A new radio piece about my earliest conspiracy.

In November, when my friend Jack and I were ten years old, we spent many precious daylight hours inside a cinder block school building. In the classroom, under buzzing tube lights, in rows of desks, all the kids sat until our seats were sore, turning textbook pages and filling blanks on worksheets that the teacher handed us. From time to time she called a few kids to the blackboard, where chalk in hand we’d show our peers who did and who did not understand the day’s math.

Each afternoon, when the bell rang at last, we might have run joyously from the building, but unbridled displays of any kind were forbidden. The chilly hand of discipline reached as far as the crosswalk at the property’s edge. In fact, that hand reached further, for in our school bags were a few extra worksheets to pencil in at the kitchen table after dinner. Kids who failed to finish those sheets, well, officially speaking, those were bad kids. Unofficially, maybe those kids had simply had enough. Some folks learn early when and where to draw a line.

In those days, before the Vietnam War heated up, America had nothing you might identify as a drone, but we had plenty of unidentified flying objects, plenty of UFOs. Some of them looked like tin pie plates, and they caused a stir when they zipped in from a cloud bank and made the evening news. Adults we knew had a very large appetite for distraction. Can’t blame them, though. They grew up during a World War and were raising families in a Cold one.

Jack and I liked the crazy social energy that churned in the wake of any disk that zig-zagged across our sky, so we concocted a little conspiracy. We would build a UFO. In our mundane world of chalk dust and worksheets, for three days this UFO project meant everything to us. 

First, we spent almost all our cash buying parts at the Woolworths at the top of the hill. Back then, America held a very sour opinion of boys stepping into the makeup aisle of a store, but we slipped in and quickly found a small, disk-shaped plastic makeup case with the sleek aerodynamics required for galactic travel. We selected a 100-foot ball of twine, too. And up at the front of the store, there was a tank of helium and a selection of balloons. We chose the largest one, had the clerk fill it almost to bursting with helium, and then tuck it into a massive paper bag. Why the bag, you might ask? This was either to cloak our project in secrecy or to protect our image as manly young boys, you decide. We hustled our purchases home and scrounged up paint, a little light bulb, a battery, thin electrical wire, and a tiny circuit to make the bulb blink. 

We planned to hang a lighted, steel-gray space ship on a long string beneath the balloon. And we would wait behind some bushes before bedtime for a passerby to spot a smooth disk blinking just below the stars. For two evenings our navy blue balloon idled up in the basement rafters as we painted and soldered and glued.

We hoped the little flying saucer had a real chance to appear on the evening news. And as long as nobody noticed the balloon, Jack and I expected that the true nature of our glorious conspiracy would never be known. That is, unless someone sworn to secrecy stepped forward later in life and told the tale. 

But by the third evening, when construction ended, the balloon sagged on the floor in the corner, unable to lift its head. We were broke, and our project stalled. A failure, you say? Absolutely not. In a world of chalk dust and worksheets, it had been a thrilling test run, a proof of concept. At the age of ten, we were just getting started.

We might dream of decisive electoral victories and the end of political struggle, but every generation must protect, recapture, and rebuild the society’s institutions. Somebody’s always aiming to seize the institutions, hollow them out, and undermine their stated goals. And they get pretty good at it, too.

A "how a law gets made" civics curriculum that doesn't say something like the above over and over again, and also illustrate it with many a case history, is an exercise in fantasy.

There are so many ways for an English teacher to ruin literature for students. With an older writer like Shakespeare, it's so easy to do. Here, students, work hard and read this great comedy. The students come back on Monday and say, it wasn't funny. The teacher insists it was very funny and says they're just not getting it. The students say, That's what we just said, we're not getting it. The teacher never notices exactly what the students are not getting. In part, what they may not be getting is this:

In comedic moments, Shakespeare doesn’t write the joke, he writes the setup for a joke. He expects the actors to take it from there.

If you read the lines without thinking of the choices the lines set up for the actors, there's not much chance the lines will be funny. And if they're not funny, the humanity of the characters will be obscure to you as a reader. Not much point for a student reading any further.

Instead . . .

Both a reader or an actor have to imagine what the lines make possible for an actor to do on stage. How to move, how to sound, what emotion to project. Shakespeare writes the setup for those acts of imagination. Thinking this way, an English teacher has a chance to help students find the lively urgency in an old play. The same goes for actors and their director.

The bumbling Pyramus, goes on stage before the local royalty to put on a play for their entertainment. In the play, his dear Thisby dies, and Pyramus prepares to stab himself out of lover's grief. When he mentions the target for his blade, his line is " . . . that left pap, where heart doth hop . . ." In a tragedy, the actor playing Pyramus would now stab himself in the heart. Because it is a comedy, and because Pyramus is a dope, the actor can stab himself somewhere else. And the actor can play with this next question: should Pyramus notice his mistake? If Pyramus notices his mistake there on stage before the lords and ladies, will he try to correct it? What emotion will the poor guy feel blundering in front the the royalty like that? Etc. All these choices set up by Shakespeare's text, and for actors, and for readers who understand that Shakespeare only wrote the setup for the joke, not the payoff.

It's not actually difficult to help a curious college student learn to read this way. In a classroom, you have to slow down and look in detail at scenes and videos of scenes, where choices have been made by skillful actors. But admittedly, it's also not difficult for a stuffy teacher to ruin an old play too.

