First Lick the Stamps

Accommodation Is Not a Transaction. It's a Subscription

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I Ain’t Dead Yet

At a meeting of the Harvard faculty, a professor who had escaped Mussolini’s Italy challenged the dean on this matter. The dean responded that signing and sending in the oaths was merely pro forma and had no more meaning than licking the stamps on the letters. The Italian professor stood and said something like, “Mr. Dean, I’m from fascist Italy, and in fascist Italy you learn one thing. First you lick the stamps. Then you lick something else.”

New York Times May 25, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET

~730 words / approximately 3 minutes reading time

Recently I read the above article by Roger Rosenblatt in the Times. He’s 84, apparently still not dead, and still writing circles around people half his age. The essay is called “I Ain’t Dead Yet,” which is either a title or a declaration of war, and with Rosenblatt it’s probably both.

He tells a story. At a Harvard faculty meeting, during a period when loyalty oaths were being demanded of professors, a dean tried to reassure his colleagues. Signing the oath, the dean explained, was merely pro forma — no more meaningful than licking the stamps on the envelopes. A professor who had fled Mussolini’s Italy rose to respond. “Mr. Dean,” he said, “I’m from fascist Italy, and in fascist Italy you learn one thing. First you lick the stamps. Then you lick something else.”

I’ve been sitting with that story ever since. Sitting with it, and getting angrier by the minute.

I am 89 years old. I will be 90 in a matter of months. I have been watching this country for the better part of a century, and I have to tell you: I have never been more disgusted by the sheer, craven, preening submissiveness of the people and institutions that are supposed to stand between a democracy and the people who would dismantle it.

The law firms. The universities. The media organizations. One by one, they have stepped forward — voluntarily, eagerly, sometimes preemptively — to demonstrate their compliance. The law firms cut deals, offering free legal services to an administration in exchange for not being targeted, and called it pragmatism. The universities canceled programs, restructured curricula, and issued statements of appeasement in response to funding threats — some before anyone even demanded it. The media settled lawsuits of dubious merit for enormous sums and then explained, with straight faces, that none of it would affect their editorial independence.

First you lick the stamps.

What the Italian professor understood — and what these institutions apparently do not — is that accommodation is not a transaction. It is a process. Every capitulation resets the baseline. Every concession establishes both your willingness and your price. You are not buying peace. You are enrolling in an arrangement that has no exit clause and only one direction of travel.

But here is what I want to say, and what I think matters most: the Italian professor’s response was not merely clever. It was a warning about isolation. He had seen what happens when institutions and individuals each make their own private calculation, each convince themselves that their particular compromise is the pragmatic exception, each believe that they alone cannot afford to resist. The result is not a series of individual accommodations. The result is a system.

Which is why the only serious answer is collective resistance.

Not one law firm holding out. All of them. Not one university refusing to capitulate. A coalition. Not one journalist refusing to self-censor. An industry with a spine. The presidency is powerful. The DOJ is powerful. No individual institution, no single voice, can stand against that force alone and expect to prevail. That is not defeatism — it is arithmetic.

What these institutions share, and what they seem to have forgotten, is that their power was never individual to begin with. The rule of law means nothing if only some lawyers uphold it. Academic freedom means nothing if only some universities defend it. A free press means nothing if each outlet is separately negotiating its own survival. Their strength was always collective. Their surrender has been, tragically, individual — each one calculating that someone else will hold the line, or that there is no line worth holding.

I have nearly nine decades of evidence for what happens when that calculation spreads. It does not end well.

I am angry about this. I am not ashamed of being angry about this. At 89, within shouting distance of 90, I have earned the right to say clearly what I see: this is the stamp-licking phase, and it will not stay the stamp-licking phase. The ask will change. It always does.

The question is whether enough people and institutions will find each other, link arms, and decide — together — that there is something they will not lick.

I, for one, am not dead yet.

FTS

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