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It's Friday, May 8, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the gist I Mike Pesca hey, you know where no good news ever comes out of? No, not Lebanon. Used to be Paris in the Middle East. Remember that one? Not even Iran. There are great directors out of Iran. And I guess you could argue that the daring rescue of that US pilot, that was good news. Kind of good news relatively, given the alternative now the location that if it's in the news, it means bad news always and without exception. It's not actually a place, it's many places. And those places are floating all over the world. Cruise ships. The coronavirus outbreak, it is taking a
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C
serious turn in California where a cruise
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ship is being held off the coast right now.
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New this morning, a hidden risk on cruise ships. An NBC News investigation found sexual assault
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as the number one crime on those ships. And the murders, don't forget the murders. Always people getting pushed overboard. But was she pushed? Yes, she was pushed. And the ship that was stranded off the coast of Italy, remember that one? Just rusting out there, leaking some oil. If a cruise ship is in the news, that news is always bad. And a cruise ship has been in the news these last few days. So you know what that means? Hantavirus. Not good. It's not like cholesterol. There's no the good hantavirus. And the so called bad hantavirus? All bad. Why is it bad? Because it's on a cruise ship. Now of course, there are many good things that take place on a cruise ship. They must. There must be. People pay a lot. I'm told there are good things. But just like that old Chris Rock joke about MLK Boulevard. I'm sure many wonderful things go down on Martin Luther King Boulevard in whatever city we're talking about. Those things don't make the news. That's why Chris Rock made this joke. Ain't the safest place to be. You can't call nobody, tell them you lost on mlk. I'm lost. I'm on Martin Luther King. Run, run, run. So the bad aspects of cruising viruses, often deadly strandings, going overboard, the rapes, the murder. But the good aspects. All right, let's be fair. Buffets, onboard entertainment, including a hypnotist. I swear, you thought the people were controlled by him and some comedian who was on season nine of last comic standing. But did you hear about the hypnotist? I. It's all a fair tradeoff. It's totally worth it because you know when you clear the hantavirus, you'll want to hit that buffet with abandon, provided you're not pushed overboard. It sounds like a supposedly deadly thing I'll never do again on the show today. It is an Antwin take. Haven't want to had one of those in a while. But first, what a book. What an idea. So I booked him. His name is Benjamin A. Saltzman. He is a professor of English and Poetics at the University of Chicago. Now, his last book was Bonds of Secrecy, Law, Spirituality and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England. Now, of course, I'm only interested in concealment in somewhat late medieval England, so I couldn't have him on for that. But he wrote a book called Turning Away the Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. Yes, it's about when you turn away or when people in paintings turned away, averted their gaze, put up a hand, didn't want to look at what everyone was looking at. A whole book and a whole conversation. Now, Benjamin A. Saltzman up next. So lately I've been getting a little. I guess the word is intentional about my wardrobe. You know, you want to look good, but you want to be comfortable. You want to look put together. You want to be put together. Enter Quince. Quince has the wardrobe staples for spring. They have 100% European linen shorts and shirts that start off at $34. And they're all lightweight and breathable. And I should also say that the reason they're able to beat all their competitors by 50 to 80% is that they do, in fact, cut out the middleman. You always hear that, but it's true. They work directly with ethical factories. And you're benefiting me. I'M benefiting to the tune of the ultra stretch 24.7 smart chinos. It is good that these are in 24.6chinos, you know, and I can't wear them Tuesdays. I could wear them every day. I'd like to wear them every day. It's like I'm getting away with something because to the outsider they look like. I'll say dress pants to use that broad category. But to the inside or me inside the pants, they are stretchy and comfortable and you know, they don't feel like those hard, stiff, uncomfortable, starchy dress pants. They're fantastic. Refresh your everyday with luxury. You'll actually use head to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com the Gist for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the Gist One great podcast that talks about everything we're going through in our democracy through a constitutional lens is the Oath in the Office. I've been on it. I listened to it. It's hosted by bonafide constitutional scholar Corey Brettschneider, past just guest and SiriusXM host John Fugal saying here's a tip, Future just guest. And the show, which always ranks in Apple's top five in government, has featured guests like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and journalist Dahlia Lithwick and Justice Stephen Breyer and me, Mike Pesca, in that company Smart Access, focused on power. Listen to the Oath in the office, wherever you get your podcast also on YouTube with full video episodes every so every once in a while an idea comes along, sometimes conveniently for me, in the form of a book, that not only do I say, well, I had never thought of that, but I go further and say I'm surprised that anyone has ever thought of that. And such is the new book by Benjamin A. Saltzman called Turning Away the Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. That gesture being, well, just that, the aversion, the averting the gaze, the maybe hand in front of the face or the hand in front of the eyes. This is a hundreds of pages long examination of in art and in life, when people turn away. Benjamin Saltzman, welcome to the gist.
