. We Americans tend to jump to our feet, immediately, and give a burst of applause. Then we bolt for the exits.

Does Honeck mind? Not at all. He is a broad-minded fellow.

In every generation, people worry that classical music is fading away—that no one is interested anymore. I have often quoted Charles Rosen, the late pianist-scholar: “The death of classical music is perhaps the oldest tradition of classical music.”

So I know I’m embodying a stereotype when I say: I’m worried as hell, especially about America—the health of classical music on our shores. It seems like music and high culture in general are going downward, fast.

Manfred Honeck is not unconcerned. Music education needs to be shored up (or even reestablished). But he says, Have faith in music. Trust music to draw people, as it always has.

I can buy that.

What music is Manfred Honeck especially close to these days? He speaks movingly about Bruckner and Mahler. And, at the end of our conversation, I ask him what pieces he would like to conduct that he has not yet conducted. What is he looking forward to? Does he have anything in reserve?

In interviews over the years, Riccardo Muti, the Italian maestro, has told me that he waited a long time to conduct Beethoven’s Ninth. He waited until he was ready. He waited an even longer time to conduct Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. And he waited still longer to conduct the Bruckner Eighth.

That was two years ago, when Muti was 83.

Honeck understands the Italian maestro very well. He himself is waiting to conduct Mahler’s Eighth. And a masterpiece of Bach: the St. Matthew Passion.

It would be good to be present, when Honeck tackles these works. Meantime, I know you will enjoy this Q&A with him. He is a superb musician, a thoughtful interviewee, and a real gent.

In Florida, there was a Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat. I was rooting for Alex Vindman, whom I admire. But he lost to a Florida House rep named Angie Nixon. I know nothing about her, except that she’s a DSA-er—a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. I’m sure I disagree with her on pretty much everything.

But I like the way she talks. Let me explain.

Here is a video of Nixon in an interview. Her voice is redolent of the American South, and of the black American South in particular. Ms. Nixon was born and raised in Jacksonville.

By the way, here we have another Nixon in politics. Maybe she can dust off the slogan “Nixon’s the One”? I’m sure it’s not copyrighted.

I love English, wherever it is spoken—and there is a huge variety of “Englishes.” In our own United States. In Great Britain, of course. In India, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere.

What is your favorite English, or your top three, say, “Englishes”?

I love the varieties of Irish English. Once, I interviewed Ann Murray, the mezzo-soprano. (Not to be confused with Anne Murray, the wonderful pop singer, who is Canadian.) Ann Murray is a Dubliner. She speaks the most beautiful English—it sounds a bit like singing.

But my favorite English—the English closest to my heart, I think—is that of black American southerners. (True, there are different types of such English, even as there are different types of English in Dublin, to say nothing of the whole of Ireland.) In the black American South, you find my favorite “English music,” so to speak.

What are your “Englishes”? If you’d like to let me know, please do—at mail@jaynordlinger.com. Might could do a piece afterward …

***

J. K. Rowling, the best-selling author in history, or right up there, is a presence on Twitter, or X. Her main cause is sexual identity, and facing facts. She kicks up ruckuses.

Some people think she is unkind. I think she is kind, but realistic and firm.

Someone had written, “Female is a divine identity beyond biology, nothing to do with sex.” JKR responded, “Say that to any woman currently in labour.”

A thought occurred to me: For someone renowned for fantasy—the Harry Potter books—Ms. Rowling is a bracing realist.

(I understand that there is realism within fantasy.) (Such writers as Salman Rushdie use the supernatural to illustrate the natural.) (Think of the second word of the term “magical realism.”)

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***

Senator Jon Ossoff (D., Ga.) did something miraculous. He made Republicans, many of them, return to propriety. How’d he do it? It was something he said.

“While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

It was the name “Natalie” that sent Republicans through the roof. “How dare you! What are you implying?” The senator was referring to Natalie Harp, the president’s close aide—who was stowed away with him on that catering truck in Ankara.

To be continued, I imagine …

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By the way, the most “relatable” thing that Donald Trump does, in my book, is sleep through meetings. Every time I see it, I think: oh, me too, baby.

***

Apparently, the First Lady, Melania Trump, does not live at the White House. I could care less. But I think back to the Clinton years, and if Hillary … Or if Michelle …

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Remember this about idioms: they’re idiomatic. That’s their job—to be idiomatic. (I am thinking of “I could care less” in particular.) If they adhered to logic, they would be … less idiomatic?

