Whew.

For a long time now, I’ve suspected there are more of us than there are of them. I haven’t always been able to prove it, and there have been moments, particularly over the past couple of years, when I’ve wondered whether I was merely indulging in the sentimental belief that most of my fellow Americans were fundamentally decent people who could be counted upon to recognize an obvious fraud when one presented itself.

Tuesday’s election results offer some encouragement. The Democrats have taken control of both houses of Congress, winning races in places where Republicans have long been accustomed to winning and where Donald Trump presumably expected his peculiar brand of political vaudeville to retain its appeal. It was a substantial repudiation of the president and his administration, although I would caution against interpreting it as a sudden national conversion to enlightenment. As Nate Bell says, this is more an Orange Crush than a Blue Wave. It is the product of exhaustion rather than inspiration. American voters are not generally inclined to undertake much philosophical reflection before marking their ballots. Sometimes they just get tired of the fellow who’s been making all the noise.

Still, there are more of us. Or at least there were on Tuesday, when enough Americans decided that whatever their reservations about the Democratic Party, they preferred it to the prospect of continuing down the road we were traveling. This was not a revolution, and it would be extravagant to call it a moral awakening. It was a braking action, a decision not to go to hell in a flaming orange dumpster cosplaying as a party barge. We have not yet determined where we are going, or who ought to drive, but for the moment we have managed to slow a vehicle that seemed determined to carry us all over the embankment.

I will take it.

For most of my life, I have considered Americans an essentially unserious people, which is not to say that we lack intelligence or industry or the capacity to accomplish extraordinary things. We have demonstrated all of those qualities, sometimes simultaneously. But we have a peculiar susceptibility to spectacle, a tendency to confuse celebrity with achievement and confidence with competence, and an almost limitless willingness to treat public affairs as another form of entertainment. We elect actors and television personalities, become attached to politicians as though they were sports franchises and mistake the ability to insult someone on television for evidence of moral courage. We have developed an enormous appetite for the kind of authenticity that can be manufactured by a publicity department.

Trump was — IS, I guess — a particularly American phenomenon, a creature of television who persuaded millions of people that his familiarity with the techniques of television was evidence that he understood something about the world. His genius, if that’s the appropriate word, was recognizing that a considerable portion of the electorate did not require him to be knowledgeable, truthful or even particularly coherent. It was enough that he behaved as they imagined a powerful man ought to behave, contemptuous of restraint and impatient with anyone who suggested that the rules might apply to him.

There is a difference between being a fool and being unserious. A fool may not understand the consequences of his actions. An unserious person declines to consider them, particularly when doing so might interfere with his amusement. And for a considerable period Americans were willing to be entertained by their own government, as though the management of the world’s most powerful nation were an unusually expensive reality show whose contestants could be voted off without anyone having to pay the bills.

Except, of course, that the bills eventually come due. The consequences of government are not imaginary, however much their presentation may resemble a television program. Prices rise. People lose jobs and medical coverage. Soldiers are sent abroad. Families are separated. Constitutional protections become negotiable. A government entrusted with the welfare of hundreds of millions of people cannot be run indefinitely as an exercise in personal grievance without producing suffering that no amount of showmanship can conceal.

Tuesday suggests that some portion of the American electorate has begun to make this connection. Not everyone who voted for a Democrat did so out of concern for constitutional government or the dignity of his fellow citizens. Many were concerned with what groceries cost, or with their prospects for employment, or with a war they neither desired nor understood. These are perfectly legitimate considerations. It is not necessary to arrive at the right decision by an especially admirable intellectual process, and a voter who changes his mind because he can no longer afford what he could afford two years ago has as much right to his conclusions as the fellow who has spent the past decade reading political philosophy.

Democracy has always depended upon the accumulated judgments of imperfect people, often acting from incomplete information and contradictory motives. It is an untidy arrangement, and I have never discovered a better one.

Which brings me to a small linguistic curiosity that has occurred to me in the aftermath of the election.

They fear minorities. Almost as much as they fear being treated like one.

There is a considerable difference, of course, between belonging to a racial, ethnic or religious minority and finding yourself temporarily outnumbered in an election. The former may involve vulnerabilities that no political defeat can adequately describe. But the double meaning illuminates something about the political psychology of a movement that has made so much of its appeal to voters by portraying other people as a threat to their way of life. Its adherents have been encouraged to regard demographic change as a kind of dispossession, to believe that the growing political influence of people unlike themselves necessarily diminishes their own standing in the world.

The fear of becoming a political minority is especially revealing because it suggests an understanding of government in which the majority is entitled to do pretty much whatever it pleases. If you regard politics as the exercise of power over people you dislike, the prospect of those people acquiring power over you must be terrifying. You can imagine what they will do because you know what you have wanted to do to them.

But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy, which does not guarantee that any of us will always prevail. The whole contraption is designed around the expectation that we won’t. The rights of a citizen are supposed to survive his party’s defeat, and the person who regards an election loss as an existential catastrophe has either misunderstood the arrangement or has considerable reason to worry about what might happen if his opponents were to behave as he has.

I don’t expect the MAGA movement to disappear immediately, and I would not be surprised if it survives in some diminished form long after Trump has departed the political scene. But I can imagine a time, perhaps not very far away, when the whole business will seem faintly ridiculous to the people who once embraced it. The red hats will accumulate in closets and thrift stores. The slogans will acquire the stale quality of old advertising jingles. People who attended rallies and decorated their pickup trucks with flags will explain that they were going through a phase, that everybody they knew was doing it, that they never really approved of the more outrageous stuff.

It will be a little like greaserdom or punk rock, a period of exaggerated style and tribal affiliation that eventually becomes an embarrassment to its aging practitioners. Punk, to be fair, gave us some excellent records and a few enduring ideas about artistic independence. MAGA’s cultural legacy may prove less agreeable, although I expect there will eventually be a profitable nostalgia industry devoted to it. There always is. Americans can sentimentalize almost anything once sufficient time has passed and the unpleasant details have been edited out.

The analogy is imperfect because the MAGA movement was never merely a fashion, and the people who embraced it were not all impressionable adolescents experimenting with their identities. Many were mature adults who knew better, or should have. Its consequences were real and sometimes terrible. But I suspect the process of retrospective self-exoneration will be much the same. People will remember their enthusiasm as a kind of youthful exuberance, even if they were 60 years old at the time. They will assure their grandchildren that they never took Trump literally, that his outrageous statements were jokes, that the whole thing was blown out of proportion by a hostile press.

Memory is a remarkably accommodating faculty, particularly when employed in the service of self-respect.

I am less inclined to be forgiving of the people who made this possible while maintaining the outward appearance of respectability. The true believers can at least plead the sincerity of their delusions. They were angry or frightened or credulous, susceptible to the assurances of a practiced con man who offered them simple explanations for complicated problems and encouraged them to blame people whose circumstances they did not understand. Some will reconsider their convictions. Others will not. I have no interest in making permanent enemies of people who may eventually come to regret their participation in an ugly political movement.

But what are we to make of the people who understood perfectly well what Trump was, who recognized the danger he represented and nevertheless accommodated him because doing otherwise might have cost them an election, a committee chairmanship or some imagined prospect of advancement?

Here in Arkansas, where the electorate emphatically declined to join the national Democratic resurgence, we have several instructive examples. Tom Cotton was reelected Tuesday, and Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders won another term. French Hill’s contest with Chris Jones remained too close to call early Wednesday, though Hill held a narrow lead. There is no point pretending that a national political reckoning necessarily extended to our state, where the Republican label continues to exercise a powerful influence, sometimes independent of the performance of the people who wear it.

Cotton, Hill and our senior senator, John Boozman, are interesting not because they are identical men but because they aren’t. Cotton is an ambitious, highly educated ideologue, a man whose intelligence is difficult to question even when his judgment is. Hill presents himself as a thoughtful, conventional conservative, a banker and institutionalist whose public manner suggests a reassuring familiarity with the ordinary habits of responsible government. Boozman has cultivated a reputation for personal kindness and civility, and I have no particular reason to doubt that he is pleasant company. I expect he is. I know people who like him very much.