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Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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B
So three part question. How? What? Why
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C
maybe How? How did it start?
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B
For you? Yeah, for you, how did it start?
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How did it start? So like, like all the best books, it started with an experience of curiosity. I was looking at a medieval manuscript with drawings of Adam and Eve. And I saw them there, standing naked, covering their eyes. And I thought, that's strange. Normally they're covering their genitals, right? Expressing a desire not to be seen, expressing their shame. And yet here they were, facing one another, covering their eyes. And I thought, why? Why are they covering their eyes? And then once I started thinking about that, I started seeing it everywhere. And this is a gesture that shows up in so much art. It shows up in so much poetry, it shows up in philosophy and literature, and I just tried to make sense of it. And. And it's a gesture, it's a term, it's a concept that I think we all find ourselves encountering on a daily basis when we. When we. When we. When we turn away, when we avert our own gazes. And I think thinking about it through art helps us process that, understand it better.
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So this is you looking and noticing the artistic depiction of those not looking. Now, what is the name of this? It's referenced many times, but it's the Justices. What is the name of this piece of art? Oh, the.
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It's a manuscript held in Oxford's Bodleian Library called the Junius Manuscript. Junius, yeah.
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And what's the importance of that? I had not heard of that before. This book.
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Yeah, it's an. It's an early English translation of the book of Genesis and the book of Exodus into. Into poetic verse. And it does some really wild things with the text. I mean, for one thing, it's. It changes the story of Adam and Eve a bit. It. It's, you know, in. In Genesis, Eve is confronted by a serpent who says, you know, if you eat this fruit, you'll be like a God. You'll. You should do this, even though God told you not to. And in this poetic version, the. The Lucifer, the. The devil shows up disguised as a messenger from God and actually says, hey, God wants you to eat this fruit. And so she does. And so it changes the ethics of it a little bit. But other than that, it's also a manuscript that has all these really amazing illustrations to accompany the text. So that's pretty cool. Written about a thousand years ago or. Okay, around the year thousand. Yeah.
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B
Now, I would assume that a lot of the depictions of covering the genitals were because of the sensitivities of the viewers at the time. You wouldn't want to show that in art in around the year 800. Is that right?
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There's a little bit of that, although it. That shows up a bit later as well. But there's a few pages later, there's a drawing representing Noah and the moment in which Noah is drunk with wine and. And doesn't you know, he's exposed, he's naked, and his son, one of his sons laughs at him and the other two cover up his body respectfully. And there his genitals are fully on display for. For us to see. Again, provoking. The thing that you. That you began with, the question that you began with, which is, here we are noticing this, here we are looking at this. What does that mean?
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B
Yeah, and the point of the artist is for you to look at it. And there's a lot of recursion in the book and analysis of us looking at them not looking and what we'll be seeing. Do you think the meaning of this gesture changed over time, over the more than thousand years you depicted?
