Are we to give Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas points for not attending the National Rifle Association convention in Houston last weekend? You know, the one that began just three days after an 18-year-old with an AR-15-style rifle slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in an elementary school less than 300 miles away?
Abbott canceled his scheduled appearance — but did speak to the gun-worshiping gathering remotely, with prerecorded remarks. This is known as hedging your bets. And this, in the Republican Party of 2022, is what passes for tact.
Ever since the Uvalde massacre, I’ve been watching Abbott and listening to him and looking for some small hint — for any evanescent glimmer — of misgiving about all that he has done on his watch and with his signature to glorify guns, to fetishize guns, to make sure that Texans can obtain guns easily and carry them proudly and be free, free, free!
But I can’t see it. He’s a portrait of his party’s pigheadedness. A poster boy for its intransigence.
Granted, he hasn’t made the sorts of defiant, strident pro-gun statements that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has, but then Cruz is the prince of provocation. It’s his brand. He’s proud of it.
And Abbott hasn’t been as perversely tone-deaf as his party’s orange overlord, Donald Trump, who stuck to his plan to speak at the N.R.A. convention, marinated in the crowd’s adulation and — my favorite part — held forth on the topic of mental health. Because that’s Trump’s forte? Because he embodies it? There’s no kinship between rhetoric and reality when he takes the stage. And that estrangement characterizes much of the Republican Party today.
Certainly, it applies to Abbott. His most impassioned, pained moment after the elementary-school blood bath came on the same day as his Wizard-of-Oz convention appearance, when he declared at a news conference in Uvalde: “I am livid about what happened.”
Livid! But he wasn’t talking about the killings per se. About the pileup of tiny corpses. He was talking about the slow response of law enforcement officers on the scene that day, about his initial misimpression that they’d acted more heroically and about his out-of-the-gate praise of them along those lines.
“The information I was given turned out, in part, to be inaccurate, and I am absolutely livid about that,” he said. Yes, Governor Abbott, that’s the most infuriating aspect of — and salient takeaway from — this ordeal.
He has no right whatsoever to be livid. He forfeited it when, less than a year ago, he signed a law that gives Texans the green light to carry handguns without a license or training. He forfeited it when he signed a law that allows hotel guests in Texas to store their firearms in their rooms.
He forfeited it by signing law after law sending the message to Texans that what they should fear most isn’t all the killing done by guns but big, bad federal restrictions that might affect how quickly they can get their hands on more guns or how many places they can brandish those guns or how much caution they must muster around those guns.
He forfeited it when, less than two months ago, he cut more than $200 million from the Texas commission that oversees mental health services in the state, which, according to the 2022 State of Mental Health in America report, ranks fourth in the nation in terms of the prevalence of mental illness, but last in access to mental health care.
Unbowed by that distinction, Abbott spoke after the massacre about the importance of dealing with mental illness. Other Republican leaders spoke about arming teachers and essentially turning schools into fortresses — which, I’m sure, would be wonderfully conducive to learning.
What Abbott didn’t speak about was reducing the glut — and regulating the types — of deadly firearms in a broken country that stands out, not so coincidentally, for both how many guns it contains and the number of people killed by them yearly.
I’m livid about that.
Abbott and other Republican leaders claimed to have heavy hearts. What they should have is haunted consciences. What they do have is a lot of nerve.
Language and Loss
In a news report that I listened to recently, a correspondent said that Russia had “underachieved” in its war against Ukraine. Ukraine, in contrast, had “overachieved.” The language suited a discussion of students studying trigonometry or of sales reps trying to meet a company goal. Lifeless bodies and sunken ships aren’t achievements. They’re the fruits of human savagery, the yardsticks of profound loss.
All the time I hear the word “victory,” in terms of whether Russia will be denied it and how Ukraine might be able to achieve it. There will be no victory — no winner — in this case. Sure, one side will prevail insofar as the result will be closer to that side’s wishes than to its adversary’s. But that will come only after reciprocal destruction and mutual impoverishment.
I worry about the words of war. I worry that they launder it, sanitize it, connect it — linguistically — to sporting events and other routine competitions. I don’t think that’s intentional, and perhaps it’s unavoidable. There’s a limit to the English language.
But there’s also a danger that our vocabulary for extreme events so closely resembles our vocabulary for less extreme ones that it turns the harrowing into the humdrum and numbs us. We should be more aware of that than we are. We should take greater care than we do.
That’s important for Ukraine, and it’s important for Uvalde.
Regarding the latter, there has been a valuable and excellent discussion — including, in The Times, this article by Elizabeth Williamson and this guest essay by Susie Linfield — about what sorts of images the media shows and whether more graphic ones are in order.
That same question can be asked about language. Do such endlessly, reflexively repeated phrases as “school shooting,” “mass shooting,” “active shooter” and “gunman” shortchange the horror of the circumstances and become some ignorable admixture of white noise and crime-procedural cant?
My worry about that is why, earlier in this newsletter, I used “blood bath,” “massacre,” “slaughtered.”
Ugly truths call for ugly terms.
For the Love of Sentences
Maybe prose can make a difference? I’ll start with a few of the best passages about the Uvalde horror.