Yet all three have made accommodations with Trump that cannot be explained by ignorance of the constitutional order. When Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, Cotton recognized that Congress had no authority to discard properly certified electoral votes. Hill understood the same thing and publicly acknowledged that the courts had rejected Trump’s attempts to change the outcome. Boozman went further, observing that none of the legal challenges had produced evidence of widespread fraud sufficient to alter the result.

These were not men confused about what had happened. They understood that Trump had lost.

After the attack on the Capitol, Hill described the assault as horrific and catastrophic and acknowledged the relationship between Trump’s rhetoric and the violence. He nevertheless voted against impeachment. Boozman said Trump bore some responsibility for the attack, then voted to acquit him. Cotton likewise opposed conviction, advancing a constitutional argument about the authority of the Senate to try a former president. There were procedural explanations, distinctions to be drawn, principles to be invoked. Each man could give an account of his conduct that sounded reasonable enough when considered in isolation.

And perhaps that is what makes their accommodation so consequential. No single surrender need seem especially important when viewed apart from all the others. One makes a concession to political necessity, another to party loyalty, another to an ingenious interpretation of constitutional procedure. Eventually a thousand such decisions amount to a substantial alteration in what a political party is willing to tolerate. The people responsible may never have intended the cumulative result, but they cannot plausibly claim to have been unaware of the direction in which they were traveling.

Nor did their support end with the events of January 2021. Cotton became one of the most vigorous defenders of Trump’s military campaign against Iran. Hill and Boozman supported the president’s sweeping domestic legislative program. They have continued to exercise their considerable powers in ways that sustain an administration whose excesses they have had ample opportunity to observe.

I am willing to accept that each may sincerely believe some of Trump’s policies are beneficial. It would be foolish to suppose that everyone who disagrees with me about taxation, immigration or national defense must be acting in bad faith. But public office involves responsibilities beyond securing desirable policy outcomes, and there ought to be a limit to what a person is willing to overlook in order to obtain them.

What is the value of being a thoughtful conservative if one’s thoughtfulness cannot produce an occasional refusal? What is the use of institutional loyalty if it does not extend to protecting the institutions themselves? And what does personal kindness amount to when it is accompanied by a willingness to facilitate policies that visit hardship upon people one will never have to meet?

I don’t know what sort of historical reckoning awaits Trump. He is such an extravagant figure that he may eventually become a neutered caricature of himself, remembered for the familiar gestures and catchphrases rather than the damage accomplished under their cover. His followers may be absorbed back into the ordinary American population, which has always contained a substantial number of people who believed foolish things for a while and eventually found other interests.

But I suspect the reputations of his respectable accomplices will prove less resilient. They cannot claim to have been swept away by enthusiasm, or to have lacked the education necessary to recognize what was happening. Their very moderation, the quality that made them seem reassuring to people who might otherwise have recoiled from Trumpism, may finally count against them. They provided a respectable setting for conduct that would otherwise have been more easily recognized as disreputable.

Shakespeare understood something about the persistence of reputation. “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones,” Mark Antony tells the Romans in Julius Caesar. It is a useful observation, even if Antony is employing it for purposes of his own. Public memory is selective, but the things a person chooses to excuse can sometimes prove more revealing than the things he has accomplished.

I don’t think history necessarily reserves its harshest treatment for the loudest demagogues. Sometimes it is the capable, civilized men who have the most explaining to do, because they possessed both the means and the understanding to resist, and because their participation made the enterprise possible. They may be remembered not for the decency of their personal manners but for the indecency they were willing to accommodate.

There is an important distinction here between accountability and vengeance. I don’t believe a person who made a foolish political choice in 2016 or 2024 should be required to spend the rest of his life apologizing for it. People change their minds. We ought to encourage that process rather than punish it. A political movement that cannot accommodate converts is not much interested in democratic government.

But we should not be obliged to pretend that the past didn’t happen, or that those entrusted with public responsibility were merely innocent bystanders. Forgiveness need not involve amnesia. A politician who has spent years enabling abuses of power cannot reasonably expect his geniality to serve as a complete defense.

The results of Tuesday’s election will not settle any of this. The Democratic Party has plenty of problems of its own, and a considerable portion of its new support may prove temporary. Americans have a habit of mistaking a corrective election for a permanent change in national character. We overinterpret victories because we would like to believe that they have resolved questions that will, in fact, have to be answered again and again.

I have no particular faith in the capacity of a political party to redeem the country. Parties are instruments, sometimes useful and sometimes defective, and we should be suspicious whenever their adherents begin speaking as though membership confers a special moral standing. A Republican can act honorably. A Democrat can behave disgracefully. The ballot is not a sacrament, and no one becomes a better person simply by choosing the candidate I prefer.

Still, I am encouraged. Not because Tuesday proved that most Americans are virtuous, or that the country has finally outgrown its attraction to political spectacle, but because it demonstrated that our unseriousness has limits. At some point the joke ceases to be amusing. The performance goes on too long, the costs become too apparent, and people who have been content to watch begin to understand that they are not merely spectators.

I don’t imagine the republic was saved Tuesday. Republics are not saved once and for all. They are maintained, imperfectly, by citizens who occasionally recognize that the preservation of their liberties requires something more demanding than enthusiasm for their own side.

We have made a beginning, perhaps. An overdue application of the brakes. The possibility of recovering a government that understands its obligations to people who did not vote for it, and of recovering a political culture in which losing an election is not treated as an intolerable humiliation.

The point of democracy is not to ensure that people like me always get their way. It is to establish a society in which people who disagree profoundly can continue to live together without having to fear what happens when they find themselves outnumbered.

There are more of us than there are of them. That is what I want to believe, and what Tuesday has given me some reason to believe again. But the more important proposition is that there ought to be room for all of us, including those who voted the other way, in the country we are trying to preserve.

The difference between the two ideas is the difference between winning an election and deserving to have won it.

The short answer is that around 2008 the major studios largely stopped arranging advance press screenings in Little Rock. Before that, the studios routinely rented local theaters and invited the handful of us who reviewed movies to watch their upcoming releases. Sometimes these screenings were crowded with people who had won passes from radio stations or picked them up at local businesses. Sometimes there were only three or four critics in an otherwise empty auditorium. Occasionally I had the theater to myself.

Then, more or less, they stopped.

There were economic reasons for this, presumably. The studios were looking to reduce expenses, newspapers were contracting, and Little Rock was never a market where a few favorable reviews might determine the commercial fate of a picture. From a business standpoint, it probably made sense to stop renting an auditorium for a handful of journalists, some of whom might not even like the movie.

But it had consequences for our coverage. We could still go to the theater on opening day, buy a ticket and review the movie afterward, but the ordinary purpose of a newspaper review is to provide readers with an assessment of a film before they decide whether to see it. What I did was contract with a couple of excellent critics I knew who lived in larger markets where the studios still held regularly screenings. So for more than a decade we were able to punch above our weight, reviewing nearly every film that opened in Arkansas on opening day.

But we paid these critics, and after a while some people at the newspaper began to question whether this was the best allocation of our resources. I argued with them, and lost. So in December of 2023 I shut down our Friday MovieStyle section and we redesigned and repurposed that particular news hole. Eventually we simply stopped trying to cover every major release.

We still review movies. Distributors, particularly those handling independent films, documentaries and foreign-language pictures, provide us with streaming links that allow us to see their work before it opens. But the biggest commercial releases generally aren’t made available this way in advance, at least not to critics in markets like Little Rock. Those movies are often kept under tighter control, for reasons having to do with piracy, spoilers, marketing strategies and the studios’ desire to manage publicity.

Occasionally we’ll buy a freelance review from one of our old contributors. More often, we’ll write about them after they open, if at all.

There is another difference we don’t review all the major releases, which may sound trivial but isn’t.

A theatrical screening was an appointment. You wrote down the time and place, arranged your schedule and went to see the movie. You sat in a theater for two hours, or sometimes considerably longer, and paid attention. You didn’t pause the picture to answer the telephone or check the refrigerator. When it was over you went home and wrote about it, frequently with a deadline approaching.

The streaming links are theoretically more convenient, and sometimes they are. But they arrive in emails, mixed in with other emails, and require us to find time to watch them. Some expire after a few days. Some require registration, passwords or specialized applications. Sometimes the links work on my television and sometimes they require me to watch the movie on a computer screen or an iPad, which is an unsatisfactory way of experiencing a medium invented to fill the wall of a theater.

