A white Christmas for me growing up was not simply that snow had blanketed the ground by Christmas, but that it actually snowed on Christmas. By either definition, I don’t remember many white Christmases. It was often bleak and cold on December 25^th in our part of Wisconsin, but at least in my memory the snow, or at least the snow that did not melt away, came later in the season. And since winters did not depart Wisconsin easily, I saw more Easters with snow on the ground than Christmases. In the shadows that the sun never reached behind the garage, there could still be pockets of snow in May.

Even so, however, there was one white Christmas (by my definition) that I have always treasured. While it had to snow on Christmas itself, I had a somewhat expanded notion of “Christmas.” Christmas day was largely for playing with new presents and ended with a boring family get-together at Aunt Hazel’s house. I remember little about it other than that the sister and Cousin Margaret lit into the olives at the first opportunity. Instead, as it is for many Germanic and Germanic-descended people, our main focus for the Christmas celebration was not Christmas Day but on Christmas Eve.

By Christmas Eve, the tree would have been up for a week or so. The buying and mounting of the tree was always a difficult process. Now all the Christmas trees I see for sale seem to be nearly perfect—symmetrical with needle-laden branches everywhere and a straight trunk. Not so back then. Finding an acceptable one without too many flaws was always a difficult and time-consuming task, and when it was brought home, much discussion would ensue about which portion of the tree should face the wall to hide the most defects and whether the tree stood as perpendicular to the floor as the often wavering trunk allowed. Rarely did the family agree on the accepted solution. But the tree was up and decorated well before Christmas Eve.

We opened our presents on Christmas Eve. Nothing was placed under the tree (except for a toy train and a miniature village) before then. I believe that we (I was the youngest of three) were sent to our rooms for a bit. Then there was a “Ho! Ho! Ho!”– now I wonder if that could have been my father—followed by a cry, “Santa’s been here!” One year the family ran to the kitchen window overlooking our backyard. Pointing to a deep, starry sky, one of the parents shouted, “There he goes!” My sister, the eldest of the children, said “I see him.” (Was this the only time she lied to me?) I looked and looked, but I saw no sleigh, no reindeer, no Santa. I had missed him yet again.

Before the presents were opened, however, we went to a Christmas Eve service at the church. This church-going was highly unusual because both parents attended. As far as I can remember, this was the only time of the year my father went, and my mother, at most, went only a few other times a year. (My father drove us kids to Sunday school and then picked us up afterwards. In between he went somewhere else.)

And then one year it happened. We walked into church on crisp winter night. Even though I can’t sing one note on tune, I have always liked Christmas carols, and, unlike on many Sundays, I enjoyed this service. The last carol was “Silent Night,” then my favorite, and it always gave me a peaceful feeling. We left the church, and there it was: A blanket of snow. During the hour of the service, an inch or two had fallen, and the church steps, the sidewalk, the lawns, the road were all white. The snow was continuing, but it was not so much falling as floating. It was the kind of snow that compelled you to catch some on your tongue. The snow almost hung in front the streetlamps causing a light that seemed otherworldly. Every pine tree looked like a Christmas tree. It was a white Christmas the way I had imagined a white Christmas should be. It seemed the correctly beautify and peaceful way to welcome the baby Jesus into the world.

Merry Christmas!

Bookstores were at the core of a cherished day. I had finished law school and was living in New York City where I had been working for a while. The college alumni magazine had published a list of books, in effect a syllabus, for studying the American revolution. Most of the books had been published a decade or more ago. My recent reading had been largely aimless; I had never taken a course on the Revolution; and I thought that it could be interesting to read as many of the books on the list as possible. In those ancient days, you could not simply go online to order the books; you had to physically find them. I had set the next Saturday for my book hunting, but a winter storm hit with seventeen inches of snow stopping at four on Saturday morning. Being then young and full of vim and vigor (what is vim?), I decided to carry out my self-appointed task in spite of the storm. Many streets were yet to be plowed, and many walks were uncleared, but the local subway was running.

I got to Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and started walking east. The sky was a brilliant winter blue. A nippy wind made everyone’s cheeks rosy, but tramping through the drifts and mounds of still-pristine snow kept me warm. Without traffic, it was quiet, and we few pedestrians treated each other reverentially as if we were the deepest friends on a meditative retreat. It was the kind of day where I was thrilled that there was a winter and I was in it.