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C
I think it's definitely changed over time, but also a lot of it has stayed the same. I think one thing that's really remarkable about this gesture is the ambiguity of it. The way that it can signify a whole range of different feelings and emotions. The way we cover our face in order to think deeply about something, or the way that we cover our face in order to grieve or. Or in order. Or sort of when we feel shame or when we feel disgust. There's a. There's a whole range of different feelings that this gesture performs. And. And one of the difficulties in looking back across time and sort of deep into history and. And across various artworks is. Is trying to understand what it means in a particular context or in a particular work of art.
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Right. And there's an. A painting of. Scene in a. I think a Euripides play where a king is told to sacrifice his daughter. Is it Agamemnon? Yeah. Told to sacrifice his daughter in order for his ships to go through. And he rejects that, but then eventually he succumbs. He has to kill his daughter or feels he does. And that depiction is just him covering his face in a way that we can't even see what's going on his face. Sometimes you see portions of the face. And that was interesting to me because it's a little different from some of the other. Looking away. There's a theory as to why the artist depicted it like this. Which was what?
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Yeah, so this is a famous painting by Timothy's depicting Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. And the reason the. The original painting actually doesn't survive. A copy of it survives from Pompeii and You can see it in. In the Naples Archeological Museum. But. But the original was so famous because early Roman reticians like Cicero and Quintilian and Pliny the Elder, they all wrote about it, and they wrote about the artist's decision to cover Agamemnon's face. Why cover his face? And the reason they initially came up with was because. Because the. Because he must have understood that the paintbrush was inadequate to the task of representing such an extreme state of emotion, the father's extreme state of grief and inner conflict and. And. And love and loss and all these feelings. And so how else to represent it other than covering up the face? And when you do that, you also conceal the expressive content. You ex. You. You conceal the expression from the. The viewer. And so you leave it to the viewer's imagination to imagine what that father must be feeling. But at the same time, later critics in the 18th century, 17th century, they all. They also sort of put these early readers to task and. And said things like, well, you know, he obviously must have just been a terrible painter because if he had any skills, he could have painted his, you know, Agamemnon's face in such an extreme state of emotion. But right from the start, I think this shows had the kind of. The richness and the power of this gesture, reaching against the limits of emotional expression, reaching up against the limits and past the limits of representation, artistic representation itself. So it's right. Right from the start, it's a really kind of. It's a problem as a. As a gesture.
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Well, by not depicting the expression, it becomes more horrible in the imagined or in the imagination of the viewer, doesn't it?
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Yeah, absolutely. It leaves it. To. Leaves it to our imagination to. To. To. To imagine what that must feel like. And it gets compared as well to kind of metaphorically to say, the work of a poet writing about some terrible moment, but then deciding to pass over it in silence, to not describe it in detail, but instead to leave it to the reader to imagine how painful that must have been. And so there's all different. All kinds of ways in which that one. That one painting by Timothy's kind of takes on a life of its own.
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B
Right, right. And there are horror movies or certain movies where the camera shifts a little bit and then we hear something horrible off camera and that sometimes the most horrible thing of all. But what I was thinking of is in rhetoric, in language, there is the phrase. There are no words which are interesting. And I'm sure you're fascinated with. Because there are words to say There are no words. But what is the visual equivalent of there is no sight, there is no visage that could encompass the idea of there are no words. And it would be something like this painting.
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Yeah, absolutely. And the. The two kind of get in, Become interchangeable in a way, conceptually interchangeable, in which this. This painting, this gesture stands in for the kind of rhetorical move of I, you know, I can't even. It's so horrible, I can't even speak of that or I won't speak of that. Yeah, there's all kinds of. There's a. There's a poetic concept. It's a little bit different, but we. We call it apostrophe, which is when a poet or a speaker addresses an absent object or person. That word apostrophe, it's the same word that we use for the punctuation mark. Because to.
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To represent an absent letter O, isn't there in don't and do not? Yeah, there are words for all sorts of gestures, obscure gestures, arms akimbo. You say those words and I know how to strike that. Is there one agreed upon term for the turning away, what you're taught, what you're talking and writing about here?