Hisham Matar has written about how, in “countless ways,” the corrupt and corrupting spirit of “the Libyan dictatorship, like a crazed jealous lover, infiltrated every aspect of public and private life.” We face that same problem here, and we do not have sturdy customs and institutions in place for talking about it, much less addressing it. If memory serves me, during the Arab Spring Hisham Matar also wrote, roughly, that it is much easier to force the tyrant out of the capital city forever than it is to remove his spirit from the what’s left of vital institutions and from the damaged hearts and minds of so many people.

In response to a thread here and here and here by A. Jay Adler, David Rothkopf, and Timothy Snyder.

An old classmate posted a poem about teachers as an often-lamentable type of person, a person easy to parody. This memory came to mind:

After the funeral of an elder member of the English Department, her son said to me, “She liked her colleagues. Her one regret was that they were not braver.”

“The task is not to claim that every ruling is fascist, but to recognize what these decisions illuminate when viewed together: the emergence of a political order in which democratic institutions are increasingly reorganized to serve authoritarian ends. Fascism becomes visible not simply in a single spectacular act, but in the accumulation of institutional changes that make concentrated power appear lawful, ordinary, and legitimate.”

"Fascism becomes visible not simply in a single spectacular act, but in the accumulation of institutional changes that make concentrated power appear lawful, ordinary, and legitimate."

Henry Giroux, “Nuremberg’s Warning: When law legitimates the machinery of authoritarianism”

On the phone with a friend (paraphrased):

P says, roughly, “For this important thing I have undertaken there is no script.”

Me realizing from his comment, roughly, that “For all the important things, there is no script.”

Beneath the stadium, people in ones and twos strolled through the air-conditioned food court. One table away from me, university students were talking about a book, Heart of Darkness, just the sort of experience recruiters promise applicants will have in the affluent enclave of a large beautiful campus. Thoughtful, healthy young people, protected from other duties, poked at Joseph Conrad’s story of a brutal colonial effort by Europeans to get their hands on the natural resources of Africa. Pondering a murderous historical episode that Conrad himself witnessed and the fiction he made of it a few years later, one young man wondered whether exploitation is the dark heart of what we humans are capable of. If so, where was hope to be found?

Before long, the students dropped their paper sandwich wrappers into a nearby trash bin and headed out. They had asked a worthy question. We do commit terrible acts or look away while others commit them, even on our behalf. Before we get far into adulthood, most of us know this. But if we’re fortunate, or some might say blessed, we come to know more than that.

I am lucky to have lived long enough to have grandchildren. There’s a beautiful 800-mile drive to visit them, but recently I rode on a plane to the east coast city where they live. Finally liberated from the narrow seat and the long tube of the jet plane, I found even the utilitarian walkways of the airport hopeful. Ahead, a child looked up to a parent to ask if she could adventure down the automated walkway all by herself, and happily her wish was granted. My own grandchildren were just a few more miles away. The afternoon was full of promise.

Then, rising over the jangle of airport noises came familiar music, a beautiful pop song of years ago. Up ahead, a live three-piece band was performing “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” while we travelers walked left and right before them. I’m never quite certain what the lyrics mean, but that music is another thing. It’s somehow knowing yet hopeful, committed to life in spite of ourselves. As I passed, the band’s rhythms were too alive for me to ignore, so I turned and came back. My afternoon, with family members and a vibrant city just ahead, was magnified, even glorified, by the song. Standing near the band now, I could not keep still.

And I noticed in the stream of people coming from the gates a gray-haired woman mouthing the lyrics to herself as she walked. Another elder moved her shoulders and her hips more than the walking required. A young man in a burgundy jump suit turned toward the band and stretched his arms and legs into a measure or two of dance before continuing on. A healthy minority of people passing in each direction were smiling, quietly singing, or subtly dancing as they walked. Something pulsed there in the corridor. In front of strangers, people, myself included, exposed themselves as secret dancers and admitted to longing and to joy.

Somehow it all compounded: the unexpected music, the promise of travel and of life in general. Some of us could not resist; down deep we had no interest in resisting. You could see, given half a chance, half an invitation, you could see people would take no interest in the bitter heart of darkness. We would choose to be singer and dancer, unscheduled, in any corridor, if only the society we built for everyone invited and allowed it.

__________

Took place on the afternoon of July 1, 2026 in Terminal B of LaGuardia Airport.

We are all "Good Germans" now, writes Dave Winer. People who look the other way, who comply, who don't seem to know what's going on, who don't manage to resist, just as many Germans did in the 1930s and 1940s.

Many Americans occupy a peculiar space of privilege, where something that looks from arm's length like ignorance covers up more complicated circumstances. It's a corrupt privilege when we claim for ourselves these "rights" —

Not having to know, or seem to know, or be seen to know, not having to spend time with anyone who will call us out for knowing.

And if nobody is going to call us out, then there is no need to share responsibility for the country's condition and its actions. No need to do anything more than vote. No need to learn the skills of activism, which are the skills of making common cause with our fellow citizens. No need to admit that anything constructive in the face of disaster is even possible. No need, really, even to vote.

It's a profoundly dysfunctional psychological and social condition to inhabit, but as a nation here we are. Maybe an election changes the ruling party. Great, but that's not nearly good enough for a country that's as psychologically unsound as we are.

Where would the work even begin? It's hard to say. That doesn't mean we shouldn't begin the work of putting words to it. Doing so would have the immediate virtue of abandoning the privilege of not having to know.

If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:

News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.

It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.

But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .

. . . about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)

. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)

. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)

When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.

Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:

They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.

They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.

This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.

In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.

Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.

Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.

________

PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:

We have to make an effort to name things accurately. 

We have to make the effort to name things accurately. 

They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?

When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .