Twenty-three skidoo. Goodbye, honey. A new year begins.
I’ve been reading the past 12 months’ work with the aim of doing a what-I-got-right-and-wrong column, but find I didn’t make many predictions. One, last month, was that Taylor Swift would be Time’s person of the year, which she was; another, in May, was that Donald Trump would skip the Republican debates, which he did. “He’s leading, his competitors are trailing; they need it, he doesn’t; he’s famous, they aren’t. One of them could land a shot and ding his mystique. Why expose himself?” On the other hand, in the spring I asserted that every one of the GOP primary challengers would beat President Biden with the exception of Mr. Trump, whose superpower is his ability to unite the opposition. Recent polls say that’s wrong, the Trump-Biden numbers are close, with Mr. Trump leading. I guess we’ll find out.
I want to say briefly what I think columnists are doing. “It’s not a column, it’s a pillar,” said the New York Times’s William Safire, half-seriously but only half. He respected his work and his thoughts and enjoyed telling them. He wasn’t afraid of getting in trouble; he liked a bit of trouble. What columnists do is attempt to give their honest thoughts in real time and under their own name. Often in this space the thoughts are anchored in current events, but sometimes they touch on history or literature, and sometimes there’s an attempt to capture things as they are in a more spacious and less particular way.
But a public writer is always trying to say something true and say it well. Like a baseball player you have hits and misses, but that’s what you’re trying for.
Safire once told me never to be afraid of saying a thing again and again, that’s how a thought breaks through. I’ve been rereading the great mid-20th-century columnist Dorothy Thompson, who also saw power in repetition. What I saw in my columns this year is the continual re-emergence of certain preoccupations and themes.
For instance: Adults have a particular responsibility to model and set a template for the young. It is a primary job of the adults in the room, wherever the room is, to show every day, in dress, speech and comportment, what being adult looks like. At least two generations have come up with no idea. Our national style has grown crude and vulgar; this entered Washington some years back, and that only made it worse. It’s a little sad. Washington used to be so old-fashioned, it was one of its charms, it was a throwback. Decades ago you smiled because female members of Congress, in their suits and high-button blouses, dressed like aspiring librarians. Now some dress like aspiring whores. Can I get in trouble for saying that? Let’s find out. Anyway, one of my favorite columns this year cuffed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for banishing the Senate’s dress code in a bow to the needs of Sen. John Fetterman, who finds it emotionally necessary to dress like a child. America likes the idea of its preeminence in the world, but that preeminence entails obligations. “You have to act the part. You have to present yourself with dignity.” (Mr. Schumer reinstated the dress code.)
A blooming preoccupation: artificial intelligence. I’ve been haunted by the first enduringly famous symbol of the age of technology: Apple’s logo, the apple with a bite taken out. Like Adam and Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit to become like God. AI can send us back to Eden, and the fall. “I believe those creating, fueling and funding AI want, possibly unconsciously, to be God, and think on some level they are God.” We are allowing this world-changer and life-changer to be pushed on us by people who, we know from a quarter-century of exposés, investigations and leaks, are loyal to their inventions but not to human beings, and certainly not to America. Their claimed idealism—We’re trying to advance mankind!—isn’t their true agenda, which is power and wealth and a place to hide when the world they’re inventing explodes.
Israel was of course an important subject this year. The terrorist attacks of Oct. 7 renewed and revived an old sympathy in me that had for years been dormant to the point of estrangement. If you didn’t mourn, if your heart didn’t hurt after what had occurred, then something is wrong with you. “I find I am reacting to everything—from the first day, with the slain and abused children, with the videotape of babies sobbing as they were grabbed and taken hostage—not as a thinker on politics, or one who has read a lot of history, or lived long in the world, but simply as a mother. All of the instincts of a parent, especially a mother, are protective: You want to keep the young from harm so everyone gets to go on and live.”
We were insistent that the deliberate and strategic rape of the Israeli women not be covered up, but seen and documented so that propagandists can’t lie and make it disappear. But Israel is vulnerable, surrounded by passionate enemies and ambivalent friends, and it should be rebuilding and re-girding, not launching a full scale invasion of Gaza. “Sometimes you must wait, build up your strength, broaden your resources, reach out to friends, let opportunities present themselves—everything shifts in life; some shifts are promising. But don’t get sucked into Gaza and spend months providing the world with painful and horrifying pictures of innocent Palestinian babies being carried from the rubble. (‘We told them to leave,’ isn’t enough. Some people can’t leave, they’re not capable, they’re old people in an apartment somewhere.)”
In August I finally read “War and Peace” after hiding from that behemoth for half a century. It was stupendous. For the first time in years I was freed of the compulsion to reach for a device and find out what’s happening. “I already knew the news. Pierre was in love with Natasha. Prince Andrei was wounded at Borodino. Princess Mary was saved by Nicholas’s intervention with the serfs. That was all I had to know and it was enough, it was the real news.”
To allow a past work of art to enter your mind is to be embarked upon a reclamation project, a rescue mission. “As you read, Nicholas and Sonya are alive, but Tolstoy himself is still alive. He isn’t gone, his mind is still producing, he continues in human consciousness. You are continuing something.”
The illustration accompanying this column is a rendering of my office, from a photo, by the artist Chad Crowe. It is where this column comes from and where right now I am thinking of my readers, whom I’ve known for many years. Thank you, sincerely, for reading me. What drives my efforts in this small corner—sorry, Bill, in this pillar—is the desire, which I know you share, to preserve and protect, to help keep things going and continuing and not falling apart. To feel part of that project is a great thing, and a privilege. And now on to 2024.