***

But back to Hillary Clinton. In a recent interview, the subject of Trump’s transformation of the White House came up. (Physical transformation, I mean.) Clinton’s interviewer, Kara Swisher, said that it reminded her of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Clinton agreed.

“I had meetings in some of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, and they were quite reminiscent of what we are seeing in our own White House.”

I agree too. I was in one of those palaces once—Faw Palace, in Baghdad. It looked like … well, think of the White House now.

Let me quote from my journal (published in 2008):

Our group makes its way to the Faw Palace—one of Saddam’s pleasure palaces. Hideous debauchery and crimes took place here. It is painful to imagine. But what’s fun is the sight of American soldiers crawling all over the place, going about their business. This is headquarters—anti-Saddam, pro–Free Iraq headquarters.

The sight of those soldiers, in this setting, does my heart good—just as it would have to see them at Berchtesgaden.

In the rotunda of the palace—if rotunda is the word—there’s a famous chair/throne. Many visitors have had their picture taken on it. This gaudy piece of furniture was given to Saddam by Yasser Arafat, the Nobel Prize winner. It shows the Dome of the Rock and says, “Jerusalem Is Ours.” I’m thinking: The money for this chair probably came from EU taxpayers—or American taxpayers.

***

Nancy Kassebaum has died at 94. For the obit in the New York Times, go here. She was a senator from Kansas (Republican). Her father was Alf Landon, the Republican presidential nominee in 1936. Senator Kassebaum was a model of sanity. You and I may not have agreed with her on everything—but she was “sober as a judge,” as we used to say. (This does not mean she was staid.)

Latish in life, Senator Kassebaum married another senator, or ex-senator, at that point: Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican. There could not have been a saner couple—saner political couple—in America.

That was a different world.

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***

Stay with the Republican Party for a moment. Did you see this?

Question: What party would Mr. Trump have belonged to in Lincoln’s day? What would his politics have been?

***

A reader writes,

Jay,

As I understand it, this is your political philosophy:

Truth, not tribe

Manliness, not machismo

Patriotism, not blood and soil

The deficit, stupid.

Our reader adds, “We could do worse. And will.”

When it comes to my “political philosophy”—a little grand for lil’ ol’ me—there’s more to it than the above sketch, but … I like it, certainly.

If what I believe, in politics, can be summed up in a sentence, it is “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that …” You can sing the rest.

***

In a recent column or two, or three, I was writing about “flexibility” in politics. Flexibility is good, of course—politics is not for the rigid or puristic. But a politician can be so flexible that he means nothing and stands for nothing and is good for … what? Reelection?

I quoted Congressman Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican of old. At their freshman orientation, he would tell incoming members of Congress, “If you don’t know the principle, or the policy, for which you are willing to lose your office, then you are going to do damage here.”

An English reader of ours reminds me of “The Vicar of Bray,” an 18th-century song (satirical). Bill Buckley used to quote this one. In fact, I first heard of the song from him. The vicar in question will do whatever it takes to retain his office—to remain the Vicar of Bray. No matter what the line of throne or altar, he will follow it, and keep his seat.

And this is law, I will maintain
Unto my Dying Day, Sir.
That whatsoever King may reign,
I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!

***

Speaking of music, I have written an article about a “festival-within-a-festival.” This summer, the Salzburg Festival has put an accent on the music of Olivier Messiaen, that outstanding composer of the 20th century. My article can be found at The Dispatch, here.

Grateful for The Dispatch.

And ever grateful for The New Criterion, my musical home, as it were. For a review published on the magazine’s website, go here. It is of Teodor Currentzis, the Greek-Russian conductor, and the orchestra and chorus he founded: Utopia. These guys have appeared in Salzburg, once more.

Let you get on with your Sunday? I will. Thank you, as always, for joining me.

Over and over, the question is, “Who are we? What do we stand for? What is our nature? What do we want to represent in the world?”

With that introduction, a few words about the United States …

Our president has once more posted a favorite meme of his:

I am not used to thinking of our country as a predator nation. A protector nation, yes. A predator, no.

How about this? President Trump crowed about all the oil “we’re taking from Venezuela.” “Billions and billions of barrels of oil.” He then cited the adage, “To the victor belong the spoils.”

Is that part of the American ethos, the American creed? “To the victor belong the spoils”?

