![]() “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight-and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. “America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. Even in death, though, it proves hard to escape or laugh off.Ī sweet-and-sour set of pieces on loss, absurdity, and places they intersect.Ī thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted. For years-chronicled in many books-Sedaris labored to elude his father’s criticism. His father’s death unlocks a crushing piece about dad’s inappropriate, sexualizing treatment of his children. He recalls fending off the flirtations of a 12-year-old boy in France, frustrated by the language barrier and other factors that kept him from supporting a young gay man. (He refers to one such person as a “snacktivist.”) Such impolitic material, though, puts serious essays in sharper, more powerful relief. Of Covid-19, he writes that “more than eight hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn’t get to choose a one of them.” The author’s support of Black Lives Matter is tempered by his interest in the earnest conscientiousness of organizers ensuring everyone is fed and hydrated. (“After thirty years, sleeping is the new having sex.”) Even more serious stuff rolls off him. ![]() His relationship with his partner, Hugh, remains contentious, but it’s mellowing. On tour, he collects sheaves of off-color jokes and tales of sexual self-gratification gone wrong. He’s bemused by his sister Amy’s landing a new apartment to escape her territorial pet rabbit. On a trip to a gun range, he’s puzzled by boxer shorts with a holster feature, which he wishes were called “gunderpants.” He plays along with nursing-home staffers who, hearing a funnyman named David is on the premises, think he’s Dave Chappelle. There’s bad news in this book, too-most notably, the death of his problematic and seemingly indestructible father at 96-but Sedaris generally carries himself more lightly. In his previous collection of original essays, Calypso (2018), the author was unusually downbeat, fixated on aging and the deaths of his mother and sister. Sedaris remains stubbornly irreverent even in the face of pandemic lockdowns and social upheaval. Capitol.Ī book that belongs in any QAnon subscriber’s collection. He argues that antifa will yield naught but “ash, blood, and feces-stained rubble,” when of course that would better describe what the mob of right-wing extremists left behind at the U.S. His conclusion seems particularly untimely given the events of Jan. ![]() According to the author, there are “whole networks of writers and so-called journalists who intentionally spread pro-antifa messaging.” Though he professes not to support the former president’s view that the press is the enemy of the people, he demurs, “but one can see the basis for that sentiment when looking at how transparently extreme ideologues are presented as the arbiters of truth.” Those extreme ideologues, the proceedings make plain, include anyone who questions Ngo’s account of events, which is right at home with the collected works of Dinesh D’Souza and Michelle Malkin. and dismissing the thought that the heavily armed, proudly violent boogaloo movement has anything to do with the far right, Ngo goes still farther out onto a logical limb when he urges that the progressive forces of education, health care, government, and the media are allies of the black-masked anarchists. Ngo is correct when he deems the organization to be “a relatively small group of committed radicals.” After muddying the waters to shift blame away from the Minneapolis police for their killing of George Floyd Jr. “At no point did the police intervene to help.” His attackers, he concludes, must have been members of the anti-fascist, or antifa, movement-and never mind that in several well-documented events, the perpetrators of violent acts have been right-wing extremists disguising themselves as fellow travelers. “I was nearly killed by a violent mob,” he claims. The framing event for Ngo’s narrative, about which readers are frequently reminded, is a moment when, in June 2019, he was attacked and beaten at a demonstration in Portland, Oregon. An overwrought exposé on the supposed lurking menace that is antifa. ![]()
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