At the moment I probably have access to 50 un- or recently released movies through various screening links. Some of them are undoubtedly excellent, and some will probably never play in Little Rock. I know I will not get around to watching all of them, partly because there are other things I have to do, but also because I can watch them whenever I want.

Which means I can always watch them tomorrow.

This is a problem that extends beyond my own deficiencies as a scheduler. We have become extraordinarily good at making movies available and rather less good at making them seem important enough to watch.

For your consideration

These thoughts occurred to me this morning when I received an email from Universal Pictures inviting me to watch Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day on its awards app, available through Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, an iPad or an ordinary web browser.

Disclosure Day opened theatrically in June, so this wasn’t an advance screening invitation. It was an FYC invitation — For Your Consideration — part of the annual campaign to place movies before critics, awards organizations and the people who vote for Oscars.

For many years, these invitations arrived through the mail in the form of physical screeners, first on videocassette and later on DVD. During the busiest part of awards season I might receive several packages a day, and over the course of a year the total could run into the hundreds. They came in cardboard sleeves or plastic cases, sometimes with elaborate packaging, sometimes with T shirts or packages of cookies or other goodies and usually with stern warnings against unauthorized reproduction or distribution.

There was a period when the accumulating screeners threatened to take over my house. I had shelves of them, boxes of them, stacks of them on tables and chairs. Some I watched immediately, others I put aside for later. Occasionally I found a movie I had entirely forgotten about, still in its unopened sleeve. I don’t think I was particularly unusual in this respect. Most critics of my generation accumulated a considerable library of movies they had been asked to consider.

The practice is generally traced to director John Boorman, who was concerned that his 1985 movie The Emerald Forestwould be overlooked by Academy voters. His distributor was in disarray and wasn’t mounting an effective awards campaign, so Boorman arranged for Academy members to rent VHS copies of the movie free of charge from Los Angeles video stores in early 1986.

The scheme didn’t produce any Oscar nominations for The Emerald Forest, but it suggested a new way of getting movies in front of people who might otherwise never see them. Other distributors adopted the practice, and before long physical screeners were an established part of the awards business. By the time DVDs became common, the distribution of screeners had developed into a substantial industry of its own.

This was especially useful for smaller movies, which couldn’t afford expensive publicity campaigns and might have had only limited theatrical runs. A critic in Arkansas could see an obscure documentary or an independent feature that had played briefly in New York and Los Angeles, and possibly bring it to the attention of readers who might otherwise never hear of it. The same was true for Academy voters and other awards groups, whose members couldn’t reasonably be expected to attend every theatrical screening of every eligible picture.

The studios were happy enough to distribute screeners until they began to worry that the recipients might distribute them further.

In 2003, the Motion Picture Association of America, led by Jack Valenti, attempted to ban the practice, arguing that screeners were contributing to the growing problem of movie piracy. DVDs could be copied and uploaded to the internet, where unauthorized versions of current movies were becoming readily available.

Piracy was real, and remains real, but it also became a convenient bogeyman for an industry that had never been entirely comfortable with surrendering control over its products. The studios were understandably concerned about distributing pristine digital copies of unreleased movies to thousands of people, but it was less clear that critics and awards voters constituted a particularly dangerous class of criminals.

The proposed ban caused an uproar, particularly among independent filmmakers who argued that it would disproportionately hurt smaller pictures. The major studios could afford to arrange special screenings and advertise their movies extensively. A little independent distributor might have no other practical way of getting its picture before the people who voted on awards.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association voted to cancel its awards in protest. Independent producers sued, and a federal judge blocked the ban in December 2003.

The whole episode was an instructive example of the movie industry’s sometimes contradictory impulses. The studios wanted people to see their movies, but they also wanted to determine precisely who those people were, where they watched and what they might do with the films afterward.

There were actual abuses, though the most notorious case didn’t involve a film critic. Carmine Caridi, a character actor who had appeared in The Godfather Part II and NYPD Blue, was expelled from the motion picture Academy in 2004 after investigators traced pirated copies of awards screeners to him.

Caridi had been sending his screeners to an acquaintance in Illinois named Russell Sprague, who copied them and passed them along. Caridi maintained that he hadn’t known the movies were being distributed on the internet; he believed Sprague was a film enthusiast who simply wanted to watch them. The Academy nevertheless expelled him for violating its rules, and the studios obtained substantial civil judgments against him. Sprague pleaded guilty to copyright infringement.

The case was treated as a warning to everyone who received screeners, although what it demonstrated was that an Academy member had been careless about whom he trusted. It did not establish that professional critics were systematically trafficking in pirated films.

I know of another case, involving a television critic whose teenage son got hold of advance copies of a popular animated series and uploaded an entire unreleased season to the internet. I won’t identify the people involved, but I’ve no reason to think this was the only instance where an issue like this was quietly settled — for a substantial sum (at the time, about the price of a new Camry). The episode is a reminder that the studios’ fears were not entirely imaginary. There were ways for their material to escape, sometimes through people who were never supposed to have access to it in the first place.

Still, it is difficult to believe that film critics were responsible for more than a tiny fraction of the industry’s piracy problem. Copies could escape from postproduction facilities, distribution systems, theaters and other points along the way. The greater the number of people involved in making and marketing a movie, the more opportunities there were for somebody to steal it.

And the industry’s anti-piracy measures sometimes made legitimate viewing more difficult than necessary.

Studios began watermarking screeners so that unauthorized copies could be traced to individual recipients. We had to agree not to share the films, loan them to friends or leave them where unauthorized persons might gain access. Some screeners displayed identifying information across the picture at intervals, an effective deterrent to piracy but a distraction when you were trying to concentrate on the composition of a shot.

It was a peculiar arrangement. The studios had decided that we were sufficiently trustworthy to receive their movies, but not quite trustworthy enough to watch them without periodic reminders that we were being monitored.

Eventually, of course, the physical discs began disappearing, though piracy was only part of the explanation. DVDs cost money to manufacture, package and mail, and millions of them were being produced each awards season. The environmental argument against creating that much disposable plastic was difficult to dispute.

The Television Academy began eliminating DVD screeners in 2020, and the motion picture Academy discontinued them beginning with the 2021-22 Oscar season. Streaming platforms and dedicated awards applications became the preferred means of distribution, offering the studios greater control over access and providing voters with a centralized place to find eligible films.

The transition has been gradual, and some distributors continued to send physical discs after the major awards organizations had abandoned them. But the change has been unmistakable. Last year I received very few physical screeners. This year I don’t really expect to receive any, though I hope Neon will come through with their annual FYC box set of their releases.

Otherwise I don’t especially mourn the disappearance of plastic discs, though I have been mildly surprised by how much I miss having the movies themselves sitting around the house. There was something useful about the physical presence of a stack of DVDs. They reminded me that there were movies I wanted or needed to see, and watching one was as simple as putting it in a player.

Emails are more easily ignored. They have to compete with correspondence, newsletters, advertisements, solicitations and the general electronic clutter that constitutes much of modern life. Often the invitation leads to an application requiring a password I have forgotten, or an authentication procedure that must be repeated because I haven’t used the service since the previous December.

This is not a particularly serious hardship. I know how privileged it sounds to complain about the inconvenience of being offered free access to movies. The technology usually works, and when it doesn’t there are people who can help. I would rather have the links than not have them.

But having access to something is not the same as using it.

A different kind of audience

I began reviewing movies in November 1986, when the theatrical movie still occupied a considerably more prominent place in American cultural life. This was before streaming, before the internet became an ordinary part of our lives, when network television was still the dominant form of home entertainment and the arrival of a new movie could command national attention.

Movies weren’t necessarily better then. There was plenty of junk, and some of the pictures we regarded as significant at the time haven’t worn particularly well. But movies were a more common point of reference. A successful film might remain in theaters for months, and the audience for it accumulated over time. People talked about the movies they had seen over the weekend, argued about whether they were any good and compared them with other movies.

That still happens, of course, but the audience has fragmented. Television became more ambitious, streaming services multiplied, and the number of available entertainment options increased beyond anything I could have imagined when I started writing reviews. There are video games that require hundreds of hours to complete, television series that consume entire weekends and social media feeds that will occupy as much time as we are willing to surrender.

