Abandoning a Cat

Abandoning a Cat

Memories of my father.

By Haruki Murakami The New Yorker

Of course I have a lot of memories of my father. It’s only natural, considering that we lived under the same roof of our not exactly spacious home from the time I was born until I left home at eighteen. And, as is the case with most children and parents, I imagine, some of my memories of my father are happy, some not quite so much. But the memories that remain most vividly in my mind now fall into neither category; they involve more ordinary events. 

This one, for instance: 

When we were living in Shukugawa (part of Nishinomiya City, in Hyogo Prefecture), one day we went to the beach to get rid of a cat. Not a kitten but an older female cat. Why we needed to get rid of it I can’t recall. The house we lived in was a single-family home with a garden and plenty of room for a cat. Maybe it was a stray we’d taken in that was now pregnant, and my parents felt they couldn’t care for it anymore. My memory isn’t clear on this point. Getting rid of cats back then was a common occurrence, not something that anyone would criticize you for. The idea of neutering cats never crossed anyone’s mind. I was in one of the lower grades in elementary school at the time, I believe, so it was probably around 1955, or a little later. Near our home were the ruins of a bank building that had been bombed by American planes—one of a few still visible scars of the war. 

My father and I set off that summer afternoon to leave the cat by the shore. He pedalled his bicycle, while I sat on the back holding a box with the cat inside. We rode along the Shukugawa River, arrived at the beach at Koroen, set the box down among some trees there, and, without a backward glance, headed home. The beach must have been about two kilometres from our house. 

At home, we got off the bike—discussing how we felt sorry for the cat, but what could we do?—and when we opened the front door the cat we’d just abandoned was there, greeting us with a friendly meow, its tail standing tall. It had beaten us home. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how it had done that. We’d been on a bike, after all. My father was stumped as well. The two of us stood there for a while, at a total loss for words. Slowly, my father’s look of blank amazement changed to one of admiration and, finally, to an expression of relief. And the cat went back to being our pet. 

We always had cats at home, and we liked them. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and cats and books were my best friends when I was growing up. I loved to sit on the veranda with a cat, sunning myself. So why did we have to take that cat to the beach and abandon it? Why didn’t I protest? These questions—along with that of how the cat beat us home—are still unanswered. 

Another memory of my father is this: 

Every morning, before breakfast, he would sit for a long time in front of the butsudan shrine in our home, intently reciting Buddhist sutras, with his eyes closed. It wasn’t a regular Buddhist shrine, exactly, but a small cylindrical glass case with a beautifully carved bodhisattva statue inside. Why did my father recite sutras every morning in front of that glass case, instead of in front of a standard butsudan? That’s one more on my list of unanswered questions. 

At any rate, this was obviously an important ritual for him, one that marked the start of each day. As far as I know, he never failed to perform what he called his “duty,” and no one was allowed to interfere with it. There was an intense focus about the whole act. Simply labelling it “a daily habit” doesn’t do it justice. 

Once, when I was a child, I asked him whom he was praying for. And he replied that it was for those who had died in the war. His fellow Japanese soldiers who’d died, as well as the Chinese who’d been their enemy. He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t press him. I suspect that if I had he would have opened up more. But I didn’t. There must have been something in me that prevented me from pursuing the topic. 

Ishould explain a little about my father’s background. His father, Benshiki Murakami, was born into a farming family in Aichi Prefecture. As was common with younger sons, my grandfather was sent to a nearby temple to train as a priest. He was a decent student, and after apprenticeships at various temples he was appointed head priest of the Anyoji Temple, in Kyoto. This temple has four or five hundred families in its parish, so it was quite a promotion for him. 

I grew up in the Osaka-Kobe area, so I didn’t have many opportunities to visit my grandfather’s home, this Kyoto temple, and I have few memories of him. What I understand, though, is that he was a free, uninhibited sort of person, known for his love of drinking. As his name implies—the character ben in his first name means “eloquence”—he had a way with words; he was a capable priest, and was apparently popular. I do recall that he was charismatic, with a booming voice. 

My grandfather had six sons (not a single daughter) and was a healthy, hearty man, but, sadly, when he was seventy, at eight-fifty on the morning of August 25, 1958, he was struck by a train while crossing the tracks of the Keishin Line, which connects Kyoto (Misasagi) and Otsu, and killed. It was an unattended railway crossing in Yamada-cho, Kitahanayama, Yamashina, in Higashiyama-ku. A large typhoon hit the Kinki region on this particular day; it was raining hard, my grandfather was carrying an umbrella, and he probably didn’t see the train coming around a curve. He was a bit hard of hearing as well. 

The night our family learned that my grandfather had died, I remember my father quickly preparing to go to Kyoto, and my mother crying, clinging to him, pleading, “Whatever you do, don’t agree to take over the temple.” I was only nine at the time, but this image is etched in my brain, like a memorable scene from a black-and-white movie. My father was expressionless, silently nodding. I think he’d already made up his mind. I could sense it. 

My father was born on December 1, 1917, in Awata-guchi, Sakyo-ku, in Kyoto. When he was a boy, the peaceful Taisho democracy period was drawing to a close, to be followed by the gloomy Great Depression, then the swamp that was the Second Sino-Japanese War, and, finally, the tragedy of the Second World War. Then came the confusion and poverty of the early postwar period, when my father’s generation struggled to survive. As I mentioned, my father was one of six brothers. Three of them had been drafted and fought in the Second Sino-Japanese War and, miraculously, survived with no serious injuries. Almost all of the six sons were more or less qualified to be priests. They had that kind of education. My father, for instance, held a junior rank as a priest, roughly equivalent to that of a second lieutenant in the military. In the summer, during the busy obon season—the yearly festival to honor family ancestors—these six brothers would assemble in Kyoto and divide up the visits to the temple’s parishioners. At night, they’d get together and drink. 

After my grandfather died, there was the pressing question of who would take over the priestly duties at the temple. Most of the sons were already married and had jobs. Truth be told, no one had expected my grandfather to pass away so early or so suddenly. 

The eldest son—my uncle Shimei Murakami—had wanted to become a veterinarian, but after the war he took a job at the tax office in Osaka and was now a subsection chief, while my father, the second son, taught Japanese at the combined Koyo Gakuin junior and senior high school in the Kansai area. The other brothers were either teachers, too, or studying in Buddhist-affiliated colleges. Two of the brothers had been adopted by other families, a common practice, and had different last names. At any rate, when they met to discuss the situation no one volunteered to take on the temple duties. Becoming the head priest of a large temple like that was no easy undertaking, and would be a major burden for anyone’s family. The brothers knew this all too well. And my grandmother, a widow now, was a strict, no-nonsense type; any wife would have found it difficult to serve as the head priest’s spouse with her still there. My mother was the eldest daughter of an established merchant family in Senba, in Osaka. She was a fashionable woman, not at all the type to fit in as the head priest’s wife in Kyoto. So it was no wonder she clung to my father, in tears, begging him not to take over the temple. 