A few wonderful bookstores still existed on Eighth Street, and I stopped in each of them, but my real destination was Fourth Avenue.  On and around the seven blocks of Fourth Avenue from Astor Place to 14^th Street had been what was called “Book Row,” New York City’s used-book district. The heyday for this book center had been the 1940s and 1950s, and by the time I headed there decades later, many of the stores were gone, but a sizeable number still remained—enough so it took me hours to go through the ones still there.

Most of these stores had a loose organizational layout at best. I might find a handwritten sign on a bookcase that said, “US History” to aid my search. The shelves had no apparent structure, and I would have to scan all the volumes to see if there were any on my list. The stores, it turned out, had a surprising number of them, and every time I found one, I got a bit excited as if I had found something much more than an out-of-print book, but some sort of little treasure that could only be found after an effortful search—the kind of thrill a seeker does not now get on the internet.

After I finished on Fourth having found many but not all the books on the list, I doubled back to Broadway and 12^th Street to Strand Bookstore, what was billed then and now as the City’s largest used book store, and I found a few more sought-for volumes.

That day can no longer be repeated. The Fourth Avenue used book stores are gone; only the Strand, which started on Fourth Avenue, but moved to Broadway in the 1950s, remains. When I came to New York, I was told that Strand Bookstore was the place to buy review copies. Book reviewers and others who got advance copies of books brought their booty to the Strand where they were paid one quarter of the book-jacket price with Strand then listing them for half the jacketed price. A lucky buyer might find a recently-released book that had just been given a great review for half price. I, however, never snagged one of those bargains. I assumed these holy grails disappeared quickly and were found only by those who scoured the store once or twice a day, and I did not.

Because I rarely found a review copy of something I wanted, for me Strand was a giant used bookstore, and since I went to other ones that were more convenient for me, I rarely visited Strand for decades. That changed a few years back for two reasons: An increasing number of my doctors had offices near the Strand. And I decided that I was going to get a license to be a New York City sightseeing guide. (To be continued.)

Barnes & Noble was the most important bookstore in my early New York City days, but I did not restrict myself to it. If I had the time, I would check out the bookstores in whatever part of New York I was in. On the Upper West Side, I would go into a Shakespeare & Co., with its creaky floors and classical music. (I have heard classical music in other bookstores. I don’t remember, however, ever hearing country music in one.) Near Manhattan’s Columbus Circle was the Colosseum, with its multiple levels. On a tony part of Fifth Avenue was Scribner’s, with its balcony and the feeling that a spinster librarian was shushing the present patrons and the ghosts of hosts of distinguished writers. I would frequent Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore and other places on Brooklyn’s Fifth and Seventh Avenues. A marvelous used book store at 15-17 Ann Street, with sloping floors and bookcases that were steadier than they looked, was a great place for spending lunch hour when I worked around the corner on Park Row. I think it was then called the Old Ann Street Bookstore, but it was once named the Isaac Mendoza Bookstore after its original and longtime owner. That store, I have read, started in 1894, closed in 1990, and was at the same location all that time.

When traveling, I try to drop into any local bookstore I see. Forty years ago in New England, it was a barn bursting with used books. It was an amazing sight. I said to the spouse, “We aren’t leaving until we buy something that we otherwise would not get.” I don’t remember what she bought, but I purchased a volume that contained several Mr. Bunting novels, which I had never heard of. The books are about an everyman in WWII London and were delightful. This purchase was so successful that now, whenever I am in a bookstore on a trip, I try to buy a book unknown to me. And thus, in Lisbon or maybe it was the Madrid airport, which had a small English-language section, I bought what is a classic to many but not then to me by Jerome K. Jerome. Three Men in a Boat.

Bookstores are, of course, for buying books, but if you know the title you want, online ordering has advantages, and I have done at least my share of that. A bookstore, however, offers the chance for browsing. You buy a book you were not looking for because you see it and remember it got a good review or your friend Dean enjoyed it. Or you buy it because the jacket copy or the back cover makes it seem interesting or because you pick it up and read a few enjoyable paragraphs or because you are looking for a biography of P.T. Barnum and you find it shelved with other books about nineteenth century characters that appeal to you. In a good bookstore I can easily find the book I seek, but in a good bookstore the displays lead me to books that I did not know I wanted but end up finding provocative, thoughtful, interesting, enjoyable.