I am not used to thinking of our country as a plundering nation, a thieving nation. No, we are a giving nation, a generous nation—and this generosity has benefited us, as much as others.

With some regularity, I quote Ernest Renan, the 19th-century French scholar, who said that “a nation is a daily plebiscite” (or a “daily referendum”). If we don’t like what we are today—we can change tomorrow.

You may have noticed this news: “Greenland issues ‘strong warning’ as Trump-linked oil firm prepares to drill.”

Almost a hundred years ago, we instituted a Good Neighbor policy. When the post-Trump period comes, maybe we should pledge to something similar.

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***

More “Who are we, what do we stand for?” and all that …

President Trump posted the below:

Remember, Kim Jong-un runs one of the most brutal dictatorships on earth. American foreign policy ought to include a streak, at least, of right and wrong. The best “realists” of my acquaintance acknowledge this.

If you were a North Korean dissident, or an inmate in the North Korean gulag, and you heard the way the American president was talking—how would you feel?

In the Soviet gulag, the “zeks,” the prisoners, found out about Reagan. They heard, for example, that the American president had denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”

This gave them a boost, even if their material conditions did not improve. There is ample testimony on this score.

Not long ago in a column, I was quoting Reagan, who in 1987 said,

Our global commitment to freedom does not mandate the sending of arms or troops, but at the very least it means that any people whose liberty is denied or whose independence is violated—that these people know we Americans are on their side.

Can they possibly know that now?

If you missed the below message from President Trump, have a look, and ponder its implications:

I will be frank: I thought the day might come when the United States ceased to be the leader of the Free World and a deterrent to tyrants. When the United States abandoned the West, so to speak. I admit I did not see it coming from the Republican Party and the Right.

But here we are.

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***

With the Republican Party in its current state, we are in sore need of a worthy and sane Democratic Party. Do you recall Ed Koch, the New York congressman, then mayor, who said, “I’m a liberal with sanity”? Ooh, they hated that—the Left, I mean. Bella Abzug and others of that stripe. When Koch said “a liberal with sanity,” they knew he was contrasting himself with them.

Well, we need liberals with sanity. And conservatives with sanity. And sanity altogether. I’m not sure either side is pulling its oar …

***

I have about a thousand more items to share with you, but maybe it would be better to keep this column on the short side. I have laid out some “heavy stuff.” Maybe we can end with language, music, and pictures. Would that be too abrupt, too strange, a pivot? If so, my apologies …

Earlier this month, Merriam-Webster sent out a bulletin saying, “Jane Austen used ‘however’ at the beginning of a sentence, and so can you.” I loved that.

There is this myth, this superstition, that you can’t say “however” at the beginning of a sentence, and that you can’t say “and,” for that matter. Hogwash.

And we all need inspiration, encouragement, from good and great writers.

For years, I wondered, “Can I use more than one colon in a single sentence? Two or even three?” That punctuation sometimes seemed natural, and I am all for naturalness in writing, for writing mimics speech—the spoken word.

Now and then, I’d use two colons in a sentence, and a proofreader would flag it—not disapprove of it, exactly, but wonder, as I myself did, “Can you do that?”

Then I read a novel by V. S. Naipaul—Miguel Street, possibly. And he would do this when it seemed natural and right.

And I never looked back. When you have an Austen or a Naipaul behind you—wow.

***

The Salzburg Festival is staging Ariadne auf Naxos, the Strauss opera. For my review, go here.

Riccardo Muti has conducted the Vienna Philharmonic, and associated forces, in the Verdi Requiem. For my review, go here.

***

Maybe we could have a couple of pictures from Salzburg, before I sign off? I was taking a picture of the entrance to the Mozarteum, because I thought it looked attractive. Then a woman with a multicolored bag emerged. Even better.

This one looks out from Schloss Leopoldskron, on a calm evening, after storms:

Thank you, my friends—thank you for reading and, if you can/want, subscribing—and I’ll see you later.

Usually, when we call a company, we get an automated voice, or a “virtual assistant.” Almost always, I ask to speak to a person—a real person. Over and over, I say “agent” or “representative.” Sometimes with agitation (a needless, or in any case a useless, agitation).

I wanted to change my phone plan. I called Verizon. I asked to be transferred to a person. For reasons I could detail, this was difficult. It had to do with scheduling a callback, etc.

