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Its a growth industry, no doubt about it. Our cup runneth over, Brejcha, 76, says of his practice. He founded the Chicago firm 22 years ago out of his pro bono work for the anti-abortion movement.

The name Thomas More pays homage to the 16th-century martyr at the center of a celebrated church-state dispute. Brejcha (pronounced BRECK-ka) admires the saint for his humor and for what playwright Robert Bolt in an introduction to his Man for All Seasons called Mores adamantine sense of self.

As the modern-day culture wars heated up, the firms donations, from small checks to six-figure gifts, surged, tripling to $6 million between 2012 and 2018. A $137,500 deficit in 2017 turned into a $539,365 surplus. The firm does all its work pro bono.

The firm represents Beloved Church in the northwestern Illinois hamlet of Lena, which continues to hold services in defiance of Gov. J.B. Pritzker's stay-home order and a federal judge's denial of its request for a temporary restraining order. Pastor Stephen Cassell says the Thomas More Society was the one conservative legal group, among more than a dozen he contacted, that followed up.

"If it wasn't for them we wouldn't be in this fight," Cassell says.

The Thomas More Society has about a dozen lawyers total, on staff here and in Omaha, Neb., and another 15 to 20 on contract across the country paid by the hour. It hires other lawyers on a case-by-case basis.

Brejcha says his main challenge is finding enough lawyers to handle the firms workload. In 2018 his firm paid nearly $1 million to attorneys. (Brejcha got nearly $200,000, according to regulatory filings.)

His career was propelled by a racketeering lawsuit filed in 1986 by the National Organization for Women alleging a conspiracy to deny women the right to an abortion. Brejcha represented defendant Joseph Scheidler and his Pro-Life Action League; they ultimately prevailed, in 2014, on a third appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The publicity attracted other clients under religious-freedom banners. Issues ran the gamut, from same-sex marriage, insurance mandates, embryonic stem cell research, nativity scenes and transgender bathroom disputes, to abortion clinic protests and nuns complaining about a suburban strip club neighbor.

As public opinion on same-sex marriage flipped over the last decade, Brejcha hasnt. I dont think anybodys going to rewrite the Bible, he says.

"He is without question dogmatic, absolutely rigid, stultified, which he probably sees as a virtue," says Chicagoan Fay Clayton, NOW's lead counsel, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center, in the Scheidler case. She credits him with getting skillful lawyers to volunteer for the case.Ed Yohnka of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois says, They have this very twisted view of the First Amendmentthat religious liberty requires government policies to adhere to their religious beliefs.

The firms highest-profile client in pending criminal and civil cases is probably David Daleiden, an anti-abortion activist who posed as a researcher and secretly filmed Planned Parenthood officials discussing fees for sale of fetal tissue and organs. In one of the civil cases, a federal jury in San Francisco last November awarded $2.2 million to Planned Parenthood, which maintains it may arrange for tissue donations at the request of patients but not sales. The verdict is on appeal.In California Superior Court, Daleiden and another defendant are awaiting trial on nine felony counts alleging eavesdropping and invasion of privacy.

Brejcha says his work isn't one-dimensional, pointing to his defense of antiwar demonstrators and backing from the likes of the brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan, activist priests who led 60s antiwar protests, and co-counsel assistance from late Attorney General Ramsey Clark. We had support from the left for what Dr. King called peaceable nonviolent direct action.

Periodically imprisoned Chicago activist Kathy Kelly relied on Brejcha two decades ago when charged with violating U.S. sanctions against Iraq, the result of her humanitarian aid missions. Hes always struck me as somebody whos remarkably selfless, she says.

After growing up on the South Side and graduating from the University of Notre Dame, Brejcha attended New York University School of Law, where he was on the law review with Rudy Giuliani (they havent kept in touch). An Army captain in Vietnam, he got a medal for helping plan the 1970 invasion of Cambodia. The operation rekindled campus unrest, triggering student massacres at Kent State and Jackson State universities.

Returning home, Brejcha gravitated to a litigation firm that had a name partner in the news: Barnabus Sears, a special prosecutor in an obstruction-of-justice case against Cook County States Attorney Edward Hanrahan and 13 others for their roles in the 1969 killing of two Black Panthers leaders.

When his work with Scheidler and other pro bono clients ate up too much time for too little income, Brejcha left to start Thomas More. He tapped Scheidlers mailing lists to raise money and Scheidler's wife, Ann, to chair the board.

