Peggy Noonan

I’m seeing something and maybe you are too.

We talk in our country about political polarization and it’s real: We’re split into a thousand pieces within two big camps of left and right. We decry the harshness of our political discourse, particularly online, where outrageous and dehumanizing things are said.

But what I’m seeing is that we don’t mind disliking each other now. We like it. That’s the new thing, that we’re enjoying the estrangement.

Nobody’s trying to win anybody over. The biggest recent example of this is the story about the Supreme Court justice’s wife who didn’t understand that flying the American flag upside down outside her home during a crisis might be experienced by others as unhappily weird and possibly alarming, and her neighbor who didn’t understand that when engaged in a political dispute it’s not really nice to spew lewd and ugly epithets unbidden, or put them on lawn signs.

That was a local and particular expression of a larger trend we’re all witnessing. Bill Maher wrote of it in an essay last month: “Would anyone ride the New York City subway wearing a MAGA hat, or go to a NASCAR race in a Biden T-shirt? That’s where we are now: Other parts of the country are seen as no-go zones.”

It’s shocking that that’s true, but it is.

When was the last time you saw anyone try to address the other side with respect and understanding, and venture something like, “I think you’re seeing it this way, but I want to explain why I see it so differently, and that way we might both understand each other and proceed with respect.” Instead we accuse each other and put each other down and it doesn’t feel merry and high-spirited, like political business as usual, it feels cold.

Both sides have an equal but different sense of superiority. Both sides enjoy looking down on the other.

The left leans toward condemnation. It is going from “Trump is a criminal” to “Trump supporters are criminal.” They understand things the other dopes don’t. Class is involved. I have quoted the friend who said recently, with no bitterness, that Democrats see Trump voters as toothless, smelly Walmart shoppers. The left does look down, sometimes from a privileged economic position, which makes it the more shameful.

Trump supporters lean toward manipulation. They charge the other side are bad human beings—selfish elites who have no feeling for, no affiliation with, the common man. They’re coastal elites who look down on flyover states as they sip martinis in first class. Some Trump voters say his foes oppose him to go to “Georgetown cocktail parties” or similar gatherings in New York and Los Angeles. This started about a quarter-century ago but sped up with Donald Trump, and I thought at the time: Are cocktail parties still going on? I knew they existed in the 1930s and 1940s, because they were featured in the old movies I watched on television as a child. Nick and Nora Charles threw them! In my town the elites who oppose Mr. Trump don’t have cocktail parties, they doggedly attend fundraisers for hospitals and libraries and go to professional events. The most establishment Trump foes are among the hardest-working people in America. They are earnest. They run the institutions you’ll rely on if you have a heart attack on the sidewalk or a story that needs exposing or a court case that needs taking. And they drink water. At least cocktail parties make them sound glamorous and carefree.

But it really is something that we’re so estranged we know nothing of the other side’s lives, and because we know nothing even our insults are lame and need updating.

The class aspect of the big estrangement portends nothing good. America has been navigating its way through issues of class since its beginning; it is text or subtext of the country’s great novels. Now it is emerging in a new way in our politics, one more laden with meaning and encouraging of unashamed judgment.

I said I sensed people are enjoying their political hatred now. Why would that be?

Some of it is human and has been around forever. People enjoy hating—it feels so vigorous. Some enjoy their hatred because they are by nature shallow and see the implications of nothing. Some enjoy it because they see politics as an extension of sports—booing the other team is part of the fun of being at the game. Some enjoy it because it lets them feel immersed in a warm bath of righteousness: I’m not immoral like a Trump supporter; I’m not a mindless snob who drove the country into a ditch like a Democrat.

But some enjoy their hatred—this is the new part, and I think pretty widespread—because it helps them avoid seeing that they are involved in a tragedy.

The tragedy is that one of two old men, neither of them great, neither of them distinguished in terms of character or intellect, who are each in his way an embarrassment, and whom two-thirds of voters do not want as presidential candidates, will be chosen, in this crucial historical moment in which the stakes could not be higher, to lead the most powerful nation on earth.

One will likely fail physically in coming years—he’s failing now—and be replaced by a vice president who is wholly unsuited for the presidency because she is wholly unserious, who has had four years to prove herself in a baseline way and failed to meet even the modest standards by which vice presidents are judged. The other may, on being elected or even before then, be thrown into the slammer for one of the felony charges against him, including those connected to attempting to overthrow a democratic national election.

This is a tragedy—that this is what we’ve got, these are our choices.

When you’ve got a major hate on, you don’t have to notice.

What we should be doing is asking each other: How are we going to make our way through this constructively?

Instead, people prattle about a coming civil war. But what are they talking about? Neither side is going to raise an army and fight in the streets, the most Trump-supporting state in the country is not going to fire on a Fort Sumter, and even if anything like that happened, who gets custody of the nuclear arsenal? Who’s left sending out the Social Security checks?

Normally in a column like this you give a suggestion or two on how to turn things around. I don’t know, but I suppose it at least starts with understanding that the people we’re so harshly judging are our countrymen. They share the country with you. We have to go forward into the future together, because if we don’t we won’t have a future.

We have to ease up, we have to slow down our desire to look down, we have to be a little more generous, we have to stop enjoying our hate so much. And we’ll have to come up with thoughts that are better than that, because we can’t go on indefinitely like this.

Some Memorial Day thoughts on the importance of love:

Children don’t need to be taught to love their parents. From the moment they come out you are everything to them. They seem to arrive with a certain amount of love built in and fix it on the mother who holds them and looks into their eyes and the father who delights them by making them laugh. It really is something, this natural force that comes prepackaged. (In this corner we believe God did this, implanting the love; we believe God in fact invented love, for his and your pleasure.)

But after parents, family and nature—children are especially sensitive to and undefended against the idea of the miraculous within nature—children have to be taught to love certain things. Such as their country.

Parents, teach your children to love America, either as an extension of your own love or as a simple kindness to them.

We live in an age—I’ll say this part quickly as we all know it—in which children are instructed in 100 different ways through 100 different portals that America is and always was a dark and scheming place, that its history is the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice. And we never meant it about the Declaration.

Ideology and idiocy imposed this view, shallowness too. It began some decades ago but has speeded up and became more extreme the past 10 years.

What does this atmosphere of unlove for America do to kids? To little ones 5 and 10 but also 15—what is its impact on them?

To kids from difficult circumstances it means there is no hope; you won’t escape a violent or unhappy family into a better place, the world outside, because it isn’t better. The world outside is America, which brutalizes the minority, the woman, the different. Inside is scary, outside is scarier. What a thing to do to vulnerable kids.

To kids from easier circumstances it does nothing good and carries a subtle bad effect. It means the thing you’re part of is, at its heart, corrupt, so you might as well be corrupt. The ugliness of America becomes a permission structure: We are amoral and you can be, too.

