I guess a guy got arrested for interrupting the State of the Union address. A parent, protesting the shameful way his son’s life was wasted in the retreat from Afghanistan. I know soldiers are brave, cops and firefighters, too. But I’ve only ever witnessed one act of raw bravery in real life.
30 years ago, I moved my family to outstate Minnesota to start a career as a lawyer. I was in my office one morning when the receptionist said, “There’s someone to see you.” It was a kid from my son’s hockey team, call him John, wearing a three-piece suit with a necktie in his hand. “Today is team pictures and we’re supposed to dress up. Can you help me with this?” he asked, holding out his necktie.
It was a small town. I knew about John’s family situation. Father drank away the family business and left. Mother worked double shifts waitressing. John had nobody to show him how to tie a necktie. Where do you go to learn that? Who wears neckties anymore? Lawyers. And he knew one, me, from hockey. So, John cut class to walk uptown to the law firm carrying his necktie to ask for help so he’d look nice for the team photo.
Can you imagine the guts that took?
Of course I helped him. And then drove him back so he’d be on time. The team photo came out great. Can’t see much of John’s suit – tall kid in the back – but the knot of his necktie is as perfect as the look of pride on his face.
Bravest man I ever met was a 17-year-old kid.
Words like “bravery” and “courage” have been devalued as badly as “fascism”, lately.
With that in mind, I’ll urge you to listen, as I do this time every year, to Reverend King’s final, and in some ways most iconic, speech, “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop”.
“I Have A Dream”, full of vigor and hope, gets all the headlines; “Mountaintop” is both more sober and more expansive; it focuses on the stump-pulling work of the battle for civil rights. It has lessons for those who fight for all civil rights.
As always, the whole thing is worth a listen.
Keep that in mind when you read some of the, uh, revision of King from the right these days – most notably Charlie Kirk:
Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to Augustine and Aquinas to justify resisting racist laws. He elevated character high above skin color and moral universalism above separatism of all kinds. His political claims were grounded in America’s founding promises, his message garbed in a high-minded, critical patriotism. He called the United States his “beloved nation,” even as he denounced Washington’s forever war in Vietnam. At a moment of profound polarization, King is one of the few figures who can still supply us with unifying themes.
So naturally, some in the more excitable corners of the right have been taking an ax to his legacy. The latest comer is Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who last week declared that “MLK was awful,” and vowed: “We’re gonna be hitting him next week. Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it’s MLK Day. We’re gonna do the thing you’re not supposed to do. We’re gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr.”
Civic pieties should be scrutinized in the light of later historiography, to be sure. But that isn’t what the MLK haters are up to. Their anti-MLK crusade is the mirror image of progressive efforts to discredit national icons and narratives. Ironically, MLK himself has also been the target of such attempts from the left, on the grounds that his moderation stunted more radical projects of racial liberation.
Now, Kirk is broadcast on Salem, so I urge you to listen for yourself.
Let’s just say I’d like a word with the guy.
Speaking of questions – I suspect George Orwell has some…
This #MLKDay, the #FBI honors one of the most prominent leaders of the Civil Rights movement and reaffirms its commitment to Dr. King’s legacy of fairness and equal justice for all. pic.twitter.com/tj9EUoXsFK
Haven’t posted here in a while. About time I did. So herewith, a memory.
True story: on the day John Lennon was killed, I had turned in a paper I wrote for my high school sociology class concerning gun control. And as a young smartass and White Album fan, I had titled the paper, “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”
I had just turned 17 and I was a senior in high school. I learned the news as I sat at the dining room table, which was where I typically did my homework in those days. I had lugged out the massive, cobalt blue IBM Selectric typewriter my dad had brought home from the office. I was typing up a paper for my Honors English class that was due the next morning; if I remember correctly, it concerned Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape.” I could see the television set in the living room and Monday Night Football was on. Then ol’ Howard Cosell told us: John Lennon had been shot dead in New York City.
It’s easy to forget now, but it was the beginning of a very violent 10-month period. At the end of that long winter of 1980-81, President Reagan nearly died at the hands of an assassin. Not long after, Pope John Paul II nearly met his maker. By the fall, Anwar Sadat was felled.
My generation was too young to really understand the events of the 1960s, especially the toll of the assassins that blighted the decade. We had come of age in the 1970s, a time that seemed simultaneously grim and silly. It was easy for me, and for a lot of my classmates, to adopt a mask of adolescent cynicism and to sneer at what we saw in front of us.