Recommendations are another advantage of a good bookstore. New York City bookstores are staffed with reams of bright people with liberal arts degrees who still have dreams of making a living somehow in a literary world. They read and often have to demonstrate that they read to get a job in a bookstore. As a result, they frequently have good recommendations for what you might like to read. Online stores try to mimic this by having on a webpage something like “Others who bought this book also bought. . . .” This does not come close to a conversation with someone who can ask if you have read and liked certain books and then makes recommendations based on that knowledge.

The spouse got a great recommendation decades ago. She told a Barnes & Noble clerk that she was going on vacation and wanted a good summer read. The clerk made inquiries about whether the spouse had liked certain books and authors and then recommended The Age of Innocence andWomen in White. We had not heard of Wilkie Collins before, who was largely forgotten then. But the spouse bought the books, read them, and loved them. She passed the book to me. I read and loved it, and we both went on to read other books by Wharton and Collins.

Bookstores have systematized recommendations by printing out what their sellers thought about some books. These aren’t as valuable as a personal recommendation stemming from a conversation, but I have still used them. Early in the trend, I saw a stack of books in a store above Union Square with a big card saying “First Novels,” and then smaller cards each containing a brief employee write-up of why a certain book was particularly noteworthy. I read an effusive one that was a mystery about racial relations in the Northwest. Based on those comments, I bought the book. Later, Snow Falling on Cedars was a big seller, but it was this recommendation that had me read and be impressed by it well before that.

I did not find it odd or even a sign of our somewhat low socio-economic status that the family did not have books in the house when I grew up. I read a lot of books, but I saw little point in buying them. Books came from the library. Once I read a book, I thought then that I would never re-read it, but if I did, I could check it out again. Buying a book was just a waste of money.

Even so, I did buy at least one book. I was a member of some Junior Astronomy club in those post-Sputnik days and subscribed to “Sky and Telescope” magazine. I understood little of what was covered in the issues. In the reverse of the “Playboy” line, I got it for the pictures, which I found mesmerizing. The magazine gave me the fantasy of building my own telescope, and there was an ad in the back of “Sky and Telescope” for a book on how to do that. The Mead Public Library of Sheboygan, not surprisingly, did not have that book, and I had not heard of interlibrary loans back then. Instead, I decided to buy the book. There wasn’t a real bookstore in town, but a store that mostly sold greeting cards and knick-knacks had a rack or two of paperbacks, and I learned that I could order a book there. After saving allowance and grass-cutting money, I acquired a book on how to grind the lens for a reflecting telescope as well as other important stuff for the telescope-building business. (I never did build it, but my parents bought me a telescope. My chief discovery was how quickly the earth seemed to rotate when I looked at a heavenly object. The image would stay within the viewfinder for only a short time. I learned that I needed counterweights and a clock drive, and all that was beyond me. But, still, I remember how thrilling it was to see the mountains and “seas” of the moon.)

Prange’s, the local department store, had a shelf or two of books, and there I spotted biographies of sports heroes that were not in the public library. This presented a quandary. I did want to read them, and unlike the telescope book, which I thought would be a reference I needed, I did not want to buy them. My solution was to–I don’t want to call it shoplifting—let’s say, whisk a desired book out the store. As soon as I finished it, I would smuggle it back in and carefully place it in the exact spot it had been in before I had “borrowed” it. This was probably the height of reading being a forbidden pleasure for me, and I never got caught doing this.

College changed these patterns. I bought the books for my courses, and now I wanted to retain the books. Having read Tocqueville, Dostoyevsky, or Kant, keeping those books seemed like a symbol of emerging intellectual maturity. I imagined that they kind of person I wanted to be would have a personal library. I didn’t sell the college books back. I still have a few of them.

I mostly remember university bookstores in those days of my formal education although I have a faint memory of Kroch’s and Brentano’s in downtown Chicago where I went to law school. It was not, however, until I began my post-education life in New York City that bookstores really came into my life.