At least from my perspective, as his son, my father seemed to be a straightforward, responsible person. He hadn’t inherited his father’s openhearted disposition (he was more the nervous type), but his good-natured manner and his way of speaking put other people at ease. He had a sincere faith as well. He probably would have made a good priest, and I think he knew that. My guess is that if he’d been single he wouldn’t have resisted the idea very much. But he had something he couldn’t compromise on—his own little family. 

In the end, my uncle Shimei left his job at the tax office and succeeded my grandfather as the head priest of Anyoji Temple. And, later, he was succeeded by his son, my cousin Junichi. According to Junichi, Shimei agreed to become the head priest out of a sense of obligation as the eldest son. I say he agreed, but it was more that he had no choice. Back then, the parishioners were much more influential than they are now, and they probably wouldn’t have let him off the hook. 

When my father was a boy, he was sent to be an apprentice at a temple somewhere in Nara. The understanding, presumably, was that he would be adopted into the Nara priest’s family. However, after his apprenticeship he returned home to Kyoto. This was ostensibly because the cold had adversely affected his health, but the main reason seems to have been that he couldn’t adjust to the new environment. After returning home, he lived, as before, as his parents’ son. But I get the feeling that the experience remained with him, as a deep emotional scar. I can’t point to any particular evidence of this, but there was something about him that made me feel that way. 

I recall now the expression on my father’s face—surprised at first, then impressed, then relieved—when that cat we had supposedly abandoned beat us home. 

I’ve never experienced anything like that. I was brought up—fairly lovingly, I’d say—as the only child in an ordinary family. So I can’t understand, on a practical or an emotional level, what kind of psychic scars may result when a child is abandoned by his parents. I can only imagine it on a superficial level. 

The French director François Truffaut talked about being forced to live apart from his parents when he was young. And for the rest of his life he pursued this theme of abandonment in his films. Most people probably have some depressing experience they can’t quite put into words but also can’t forget. 

My father graduated from Higashiyama Junior High School (equivalent to a high school today) in 1936 and entered the School for Seizan Studies at eighteen. Students generally received a four-year exemption from military service, but he forgot to take care of some administrative paperwork, and in 1938, when he was twenty, he was drafted. It was a procedural error, but once that kind of mistake is made you can’t just apologize your way out of it. Bureaucracies and the military are like that. Protocol has to be followed. 

My father belonged to the 20th Infantry Regiment, which was part of the 16th Division (Fushimi Division). The nucleus of the 16th Division then consisted of four infantry regiments: the 9th Infantry Regiment (Kyoto), the 20th Infantry Regiment (Fukuchiyama), the 33rd Infantry Regiment (Tsu City, in Mie Prefecture), and the 38th Infantry Regiment (Nara). It’s unclear why my father, who was from Kyoto City proper, was assigned not to the local 9th Regiment but instead to the far-off Fukuchiyama Regiment. 

At least this was how I understood it for the longest time, but when I looked more deeply into his background I found that I was wrong. In fact, my father belonged not to the 20th Infantry Regiment but to the 16th Transport Regiment, which was also part of the 16th Division. And this regiment wasn’t in Fukuchiyama but was headquartered in Fukakusa / Fushimi, in Kyoto City. So why was I under the impression that my father had belonged to the 20th Infantry Regiment? I’ll discuss this point later. 

The 20th Infantry Regiment was known for being one of the first to arrive in Nanjing after the city fell. Military units from Kyoto were generally seen as well bred and urbane, but this particular regiment’s actions gave it a surprisingly bloody reputation. For a long time, I was afraid that my father had participated in the attack on Nanjing, and I was reluctant to investigate the details. He died, in August, 2008, at the age of ninety, without my ever having asked him about it, without his ever having talked about it. 

My father was drafted in August of 1938. The 20th Infantry Regiment’s infamous march into Nanjing took place the previous year, in December of 1937, so my father had missed it by nearly a year. When I learned this, it was a tremendous relief, as if a great weight had been lifted. 

As a private second class in the 16th Transport Regiment, my father boarded a troop transport in Ujina Harbor on October 3, 1938, and arrived in Shanghai on October 6th. There his regiment joined up with the 20th Infantry Regiment. According to the Army’s wartime directory, the 16th Transport Regiment was primarily assigned to supply and security duties. If you follow the regiment’s movements, you see that it covered incredible distances for the time. For units that were barely motorized, and lacked sufficient fuel—horses were the main mode of transportation—travelling so far must have been extremely arduous. The situation at the front was dire: supplies couldn’t get there; there was a chronic shortage of rations and ammunition; the men’s uniforms were in tatters; and unsanitary conditions led to outbreaks of cholera and other infectious diseases. It was impossible for Japan, with its limited strength, to control a huge country like China. Even though the Japanese Army was able to gain military control of one city after another, it was, practically speaking, incapable of occupying entire regions. The memoirs written by soldiers in the 20th Infantry Regiment give a clear picture of how pitiful the situation was. Transport troops were not usually directly involved in front-line fighting, but that didn’t mean they were safe. As they were only lightly armed (usually with just bayonets), when the enemy attacked from the rear they suffered major casualties. 

Soon after starting at the Seizan school, my father had discovered the pleasures of haiku and joined a haiku circle. He was really into it, to use a modern idiom. Several of the haiku he wrote while he was a soldier were published in the school’s haiku journal; most likely he mailed them to the school from the front: 

Birds migrating

Ah—where they are headed

must be my homeland 

A soldier, yet a priest

clasping my hands in prayer

toward the moon 

I’m no haiku expert, so it’s beyond me to say how accomplished his were. Clearly, what holds these poems together is not technique but the open, honest feelings that underscore them. 

My father had been studying, no doubt conscientiously, to become a priest. But a simple clerical error had turned him into a soldier. He went through brutal basic training, was handed a Type 38 rifle, placed on a troop-transport ship, and sent off to the fearsome battles at the front. His unit was constantly on the move, clashing with Chinese troops and guerrillas who put up a fierce resistance. In every way imaginable, this was the opposite of life in a peaceful temple in the Kyoto hills. He must have suffered tremendous mental confusion and spiritual turmoil. In the midst of all that, writing haiku may have been his sole consolation. Things he never could have written in his letters, or they wouldn’t have made it past the censors, he put into the form of haiku—expressing himself in a symbolic code, as it were—where he was able to honestly bare his true feelings. 

My father talked to me about the war only once, when he told me a story about how his unit had executed a captured Chinese soldier. I don’t know what prompted him to tell me this. It happened so long ago that it’s an isolated memory, the context unclear. I was still in the lower grades in elementary school. He related matter-of-factly how the execution had taken place. Though the Chinese soldier knew that he was going to be killed, he didn’t struggle, didn’t show any fear, but just sat there quietly with his eyes closed. And he was decapitated. The man’s attitude was exemplary, my father told me. He seemed to have deep feelings of respect for the Chinese soldier. I don’t know if he had to watch as other soldiers in his unit carried out the execution, or if he himself was forced to play a direct role. There’s no way now to determine whether this is because my memory is hazy, or whether my father described the incident in intentionally vague terms. But one thing is clear: the experience left feelings of anguish and torment that lingered for a long time in the soul of this priest turned soldier. 

