The sky over Frederick is the wrong color again.

Not the clean gray of rain coming, but a flat, sourceless ochre. Wrong, creepy. It’s like the light of an old photograph that was left too left too long in the sun.

It carries a faint campfire smell, but there’s nothing cozy in it. Campfire smoke drifts on the breeze, evanescent and companionable. But this smell is the breeze, is the air, is the atmosphere itself, and it hangs acrid and unhealthy over all of us here. Our sky is slow poison.

Somewhere to the north and west, vast, trackless forests are burning, and their smoke has settled over my town, over my neighbors mowing their lawns, over the kids playing ball, over millions of Americans checking their phones, as if nothing were the matter.

People adapt, I guess.

I am not, by my nature, a pessimist. I believe in our country, in our countrymen and countrywomen, in our abiding capacity for republican self-improvement and democratic solidarity. Our story is, as Barack Obama said, never finished, but it “depends not just on the consent of the governed, but the service of citizens.”

Under our acrid skies, we are all called to service.

Fire concentrates the attention. Climate change—accelerated by the massive human use of fossil fuels over generations—is driving these fires, this year and in other years. And there’s something about the sky being filled with smoke—again—that makes even an inveterate optimist like me sag under the weight of it.

What we are seeing in our skies is the physics of our carelessness and cruelty towards our planetary home made visible, tangible, poisonous. Our efforts to undo the damage we’ve done seem puny.

Which brings me, improbably, to a boat.

Years ago I spent a day sailing off the coast of San Diego with Craig Venter, the buccaneer of the human genome—a big thinker, a dreamer, the kind of old-fashioned scientific rebel we do not make many of anymore.

Venter, who died last April at 79, was a pioneer of genomics, the study of the entire set of DNA in organisms, including human beings. In the late 1990s, Venter was frustrated with the slow pace of progress made by the Human Genome Project, a government-funded effort to decode the human genome. Venter thought he could do it faster and cheaper than the National Institutes of Health, and he nearly succeeded. In the end, he and the NIH made a joint announcement of the historic achievement in June 2000, with then-President Bill Clinton hailing the public-private partnership.

I met Venter on his yacht, Sorcerer II, in 2009, as he was pursuing his next quarry: engineered microbes that would eat carbon dioxide out of the air, that would turn our exhaust back into something useful. I have wondered over the years what became of that project, which seemed so magical and hopeful as he described it while tacking across a fresh breeze (at least that’s what he said we were doing; I’m no sailor, but the day was glorious).

So I did some research, and here is what became of that.

Craig Venter’s dream took the form of engineered algae, grown in saltwater ponds, sucking up CO2, and then tweaked and coaxed to produce oil out of it. ExxonMobil poured more than three hundred fifty million dollars into it over a decade—and spent tens of millions more advertising its own virtue—before quietly walking away in 2023. Bill Gates stepped in with some funding, but in 2025 Venter’s company filed for bankruptcy.

The buccaneer’s dream ran aground, as buccaneers’ dreams do, and not on the science but on the shorter patience of oil-company money.

So the dream died; the smoke won; the buccaneer sailed off the edge of the map.

But that wasn’t actually the end of the story.

This month, researchers at the South Dakota School of Mines—studying microbes that live in the deep dark beneath the Black Hills, a mile down in an old gold mine—announced that they had engineered enzymes that pull carbon dioxide straight out of industrial smoke and turn it into minerals for concrete. The process accelerates the carbon capture process from years to minutes.

And those scientists out on the American plains are not alone.

In Zurich, they have made a living building material—microbes set in a printed gel—that mineralizes carbon as it goes, so that a wall grows stronger over its life while drawing carbon down.

There’s more of this kind of research happening all the time. None of it is a miracle, of course. Pulling carbon from the air is still expensive, and dreaming that it will solve our climate challenges is foolish and becomes an excuse to keep burning. Carbon capture buys time; it does not stop the fires.

The race is not won. But the race is still being run.

So I will mourn what we have done to our sky. But I will also remember that the human spirit is never irredeemable—just like our beloved country.

So let us hope, let us put our shoulders to the wheel. Let us not be discouraged.

And our poem today captures the conflicting feelings I’m feeling right now.

It’s by Denise Levertov, the 20th Century British-American writer who was a poet of both progressive resistance and profound Christian faith.

This poem is both urgent and hopeful. Levertov senses a rising of love to confront what we have done to the world, to each other. It is a mystic vision, and a necessary one.

The poem is dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood, a labor union activist and nuclear-power whistleblower who died under suspicious circumstances, and Eliot Gralla, who was also an activist against nuclear weapons and power.

Beginners

by Denise Levertov

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea —“

But we have only begun
To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
— so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
— we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet —
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

This is the third in a series of Sunday columns celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Each column touches on one of the great principles of our nation. The first considered Equality, the second Liberty. This week: Indivisibility.

“…one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Americans have been pledging their allegiance to our Republic in those words since 1892—though the words “under God”,” of course, were added in 1954, during the Cold War, to distinguish the United States from those nations where state atheism was aggressively enforced. The Supreme Court has never resolved the issue of whether including the phrase “under God” violates our Constitution’s Establishment Clause.

But today I want to focus on the word that comes after that contested phrase: Indivisible.

These days, for many Americans, the idea that our nation is “indivisible” is also contested.

Equality and Liberty are ideals that we argue about and sometimes fight about. But indivisibility—”one nation, indivisible”—is supposed to be a fact. The people who first started pledging allegiance to an “indivisible” Republic in the 1890s had a quarter-century earlier proved the case by way of the bloodiest war in our history. “Indivisible” was for them a cry of victory over the forces of disunion, a fact established once and for all at a terrible cost.

Yet today, some of the loudest voices in our public life insist the fact has failed.

The country is coming apart, they say. Some say it with grief. Some, God help them, say it with relish.

I don’t believe it. And to explain why, I want to talk about the man who saved our Union—and before that, redefined it so that our country was worthy of all the lives that were lost in the bloody struggle to save it.