Kids live on dreams. Have the adults who’ve created this atmosphere forgotten that as they pursue their own resentments and make their accusations?

To kids in all circumstances, it denies a dream of a good thing you can make better. It undercuts the idea the people you came from were brave and hardy and did marvelous things. It robs you of a sense you’ve got this within you, and can go on and be a marvel too.

It denies kids a secure sense that they’re part of something sound and healthy. It subtly discourages them from trying to make things better—you can’t right something whose sicknesses are so structural. This isn’t a good way to bring up the future.

You have to start kids out with love. Irony and detachment will come soon enough, but start with love, if only to give them a memory of how that felt.

I’ve spent the past few days reading an old book, one that couldn’t possibly be published today because it’s so full of respect for America. “Manual of Patriotism: For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York,” runs 461 pages of text and was published in 1900. The flag that illustrates this column is from its frontispiece.

The manual was written after the Legislature passed an 1898 law requiring public schools to display the American flag and “encourage patriotic exercises.” Organized veterans of the Civil War and of the Women’s Relief Corps, who were nurses on the battlefield, pushed for it to “awaken in the minds and hearts of the young” an “appreciation” for “the great deeds” of their nation.

Memorial Day meant a lot to those old veterans, but more was needed. Their generation was passing; they’d given everything to hold the nation together; they wanted the young to understand why.

Unsaid but between the lines: America at the turn of the 20th century was being engulfed by waves of immigrants; they too needed to understand what America is and means to be, so they would love it too.

What a book the manual is, what a flag-waving old classic.

How do you encourage love of country among schoolchildren? You let them have fun. You hold pageants and parades, have them read poems and learn songs. Let them dress up as figures in history and enact great events. This need not be costly: “An old-time coat or dress found in a garrett or unused drawer at home may serve all needful purposes.”

Tell the story of the American flag. The Continental Congress in 1777 said we need a national banner. Here enters the heroic Mrs. Elizabeth Ross of Philadelphia, known as Betsy, who, on the personal request of General Washington, started sewing. The stars and stripes from her hand, “were unfurled at the battle of Brandywine, in 1777. . . . They sang their song of triumph over defeated Burgoyne at Saratoga. . . . They saw the surrender of the enemy at Yorktown; they fluttered their ‘Goodbye’ to the British evacuating New York.”

Have children memorize and recite Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Have them enact the battle of Lexington and Concord and read aloud Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Tell the story of the Mayflower, of the making and meaning of the Compact, of the landing on Plymouth Rock: Quote an old poem: “Here, on this rock, and on this sterile soil, / Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men; / Began the making of the world again.”

Remind children, as Sen. James G. Blaine once said, that the U.S. was long “the only country with a known birthday. All the rest began they know not when, and grew into power, they knew not how.” America wasn’t just some brute force that pushed up from the mud; we announced our birth with a Declaration that was “a revelation”: All men are created equal.

The manual includes a lot of opinions on historical events. One I liked was the assertion that the Civil War ended the day Ulysses S. Grant was buried in 1885. Why? Because America saw who his pallbearers were: “Johnston and Buckner on one side of his bier, and Sherman and Sheridan upon the other.” The first two were generals of the Confederate army, the last two of the Union Army. Henry Ward Beecher wrote that their marching Grant to his tomb was “a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery, and peace war.”

You come away from that vignette thinking not only “what men,” but “what a country” that could tear itself in two, murder itself, forgive itself, go on.

Parents, help your children love this country. It will be good for them, and more to the point this country deserves it.

Also when you don’t love something you lose it. We don’t want that to happen.

I have a friend who lives in western New Jersey near a lake. Dee is middle aged, works in sales in a service industry, had been a politically independent moderate most of her life, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, less fervently, 2020. When I last saw her, in February, she and her husband felt drawn to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but that feeling has cooled. She didn’t like it that his family endorsed Joe Biden: “That was weird.” She has also concluded the 2024 election will be close. “I think I’m not willing to take a chance, to experiment at this point.” So they are back to Donald Trump, with revived enthusiasm.

Last Saturday she attended her first Trump rally, on the beach and boardwalk of Wildwood. That rally fascinates me because it has been the biggest of the 2024 presidential cycle, drawing 80,000 to 100,000 people in a Republican area of a deep-blue state, according to a local official’s estimate. From all the coverage the crowd looked raucous and entertained as Mr. Trump played his greatest hits. “We want strong borders, not open borders, we want the American dream, not the Biden inflation nightmare. . . . We want safe communities, not defund the police.” He led the crowd in chants of “Bulls—!” and insulted his foes in the usual manner. He spoke for an hour and a half, and in every video of the event the crowd seemed to stay with him and listen, not drift off.

I asked Dee what she saw and experienced. This is what I heard:

Trump may scare you, but he makes her feel safe. “It was like he made you feel everything’s gonna be OK. The economy’s gonna get better; everybody’s freaking out about the border, but he’ll get it stopped.”

At the rally she felt part of a rebel army, yet she also thinks the rallygoers represent the mass of regular Americans so maybe they’re not the rebels but the majority.

She finds him hilarious. When he riffs about Al Capone and Hannibal Lecter he’s goofing with the crowd and being comical because he’s an entertainer. “He’s very funny and sarcastic,” Dee says. “It’s like a husband sometimes.”

She does not trust the press, nor does she hate them. She just thinks they lie because they have preconceived notions and agendas: “They think we are smelly Walmart shoppers with no teeth.” She says this not with bitterness but as a dry descriptor.

Why did she go? “I thought no matter what happens, it’s history. I was curious. I get to tell my grandkids.”

It went all day. “You’re on line at 8 a.m. for a 5 p.m. start. There were thousands on line with us. We made a bunch of friends. Everyone was friendly, peaceful.” A 17-year-old Hispanic kid named Andrew and his single mother, a nurse, sat nearby and posed with Dee for a picture. His T-shirt said “Jesus is my savior and Trump is my president.” Dee: “It’s not just white people were there—a total mix, also in the speakers.”

“Secret Service was fantastic—they weren’t jerks to us, they checked bags, wanded you, metal detector, but all very respectful.”

Most politically significant, it seemed to me: Dee lives in an affluent suburban community with little crime, but “I have a lot of concern for my safety.” She locks the door when her husband puts out the garbage. At the rally, “there was no drugs, no people smoking weed, no violence.”

Late in the afternoon Mr. Trump flew over the crowd in his plane. “It was spectacular. He flew low enough for you to see it close. Everyone freaked out.” She thinks he landed in Atlantic City. His motorcade arrived at the rally late. “When he came out everybody went crazy.”

The message she took from his speech: “Everything’s going to go back to the way it was. He’ll put things back in order.”