At the time, it wasn’t at all uncommon to allow new soldiers and recruits to practice killing by executing captured Chinese soldiers. Killing unarmed prisoners was, of course, a violation of international law, but the Japanese military in that period seemed to take the practice for granted. Military units likely didn’t have the resources to take care of prisoners. Most of these executions were performed either by shooting the prisoner or by stabbing him with a bayonet, but I recall my father telling me that for this particular execution a sword was used. 

Needless to say, my father’s recounting of this cold-blooded beheading of a man with a sword became deeply etched in my young mind. To put it another way, this heavy weight my father carried—a trauma, in today’s terminology—was handed down, in part, to me, his son. That’s how human connections work, how history works. It was an act of transference and ritual. My father hardly said a word about his wartime experiences. It’s unlikely that he wanted to remember this execution or to talk about it. Yet he must have felt a compelling need to relate the story to his son, his own flesh and blood, even if this meant that it would remain an open wound for both of us. 

The 20th Infantry Regiment, along with my father’s unit, returned to Japan on August 20, 1939. After a year as a soldier, my father resumed his studies at the Seizan school. At the time, the draft meant two years of military service, but for some reason my father served only one. Perhaps the military took into account the fact that he had been enrolled as a student when he was drafted. 

After his service, my father continued to enthusiastically write haiku. This one, written in October of 1940, was probably inspired by a good-will visit by the Hitler Youth to Japan: 

They call out, singing
to bring the deer closer,
the Hitler Youth

Personally, I really like this haiku, which captures an obscure moment in history in a subtle, unusual way. There’s a striking contrast between the far-off bloody conflict in Europe and the deer (probably the famous deer in Nara). Those Hitler Youth, enjoying a short visit to Japan, may very well have gone on to perish in the bitter winters at the Eastern Front. 

I’m drawn to this poem as well: 

Anniversary

of Issa’s death, I sit here

with his sad poems 

The world depicted is so calm and tranquil, yet there’s a lingering sense of chaos. 

My father always loved literature and, after he became a teacher, spent much of his time reading. Our house was full of books. This may have influenced me in my teens, when I developed a passion for reading myself. My father graduated with honors from the Seizan school, and, in March, 1941, he entered the literature department at Kyoto Imperial University. It can’t have been easy to pass the entrance exam for a top school like Kyoto Imperial University after undergoing a Buddhist education to be a priest. My mother often told me, “Your father’s very bright.” How bright he really was I have no idea. Frankly, it’s not a question that interests me much. For somebody in my line of work, intelligence is less important than a sharp intuition. Be that as it may, the fact remains that my father always had excellent grades in school. 

Compared with him, I never had much interest in studying; my grades were lacklustre from start to finish. I’m the type who eagerly pursues things I’m interested in but can’t be bothered with anything else. That was true of me when I was a student, and it is still true now. 

This disappointed my father, who I’m sure compared me to himself at the same age. You were born in this peaceful time, he must have thought. You can study as much as you like, with nothing to get in the way. So why can’t you make more of an effort? I think he wanted me to follow the path he hadn’t been able to take because of the war. 

But I couldn’t live up to my father’s expectations. I never could will myself to study the way he wanted me to. I found most classes at school mind-numbing, the school system overly uniform and repressive. This led my father to feel a chronic dismay, and me to feel a chronic distress (and a certain amount of unconscious anger). When I débuted as a novelist, at thirty, my father was really pleased, but by that time our relationship had grown distant and cool. 

Even now I carry around with me the feeling—or perhaps the dregs of the feeling—that I disappointed my father, let him down. Back in my teens, this made things uncomfortable at home, with a constant undercurrent of guilt on my part. I still have nightmares in which I have to take a test at school and can’t answer a single question. Time ticks away as I do nothing, though I’m well aware that failing the test will have major consequences—that sort of dream. I usually wake up in a cold sweat. 

But, back then, being glued to my desk, finishing homework, and getting better grades on tests held far less appeal than reading books I enjoyed, listening to music I liked, playing sports or mah-jongg with friends, and going on dates with girls. 

All we can do is breathe the air of the period we live in, carry with us the special burdens of the time, and grow up within those confines. That’s just how things are. 

My father graduated from the School for Seizan Studies in the spring of 1941, and at the end of September received a special draft notice. On October 3rd, he was back in uniform, first in the 20th Infantry Regiment (Fukuchiyama), and then in the 53rd Transport Regiment, which was part of the 53rd Division. 

In 1940, the 16th Division had been permanently stationed in Manchuria, and while it was there the 53rd Division in Kyoto was organized to take its place. Most likely, the confusion of this sudden reorganization accounts for why my father was initially placed in the Fukuchiyama Regiment. (As I said, I was always mistakenly convinced that he’d been in the Fukuchiyama Regiment from the first time he was drafted.) The 53rd Division was sent to Burma in 1944, was in the Battle of Imphal, and, from December to March, 1945, was nearly decimated by the British in the Battle of the Irrawaddy River. 

But quite unexpectedly, on November 30, 1941, my father was released from military service and allowed to return to civilian life. November 30th was eight days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that attack, I doubt that the military would have been generous enough to let him go. 

As my father told it, his life was saved by one officer. My father was a pfc. at the time and was summoned by a senior officer, who told him, “You’re studying at Kyoto Imperial University, and would better serve the country by continuing your studies than by being a soldier.” Did one officer have the authority to make this decision? I have no idea. It’s hard to conceive that a humanities student such as my father could be seen as somehow serving the country by returning to college and his study of haiku. There had to be other factors at work. Either way, he was released from the Army and was a free man again. 

At least that was the story I heard, or have a memory of hearing, as a child. Unfortunately, it doesn’t accord with the facts. Kyoto Imperial University records indicate that my father enrolled in the literature department in October, 1944. Perhaps my memory is cloudy. Or maybe it was my mother who told me this story, and her memory was faulty. And now there’s no way to verify what’s true and what isn’t. 

According to the records, my father entered the literature department of Kyoto Imperial University in October, 1944, and graduated in September, 1947. But I have no idea where he was, or what he was doing, between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six, the three years after he was released from the military and before he entered Kyoto Imperial University. 

Right after my father was released from service, the Second World War broke out in the Pacific. In the course of the war, the 16th Division and the 53rd Division were essentially wiped out. If my father had not been released, if he’d been shipped off with one of his former units, he would almost certainly have died on the battlefield, and then, of course, I wouldn’t be alive now. You could call it fortunate, but having his own life saved while his former comrades lost theirs became a source of great pain and anguish. I understand all the more now why he closed his eyes and devoutly recited the sutras every morning of his life. 