Barnes & Noble was the most important bookstore for me in my early New York days. B & N had but one location then—on 5^th Avenue near 17^th Street—selling both new and used books. I remember it as a warren of rooms and shelves. If I said to a clerk as I entered–in days long before computer inventories–that I was looking for a particular book on Chinese history, the employee might reply, “If we have it, go to our Chinese section. Walk through this room and turn right in the next room and when you get in the next room after that, go past the Roman philosophy racks, and you will see that the bottom two racks of the next bookcase are Chinese history.” And it was amazing what they had. (To be continued.)

When my young friend turned around, I could not help but notice the shiner under his left eye. Some guys tried to rob him as he got out of his car. A scuffle ensued, with my friend adamantly maintaining that he got in some good blows, but clearly, he also took one. The would-be robbers ran off when a shopkeeper came out of his store, and my friend lost nothing. I commiserated with him and told him about various incidents involving me, the spouse, and the daughter. I asked him if his girlfriend had been with him. “No,” he said, but he saw her the next day. He said that she had been very sympathetic. He hesitated for a moment. A slight grin appeared—his first smile of the evening. Then he said, “Sympathetic sex is very good.”

“To me, the movie [It’s a Wonderful Life] meant that if you become unhappy enough, almost anything can pass as happiness.” Akhil Sharma, Family Life.

I was looking in a bookstore window a few blocks from the theater when I heard three men walking past me discussing the Romanian film I had just seen. One said something about Roman, the main character, and continued by asking, “How could he do that to his beautiful girlfriend?” One of the other men maintained, “She was not that beautiful.” And then the trio of men, without any women accompanying them, drifted out of ear shot.

A man stumbled on the corner. His legs would not hold him up. He fell. With much effort, he got up. He weaved about. He fell again. Two women crossing the street came up to him where he lay in the gutter of the crosswalk. They tried to help him stand. He had a slight build, but he was too much for them. Quickly the cook from the nearby Middle Eastern restaurant came out and helped the man to walk a few yards to a stoop where he could sit. A server from the restaurant brought out a glass of water and a cup of coffee. Shortly afterwards, the cook and one of the women helped the man, who had an expensive-looking haircut, into the restaurant. Someone had called emergency services, which arrived in a few minutes. The two emergency services workers loaded him on to a gurney and then into the back of an ambulance, which drove off. One of the restaurant patrons who had gone over to the disabled man said that he had taken ketamine, a horse tranquilizer. During the entire time, the man had a death grip on his telephone held in front of his chest.

Remember “crack babies”? Twenty years ago, the press was filled with stories about children being born to mothers addicted to crack cocaine, often somewhat politely called “crack mothers,” but often labeled “crack whores.” The kids were supposedly permanently damaged and would harm society for generations to come. So, they should be harming us inordinately right now. Why don’t we hear about that? Is it because those scare stories weren’t true? And a quick experiment. Imagine a “crack baby” or a “crack mother.” Did any of you see a white woman or white child?

Someone who had known me for decades said, “When I first met you, I thought you were incredibly arrogant—the kind of person who thought his feces did not stink.” He pronounced “feces” with a hard “c”.

A friend is on a conservative email list. The friend, at my request, now forwards to me these emails, which average four or five a week. Some are cartoons or videos—often quite funny. Some are straight-out opinion pieces. Others, however, are filled with purported facts. I have gotten in the habit of checking the “facts.” It takes little time to do this. Usually a few key words entered into a search engine reveal something about the assertions. More often they reveal something about the particular piece that was sent around because what is distributed is never anything original by the group, but always a forwarded article composed, often years ago, by someone outside the circle, although the original author of the essay is seldom given.

I started this process because often it seemed clear that an asserted “fact” could not be true, or was, at least, unlikely. Some were so obviously fishy that it surprised me that anyone could take the “fact” seriously.

My restraint in keeping the checking to myself was finally broken when a forwarded message purported to reproduce telegrams between General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman on the eve of the signing of Japan’s surrender at the end of WWII. The author of the piece was not given, but he authoritatively stated that the original telegrams were in Truman’s presidential library and not a word had been changed.

MacArthur, according to the account, sent a telegram to the President that contained what would now be considered racist terms describing the Japanese. Truman responded by telling the General that he could not use such terms with the press because the terms were not “politically correct.” MacArthur then expressed bewilderment at what “politically correct” meant, and Truman replied, according to this account, on September 1, 1945, writing, “Political Correctness is a doctrine, recently fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and promoted by a sick mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end!”

