Opinion | Our Semicolons, Ourselves

Kevin D. Williamson let it rip in a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal about how far American democracy has fallen. Here’s one whooshing stretch: “With the old media gatekeepers gone, right-wing content creators rushed in and filled the world with QAnon kookery on Facebook, conspiracy theories powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress, fake news sponsored by Moscow and Beijing and fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orban and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built around himself. The prim consensus of 200 Northeastern newspaper editors has been replaced by the sardonic certitude of 100 million underemployed rage-monkeys and ignoramuses on Twitter.” (Thanks to Lisa Lee of Newton, Mass., and Emily Hawthorn of San Antonio for nominating this.)

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Daniel Drezner charted the hell of university leaders: “The primary job of any president or dean is fundraising, and some folks might be surprised at how hard it is to perform that task with any dignity or grace. The key thing to understand is that if you think speaking truth to power is hard, try speaking truth to money.” (Lee Burdette Williams, Mystic, Conn.)

In The Times of London, James Marriott sang the praises of profanity. “Consider the force and versatility of ‘the f-word,’” he wrote, later adding: “Shouting it has been shown to reduce pain. It can be used as a verb, an adverb, a noun, an adjective, a modifier, an intensifier and an interjection. It is a valid exclamation of love, dismay, rage, astonishment, happiness, agony and grief. We are likely to hear it or to utter it at the greatest and the most tragic moments of our lives. A vulgar one-word sonnet.” (Jan Whitener, Washington, D.C.)

In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper weighed in on the debate over the importance of the humanities: “When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me — and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med — because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital.” (David Schulz, San Francisco)

At some point we will have to declare a moratorium on jokes about George Santos. But not yet. In The Washington Post, Herb Scribner and Anne Branigin wrote: “If we’ve learned anything about Santos — a serial fabulist who has told multiple falsehoods about his education history, religion and physical abilities — it’s that when life hands him lemons, he stuffs them into a Hermès bag filled with cash, or something.” (Katherine Mechner, Brooklyn, N.Y. )