Here’s Bret Stephens in The Times: “The United States seems to have a not-so-secret death cult that believes that the angry god known as the Second Amendment must be periodically propitiated through ritual child sacrifice.” (Thanks to Scott Howie of Glenview, Ill., and Randy Komisarek of Tucson, Ariz., among others, for nominating this.)
Also in The Times, Maureen Dowd: “We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.” (Sylvie Kimche, Manhattan, and Marc Etter, Detroit)
In The New Yorker, the conclusion of Jessica Winter’s excellent essay about Uvalde echoed lines from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” while excoriating Republicans who offer only “thoughts and prayers” for the dead: “If the leaders of this political movement, which in Texas managed to ban most abortions and criminalize health care for trans kids in the space of a school year, took real offense to murdered children, they would never simply accept their deaths as the unfortunate cost of honoring the Founding Fathers’ right to take up muskets against hypothetical government tyranny. They would act. If America were not afraid to know itself, we could more readily accept that gun-rights advocates are enthralled with violent sorrow. This is the America they envisaged. It is what they worked so hard for. Their thoughts and prayers have been answered.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J., and Mark Wilding, Studio City, Calif.)
And in an essay in The Atlantic that deserves to be read in full, Clint Smith pondered sending his soon-to-be kindergartner off to school in these blood-soaked times: “I picked up my phone and began scrolling through photos of my son from the day he was born, almost five years ago, his pink-brown body awash with wrinkles and wonder. I kept scrolling and saw photographs of him in the crib where he slept (and too often did not sleep); photographs of him chasing a flock of birds in the park, his arms raised as he toddled toward them with breathtaking inelegance; photographs of him after he had applesauce for the first time, his eyes gleaming, his smile as wide as the sky, his lips covered in a chaos of golden mush.” (Lois Ambash, Needham, Mass.)
For pure prose joy, no recent passage tickled you more than this from Matt Flegenheimer in The Times, reflecting on the career of Guy Fieri: “In the 15 years since he began ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,’ his Food Network flagship, Mr. Fieri, 54, has become perhaps the most powerful and bankable figure in food television, the éminence grise of the eminently greasy.” (Thanks to Peter Comerford of Providence, R.I., and Monica Tarantino of Walton, N.Y., among many others for nominating this.)
Also in The Times, in the final sentence of an obituary for the “pickle mogul” Robert Vlasic, Clay Risen slipped in this sly characterization of Vlasic’s philanthropic activity: “It was, his son said, the sort of work he relished.” (Rebecca Jones, Southampton, N.Y.)
As “Top Gun: Maverick” jetted its way into multiplexes, the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker recalled the time she met Tom Cruise at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2006: “Taking my hand in his, he hit the high beams on those piercing, blue-green eyes, singeing my eyeballs with — I’m certain of it — the recognition that he had finally found his one true love. I have no idea what he said. Then he was off to charm his next victim, and the next. That’s star power.” (Valerie Congdon, Waterford, Mich.)
And in The Seattle Times, the sports columnist Matt Calkins bemoaned the dashed hopes for the city’s baseball team, the Mariners: “If preseason expectations were a redwood, their performance thus far has been a houseplant.” (Mike Heinrich, Seattle)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.
Bonus Regan Picture!
“We have a deficit of Regan pictures!!!!!” Mary Westerlund, of The Villages, Fla., wrote in an email last week. I appreciate the sentiment. I applaud the number of exclamation points. And, with the image above, I address the longing.
This was Regan, just the other day, taking a break from our game of fetch on the front lawn of our Chapel Hill, N.C., home. A girl needs her ball. And readers need their Regan.
On a Personal Note
In an excellent reflection on Ellen DeGeneres’s goodbye to daytime television last week, John Koblin noted her show’s decline in viewership after media reports about its toxic backstage environment. He wrote that her fans seemed to have “a tough time puzzling out the discrepancy between her sunny stage persona and the realities of the workplace she oversaw.”
I suspect he’s right. But I see no puzzle. And that’s not just because the roles that performers perfect in front of a camera or an audience almost always diverge significantly from the flawed, complicated truths of their lives. It’s because everyone is to some degree contradictory and compartmentalized.
Each person is many people, perhaps behaving one way at home and another at work, possibly big-hearted in certain settings but meanspirited in others, maybe cycling through various personalities — or, rather, the varied dimensions of a given personality — in accordance with outer and inner weather.
That’s often the explanation when I like and admire someone whom, I discover, a trusted friend of mine can’t stand. My friend and I aren’t seeing that person in different ways so much as we’re seeing different facets of that person, whose behavior isn’t the same around me as it is around my friend.
People are complicated. I know — duh. But we spend too much of our lives being surprised and frustrated and even undone by that. We come to better and better terms with it, I think, as we age. We accept more fully that our friends, family members and romantic partners are jumbles of appealing and unappealing attributes, of traits that suit us and tics that don’t, and that the trick to forging the right relationships, and to making them last, is figuring out how to spotlight and foreground what we value in those people and how to minimize what we don’t.
Actually, there’s another trick, just as important and maybe, well, trickier. We must be humble enough to recognize that we too are mixed bags, less constant and less virtuous than we mean to be. And those friends, family members and romantic partners are going through the same process of making peace with us as we are of making peace with them.