The virtual assistant said, “But I can help you. Just tell me what you need.” Ticked, I ignored this, and lamented the whole automatization, or virtualization, of business.

Then I thought, “Jay, why not give the virtual-assistant thing a chance? What do you have to lose? You can always hang up, even after ten seconds.”

I gave it a chance. And you know? The transaction was amazingly easy. Everything was clear, straightforward, and fast. The whole “conversation” went better than most I have with real, flesh-and-blood assistants.

Huh. So much to discuss here. But there will be plenty of time for that later. AI will be with us for a while, won’t it?

(When you write “AI,” as in “artificial intelligence,” it often looks like “Al,” a man’s first name, short for “Albert” or “Alfred.”)

***

In New York, I saw an eatery whose sign said “Established in 2013.” Made me smile. Someday, people will see “2013” and think “a long time ago.”

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***

I was flying from New York to Salzburg, via Frankfurt. The plane out of New York took off two hours late. My connection was going to be fairly tight anyway. I figured I would not make it.

“Well, let’s just see,” said a flight attendant.

Hours later, as we descended into Frankfurt, this same attendant said, “Look for airline representatives just outside the jet bridge.”

The airline was Lufthansa, by the way.

There were indeed representatives. And a woman said, “Salzburg? You’re going to make it. We need to move along, however. Just follow me.”

What a shepherd she was.

Three of us passengers—three of us connectors—went with her. She led us down back staircases to a small shuttle van. We were driven to another part of the airport and led to a room, dimly lit. No one else was around. There was an immigration officer, to stamp our passport.

Then we were led back into the van and driven to yet another part of the airport—where we climbed back staircases to our gate.

Easy-peasy. We then boarded normally.

And our luggage made it too.

“This would never happen in America,” one of the connectors commented. I don’t know. But I know I had never experienced this—such service. Service that was kind, reassuring, even tender.

Amazing.

***

Maybe I should now slip into journal mode, using the present tense?

In the Salzburg airport—W. A. Mozart Airport—there is a sign advertising an Alpine vacation. “Your Next High Awaits,” it says. Clever.

I think of my friend Alison Ames, who worked in the music business. She once had buttons made that said, “Beverly Sills is a good high.”

(Sills, for the uninitiated, was a famous soprano, who could go up into the stratosphere.)

***

A sign on a little eatery here in Salzburg says, “Laptop-free zone! Time to unplug and make the right connections.” I am all for individual rights, and I have a strong sense of “You’re not the boss of me.” Yet I appreciate the sentiment …

***

Salzburg is fairly easy on the eyes, don’t you think?

***

Throughout town, there are electric bikes and scooters. Not as menacing as in New York, but still—one or two give me a start.

This is new, these electric transporters. They weren’t here when I started coming to Salzburg about 25 years ago. Hell, they weren’t here last year, that I recall.

But like AI (not a man named “Albert”), they are the future. And the present …

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***

I like this color, do you? Cheers one up, possibly.

***

I notice older kids holding the hand of their mom or dad. I mean, kids who are maybe 12 or 13. A wonderful habit, I think. We Americans start to recoil at this … when?

***

From time to time, I see people looking at Stolpersteine—the “stumbling stones” that tell you where Jewish people lived or worked before they were seized and taken away to be murdered.

I first learned about Stolpersteine from Marko Feingold, who was the leader of the Jewish community here in Salzburg. He was a survivor of the Holocaust, and I interviewed him in 2013, when he was 100. He died in 2019, at 106.

My piece about him is in two parts: here and here.

A bridge in Salzburg is now named after him. This summer, there are pictures of him and others on it, with accompanying texts, giving us some history.

This is good. As Feingold told me, Austria has lagged far behind Germany in coming to grips.

***

When I look on the below scene, I think of the title of a V. S. Naipaul novel: A Bend in the River.

***

Two accordionists sing, and play, for their supper. For tips. They’re good. And I like that they’re offering something, you know? (Whether people like it or not.)

In New York, there are many, many beggars, and some of them just demand money, in belligerent tones.

I sympathize with their predicament, or at least I hope I do. But …

In my Italian journal, earlier this summer, I wrote of a woman in Naples, who, night after night, sits and sings (hoping for money in the box before her).

Begging is a big subject, multifaceted and challenging, but I will skip along …

***

… to this statue here in Salzburg, which I’ve passed a thousand times but had never stopped to examine. It is of Johannes Nepomuk, John of Nepomuk, a 14th-century Bohemian clergyman, murdered by Wenceslaus IV, canonized in the 18th century.