She doesn’t see Trump as an evangelical Christian might, a fallen sinner redeemed in Christ and transformed in leadership. “We grew up with him in the East,” she says. “He’s a celebrity—TV, real estate.” Now he’s a politician. “It’s a rough-and-tumble business. . . . At this point most people don’t care about all the insanity—Stormy, Michael Cohen. It’s so tawdry and disgusting, yuck.”

I asked her to characterize previous figures of the Republican Party, such as both Presidents Bush. She said, “A bunch of uptight white guys, not necessarily honest. Them, Obama—I don’t think Trump is better or worse than any of them. They don’t have the moral high ground, not in hindsight.”

When the crowd started to build, people went online to see how big it was. The press seemed to be low-balling it. “A lot of us think a lot of the news is fake,” Dee says. TV cameras showed Trump on the stage and the people behind him but not the size of the crowd. Trump accused them of bias. “We started chanting, ‘Turn around, turn around!’ for the cameras to scan the crowd. So the Trump campaign put drones up, and later on social media we saw the video.”

Dee says: “I noticed—in the crowd you get these crazy people in their over-the-top outfits. The press flocks to them, to make us all look like white trash.”

I asked about Jan 6. Why didn’t that change her view of Trump? I, and many others, understand it as a singular event. Breaking in, smashing doors and windows, beating cops, threatening the vice president’s life—this was a violent assault on an institution that was also an assault on the Constitution. Doesn’t it threaten or imply something about the future?

She said she understood but sees it differently.

In Wildwood, “we had a bunch of Jan. 6 people in the crowd around us. Middle-aged white women—grandma. . . . The thing about Jan. 6 is we see it as a two-part story. His speech that day was a Trump speech, the crowd was a Trump crowd, it was kind of normal. Part 2 was the people up at the Capitol. But the people just at the speech, they quietly left, they got on the bus, they went home. There was the speech and the insanity up the street. We talked, I heard people say, ‘We left.’”

“There were some bad people and some agitators. They shouldn’t have gone in there. Some people broke windows, shouldn’t have happened. And some old ladies go to jail!”

“A lot of what happened at the Capitol—a lot of that was created. A constant narrative to make Trump look as bad as possible at all times.”

I mentioned the testimony under oath of people around Mr. Trump in the White House that day who said he enjoyed it, thought Mike Pence deserved it, refused for hours to tell the rioters to stop, watched it on television, did nothing.

We were on the phone but I could feel her shrug.

“Jan. 6 wasn’t even on our radar,” she said of the people at the rally. “The only thing that made us a little nervous—if there was any trouble, it would be some pro-Hamas thing would cause trouble.”

She thinks Mr. Trump will carry New Jersey and win the election. What will happen the day after? She sighed: “I don’t know. Gonna be bumpy.”

Six months to election day and things feel sort of fatalistic. There seems little to discover and nothing new to say about each of the candidates. It’s not going to dawn on you suddenly that Joe Biden is too old and infirm or Donald Trump too crazy. You’ve factored that in. You know what you think of both and have a sense of what compromises you’ll make within yourself to vote for either.

Voters can still be nudged, it’s not over, but Mr. Trump is ahead in most if not all of the battleground states, and I’m struck by the number of political operatives, veterans and thinkers now asking, honestly, if there is anything the president can do to pull it out.

Someone will suggest a “Sister Souljah moment” in which the president distances himself from the cultural left. Then they’ll shake their heads: too late, and who would believe it?

A veteran Democratic officeholder gives the bottom line: “A pro-Biden coalition does not exist, but an anti-Trump one does.” Mr. Biden must stop making the election a referendum on his record. “Instead make it a referendum on Trump’s. When people are this negative, make it about your opponent.”

The past month’s campus demonstrations will hurt Mr. Biden, at least marginally. They reveal his party’s split. People don’t like violence and screaming and the antisemitism bubbling up from the universities. The veteran political consultant Alex Castellanos said the other night, on Mark Halperin’s “Wide World of News,” that for parents with kids in high school and college, what’s happening on campus isn’t abstract and faraway, it’s personal. Afterward he elaborated: parents have seen their children not only radicalized but left unfit and unprepared for a productive future. Parents are “stunned to see that trusted educational institutions have captured their children and engrossed them in naive fantasies about the world.” When voters object to a situation, they kick against the incumbents who reign over them.

The Trump criminal cases seem a bust. The stolen-documents case is delayed; the Georgia election-tampering case done in by the arrogance and ill-judgement of prosecutors. The one that’s gone ahead, in New York, is the case of least national significance and no news: Donald Trump is a pig with women and a financial finagler. Stormy Daniels, on the stand, was more descriptive than required, and it actually isn’t nice to see a former president embarrassed in this way. On the other hand news reports reminded me of Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell: One would have to have a heart of stone to read it and not laugh.

I begin most days with John Ellis’s reliably brilliant daily newsletter, Political News Items. Six months ago he sensed that voters weren’t sold on the idea that what stands between them and the end of democracy was Joe Biden. He advised Democrats to offer “a variation on the theme”: “Trump is a one-man anxiety-creation machine.” He all but promises chaos with his late-night Truth Social screeds and menacing behavior. “Chaos is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s idea of his re-election campaign. It will continue because he enjoys it; enjoys testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior and seeing what happens when he does.” Democrats should hit hard there. “If the issue is Biden, defeat is certain.”

This week Mr. Ellis advanced the idea that Democrats home in not on Mr. Trump or his supporters but on MAGA-world. He may be half mad, but there’s often method to his madness. MAGA-world is just crazy, and dumb. Highlight the clown car with its “three stooges—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.” Not many people want them in the driver’s seat.

Mr. Ellis sees Mr. Biden struggling because “the two pillars” of his re-election effort are “tenuous at best.” The first is abortion. Mr. Ellis cites a CNN poll showing only 23% of voters say that a candidate must share their views on abortion. Abortion polled way down at 5% when respondents were asked the nation’s most urgent issues. The issue helps him, but not decisively.

As for the second pillar: “Is there anyone who believes that defending democracy can only be entrusted to an 82-year-old man of halting gait and declining ‘mental acuity,’ whom three-quarters of the American electorate view as incapable of serving effectively as president if re-elected?” That issue too can help him in November, but not decisively. “The Biden campaign needs a larger argument.”

Mr. Ellis writes that for Mr. Trump, his choice of vice president could be decisive.

My read on that question is that Mr. Trump tends to do what Mr. Trump does. In 2016 he picked Gov. Mike Pence because he needed a veteran officeholder who was demonstrably sane. Mr. Trump has since acquired his own political experience but still needs sane. He is said to want someone who would put personal loyalty over other loyalties, which limits the list. And as Mr. Biden has more donor money, Mr. Trump would want someone with lots of cash.