Do you wonder if Truman actually wrote that? You don’t have to be a genius to question it, but you do have to be a lot less than that to simply accept it. When did you first hear the term “politically correct”? When did you first hear the term “mainstream media”? I punched a few words from the supposed telegraphic exchange into Google, and I found that the inauthenticity of the telegrams had been exposed many times in the last few years. The words had not been written. The telegrams  were not in any Truman archives.

I wrote to my friend who had forwarded me the message: “This is lame. If it is meant to be satire, it fails for lack of humor. If it is supposed to delude people into thinking it is true, anyone with a modicum of historical sensibility or of critical sensibility would never give this unquestioning acceptance. It is sad if this needs debunking, but apparently it does, and it has been debunked many times. For example: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/trumanpc.asp.”

I also, however, sent it to recipients of the email that “reproduced” the MacArthur-Truman exchange. I got no response from anyone on that extensive list. Instead, the next email to this group started with an admonition that the emails should not be forwarded to unsympathetic people, and the addresses of the recipients were now blocked. Surprise, surprise! These people did not want to know if what they passed around had been debunked. They were indifferent to the truth. Or in Franfortian terms, they were content to eat bullshit.

This group is not alone in that desire. Many in our society are happy to receive bullshit. Even though it is often easy now to do some checking for accuracy, they don’t do it. They are, too often, indifferent to the truth. If many are willing to consume bullshit, it is not surprising that others are willing to provide it.

Of course, we get bullshit on many different topics—often about personalities in popular culture, for example—and there is bullshit throughout the political spectrum, but I don’t think it is bullshit to believe that never before have we had a President who has provided so much, so regularly. And perhaps we have never before had so many people not just willing to accept it, but seemingly to desire it.

This should lead us to think about what this pervasive political bullshit culture will do to our country as the steaming bullshit mounds will reach increasingly unprecedented heights in the coming years. For example, Frankfort maintains that cultural conditions and epistemological beliefs can help spread bullshit. It proliferates where it is denied that “we can have reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things really are.” But isn’t it also likely that the proliferation of bullshit and its acceptance will also lead to more people believing that there is no reliable access to an objective reality and no way of knowing how things truly are? And if that happens, haven’t we entered a bullshit spiral from which we might never escape?

And perhaps after discussing Frankfort’s On Bullshit, the time is nigh to discuss Aaron James’s book, Assholes: A Theory.

President Donald Trump told a lie. That gets reported almost every day, or more likely several times every day. Some news outlets give us the cumulative total since Inauguration Day. One source has him uttering more than 1600 different lies since he became President.

I find myself almost pulling for more lies. Two thousand would be a nice, memorable number that would be easy to compare as next year’s total begins. I feel a little like I did in a harsh winter a few years back. Snowy day after snowy day. Ice was everywhere. A fall on the sidewalk always seemed imminent. Roads were close to impassable. Then at the end of winter another storm was approaching. The weather reporters said that it might veer north and not hit us, but I felt bizarre because I was welcoming it. If it hit us, we were going to hit an all-time record for the yearly snowfall. If I had to suffer as I had most of the winter, at least it should be a record year.

Having listened to so many Presidential lies, I, again, want this storm of lies to be memorable. To say that the total lies was more than 1,600 is more forgettable than if he gets the total over 2,000.

But as I have been wanting even more lies to get there—he might have to slightly increase the pace, but I had great confidence that he could reach 2,000—I started to remember something I had read a few years back, and I started to doubt whether President Trump really told any lies. So, I re-read Harry G. Frankfort’s marvelous little book, On Bullshit.

Frankfort makes a convincing distinction between bullshit and lies. Lying requires a degree of craftsmanship to get the lie accepted, and it also takes a concern for the truth. “In order to invent a lie at all, [the liar] must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.”

The liar, thus, has a concern for the truth. The bullshitter does not. A bullshitter’s “statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.” And since our President does not seem to craft lies as much as utter falsehoods with an indifference to the truth, he is not liar. Stop calling him that! He is a bullshitter.

The bullshitter has more freedom than the liar. The bullshit artist “does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a certain point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, as far as required, to fake the context as well.” Frankfort continues, “He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

Many wonder how Trump can tell so many falsehoods, or how he can repeat falsehoods that have been repeatedly debunked, or how he can assert things that on their face are blatantly false. Their outrage stems from their mistaken assumption that they are both playing I Spy, when Trump is really playing Pin the Tail (or in this case, Tale) on the Donkey. While a liar and truth-teller are on opposite sides in the same game, the bullshitter is not rejecting the authority of truth, as the liar does. Instead, “he pays no attention to it at all.”