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A field, at twilight:

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“A mighty fortress is our God.” Less mighty, but still impressive, is Salzburg’s fortress, its Festung, up on that mount:

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A final picture for today—in town:

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Do you want to hear a great tribute to my mother (who deserves the greatest tributes utterable)? She has several great-grandchildren, and they call her “Grandma.” Little Charlotte announced, “When I grow up, I want to be a grandma.” That is the esteem in which she holds my mother, rightly.

Talk to you later, everyone, and thanks so much for joining me.

Eric is from Adel, Iowa, about 25 miles west of Des Moines. In his sophomore year of high school, something interesting happened. It was “one of those serendipitous things,” as he says. There was an exchange student at school whose father was a tenor. There were lots of recordings in the home.

This made an impression on Eric Cutler.

He went to Luther College, in Decorah (Iowa). He studied with an excellent singing teacher, Ed Andereck. The first opera Eric ever saw, he was in. This is true of a great many singers: they never had a chance to see an opera until they were in one.

Eric was in The Elixir of Love, in the leading role of Nemorino.

He was soon at the Met, in New York. What was that like?

“You know, here’s this kid from the sticks, from the farms of Iowa, and then all of a sudden I’m let loose in New York in the ’90s. I mean, it was terrifying, but it also expanded my world exponentially.”

In 2005, he won a big award: the Richard Tucker Award. The world was his oyster.

The next year, in 2006, he was singing in Edinburgh—The Magic Flute, under the baton of Claudio Abbado. The German soprano Julia Kleiter was also in the cast. They married.

Julia is the niece of Christoph Prégardien, the tenor, and therefore the cousin of Julian Prégardien, also a tenor. Lotta singing in that family. I interviewed Julian here in Salzburg last year.

With Eric, I talk about a number of issues, several of them touchy. Take amplification (please). There is creeping amplification in the opera world—microphones and all that. If it creeps too far, says Eric, that’ll be the end of the art form.

He is worried about the future of opera, on various counts. He is also worried about the future of voice recitals. Many, many of us share these worries.

Did I say “future”? There’s plenty to worry about where the present is concerned.

One problem plaguing the opera world, says Eric, is screwy productions—productions out of harmony with the operas they’re intended to serve. People are “pissed off,” says Eric (and I can vouch for this).

Another touchy subject, a touchy question: Do some people—administrators, critics, politicians, operagoers—have a problem with American singers? Singers with names like “John Smith,” or “Eric Cutler,” rather than “Giovanni Martinelli”?

Yes.

In any event, Eric is a happy warrior, and a grateful warrior. We talk about some of his favorite singers, all-time. Jussi Bjoerling is just about No. 1.

Near the end of our talk, Eric says, “My great love since I was 15 years old has been the feeling of singing an open-throated operatic high note. It feels like hitting a 350-yard drive down the middle, or knocking a baseball out of the park.”

I know the feeling. I mean, I don’t, but I can imagine.

You will enjoy getting to know Eric Cutler, a superb singer, and a warm, thoughtful person.

Last week, a reporter asked President Trump about Russia’s perpetual murder of civilians in Ukraine. Trump began his answer by saying, “Look, we’re not involved. We’re separated by an ocean.” He went on to talk about hatred on both sides.

Do you think the Ukrainians have any reason for such hatred?

When listening to President Trump, I thought of two quotations. One, you are very familiar with. It was uttered by Neville Chamberlain—a basically good if misguided man—in September 1938: “… a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”

I also thought of Ronald Reagan, and his address in July 1987 at the Ukrainian National Catholic Shrine in Washington, D.C. Reagan said:

Our global commitment to freedom does not mandate the sending of arms or troops, but at the very least it means that any people whose liberty is denied or whose independence is violated—that these people know we Americans are on their side.

Yes. These people ought to know, and deserve to know, we are on their side.

By the way, anyone who thinks that a distant conflict can have no bearing on the United States is too ignorant to be anywhere near foreign policy. A conflict can wind up nearer than you think.

Men such as George C. Marshall, and the once-isolationist Arthur Vandenberg, tried to impress this on Americans after World War II.