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C
No. And in some ways, that's kind of the problem is that week, I tend to refer to this group of gestures, of related gestures, which you touched on at the beginning. You kind of listed them at the beginning. Covering the face, averting one's glance, turning one's head, burying one's head in one's hands. And so I kind of group all of these gestures together under the category of aversion. Again, it's from the Latin adverture to turn away, which is where the book gets its title. And so it's kind of. They're kind of grouped, but they're all also. They're related in the sense that the eyes are being somehow covered or turned away, but they're also quite distinct. They're individual gestures that have particular meanings. And that's one of the. That's one of the things that I try and do in the book, is that rather than starting from a kind of history of a particular emotion. So rather than writing a book about the history of shame, let's say, or the history of grief, I kind of start from this very different perspective where I say, okay, let's start with a gesture or a set of gestures and see where that takes us. See what these gestures mean in different contexts and different work of art, works of art. And by doing that, you really get a sense of the. The. The ambiguity of meaning. The. The way in which the gesture, for instance, as we were just talking about, the way in which it entails covering up the expressive. The expression of the face. And so it makes. It sort of puts the burden on the beholder. So there's all these different ways in which starting from the gesture opens up a new way of thinking about how we encounter, say, emotion in. In works of art or in life.
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B
Do you think this gesture is a reflex? The depiction of it in art is a depiction of the natural reflex. Or you could say it's a construct where maybe the artists are commenting on the last artist who depicted it. Or they know that the audience will read this in a way that is not exactly like a human would do it. But we all understand the conceit that when this is done, it's conveying some sort of emotion.
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C
Yeah, that's exactly the problem. Right. Is that this is a gesture that we perform instinctively sometimes. Right? We perform it unthinkingly. We. It's how we react to something sort of terrible coming at us, something scary coming at us, something that we don't want to see, and we. We perform it. Even me using the word perform right now is a bit off because we. We sort of instinctively react in that way. But then other times we perform this gesture, truly perform it to almost. To rhetorically demonstrate to those around us that we are not willing to see or we're ashamed of seeing or something like that. And so this gesture spans the spectrum from instinctive or reflex action to performative action. The kind of thing that an actor
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would perform or even a silent movie actor. I'm thinking of like a Lon Chaney exaggeration. Two hands, one close to the eyes, one fully extended. You probably don't see that in real life, but I would have in some
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C
Max Senate films exactly where it's exaggerated, but. Yeah, but that's the problem is that it's really hard to tell, right. When you encounter, you know, say. Say encounter this gesture in real life. Right. It's. It's hard to know whether a person is performing it rhetorically or instinctively responding.
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B
Did you see examples of depictions of this gesture that have fallen away. Fallen out of favor as a way to depict a turning away?
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C
I don't know if it's fallen out of favor or. But it's certainly. It's certainly changed. And I think one way that it has changed over, let's say, the past 100 years is that I think since the second half of the 20th century, the it has become maybe metaphorized, it's turned into a metaphor in which looking away is equated with indifference. And by extension, that we have a moral obligation not to turn away, not to look away from all of the horrors and pains of this world in which we live. And I've become fascinated by this because while it's easy to think that turning away or looking away is a mode of indifference or a mode of inattention, what I realized and was surprised to find as I looked across, you know, art across the age, it looked at art across the ages, was that this is actually a gesture that shows up in moments where attention is most engaged, most profound, most sort of difficult and struggling. Right. Where there's a real struggle. And I think about a work like Francisco Goya's 3 May, which is a famous execution scene. Yeah, Famous painting of a, of an execution figure with outstretched arms and a white shirt, kind of Christ like figure is faced by a line of, of executioners with their rifles. The, the executioners have their backs to the viewer, so we can kind of only see their figures. But around the, the person who is being executed are several other figures who have their, their faces covering, or their hands covering their faces. And to me, the more time that I spent with this work of art, the more I realized that in fact those figures covering their faces in that moment are the figures that indicate the, the weight of this scene, the significance of this, of this moment. And I, and I in some ways try and imagine, like, what would this work of art look like if everyone standing around had their eyes wide open and, and was sort of taking it in without flinching, without being repulsed by it, without that, that experience of fear and terror. And, and so it's, it's, it's works like that that made me pay closer attention to, to this gesture and realize that it's, that it often shows up in moments where we are grappling with the most difficult aspects of life.