Brejcha, in a politically ecumenical way, says Thomas More the saint would be appalled if he walked the earth today.

The way the First Amendment has been pushed aside I think it would be shocking to him. Youre allowed to patronize liquor stores, but you cant get into church, he says before broadening his complaint. There used to be a common core consensus thats turned into hard line divisionsthats regrettable . . . very, very sad. I dont know if were going to restore the center. I hope democracy has a future.

As for President Donald Trump, Thats a tough one. I dont think the president is immune from what Im talking about. Brejcha says he's guided by a favorite saying of Sears': "Who you are shouts so loud I can't hear what you're saying."

During the coronavirus crisis, Brejcha is taking long walks with his wife, Deborah, and reading. On his list is Fatal Discord, a history of Western civilizations bedrock culture war, the 16th-century schism between Luther's Reformation and humanism espoused by Erasmus.

See more here:
Chicago-based Thomas More Society busy with religion-oriented cases - Crain's Chicago Business

What motivates those groups, often a small but loud minority, clamouring for an end to the lockdown? Hawaiian shirt-wearing boogaloo boys preparing for the next US civil war might be surprised with what they have in common with one or two scientists. Why is coronavirus another casualty of the culture wars?

Familiarity with ideological contamination leads me to wonder whether epidemiologists are as susceptible as economists. The left-right divide in economics is a debate about the virtues of government intervention versus free markets. Which comes first, the political beliefs the ideology or the admiration for markets?

Adam Smith marvelled at the markets invisible hand and every economics student has a moment when they experience a similar flash of insight. Market co-ordination is a thing of beauty, particularly when written down as a set of equations resolved via fixed point theorems.

But markets malfunction or dont exist. Reality is messy and opaque. Capturing this in words or algebra is as much art as science. The equations might embody ideology; mathematics deployed to confirm beliefs, acquired long ago and for mysterious reasons. Of course, models can be a genuine attempt to capture reality. Trouble is, its hard to differentiate between science and charlatanism.

The government versus markets debate embodies trust and views of human nature. Bureaucrats may be malevolent or incompetent. Even a well-intentioned planner will make things worse if he has only partial information. So best leave it to markets.

Buried deep within the biases we bring to our models, consciously or otherwise, is often a perspective on personal freedom. There are genuine differences of opinion about how economies can be made to function better. But when it comes to government intervention, many views are pre-determined. Maybe thats inevitable, perhaps not even a bad thing. We have to believe in something. If personal freedom means everything to you, governments are anathema and you will write down a model that explains why.

Could any of this apply to epidemiology? One class of models has told governments to take action. In Sweden, different models suggest relatively minimal government intervention, relatively few restrictions on personal freedom. How do epidemiologists come up with such different recommendations?

Economists tweak key assumptions and produce radically different conclusions from similar looking equations. Epidemiological models are vulnerable to similar manipulation.

How can epidemiology be compared to economics? Surely ideology cannot play a large role in a science devoted to human health? Youd think so but a trawl of academic web sites reveals epidemiologists, from respectable universities and with Professor in their name, willing to debate modelling, parameter choice and data quality in a similar way to economists. There are a small number of epidemiologists who think what we are doing to our societies and economies is nuts.

My own prejudice says that some of these scientists share the same perspective as the people waving placards declaring the lockdown as synonymous with communism.

Opposing the lockdown arises from a false sense of personal freedom and a flawed assessment about the threats that government actions pose to liberty. That opposition can express itself via angry demonstrations on the steps of state capitols. Or via a different guess about a key parameter in a model.

The choice between individual and collective action lies at the heart of this. Epistemology joins economics and epidemiology. Why are some of us happy for the government to take decisions on our behalf while others take up arms to avoid anything to do with centralised control?

A popular libertarian bumper sticker in the US proclaims defend my shores and deliver my post: these are the only activities to be devolved from the individual to the government. And modern libertarians have doubts over the need for the US postal service.

Covid-19 deaths occur mostly within a number of overlapping groups: the elderly, some ethnic minorities, and individuals with underlying health conditions. Ending the lockdown too early poses a particular threat to these vulnerable people.

Prioritising individual freedom leads some to want the virus to run unchecked and to let those most at risk take their chances with severe or terminal illness. Lower risk individuals the well and the young will get the disease but probably not get very sick or die.

If there is a grim logic to the too early reopening of economies, this is where it is to be found.