At the same time, movies have become easier to obtain. A reasonably curious person with a few streaming subscriptions can watch an extraordinary range of films, including thousands that would have been almost impossible to find in Little Rock 40 years ago. I sometimes think the principal advantage of the new system is not that I can watch whatever I want, but that I can discover how many things exist that I didn’t know I wanted to watch.

The abundance is wonderful, although it has altered the way we assign value to individual movies. When there were only a few new films opening each week, the release schedule provided a kind of structure to our viewing. A movie opened on Friday, and if we wanted to see it while people were talking about it, we had to make an effort.

Now the calendar is less important. Movies circulate through theaters, premium digital rentals, subscription services and awards platforms, sometimes in rapid succession. They can be watched weeks or months after their initial releases without any real sense that an opportunity has been missed.

I suppose there is some freedom in this, but there is also a tendency to defer what we know we can have at any time. The more movies available to us, the less pressing the decision to watch any particular one becomes.

And while movies continue to attract audiences, they no longer command the same broad cultural attention. The occasional blockbuster still brings people together, but much of what passes for movie conversation now occurs within separate communities of enthusiasts. One group may be absorbed in a new superhero franchise, another in international cinema, another in the work of a particular filmmaker. Millions of people may be watching movies every night without very many of them watching the same movies.

This is part of a larger change in the way Americans experience culture, and I don’t know that it is necessarily a bad thing. The old mass audience was never quite as unified as nostalgia suggests, and the increased availability of films has been an enormous benefit to people whose interests lie outside the commercial mainstream.

But I do think the diminished centrality of movies helps explain why the newspaper reviews fewer of them. The old arrangements that supported regular film criticism have changed, and so have the expectations of the audience. We are no longer operating in a culture where the arrival of a new studio picture automatically constitutes an event that requires a critical response.

Which brings me back to the email from Universal.

I have been invited to watch a Steven Spielberg movie on my television, through a service that exists for the purpose of making movies available to people like me. It’s a picture that has already played in theaters and is available through other home-viewing channels. The invitation is part of a campaign to keep it in the minds of critics and awards voters, and I appreciate receiving it.

I may watch it. But I’ve already seen Disclosure Day and here are also dozens of other movies available to me right now, some of which are probably better, and many of which I will never see.

Forty years ago, if I wanted to review a movie, somebody generally told me where to be and when to be there. I would put the appointment on my calendar and show up.

Now I have more opportunities to see movies than I have ever had before.

I just don’t have to show up.

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I went out on election night,
after the TV stations had called it
and I had interviewed the bright young hope,
to the house of the old pol.
A loser
whose surname has fled—Carroll, he was called—
the nation of my mind
for Nambian exile.

His wife led me in
to his dim gold den
with the cherrywood chairs
and the Scotch in highball glasses,
heavy as revolvers.

“It is hard to lose
especially when
you thought they liked you
and were grateful for your
years of service. You will
have a drink, son?”

(I did because back then
that was how those things were done.
It isn’t like it is now.
Drinking on the job
is a fireable offense
and you can’t
take whiskey from a source.)

“They can go to hell for all I care.
I did my best for them and they
turn around and vote
for the facile and broadshouldered,
the pleasant and the good.
It doesn’t work like that
they’ll see; and all their charming lads
will come to grief.
It takes
a man like me.
Rude and cunning,
half a liar,
half a thief.”

I wrote this down
and wrote it up,
inverted pyramid style.
An editor took the top four inches—
the frothy head—
and left the rest to die
in the gutter of the composing table.

This unquoted man whose name I cannot quite recall
died weeks later behind the wheel
of his parked Cadillac.
His outvoted heart gave out, that’s all,
something in his viscera—wind and reel—
sparked an attack.

It would be speculative to say,
we killed him with our unattentiveness.

But when I pray
I pray for losers,
for the stand-up guys in movies
the Baxters 
who never get the girl
but show up anyway
at the wedding bearing
good wishes
and forgiveness
wrapped in smallpox blankets.

The voting hasn’t stopped. But somewhere along the way, American democracy became a considerably less pleasant undertaking.

I remember when Election Day was fun.

That was probably more a function of my age than anything else. When you’re young, doing almost anything adult is exciting. Whether it’s ordering a beer or voting a straight ticket, it’s all new and interesting. I didn’t even mind standing in line at the DMV to get my first driver’s license. The possibility of being recognized as a functioning member of society was sufficient compensation for the bureaucratic inconvenience.

But it’s not just that the novelty has worn off. I remember when you could joke with your neighbors about political differences, when people didn’t necessarily define themselves by the preferences they expressed in the privacy of the ballot box. I remember when asking someone how they voted was considered a little rude, an intrusion into personal business. You weren’t entitled to know, and most people wouldn’t tell you if you asked.

My mother still won’t tell me how she votes. And I know better than to ask.

I suppose there’s a certain amount of selective memory involved here. The past always looks more agreeable from a distance, particularly when you’re old enough to have forgotten the inconveniences. There were bitter political divisions when I was growing up, and plenty of people whose lives were affected by politics in ways that didn’t allow them the luxury of regarding elections as a friendly neighborhood competition. The period some of us remember as a golden age of civic comity included the systematic exclusion of Black Americans from the polls. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was necessary precisely because the country had failed to make good on its democratic promises.

It would be foolish to pretend that Americans were once uniformly civil to one another, or that the political disagreements of earlier generations were less consequential than ours. But I do think something has changed in the way we experience politics. It has become a more comprehensive expression of personal identity, a public declaration of who we are and, increasingly, who we believe other people to be.

Even in the way back, there were political hobbyists willing not only to tell you how they voted but to loudly explain how you ought to vote. We called these people “cranks” back when they were in the minority, and sometimes we crossed the street to avoid them. They weren’t quite shunned, but their toleration came with eye rolls. They were the people who could turn a casual conversation about the weather into an argument about the federal deficit.

Now we’re all pretty much cranks when it comes to politics.

The television people figured out how to market politics as cheap entertainment, and social media has completed the conversion of political opinion into a form of personal branding. Everybody has a platform, even if it’s only a Facebook page with 37 followers, and everybody is encouraged to have a position on everything. Not simply an opinion, but an opinion that reveals something essential about his character. The distinction between a political disagreement and a moral failing has become increasingly difficult to maintain.

There are actual moral questions involved in politics, of course. The way we treat immigrants, the poor, people accused of crimes and people who cannot defend themselves has moral significance. So do decisions about war, public health, education and how we distribute the obligations and benefits of citizenship. These things ought to be taken seriously.

But when every disagreement becomes evidence of somebody’s depravity, we lose the ability to distinguish between an opponent who is mistaken and one who is genuinely dangerous. We become less interested in what people believe than in what their beliefs supposedly reveal about them. We stop listening because we imagine we already know everything important about the person doing the talking.

And politics becomes simultaneously deadly serious and supremely silly, a spectacle in which the most consequential questions imaginable are argued by people who sometimes seem to be auditioning for jobs as professional wrestlers.

I don’t have a very high opinion of the modern political debate, which is less a test of competing ideas than an opportunity for candidates to deliver rehearsed responses to questions they have no intention of answering. If anybody ever put me to work asking questions at one of these affairs, my first would probably be, “Who hurt you so badly that you have to try to fill your interior abyss with the approbation of strangers?”

My second, and considerably more useful, question would be, “Why do you want so much to be the boss of us?”

I suppose most candidates would respond with some variation of the familiar humble malarkey about wanting to be of service. Perhaps some of them would mean it. But I’d be inclined to test their sincerity by handing them a plastic trash bag, a reflective yellow vest and one of those pointy-sticky things and dropping them off alongside one of our state’s beautiful byways. We could sign them up to deliver meals to elderly people. There are any number of ways to be useful that don’t require a title, a staff, a campaign treasury or the opportunity to appear on television discussing your own importance.

Public office is necessary work, and some people undertake it for honorable reasons. I recognize this, though I sometimes have to remind myself. There are people who genuinely want to improve their communities and who understand that governing requires patience, compromise and a willingness to be held accountable. There are polka-dotted zebras in the world, too, and competent French rock ‘n’ roll bands. If you can imagine something, it probably exists somewhere in this world of mystery and wonder.