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B
So I started by speaking of instinct. But maybe it is the case that when we as a species see others turning away, it is a cue to us to pay attention.
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C
Yeah. And I would, I would take it even a bit farther and to say that and to invite your listeners to reflect on moments when we ourselves are turning away. Right. So rather than maybe trying not to turn away, because that's, I think is often impossible, but instead noticing when we do, and when we do turn away or when we notice other people turning away, that that's a, that is a cue to us that, that the thing that we are turning away from matters, that it's affecting us deeply, that. That it's worthy of our attention in some ways, as difficult as it may be.
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B
I want to thank you. Benjamin A. Saltzman is the author of Turning Away the Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. But as we found out, also an omnipresent one and a current one. Thank you so much.
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C
Thanks for having me.
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B
So lately I've been getting a little, I guess the word is intentional about my wardrobe. You know, you want to look good, but you want to be comfortable. You want to look put together. You want to be put together. Enter Quince. Quince has the wardrobe staples for spring. They have 100% European linen shorts and shirts that start off at $34, and they're all lightweight and breathable. And I should also say that the reason they're able to beat all their competitors by 50 to 80% is that they do, in fact, cut out the middleman. You always hear that, but it's true. They work directly with ethical factory accessories. And you're benefiting me. I'm benefiting to the tune of the ultra stretch 24.7 smart chinos. It is good that these are in 24.6chinos, you know, and I can't wear them Tuesdays. I could wear them every day. I'd like to wear them every day. It's like I'm getting away with something because to the outsider, they look like, I'll say dress pants to use that broad category. But to the insider me, inside, inside the pants, they are stretchy and comfortable and, you know, they don't feel like those hard, stiff, uncomfortable, starchy dress pants. They're fantastic. Refresh your everyday with luxury. You'll actually use head to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order. And 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com the gist for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/the gist and now the Spiel. And not just a spiel. And Antwin Tig, which occurs every three weeks or based on our cadence, every three months. I've chosen not to do too many of these things where we answer listener complaints, listener emails, listener substacks, listener tweets, listener blue skies. A lot of ways to get in touch with me. A lot of ways for me not to address it on the show in an ant twin tig. But I do get back to you and I do usually post on the site that you reached out to me on and I will continue to do so. And I say this having passed a milestone. I don't know if you know this, but Cinco de Mayo is not just a great day in Mexican history, it is a great day in Gistian history because it was in 2014, on May 5, that the gist started. So yes, we have just passed our 12th anniversary. And on this gist anniversary, rather than doing an entire assessment of all we have talked about, let's just do one story because I got a lot of feedback. I talked about it on the spiel the day after the presidential do we want to say assassination attempt? Some guy running a few feet past a detection device that would have worked if it was abided by, but that gentleman was stopped. What wasn't stopped is the calls that were pretty predictable. We need to have a conversation about guns. I think the conversation has been had and I think the conversation as is had is not the one to get us to a better place when it comes to gun policy. So I'm not going to reiterate what my spiel was on that day. I'll just say I turned it into a written piece for the Free press. Nothing will solve the tragedy of gun violence in America. I believe in gun control, but it's a fairytale to believe that tougher laws are the answer. As I make clear in the piece, tougher laws can help. And I understand that Connecticut is tougher gun laws than Missouri, and Connecticut has fewer gun deaths, especially by suicide, than Missouri. But there are a lot of things about the gun debate that kind of drive me crazy. And they were all in evidence after that assassination attempt, if we want to call it that one. Those kind of events are not typical. I don't just mean assassination. We normally talk about gun control after a mass shooting in a public place by strangers. That is 99% of gun deaths aren't like that. So they're