Surely a better choice, even for libertarians, would be to protect ring-fence the vulnerable and let the young and healthy make their own choices. Indeed, this may be the rational, data-driven, optimal policy. Not all of the lockdown protestors are young or healthy. Collective wellbeing isnt necessarily in conflict with our individual health. Its a false dichotomy, one used time and again by climate-change deniers, Brexiteers and all the other culture warriors.

Climate change science hijacked by ideology: who cares about people not yet born, people far away, if my freedoms are restricted by governments? Take back control: the brilliant Brexit slogan that spoke to individualism but without regard to cost or consequence for others.

Evolutionary biologists believe that cooperation was a learned behaviour that accelerated human development. Not for every member of our species it seems.

Excerpt from:
Opposing the lockdown arises from a false sense of personal freedom - The Irish Times

On a recent afternoon in San Jose, California, Chuck Rossi held up his AR-15 in front of his computer camera, talking through how to hold the weapon safely, and how to load it with ammunition.

AR-15s are modular. Theyre like Legos for men, Rossi said. The man on the other side of the Zoom call chuckled.

Rossi is an activist turned safety instructor, one of the many gun owners across the country who are using Zoom or social media to teach new gun owners how to use their weapons.

The coronavirus pandemic has driven record-breaking numbers of gun sales in the United States, as gun sellers have succeeded in being categorized as essential businesses. At least anecdotally, many of the millions of guns sold during the pandemic have gone to first-time gun buyers, sparking concerns about potential increases in domestic violence, gun accidents and child gun deaths. Gun control advocates say the panic-buying during a time of anxiety, uncertainty and economic distress has also made gun suicide a particular concern.

In response, gun rights advocates have focused on safety training, with some offering free sessions to make sure new gun owners understand how to operate their weapons and feel welcomed to the gun community.

Rossi was an early Facebook employee who left the company in 2018, and still lives in San Jose. He co-founded Open Source Defense, a Silicon Valley gun rights group. The groups founders live across the country, but many of them are current or former tech workers. Between 20% and 30% of Americans say they personally own a gun, a number that has fallen for decades, and the group aims to grow the base of American gun owners by being friendly, digitally savvy and zero percent focused on culture wars. Zoom office hours for new owners is one of their initiatives.

When he signed up for a Zoom gun safety session, one new gun owner, a 40-year-old tech company worker from San Jose, said he expected he would be chatting with some hillbilly NRA guy.

Is he even going to be nice to me? the tech worker, who is black, wondered.

Instead he got Rossi, who works in the same industry and lives in the same town.

Just a few years ago, the new gun owner, who asked that his name not be used, said he was someone who had believed that AR-15s should be banned.

In early March, as concerns about coronavirus grew, his company told employees not to worry, that the government has it under control, theres going to be a vaccine. Then he went to grocery store, and there was nothing so he had to go to his parents house to get toilet paper.

He starting thinking about stories of civil unrest during the Los Angeles riots or Hurricane Katrina and said he worried about desperate people, hungry people, who might see homes in his nice San Jose neighborhood as soft targets.

People take from those who have, he said. How likely was it that he would ever be a target? One in a million, he said. I consider it an extreme impossibility. But why not be prepared?

In mid-March he went to buy self-defense weapons: a handgun and, because shotguns were sold out, an AR-15, which retails for about $1,000.

The new gun owners parents were appalled, and worried about the safety of his young children, ages three and one. His mother tried to get his brother to intervene. Instead, his brother bought himself three guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

The new gun buyer said the Zoom session was part of his attempt to be responsible. Rossi, hefting his own high-end AR-15, recapped the principles of gun safety: always keep the weapons muzzle pointed in a safe direction. Keep your finger off the trigger until youre ready to fire. Be aware of what might be behind the target youre shooting at. Treat every gun as if its loaded.

They did some troubleshooting: what should he do if an ammunition round got jammed inside his gun? How long would his military-surplus ammo be usable?

Ammo didnt go bad, Rossi said. He was still shooting shit from the second world war and surplus from the Korean war.

While white Americans tend to be more vocal about their gun ownership, the new owner said, being a black gun owner didnt feel special.

But it came with different concerns. He was more afraid a police officer might shoot him than that someone else might attack him on the street; he would never carry a gun in public.

If he ever had to call the police to his home, he said, he would emphasize: The black guy with the gun is the homeowner.