I saw the vice presidential choice as important but not crucial. Mr. Ellis sees otherwise. “One of the strongest (implicit) arguments for voting for Trump is the not unimaginable possibility that Biden will have a stroke or be otherwise brain-damaged (or dead) and thus be replaced by . . . Vice President Harris.” People regardless of political affiliation see her as not competent. She is far less a liability to Biden if Trump picks a running mate such as Gov. Kristi Noem, “a dog murdering nitwit.”

Mr. Trump needs someone with gravitas and stature.

Mr. Ellis puts forward Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, “a proven vote-getter in a blue-ish state,” who became wealthy in the private sector. “He’s personable and untainted by scandal. He’s not crazy but “steady and sturdy as they come.” This might impress those among “the roughly 300,000 voters in the seven or eight battlegrounds who’ll swing the election.”

I end with a word to Trump foes who hope he’ll be found guilty in the New York case and sentenced to prison time. They think this will finish him off. It will not.

Donald Trump doesn’t know it, but he will love prison. He’ll be the most specially treated convict in American history, better than the mob bosses in “Goodfellas.” He’ll be in his cell with his phone—he’ll get one—live-streaming and live-Truthing; he’ll be posing thumbs up in his uniform surrounded by gangbangers and white collar hoodlums. He’ll philosophize about how a lot of people in prison don’t deserve to be there, the system’s rigged, he’ll consider pardons. All convicts tell you that they were railroaded, but this will be new to Trump, he’ll believe them.

He’ll be the king of Rikers. He’ll say he’s learned a lot and the guards are all for Trump and he’s going to get out and reform the justice system. It will be fabulous for him. He’ll put himself as Martin Luther King and he’ll be writing Truths From the Birmingham Jail.

People forget: He loves this, loves the game, the drama, and the devil takes care of his own.

I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it.

You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, murders, a sociopath scheming his way among high-class expats on the Italian Riviera. The laid-back glamour of Jude Law, the Grace Kelly-ness of Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks like a Vogue magazine cover decided to take a stroll through the streets of 1950s Venice, the truly brilliant acting of Matt Damon, who is so well-liked by audiences I’m not sure we notice anymore what a great actor he is. The director, Anthony Minghella, deliberately showed you pretty shiny things while taking you on a journey to a heart of darkness.

There’s a new version, a streaming series from Netflix, called “Ripley.” I turned to it eagerly and watched with puzzlement. It is unrelievedly ugly. Grimy, gloomy, grim. Tom Ripley is now charmless, a pale and watchful slug slithering through ancient rooms. He isn’t bright, eager, endearing, only predatory. No one would want to know him! Which makes the story make no sense. Again, Ripley is a sociopath, but few could tell because he seemed so sweet and easy. In the original movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman has an unforgettable turn as a jazz-loving, prep-schooled, in-crowd snob. In this version that character is mirthless, genderless, hidden. No one would want to know him either. Marge, the Paltrow role in the movie, is ponderous and plain, like a lost 1970s hippie, which undercuts a small part of the tragedy: Why is the lovely woman so in love with a careless idler who loves no one?

The ugliness seemed a deliberate artistic decision, as did the air of constant menace, as if we all know life is never nice.

I go to the No. 1 program on Netflix this week, “Baby Reindeer.” People speak highly of it. It’s about a stalker and is based on a true story, but she’s stalking a comic so this might be fun. Oh dear, no. It is again unrelievedly bleak. Life is low, plain and homely. No one is ever nice or kind; all human conversation is opaque and halting; work colleagues are cruel and loud. Everyone is emotionally incapable and dumb. No one laughs except for the morbidly obese stalker, who cackles madly. The only attractive person is the transgender girlfriend, who has a pretty smile and smiles a lot, but cries a lot too and is vengeful.

Good drama always makes you think. I thought: Do I want to continue living?

I go to the Daily Mail website, once my guilty pleasure. High jinks of the rich and famous, randy royals, fast cars and movie stars, models and rock stars caught in the drug bust. It was great! But it seems to have taken a turn and is more about crime, grime, human sadness and degradation—child abuse, mothers drowning their babies, “Man murders family, self.” It is less a portal into life’s mindless, undeserved beauty, than a testimony to its horrors.

I go to the new “Cabaret.” Who doesn’t love “Cabaret”? It is dark, witty, painful, glamorous. The music and lyrics have stood the test of time. The story’s backdrop: The soft decadence of Weimar is being replaced by the hard decadence of Nazism.

It is Kander and Ebb’s masterpiece, revived again and again. And this revival is hideous. It is ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid. Also obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.

I had the distinct feeling the producers take their audience to be distracted dopamine addicts with fractured attention spans and no ability to follow a story. They also seemed to have no faith in the story itself, so they went with endless pyrotechnics. This is “Cabaret” for the empty-headed. Everyone screams. The songs are slowed, because you might need a moment to take it in. Almost everyone on stage is weirdly hunched, like a gargoyle, everyone overacts, and all of it is without art.

On the way in, staffers put stickers on the cameras of your phone, “to protect our intellectual property,” as one said.

It isn’t an easy job to make the widely admired Eddie Redmayne unappealing, but by God they did it. As he’s a producer I guess he did it, too. He takes the stage as the Emcee in a purple leather skirt with a small green cone on his head and appears further on as a clown with a machine gun and a weird goth devil. It is all so childish, so plonkingly empty.

Here is something sad about modern artists: They are held back by a lack of limits.

Bob Fosse, the director of the classic 1972 movie version, got to push against society’s limits and Broadway’s and Hollywood’s prohibitions. He pushed hard against what was pushing him, which caused friction; in the heat of that came art. Directors and writers now have nothing to push against because there are no rules or cultural prohibitions, so there’s no friction, everything is left cold, and the art turns in on itself and becomes merely weird.

Fosse famously loved women. No one loves women in this show. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character doesn’t flirt, doesn’t seduce or charm. She barks and screams, angrily.

Really it is harrowing. At one point Mr. Redmayne dances with a toilet plunger, and a loaf of Italian bread is inserted and removed from his anal cavity. I mentioned this to my friend, who asked if I saw the dancer in the corner masturbating with a copy of what appeared to be “Mein Kampf.”

That’s what I call intellectual property!

In previous iterations the Kit Kat Club was a hypocrisy-free zone, a place of no boundaries, until the bad guys came and it wasn’t. I’m sure the director and producers met in the planning stage and used words like “breakthrough” and “a ‘Cabaret’ for today,” and “we don’t hide the coming cruelty.” But they do hide it by making everything, beginning to end, lifeless and grotesque. No innocence is traduced because no innocence exists.

How could a show be so frantic and outlandish and still be so tedious? It’s almost an achievement.

And for all that there is something smug about it, as if they’re looking down from some great, unearned height.

I left thinking, as I often do now on seeing something made ugly: This is what purgatory is going to be like. And then, no, this is what hell is going to be like—the cackling stalker, the pale sociopath, Eddie Redmayne dancing with a plunger.