If Trump lied, he would not be as dangerous. Frankfort writes, “By virtue of [not paying attention to the truth], bullshit is the greater enemy of the truth than lies are. . . . Through excessive indulgence in [bullshit], which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost.”

There may be many causes for Trump’s bullshit—his narcissistic ego may be the prime reason, but there is at least another one. “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Those of us concerned with the truth should give up the notion that Trump will learn what is true and what is not and that the falsehoods will decrease over time. As long as Trump continues to talk about things he knows little to nothing about, the bullshit will continue.

But the bullshit will also continue because many of us simply do not want to grapple with determining what is true. A sizeable portion of the population does not care whether what a speaker says is true or not, much less whether the speaker believes what he says is true or that he knows, like the liar, that it is not true. A sizeable audience is indifferent to how things really are. In other words, this group is content to be fed bullshit, and that almost guarantees that bullshit will proliferate. (To be continued.)

“I am Misha Borisovich Vainberg, age thirty, a grossly overweight man with small, deeply set blue eyes, a pretty Jewish beak that brings to mind the most distinguished breed of parrot, and lips so delicate you would want to wipe them with the naked back of your hand.” Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan.

“By all rights, Times Square should have been called Oscar Hammerstein Square.” Anthony Bianco, Ghosts of 42^nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block.

“The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.” Ben Lerner, 10:04.

“That God created mankind, male and female, in his own image is a matter of faith.” Jack Miles God: A Biography.

“The accused, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendant’s table—the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as that is possible at his own trial.” David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars.

“The Civil War started in darkness.” John Strausbaugh, City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War.

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meaney.” John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meaney.

“’Oysters! Oysters! Beautiful oysters,” trumpeted a headline in a Batavia, New York, newspaper in 1824.” Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862.

“We are at rest five miles behind the front.” Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front.

“When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money.” Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie.

A bout a decade ago a colleague was arrested for having pornographic images of children on his computer. He was labeled a “child pornographer.” I later did some work in a couple of public defender offices that represented others who had been arrested for obscene and disturbing pictures of children on their computers. They, too, were “child pornographers.” I wondered that since we called those who looked at the images child pornographers, what we should call those who create the images and those who sell them after they are created. However, when I saw arrests for such conduct, these people also were called child pornographers. One term was used to describe what to me were related but quite different behaviors. The same term for all the conduct tended to make all the offenders seem to be equally heinous.

With drugs our societal labels make a distinction among smugglers and manufacturers, wholesalers, retail sellers, and users, but seemingly not with child pornography. The person who forces children into poses or photographs them while they are being raped should be labeled differently because their behavior is different from a person who has downloaded images. Language can help create useful distinctions, but when the language is overbroad, it can blur needed distinctions. The term “child pornographer” indiscriminately used for different behaviors is a language failure.

Perhaps for child pornography, we might just use the terms that are used for drug offenders and say that there are manufacturers, sellers, and possessors of child pornography. The child pornography industry, however, differs from the drug trade in important ways, and the same labels used for both sets of offenders might blur those distinctions. Thus, the grower, smuggler, or the manufacturer of drugs does not intrinsically harm someone in their activities, but surely the maker of the child pornography always creates victims who may suffer for the rest of their lives. The creators of child pornography aren’t simply akin to Walter White when he cooks meth.

The possessors of child pornography also differ from the drug user. The drug user pays to get the drugs. This is the reason we have drug growers, smugglers, and sellers. The drug user, because he buys drugs, is at least partially responsible for the drug cartels and the gangs that smuggle, distribute, and sell drugs with all their attendant harms, including much violence.

Only some collectors of child pornography have bought the images. These paying customers are like the drug user in that they are part of a child pornography chain, from the rapes, kidnapping, and beatings of children to the retailing and selling of the images. Perhaps some sick people would still create child pornography if there were no market for it, but surely there would be less of it.