Owning guns had already shifted some of his political opinions. He said he still supported limits on larger-capacity ammunition magazines. But when he bought his guns, he said, he had to wait 10 days to get them. That was an eternity to me, he said. Are these really common sense gun laws?

Rossi was encouraged to hear this, and said hed try to persuade the new gun owner about why he actually needed larger-capacity magazines next. The two men made a plan to go shooting in person as soon as possible.

Continue reading here:
Meet the gun safety instructor holding 'office hours' on Zoom - The Guardian

Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand

Photo: Bloomsbury, Handout

Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand

Book World: The book behind the cable series 'Mrs. America'

Divided We Stand

By Marjorie J. Spruill

Bloomsbury. 436 pp. $33

---

At the opening and conclusion of each episode of the acclaimed cable series "Mrs. America," credits scroll across the screen. The initial round, not surprisingly, names the stars and the creative team, while the latter roster extends from supporting players to walk-ons to the gaffer, hair stylist, sound mixer and colorist.

Yet the lengthy litany overlooks the book that clearly informed the docudrama by Dahvi Waller, which vividly chronicles the conflict between feminist and anti-feminist American women over the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. "Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics," by Marjorie J. Spruill, came out three years before the cable series and covers much of the same terrain and with the same narrative structure.

The brilliant production of "Mrs. America" - highlighted by Cate Blanchett's pitch-perfect embodiment of Phyllis Schlafly, leader of the successful effort to defeat the ERA - should bring some of its captivated viewers to Spruill's book.

Docudrama and historical scholarship exist in a sort of Venn diagram, necessarily serving the complementary purposes of entertainment and education. "Mrs. America" admittedly takes the liberties of inventing certain characters and altering the sequence of some events. Its interest in the sex lives of Schlafly, her major adversary Gloria Steinem and their respective mates falls well outside Spruill's purview.

The many admirers of "Mrs. America" who have pondered its factual basis, though, will find great satisfaction in Spruill's book. It may not be a page-turner, but it is a clear, compelling and deeply insightful volume. I can say this from the dual experience of having read the book for pleasure and then assigned it to my Columbia Journalism School class in nonfiction book-writing.

Now retired after a long career as a university professor and provost, Spruill recounted in a recent podcast how she was an undergrad in the mid-1970s when enactment of the ERA appeared to be assured with overwhelming bipartisan support. By early 1971, the House had passed it by a vote of 354-24 and in 1972, the Senate passed it by a vote of 84-8. By 1977, the amendment was within three states of the 38 whose legislatures needed to approve it.

As we now know, the anti-ERA campaign spearheaded by Schlafly reversed the tide. And, in Spruill's book, the strife over the amendment reaches its apex in November 1977, when pro- and anti-feminists gather in Houston for competing rallies, each drawing tens of thousands of adherents. That spectacle of polarization - the federally funded National Women's Conference on the left and in the center and the Pro Life, Pro-Family Rally on the right - also dominates the final portion of "Mrs. America."

Several years after the Houston rallies, as a history professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, Spruill began searching into the untold story of the successful backlash. Initially, she delved into the records of the state-by-state conferences that were held as part of International Women's Year, in 1975. At many of those conclaves, she discovered, Schlafly's forces took feminists by surprise, disrupting the proceedings or even winning a majority of delegates' seats.

Those local conflicts all fed into the dueling rallies in Houston, which featured not only a who's-who of female activists - Schlafly, Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm - but the issues of abortion and gay rights that would come to permeate the culture wars. Assembling and writing that entire saga took Spruill 17 years.

"Without knowing it," she writes, "the nation had caught a glimpse of its political future. Only later would the full implications of the schism that had developed between American women become clear."

Spruill tells that story by toggling back and forth between the two contesting female coalitions several chapters at a time. (Coincidentally or not, "Mrs. America" employs the same pendular trope.) For Spruill, the headwaters of the Houston confrontation flow from the John F. Kennedy administration, when the young president created the President'sCommission on the Status of Women, which included Friedan as a consultant. Dissatisfaction among feminists with the subsequent pace of federal action against gender discrimination led them to found the National Organization for Women in 1966.

Support for the ERA from the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, though sometimes ambivalent, made its enactment look inevitable. Even such right-wing politicians as George Wallace and Strom Thurmond endorsed the measure.