Why does it all bother me?

Because even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up.

Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.

Most politics is day by day, and certainly we consume it that way. But the thought that presses on my mind has distant horizons.

The criminal trial of Donald Trump, de facto Republican presidential nominee, commenced Monday in Manhattan Criminal Court. The case revolves around charges that he directed hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film performer, to stop her from speaking publicly of what she alleges was their sexual relationship. Witness lists not yet released are expected to include David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer said to have been involved in a “catch and kill” scheme to bury Ms. Daniels’s claims in 2016, and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model. Days before the 2016 election this newspaper reported Ms. McDougal had told friends of an affair with Mr Trump, and also received money and blandishments from the Enquirer.

In the first days of the trial the judge refused to recuse himself and refused to allow into evidence the famous “Access Hollywood” videotape, in which the defendant claimed his fame was such that he could grab women by the genitals because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Mr. Trump was admonished for seeming to mutter menacingly toward a prospective juror, and the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that he fell asleep at the defendant’s table: “His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.” CNN’s Jim Acosta joked Mr. Trump might call such reports “fake snooze.”

All of this is part of the fabulous freak show that is American politics, but we’re getting too used to scandal, aren’t we? We’ve become blasé.

The quality of our leaders is deteriorating, and we’re so used to it it’s not alarming us anymore.

I often read the memoirs of contemporary British politicians. Once I read weighty biographies by serious historians of the greats—Gladstone, Disraeli, Churchill, Harold Macmillan—but current leaders don’t seem great, and don’t last. They often write memoirs, however, and I read them to horrify myself.

Nadine Dorries’s “The Plot,” her memoir of her tenure as secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is quite wild. (In 2012, as a member of Parliament, she appeared on the reality TV show “I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!” which, almost touchingly, offended some people.) She calls her book a “shocking tale of corruption and unaccountable power.” It’s gossipy and score-settling: “Lee Cain was [Dominick] Cummings’ creature.” “Dominick hated Carrie,” Mr. Johnson’s future wife.

A source tells her of an incident in which a member of Parliament had sex on a billiard table as four other members watched. Another tells her of Tory sex parties. Another source—Ms. Dorries isn’t a historian or journalist, and we must trust that these are real sources and not third brandies—says of government in Westminster, “It’s all broken. Like, all the parameters that kept things in place—respect, values, public service—it’s all gone.” He tells her a member of Parliament gave a young female a date-rape drug.

In Rory Stewart’s more thoughtful and textured “How Not to be a Politician,” the former lawmaker diplomat reports the brains of Westminster politicians “have become like the phones in our pockets: flashing, titillating, obsequious, insinuating machines, allergic to depth and seriousness, that tempt us every moment of the day from duty.” Mr. Johnson is “a chaotic and tricky confidence artist, almost entirely unfit to be prime minister.” His successor, Liz Truss, confuses caution with cowardice: “Everything she did . . . had the flavour of a provocation.” (I haven’t yet opened Ms. Truss’s memoir, published this week, but the Guardian reports she contributes to the history of political insults by labeling party members who didn’t back her sufficiently “Chinos”—Conservatives in Name Only, who I guess tend to wear chinos. The Times of London said that for whole chapters the book is “readable only in the most literal sense of the word.”)

Back to Mr. Stewart. He was approached by an aide to the wealthy Russian Evgeny Lebedev, who invited him to stay for a weekend at Mr. Lebedev’s castle in Italy. A celebrity model who posed topless in the Sun would be there, she said; it would be fun. “I said as politely as I could that this was a joke, ‘I’ve just become a foreign minister. There’s no way I can possibly go. . . . The man’s father was an officer in the KGB.’ ” Also an oligarch. “ ‘Oh don’t worry about that,’ she replied. ‘Boris Johnson is coming and he is Foreign Secretary.’ ” Mr. Stewart didn’t go. Mr. Johnson did, and later put his host in the House of Lords.

The thing about these books is they’re almost all so tatty, so seamy. There’s a smallness to the preoccupations revealed, as if the authors are proud to be immature. They’re political leaders in the business of making history, yet they evince no particular interest in it. The American court case with the porn star, the shallow, frivolous British memoir—they seem to me of a piece, and part of the unseriousness of the West’s leaders.

Why is this worth mentioning, since everyone seems to have noticed a deterioration in their quality? Because our foes know. The character of our leaders seems to me a national-security issue.

My concern is that history will see it this way: At the exact moment America’s foes decided to become more public in their antipathy and deadlier in their calculations—“back to blood,” as Tom Wolfe said, in terms of the nature of peoples’ future loyalties—at that same moment our leaders in the West were becoming more frivolous and unfocused, more superficial, than ever in modern times. I suspect our foes notice this. It is perhaps part of why they have become more aggressive.

Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, whatever else they were, no one ever thought they were buyable or shallow in their advancement of America’s meaning and interests. Their successors seem to lack a comparable internal stature. We’re too quick to accept the idea they’d let their family use their name to get money—from the company in Ukraine, or the one in China, or the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund.

I’m not saying once we had Henry Clay and now we have Marjorie Taylor Greene but—well, I guess I am saying that. And I think it’s dangerous.

The unseriousness of our leaders isn’t a small and amusing tabloid story but a reality that ought to startle us. Leaders of other nations extrapolate from our leaders, whom they know. They think that as they are, we are. It contributes to the power of the argument, in their councils of state, that the West has lost its way.

Sometimes serious national goals have to be long-term. In the daily press of events we don’t think enough about the character of those we’re putting forward to represent us.

One particularly good man here, one exceptionally good woman there, could begin to turn it around, or might at the very least startle foreign leaders and make them reappraise. That would be a good long-term project for us as citizens: Get a better class of humans to go into the business of leading us.

Our crazy country. The O.J. Simpson case was the beginning of knowing we were crazy and admitting it. It was 30 years ago this June, the murder followed by the Bronco chase, and I find myself wanting to tell those who weren’t there what a sensation it was, what an amazement.

Everyone over 40 this weekend will be saying, “I’ll never forget when I heard the verdict,” and, “Did you watch the Bronco?” The case burned itself into our retinas; everyone in the country was in the path of totality.

As much as anything and more than most, the story was the beginning of the modern media age. It was the beginning of hypercelebrity and marked by the emotionalism of crowds. Crowds ran to California freeway overpasses on June 17, 1994, to see the Ford Bronco containing Simpson roll by, surrounded by police cruisers. They cheered and pumped their arms. They didn’t see it as a tragedy, the story of the beautiful young woman and mother, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her 25-year-old friend, Ron Goldman, who had been brutally stabbed to death. They saw an exciting drama unfolding before their eyes, like Al Capone shooting his way out of a bank heist surrounded by cops. Simpson was a guy everyone liked. So they cheered. And people watching thought: Whoa, what are we seeing, what is this?