Abraham Lincoln was underestimated by most people for most of his life. He was common; both low-born (in the language of his day) and undistinguished. The smart set at every step—from Indiana to Springfield to Washington—saw nothing in this gangling giant with his high-pitched voice and twanging Kentucky accent but a graceless rube with an ordinary legal mind and a corny sense of humor.

Edwin Stanton, who served as Lincoln’s redoubtable Secretary of War, had been a political rival for years, and dismissed Lincoln as “a low, cunning clown” and “the original gorilla.”

But it was Stanton, at the bedside when Lincoln died, who said with reverence and love, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

In my judgment, two character traits made Lincoln a great man, the greatest American. Both are relevant to us today.

First, he had an excellent mind—powerful, penetrating, relentless. Lincoln’s intellectual superpower was an appetite for essentials: He naturally drove right down to the absolute heart of things, and examined issues first in their essences. Then the whole field of ramifications and complications was clear to him.

That trait helped to spark the Civil War.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

This was the real issue before the country—Lincoln’s famous declaration in the 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas.

“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” he continued, relentlessly. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

For decades, American political leaders had done everything they possibly could to avoid that conclusion, or at least avoid saying it out loud. Lincoln couldn’t help himself.

The second trait that made Lincoln a very great man (“incontestably the greatest man I ever knew,” Ulysses Grant said of him) was not intellectual.

He was a kind man.

Sounds simple. Small, even, when one considers the great and terrible issues he faced. Don’t presidents have to be tough?

Yes, and kind (or should be). Many people underestimated Lincoln because the conventional signs of greatness were missing. He was awkward rather than commanding, humorous rather than grand, patient rather than imperious, merciful rather than severe. They mistook his kindness for weakness. Then, under the tremendous pressure of civil war, they discovered that these were not deficiencies. They were the true sources of his political power.

And he used that power for one thing: To save the Union.

Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who knew Lincoln in Congress and then later served as vice president of the Confederacy, said that with Lincoln the Union “in sentiment rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism.”

But maybe that commitment masks something darker, something we look for more carefully today.

More and more people in our time ask: Wasn’t Abraham Lincoln a racist?

Or, at the least, too slow and too reluctant to join the fight for the abolition of slavery that it hardly makes a difference what you call him?

A decade after Lincoln’s death, the great American abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass said he was, “the white man’s president,” and that when it came to the abolition of slavery, Lincoln was “dull, cold, tardy and indifferent.”

It’s true; Lincoln moved slowly against slavery his whole political career—until he didn’t. He hated slavery, he said, but his overarching goal was to preserve the Union. Perhaps that is not good enough for 21st Century Americans.

Later in his life, Frederick Douglass said something else about Lincoln, whom he met personally several times. The two men became friendly. Douglass was the first Black person to enter the White House as a visitor, and he and Lincoln met there several times.

“I have often said that Mr. Lincoln was the first great man with whom I could talk for hours without being once reminded, either by way of compliment or condescension, of my color,” he said. “Mr. Lincoln said and did nothing during our interviews that reminded me in any way of our difference in color.”

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”

That was Lincoln’s hope, his plea, declared in march 1861 in his first Inaugural Address, as the seceding Southern states were preparing for war.

He never retracted that commitment, even during the worst days of the war. Lincoln was a clever man, and he could hold two things at once in his mind—a skill most Americans seem to have lost. He prosecuted the war without compromise, to unconditional victory—and he refused, absolutely, to make enemies of the people he was defeating.

I believe that is the moral and intellectual discipline our moment demands.

I hold, without apology, to committed opposition against a political movement that masquerades as patriotism while working against the bedrock practices of our democracy. Lincoln did not split the difference with secession; he defeated it. But he never forgot what the fight was for. The goal was Union. It still is.

I believe the vast majority of Americans still love this country—despite the voices, right and left, trashing it.

I believe in the Union Lincoln gave his life to save.

This week’s poem is Edwin Markham’s “Lincoln, the Man of the People.”

Markham is utterly obscure today, but around 1900 he was perhaps the most famous poet in the nation. He wrote poems in a clear, public, democratic voice that modernism buried.

On May 30, 1922, at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, before a hundred thousand people, and carried across the country by the new miracle of radio—he read this poem. The crowd that day was segregated.

Markham’s Lincoln is made of the common earth itself—the patience of the cliff, the rain that loves all leaves, “the smack and tang of elemental things.” And he dies like a lordly cedar tree going down, “leaving “a lonesome place against the sky.”

That lonesome place is ours to fill.

—Terry

Lincoln, Man of the People

by Edwin Markham

When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour
Greatening and darkening as it hurried on,
She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down
To make a man to meet the mortal need.
She took the tried clay of the common road—
Clay warm yet with the genial heat of Earth,
Dashed through it all a strain of prophecy;
Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears;
Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff.
Into the shape she breathed a flame to light
That tender, tragic, ever-changing face.
Here was a man to hold against the world,
A man to match the mountains and the sea.

The color of the ground was in him, the red earth;
The smack and tang of elemental things;
The rectitude and patience of the cliff;
The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves;
The friendly welcome of the wayside well;
The courage of the bird that dares the sea;
The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn;
The pity of the snow that hides all scars;
The secrecy of streams that make their way
Beneath the mountain to the rifted rock;
The tolerance and equity of light
That gives as freely to the shrinking flower
As to the great oak flaring to the wind—
To the grave’s low hill as to the Matterhorn
That shoulders out the sky. Sprung from the West,
He drank the valorous youth of a new world.
The strength of virgin forests braced his mind,
The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul.
His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts
Were roots that firmly gripped the granite truth.

Up from log cabin to the Capitol,
One fire was on his spirit, one resolve—
To send the keen ax to the root of wrong,
Clearing a free way for the feet of God,
The eyes of conscience testing every stroke,
To make his deed the measure of a man.
He built the rail-pile as he built the State,
Pouring his splendid strength through every blow:
The grip that swung the ax in Illinois
Was on the pen that set a people free.

So came the Captain with the mighty heart;
And when the judgment thunders split the house,
Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest,
He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again
The rafters of the Home.   He held his place—
Held the long purpose like a growing tree—
Held on through blame and faltered not at praise.
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

—Terry and Johanna

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We’re back home from Michigan, back to Maryland’s steamy, stormy summer, back to work. So let’s talk!

JOIN TABLE TALK LIVE HERE

How’s your summer going? Join us for a chat at our kitchen table about the week in politics and at home. Drop your questions and comments here, and see you soon!

—Terry and Johanna

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Early Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo took the coffee and the meal his wife had prepared for him, said goodbye to his dog, and walked out of the house he built with his own hands.

Lorenzo was 52 years old, a husband and father, a carpenter and contractor by trade. He had spent 35 years building homes in and around Houston, framing the suburbs of that city. Hundreds of homes, by his family’s count.

On Tuesday, Lorenzo was driving through the Magnolia Park neighborhood looking for workers to hire when agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement moved to stop his van. Within minutes, one of them shot him.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo died at Ben Taub Hospital in Houston—the same hospital, his eldest son said, where he and his brothers were born.

A good man was killed, and now an American family—yes, an American family—is torn apart, drowning in grief.

The government claims the killing was justified. The Department of Homeland Security asserts that Salgado rammed an ICE vehicle and tried to run over an officer, who fired in self-defense. Their evidence for this scenario, ICE tells us, is based on “information we are receiving.” They are immediately declaring that unverified information proves a settled verdict of self-defense.

That’s not an investigation. It’s a press release pretending to be one.

And we have seen this press release before.

In January, in Minneapolis, the government told us that Renee Good, an American citizen and mother, had weaponized her car against an ICE officer who fired in self-defense.

Then the video emerged, showing the agent standing clear of her car when he shot her. The Hennepin County medical examiner ruled her death a homicide, but the feds were—and remain—adamant. They want the world to believe Renee Good was a killer. The State of Minnesota actually had to go to court to pry the evidence out of federal hands.

In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, last week, just six days before the shooting in Houston, an ICE officer fired at another driver who, the agency said, had “weaponized his car.” Same story, same script, same word. Juan Proaño of LULAC spoke for a skeptical nation when he responded with two syllables: “Prove it.”

Instead, what we get from the Trump administration is a process that’s a legal farce, at best, a coverup at worst.

The shooting of Lorenzo Salgado is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general. The agency is investigating itself. And the current inspector general—hand-picked by Trump in 2019 and left there through the Biden administration—was cited by Congress in 2024 for “engaging in conduct undermining the independence or integrity reasonably expected of his position.”

The FBI, meanwhile, has opened an investigation into the alleged “assault” by Loranzo Salgado on the federal officer. Which means that right now the only criminal suspect in this killing in Houston is the man in the morgue.

The Harris County District Attorney, whose office ordinarily investigates every death at the hands of law enforcement in that county, says federal authorities have shut him out entirely. A man is dead on a Texas street, and Texas is not permitted to ask why.

Here is what I think this case reveals.

And why it matters beyond one family’s grief—though that grief is what speaks most powerfully to us, what ought to bind us in the fight for justice.

The American people were promised an immigration crackdown aimed at the worst among us—the traffickers, the gang members, the predators. That promise won an election. But dangerous criminals are hard to find, because dangerous criminals hide.

A carpenter is easy to find.

Lorenzo Salgado’s son described his father as a man of routine—same early hour, same white van, same streets, same lunch his wife packed, same porch in the evening with his dog and his music.

This is the basic truth right now in Washington, DC: A bureaucratic machine handed $70 billion by Congress and assigned obscene arrest quotas will always optimize the easily findable over the truly fearsome. The very virtues that made this man admirable—regularity, industry, visibility, roots—are what made him catchable. That’s what’s happening.

The cruelty of the killing of Lorenzo Salgado—and of so many more non-lethal arrests and brutalizations of our immigrant neighbos—is not an accident of the Trump administration’s policy. It is the arithmetic of their policy.

And Americans have noticed: it’s why support for an enforcement regime that polls once showed to be Trump’s strongest issue has collapsed. The country was promised the worst of us and has watched the government harvest the best of us.

Salgado, by his son’s account, had spent the last year and a half assembling a work-permit application—photographs, letters from employers, testimonials—and was close to receiving it. He was in the line. Then they killed him.

Most Americans do not want this.

They want a border that is orderly, safe, lawful, and democratically accountable, and immigration enforcement aimed at people who actually endanger them. What they got instead, on Tuesday, was a man shot at dawn while he was looking for work, a government trying to cover it up, and a family learning of his death from a video. His son recognized his dad not by his face but by his voice, as he cried out in the street with his last breaths for help as he was being killed.

His name was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He built houses. He built a family. He built a life.

The American dream is not an abstraction; it is a man like this.

And this week, the government of the United States shot it dead in the street and called it self-defense.

—Terry

This is the second of three Sunday columns celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Each week, we’ll look at one poem that touches on one of the great principles of our nation: Equality, Liberty, and Indivisibility.

Last week, Equality—here.

This week, Liberty.

What does it mean to be free?

“It’s a free country,” we like to say.

Is it? What do we mean when we say that?

The idea of liberty is central to the American journey, and it has been contested since before the ink on the Declaration dried. It turns out that “Liberty,’“ in the hands of generations of Americans, is a pretty slippery concept.

The Brits called out the sinister elasticity of “Liberty” in America as soon as they read Thomas Jefferson’s magnificent sentence.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Samuel Johnson, the English critic and lexicographer, contemptuously asked.

The English abolitionist Thomas Day cut deeper: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”

For generations, that word “Liberty” meant the opposite for millions of Americans.

And it kept meaning its opposite.

John C. Calhoun, Senator and Vice President from South Carolina and the fiercest champion of the “rights” of slaveowners, constructed an entire intellectual edifice to perform the immoral linguistic alchemy.

“It is a great and dangerous error,” he wrote in his Disquisition on Government, “to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty.”