But as Spruill's book shows, and "Mrs. America" faithfully dramatizes, a counter-revolution was building outside the political mainstream. While Schlafly was still focused on a militant brand of anti-Communism - she had been a sympathizer, and quite likely a member, of the extremist John Birch Society - women such asRosemary Thomson and Connie Marshner were already assailing the women's rights movement from religiously conservative standpoints. In "Divided We Stand," Spruill quotes Thomson calling a Nixon task force on gender issues an "attack of family life and the moral values of America's spiritual heritage."

What Schlafly brought to the table, Spruill points out, was "an experienced leader with uncommon organizing skills and a large network of admirers who were political activists and ready to respond to her call." The coalition of conservative women she forged managed to unite traditional theological foes from the Catholic, Mormon and evangelical Christian camps. The male-led Moral Majority, an integral factor in Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, simply appropriated Schlafly's formula.

Similar to the cable series, Spruill's book leaves one struggling to reconcile Schlafly's intelligence - Phi Beta Kappa, master's from Radcliffe, law degree from Washington University - with her talent for demagoguery. In its epilogue, though, "Divided We Stand" has no doubt about her lasting effect on the Republican Party and the nation as a whole.

"The rally was about religion," Spruill writes of the Pro-Life, Pro-Family event, "but it was also about politics. In fact, it was about the need to support politicians who had no qualms about combining religion and politics."

In Schlafly's heyday, the figure who did so was Reagan, elected with the mobilized support of Christian conservatives. And shortly before dying at age 92, Schlafly made her final political endorsement: Donald Trump.

---

Freedman is a former columnist for the New York Times, a journalism professor at Columbia University and the author of eight books.

Read more:
Book World: The book behind the cable series 'Mrs. America' - SF Gate

Mia Farrow (Daisy Buchanan) and Robert Redford (Jay Gatsby) in promotional art for the 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby(Paramount Pictures)Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby, by Greil Marcus (Yale University Press, 176 pp., $26)

Sometimes a short book casts a long shadow. F. Scott Fitzgeralds slim 1925 novel The Great Gatsby looms large in American culture: It has sold well over 25 million copies and spawned film adaptations ranging from a lost silent movie to A-list productions with Redford and DiCaprio. Theres a Gatsby opera, a forthcoming graphic novel, and even a retro computer game in the style of the original Nintendo. It wasnt always canonical literature like many classics, the book was widely considered a flop until after the authors death but now this gem of the Jazz Age is a contender for our Great American Novel, its lush prose and bittersweet melancholy perfectly balancing the tabloid ending to its tragic plot.

The book tells the story of the blue-collar James Gatz, who reinvents himself as Jay Gatsby and loves the beautiful Louisville aristocrat Daisy. When she marries the brutish Tom Buchanan, Gatsby works for years to win her back, amassing a fortune through organized crime and throwing lavish parties in a mansion just out of reach from where Daisy has settled on a fictionalized Long Island. Gatsby briefly attains his romantic dream, but his faade soon crumbles, and American aristocracy shuts him out forever. When Daisy runs over Toms mistress, Myrtle Wilson, in Gatsbys Rolls-Royce, the victims husband tracks down the owner of the car. And before we know it, the glamorous Jay Gatsby is dead, murdered in his swimming pool by a cuckolded husband mad with grief, in a case of terribly mistaken identity.

Greil Marcus tackles the meaning and the cultural influence of Fitzgeralds masterpiece in his new book, Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby. Marcus is a noted music critic, scholar, and writer on American culture, as we saw in his editorial work for the fascinating revisionist New Literary History of America. In this book, he sets out to see what The Great Gatsby has to say about America, and how it has informed countless other responses to the failures and successes of the American project.

Fitzgerald once floated Under the Red White and Blue as a possible title for Gatsby, and we can be thankful it didnt stick; but readers have often seen in The Great Gatsby an allegory that critiques the American experiment. (English teachers everywhere are nodding their heads). Marcus starts there, and proposes that Gatsby himself represents the conflicted nature of America: big, transcendent dreams yoked to sordid violence and greed. What if Fitzgeralds goal, he asks, was to create just such a thing, a doubled, shifting image of beauty and crime? Its a poignant question, because Jay Gatsby always attracts and repels us. He stands grasping at a beautiful ideal of romantic fulfillment, but his business associate Meyer Wolfsheim wears cuff links made from human molars. Its a fair if not entirely original assessment of the American riddle: How do we understand a nation whose ideals of liberty and equality have too often been violated by its people, its leaders, and even its laws?