On June 12, 1945, after he had entered Kyoto Imperial University, my father received his third draft notice. This time he was assigned to the Chubu 143 Corps as a pfc. It’s unclear where the corps was stationed, but it stayed within Japan. Two months later, on August 15th, the war ended, and on October 28th my father was released from service and returned to the university. He was twenty-seven. 

In September, 1947, my father passed the exams to receive his B.A. and went on to the graduate program in literature at Kyoto Imperial University. I was born in January, 1949. Because of his age, and the fact that he was married and had a child, my father had to give up his studies before completing the program. In order to make a living, he took a position as a Japanese teacher at Koyo Gakuin, in Nishinomiya. I don’t know the details of how my father and mother came to be married. Since they lived far apart—one in Kyoto, the other in Osaka—most likely a mutual acquaintance had introduced them. My mother had intended to marry another man, a music teacher, but he died in the war. And the store that her father had owned, in Senba, Osaka, burned down in a U.S. bombing raid. She always remembered Grumman carrier-based fighters strafing the city, and fleeing for her life through the streets of Osaka. The war had a profound effect on my mother’s life as well. 

My mother, who is now ninety-six, was also a Japanese teacher. After graduating from the literature department of Shoin Women’s School, in Osaka, she worked as a teacher at her alma mater, but she left her job when she got married. 

According to my mother, my father in his younger days lived a pretty wild life. His wartime experiences were fresh then, and his frustration at the fact that his life hadn’t gone the way he’d wanted it to made things hard at times. He drank a lot, and occasionally hit his students. But by the time I was growing up he’d mellowed significantly. He’d get depressed and out of sorts sometimes, and drink too much (something my mother often complained about), but I don’t recall any unpleasant experiences in our home. 

Objectively speaking, I think my father was an excellent teacher. When he died, I was surprised at how many of his former students came to pay their respects. They seemed to have a great deal of affection for him. Many of them had become doctors, and they took very good care of him as he battled cancer and diabetes. 

My mother was apparently an outstanding teacher in her own right, and even after she had me and became a full-time housewife many of her former pupils would stop by the house. For some reason, though, I never felt that I was cut out to be a teacher. 

As I grew up and formed my own personality, the psychological discord between me and my father became more obvious. Both of us were unbending, and, when it came to not expressing our thoughts directly, we were two of a kind. For better or for worse. 

After I got married and started working, my father and I grew even more estranged. And when I became a full-time writer our relationship got so convoluted that in the end we cut off nearly all contact. We didn’t see each other for more than twenty years, and spoke only when it was absolutely necessary. 

My father and I were born into different ages and environments, and our ways of thinking and viewing the world were miles apart. If at a certain point I’d attempted to rebuild our relationship, things might have gone in another direction, but I was too focussed on what I wanted to do to make the effort. 

My father and I finally talked face to face shortly before he died. I was almost sixty, my father ninety. He was in a hospital in Nishijin, in Kyoto. He had terrible diabetes, and cancer was ravaging much of his body. Though he’d always been on the stout side, now he was gaunt. I barely recognized him. And there, in the final days of his life—the very final few days—my father and I managed an awkward conversation and reached a sort of reconciliation. Despite our differences, looking at my emaciated father I did feel a connection, a bond between us. 

Even now, I can relive the shared puzzlement of that summer day when we rode together on his bike to the beach at Koroen to abandon a striped cat, a cat that totally got the better of us. I can recall the sound of the waves, the scent of the wind whistling through the stand of pines. It’s the accumulation of insignificant things like this that has made me the person I am. 

Ihave one more memory from childhood that involves a cat. I included this episode in one of my novels but would like to touch on it again here, as something that actually happened. 

We had a little white kitten. I don’t recall how we came to have it, because back then we always had cats coming and going in our home. But I do recall how pretty this kitten’s fur was, how cute it was. 

One evening, as I sat on the porch, this cat suddenly raced straight up into the tall, beautiful pine tree in our garden. Almost as if it wanted to show off to me how brave and agile it was. I couldn’t believe how nimbly it scampered up the trunk and disappeared into the upper branches. After a while, the kitten started to meow pitifully, as though it were begging for help. It had had no trouble climbing up so high, but it seemed terrified of climbing back down. 

I stood at the base of the tree looking up, but couldn’t see the cat. I could only hear its faint cry. I went to get my father and told him what had happened, hoping that he could figure out a way to rescue the kitten. But there was nothing he could do; it was too high up for a ladder to be of any use. The kitten kept meowing for help, as the sun began to set. Darkness finally enveloped the pine tree. 

I don’t know what happened to that little kitten. The next morning when I got up, I couldn’t hear it crying anymore. I stood at the base of the tree and called out the kitten’s name, but there was no reply. Just silence. 

Perhaps the cat had made it down sometime during the night and gone off somewhere (but where?). Or maybe, unable to climb down, it had clung to the branches, exhausted, and grown weaker and weaker until it died. I sat there on the porch, gazing up at the tree, with these scenarios running through my mind. Thinking of that little white kitten clinging on for dear life with its tiny claws, then shrivelled up and dead. 

The experience taught me a vivid lesson: going down is much harder than going up. To generalize from this, you might say that results overwhelm causes and neutralize them. In some cases, a cat is killed in the process; in other cases, a human being. 

At any rate, there’s really only one thing that I wanted to get across here. A single, obvious fact: 

I am the ordinary son of an ordinary man. Which is pretty self-evident, I know. But, as I started to unearth that fact, it became clear to me that everything that had happened in my father’s life and in my life was accidental. We live our lives this way: viewing things that came about through accident and happenstance as the sole possible reality. 

To put it another way, imagine raindrops falling on a broad stretch of land. Each one of us is a nameless raindrop among countless drops. A discrete, individual drop, for sure, but one that’s entirely replaceable. Still, that solitary raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, its own duty to carry on that history. Even if it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into a collective something. Or maybe precisely because it’s absorbed into a larger, collective entity. 

Occasionally, my mind takes me back to that looming pine tree in the garden of our house in Shukugawa. To thoughts of that little kitten, still clinging to a branch, its body turning to bleached bones. And I think of death, and how very difficult it is to climb straight down to the ground, so far below you that it makes your head spin. ♦ 

Greta Thunberg Is the Anti-Trump

Greta Thunberg Is the Anti-Trump

By Masha Gessen The New Yorker

She is young and he is old. She is honest and he is a habitual liar. She relies on science and he relies on nothing but his gut. Her focus is on the forecastable future, and he lives in an imaginary past. Greta Thunberg is the anti-Trump.