The trouble is that the incentives of modern politics seem especially well suited to attracting and rewarding people who want attention. There is a great deal of money and power to be found in proximity to government, and a great many ways to convert political influence into personal advantage without necessarily doing anything illegal. A title brings a staff and a budget, along with people whose professional responsibilities include telling you how important you are. Lobbyists want your attention. Donors want your ear. People who never would have returned your telephone calls before your election suddenly become interested in your opinions.

Money and power have a way of getting into your clothes and hair when you’re exposed to them. It isn’t always necessary to take a bribe. Sometimes it’s enough to become accustomed to being treated as somebody special.

None of this is new. Human nature is human nature, and the political history of the United States is not a chronicle of selfless statesmanship occasionally interrupted by scandals. The political machines of the 19th and 20th centuries were not charitable organizations. Corruption, patronage and influence peddling were familiar features of American democracy long before anyone thought to invent a cable news channel.

What may be different is the extent to which we have made these characteristics entertaining. We reward theatrical aggression, confuse cruelty with candor and take delight when someone we support manages to humiliate someone we oppose. We treat the capacity to provoke outrage as a political talent, which in the attention economy it certainly is.

All of which sucks some of the joy out of voting.

Or it ought to.

Because one of the more interesting developments in American politics is that, while we’ve been becoming increasingly disgusted with the political process, we’ve also been turning out to vote in rather impressive numbers.

The idea that Americans have simply lost interest in elections doesn’t hold up particularly well. According to the University of Florida Election Lab, about 66% of eligible Americans voted in the 2020 presidential election, and about 64% in 2024. The 2018 midterm election drew about half of eligible voters, an extraordinary showing by the standards of recent history, and the 2022 midterms attracted roughly 46%.

Those are not the numbers of a population that has collectively decided elections don’t matter.

And here we are again, on the eve of the 2026 midterms, with Donald Trump nearly two years into his second presidency and Americans preparing to decide who will represent them in Congress, statehouses and local governments. In Arkansas, we’re voting for governor, a U.S. senator, members of Congress and a variety of other officeholders. We have the usual collection of ballot questions, campaign advertisements and people assuring us that the future of civilization depends upon the outcome.

Early voting has been brisk. Nationally, more than 50 million ballots had been cast before Election Day. In Arkansas, nearly 460,000 people had voted early or absentee by Oct. 29, running about 17% ahead of the comparable point in the 2022 midterms. Early voting numbers are not necessarily reliable predictors of final turnout; people who vote early might otherwise have voted on Election Day. Still, there’s little evidence that political disgust has translated into a general refusal to participate.

It may have had the opposite effect.

A Pew Research Center survey in 2023 found that 65% of Americans said they often or always felt exhausted when thinking about politics. More than half said politics made them angry. Only 4% reported frequently feeling excited about it.

This is a curious arrangement for a democratic republic. We have constructed a political culture that makes people miserable and then given them compelling reasons to keep participating in it.

Maybe people vote because they’re hopeful. Maybe they vote because they’re frightened. Maybe some of them are simply trying to prevent what they regard as the worst possible outcome. There are plenty of people who have come to regard elections less as opportunities to choose a government than as emergency measures undertaken to prevent the wrong people from acquiring power.

I understand the feeling, though it strikes me as a poor basis for a lifetime of citizenship. When every election is presented as the last opportunity to save the republic, eventually the republic begins to look like something that ought to have been more carefully designed.

Meanwhile, there’s an important distinction between being disgusted by politics and being indifferent to what government does. A person who doesn’t want to spend his evenings arguing about immigration policy on Facebook may nevertheless care deeply about what happens to his paycheck, his children’s schools, his health insurance and the roads he drives to work.

He may have well-developed views about these matters without wanting to make them the central facts of his identity. He may even prefer to keep those views to himself.

I have considerable sympathy for such people. I don’t think anyone ought to be required to follow the daily political spectacle in order to qualify as a responsible citizen. You can understand the stakes of an election without knowing which candidate insulted which other candidate on television yesterday afternoon. Indeed, an excessive diet of political entertainment may interfere with understanding the actual business of government.

There’s also something to be said for the person who chooses not to vote. We newspaper columnists are supposed to deliver periodic sermons about the obligations of citizenship, but I don’t believe casting a ballot is the only meaningful way to participate in a democracy. Some people are uninformed. Some are alienated. Some find none of the available candidates acceptable. Some devote themselves to their families and communities without taking much interest in electoral politics.

Not voting is a choice, and the freedom to make that choice is part of what makes voting a right rather than an obligation enforced by the state. I don’t think people ought to be shamed for exercising it.

But neither should we confuse the right not to vote with the obstacles that prevent people who want to vote from doing so.

It is one thing to decide that you don’t care who wins an election. It is another to work an hourly job that makes it difficult to get to the polls, to lack reliable transportation or to encounter a bewildering set of procedures that require time and attention you can scarcely afford. For people with flexible schedules, a trip to the polls may be a pleasant errand. For somebody who has to arrange child care, miss work or travel a considerable distance, it can be an undertaking.

And while it is tempting to imagine that a great wave of new voters would necessarily produce whatever political results we happen to favor, there’s no reason to believe this. Working people do not constitute a single political constituency, and Americans with similar economic interests often have profoundly different ideas about what government ought to do. The assumption that greater participation would automatically restore New Deal-style politics is too simple. So is the notion that either major party has a permanent claim on people who earn their living by the hour.

The electorate is more complicated than our political mythology allows.

Nevertheless, it should be a relatively uncontroversial proposition that eligible citizens who wish to vote ought to be able to do so without unnecessary difficulty. Election security and accessibility are both legitimate concerns, and there’s no inherent reason one must come at the expense of the other. Reasonable people can disagree about the best means of verifying eligibility, administering absentee ballots and establishing voting procedures.

What should concern us is the ease with which these practical questions are converted into partisan weapons. A disagreement over identification requirements becomes an accusation that one side wants to steal elections and the other wants to prevent lawful citizens from voting. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons to challenge particular regulations. Sometimes there are legitimate concerns about the administration of elections. But the argument too often proceeds as though recognizing one concern requires denying the existence of the other.

A Pew survey conducted just weeks before this election found that 80% of registered voters were at least somewhat confident that legally qualified voters who wanted to cast ballots would be able to do so. There were substantial partisan differences in attitudes about access and security, but the survey also found broad confidence in the ability of election workers to administer the voting process.

This is worth remembering. The people who actually conduct our elections, the local officials and poll workers who check registrations, distribute ballots and count votes, generally go about their work without anything like the attention lavished upon the people who make accusations about them.

Most of the work of democracy is ordinary, repetitive and unglamorous. Which is probably why it gets so little attention.

It is possible, I suppose, to take the wrong lesson from all this and conclude that what we need is a more entertaining form of politics. But that is precisely the experiment we’ve been conducting for the past several decades, and I don’t think the results recommend further investment.

We don’t need politics to be more exciting. We probably need it to be considerably more boring.

We might benefit from candidates who regard holding office as a temporary assignment rather than the fulfillment of some personal destiny, who understand that the people who disagree with them are not necessarily stupid or malicious and who recognize that winning an election is an authorization to exercise certain defined powers, not a certificate of moral superiority.

And perhaps we could learn to regard elections as occasions for resolving disagreements rather than opportunities to establish which of our fellow citizens deserve our contempt.

The secret ballot is a particularly ingenious democratic invention because it acknowledges that what citizens believe about government is their own business. They may explain themselves if they wish, and they may attempt to persuade others. But they are not obliged to make public confessions of political faith. They don’t have to wear a cap, display a bumper sticker or identify themselves with a movement. They can walk into a voting booth, make their choices and return to their lives.

The system was designed to allow people who disagree about important things to inhabit the same country without having to settle every disagreement. We might do well to recover some respect for that arrangement.

I am not nostalgic for the political arrangements of my youth, which had their own injustices, hypocrisies and failures. Nor am I particularly interested in returning to a time when certain people were expected to remain silent about matters that directly affected their lives. The fact that more Americans are willing to insist upon their rights and express their views is, on balance, a democratic achievement.

But there ought to be some room between political engagement and political obsession. We ought to be able to care about how we are governed without making our political allegiances the most important facts about ourselves. We ought to be capable of recognizing that a person may be wrong about something consequential without being wrong about everything.