When Lennon was killed that night, I was thinking the cynicism I felt about my life and my future prospects was somehow justified. I felt constrained by the town I had called home. I kept thinking to myself — I can’t wait to get the hell out of this place. It wasn’t for me, this Appleton, Wisconsin. There was no way I would ever come back to Podunk and I sneered at those who were content to stay and settle for the blandishments of a boring little town, a suburb without a city attached to it. Once I left, I did not return. That much was true. Still, I was wrong about my town, though you couldn’t have convinced me otherwise.
The thing was, that cynicism had a very thin veneer. I remember when we were discussing the murder in school the next day, one of my friends reported the reaction of Mick Jagger, who purportedly called Lennon’s murder “a good career move” or something like that. I didn’t know if Jagger actually said it (and it turns out he didn’t), but we were all convinced it was the worst thing we’d ever heard and some of my friends vowed to get rid of their Stones albums in protest. They didn’t, as I recall.
Adolescents are often like that — simultaneously full of dreams and full of crap. Many, many things have changed in the 43 years since John Lennon died. One thing hasn’t — I still write at the dining room table. And, in 2023 at the age of 60, I’m actually less cynical than I was in 1980 at the age of 17. No matter how rotten the world might look at any given moment, there are always opportunities if we choose to see them.
I’m not sure how I missed this piece, from five years ago, about supremely complicated story of Warren Zevon – a deeply flawed person who wrote some of the best music ever about deeply flawed people.
It’s a sprawling article that covers a lot of turf – too many
In an old Late Show episode from the ’90s, when Zevon was guesting as bandleader, David Letterman asks Zevon to play “Desperados Under the Eaves,” which he had never performed on the show. Zevon demurs, suggesting that he needs an orchestra backing him to do the song justice. Maybe he just didn’t want to play his big hymn about L.A. on the opposite coast from that “beautiful, sensual morgue.” Either way, Dave never was able to convince Warren to play it for him.
The best song can’t ever be your favorite song, because the best song belongs to everybody, whereas a favorite song belongs only to you. Goldsmith goes with “The French Inhaler,” a telling choice for a songwriter — it boasts a parallel narrative that references Zevon’s bitter break-up with the first love of his life and mother to Jordan, Marilyn “Tule” Livingston, and the controversy over Norman Mailer’s 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. It’s the sort of song — sophisticated without making a big deal about it — that professionals wish they had written.
Favorite but not “best”? Probably a three way battle between “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”, “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and “A Certain Girl”.
The rebooting of Zevon’s reputation – from untouchable to secular saint, in the two decades since he died – fills a lot of the article, and it’s fascinating, and a little bit of a blast down memory lane to the days when he was one of the most alcoholic-y alcoholics around:
One of the most haunting passages from I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead concerns “Reconsider Me,” Zevon’s most poignant love song. (Given how much Zevon labored over his lyrics, the use of “reconsider” seems especially crucial.) Crystal Zevon recounts how Warren showed up at her place at some point in the mid-’80s, before he got sober, to play her the song. In spite of everything, they were thinking about giving their marriage another go.
Their daughter, Ariel, was excited to show her daddy her report card and a drawing she made for him. But when he walked in, he ignored Ariel, instead fixating on Crystal as he played her his beautiful love song. The little girl looked on, quietly devastated.
It’s an illuminating and fascinating read if you’re a fan. And I am.
It’s an aphorism I’ve kept in my mind through a *lot* of life’s ugly travails and misfortunes this past 20-odd years, along with “This, Too, Shall Pass”. Together, the two lines are wonderful, complementary views of coping with life’s vicissitudes; trouble ain’t forever – but sometimes, the only way past a problem is to finesse, claw or bludgeon your way all the way to the other side of it.
Through divorce, dips in the employment situation, post-divorce shenanigans, teenage problems, pandemics, riots and all of life’s other ups and downs, both aphorisms have been priceless.
The original line was from Tom Sizemore, as Sergeant Horvath in “Saving Private Ryan”.
Sizemore didn’t write the line.
But if anyone else – John Krasinski or RuPaul or Mark Wahlberg or even Tom Hanks or Morgan Freeman, even a young Clint Eastwood – had delivered the line any other way, it wouldn’t have had the same impact.
But something about the way Sizemore delivered that line made it memorable enough to keep it front and center all these years.
For every singer who manages to keep a career going for decades, there are hundreds of flashes in the pan – people who get a one-hit-wonder in their teens or twenties, have a brief spurt of stardom, and then…
In 1987, seemingly overnight, Terence Trent D’Arby became the most arresting new pop star of his generation. To hear him sing songs such as If You Let Me Stay and Sign Your Name was to bear witness to the art of aural seduction; the knees buckled. He became terribly famous, terribly quickly. He was 25.