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***

Hussam Luka was one of the nastiest men in the regime of Bashar Assad—and that was one of the nastiest regimes on the planet. The BBC did a lengthy, dogged investigation of him. Guess where this killer, kidnapper, and torturer found refuge? Russia. (Like Assad himself, of course.)

***

I wrote an article about the late senator Lindsey Graham. A “man of our times,” I called him. The article touches on what it means to be a politician—or different ways of being a politician—and I’d like to quote a little:

Congressman Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who served in the House from 1975 to 2007, had the job of speaking to new members at their freshman orientation. He stressed one thing: Figure out what you’re willing to lose your seat over. What principle or policy. If there is no such thing, “then you’re going to do damage here.”

I thought you might like a fuller version of Hyde’s remarks. A congressional staffer sent this to me some years ago. Here is what Hyde said on November 29, 1990:

This may sound odd, even ironic. You are here in the flush of victory. And yet it is precisely now that I ask you to contemplate the possibility of defeat—perhaps even the necessity of defeat.

Edmund Burke, in 1774, set forth a model we should all emulate when he told his Bristol constituents: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement, and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Let me put the matter plainly: If you are here simply as a tote board registering the current state of opinion in your district, you are not going to serve either your constituents or the Congress of the United States weIl.

Your constituents expect you to represent their interests, and that you should certainly do. But you are also a member of the Congress, and your responsibilities are far greater than those of an ombudsman for your district. You must take, at times, a national view, even if, in taking that view, you risk the displeasure of your neighbors and friends back home.

Indeed, I feel obliged to put the matter more sharply still: If you don’t know the principle, or the policy, for which you are willing to lose your office, then you are going to do damage here.

This institution needs more members willing to look beyond the biennial contest for power, more committed to public service as a vocation rather than merely a career.

Well said, right?

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***

Let me quote from my article about Lindsey Graham a bit more. I said that, when we assess the senator’s behavior, meaning the mental and political gymnastics he performed to defend and support Donald Trump,

we must also consider the simple matter of partisanship—“the call of the tribe.” (Mario Vargas Llosa used this phrase in the title of a book.) Graham was a Republican, and where his tribe went, there went he.

But he was probably more aware of this than most. He would comment on his own hypocrisy.

Yes.

When Trump and his team covered for the Saudi dictatorship after that dictatorship murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Graham said, “If they were in a Democratic administration, I would be all over them for being in the pocket of Saudi Arabia.”

When Trump announced a pullout from Syria later in 2018, Graham said, “If Obama had done this, we’d be going nuts right now: how weak, how dangerous.”

Okay. A friend of mine—a student of philosophy—e-mailed,

It’s a fascinating thing, isn’t it? How Graham managed to be upfront about being a hypocrite. Are those who admit their hypocrisy better or worse than the non-confessional hypocrites? Not a rhetorical question.

I answered,

Somehow, it makes me feel better when a hypocrite acknowledges his hypocrisy, but I don’t know what the philosophical answer is!

My friend answered,

I’m with you; can’t help but prefer the “honest” knave. Yet the trouble with the forthcoming hypocrite is that he may be furthest from redemption, as he seems to confess that the charge of hypocrisy has lost all bite on his conscience.

Smart dude, my friend.

***

Just a little more quoting from my Graham piece, if you don’t mind, and I do it for a purpose:

“You want Graham to have a seat at the table,” I often heard. “You want Graham to play golf with Trump. Better that Graham be in his ear than the isolationists, right?”

Maybe. But Trump has always changed people more than they have changed him.

A reader tells me,

There’s a saying I learned from a youth pastor about 30 years ago: “It’s easier to pull someone out of a canoe than to pull someone into one.”

True dat.

***

My dear friends, I have been in Salzburg for a while, doing some annual work at the festival. For a review, published at The New Criterion, go here. It’s of a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Tugan Sokhiev, with the piano soloist Lang Lang.

***

I will head this column of mine “Taking Sides, &c.” I borrow the phrase from a play, later a movie, about Wilhelm Furtwängler, the great German maestro, and the U.S. Army’s investigation of his conduct during the war.

***

Before I left New York for Salzburg, I saw a sweet ’vette, parked all by its lonesome. What a fantastic machine, right? Possibly even better than the Vienna Philharmonic.

Oh, one more thing: In this podcast, we talk about Mikhail Pletnev’s transcription of the Grand pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. It is a frequent Malofeev encore. To hear Sasha in it, go here.

And one more one more thing: interviewee and interviewer: