Trump Invades Blue America

25:38You know, Swan Street, where they parked the car, is a fancy street. I think it was two in the morning or something. Yeah, three in the morning. Three in the morning. And you're near the bars and clubs of U Street, which are, again, very popular, but at three in the morning, probably get a little rougher than they would be. You've got a lot of drunk people wandering around, a lot of people on various substances wandering around. And then you have this group of teenagers who are under 18, who don't seem to have been allowed, who probably would not legally have been allowed into the clubs or bars, but are looking for some kind of fun.

26:03And it's three in the morning, and the ones who are making good decisions have probably gone home. And the ones who are making bad decisions are still there. But unless you had a National Guard person on that corner at that moment, it's pretty hard to know how policing prevents that kind of crime. No, that's right. I think one of the challenges for all police officers everywhere is that, you know, whatever the root causes of crime, policing doesn't necessarily have a whole lot to do with them. Police are not very good at preventing crime unless they happen to be standing there at that exact moment.

26:35They're reasonably good at solving crimes. They're reasonably good at finding the people who committed the crime and arresting them. But they're not so great at preventing crime. I mean, needless to say, the other problem with the let's just flood the zone with armed people, you do that enough, there is very little crime in Stalin's Moscow. If you want to have armed people on every street corner stopping everybody and searching them without cause, you absolutely can keep crime low for a really long time, but you're going to sacrifice a whole lot of other things. One of the big left-right divides in our society, and this is a place where I think Donald Trump, in a lot of places, he's aberrant from where traditional conservative thought has been.

27:17But here's a place where he does seem to be lined up with traditional conservative views. What do you do about people who are not actually committing a crime at that moment but who are breaking down public order? And the classic example is the homeless encampment. There are laws against camping on public places, but they're not criminal statutes. You're not a criminal if you pitch your tent in a public park or near a train station. But if you or I had to do it, we'd get a ticket, not we wouldn't be charged. But if 100 people, many of them mentally ill, many of them on drugs do it, they really degrade the attractiveness of the neighborhood for every lawful user.

27:50And right-wing people like me say, that's bad and should be stopped. And left-wing people tend to say, I don't want to exaggerate. Well, it's not good, but it's not their fault and they shouldn't be punished. And there has to be another answer beyond telling them to move along. and Donald Trump, and this is a case where I think he's onto something, say, well, move along is the first step on the way to a solution. How do you think about that? How should we think about the problem of these encampments in front of places like Union Station? No, I mean, I have very mixed feelings. I don't think homelessness is the fault of most homeless people, right?

28:27When you talk to homeless people and you find out their stories, they're often terrible tragedies, right? They're often the sort of series of mishaps that would knock anybody down, you know, just the one thing after another. And yes, sometimes there are also bad choices. Sometimes there's mental illness. Sometimes there's substance abuse, but not always. You know, you also have homeless families living on the streets because of, you know, a succession of bad things happen to them and things that end up trying to solve that problem by putting people in prison. That's that's just compounds the tragedy.

29:02That being said, yeah, it's it's both it's not just unsightly, it's dangerous, both from a public health perspective in terms of disease and hygiene, but also from a crime perspective, when you have a lot of desperate people, you know, and you're walking through desperate people, people feel scared, people feel like this is not a good place to be. I'm not an expert on housing and homelessness. I don't have a solution to this, a long term solution to this. I think clearing out the encampments sometimes can have a good effect if you have a place for those people to go. But if you don't have a place for those people to go except prison, that doesn't seem like the right solution either.

29:41So I worry that what we're seeing right now is this sort of, again, this kind of cosmetic, okay, well, we can put a lot of troops on the street. We can make these homeless people go somewhere else and look magic, Like, presto, we've got you this beautiful city. We've solved crime. We've solved homelessness. But in fact, you haven't solved anything. You've just put the problem somewhere else, and you may have done it. You may, in the process, have done that, been violating people's rights all kinds of ways. Yeah. Well, let me put this even more bluntly. Homelessness is a chronic problem of urban society.

30:16In the 1890s, there were hobos. There was a terrible depression in the 1890s, and you had these men who would show up in cities, writing the – this has now all been romanticized and sometimes treated as a kind of period piece humor, but it was a serious problem then as now. You would have men who were shaken, mostly men, shaken loose from the existing structure of society. They're detached from home, they're detached from family, they're detached from work, and they needed somewhere to go. And the old answer that American society would be, okay, well, we'll have zones which are undesirable zones.

30:46Yeah, Skid Row, which was – I think the first was a place in Seattle. and that the name spread. You can go to a Skid Row and we'll leave you alone, but you can't go to the train station. You can't go to the good neighborhoods. You can't be in front of the library. And somewhere along the way, that previous rule broke down and cities, especially in the more liberal states, said, you know what? The train station, the airport, the bus station, the libraries, that's exactly where you should be. And in fact, services will, not only can you be there, but services will be provided there. And so what used to happen in Skid Row now happens at Washington's Union Station.

31:20I've spent a lot of time in desperately poor countries where there are enormous shanty towns around big cities, you know, just just chin roof shacks and shacks made out of cardboard. And in the United States, by and large, we don't have that. And it has often seemed to me we also, as you know, have an incarceration rate that is wildly higher than almost every other country in the world. The reason we don't have Chantytowns is even pre-Trump is because we lock so many people up, you know, that so many crimes that are linked to poverty. Our solution has been, well, we put people in prison. And again, that gets them out of the way.

31:56Yes, it does. It makes it makes the city nicer for the rest of us who haven't been arrested. I'm completely with you. I don't think just saying, oh, well, I guess the entire center of the city and the train station and all the public spaces. I guess it's cool for them to be full of people who, because they're so desperately poor and because many of them do have mental health issues, you know, they're peeing there, you know, all sorts of bad drugs are going on. Drug use is going on. I don't think that's good. I do think cities should have the ability to keep public spaces clean and safe, even if that means saying to people, no, you can't be here.

32:29You've got to be somewhere else. But I also think that cities, not just cities, but states and the federal government have an obligation to try, difficult as it is, to find safe places for those people to go other than prison. Let me ask, put us on a slightly different track and ask what this deployment is doing to the National Guard. Now, you and I have been part of group discussions about the fate of the Guard in the second Trump administration. One of the big facts about the National Guard is unlike the regular military, it's really easy to quit if you don't like the work you're being asked to do.

33:00And if major economic sacrifices are being imposed on the Guard's people. And the Guard has crucial, indispensable roles to play in protecting their neighbors against natural disasters. There are disproportionate numbers of police and firefighters and EMT people who serve their neighborhood and make some extra money by giving one weekend a month to the National Guard with the understanding, I'm on call. If there's some disaster, I can help. But they've signed up for particular, they often have other jobs. They often have other family, they often have families, and they've signed up for something on one set of expectations, which are now being challenged.

33:34Do you worry, or do you have thoughts on what Trump is doing to the Guard by these kinds of deployments? No, I think it puts a huge strain on the Guard. I mean, and it puts a strain on their home communities, as you say, partly because these are people who are parents, These people who are taking care of older parents themselves, they're taking care of spouses, etc. In addition to having jobs, and when you take them out of their community for extended periods of time for any reason, you are not only denying that community access to the services that they provide in their work. And as you say, yes, a disproportionate percentage of people in the Guard are first responders in their own communities, not just available for emergencies, but they work full time as police, as firefighters, as EMTs.

34:17as nurses and similar jobs. And so you're taking them out of their home community, but you're also taking them out of families. And, and that's a real challenge for their home communities. I think it potentially is, you know, as we're seeing this already can be really demoralizing if they're sent to do something that they either feel is pointless or they feel is unconstitutional, you know, you're really putting them in a bind and, and, you know, one thing I do worry about going back to your, your friendly criticism of liberals, David, I do really worry about there's a this isn't liberals, this is, you know, more radical groups that are very hard to control and individual people who are also very hard to control, you know, responding to their displeasure with Trump, which is totally appropriate by, you know, shouting at guard troops they see in DC or spitting at them, things like that.

35:09You know, they did not these these folks did not ask to be here. They're doing their job. And I actually would like them to go home and say to their neighbors or call home and say to their friends and family, boy, I don't think I'm needed here. This may be the president who said there was a crime emergency in the streets of the wharf and the National Mall. Maybe not everything the president says is true. And by the way, these people here are really nice, right? So I'm kind of appalled at people taking it out on the guard. Well, we often in Washington have guard deployments. I mean, every four years is a presidential inauguration and the guard is here.

35:46And I think they by and large have a pretty good time. They get to see some American history. They have a good view. David, I actually, as I think you know, I was a police officer on duty at President Trump's first inauguration. And we also get police departments from all over the country coming. And yes, they have a very good time. They come in for four or five days. They get deputized as deputy federal marshals. They go to bars. They get very, very drunk. They see a few sites and then they go home again. And when they have been here for real emergency, I remember very vividly the massive guard deployment here after 9-11.

36:23And again, people, they're made to feel welcome, that people thank them. The merchants send out coffee and soda. They are received as they are in hurricane and flood sites as your protectors and people who are doing a good deed at a time of need. So thank you. I mean, I really do hope everyone is polite to them and nice, but they didn't sign up to pick up trash. And many of them are making an economic sacrifice to do this. And they're going to be here till it looks like now, November. So if you're a police officer back in your hometown or a nurse or a retired police officer now having a second career doing something else, and you're making more money, you've had to say goodbye to your employer, say goodbye to your income stream to make whatever they pay the guard to clean up the trash in Washington, D.C., that's got to seem crazy to people.

37:06And it invites resignations. It does. And the other time that we saw, you know, real recruiting crisis, of course, was the height of the Iraq war, when we also started sending guard troops and reservists to Iraq and Afghanistan, and for extended deployments, and sometimes repeat deployments. And there again, these were folks who, you know, maybe signed up for the guard because they wanted money for their educations, or because, you know, they health insurance, or it's just a little bit of extra income and they wanted to be serving, but they were not expecting to be shipped off to Iraq for a year and then another year and so forth.

37:42And often they were put in positions there too, for which they didn't have the appropriate training. I mean, some of the National Guard troops deployed to DC are MPs in the Guard, military police. So they at least have some policing law enforcement experience and hopefully, you know, some training and knowledge in in constitutional protections for from a criminal procedure perspective. But many of them are not. And one thing I do worry about in D.C. is you get a whole lot of armed people and they don't necessarily coordinate very effectively with each other. Right. Guard troops, DEA agents, D.C.

38:18Metropolitan Police Departments. You know, they have different training, different sets of assumptions, different rules of engagement. And then there's something scary happens and you've got a whole lot of armed people who don't communicate well and haven't trained together. Really bad things can happen. So that's something I worry about as well. There's a famous set of rules for policing that are, I don't know if they were actually written by Robert Peel, but they're attributed to Robert Peel, who was a British politician of the early 19th century, who created the first professional police force in the Western world in London.

38:49That's why London police are called Bobbies after Robert Peel. And he or whoever wrote them had a series of principles in which, number one, is we police by consent. And that's the reason why you don't confuse military and police is because the military, at least if you're winning, they are not there by consent. They're advancing into the other guy's terrain and the people don't want them there. That's how you know you're winning. Whereas the police are there or should be there in a democratic society because people want them. And it was very striking during the George Floyd protests when Washington was suddenly policed by all these strange officers from the Bureau of Prisons, and they weren't wearing proper uniforms.

39:24They had strange... One of the things that you could tell was they all had their own shoes. If you looked at them at foot level, you'd see everyone had different... So you knew they weren't proper police in a proper police uniform, which comes with a standardized shoe. Well, you've got to go buy your own boots, as long as they're black, but you don't have to speak to a specific brand. They're wearing dad shoes. They're wearing dad shoes. And many of them didn't seem to be in great physical condition. And they were then masked like this phalanx. And the idea was that they were trying to – they didn't look very intimidating one by one, but as a group, they looked hostile.

39:55And they challenged the notion of, you know, who are you here? Are you here to protect me or are you here to protect somebody else from me? Right. I really strongly disapprove of the effort to, quote unquote, unmask federal police officers by identifying them personally and using AI and facial recognition and putting their names on the Internet for the same reason that I would like people to be nice to the guard troops who are here. You know, I think that individualizing this and personalizing it and making it about, you know, Joe Schmo, you know, we're going to harass you because you are here.

40:32We saw you on the streets of D.C. wearing a mask. And in many cases, again, these people don't necessarily even want to be here. You know, many of these people strongly disapprove of what they've been sent to do. And I think that's the wrong focus of anger. That being said, I think it is totally appalling and counter to every principle of democratic accountability to have masked, unidentifiable people with the power to scoop you up off the street for any reason or no reason. And we don't know who they are and we don't know why they're doing it and we don't know where they're taking you. I mean, that epitomizes police state.

41:02And if they're not going to have people's faces visible. And I understand the concern about people being harassed individually. You can have badge numbers. You need to have agency names on their uniforms. And we're seeing that right now. We're seeing the National Guard troops are identifiable. We know who they are. They're wearing uniforms. Their faces are clear. Their names are clear. But we do have an enormous number of federal agents who seem to be involved in most of the actual arrests. And we have no idea who these people are. Do they, in fact, have the power to arrest you? Uh, well, it depends on who the, they are, but, but yeah, they, the, the, the, it depends who the, they are, but essentially, you know, unfortunately in some ways, the federal government, number one in Washington, DC, it's, it's a city with a unique status, as you know, so there are going to be different issues that arise if president Trump's tries to replicate what he's doing in DC and Chicago or wherever, right.

41:54Because DC has a greater degree of just direct federal control. But number two, just as I remember, I was talking about Trump's first inauguration where I was a police officer on duty. The way that works when you've got all of these national every National Guard troops, you've got law enforcement agencies from around the country coming in. Normally, they would have no jurisdiction in Washington, D.C. If you're a cop in Mississippi, you can't come to D.C. and arrest somebody. But they were all deputized en masse as federal marshals, literally a ceremony at the armory in D.C. with thousands of visiting law enforcement officers, etc., in which en masse people held up their hands and were temporarily deputized as marshals with limited jurisdiction associated with their task.

42:39But yes, you absolutely can lawfully empower them to make arrests, engage in law enforcement. National Guard's a little bit more complicated, even here in D.C. Technically, they should be restricted to providing support for law enforcement. All kinds of legal questions about what exactly does that mean? even though they're only in theory restricted providing support for law enforcement they're also allowed to temporarily detain when necessary for their own safety until law enforcement arrives and frankly temporarily detaining somebody to the person being temporarily detained is the equivalent of an arrest and you know a lot of this is going to find its way through the courts who I think are likely to view this as arrest for constitutional purposes and therefore subject to the same constitutional requirements, such as having a reasonable basis for the stop and the search and the detention.

43:29But the bad news and the short answer to your question is legally, for the most part, can they do this? Yeah, if they've got a reason and a good reason, a constitutionally acceptable reason, but the courts have allowed many, many, many reasons, some of which you and I might not think are good reasons as the basis for stops and seizures. Well, there have been some dramatic videos circulating, and I don't know how many cases these describe, whether it's few or many or one, of law enforcement personnel seizing food delivery people. People who are delivering food typically look like they're from somewhere else.

44:06And not to overgeneralize, but I think they do tend to look like they're from somewhere else than the United States. Well, I don't even think it's an issue of whether they look like they're from someone else, that we know that is a job that does tend to attract a lot of immigrants because it's an easy job to get. You don't have to have a lot of education. Your English skills don't need to be great. So disproportionately, the food delivery service drivers, Uber drivers, et cetera, are disproportionately immigrants. So when it does look like, and again, in any particular case, this could be wrong, but the police don't have any particular individualized reason to stop this person that they're making either because of the way they look or the job they have, they're making a decision to grab them.

44:46And in some cases, the grabs look really - Really violent. Violent. And these people who, at least as you see it in the video, and again, there may be more here out of the frame, but don't look dangerous. Right. No, I mean, and again, one of our big challenges, and this is why I think it's a fundamental sort of problem of democracy and accountability is that we don't know what's happening. We're not being given information that says, oh, yeah, you might have thought it looked like we were just engaging in racial profiling and, you know, scooping up everybody who sounded like they had a foreign accent or looked wrong to me.

45:22But that's not what's happening. We actually did have specific information that this person who appeared to be an innocent, non-dangerous Uber driver, pizza delivery guy or whatever it might be, you know, was a serial killer, heavily armed and that's why we did what we did. I mean, okay, maybe, right? Sometimes it's not impossible, but we're not being told. And we don't know where these people are ending up. We don't know whether the targets of those violent takedowns are ending up in the criminal courts, where they will have judges who will scrutinize that question of was there adequate reason for that stop?

45:54And was it carried out in the constitutional manner? Or they're going straight into some kind of immigration detention where the Trump administration is granting them essentially no legal rights, you know, and often no access to a lawyer and they're being put on a plane to God knows where five minutes later, we don't even have the ability to determine if the Trump administration's agents were right or wrong. And we know they're making mistakes. We don't, we clearly, we do know that they are at a minimum making mistakes. We don't know how many mistakes they're making, et cetera. And that's a real problem when the population just has no idea, You know, who are these people?

46:30Why are they picking people up? Where are they taking them? What happens to them? I want to ask you one last thing, an arithmetic question. I don't know if this is in your area of expertise. Arithmetic. Definitely not. But one thing that people may not know, no, the question that people may not appreciate about Washington, D.C. is how small it is. Right. I think they're, what, 700 ,000, a little bit more now in the District of Columbia. The Trump administration has talked about repeating this project that they did a little bit in Los Angeles, have done heavily in D.C., in Chicago and New York, really big cities.

46:57Right. How many troops would it take to try to repeat this experiment in Chicago and New York? Just to give you a sense of scale, these numbers are about 10 years old, so they may not be completely up to date. Listeners can look this up for themselves. But the NYPD, for instance, has more than 30 ,000 sworn officers. That's larger than the entire militaries of some small countries. That's a lot of police officers. And that's just NYPD. That's not counting the various other types of security agents in New York City. Because there's a separate transit police force in New York. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are all kinds of smaller separate police forces.

47:35Not as many agencies as in D.C. As I said, here in D.C., we've got the zoo police. We've got the government printing office police, you name it. But that's just the police department itself. In a city with eight or nine million people, if you want to have any meaningful, even again, just short term impact on crime in terms of sort of flooding the zone, boy, you are talking about massive deployments. And the irony here, here's our defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, you know, focusing on lethality, lethality, lethality, as he put it, and wanting to change the name of the Defense Department to Department of War because he thinks that, you know, our troops have gone all soft and too woke.

48:17This means that we're taking men and women who have been trained to be war fighters, and we're putting them into positions where, I mean, here in DC, they seem to be picking up leaf blowing and picking up litter. It's bonkers. We actually do have real national security threats in the world today. But instead, we're essentially rerouting our military to scooping up, you know, DoorDash delivery guys for no particular reason. Well, if you think that the project here is to fight crime, then yes, it is bonkers. If what you think it is is to show a kind of form of occupation of blue cities by red hinterlands, to sort of do a kind of show of force to demonstrate who's the master and who takes orders, then it's very effective.

49:04And that's when you listen to it, the places that they're talking about doing this are not the highest crime jurisdictions. New York is one of the lowest crime jurisdictions in America. It is about a show of force by one part of the country against another. And I think it's teaching us, the thing I worry about most, and maybe this is the place, is it's teaching everybody in America, red state, blue state, red hinterland, blue cities, this game is going to be played a little bit more harshly than it was before. And one of the things I think about is during the Biden administration, how far out of their way the Biden people went to avoid tangling with the lawbreaking by the previous administration.

