Bret Stephens publishes sacred words!

TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2025

There are no disposable people: This afternoon, during a brief medical sojourn, we had a chance to retreat, once again, inside Francine Prose's book:

HarperCollins Publishers
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
By Francine Prose

“Prose’s book is a stunning achievement. . . . Now Anne Frank stands before us. . . a figure who will live not only in history but also in the literature she aspired to create." Minneapolis Star Tribune

We even found ourselves asking this: 

Have we ever read a better book? More on that below.

Returning to our sprawling campus, we were lucky enough to encounter Bret Stephens' new column. These are extremely dangerous times, but they may help us recall the essentials. 

Stephens starts as shown:

The Destruction of the American Ideal

Even by the ugly standards of this administration, the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia stands out.

A Salvadoran migrant and metal worker in Maryland with no criminal record other than traffic violations and illegal entry into the country, he was arrested by immigration authorities in March and deported to one of the notorious prisons of his homeland, in contravention of a U.S. immigration judge’s order. The government acknowledged the “administrative error”—an Orwellian euphemism for a Kafkaesque nightmare—but petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a federal judge’s order requiring his return on Monday. The same day, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the lower court’s order so it can have time to consider the case.

Abrego Garcia was an unimportant person when he was deported—except, of course, to his wife and son and two stepchildren. He is the subject of an accusation that he belonged to the MS-13 gang—but there is only flimsy evidence and no proof. The entire edifice of American justice is built on the conviction that there is no guilt without proof beyond reasonable doubt—and that there is no unimportant person, at least not in the eyes of the law.

"There is no unimportant person!" The statement is quite direct. On the Fox News Channel program The Five, Jesse Watters expressed a different point of view. 

Speaking of another deportee, one who is quite likely wholly innocent, the exasperated "silly boy" offered this to Jessica Tarlov:

"It's just a gay barber."

In the (correctable) squalor of the program in question, he was a disposable person.

There is no unimportant person! We feel lucky to have been able to encounter that statement today. In the squalor of the last week, we've been thinking of the start of the Yevtushenko poem, if only in translation:

People 
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

[...]

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

And so on from there.

No people are uninteresting, Yevtushenko said, thinking of the millions of people who died in the Soviet gulag. Then too, there was the aforementioned Frank, who we've long regarded, for no reason we can explain, as a sacred person.

Stephens mentioned Kafka; we'll see him and raise him one. As we noted on Saturday, Philip Roth once referred to Anne Frank in this way:

"She was a marvelous young writer...The ardor in her, the spirit in her—always on the move, always starting things . . . she's he's like some impassioned little sister of Kafka's, his lost little daughter." 

Looking through Prose's book again, we thought of a different comparison. She seems to us like a more sacred version of our own native county's Thoreau.

Here's the impassioned little sister of Kafka, as quoted in Prose's book, even as she's thinking ahead to the decency and the fun of life after liberation:

"Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the 'Secret Annex.' The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story. But, seriously, it would be quite funny ten years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here." 

We thought of Middlesex County's Thoreau, right at the start of his most famous volume:

Walden

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book.

How did they live and what did they eat! One was allowed to return to civilized life. One was "arrested," then sent away to an especially demented, deranged type of prison.

Could it be, at a time like this, that we will remember first principles? Stephens makes a simple statement today:

There are no disposable people.