I used to think that if you wanted to discourage people from voting, all you had to do was make it a little less convenient for them. Make them stand in longer lines, travel farther to the polls, fill out additional forms. Convince them their votes don’t matter or that the available choices aren’t worth the trouble.

All you had to do was make it less fun.

But the turnout figures suggest that Americans will put up with a great deal of unpleasantness when they believe something important is at stake. Perhaps the problem isn’t that we no longer enjoy voting. Perhaps it’s that we’ve forgotten how to live with one another between elections.

I don’t expect Election Day ever to recover the innocent excitement it held for me when I was young. I’ve been voting too long, and I’ve seen too much. But I wouldn’t mind recovering some of the ordinary civility that once allowed us to go to the polls, make our choices and return to our lives without feeling obliged to account for our neighbors’ moral deficiencies.

My mother still won’t tell me how she votes.

I think she’s got the right idea.

I’m playing a few songs at the local chapter of the Nashville Songwriters Association International showcase at the Hibernia Irish Bar in Little Rock on Monday evening and I haven’t picked up a guitar in a while. So I’ve been rehearsing.

This first track is kind of a warm-up exercise; a ditty they play on the Tony Kornheiser podcast to introduce the football picks of a monkey (actually a chimpanzee named Reginald). I do a little differently than the official version.

And this is the raw acoustic version of “Pete Rose” I’ve worked up.

And, repeating for all needing, a one guitar version of “Caliban.” I think I will play this Monday night

Finally, here’s my second take on the “Tony’s Mailbag” theme from the aforementioned podcast. I sent all this into the folks at the show and they’ve been good about playing my stuff int he past but I don’t know if this will fly.

That’s an extraordinarily difficult proposition to live by, particularly when we are dealing with people who seem to regard our restraint as weakness and our willingness to compromise as an opportunity to take advantage of us. There are people who will lie to us, cheat us, exploit our good faith and use whatever power they can acquire to make other people miserable. We have no obligation to pretend otherwise. We don’t have an obligation to like them.

But maybe we do have an obligation to recognize their humanity. Not because they have earned that recognition, but because the alternative is to make human dignity contingent upon our approval. And once we do that, we’ve adopted the essential reasoning of the people we oppose.

The distinction, I think, is between holding people accountable for what they do and punishing them for what we believe they are. A decent society can arrest a corrupt official, prosecute a criminal, remove an abusive leader from office and prevent someone from exercising power he has demonstrated himself unfit to exercise. It can do all these things without declaring the offender subhuman, irredeemable or unworthy of legal protection.

Indeed, the protections are most important when the accused is someone we despise. It takes no particular moral courage to respect the rights of people we admire.

This doesn’t require passivity. There’s a persistent confusion, particularly among people who are understandably frightened by authoritarianism, between restraint and surrender. But a society can defend itself vigorously without abandoning its principles. It can investigate, prosecute, impeach, organize, demonstrate, refuse cooperation with unlawful demands and impose consequences on people who abuse the public’s trust. It can even use force when necessary to protect people from immediate harm, subject to law and accountability. What it cannot safely do is grant itself unlimited authority on the grounds its intentions are better than those of its enemies.

Government requires something more than laws. It requires conscience. But we cannot depend upon conscience, including our own, to operate reliably when our interests and emotions are engaged.

The rule of law is not a declaration that everybody deserves our sympathy. It is a recognition that nobody, however virtuous he believes himself to be, can safely be trusted with arbitrary power.

There is also something to be said for humility. We are not equally mistaken about everything; some positions are demonstrably false, some actions plainly wicked. But certainty about another person’s wrongdoing does not establish our own incorruptibility. History offers plenty of examples of people who began by trying to eliminate cruelty and wound up administering it. Rarely did these people decide to change sides.

We must be willing to do something that feels profoundly unsatisfactory: punish wrongdoing without taking pleasure in punishment, resist oppression without fantasizing about revenge, and preserve the rights of people who would happily deprive us of our own.

We must also accept that will often put us at a disadvantage. The unscrupulous will occasionally escape consequences. Some will exploit our fairness. There is no constitutional arrangement that can guarantee otherwise, and attempts to construct one tend to require precisely the arbitrary powers that make tyranny possible.

The alternative is worse.

Decency is not demonstrated by the kindness we show our friends, or even by the compassion we extend to strangers. Its hardest test is whether we can exercise power over someone we despise without allowing our contempt to determine what we do to him.

We cannot guarantee that decent people will always prevail. We can insist that, when they do prevail, they remain decent.

I’m a reluctant and somewhat nervous performer — Kris Kristofferson once said most songwriters need a support group more than an audience — but I do kind of enjoy these occasional outbursts. So come see us if you’re in my town.

I was just today contacted by a true crime podcast, apparently a pretty big one, about a case I worked in Shreveport in 1985; I don’t remember much about the facts or the disposition of that case — they’re sending me my old clips to “rejig” my memory — but I have thought an awful lot about the victim over the years.

I knew him slightly; he was a presumably homeless dude called “Jesus” both for his appearance and gentle nature, who was more or less taken in by the denizens of a Shreve Square bar. A few years ago I wrote this song about him and his (imagined) killer:

Lyrics:

Jesus finally quit the booze;
Made a promise not to use
It was strictly weed and Antabuse
And an occasional Marlboro red

They let Jesus sweep the floor
Let him keep his own tip jar
Let him sleep behind the bar
And the bikers kept him fed.

A scared kid with his dad’s .410
Pops the lock and stumbles in
And Jesus mumbles “Howdy, friend”
And nothing more is said.

There’s gasoline and gummy bears
Lost weekends and golden years
And someday it all disappears
That’s how you know you’re dead.

I know that I ain’t Superman,
It don’t matter if “I think I can”
We ride the back of a Leviathan
That knows no doubt or dread

I duck my head and act polite
There’s stories I can never write
A shotgun plunges through the night
Into a river running red

I think I love my wife and son
I ain’t got hate for anyone
I sleep OK when I get done
I don’t lie awake in bed

Additionally, the precipitating event in my novel Parallel to Heaven (out next year) is very loosely based on Jesus’ murder.

If I end up in the podcast, I’ll let you know.

The things we recognize

An Otto Dix painting in The Age of Anxiety at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts reminded me of a George Grosz drawing that occupies an uncomfortable place in my novel Parallel to Heaven. The Grosz is not in the exhibition; I’m showing it here alongside the Dix because the connection sent me back to something I had written and perhaps not quite finished thinking about. Grosz’s drawing is known as Jonk the Killer, or Lustmord in der Ackerstraße — “Sex Murder in Acker Street.” A woman’s headless body lies on a chaise longue. In the background, a stout man washes his hands.

In the novel, a character called Bludge shows the drawing to my narrator, who has told him something about a recurring murder dream, though considerably less than everything. What disturbs the narrator is not an exact correspondence between the drawing and his dream. It is the recognition of a feeling, the panic that survives waking even as the particulars dissolve. Grosz has put something on paper that the narrator would prefer to believe belonged exclusively to sleep. “But Grosz’s drawing both fascinates and repels me,” he says. “I think I get it, and that worries me.”

Dix and Grosz both worked with the subject of Lustmord, sexual murder, and the usual explanations for such pictures invoke the brutality and dislocation of German life around the First World War. These are reasonable places to begin. They become less satisfactory when they allow us to settle the question of what an artist is doing by depicting a woman’s mutilation. To expose violence requires making it visible, but the decision to show it does not establish the artist’s relationship to it. Disgust and fascination can occupy the same person, sometimes without either diminishing the other.

Bludge distrusts the defense that Grosz was holding a mirror up to society. My narrator is more troubled by his own response to the drawing, by the possibility that recognizing something in it has implicated him. Neither character speaks for me in any simple way, though I gave them a question I have not resolved to my satisfaction. How much can we understand about another person’s capacity for evil before we begin to recognize our own? And what do we do with that recognition when we still have an ordinary life to conduct, people to love, work to finish?

The man washing his hands is what holds me. Grosz gives him a familiar task, performed in a room full of ordinary possessions. The murder has happened, and already there is something practical to attend to. My narrator worries about how people restore their sense of themselves after doing something unforgivable, how they become whole in their own estimation again. The drawing allows that question to remain in the room with the body.

Later, Bludge and his partner Phoebe give him an expensively framed reproduction for Christmas. He hangs it in his office near a photograph of his father and a postcard of Monet’s Waterloo Bridge. I still find that arrangement troubling: the beloved father, the beautiful bridge, the room in which something terrible has happened. He has found places for all of them.

George Grosz’s pen-and-ink drawing “Jonk the Killer” (1916), also known as “Sex Murder in Acker Street,” depicts a murderer washing his hands near his victim’s body. The work is in Vienna’s Leopold Museum and is not part of AMFA’s “The Age of Anxiety” exhibition.

WESLEY

By noon the next day, people had begun leaving things at the gate.

There were tennis balls, dog biscuits, three stuffed police officers with chewable arms and a blue bandanna printed with the words BACK THE GOOD BOY. Someone had sent a rawhide shaped like a pistol. A florist delivered two dozen yellow roses addressed to Beau, who attempted to eat the card before Wesley could read it. The card said the flowers were from the Hargrove family of Franklin and their rescue Lab, Moses, who had been shot at by a sheriff’s deputy in 2021 but, the Hargroves wanted Wesley to know, was doing fine now.

A television crew occupied the curb across the street. Two more had come earlier and left after filming the gate, the front walk and Beau urinating on a newly planted azalea. Wesley had taken him into the yard on the red leash, as Jack instructed, which made the dog look less like a survivor than a defendant being permitted an hour of exercise.

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That he did not know where he was did not make him uneasy, but he felt guilty of a crime he couldn’t name. Sometimes he dreamed he had murdered his sister when they were both children and woke in panic and shame. This was that feeling, though he couldn’t remember what he had done.

He wished he were dreaming, but the wooden arm of the chair he was sitting in was solid, and Ludwig and his musician friends were chatting in the sunken living room with the white leather furniture. It was all pleasant burble to Paul until he realized he was the subject of their conversation. He heard the bass player with the white beard say “But he doesn’t gig.”

“Oh, I do, sometimes,” Paul said. “I’m also a singer-songwriter. I play three or six shows a year; I don’t get out a lot but I do play out some.”

“I bet you have a thriving Patreon,” the bald violinist said. Paul couldn’t tell whether the man was mildly impressed or mocking him. He scanned the room for a guitar with which he might demonstrate his competence and was relieved that Ludwig seemed not to have one handy. Then the memory of the accident rushed back at him and he felt bad about the cyclists and looked down at the smear of too-bright blood on his jeans. His head fell forward and he caught it in his hands. It felt like a stone.

Why can’t this be a dream? he thought, as he reached for his phone even as he remembered it had been taken by the police. Why can’t this be a —

Paul woke up in the double bed with his wife Beth and the terrier Rocket Richard.

He squinted at the clock radio, it was fuzzy but he could make out the one before the colon. He’d slept about three hours. His dream, which he clearly remembered now, seemed to have played out over the course of a couple of days.

Paul had been driving his truck in the Holland Tunnel. His father, who had been dead forty years, was riding shotgun. This was not his father as Paul remembered him, but his father grown old and somehow afflicted, maybe by Alzheimer’s, maybe by some more general loss of wits.

They were on their way into the city, when they ran up on a small peloton of cyclists, each outfitted in their own uniquely colored alien-tight jerseys and padded shorts. Paul switched into the left lane to pass them, and thought he had when his father looked back over his shoulder and said, “Ooh, that asshole is giving you the finger, son.”

Paul glanced in the rear view and saw a tangle of bicycles, riders strewn on the ground, their apparent leader still upright, straddling his bike and thrusting his middle finger at Paul’s truck. Paul braked and got out and walked through carnage. Two of the cyclists were decapitated, their heads rolling in their helmets. Others were alive and broken. The leader seemed unscathed and calm. “Look at what you’ve done,” he said.

Paul punched at his phone but had no signal. He thought there was an emergency S.O.S. button but couldn’t find it. The leader walked among the bodies and offered a squeezy water bottle to the survivors. Paul wanted to ask if cyclists were even allowed in the Holland Tunnel but thought, under the circumstances, that would be rude.

“We’ll just have to wait,” the leader said.

Paul’s father went to sleep in the truck. Traffic filed slowly past the bloody tableu in the left lane. The leader stood at the back of the crash and waved the cars around it.

After about two hours, an ambulance and a police car showed up. The dead and the injured were hustled away and a young policewoman with no hat and red hair spoke kindly to Paul. She took his phone and scanned his driver’s license and asked him his business in the city.

“I’m here for the film festival at Lincoln Center,” Paul was surprised to hear himself say, for it had been at least a decade since he’d been to the New York Film Festival and he no longer had a contact on the media team.

“Where are you staying in the city?”

“The Waldorf-Astoria,” Paul said. “My father always stays there.”

The pretty policewoman nodded. Looking back, Paul thought she had seemed familiar, though he couldn’t place her. Maybe his brain had cast her with some background actor he’d seen in a Netflix series.

Then he and his father were back in the truck, driving down Park Avenue. That should have tipped him off, too, the way the scenes shifted cinematically. There was a “cut to” structure to the dream. Paul couldn’t remember negotiating the rest of the tunnel, emerging in lower Manhattan or fighting his way north through a snarl of traffic. Yet while he was dreaming, none of those omissions had troubled him.

The next scene was set at a rooftop bar in Tribeca, where he met his friend Ludwig, who in real life was a professor of economics at the University of Virginia but in this dream was the “chambermaster” of the “New York City Symphony.” Ludwig had invited Paul and his father—who had wandered off—to stay at his apartment rather than the Waldorf, which, he said, was these days less grand than Paul’s father remembered.

Paul smiled to remember this; in real life, he had stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria a couple of times, on movie junkets. He had been less impressed than he’d hoped to be, though it was a much nicer hotel than he would ever have paid for on his own dime. He could see how his brain might work that mild prejudice into his dream.

He found his father talking to two women at the bar. One looked like Barbra Streisand; the other was Paul’s age. The old man winked at him as he approached, and held out a martini. The drink was cold, slivers of ice glinted on its surface, but it had no taste at all.

“I’ve just been telling these young ladies about our business,” his father said. “About the return on investment.”

“Yeah, Dad, well, it’s time to go. We’re staying at Ludwig’s for tonight. We’ll figure out something else tomorrow.”

“You’re going to jail, you know. To jail or to prison. For six months or for the rest of your life.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

And then he was at Ludwig’s, looking out the window. The sky was a gradient, a matte painting.

“You are a Camry among men, Paul — reliable, efficient, ubiquitious,” it was the bald violinist. Paul couldn’t tell whether he was being insulted or whether the man had meant to say something kind.

Beth stirred beside him. She reached across Rocket Richard and touched his arm. He was glad to be awake, though the dream still troubled him. She seemed to sense this and put her foot on top of his. He began to scratch the back of her head, and Rocket Richard grumped his way down to the foot of the bed. In a moment they were making soft, undramatic marital love.

Afterwards, they lay together and he thought of talking to her about his dream but he knew that annoyed her, as it annoyed most people. So she rested her head on his chest and he thought about what a good life he had and how, even though he was no longer a movie critic — the newspaper had decided they could no longer afford the luxury of a movie critic — he was still writing for a living and they had their savings and he would not have to answer for the accident in the Holland Tunnel. No one had died because of his negligence.

He lay there a little longer after Beth got up to do her exercises, to swing her kettle bells and stretch out her yoga poses. He thought about how he would go to work and pour a cup of coffee and how, probably within a few minutes, his dream would evaporate and he’d be left only with the background unease of modern life.

Finally he slid from beneath the covers and his feet touched the floor...

Paul looked out Ludwig’s window. Carbon black gave way to deep violet, then a paler blue, and finally a vanilla stripe along the horizon, interrupted by blocky silhouettes pricked with gold.

There are two substantial exceptions, and they happen to sit at opposite ends of his career. One is On Writing, published in 2000, which I regard as one of the fundamental books about the work of writing, useful well beyond the aspiring-novelist constituency toward which it is sometimes marketed. The other is Carrie, his first published novel, which appeared in 1974 and remains my favorite of his books. The two seem increasingly connected to me. On Writing is the work of a famous writer who has spent enough time at the desk to know what he can do, what he cannot do and how large the distance can be between intention and execution. Carrie, written by a young man with no reason to believe millions of people would someday read him, is a short, fractured novel about the distance between moral atrocity and all the explanations people manufacture afterward.