Some child pornography possessors, however, have not bought the images. They are like my colleague. In yet another wonder of the Internet, they have found ways to collect images online without paying. My colleague wanted to believe that, therefore, he was not doing any harm to anyone else, and tried to convince himself that what he had done should not have been considered criminal. While he did not do the harm of adding money to the pornography commerce, I became convinced that his conduct was still harmful. After my colleague went to jail, I read an article by a woman who was a victim of child pornography. She said that every time she learned of a person possessing an image of her, she felt a new violation. That makes sense to me, and while I might like to legalize the possession of drugs because the user of drugs may primarily hurt himself, legalization should never happen for the possession of child pornography.

While the use of the one term “child pornographer” for all those involved in the making, selling, and possession of the images blurs distinctions and helps to equate the harm of the child rapist with the lonely man peering at a computer, the drug trade terms don’t work for child pornography either. Our language is just deficient.

These thoughts about the term “child pornographer” have come back because of the recent avalanche of headlines about sexual harassment.  My first thoughts about this cavalcade of news have been mostly shocked wonder at our society. I, of course, knew sexual harassment existed, but not how pervasive it is. All this news had led me to think that a good starting assumption is that all men are pigs. And many are worse. I hope that we will learn that behavior that too many of us men think is cute or funny or seductive is rightfully seen by women as degrading and threatening and just an exercise of power.

Even so and even though our society would be better if all such behavior were eliminated, should we lump all of it under the one label of “sexual harassment”? I have seen that term used for drugging women in order to have sex with them; grabbing a breast in a private place; suggesting that a blow job will enhance job prospects; placing the hand on a buttock in a public place; exposing a penis to a woman alone in the office; molesting a fourteen-year-old girl; making lewd comments in a workplace; making lewd comments on the street; and so on. At least to me, this behavior includes the bad, the awful, and the despicable. Lumping it all under the same term, however, makes the despicable seem not quite as bad and makes the bad seem worse.

But for headlines and stories that must be succinct, we don’t have the ready language to make the distinctions. Once again, our language is deficient.

I represented many people charged with drug offenses. While all the cases involved controlled substances, one indiscriminate label was not used for every offender. Instead, in both the legal and public eye, a basic distinction was made between sellers and users of drugs. Sellers deserved, and got, more punishment than mere users..

Furthermore, both the possessor and seller categories had gradations by amounts. The greater the quantity sold, the more serious the offense. If I told a colleague that I had just been assigned a “sale case,” the immediate response invariably was, “How much?” That meant how much was the weight of the drugs allegedly sold. The seriousness of possession cases, too, was measured by amounts, but for a different reason. Possessing more drugs was not necessarily worse than possessing a lesser amount if the drugs were to be used by the possessor, but the assumption was that a person possessing a large quantity of drugs was not likely just planning to use those drugs personally. Instead, the possession of the large amount indicated that the person was really a seller, Thus, because he possessed with intent to sell, he should be punished more like a seller than a user. Once again, both the law and popular culture tried to distinguish among the drug offenses.

In state court, I never dealt with what is often seen as a third category of drug offenders—the importer or the smuggler. Perhaps this category also includes the manufacturer of a drug—think the TV series Breaking Bad, or perhaps Walter White is a fourth category. We could simply call the smuggler or the meth cooker a “drug seller,” for they will sell their product, but that does not suffice. That label would lump the smuggler or the manufacturer with the street corner seller of heroin, cocaine, or meth, and we all know that the smuggler’s or manufacturer’s conduct is vastly different from a “clocker’s.”  (If you are not familiar with that term, or even if you are, I highly recommend Clockers by Richard Price.)

My point is that we almost instinctively make what seem like natural distinctions among drug offenses and do not put the same label on all offenders. This does not mean the gradations perfectly capture all the distinctions. For example, I represented a woman who was a user of drugs and, not surprisingly, a prostitute in what was then a scruffy part of Brooklyn. An undercover police officer “befriended” her and offered her $50 dollars if she would lead him to people that would sell him a kilo of heroin. After much beseeching by him, and after she made some inquiries, she led the cop to some major drug dealers in Harlem who sold a kilo to the cop. She was charged with acting in concert with the major drug dealer although all agreed she stood to get only $50 from the transaction. For that she got a life sentence.

The drug gradations may not have been perfect, but it is right, and seemingly natural, that we make these distinctions. We recognize that all the behavior concerning drugs should not be lumped together. But that has not been true for child pornography. (To be continued.)