Gee, Officer Krupke
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2023
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We hear the word "justice" and immediately think "punishment." But justice in the truest sense isn't only a set of rules: it's also a virtue. From Plato to Dante by way of Stephen Sondheim, Spencer explains the last of the four cardinal virtues as both a source and a destination of love. Plus: an extended mailbag question about dealing with gender dysphoria.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We begin today with a piece of wisdom literature for our modern times. |
| 0:07.1 | Dear kindly Sergeant Kropke, you gotta understand, it's just our bringing up key that gets us out of hand. Our mothers are |
| 0:17.0 | all junkies, our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, naturally were punks. See Officer Kropky, you're really a square. This boy |
| 0:28.9 | don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care. It's just his neurosis that ought to be curbed. He's psychologically |
| 0:36.7 | disturbed. |
| 0:37.7 | Okay, hopefully some of you recognize the 1957 lyrics to Officer Krupky by Stephen Sondheim |
| 0:48.0 | from Westside Story. |
| 0:50.3 | I'm joking a little bit, but only a little bit when I call Sondheim one of the great artistic geniuses of the 20th century |
| 0:58.0 | It's arguable whether musical theater ever really rose to heights that would merit description as works of genius, but I would |
| 1:07.6 | argue that Sondheim is certainly in the running. |
| 1:10.0 | Some of his lyrics are so perfect, so minutely crafted, and so expressive |
| 1:14.9 | of certain sensibilities that sometimes |
| 1:17.2 | he just really capture something. |
| 1:18.4 | And this is one of those times. |
| 1:19.8 | Officer Krupky's a song in which the gang members on the streets of New York try to convince their |
| 1:26.2 | officer, the parole officer, that they're really just misunderstood. |
| 1:30.2 | They're not actually criminals. |
| 1:32.4 | They don't deserve to go to jail. They don't deserve to be punished. |
| 1:34.5 | What they deserve is to be cured, to be given an analyst's care. And I started reading that today |
| 1:41.2 | because we have moved on now to justice as the last of the four |
| 1:46.0 | cardinal virtues. It's been quite a journey on young heretics now through these |
| 1:50.9 | classical cardinal virtues. |
... |
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