Liberty was, Calhoun declared, “a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike—a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving—and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.”

Does that sound familiar to you? Hear any echoes of it in our own time?

Calhoun was (and still is, by some conservatives) considered to be a great political theorist, an intellectual of the first rank.

But Abraham Lincoln, with his characteristic clarity and biting humor, punctured the moral idiocy of Calhoun’s argument with a simple story.

Imagine, he told audiences, a shepherd driving a wolf away from a sheep’s throat just in time. The sheep will thank the shepherd as a liberator; the wolf will denounce him as a destroyer of liberty.

“Plainly,” Lincoln concluded, “the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word.”

Same word. There’s a lot of mischief in it.

In the 1950s, Southern segregationists shifted the resonance slightly, but kept the claim to power in their reaction to the Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education. “Freedom of choice,” they demanded.

So Southern school boards kept both public schools open and let each child “choose” annually between the formerly-white and formerly-Black one. But then they relied on fear, inertia, threats, and social pressure to keep the choosing from happening. Black children and white children were regarded as “free” to attend the other race’s school if they so desired. And almost none did. The Supreme Court put a stop to this charade in the 1968 case of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County.

So what is it, really? What does it mean to be free?

Which brings us to Allen Ginsberg, and his great, strange ode to our beloved country.

The leading figure of the Beat Movement in American literature, Ginsberg liked to say that he was America’s greatest Jewish, Marxist, Zen Buddhist, homosexual poet. He was right about that. Not a whole lot of competition for that title, really.

In truth, Allen Ginsberg was one of the freest men who ever lived. A lifelong dissenter, openly gay when that was dangerous, a man fearlessly himself.

He learned the fierce posture of self-liberation from Walt Whitman, his “lonely old courage-teacher,” he called him. Whitman’s epic poem, “Song of Myself” is somehow also a song of everyone, an ecstatic declaration of universal love. The “I” at the heart of it turns out to be a “we.”

And right there, in the greatest work of our greatest poet, is the American answer to the slippery word, “Liberty”: self-expression so true and deep that it opens outward onto the whole people, instead of closing in against them.

So this is Allen Ginsberg’s ode to our country.

On the poem. It is long, maddening, and at times sexually explicit. (It’s Allen Ginsberg.) In one passage Ginsberg puts on the voice of the country’s own bigotry, and deploys a racist slur. That passage is fierce anti-racist satire and worth reading whole—but it is not needed for our theme here, and I will not set that word under this masthead. I have marked the cut; the full poem is a click away.

—Terry

America

by Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?

I’m trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I’m addressing you.

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

I’d better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.

America you don’t really want to go to war.

America its them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. [Line omitted.]. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

America is this correct?

I’d better get right down to the job.

It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

Wherever you are celebrating our beloved country’s 250th birthday, we hope it’s full of fireworks and good feelings, all-American food from all our families’ diverse traditions, and hope for better times ahead.

—Terry and Johanna

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We’re coming to you this week from Michigan, our “studio” a 99-year-old cottage built by Johanna’s great-grandparents on a beautiful lake not far from Traverse City. So we’re in vacation mode, and we hope you have some time as this holiday weekend begins to join us. Lots to talk about.

Drop your questions and comments here, and we’ll see you at 2PM ET!

—Terry and Johanna

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Barbara is not her real name.

We do not know her real name, and that fact belongs at the beginning of this story.

“Barbara” is a pregnant mother who sued the President of the United States, using a pseudonym. She was asking the Supreme Court to keep the promise our country made to her unborn child, and she was afraid of what her neighbors might do to her family if they knew.

Here is what we do know. She fled Honduras with her husband and three children, running from the Mara 18 gang, and has been living in New Hampshire since 2024, seeking asylum. In February 2025, she learned she was pregnant—just a few weeks after President Trump signed an executive order declaring that her baby, though born on American soil, would be no American.

As the litigation proceeded, nature took its course. Last October, the baby was born, on American soil. And that is the child whom—along with so many others—our government went all the way to the Supreme Court to unmake as an American.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court refused to strip this child of US citizenship, and so reaffirmed the idea so plainly stated in the Fourteenth Amendment: Every child born here is one of us. The only exceptions are the ones that were established in 1866, when the Amendment was passed—children of foreign diplomats and of invading foreign military forces. The vote was 6 to 3 (though the principle of birthright citizenship under the Constitution was upheld by a vote of only 5-4.)

What struck me about about the Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Court is how quiet it is. There is no trumpet blast about the US being a nation of immigrants, no Emma Lazarus. It is all common law and the debates of 1866, Wong Kim Ark and the careful weighing of the Trump administration’s theory that only children of those immigrants who are properly “domiciled” in the US (as Trump’s executive order defines that term) are citizens if they are born here.

The Chief Justice closes his opinion for the Court by calling birthright citizenship a promise the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment made to every child born on American soil. “We keep that promise today,” he writes.

That’s it. And maybe Roberts is making a point with the modesty of his language.

For a century and more, this ruling would have been seen as totally normal—mainstream—unobjectionable to the vast majority of legal scholars, political leaders, and ordinary citizens of both parties.

Birthright citizenship was settled law in the deepest sense; settled not just in the casebooks but in the country’s understanding of itself.

I thought the case should have come out 9–0. Instead, there were three dissents, tendentious and radical, and a fourth justice who grudgingly joined the result but not the constitutional principle, encouraging a MAGA Congress and president to pass a law and try again.

So times have changed. For the worse.

Ask yourself honestly: fifteen years ago, would this case have been close at all?

Then came the reaction to Barbara’s victory in the Supreme Court. Incandescent rage.

Representative Troy Nehls of Texas proposed a ten-year moratorium on all immigration, declaring: “You have to love our country. We gotta put a bedsheet—a big bedsheet—over the Statue of Liberty…She gotta go to sleep for a while. I’m not saying she’s dead. Instead of having a torch, maybe she needs a stop sign.”