Other young people have been in this battle longer than Thunberg, who led the global climate strike last Friday, in New York, and addressed the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit on Monday. Other young people have stated the obvious truth: that the governments elected by their parents and grandparents have been derelict in their responsibility to insure that today’s teen-agers have a planet to inhabit. Kelsey Juliana, of Eugene, Oregon, who is now twenty-three, has been a consistent and inventive climate activist since she was a young teen-ager. At fifteen, she co-filed a lawsuit against the governor of Oregon, and at nineteen she became the lead plaintiff in Juliana v. United States, which has been working its way through the courts for four years, slowed by objections from both the Obama and the Trump Administrations; the twenty-one young plaintiffs are claiming that government inaction on climate change violates their constitutional rights. The Sunrise Movement, driven by young people, was founded in 2017, a year before Thunberg began skipping school to protest outside Sweden’s parliament building, in Stockholm. Members of the Sunrise Movement confronted Dianne Feinstein earlier this year, prompting the California senator to admonish a sixteen-year-old: “You didn’t vote for me!” On Monday, Thunberg joined sixteen other children in filing a lawsuit against worst-polluter countries; one of her co-plaintiffs, the New York activist Alexandria Villaseñor, criticized the media for paying little attention to the other children named in the suit: “The other plaintiffs have names, experiences, and stories.”

Villaseñor is right that Thunberg has commanded far more media attention, and more respect from politicians, than her peers in the climate movement—she is the only one who has a hold on our collective imagination. More important, she has inspired her peers: in one year, her solitary school strike and weekly protest on the steps of the Swedish parliament turned into a global movement. She is the political leader for the age of Trump because she is in every way his opposite.

Thunberg thinks and speaks logically. Her activism was prompted by a contradiction: the planet was dying but the grownups were not behaving as if there were an emergency. This was absurd, unthinkable, untenable—and it was reality. Every time Thunberg speaks, she makes this incontrovertible case for action and against hypocrisy. She points out that adults tell children to have hope and dream of a big future while they themselves act like there will be no tomorrow and that’s all right. She says that adults tell children to go to school and study while they themselves willfully ignore the fruits of the best scholarship available. She exposes the fundamental contradiction of Western politics: that it is impossible to fight climate change and continue to measure national success by the rate—or presence—of economic growth. One is not compatible with the other, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” she said at the U.N. on Monday. Some of Thunberg’s sentences are simple and predictable: “We will make them hear us.” Others are poetic: “[Our future] was stolen from us every time the adults said that the sky is the limit and that you only live once.” All of her sentences have verbs and nouns, beginnings and endings, and describe something we recognize as true.

Trump speaks by creating piles of words that become more distant from facts the longer he speaks. He free-associates, escalates, repeats, distorts, lapses into the unintelligible, and lashes out. He builds feeling but never an argument. Logic is his enemy. The purpose of Trump’s speech is to obscure, to muddy the waters. Even when he reads a speech clearly prepared by someone else, as he did on Tuesday at the U.N., he is inevitably engaged in rhetorical coverup. While Thunberg was at the Climate Summit (Trump stopped in for a moment), the President was speaking at a religious-freedom event. The man who began his Presidency by imposing a ban on Muslim travellers, and who went on to reduce the number of refugees the country accepts to an all-time low, delivered an address about American commitment to helping people persecuted for their religious beliefs, wherever it happens.

Thunberg and Trump hold opposing world views: she sees the universe as moral; he believes that it is rotten. She believes in the concepts of right and wrong, and he is a nihilist. Speaking at the U.N., Thunberg said, “If you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil, and that I refuse to believe.” A day earlier, Trump talked with reporters at the White House about the whistle-blower report that allegedly concerns, in part, his July phone conversation with the President of Ukraine. “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice-President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine,” Trump said. To the extent that this sentence can be interpreted as having meaning, it seems to reflect Trump’s understanding that the world is full of corruption, ruled by corruption, and doomed to corruption. To succeed, one has to be even more corrupt than others.

Thunberg’s message of logic and the basic belief that humanity is capable of moral action lands precisely because we are living in a time dominated by a man who continuously spews nonsense based on the premise that the world is rancid to the core. Thunberg always makes me think of Soviet dissidents who cut through the fog of late-totalitarian propaganda by insisting that words that had long been stripped of meaning be taken seriously. They demanded the rights guaranteed to them by the Soviet Constitution, such as the right to peaceful assembly. Everyone around them had long known that the law was just words, but they began acting as though words had meaning. They were thrown in prisons and psychiatric hospitals or tossed out of the country, and yet they and their friends persisted, because that’s what one did if the universe was moral. They had no evidence that it was moral, but by insisting on acting as if it were, they were willing a better future into being. Their moral authority came from the simple heroism of behaving logically and consistently. So does Thunberg’s. She doesn’t fly. She sailed to the United States. She has taken trains to destinations in Europe. At home in Stockholm, she bikes. She buys clothes secondhand. She looks smaller and younger than her sixteen years; with her braids, she looks like a girl from a children’s storybook, where she would surely be shown in nature. Her opposite is the man in the oversized, shiny Italian suits—everything about him is too much, including the length of his tie. He looks older than his age, or like a bad commercial for a self-tanning lotion. Just looking at and listening to him feels embarrassing.

Trump has been repeatedly and unfairly (to children) accused of acting like a child. “Baby Trump” balloons have been used to troll the President all over the Western hemisphere. Thunberg is a child. Unlike many other young activists, she does not dress, act, or speak like a miniature adult. When Sunrise Movement activists confronted Feinstein, they addressed her in the idiom of the existing political process: “I hear what you are saying, but we are the people who voted for you; you are supposed to listen to us.” Feinstein immediately rebuked the teen-ager for being a child impersonating an adult. Thunberg is a child who rebukes adults for failing, and for forcing children to act. She calls bullshit on every single political slogan based on the construction of children as human beings in need of protection. Her activism is not an attempt at participation. It’s an intervention.

Trump Confirms He Discussed Biden With Ukraine

As Trump Confirms He Discussed Biden With Ukraine, Pressure to Impeach Builds

By Nicholas Fandos, Jonathan Martin

and Maggie Haberman NY TIMES

WASHINGTON — President Trump acknowledged on Sunday that he raised corruption accusations against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during a phone call with Ukraine’s leader, a stunning admission as pressure mounted on Democrats to impeach Mr. Trump over allegations, he leaned on a foreign government to help damage a political rival. 

In public and in private, many Democrats said the evidence that has emerged in recent days indicating that Mr. Trump pushed the Ukrainian government to investigate Mr. Biden, and his administration’s stonewalling of attempts by Congress to learn more, were changing their calculations about whether to charge him with articles of impeachment. 

The influential chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has resisted such action, said the House might now have “crossed the Rubicon” in light of the new disclosures, and the administration’s withholding of a related whistle-blower complaint. A group of moderate freshman lawmakers who had been opposed to an impeachment inquiry said they were considering changing course, while other Democrats who had reluctantly supported one amplified their calls. Progressives, meanwhile, sharpened their criticisms of the party’s leadership for failing to act. 

