Peter Wood

New York City isn’t as tough as it once was, but it’s practicing. A few weeks ago, I saw a young black woman barreling down the sidewalk on Madison Avenue. She tackled an elderly white woman at a bus stop. I was on the bus and saw the whole thing unfold. The elderly woman rolled over to protect her purse, which prompted her assailant to start choking her. At that point two clerks from a shop ran out and the attacker fled. The bus driver opened the door and the elderly woman hobbled abroad to the cheers of the other passengers.  Our bus proceeded up Madison where three blocks later we saw the same young woman tackling another elderly woman. This time the bus didn’t stop. As far as I know, no police were involved.

The other night, I went to the Vermont State Fair in distinctly downscale Rutland, where my wife and I watched the pig races, ambled through the livestock exhibits, and examined the farm equipment, while enjoying corndogs and the crowd of distinctly overweight Rutlanders. The next day, I was back in my office in midtown Manhattan. A thin man wearing a mask got into the elevator with me and used a cloth to press the elevator button. Then he used the cloth to open the two doors to the street. He was clearly annoyed to have had to share the elevator with a maskless heathen. As he walked away, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a single mask or Covid-crazed person of any sort at the Vermont State Fair.

Professor James H. Sweet is a temperate man. He seeks to avoid extremes. But he also seeks to be bold in his temperance. You can do that by emphatically stating an opinion that seems above reproach. But Professor Sweet miscalculated. His emphatic bromide blew up, and he was left offering emphatic apologies. For those who have not followed this little academic circus, Professor Sweet, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is also the president of the American Historical Association (AHA). That’s an important post. The AHA has more than 11,500 members. It publishes the American Historical Review, ‘the journal of record for the historical profession in the United States’. And AHA holds a huge conference each January.

What is America? The answer to that simple question can get you into a lot of trouble. Or it can propel you to the Oval Office. You can try to run away from the question with adverbs. 'Well, historically, America was the name a European mapmaker slapped on the unexplored continents across the Atlantic.' Maybe Amerigo Vespucci, that mapmaker, had Florida in mind, though Vespucci would have struggled to imagine a future figure such as the 46th governor of the state, Ron DeSantis. Or, 'Linguistically, America is an abbreviated form of the United States of America, a political union that traces itself to a local rebellion of thirteen British colonies in the 18th century, which grew into territorially aggressive entity.

The best comedies always begin on a note of solemnity. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid opens with an unwed mother driven to abandon her newborn. Buster Keaton’s The General opens with news arriving in Marietta, Georgia, that the South has fired on Fort Sumner and the Civil War is on. Thus did Congressman Bennie Thompson open Thursday's January 6 Pageant with a solemn story about the "conspiracy to thwart the will of the people," in which an insurrection "put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk." He was followed by the even more solemn Liz Cheney, who promised a thrilling line-up of testimony that will prove beyond the shadow of a sunspot that Donald Trump planned the whole thing. Well, maybe so.

Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia (Ginni) made the cover of the New York Times Magazine on February 27 amid an eleven-page article titled “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas.” The authors are Danny Hakim and Jo Becker. It is in essence a hit piece, and the latest of several in the left-wing media aimed at undermining the legitimacy of Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence. The first salvo came in late January from Thomas’s long-time antagonist Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, but other eager journalists have stepped through Mayer’s muddy footprints. Three of their publications — the New Yorker, the Guardian, and CNN — contacted me because Ginni Thomas serves on the advisory board of my organization, The National Association of Scholars (NAS).

Bewilderment, a novel by Richard Powers issued last September, has been praised to high heavens by Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Naomi Klein, and reviewers at NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The New Republic, among others. This ought to be enough to warn any sensible reader to stay far away from its pages and to resign promptly from any reading group that nominates it for collective perusal. But I am not always sensible. The title lured me, for what better word to describe our Zeitgeist?