Matt Walsh, far-right provocateur, publicly confessed a hatred for the justices in the majority—and all who agree with the ruling—simply because they affirm the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, accepted for generations:

Stephen Miller, the President’s chief domestic policy adviser, reacted with his customary hatefulness and fascist rhetoric. He called the ruling “a deep knife-wound in the heart of the American republic,’“ and went on to show the depths of his bigotry and his own weird insecurities, screeching about the idea that a baby born here to immigrant parents “can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you, and sit in judgment of me!”

And then there was the editor of a prominent conservative publication who looked forward, offering his ideas to undo what the Court had done. He included, without irony, the forced sterilization of foreign visitors—a proposal that international law classifies, plainly, as a crime against humanity. This man remains employed. He will suffer no consequence at all.

Trump did not make these people this way.

I don’t believe that. The truth is worse, and that’s the terrible lesson of this moment.

In the summer of 2016, a team of researchers offered people in reliably Republican states a small amount of money to authorize a donation to a fiercely anti-immigrant organization. Half were promised anonymity; half were told a researcher might learn of their choice and follow up with them.

Before the election, that little difference mattered enormously. It turns out that some people would take the deal—support that organization in secret—but not make that choice if there was a possibility it would come to light.

Then Trump won, and the researchers ran the experiment again. The gap had vanished. Same people. Same money. Same organization. The only thing that had changed in those few weeks was what they believed their neighbors would think of them.

For a long time, I have thought that Donald Trump’s true gift as a demagogue, a kind of genius, is that through his personality, rhetoric, and carnivorous instinct for the dark viscera of his audience, he creates a permission structure. He does not put hatred into people. Rather, he convinces millions of Americans that the shameful thing they carry (we all carry shameful things, since Eden) is not shameful—that the neighbors carry it too, that the mask was only ever a burden, that cruelty can be fun and funny and free. He grants permission—permission to become the worst version of yourself. It’s intoxicating.

And permission, when indulged for long enough, stops being permission and becomes character.

Abraham Lincoln, in the last sentence of his First Inaugural, famously appealed to “the better angels of our nature.’” With rebellion (grounded in racism) already primed and loaded and aimed, Lincoln still believed those “mystic chords of memory” would swell the chorus of union when touched.

Donald Trump’s discovery is that the worse angels of our nature answer to touch as well, and faster.

But we have been here before.

The 1920s gave us the Ku Klux Klan reborn and the Golden Door of immigration slammed shut on explicitly racial lines. It felt permanent, but it was not. What was granted as permission was, eventually, revoked—and not by courts alone but by Americans who decided, one conscience at a time, to be kind to the stranger, to care for him, to invite him in. And to be ashamed again of succumbing to the temptations of racism and cruelty.

The old American ideal was never that we were exceptionally virtuous. We weren’t. We have always been capable of prejudice, selfishness, cruelty, and fear. Our aspiration was different. It was that, despite our failings, we should try to become better than the worst version of ourselves. And thus establish a free and decent society.

Barbara is a citizen of the United States. The Court kept the promise. The harder promise—the one about who we are willing to be, in public, in our shared civic life—is not Court’s to keep. It never was.

—Terry

Coming to you from Up North in Michigan.

See you soon!

—Terr

y

Bring our questions and comments as we cover tonight’s big stories.

See you soon!

—Terry

I’m sad about The Great American State Fair.

It’s a bust, so far.

It was supposed to be something special, the centerpiece public “expo” of America’s 250th birthday: A free, 16-day national exposition on the National Mall, with pavilions and programming from all 56 US states and territories, plus music, rides, cultural exhibits, military elements, movie screenings, flyovers, and a Ferris wheel. All of it to celebrate the people, traditions, innovations, and spirit of our beloved country.

That sounds awesome.

I mentioned to Johanna a couple of weeks back that I wanted to go, and asked if she did.

“No. Not if it’s going to be all about him.”

It seems a lot of people feel the same way. This photo was taken on the third day of The Great American State Fair:

What a shame.

It should have been a truly national birthday party.

A celebration of states, food traditions, crafts, music, agriculture, invention, regional pride, and public memory. But the branding, the kickoff rally, especially Trump’s speech (a few scripted paragraphs of patriotic boilerplate, the rest just “Me, me, me, me, me”), the Trump-centered monuments and MAHA programming, the atmosphere soaked in donor privilege and partisan politics, the performers withdrawing, the states opting-out, and the predictable lies about crowd-size all turned what could have been a shared civic ritual into something many Americans correctly read as a Trump spectacle, just as Johanna predicted.

Maybe it will turn around. Maybe the crowds will come. Maybe the meaning of our national holiday will shine through the MAGA dross. Maybe the president will make it less about himself, more about us.

And maybe, as the Irish say, it will rain beer.

The deepest problem isn’t Trump, though he fuels it. The real issue, and tragedy, is that too many Americans feel we don’t share the same country any more, the same culture, the same history, even. And they’re done debating the question.

The sharp edge of MAGA claims the country for themselves and themselves alone. It’s their country. Trump has liberated many of these followers into an assertion of the power to decide who is a “real American,” and who isn’t. And his administration is using the apparatus of the national government to establish that claim as law.

But it’s not their country. It’s ours. America belongs to all of us.

Recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants. Devout Christians and proud atheists, Muslims and Jews and so many more. Black and White Americans and those of all the various, glorious shades our people come in. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Green voters and—yes—Socialists, the whole political spectrum. Trans people. The imprisoned. “Anchor babies.” The disabled.

You aren’t more American, or more of a “real American,” because of who you’re great-great-great granddaddy was, or how much money you’ve got, or what your politics are.

Goodness gracious, that is the whole point of the place! That is precisely what we celebrate on the Fourth of July, the world-changing promise and pledge that we made to ourselves and to all peoples for all time, the promise we still struggle to fulfill in a national journey unlike any other in human history:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

That audacious declaration, and the continuing work we must do to make it real, is worthy of a truly splendid celebration after 250 years.

We’ll have to do it ourselves.

And we will, in our own ways, our own towns, our own families.

And our own newsletters and websites.

