Again and again, I run into America’s sick preoccupation with labels. In our culture, everyone gets a label – red, blue, progressive, conservative, Trumpist, MAGA supporter. People instantly tag one another with labels; they are the laziest way of thinking and knowing anything.

If you favor the right to an abortion, you are a progressive; if you don’t, you must be a conservative or a Trumpist. If you are liberal in your social views, then you woke, and any book you write can be banned; this is all in Floria, our brightest, warmest,  and most prosperous Orwellian state.

Big Brother DeSantis and an army of homemakers are watching the books – all of the time.

In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated but has also become more urgent and evident today.

In clear, readable prose, Bloom argues that contemporary America’s social and political crises are part of a more significant intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites.

Bloom was decades ahead of himself; what was unimaginable in 1987 is standard procedure today. We are all learning the wrong things. Instead of learning how to talk to one another, we are simplifying the process; we need to hate and ignore one another and then wonder what the problem is with our troubled country..

Today a week after, I pissed off some Amherst art people by saying my portrait of Maria also reminded me of a still life by a revered painter like Vermeer.

I love this series of Maria photos; I call it the “Blogger,” and honestly, I don’t know what to call it in art terms. It is part scene, part portrait, and maybe a tinge of still life. I am not an academic professor; I am curious if this is technically correct, and I realized this week that I don’t care.

One of my favorite blog readers summed up this by messaging me: “It doesn’t matter what these Maria photos are called; they should be labeled “beautiful.” This is so obviously true that I was embarrassed.

The thing about labels I hate the most is that they deprive most people of the need to think or listen. Once tagged, there’s no sense of thinking, listening, or talking. We know all we need to know. As a writer, I find this tragic. As an American, I find it a catastrophe.

The son of immigrants who found America a life-saving miracle beyond belief, it breaks my heart to see our Congress paralyzed and spewing lies and venom.

The American idea was never to freeze disagreement or isolate people with different beliefs; it was to celebrate and use it to come together and solve problems.

I’m working on compassion and empathy, not foolish labels. Maria does not need to have her spirit labeled (sorry,  Amherst professor).

To understand how labels in America are choking any meaningful dialogue, think about what it means to be labeled “red” or “blue” in America. The reds have no reason to listen to the blues, and the blues have no reason to listen to the reds.  So they’ve stopped talking or listening to one another.

That’s where we are in America, trapped inside an awful mess, one half of the country unable to hear or communicate with the other half. Political scientists from Jefferson to H.L. Mencken have repeatedly written that a healthy democracy depends on one side listening to the other and negotiating difficulties with the other.

The Internet has washed away that tradition; we do not need to take the time to talk to people we disagree with directly; we have X Facebook and Apple iPhones. Everybody talks, and nobody needs to listen. The new idea is to use the latest technology to hate and divide one another.

That is working for the haters.

It’s foolish and presumptuous of me to label these photos of Maria. I got a good and needed lesson this week.

The photos of Maria don’t need labeling. She has many fans and people who love her work, and her blogs and art don’t need to be labeled; they can just be seen and enjoyed, and absorbed.

My reader broke through the smoke and stated clearly and correctly: “Maria is beautiful. That’s all we need to know.”

All True.