A is for Anal

This is a satire for adults. It is not a children's book.

Every generation needs a primer. This one is for grown-ups.

From A to Z, A is for Anal teaches the vocabulary your grown-up will meet on campus, at the march, and across the Thanksgiving table. Twenty-six words. Twenty-six full-page illustrations. Twenty-six Classroom Tips, so you can reinforce the lesson at home.

B is for BDS. C is for Check Your Privilege. E is for Equity, which is not equality. H is for Harm, the word that turns disagreement into injury. P is for Pallywood. S is for Safe Space, where challenging ideas are held gently until they stop moving. Z is for Zionist, a label now applied to anyone who knows Israel is the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.

And F is for From the River to the Sea, a geography slogan whose river and whose sea remain, to this day, unnamed.

The format is the joke. Bright letters, cheerful illustrations, the patient cadence of the books we read to children, applied to a vocabulary built to end arguments rather than win them. The slogans are real, and the movements are real. The classroom is invented, and so are its teachers and its students.

Gerard Filitti is a civil rights lawyer who has spent years reading the documents these words come from. The documents are worse.

Adults only. This is satire. It should go without saying; it no longer does.