So I thought The Sunday Poem can be part of that, too. Over the next three weeks (a 250th birthday deserves a season of observances), we’ll have a poem that touches on the great principles of our nation: Equality, Liberty, Indivisibility.

We have fought for each of those American ideals down through the generations; we must still fight. And perhaps a poem that reflects upon some aspect of the power of those principles can help, in a small way, to commemorate what our ancestors did to bring us this far, and inspire us to carry on the work.

We begin with equality, as the Declaration does.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is sometimes called the Black National Anthem. It is also a magnificent lyric set to stirring music, the words written by James Weldon Johnson and the melody by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson. Their stories and achievements are remarkable; it’s worth looking them up.

I’d only note how strong in hope these words are, hope that our country can fulfill that 250-year-old promise. As I read them, I was once again grateful for the long and terrible struggle of Black Americans, whose work in our country’s history was memorably described by historian Nikole Hannah-Jones in The 1619 Project:

“Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: it is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

James Weldon Johnson himself describes how this song came to be.

—Terry

Lift Every Voice and Sing

by James Weldon Johnson

A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.
Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.
The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.

Lift every voice and sing   
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.   
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;   
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,   
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,   
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might   
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,   
May we forever stand.   
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Click here: YouTube.com/@TerryMoranJournalist.

See you soon!

—Terry

We recorded this one last week, but Johanna was on her game, and I want to get back to a regular schedule of posting these. Expanding my work to a daily news program and trying to build out an enhanced website (RealPatriotism.com) has gotten in the way. Won’t let it happen again.

Alas, this Friday, Johanna is in South Carolina for—you guessed it—a travel-sports tournament. Michael’s baseball team. We talk about it a little bit at the end of this one.

I love the Substack community and I love Table Talk—so I’ll make sure I get these out as soon as we do them.

See you July 2nd!

—Terry and Johanna

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On Tuesday night in New York, there was an earthquake.

You couldn’t measure it on the old Richter Scale, but you could feel it in your bones. It felt new. It felt like a new Democratic Party was declaring itself—and it wasn’t asking permission from anyone to do so.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s hand-picked slate of Democratic Socialists swept the city’s congressional primaries. Sitting members of Congress were turned out by insurgents half their age. And a chant went up at the victory rallies, not a name, but three letters, “DSA! DSA! DSA!”

Mayor Mamdani, all of thirty-four years old himself, stood in the middle of it, and he told the crowds that this was not the end of anything, but the beginning of something. Watching Mamdani, it felt like a generation taking the keys away from Granddad.

And I, a 66-year-old man, said to myself, “It’s about time.”

But I want to be honest with you about what I also felt, because I suspect many of you felt some version of it too.

I felt the vertigo of being overtaken.

I like to say that I am a member of what sometimes feels like the most despised community in American politics: the proud center-left.

That’s a little theatrical, but only a little. I come out of the old labor, civil-rights, patriotic left—the Hubert Humphrey tradition, if that name still means anything to anyone under sixty. I believe in unions, public purpose, service to community and nation, American pluralism, social insurance for all who need support, civil rights, American power when used wisely, and the idea that democracy is not just the process by which we vote for candidates, but a moral inheritance that we must defend.

The left I grew up loving was the left of the labor hall and the civil rights coalition; of solidarity with the migrant farm worker and the ordinary soldier; of a patriotism that constantly pushed the country into keeping its promises. It took prayer seriously and stood for the national anthem. That left was fierce in opposition to the status quo of those years, but it was rooted in the conviction that America is worth fighting for.

I believe it still is, and that is something I recognize and admire in this fast-rising movement in the Democratic Party—the Mamdani movement, you might call it. They want to make our country better, for all of us.

This movement is answering a real failure, and the failure is ours.

A generation of Americans cannot find an apartment they can afford in the cities their parents built, or a home in the towns they grew up in. The cost of an ordinary life—rent, health care, a child or more—has gone far beyond the reach of the people who do the actual work of the country now.

My political kind had decades to address this and did not. The young organizers knocking on doors in Queens did not invent the anger that fuels so much of this movement. It was already there, behind those doors and so many others, lying out in the street where we passed it by. The anger in this movement is right and proper. But there is also hope in the eyes of those door-knockers in Queens—because the young Americans driving this movement know it’s their turn now, and no old guard, no establishment, no worn-out rhetoric or musty political customs are going to stop them.

And it’s that demographic fact that many older Americans find frightening. Maybe it’s just Mamdani’s charisma and skill, they might tell themselves. Maybe it’s just the latest fad for these kids. Maybe the anger will die down.

To dismiss this movement as merely a fever, a fashion, a children’s crusade, is to commit the oldest sin of a tired establishment: mistaking your own exhaustion for wisdom.

And yet.

Traveling under the banners of this movement, is something old and ugly.

A kind of permission in the air, the loosening of a taboo.

On October 7, 2023, hours after one of the most atrocious acts of terrorism in history, DSA National issued a statement saying it stood in “solidarity with Palestine,” that “today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime,” and that the attack “was not unprovoked,” while also saying it “unequivocally condemn[s] the killing of all civilians.”

The sequence there matters. A lot. So does the morality. The slaughter of October 7th was not an “attack” in any military or political sense of the word.

“From the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” are common chants in this movement. Those are phrases that contemplate and call for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Given the history of the last 78 years (to say nothing of the last 3000 years), the people of Israel are not crazy to believe that those calls are not merely about political arrangements.

I know many of my friends will disagree with me on these points, and some may simply unsubscribe and move on. But before you do, let me give you a bit more of how I understand the beautiful, tormented land of Israel and Palestine.

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in that region. I am not by any means an expert, just an ordinary journalist, one witness to many of the events that shaped the present moment.

I condemn the actions of Israel towards the Palestinians across decades.

The stealing of Palestinian land meant under international law for a Palestinian state. The brutalization of the Palestinian people on a daily basis. The rising racism in Israel against Palestinians. And, emphatically, Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

A few days ago, reacting to a poll which showed that for the first time in two decades, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis, I posted this on X:

So: I believe there should be a Palestinian state—now—in accordance with UN Resolutions 242, 338, 1397.