Some new kind of fame was being presaged. A close friend of O.J.’s, Los Angeles lawyer and businessman Robert Kardashian, an apparently quiet fellow no one had heard of, was thrust into the case from the beginning. At a news conference he read a public letter from O.J., just before he turned himself in. The letter said he had nothing to do with Nicole’s murder. “I loved her. . . . If we had a problem, it’s because I loved her so much.” It was classic abusive-husband patter.

Kardashian, like other O.J. attorneys, would become famous, and the fame would be a lesson to many. After fame comes wealth and power and everyone gives you a good table. It is probably true that none of this was lost on his former wife, Kris, who had been one of Nicole Simpson’s best friends, or on his children, Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Rob. Their show, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” debuted in 2007. They were the first reality-TV family, famous for being famous. They are billionaires now.

“It marked the end of cozy, afternoon soap opera entertainment and ushered in a tabloid culture of Kardashians, Jenners, and lesser beings,” former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said by email. “Also, it made, for a time, Dominick Dunne the most recognized print reporter in the world.” Dunne’s colorful and breathless reports each month in Vanity Fair covered the case like a blanket—who snubbed whom in the courtroom, who said what at Brentwood’s glittering dinner tables.

The O.J. case didn’t create mass celebrity, Hollywood did, in the 1920s. At that time a young teenager named Bette Davis went, on a lark, to a fortune teller in her small New England town. She recounts in one of her memoirs that the fortune teller read her palm and was puzzled: Your face will be famous in every corner of the earth, she said.

Davis thought that was silly, you can’t be famous everywhere. Then, in 1930, at 22, she walked onto her first Hollywood sound stage. Her mind immediately flashed back: This is what the fortune teller meant.

But that kind of fame took art or gifts or a talent. Now you could be just another crazy American and become a worldwide name.

If the signal moment was the Bronco chase, it was the court case that would have lasting significance. It was a prime example of how our legal system got bogged down in distractions, inanities, and poor police and legal work. It dragged on nine months. The judge, Lance Ito, also became a celebrity, and apparently liked it. He kept three open computers on his bench. No one had ever seen that before. Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” had a regular sketch, the “Dancing Itos.” There were endless, meandering objections. The prosecutor, Marcia Clark, had to get her hair and makeup done, and a new wardrobe.

And the cast of characters! Kato Kaelin, the house guest who never left. Mark Fuhrman, the police detective who seemed solid on evidence and then was torn apart for having once used racial epithets and was accused of planting evidence.

And the phrases that bubbled up from the courtroom and entered the national consciousness: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

And, of course, the terrible and historic moment when the jury announced its verdict.

The trial felt like it had gone forever but the verdict came in within a day. No one in America did a bit of work from the moment it was announced that the jury had a verdict. Everyone ran to a TV set. From Robert D. McFadden’s O.J. obit in the New York Times: “Even President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office to join his secretaries. In court, cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘Oh, no!’ were echoed across the nation as the verdict left many Black people jubilant and many white people aghast.” Exactly true.

A friend wrote Thursday afternoon: “Trial as spectacle has been with us for a long time (think Lizzie Borden), and so have juries doing unusual things. But this seemed to take it to a new level. If memory serves, the volume of the New York Stock Exchange went down to basically nothing for a few minutes as the verdict was announced. That’s real.”

Reaction famously fell almost completely along racial lines. It was one of those 20th-century moments when you realized race is here to stay as an unending factor, an unyielding actor in American life. White and black saw two different realities. Whites: All the evidence points to his guilt, he’s one of the most admired men in America, race isn’t the story here.

Blacks: This is what you do to black men, you railroad them on cooked-up evidence, there’s plenty of room for doubt.

It showed in some new and unforgettable way the divided country. The verdict itself didn’t divide the country; it revealed it, again and not for the last time, as divided. Reaction was called shocking, revelatory. But what it was, was simpler. It was painful. It left you with a tight and mournful feeling in your throat.

Before O.J., American blacks lacked confidence in the legal system. After O.J., everyone lacked confidence in the legal system. It looked cynical, performative, agenda-driven, not on the level.

I would say he got away with murder because I believe he was guilty. But in a way he didn’t get away with it; it stalked him the rest of his life. And that is tragedy, too, because he’d been such a hero, a winner of the Heisman Trophy, a football star, a man of great accomplishment whom everyone admired.

That’s all.

The O.J. case revealed so much and started a new age. Within a few years the internet would become ubiquitous, and at that point the new age would become more so.

There’s a funny thing that happens in a nation’s thoughts. At some point everyone knows something is true, and talks about it with each other. The truth becomes a cliché before it becomes actionable. Then a person of high respect, a good-faith scholar who respects data, say, comes forward with evidence proving what everyone knows, and it is galvanizing. It hits like a thunderclap, and gives us all permission to know what we know and act on it.

That is my impression of Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness,” that it has broken through and is clearing the way for parents’ groups and individuals to move forward together on an established idea. Mr. Haidt, a widely admired social psychologist who teaches at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has spent his career studying emotion, culture and morality, turning along the way to child development and adolescent mental health.

What we all know is that there’s a mental-health crisis among the young, that they seem to have become addicted to social media and gaming, and that these two facts seem obviously connected. Mr. Haidt says, and shows, that the latter is a cause of the former.

He tells the story of what happened to Generation Z, which he defines as those born after 1995. (They followed the millennials, born 1981-95.) Older members of Gen Z entered puberty while four technological trends were converging. One was the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, another the continuing spread of broadband internet. The third, starting in 2009, was “the new age of hyper-viralized social media,” with likes, retweets and shares. In 2010 came the front-facing camera on smartphones, which “greatly expanded the number of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for their peers and strangers not just to see, but to judge.”

This became “the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable and . . . unsuitable for children and adolescents.”

Pew Research reports that, in 2011, 23% of teens had a smartphone. That meant they had only limited access to social media—they had to use the family computer. By 2016 one survey showed 79% of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28% of children 8 to 12. Soon teens were reporting they spent an average of almost seven hours a day on screens. “One out of every four teens said that they were online ‘almost constantly,’” Mr. Haidt writes.

Girls moved their social lives onto social media. Boys burrowed into immersive video games, Reddit, YouTube and pornography.

The tidal wave came to these children during puberty, when the human brain is experiencing its greatest reconfiguring since early childhood. In puberty, as brain researchers say, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” What you do at that time “will cause lasting structural changes in the brain,” Mr. Haidt writes.

Suddenly children “spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching or even making eye contact with their friends and families.” They withdrew from “embodied social behaviors” essential for successful human development. It left them not noticing the world.

Signs of a mental-health crisis quickly emerged. Rates of mental illness among the young went up dramatically in many Western countries between 2010 and 2015. Between 2010 and 2024 major depression among teens went up 145% among girls, 161% among boys. There was a rise in disorders related to anxiety as well.

Some medical professionals were skeptical. Most pertinent studies were based on self-reporting: Maybe young people had simply grown more willing to talk about their feelings. Mr. Haidt looked at changes that weren’t self-reported—studies charting emergency psychiatric care and admissions. They too were up. “The rate of self harm for . . . young adolescent girls nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020.”
Read More Declarations

What Mr. Haidt calls the Great Rewiring isn’t only about changes in technologies. Parents over the past few decades made two big choices about how to keep children safe, and both were wrong. “We decided the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision, even though the risks to children from crime, violence, drunk drivers, and most other sources have dropped steeply since the 1990s. At the same time, it seemed like too much of a bother to design and require age-appropriate guardrails for kids online, so we left children free to wander though the Wild West of the virtual world, where threats to children abounded.”

A dark irony: Parents are often physically overprotective of their children out of fear of sexual predators. But those predators have moved online, where it’s easy to find and contact children.

Mr. Haidt cites an essay for Free Press by a 14-year-old girl: “I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time. I found myself on Pornhub, which I stumbled across by accident and returned to out of curiosity. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age. Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily.”

Mr. Haidt suggests four reforms:

• No smartphones before high school, only basic phones with no internet capability.
• No social media before 16. Let their brains develop first.
• All schools from elementary through high school should be phone-free zones—students can store their devices in lockers.
• Bring back unsupervised play. Only in that way will kids naturally develop social skills and become self-governing.

Parents feel defeated and powerless. “It’s too late,” they tell Mr. Haidt, “That ship has sailed.” No, he insists. America has always found ways to protect children while mostly allowing adults to do what they want. Automobiles? Seat belts and car seats. Cigarettes? Age limits and a ban on vending machines.

We can’t abstain and allow a virtual world in which adults run free and children are defenseless. Concrete measures and collective action, to which Mr. Haidt devotes the last third of the book, at least offer improvement.

Near the end he quotes Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook
, on the inner thinking of the Silicon Valley pioneers who created the new world. In a 2017 interview Mr. Parker said they wished to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.” The “social validation feedback loop” they created exploits “a vulnerability in human psychology.” The apps need to “give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you . . . more likes and comments.” He said that he, Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram, “understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” He added: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

We know now.

Easter’s coming, Holy Week’s here and Passover is a few weeks away, so it’s a good time to look at the work of a great artist who’s brought considerable beauty into the world, Paul Simon. Alex Gibney’s two-part MGM+ documentary on the making of his most recent album is also beautiful—moving, mellow, sweet and deep. It tells of Mr. Simon’s life and touches on three big themes—the nature of creativity and where it comes from; that tricky thing called a career, which carries a talent forward into the world and keeps it there, or not; and, centrally, an ongoing spiritual event in Mr. Simon’s life that sounds like an ongoing miracle, or at least has pronounced supernatural aspects.

Mr. Simon, now 82, is one of the greatest American songwriters of the 20th century, and you carry his songs in your head—“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Scarborough Fair,” “American Tune,” “Mrs. Robinson.” It was classic after classic. “People used to say, ‘Oh, you have your finger on the pulse,’ ” Mr. Simon says in the documentary. “And I would think, no, I don’t have my finger on the pulse, I just have my finger out there, and the pulse is running under it, for the time being.” How long it lasts is a mystery, knowing the pulse is there and feeling its vibrations is a gift, putting your hand out there is the effort.

He grew up in the New York City borough of Queens, where his heroes were Mickey Mantle, JFK, Lenny Bruce and Elvis. He met neighborhood boy Art Garfunkel in sixth grade, and they began to sing together, Mr. Simon writing the music and Mr. Garfunkel harmonizing. Mr. Simon says something arresting about America when he was coming up: “My culture was radio. It wasn’t like I was singing the music of Queens, you know? We didn’t have people sitting around on the porches in Queens singing fables about what it was like in Queens in the old days.” What he worked with was AM radio Top 40—the Everly Brothers, the Cleftones. America was becoming less local and regional even then, more a national entity projecting a national sound that generation after generation would imitate, recapitulate, expand on.

When Simon & Garfunkel first went on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” Mr. Simon was asked where he was from. “Macon, Georgia,” he spontaneously lied. Because it sounded like a real place with a real meaning, not just someplace waves were passing through. I mention this because I think that’s a very American longing, to come from somewhere real, discrete and vividly itself.

He took his guitar into the bathroom at his parents’ house to write. “The tile made an echo and the water was kind of a white-noise sound.” He felt a flow of creative energy and wondered what it was. “One second ago that thought was not here and now I’m weeping. How’d that happen? And how can I do it again?”

Simon & Garfunkel knew huge recording success, would, in the coming decades, break up, reunite, part. Popularity fluctuated; Mr. Simon’s career went hot and not-hot. There’s a powerful section on a lukewarm period. Mr. Simon, solo, looking for the different sounds of the world, goes to Jamaica and South Africa. In the latter, in 1985, he is surrounded by singers and musicians and music he doesn’t know. They form the elements of what would become his masterpiece, “Graceland.” You hear the blunt, raucous accordion riff that opens “The Boy in the Bubble,” and it sounds so big. Later, when Mr. Simon started writing the lyrics he found his subject matter was unrelated to the world he’d just visited—he was writing about the Mississippi River, about Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Confused, he went there for the first time and realized he was writing about a father and son on a journey of repair. He accepted it, because creativity is a mystery. “I really love the mystery.”

Once he told Dick Cavett he didn’t know why he wrote “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? / Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you,” but he wasn’t perturbed not to understand. Someday it would mean something. It came to be a shorthand way of saying Americans have a sense of lessened greatness, that our heroes are in the past.

Now to the supernatural event. Mr. Simon and his wife, the musician Edie Brickell, had been living in Texas for a few years when, on Jan. 15, 2019, he had a dream that said: “You’re working on a piece called ‘Seven Psalms.’” He hadn’t written anything in a few years, hadn’t wanted to, but the dream was so strong that he got up and wrote it down. “I had no idea what that meant.” Gradually, information came—chords, a sound. Then he started to wake up two or three times a week between 3:30 and 5 a.m. and words would come. “I’d write them down and if I tried to add to them—‘Oh that’s a good verse, I’ll write a second verse’—it would stop.” He thought whatever it is, “it’s coming to me and that’s all, I just have to wait, and when it comes, write it down.”

In the documentary he sings one of the songs that came of the process:

I’ve been thinking about the great migration
One by one they leave the flock
I’ve been wondering about their destination
Metal grass on a jagged rock
The Lord is my engineer
The Lord is the earth I ride on
The Lord is the face in the atmosphere
The path I slip and slide on

It’s beautiful. He alters the lyrics slightly on the final album, but they’re beautiful too.