The fast-moving developments prompted Speaker Nancy Pelosi to level a warning of her own to the White House: Turn over the secret whistle-blower complaint by Thursday, or face a serious escalation from Congress. 

In a letter to House Democrats, Ms. Pelosi never mentioned the word “impeachment,” but her message hinted at that possibility. 

“If the administration persists in blocking this whistle-blower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the president, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation,” Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, wrote in the letter. 

Read the Letter Nancy Pelosi Sent About the Whistle-Blower Complaint 

The House speaker warned of a new phase in the investigation of President Trump if he refuses to hand over the whistle-blower complaint. 

The allegations center on whether Mr. Trump pressured Ukraine’s newly elected leader, implicitly or explicitly, to take action to hurt Mr. Biden’s election bid at a vulnerable moment for the former Soviet republic, possibly using United States military aid as leverage. Ukraine has been fighting Russian-backed separatists, and the Trump administration had temporarily been withholding a $250 million package of military funding. There have been no indications to this point, however, that Mr. Trump mentioned the aid money on the call. 

Mr. Trump showed no sign of contrition on Sunday, telling aides that Democrats were overplaying their hand on a matter voters would dismiss. Publicly, he worked to focus attention not on his own actions but on Mr. Biden’s. 

Speaking to reporters, the president defended his July phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as entirely appropriate, and stopped short of directly confirming news reports about what was discussed. But he acknowledged that he had discussed Mr. Biden during the call and accused the former vice president of corruption tied to his son Hunter’s business activities in the former Soviet republic. 

“The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, with largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place and largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine,” Mr. Trump told reporters before leaving for a trip to Texas and Ohio. 

It is still far from clear that the latest scandal surrounding Mr. Trump’s conduct will lead Ms. Pelosi or other top Democrats to bless full impeachment proceedings and a vote. The House Judiciary Committee is already investigating whether to recommend articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump over other matters, but Ms. Pelosi has consistently questioned the strength of the case. 

Proponents of impeachment have repeatedly pointed to damaging revelations — including several instances of possible obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump detailed by the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — that they believe warrant seeking Mr. Trump’s removal. But they have run into resistance or indifference from their colleagues and the general public, in part because any impeachment proceeding could end in an acquittal by the Republican-controlled Senate. 

On Sunday, the pattern appeared to be holding, with the vast majority of Republican lawmakers refraining from comment about the latest allegations against Mr. Trump. A few prominent lawmakers suggested, however, that the White House should disclose the contents of the phone call with Mr. Zelensky. 

“I’m hoping the president can share, in an appropriate way, information to deal with the drama around the phone call,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “I think it would be good for the country if we could deal with it.” 

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, was more critical, deeming it “critical for the facts to come out” and saying, “If the president asked or pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rival, either directly or through his personal attorney, it would be troubling in the extreme.” 

At the same time, interviews with more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers this weekend made clear that they believed the latest allegations had the potential to be singularly incriminating, with the potential to advance the impeachment drive just as it appeared to be losing steam. Not only do the allegations suggest that Mr. Trump was using the power of his office to extract political gains from a foreign power, they argued, but his administration is actively trying once again to prevent Congress from finding out what happened. 

“I don’t want to do any more to contribute to the divisiveness in the country, but my biggest responsibility as an elected official is to protect our national security and Constitution,” said Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, adding that it is “becoming more and more difficult” for Democrats to avoid an all-out impeachment inquiry. 

Several first-term lawmakers who had opposed impeachment conferred privately over the weekend to discuss announcing support for an inquiry, potentially jointly, after a hearing scheduled for Thursday with the acting national intelligence director, according to Democratic officials familiar with the conversations. A handful of them declined to speak on the record over the weekend, with some still reluctant to go public and others looking for cues from Ms. Pelosi and their freshman colleagues. 

Representative Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey freshman who has supported an inquiry, said the fresh revelations made it clear that Congress must move more decisively. 

“There are lines being crossed right now that I fear will be erased if the House does not take strong action to assert them, to defend them,” he said in an interview. “If all we do is leave it up to the American people to get rid of him, we have not upheld the rule of law, we have not set a precedent that this behavior is utterly out of bounds.” 

The Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, said Sunday morning that the accumulating evidence of wrongdoing, and of a presidential cover-up unfolding in real time, left the House with few other options. Mr. Schiff spoke with Ms. Pelosi before making his remarks to coordinate their statements, two people familiar with their conversation said, a sign that the speaker may be more comfortable moving toward a direct discussion of impeachment. 

“I have been very reluctant to go down the path of impeachment,” Mr. Schiff said on CNN. “But if the president is essentially withholding military aid at the same time he is trying to browbeat a foreign leader into doing something illicit, providing dirt on his opponent during a presidential campaign, then that may be the only remedy that is coequal to the evil that that conduct represents.” 

Mr. Schiff first brought the existence of the whistle-blower complaint to light a little more than a week ago and has been the party’s lead negotiator with the acting director of national intelligence, who has refused to turn it over to Congress. 

Progressives in Congress have watched the stonewalling with seething frustration, and in recent days, they have begun to openly second-guess Ms. Pelosi’s go-slow approach. 

“At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior — it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, who commands considerable influence among progressives, wrote on Twitter late Saturday night. 

Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the co-chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus, said in an interview that she was now ready to vote outright to impeach Mr. Trump, rather than simply continuing the investigation, and that she planned to make her case in public. 

“There is no congressional authority anymore that we are being allowed to exercise, except the one that we have not exercised yet,” Ms. Jayapal said. 

But the more crucial issue is whether Democrats from the districts Mr. Trump won or nearly lost can stomach a push to expel him. 

Representative Dina Titus of Nevada said once a transcript is made public of Mr. Trump pressuring Mr. Zelensky, she doubted that even Democrats from competitive seats could continue to resist impeachment. 

“Once that comes out,” said Ms. Titus, an impeachment proponent, “I don’t see how they can fight it any longer.” 

Strikingly, some traditionally cautious veteran Democrats said the party might have no choice but to move toward impeachment. They believe that Senate Republicans, who are clinging to their majority of 53 seats, would pay a political price for protecting Mr. Trump if they voted to exonerate him in the face of damning evidence of malfeasance and a House vote to impeach. 

“They’ve got to take a second look” at impeachment, Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and national party chairman, who is an ally of Ms. Pelosi, said of fellow Democrats. He predicted that the latest revelations would “push some of our folks over.” 

James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist, said he had opposed impeachment, but now thinks the House should move “quick and clean” after obtaining a transcript of Mr. Trump’s phone call. “Let the Senate Republicans stew,” he said.

When the Ideologues Come for the Kids

When the Ideologues Come for the Kids

By Andrew Sullivan NY Magazine

Like any religion, wokeness understands the need to convert children. The old Jesuit motto (sometimes attributed to Voltaire) was, after all, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” And so I was moved but not particularly surprised by George Packer’s tale of a progressive school banishing separate restrooms for boys and girls because this reinforces the gender binary. The school did not inform parents of this, of course:

Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking.