My whole adult life I’ve held the same attitude about the Middle East that most Americans once held: A bedrock commitment to self-determination for peoples, in the mainstream Jeffersonian/Wilsonian tradition.

It is the principle that a distinct people has the right to freely determine their political status and pursue their own destiny in the world.

Israel and Palestine.

I am committed to this approach because I believe it is in the interests of the United States and remains squarely in the best traditions of our own Revolution and the best of our foreign policy.

The hardest freedom we have.

It’s not the freedom to speak—that one is loud and cheap and everywhere. The hardest freedom is the freedom to tell your friends when you believe they are wrong, to stay loyal to the truth instead of the team, to love a movement enough to tell it the thing it does not want to hear.

So let us watch this new movement rising in the Democratic Party with a glad heart and open eyes. Cheer what is brave in it. Name what is poisonous in it. Refuse anyone, on any side, who tells you that loving your country, or your cause, requires you to stop seeing.

That act of witness is not just the job of a journalist. It is the citizen’s whole vocation, and in every generation it belongs to each and every one of us.

—Terry

Imagine being Benjamin Netanyahu this week.

Or any Israeli who cheered the strike that started this wretched war and rejoiced at the prospect of total victory, at long last, over their most dangerous enemy; who actually believed that the man in the Oval Office—Donald Trump—was the presidential partner of their dreams: bold, unsentimental, willing to do what cautious presidents would not, willing to stay the course and get the job done.

Now they have learned what everyone who does business with Donald Trump eventually learns. An iron truth of war, of life: Character is destiny. A man’s nature is his fate, and the fate of all who lash themselves to him.

Trump rolls the dice, it is true. His willingness to try things other presidents had not resulted in the Abraham Accords, the strike last June on Iran’s nuclear sites, and the raid in Caracas to seize Nicolás Maduro.

The dice ran hot. The longshots came in, and Trump mistook luck for genius. He always has.

Because the gambler who rolls big enough, long enough, eventually rolls snake-eyes…

Continue reading at Real Patriotism ➡

Real Patriotism is where I am building a new “civic newsroom.”

It’s drawing on what I’ve found to be the most exciting aspects of independent journalism, where readers are not just an audience but co-creators—included in the journalism itself, and not just in comments but in conversations, guest columns, story development, booking ideas, events and more.

Hope you’l join me.

See you soon!

—Terry

How can you not like this guy?

That’s Pope Leo XIV (Father Bob Prevost at the time), of course, at the 2005 World Series, won by his beloved Chicago White Sox.

Now, I’m a Cubs fan and am supposed to hold all Sox fans in bitter contempt. But here’s the thing: My dad was from the South Side of Chicago, and he was a lifelong White Sox fan. My mom was from the North Side, and she was a stalwart Cubs fan. It was a mixed marriage, Chicago-style. Their ten kids each rooted for whichever team was good when they were little. So the Sox have a claim on my heart by kinship, and I can forgive the Pope for this error in judgment.

His Holiness, however, is not so tolerant. Last year, during an appearance at the Vatican, someone in the crowd yelled, “Go Cubs!” This, after the North Siders had made the playoffs for the first time in five years, but then lost to the Milwaukee Brewers in the Division Series. It was sad. But Leo cheerfully taunted the man. In two languages. This I cannot forgive.

Leo’s American-ness doesn’t stop with baseball. He’s a guy who walks the walk.

The pope has, by dint of circumstances and by his own lifelong faith commitment, become the major voice in opposition to a populist movement that has arisen across the globe—a movement marked in many ways by rabid racism, gleeful cruelty, and weaponized Christianity.

Donald Trump is the world leader of this movement, and Trump v. Leo XIV is the great moral contest of public life in our time.

Now Leo has sounded a cry of moral opposition to artificial intelligence, at a moment that Trump and MAGA might be reachable, might be able to hear it.

We are all astonished by AI. You can’t not be. It is a promethean tool. And a weapon that can turn itself against us.

We are all worried by AI. You can’t not be. The people who invented it acknowledge without exaggeration that there is a non-zero possibility the technology will end human life or become the dominant power on our planet.

The Biden administration understood this. Top officials from the president on down saw the dangers, and understood that significant regulation was necessary to keep our country, and our world, safe. It was a technology so dangerous, like nuclear power, that the private sector could not be counted on to develop it alone.

That was the moment all the previously “woke” tech bros went MAGA. Because they don’t believe in anything except their own power and fortunes.

Trump changed all that. Let it rip, was his administration’s attitude (though they may be having a change of heart.)

Enter Pope Leo.

On Monday, the first American pope released his first encyclical. Magnifica Humanitas—Magnificent Humanity.

It is about safeguarding the human person—each one of us as we are made and meant to be by nature. And it is an unmistakably American argument.

Technology is never neutral, Leo writes. He rejects the idea that AI—its voracious collecting of all human intellectual productions; its rapacious need for energy and water and other resources; its financial incentives to eliminate workers; its creators’ hubris and inhumanity—is just another business venture, just a new set of platforms we that we can choose how to deploy and use.

“Technological power,” the pope declares, “takes on an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect…We must, then, avoid the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak.”

We are one human family, he is saying. And I say: If you don’t like that—move to Mars.

But the pope goes deeper than righteous condemnation. And here is where you sense the American in him.

The key word of the whole thing, the controlling verb of this pope’s call to action on AI is: Building. Leo wants each one of us out on the work site of our AI age, hands dirty, doing the heavy lifting.

Papal documents usually talk about social issues in the abstract metaphysical mode and lingo of the Curia. But Leo writes in the register of the parish hall after Mass, the union meeting during tough times, maybe even the ballpark during a lull in the game. His is the American Catholicism built on this continent by bricklayers and pipefitters, by men and women who organized garment workers and steelworkers and farmworkers, by a Church that produced Father John Ryan and Dorothy Day and the the 1986 American bishops’ letter Economic Justice for All.