Throughout all this, another major event. He suddenly lost hearing in his left ear. Within a month it was almost gone. He couldn’t hear his music the same, his voice sounded different; it used to come from here and now it was there. He fell into depression, got out of bed, searched for remedies and workarounds. In time he thought maybe the whole thing—the dream, the words and sounds, the songs, the deafness—was part of the same whole, one he was meant to grapple with. Maybe it was supposed to be hard. Why not? The whole album was about an “argument” he is having with himself, which he later calls a “debate,” “about belief or not.” “Maybe it isn’t supposed to be so easy. Maybe you’re supposed to have an obstacle.” Maybe the struggle helps you know what you know in a deeper way.

Wynton Marsalis, another great artist and Mr. Simon’s close friend, told him, as he recorded, to “leave the struggle in there.”

There are more spiritual references in the documentary—he speaks of the psalms of David and makes biblical references—and once you see them you realize they’ve always been there in Mr. Simon’s work. All writers reveal their obsessions and preoccupations, and half the time they’re not even conscious of it. And no one knows where anyone’s going or what’s going on with them, but Paul Simon is speaking the language of conversion and I think he’s going to graceland.

A radiant Easter to my beautiful readers.

The heartening story this week was the House vote to force TikTok, the video sharing platform, to stop acting as what U.S. officials have long warned it is, a true and grave security threat to the United States.

In this, the House showed what it rarely shows, self-respect. Its members said: You can’t harm America without our at least trying to resist. They signaled to China that it can’t bank forever on America’s stupidity and carelessness. Maybe they signaled to Big Tech outfits here that Congress will eventually move against their abuses, too.

The vote was bipartisan and overwhelming, 352-65. Nancy Pelosi backed it, as did Elise Stefanik. Against it were many on the fringes of each party, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Matt Gaetz.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is connected to the Chinese Communist Party. If the bill becomes law, ByteDance will be required to sell TikTok to non-Chinese owners or face a ban in the U.S. At least one prospective buyer has expressed an interest.

Here is part of the case against TikTok:

It uses its algorithms to suck up information about America’s 170 million users, giving it the potential to create dossiers. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray has warned that China, through ByteDance, has the ability to control software on millions of devices in the U.S.

TikTok demonstrably suppresses content that China doesn’t like and promotes posts injurious to America. It can flood the U.S. in an election year with information that can be used to toy with us and further drive us apart. Here it should be said that if you’ve been watching things for a while you have a strong sense that the Chinese, and our other competitors, aren’t pulling for Donald Trump or Joe Biden; they think both are jokes. They want to hurt America. They want to bring it down as a power. It’s not about favoring one party or the other, it’s about hurting us. You could see China’s commitment to its efforts in the language it used before the House voted. A proposed ban would “come back to bite the United States,” its Foreign Ministry warned.

TikTok fought back hard and lost, which seems to me the first such loss for a tech company. It pulled out all the stops, alerting its U.S. users, who jammed phone lines on Capitol Hill. TikTok paid expenses for “creators” to go to Washington. The New York Times quoted a creator called Giovanna González, who posted in a video: “So old white people boomers we call congresspeople are trying to ban TikTok, but I’m not having it.” You are having it.

I don’t know if what TikTok did backfired, exactly, but it didn’t work. It overplayed its hand.

U.S. security agencies have been warning the American people since 2020 that TikTok is an espionage tool. Since the warnings began, use of the social-media app has exploded. It seemed to me a seminal event when agencies of Republican and Democratic administrations in turn told the people that a platform was threatening their own safety and security—and Americans not only don’t turn it off; they clamored for it. At some point we have to admit that something is wrong not only with Congress but also with us. People make their living on TikTok, it is true, but they can make their living in a lot of places, not only one that can do damage to their fellow citizens and, old-fashioned concept coming, their country. Independence and entrepreneurship are beautiful but can tip into sheer dumbness and lack of care for others.

The bill now goes to the Senate. Senators would be impressed by the size of the House win and its ideological mix, but I wonder if Big Tech money is flowing in or being withheld. Will they slow things down until people forget? Victory will take vigilance. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley on Thursday told Axios he doesn’t expect the Senate to vote for it. “Nothing that Big Tech doesn’t want moves across the Senate floor,” he said. “My observation is that people say, ‘I agree with the idea in principle but have concerns.’ That basically means we should never do anything.”

*   *   *

The second most important story this week was the clincher nobody noticed.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden sewed up their respective parties’ presidential nominations in primaries on Tuesday, each receiving the threshold number of delegates needed to win in coming conventions. By the latest count, Mr. Biden has received a combined total of 8.5 million votes. Another 1.3 million voters cast Democratic ballots for other candidates or no candidate.

In all Republican contests combined, Donald Trump received 10.3 million votes, and Nikki Haley drew 3.3 million, and 500,000 other ballots were cast.

Does the disparity in turnout—9.8 million Democrats showed up and 13.7 million Republicans—suggest which party has the energy and hunger? I suspect so.

But overall this is an absurd moment. Everything’s settled but nothing feels stable. A nation now knows who its two major party candidates will be, after relatively easy contests, and that nation doesn’t want those candidates! The polls show it. The general feeling: We’re stuck with these crazy old coots.

Neither candidate can, as they say in politics, do optimism. Neither can make you see a better tomorrow. Mr. Trump is American carnage; everything’s terrible and only he can repair it; the worse things are, the better his chances. That’s why he didn’t want the recent bipartisan immigration bill. On a problem that’s, say, a foot long, it offered 2 inches of progress. Can’t have that! Mr. Biden can’t do optimism because when he speaks of the sunny side he sounds out of touch. He’s not believable and does not have a plan beyond keep on keepin’ on. He sounds like a politician who’s just word-saying.

But you can also connect a little of the general unhappiness and dissatisfaction to the TikTok story itself. President Trump was the first to call it a security risk, and he did it with vivid, concrete language. His 2020 executive order banning it warned that TikTok could funnel American users’ personal data to the Communist Party, “potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.” The order was enjoined in court, and Mr. Biden later rescinded it. The bill passed this week was aimed at redressing those grievances. But Mr. Trump has now reversed his stand, saying this week that banning TikTok would make Facebook happy. Can’t have that! Also a major ByteDance investor is a major Republican donor. His former adviser Steve Bannon said on the social-media site Gettr that it is the “coin.”

As for Mr. Biden, his administration continued the warning of TikTok’s threat and backed a ban. Then, his approval ratings sinking, he decided to open an account on TikTok to sway its young hep-cat users. (He says he’ll sign a final bill.)

What a crew. How mutually swampy. It is a cliché that it’s not what’s done in secret in Washington that’s a scandal but what’s done in public, right under your nose. It’s a cliché because it’s true.