As an analogy for the price of progressivism, it’s close to perfect. Authorities impose an ideology onto reality; reality slowly fights back. The question is simply how much damage is done by this kind of utopianism before it crumbles under its own weight. Simple solutions — like a separate, individual gender-neutral bathroom for the tiny minority with gender dysphoria or anyone else — are out of bounds. They are, after all, reinforcing the idea that girls and boys are different. And we cannot allow biology, evolution, reproductive strategy, hormones, chromosomes, and the customs of every single human culture since the beginning of time to interfere with “social justice.”

It’s also vital to expose children to the fact of their race as the core constituent of their identity. Here is an essay written by a woke teacher about the difficulty of teaching “White boys”:

I spend a lot of my days worried about White boys. I worry about White boys who barely try and expect to be rewarded, who barely care and can’t stand being called on it, who imagine they can go through school without learning much without it impacting in any way the capacity for their future success, just because it never has before.

This sounds to me as if he is describing, well, boys of any race. And when boys are labeled as “White” (note the capital “W”) and this requires specific rules not applied to nonwhite boys, they often — surprise! — don’t like it:

This week, a student spoke up in class to say that every time a particular writer talked about White people and their role in racism, he would start to feel really guilty, and it made him not want to listen … I try to keep an arm around the boys who most need it, but it’s hard, because I’m also not willing to give an inch on making my room safe for my students of color. It’s not their job to keep hurting while White boys figure it out.

Children, in other words, are being taught to think constantly about race, and to feel guilty if they are the wrong one. And, of course, if they resist, that merely proves the point. A boy who doesn’t think he is personally responsible for racism is merely reflecting “white fragility” which is a function of “white supremacy.” QED. No one seems to have thought through the implications of telling white boys that their core identity is their “whiteness,” or worried that indoctrinating kids into white identity might lead quite a few to, yes, become “white identitarians” of the far right.

One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it’s completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it’s a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories. (For a searing take down of this huge academic con, check out Douglas Murray’s superb new book, The Madness of Crowds.) The forces involved — “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “heterosexism” — are all invisible to the naked eye, like the Holy Spirit. Their philosophical origins — an attempt by structuralist French philosophers to rescue what was left of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s — are generally obscured in any practical context. Like religion, you cannot prove any of its doctrines empirically, but children are being forced into believing them anyway. This is hard, of course, as this teacher explains: “I’m trying. I am. But you know how the saying goes: You can lead a White male to anti-racism, but you can’t make him think.”

The racism, sexism, and condescension in those sentences! (The teacher, by the way, is not some outlier. In 2014, he was named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year!) Having taken one form of religion out of the public schools, the social-justice left is now replacing it with the doctrines of intersectionality.

Last week, I defended drag queens reading stories to kids in libraries. I don’t take back my words. Getting children interested in reading with costumed clowns strikes me as harmless. But when I was directed to the website of Drag Queen Story Hours, I found the following:

[DQSH] captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.

However well-meant, this is indoctrination into an ideology, not campy encouragement for reading and fun.

And then there is the disturbing “social justice” response to gender-nonconforming boys and girls. Increasingly, girly boys and tomboys are being told that gender trumps sex, and if a boy is effeminate or bookish or freaked out by team sports, he may actually be a girl, and if a girl is rough and tumble, sporty, and plays with boys, she may actually be a boy.

In the last few years in Western societies, as these notions have spread, the number of children identifying as trans has skyrocketed. In Sweden, the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a phenomenon stable and rare for decades, has, from 2013 to 2016, increased almost tenfold. In New Zealand, the rate of girls identifying as boys has quadrupled in the same period of time; in Britain, where one NHS clinic is dedicated to trans kids, there were around a hundred girls being treated in 2011; by 2017, there were 1,400.

Possibly this sudden surge is a sign of pent-up demand, as trans kids emerge from the shadows, which, of course, is a great and overdue thing. The suffering of trans kids can be intense and has been ignored for far too long. But maybe it’s also some gender non-conforming kids falling prey to adult suggestions, or caused by social contagion. Almost certainly it’s both. But one reason to worry about the new explosion in gender dysphoria is that it seems recently to be driven by girls identifying as boys rather than the other way round. Female sexuality is more fluid and complex than male sexuality, so perhaps girls are more susceptible to ideological suggestion, especially when they are also taught that being a woman means being oppressed.

In the case of merely confused or less informed kids, the consequences of treatment can be permanent. Many of these prepubescent trans-identifying children are put on puberty blockers, drugs that suppress a child’s normal hormonal development, and were originally designed for prostate cancer and premature puberty. The use of these drugs for gender dysphoria is off-label, unapproved by the FDA; there have been no long-term trials to gauge the safety or effectiveness of them for gender dysphoria, and the evidence we have of the side effects of these drugs in FDA-approved treatment is horrifying. Among adults, the FDA has received 24,000 reports of adverse reactions, over half of which it deemed serious. Parents are pressured into giving these drugs to their kids on the grounds that the alternative could be their child’s suicide. Imagine the toll of making a decision about your child like that?

The American Academy of Pediatricians concluded last year that this use of puberty blockers “is founded upon an unscientific gender ideology, lacks an evidence base, and violates the long-standing ethical principle of ‘First do no harm.’” The drugs “arrest bone growth, decrease bone accretion, prevent the sex-steroid dependent organization and maturation of the adolescent brain, and inhibit fertility.” Yes, they can make kids sterile. Yet they are now administered to children as young as 10.

Eighty-five percent of gender-dysphoric children grow out of the condition — and most turn out to be gay. Yes, some are genuinely trans and can and should benefit from treatment. And social transition is fine. But children cannot know for certain who they are sexually or emotionally until they have matured past puberty. Fixing their “gender identity” when they’re 7 or 8, or even earlier, administering puberty blockers to kids as young as 12, is a huge leap in the dark in a short period of time. It cannot be transphobic to believe that no child’s body should be irreparably altered until they are of an age and a certainty to make that decision themselves.

I don’t have children, but I sure worry about gay kids in this context. I remember being taunted by some other kids when I was young — they suggested that because I was mildly gender-nonconforming, I must be a girl. If my teachers and parents and doctors had adopted this new ideology, I might never have found the happiness of being gay and comfort in being male. How many gay kids, I wonder, are now being led into permanent physical damage or surgery that may be life-saving for many, but catastrophic for others, who come to realize they made a mistake. And what are gay adults doing to protect them? Nothing. Only a few ornery feminists, God bless them, are querying this.

In some ways, the extremism of the new transgender ideology also risks becoming homophobic. Instead of seeing effeminate men as one kind of masculinity, as legitimate as any other, transgenderism insists that girliness requires being a biological girl. Similarly, a tomboy is not allowed to expand the bandwidth of what being female can mean, but must be put into the category of male. In my view, this is not progressive; it’s deeply regressive. There’s a reason why Iran is a world leader in sex-reassignment surgery, and why the mullahs pay for it. Homosexuality in Iran is so anathema that gay boys must be turned into girls, and lesbian girls into boys, to conform to heterosexual norms. Sound a little too familiar?