highly, highly not typical. They are. Usually those deaths come at the muzzle of a long gun and 85% of deaths and murder in the United States come at the muzzle of a handgun. Also, a lot of times the exact cures or the exact proposals wouldn't have stopped the last thing we saw. Which isn't the greatest criteria, right? If you could stop 10 gun deaths, even if the way to get there is the conversation you have after an event that wouldn't have been stopped by your proposal, it's good to stop the 10 gun deaths. But an assassination attempt by a Truly deranged individual with no chance of success. Like I said on the show, they assassinated Sinjo Abe in Japan and they did it with a relic, an antique gun that a very dedicated person put together. So when it comes to the extremely deranged wannabe assassin, very hard for a gun law to do its job. These people are not easily dissuadable. Most gun murders in the United States handgun and this is a crazy statistic, and I don't think it's true now, but as of a couple of years ago, most gun victims, most murder victims in the United States were black. The country is 14% African American. Most over 50% of those who were killed were black. It's not true that there are black men, but of those killed, 90 something percent were black men. The statistics, you know, they're the best we have. They're not great. They're mostly FBI statistics. But when murder spiked post pandemic, it was mostly black men who were being murdered by handguns. And our quote, need for a conversation rests on a couple assumptions about what we do in the wake of something other than the individual murder of a black man by a handgun. So some other big points that I made are it's usually the NRA that's blamed for distorting our politics because many gun control advocates, of which I am one, will say America wants gun control. Just the NRA gets in the way. I lay out just how unbelievably weakened the NRA is from what they once were. And yet gun control doesn't offer better solutions or get any easier. It's not the NRA standing in the way, it's your fellow Americans I have linked to all these polls and I say there are a sliver of solutions that can be found by some of the enactable gun laws, but they're just a sliver and they're not going to stop most of the gun murder. I am in favor of everything that helps a little bit, but please understand, this will just help a little bit. So among the people reacting were Edward Ashton, who tweeted at me, little surprised by that spiel. TBH. Of the many things traits I associate with you, one that doesn't come to mind is fatalism. And that's what it sounded like. It may be correct. Can't prove you wrong, but yeah, the sense of weary resignation surprised me coming from you. I also like Edward, pride myself on my optimism. But also optimism doesn't play well if it's grounded in a track record of being wrong. So I like to be optimistic and right. And I really think the correct assessment is these conversations after a mass shooting event or an attempted murder are kind of beside the point. Point won't address the underlying causes conversations. And really and here's a line in the piece and in my spiel that really encapsulates what I'm getting at. No matter what we do, and there are some things that we can do a little bit, but no matter what we do, we will never cease to be a very high gun crime country among the developed nations. We won't be as bad as Sudan, but we're never going to get to a place where compared to other OECD nations and Mexico's one. So not all of them, but compared to the majority of them and compared to Europe and of course compared to Japan, we're never even compared to Slovakia, we're never going to Finland, another European country with pretty high gun murder rates, but high in Europe and high in the United States. Don't even talk to each other. We're always going to be a high gun murder country. I think it's better not to give up. We always have to do what we can. But I think it's good to realize this. So I take Edward Ashton's point, however, that was I thought Ashton was more in sadness than in rage. Seth Dowland wrote in More the Little Bit of Anger. And he writes, one could write a similar column about all sorts of seemingly intractable problems at various moments of history which ultimately changed as a result of slow and steady pressure campaigns. Even a big majority, he goes on to say, of Americans favor a lot of half measures on gun control. Yes, I acknowledge that. My favorite possibility is changing liability laws for gunmakers. Sure. You think it'll work to stop inner city handgun violence? I do not. I think it might be hard to change the law. Maybe you could spend a lot of time, put a lot of political capital in putting Smith and Wesson and other gun manufacturers somehow on the hook for murders that happen. I mean, everyone looks at the cigarette industry as a model for that. And yet the connection between cigarettes