American Catholicism has been plagued by many abuses—there is no denying this. But, at its best, it has drawn on the genius of the workshop and the picket line, dignified by sacrament and reasoned by St. Thomas Aquinas. Pope Leo—born in Chicago, formed as a missionary in Peru—writes in that tradition.

Which brings me to what I take to be the deepest gift this encyclical offers our American moment.

Our liberalism is in trouble. It has been in trouble for some time.

The procedures and rights remain, the analyses and policies, but the soul seems to have thinned in it.

American liberalism cannot quite explain anymore why the individual human person is and must be the focus of moral concern, why dignity—not just assistance—is owed to the weakest among us, why a citizen is more than a consumer or a data point with material needs.

Liberalism used to do this naturally. FDR’s oratory is laced with encouragement and American fellowship grounded in solidarity. Other great liberals reached out to us this way, too. Robert Kennedy (SENIOR). Martin Luther King Jr. Barack Obama at his best.

They all drew on inheritances—biblical, classical, republican—that gave liberal ideas and commitments depth and durability. Without those resources, without that language of love and faith that seems to embarrass some liberals today, the entire project has become brittle. The technocratic right and the nihilistic right have both noticed. They sense the weakness in an arid and over-intellectualized liberalism, and they sell the people MAGA fantasies and unbounded libertarianism for their AI empires.

But Pope Leo offers, in his encyclical about machines, the inheritance our liberalism most needs: a deep, spiritual account of the human person. Not a bundle of preferences. Not an optimization problem. Not a quantity to be perfected or surpassed. Not a negotiation among groups. Something irreducible, owed reverence. He reminds us we are made for communion with one another and with all creation. We are a mystery, in the end, that no language, digital or otherwise, can finally translate.

That is a gift. American liberalism has always borrowed quietly from American faith without quite admitting it. Leo, an American pope, is offering to lend the inheritance back to us in broad daylight. Let us listen.

—Terry

Vikki and Mark Pier visit the grave of their son, Noah, who was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in July 2011. PHOTO CREDIT: Erin Stalnaker

It’s Memorial Day Weekend, and I am thinking of my mother, who taught me—and our whole family—so much about what Memorial Day means.

I think of her often, of course. Margie Lou Moran, née Goodrich, born July 7, 1922.

In 1940, on the steps of the library at DePaul University, she met our dad, Joseph Thomas Moran Jr, two years older than she. In early 1942, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, he volunteered and went to war. US Army 11th Airborne. Fought in the Philippines and on Okinawa, served in the occupation of Japan, and came home in 1946.

He came home.

So many they knew did not. Their absence defined “The Greatest Generation” as much, if not more, as the presidents and CEOs and famous intellectuals and actors and athletes of their time. They all came home. But they all carried with them the dead of their generation—specifically in memory, or as a kind of climate of loss that shaped the spiritual life of our country for decades. I think it made us closer as a people, more civil.

When my dad came home, they started their family, and made up for any lost time by having ten children. Seven sons, three daughters. “It was so much fun,” Margie Lou kept saying through her tears the night my father died 36 years later. “It was so much fun.”

She had seven sons. And each one of us remember how, on Memorial Day (Veterans Day, too, sometimes), she would tell us the names of the young men she knew who did not come home from World War II, and tell us where they died, and what she knew of the circumstances. “Tommy Curran, shot down over Leyte Gulf.” (That wasn’t one of the names; I don’t recall them now, but that was the feel of the moment.) And as we reached a certain age—19, 20, 21 years old—she would say to us, quietly, maybe more to herself, something like: “Now you are older than Tommy Curran ever was, or ever will be.”

The weight of it. It shaped me and my brothers, just as she intended. And I think of her now, Margie Lou watching as her boys grew up and became young men, and how it made her think of the lads of her youth, “the lads that will never be old”—a line from a poem she loved that she often quoted to us.

Yet we also celebrated Memorial Day, going into town for the local parade, welcoming summer with the rest of the country. She saw no conflict in this. We celebrated the nation and the life that our fallen sons gave their lives to defend and preserve.

And it was natural. It wasn’t some kind of ostentatious advertisement of her patriotism. In some ways, it wasn’t patriotism at all. It wasn’t part of a debate or grievance or tribal declaration. It was life. American life.

She was a Real Patriot, Margie Lou.

Our poem this week is by Archibald MacLeish, whose younger brother Kenneth was killed in World War I. The recording is his own reading of this poem.

—Terry

The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak

by Archibald MacLeish

The young dead soldiers do not speak.
Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:
who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night
and when the clock counts.
They say: We were young. We have died.
Remember us.
They say: We have done what we could
but until it is finished it is not done.
They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished
no one can know what our lives gave.
They say: Our deaths are not ours: they are yours,
they will mean what you make them.
They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for
peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say,
it is you who must say this.
We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.

Hope you enjoy this chat, covering national issues and home-front challenges, as much as we did.

And Happy Memorial Day!

What a blessing our veterans are, and let us never forget all those who served, but did not come home to become veterans. We owe them everything.

See you soon.

—Terry and Johanna

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What week for our country--and it’s not over! Let’s talk.

Johanna and I are doing “Table Talk” a day early, because of—you guessed it—kids’ sports. Our son has a tournament in North Carolina, and Jo will be heading down there tomorrow. I’ll be holding down the fort here.

So—what’s on your mind?

Me, I am righteously furious about the Trump Slush Fund. And all the rest of the corruption cascading out of this administration. And, to me, some of the real villains here—aside from the president and his White House henchmen—are Trump’s lawyers, all the way up to the Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. A law license is a public trust. And I know that’s a pretty low bar much of the time. You can get a lawyer to make a case for you that the sky is green and the grass is blue, and they’ll do it without blushing. For a nice fee.

But this? At some point the bar should step in. If you are an American lawyer and you have played a part in the plundering of our Treasury with this “weaponization” slush-fund scheme—maybe you should lose your license? What do. you think?

Plenty more to talk about. What stories have you been following this week? What’s making you angry? What is inspiring you?

Let us know—drop a question or a comment here—and we’ll see you at 2PM ET today!