49:41Sometimes they just couldn't help it, but they were really hesitant. And I don't think Biden's Justice Department was at all displeased by how slowly the courts moved against Trump and the senior people. I think they liked that. Just let this cup pass away from us. I don't think that's the way the game is going to be played in the next democratic administration and maybe that's not how the game will be played in the next republican i mean we are in a you know uh the the rules are there are just rules are being broken every day and people are being taught oh the game that I thought politics was that's not the game we have a we have your cut your soldiers in our cities wait till it's our turn see what we do to you then which is a terrible cycle to get into uh and and and that of course is assuming that it is a cycle which is making a set of assumptions about what will happen in the next elections and what kind of elections the next elections will be.

50:34I think that even deeper fear - You're very right. The people who are doing this are thinking this is the last cycle. Right. Because bad enough if we have a swing between, okay, now it's my turn to take revenge on you and toss you in jail and put soldiers on your streets and oops, now it's your turn. Now it's my turn again. That's bad. But even worse is I put soldiers on the streets and you don't get to have an election. You don't get to have a turn anymore. And that is what I fear most. But that would imply that the places that the Trump administration would really want to occupy are not New York and Chicago, but are Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix, blue cities in swing states.

51:17And maybe that's what we're really warming up for in 2026. I think that's a possibility that this this sort of to use an overused word, you know, it normalizes the idea that you're going to have soldiers on every street corner. It normalizes the idea that you're going to have masked agents of the federal government who can detain you at any time and you won't know who they are. Your relatives won't know who they are or where you are or why this is happening. You know, that idea gets normalized. We've still got, you know, whatever it is, you know, 14 months, 15, 14 months until the 2026 midterm elections that you start getting people used to the idea that soldiers just show up, masked agents with guns show up and there's nothing you can do about it.

51:59I don't think it is at all beyond question that you could have a manufactured emergency right around the time of the next elections that requires, you know, masked agents stationed at every polling booth or an emergency that is purportedly enough to postpone the elections in some way. So, yeah, I'm really worried about that. And if the message is, and we'll be grabbing people who are recently naturalized and they have then three weeks to prove that, oh, maybe you were entitled to be in that line. That's three weeks in a prison in some other state. Why do you prove your identity? If you were an immigrant, even if you were here completely legally, even if you had a green card, in those circumstances where people are being scooped up apparently based on how they look, would you go vote if you knew that you were going to be running a gauntlet of masked unidentified federal agents?

52:48Well, I'm a naturalized citizen myself, and I don't think actually they're going to scoop up me. Probably not, because you're white. Some obvious reasons. But yeah, and I wear one of these. It's like the Don Draper. You can't go out there. I can't. But theoretically, there's no theoretical reason why they couldn't and say, now, let us challenge what you're challenged to prove. You have three weeks in a prison in Texas to prove that you had a right to be in that voting booth line. Right, right. Rosa, thank you so much for joining. This is so interesting. We learned so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me, David.

53:18Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

53:48And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show, Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors.

54:31If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

54:49Thanks so much to Rosa Brooks for joining me today for that important discussion. Now, at the beginning of the program this week, I mentioned that I was testing a new feature in this final segment. Let me talk to you a little bit about why I'm doing it and what it is. This past summer, I reread the novel Frankenstein for the first time since I read it 40 years ago. Frankenstein, of course, was written by Mary Shelley as a very young woman in 1817. and then revised and republished in 1831. When the book was assigned to my daughter at college, I was chagrined to realize I didn't remember any of the details I'd read so long ago.

55:28So I returned to Frankenstein. Now, I'm not here to deliver a book report about Frankenstein, but to make a point about an important change in our society. The novel Frankenstein, as I'd forgotten, is structured as a series of stories inside stories. The book begins as a letter by a young English explorer to his sister back home in England. In frozen Arctic seas, the explorer rescues a near-dead man, and that near-dead man turns out to be the scientist Victor Frankenstein, for whom the book is named. Frankenstein then relates to the explorer his own tale of reanimation and horror. In other words, everything in the book is refracted at least twice, once by the explorer narrator, then by the Frankenstein narrator.