Adults are increasingly forced to obey the new norms of “social justice” or be fired, demoted, ostracized, or canceled. Many resist; many stay quiet; a few succumb and convert. Children have no such options.

Indoctrinate yourselves as much as you want to, guys. It’s a free country. But hey, teacher — leave those kids alone.

Foreign Interference, Part II

You’ve got to love Rudy Giuliani. His foam-flecked meltdown on CNN last night was not exactly a sign of confidence in his beleaguered client in the White House. Roy Cohn would have been a little smoother.

What Giuliani admitted — and then tried to deny he admitted — is that he went to Ukraine in order to get the government in Kiev to investigate a potential scandal involving the Bidens. Once again, Trump was seeking support from a foreign power in order to influence next year’s presidential election. Hey, he got away with it once. Why not twice? All of which casts a whole new and incriminating light on that phone call with the Ukrainian president that an intelligence agent brought to the attention of the authorities via the whistle-blower statute.

Do I believe that Trump is perfectly capable of using his office to lean on a foreign government to expose a political opponent? Well, duh. And do I believe that he and his attorney general will do everything they can to keep this bottled up and away from the congressional oversight it clearly merits and legally requires? Of course they will. And the worst of it is: They have a point.

The trouble in our constitutional system is that a confidential presidential phone conversation with a foreign leader is obviously covered by executive privilege. In fact, I’d say it’s one of the most defensible cases of executive privilege there is. The president must have the ability to speak candidly with foreign leaders, and his conversations should not be available to anyone outside the Executive branch. Separation of powers requires that even the Congress be excluded from the details of this kind of discussion. And yet that discussion may well present a real threat to national security, and constitute an impeachable offense.

What do we do then? The elevation of a despicable, shameless liar and con artist to the presidency has revealed a core weakness in the U.S. Constitution. Its attribution of executive authority to one individual, the president, gives that individual extraordinary control over the entire government. If that individual is a traitor, a crook, or a pathological liar, too bad. You either impeach him … or he wins. You begin to understand why the Roman republic vested this kind of authority in two men, so that if one were corrupt, the other might correct it. We have no such system. We have, in effect, a dictator of sorts, and since Trump has no other way of operating, we have slid — perhaps irrevocably — away from liberal democracy toward an elected form of tyranny. The Founders simply assumed that a figure as depraved as Trump would never win an election.

More to the point, his criminality is backed by a solid majority of his own party. It seems increasingly likely to me that Trump’s “defense” will be to admit he did it, and insist there’s nothing wrong with it. And who believes that the GOP won’t support him on this? Rudy gave Hannity the game plan last night, and from now on, the right-wing media will likely ignore a massive abuse of power and focus on yet another largely incomprehensible conspiracy theory about Biden.

As I’ve said over and over again, the instinctual tyrant never stands still. Each time he survives, he moves the baseline. The corruption, profound now, will only intensify. The abuse of power will grow. Each time we fail to hold the tyrant accountable is an opportunity for him to up the ante yet again. Which is to say there is one obvious remedy for this lawlessness and borderline treason. Impeach!

Madam Speaker, the ball is now in your court. Please don’t fuck it up again.

Brexit Bright Spots

Through the Westminster grapevine, I’m hearing hints that the U.K. and E.U. positions on Brexit are getting closer. We all knew it would come down to the wire. Hard negotiations are like that. Yesterday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that he had received a new formal proposal from Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday night. Juncker’s language was more conciliatory than it has been, especially on the main sticking point, the “backstop” designed to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. He said he did not have “an erotic relation” to the backstop, in which the U.K. would be permanently trapped in the E.U. Customs Union, and was open to “alternative arrangements … allowing us and Britain to achieve the main objectives of the backstop.”

One possible solution: to keep Northern Ireland inside the Customs Union, but leave the rest of the U.K. out of it. So the hard border would actually be the Irish Sea, which is both enforceable and leaves Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement in place. Of course, this means that one part of the U.K. would be treated differently than the rest. But Northern Ireland is unique. Unlike Wales and Scotland, there is a sea between Ulster and the mainland U.K. And there are special factors — namely the long internecine, sectarian strife — that render a new, hard land border highly contentious and potentially dangerous.

There’s already a proposal from Johnson, which the Irish government is considering, to keep a customs-free zone for food and agriculture across the whole island. Surely this could be widened and built on. And this might only be a temporary arrangement, with the Brits doing what they can to see if new technology might construct a virtual border without a physical structure and checkpoints. (Don’t ask me how that would work — but it might.)

There is surely a sweet spot there — and both Boris and the E.U. have a huge incentive to get a deal. The E.U. would avoid a real economic blow at a time of slowing growth; and Johnson would be able to get a compromise through the Parliament, because only the man who led the Brexit campaign has the credibility with the Tories to tell them that this deal is the best they’re going to get. And it would be better than May’s. Having delivered Brexit, Johnson could then call an election.

In those circumstances, I suspect he’d do pretty well. He has had nothing but terrible press since entering Number 10 — but he is more popular now than on day one, with his favorable/unfavorable mix currently at 38/54. This doesn’t sound very good — until you realize that his main opponent, Jeremy Corbyn, has a favorable rating of 18 percent and an unfavorable of 70. The Tory party as a whole, meanwhile, has a double-digit lead over Labour in the latest poll of polls, and, in some, the Liberal Democrats are neck and neck with Labour.

The Eurocrats are not doing themselves any favors either. At their party conference last week, the Liberal Democrats invited Guy Verhofstadt, the chief E.U. negotiator on Brexit, to speak of his European vision. Here it is:

The world order of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order that is based on empires. China is not a nation; it’s a civilization. India, you know it better than I do, is not a nation. There are 2,000 nations in India. There are 20 different languages that are used there … The U.S. is also an empire, more than a nation. Maybe tomorrow they will speak more Spanish than English; I don’t know what will happen. The world of tomorrow is a world of empires, in which we Europeans and you British can only defend your interests, your way of life, by doing it together in a European framework and a European Union.

So many people assume that the E.U. is about internationalism, openness, transcending the old power politics. It is, in fact, a would-be empire, big enough to compete for power in the world against the U.S., China, and the rest. It is an imperial project that sees no value in nation-states. Britain, on the other hand, has already had a real empire and now just wants to govern itself.

See you tonight on Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO at 10 p.m. ET. And, of course, next Friday

From David A Fairbanks:

I will not apologize for being white and I refuse to be held accountable for the crimes of the past. I condemn bigotry or violence toward anyone. I reject humiliating children for being the wrong color or culture. Black men and women are treated as if they are eternal victims which they are not. Progressive notions become a tyranny and defeat their best intentions.