On Writing begins from a humility about the work that I have always found persuasive. “Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do,” King writes, “not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.” That seems closer to the experience of writing than most of the mystical language people use to describe it. A serious writer usually knows something about his deficiencies. He can recognize the prose that has gone dead, the transition he has bullied into place, the sentence that sounded right somewhere behind his eyes but arrived on the page missing whatever music it seemed to possess there. Recognition is not the same as diagnosis, much less cure. Sometimes you can repair the sentence and sometimes, after enough revisions, you merely make it differently bad.

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In the inaugural episode of “Sessions,” I talk with two Arkansas writers receiving major literary honors this year: Jeffrey Condran, winner of the Porter Fund Literary Prize, and Eli Cranor, recipient of the Booker Worthen Literary Prize for his novel “Mississippi Blue 42.”

Condran is a novelist, short-story writer, teacher and publisher whose books include “Prague Summer,” “A Fingerprint Repeated” and “Claire, Wading Into the Danube by Night.”His Braddock Avenue Books is also publishing my novel “Parallel to Heaven.” Cranor is the author of “Don’t Know Tough,” “Ozark Dogs,” “Broiler” and “Mississippi Blue 42,” and a former football player and coach whose fiction often explores violence, loyalty, class and place.

The conversation ranges across literary prizes, what it means to be an Arkansas writer, the influence of place, teaching and publishing, college football, and the peculiar business of returning to the desk after someone has stopped to honor the work.

Karen says we like songs that are in our range. She may be right, though applied strictly this would considerably reduce the number of songs available to me. I tend to regard a song’s being in my range as a desirable feature rather than a condition of attempting it. “Dead Flowers” offers enough room to encourage me, which is probably part of its appeal. There is also something reassuring about a song whose narrator has more pressing problems than whether he can sing.

There are songs where you just know where the words fall, where to wait, how the tune accommodates a feeling you might have trouble explaining in conversation. “Dead Flowers” has that sort of familiarity for me. I can hear the Rolling Stones in it, of course, but there is also room enough to get inside and close the door.

On Sticky Fingers, released in 1971, it sounds like an excursion into country music undertaken by people who appreciate both the music and the opportunity it provides for misbehavior. Mick Jagger’s exaggerated drawl gives us permission to regard the whole thing as a joke (like the Band’s version of “Long Black Veil”), though the guitars seem less interested in kidding anybody. They understand how naturally a bright, companionable tune can carry an account of somebody coming apart.

The singer is addressing a woman whose life has become considerably more elegant than his own. She has acquired the surroundings in which people are supposed to be happy, while he has settled into a basement and a habit unlikely to improve his prospects. He wants her to know he sees through all that prosperity. He also wants her to remember him. These are familiar and not entirely compatible desires, particularly when remembering him appears to be the one service she is still willing to perform.

What I like is the smallness of the proposed revenge. He doesn’t threaten to interrupt her wedding or arrive at her door with some terrible revelation. Dead flowers are a wonderfully economical emblem of a relationship whose ceremonial gestures have outlasted whatever once made them necessary. Even the insult requires her participation. He is still arranging ways for something to pass between them.

And then there is the promise at the end, to bring roses to her grave. You can hear it as tenderness, or as the last word in an argument he intends to win by surviving her. Most days I hear both. People rarely achieve the emotional clarity that songs appear to offer them; they can be generous and mean in the same breath, especially toward someone they once loved and would prefer to believe they have finished loving.

Country music has always made room for that confusion. Its people can know exactly what has gone wrong and remain remarkably unwilling to do anything about it. They order another drink, furnish an explanation, make a promise whose fulfillment would require them to become someone else. “Dead Flowers” moves easily through that country, with enough humor to make the company pleasant and enough hurt to keep the humor from settling everything.

Anyway, here is my recording. Singing a song you’ve lived with for years is a way of finding out what you’ve been hearing all along. Some of the swagger falls away when you have to supply it yourself. What remains, for me, is a man trying to sound finished with somebody while making sure she knows where to send the flowers.

BEAU

My2legs comes back.

I know before dooropen. Before rollbox stop. Before footsound on still2legs walkstone.

I smell him through shuthouse.

Bloodold. Hurt. No-sleep. Blue2legs house. Sharpclean soap that dont clean nothing. Under all that my2legs, coming near.

I run doorhard.

Still2legs house has no good run. Slickfloor everywheres. Rugslide. Chairs that dont smell sat-in. Deadlady smell in some rooms, thin but staying. Still2legs smell is paper and darkcloth and handsoap and the nightwater he drinks without pleasure.

I waited here.

I watched frontglass. I heard rollboxes come and go. Not his. I smelled food Still2legs made and ate some because waiting takes bodywork. I slept but not downfar. Every sound brought me up.

Now him.

I hit the door.

MY2LEGS MY2LEGS MY2LEGS.

Still2legs says no Beau wait but wait is done. Wait was all night and morning. Wait was road empty but not empty. Wait was smell going old.

Locksound.

Door opens.

I go through.

My2legs bends and I take him down.

He makes hurtsound when my headbop finds his face. I back away then go again, lower this time, chest and neck and hands. His hands are on me everywheres. Ears. Back. Ribs. He says my sound over and over.

“Beau. Beau. Jesus, Beau.”

I get his mouth. Bloodtaste still there. Newhurt under eyes. I lick careful then not careful. Tail hits door and wall and still2legs leg. Whole backhalf goes. Cant hold body together.

My2legs sits on floor.

I climb him.

He laughs and that goes wrong in middle. Breath catches. Face goes into my neckhide and stays. Hotwet comes through.

I hold still.

Still2legs stands above us. He says something about nose and careful and bond but his voice is low. He touches my2legs shoulder once then takes hand away.

My2legs smells brokenopen. Not fear. Not mad. Something downbelow both.

I push closer.

HERE I AM HERE I AM THIS PLACE GOT ME IN IT.

My2legs says, “I know.”

Maybe he does.

We stay floorlong. Then still2legs brings redleash. I dont need redleash because I have found my2legs and wont lose him. Still2legs puts it in his hand anyway.

“Can you manage him?”

My2legs looks at him.

“Can I manage my dog?”

Still2legs dont answer fast.

“Today,” he says.

My2legs gets up. Ground moves under him some. I move with him so he has me against his leg. That is what body is for when your2legs ground goes bad.

We go rollbox.

I climb frontseat because last time frontseat led toward him. My2legs gets in back. Wrong.

I turn around.

“Back here, buddy.”

I climb between seats. Still2legs makes stopnoise. My2legs takes my collar and pulls me beside him. I stand feetwide across his lap. He puts face against mine.

Rollbox wakes.

Homeway.

I know turns. Smells come through coldair holes. Cookmeat place. Wet dirt where water sits. Otherdog yards. Hot road. Then our trees, our walls, our gate.

Blue2legs smell still there.

I go stiff.

My2legs hand closes on collar.

“It’s all right.”

Not all right. Blue2legs fear at gate. Their boots in grass. Their hands on door. My2legs blood dried on stone. Littleblack no smell but I know where it pointed.

I growl low.

My2legs says, “Easy.”

Still2legs looks at him through mirror.

“He’s reacting to the scene.”

“He’s reacting to cops coming onto his property.”

“He’s reacting to something.”

My2legs says badmouthnoise.

Still2legs says, “That kind of nuanced thinking will serve you well.”

I hear mad rising but not high. My2legs holds it inside. Rollbox stops.

Home.

This time my2legs holds redleash short. Door opens. I jump down and nose everything fast.

Bloodspot. Glasssmall in doorcrack. Flowerbush broke open. Blue2legs bootplaces in softground. Soap2legs hands on collar. My own fear where belly touched stone.

All still here.

I pee on whitepost.

My2legs laughs again. Better laugh.

“That’s right,” he says. “Fuck them.”

Still2legs says, “An encouraging beginning.”

Inside smells wrong from other2legs walking rooms. Drawers opened. Things moved. My foodbag gone then back. Waterbowl dry.

My2legs fills it. I drink while he stands over me. When I finish he fills it again though I dont need more.

Still2legs goes upstairs.

My2legs follows.

I follow my2legs.

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