and cancer is so much higher than the connection between handguns and something like a covered up, unacknowledged side effect of the gun. I mean, guns are advertised as that thing that could kill you in a hurry. And once they kill people in a hurry, the gun manufacturers aren't going to be as on the hook as cigarettes were. They're not even going to be as on the hook as McDonald's was. And McDonald's knows that sweet and Salty is kind of addictive. Guns aren't addictive, they're just deadly. They're marketed as such. There's some amount of liability that you could perhaps use to sue a gun manufacturer. Really think that there's no chance that that heavy lift will result in us being something other than a highly murderous country? And by the way, all the guns, if you have liability but you don't have confiscation or buybacks, you'll still have, as they always say, more guns than people. But I really want to get through because I'm fascinated by the mental mindset of don't give up on this. Because look at all the other things that people almost gave up on and then they came to fruition. So the clear mental model for this is civil rights. And I remember I read a great book by Todd Purdom called An Idea Whose Time Has Come. Two Presidents, Two Parties in the battle for the Civil Rights act of 1964. And that title alone tells you what the theme of the book was. Its time had come. That was a long time coming. It was a clawing and a fighting for progress. And sometimes progress slipped backwards. But unlike guns, it was clear that if the Civil Rights act were enforced, you'd get big changes in civil rights. Unclear with that. When it comes to guns, there was no constitutional amendment in the way of the Civil Rights Act. In fact, you know, 13, 14, 15 constitutional amendments that would argue for and in fact literally did give civil rights at one time. So with civil rights, also with gay rights the solution, or same sex marriage, the solution clearly solved the problem. And to me, with these slivers of solution or gun rights liability, it does not solve the problem. It doesn't come close to solving the problem. Some of these gun measures might help, but that's not what the Civil Rights act was. The mental model can't be something that there is progress. It has been slow, it has been incremental. With all examples of progress, like the civil rights legislation that did predate the landmark Civil Rights act of 64, you could say this helped. You could say that LBJ's initiatives helped. You could say that voting rights protection under Bobby Kennedy helped. It's not like that with guns. But I understand why so many people who want progress light on something that represented great progress like civil rights. And you think of the arc of history being slow but bending towards justice, except all the times it doesn't and the hundreds of years in the dark ages where it did nothing and the times where it bent towards injustice. Just ask South Africans before the Boers came and afterwards. And how many hundreds of years did they have to put up with apartheid? There are as many counterexamples of that great little piece of poetry as there are examples. Or the other big one, always misattributed to Gandhi, is first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win at every one of those steps. And Gandhi didn't say it. Maybe a trade Union activist in 1918 said it. By the way, that strike he was talking about didn't quite work. The Wobblies were in favorite, but the other unions weren't. Just asterisk. With Gandhi, first they ignore you. Not with Gandhi, but with Schlessberg. Right? They ignored him. With Heifowitz, they ignored that guy. And of course with Sternfeld, I mean, you gotta ignore Sternfeld and then they laugh at you. There are plenty of people, they stop at the laughing and then they fight you. Often they win. But in the quote, then you win. That's not how history usually works. There are four off ramps to you winning. And if you say Gandhi said it, it sounded good. If you say a Wobbly in 1918, who is against the Schloss clothing manufacturers of Baltimore, maybe it's less good. By the way, that guy was right. I read his speech. He did predict the Great Depression. But I don't know if I'd be on the side of the Wobblies during that particular labor action. So what I want to do is instead of thinking about civil rights, a righteous cause where working hard at it got us to the promised land, think of counterexamples. Think of the worry about the population bomb. Right. Paul Ehrlich and Malthus explosion. There was a lot of worry. And the people who are activists back then thought we had to worry about this and we shouldn't give up. But that was one of those examples where we were totally wrong about the population bomb. It didn't come to pass. If anything, we could use more population. Other example from my lifetime, peak oil. Now there's the opposite. You know, the oil companies are worried about peak demand. So a lot was supposed to be done. And I'm sure there was a lot of dissuaded people who wanted to ban more oil exploration. And that could never be banned. But the entire underlying premise of fighting for the bringing about peak oil was in error. Here's another great one. I think that very much maps on to guns. It's another kind of weapon. It was nuclear weapons. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that was that Was the British version, 1958 at launch. And they had a lot of marches. And then there was sane, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Bertrand Russell and Linus Pauling and all these intellectuals signed petitions. And there was an atmospheric testing ban that won the Nobel Peace Prize. So there was so much energy to try to ban the bomb. Ban the bomb was one of the most omnipresent slogans in the 60s and 70s. The SALT 2 treaty very much maps on to a piece of legislation that we were told our political leaders wouldn't enact even though America supported it. Right. The Carter administration kept citing findings that shows that polls showed that there was overwhelming support for salt, and therefore senators should support it. The Senate never ratified SALT too. And you know what? It didn't matter. The realistic assessment of this would be we'll get to a place of, if not banning the bomb, understanding and containing the nuclear threat from the Russians by other means. Because we weren't ever going to do it through banning the bomb like banning the gun. It's not going to happen. Be realistic about what could happen. Here's another example I thought of the Equal Rights Amendment. There are scholars that would say that if the ERA passed, it would be better for Americans, for women, that the main mechanism would be that when cases went to the court, it would be looked at under strict scrutiny, which is to say that people alleging sexism or discrimination would have a lot more on their side. So many more cases, more might have been decided for women who were suing for equal rights, but not all. And there are also. There's a good school of thought that the idea of the Equal Rights Amendment could be in later years turned around. Right. And used for men who were maybe not the beneficiaries of scholarship programs that specifically reached out for women. But the other big point was through Title 9 and other mechanisms, just society changing things very much improved without the Equal Rights Amendment. So that's a contradiction. With guns. I don't think things are going to improve, but I do think that it's. It wouldn't be fatalistic and it wouldn't be depressing or cynical to say in 1985 or 1987 or at some point after you saw the Equal Rights Amendment not getting the momentum to pass by the very arduous 2/3 of the state or 3/4 of the legislature that a constitutional amendment needs to pass would be very realistic to say it is a false hope to think that the Equal Rights Amendment is going to pass. It's better to use our time on other initiatives on other ways to improve society. And that's what I think about gun control and gun laws. The states that can pass the laws should. It's going to be far from a panacea. My last paragraph is how we have to live with the situation and I'll read it to you now and leave it there. So I was talking about the people who, and there's a lot of them said the attack on the White House Correspondents Dinner was a false flag operation. But if you have a commitment to reality, you should reject that. Just as the same commitment to realism that rejects the notion that this was a staged event also demands jettisoning the fairy tale that gun laws are going to turn the US into something other than a nation with an extremely high number of gun crimes where an actual country that's actually awash and actual guns. The best response is a bad one, but it's the only one. We have to be guarded by better trained and better funded people carrying their own more sophisticated guns if you're lucky enough to enjoy their protection. I would also add pass the gun laws you can, knowing it won't do much. And then my last two lines are it isn't a good place to be, but it's where we are. That's it for today's show that just is produced by Cory Wara with Michelle Pesca going second in the credits. I heard she was on some sort of a social strike against things Gist. I just found that out. We're bringing her back into the fold by mentioning her up top. Couldn't have done 12 years without her. Probably could have done the first year. I don't think I met her then but like soon thereafter. Couldn't have done. Jeff Craig, he's the guy who edits all our how to shows. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list. Go to mikepaska.substack.com you can see that guy Dowland who criticized the gun control piece, that that's fine. An AP writer also wrote in with a critique and Benister is our booking coordinator. And thanks for listening.