56:15In the middle of the book, Frankenstein and his creation encounter each other. The creation explains himself and his actions to his creator. Now the point of view is refracted three times. We are hearing the explorer's account of Frankenstein's account of his creature's version of events. This double and triple refraction of the action of a novel invites the question, can these narratives be trust him. The explorer describes Frankenstein as brilliant, and indeed, Frankenstein has raised the dead to life, which is no small achievement. Yet Frankenstein, the scientist, not the monster, Frankenstein, the character, again and again commits acts of amazing stupidity that get people killed.

56:55For just one example of his gullibility and silliness, in his most dramatic confrontation with this creature, that Frankenstein's not dramatic confrontation with this creature, the creature warns that they will meet again on Frankenstein's wedding night. Now, by this point, the creature has killed Frankenstein's younger brother to revenge himself on Frankenstein. He will soon kill Frankenstein's best friend again to hurt Frankenstein. Yet, it never occurs to Frankenstein that the wedding night threat might be aimed not at him, but at his wife-to-be. Not even though the creature is refusing, as they speak, a perfectly good opportunity to murder Frankenstein right then and there.

57:32The Explorer describes Frankenstein's character as noble, yet under pressure, Frankenstein repeatedly panics and either runs away or collapses into protracted bouts of faintness and helplessness. Frankenstein gives little speeches about the evils of selfishness, yet never once does he show any regard for any other person, including his wife, whom he makes no effort to protect on the dangerous wedding night. Again, this is not a book report, but it's a study of the way we encounter literature when we meet it on the page. One more example, the creature, the famous monster. The creature offers a heart-rending account of his wretchedness that drove him to repeated murder.

58:10But then, does not every murderer have a heart-rending story? Frankenstein's creature not only killed Frankenstein's brother, Frankenstein's best friend, and Frankenstein's wife. The creature takes extra trouble, and for no obvious reason, to frame a servant girl for the first murder, who was hanged for it. The creature's preferred method of killing is especially cruel and intimate. He enjoys choking his victims to death with his bare hands face to face. At the very end of the book, the explorer, not Frankenstein, now this time the explorer, and the creature meet over Frankenstein's dead body.

58:43Frankenstein has died of natural causes. The creature professes himself full of regret and remorse for all the atrocities he committed, and we are asked to take these words as sincere. But we have only the creature's own word for it. The creature vows to atone for his many crimes by suicide. We never learn whether the creature honors that vow. Now, the point again to tell these stories is to say that these are doubts you're invited to think about as you encounter a book on the page. And it's a description, an example of how the practice of reading will push readers to question the material they encounter.

59:20And if they don't question spontaneously, then the whole point of studying literature in English 101 is to introduce us to the idea that we should be questioning what we read. So here's my bottom line on this. As the habit of reading fades from our society, these critical habits of mind are put at risk. Only about one in eight Americans reads for pleasure on any given day. Almost twice as many did so as recently as 2004. The rise of literacy changed culture in all kinds of important ways. The decline of literacy is changing us again on its way out. Now, one man cannot do much against such a mighty cultural tide, but I can do one thing, and that is every week add a segment to this show on a book, Older New, that mattered to me.

1:00:06It seems apt to start with Frankenstein, a book about how one man and his family were destroyed by a creation he could not control. That seems a powerfully symbolic metaphor for so much in our society. I'll see you at the end of next week's David Fromm Show with another selection. I appreciate so much everyone who joined me this week on the David Fromm Show. Thanks so much for watching or listening on whatever platform you use. I hope you return next week to view or listen to the David Fromm Show. Remember, please like, share, subscribe. It helps so much to bring our content to other people. And if you want to support the work we do here at the David Fromm Show, remember the best way to do that is by subscribing to the work of me and all my colleagues at The Atlantic Magazine.

1:00:47Thank you. See you next week.

1:01:13This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

1:01:58Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.