Marcus sees Fitzgeralds project in The Great Gatsby as fundamentally patriotic, because it maintains this twin vision, this chiaroscuro consciousness of darkness and light. He sees artists like Fitzgerald, musicians, legislators, and everyday people living out American patriotism when they serve as what Alexander Hamilton called inquisitors in Federalist No. 65: by which Marcus means interrogating our national cultures failures and holding it to its own high ideals.

Marcus continues this patriotic task of inquisition in his book, but readers of Under the Red White and Blue will struggle to follow the train of thought across its eight loosely connected sections. One ill-fitting chapter is an adapted essay on Moby-Dick. Another offers a long summary and analysis of Gatz, a six-hour theatrical dramatic reading of The Great Gatsby. A chapter titled The Ferment situates Fitzgerald in his cultural milieu, especially music and popular culture, and At the Movies follows some of the film adaptations of the book. Along the way we learn of numerous quirky spinoffs of Gatsby: an SNL skit by Andy Kaufman, a replica in St. Paul, Minn., (Fitzgeralds hometown)of Doctor T. J. Eckleburgs bespectacled billboard, and a Korean pop star modeling his public persona on Jay Gatsby.

Those who manage to follow the scattershot content of this cultural study will likely founder in its tangled prose. In one long sentence, Marcus delays his main verb to the 215th word, leaving poor old Strunk and White rolling in their graves. Rather than a clear, sustained analysis of Gatsby and its cultural afterlives, Under the Red White and Blue offers a freewheeling brain dump about America, until the book closes with an implication that conservatives are you guessed it racists like Fitzgeralds Tom Buchanan. Sigh.

Under the Red White and Blue skates gleefully across the surface of American culture, rarely risking a dive into profundity. But what does Fitzgeralds heartbreaking novel have to say to us today? Its a portrait of a tremendous crash some have read it as a prophecy of the crash that sparked the Great Depression but it deals with a deeper crisis than any stock-market plunge. The people of Gatsbys America have built a fragile world of distraction to numb their existential emptiness. Theyre trying to live without the permanent things: without real love, without family, without sacrifice, without transcendent meaning. Even Gatsbys lofty dream is just an egoistic project of self-fulfillment, an attempt to relive his own emotions from the past. Its a world in which there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired. That is, its a world built on the false premise that too many of us if were honest have accepted: that our life consists of busily avoiding pain and seeking pleasure.

Then it all comes crashing down. It ends when almost no one but the narrator, Nick Carraway, attends Gatsbys funeral, and the great mansion an extension of Gatsbys own vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty stands dark and empty. Nick watches a lone car drive up one night, someone hoping for another of Gatsbys epic galas: Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didnt know that the party was over.

The party was over. As I sit rereading The Great Gatsby amid the COVID-19 lockdowns, that phrase sticks with me. A lot of modern life has ground to a halt. The death toll rises; the shelter-in-place orders drag on. The economy shudders. The party is over, and weve all got a chance to do some soul-searching about what really matters, a chance to reflect on just exactly what the party was and whether we want to resume it when life returns to normal. Popularity, pleasure, success start to feel pretty empty when I cant have a beer with my best friend or hug my mom. The self-righteous bitterness of our partisan politics and culture wars seems mighty petty when were all facing death by plague together. And Fitzgeralds century-old tale of Gatsbys Jazz Era catastrophe offers a timely reminder of which things do and which things dont constitute the good life for human beings.

He painted the glittering escapism of an age, but Fitzgerald was too true an artist to accept shallow substitutes for the deepest things. As he once wrote in an autobiographical essay about the Roaring Twenties, I was pretty sure that living wasnt the reckless, careless business these people thought. Fitzgeralds book may speak to the American condition, as Marcus rightly sees; but it speaks louder to the human condition. Gatsby and the Buchanans and the Wilsons reap death or existential emptiness not because they have been bad Americans or because of the failure of American ideology, but because they have been bad humans because to the last pages of the story they lived selfishly.

And so for almost a hundred years, The Great Gatsby has remained fresh, because it utters something that still matters, something that touches bedrock: It dramatizes the failure of passing things to satisfy our colossal human yearnings, reveals the starved souls of people who live entirely for themselves. Well, thanks to the lockdowns were all getting some quality time with ourselves in 2020. Unlike the fictional characters of Fitzgeralds marvelous book, we have a chance to make some serious changes; now that the party is over, maybe we can begin the business of living.

This article appears as Before the Crash in the June 1, 2020, print edition of National Review.

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'Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby' Book Review - National Review