Of course you remember Terence Trent D’Arby.
Er, Sananda Maitreya.
“I wanted adulation and got it,” D’Arby tells me almost 35 years later, by now working under the name Sananda Maitreya, “but I had to die to survive it.”
If his ascendancy had the stuff of legend about it, then so did his demise. Like Prince before him, he began to feel himself capable of anything, each new song he composed a masterpiece. His record company felt differently – it wanted hits, not ornate rock operas – but D’Arby was not someone easily restrained. And so, in pursuit of his muse, he spent the early 90s reportedly living the life of a tormented recluse in a Los Angeles mansion. When I speak to him – which takes six months to arrange – he suggests he was grateful to move on “from such excess and artifice. I didn’t give a fuck about it then, and even less about it now that memory has been kind enough to allow me to forget most of it.”
Prince had died, Michael Jackson, too. D’Arby was still here, albeit with a name change – prompted by a dream he had in 1995 – to help him better bury the past. Today, Maitreya lives in Milan, is happily married with young children, and writes, records and produces his own music, which he releases on his own label, behaving as he damn well pleases.
And Trent D’Arby…er, Maitreya – hints at something that dogged me and my mental state through my early thirties:
The question of whether anyone is listening any more doesn’t seem to trouble him unduly. When I ask what, if anything, he misses from the old days, he replies: “I miss the unbridled, bold, naked stupidity of youth’s vibrant electric hubris.”
As someone who oozed vibrant electric hubris himself? Even though I never had a hit (or came much closer than this single glorious evening), I do miss feeling that way pretty badly, sometimes.
Not all the side-effects, of course. I’m one of those guys who wants four metaphorical Old Fashioneds, but no hangover.
As the article shows, it doesn’t work that way, literally or figuratively.
My car broke down Saturday evening, as I was coming home from St. Cloud. Well not “broke,” exactly. The computer decided something was wrong and threw me into “Limp Mode.” Engine runs but can’t go over 15 mph. It’s designed so you can limp to the nearest exit to get your car off the freeway. I limped to Clearwater Truck Stop, called the tow truck to haul it to the dealership in St. Cloud and arranged for a ride home to the Twin Cities.
This is what happens in a High Trust society. I gave a $30,000 car to the tow truck driver, gave him my credit card number to pay the difference between what AAA would pay and the actual cost of the tow when he gets the final total, and just assumed the car would make it to the dealer who would give me an honest diagnosis and estimate of repair costs. I felt perfectly safe doing so. This isn’t some Third World country where giving a stranger my vehicle and credit card number would be insanity. This is America; that’s how we do things, here.
Interestingly, when I called the dealership to alert them the car was coming, they asked what model year and how many miles, then said, “Oh, your 5-year 60,000 mile warranty expired last month.” Uh huh, of course it did. And the computer that controls the engine knows that date, too. How convenient that it waited until now to discover the problem on my nickel, not theirs. It’s like video blackjack at the casino. The machine is required to pay out 93% but no more, which is achieved by software controlling which cards I am dealt. Oh, you needed a seven? You got a nine. Bust. You lose. Uh huh, sure I did.
What, I don’t trust the billion-dollar car maker computer or the scrupulously honest casino computer as much as I trust a greasy-faced 20-something kid in overhauls? No, I don’t. And don’t even get me started on medical doctors with their ever-changing SCIENCE, corrupt politicians selling influence, or economists who can’t figure out why too many dollars chasing too few goods would result in price increases. I don’t trust any of those jokers. They’re transforming America from a High Trust society into a Low Trust Third World society and I hate it.
Democracy. They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
Of course, what frightens Max Boot is having anything he says face a challenge. Content moderation is especially cool if it means you don’t have to face any discontent. Boot’s preferred usage is a Boot on the throat.
I am not sure what I think about Elon Musk generally. One could argue he’s built his fortune by using government subsidies and cronyism, as he clearly has, but it’s also undeniable he’s building useful things. And it’s absolutely undeniable that he has all the right enemies. And the cognitive dissonance is off the damned charts:
Does Musk want to take over Twitter? I don’t think so. The company’s financials aren’t great, and running social media companies is hard. The car crash that is former President Donald Trump’s social media experiment, Truth Social, is a cautionary tale for Musk. Does Musk want to name some people to Twitter’s board of directors? Maybe. That would allow him to have some say over its affairs without spending too much time or money.
That’s worrisome, because it’s not ideal to have a free speech absolutist who isn’t absolutely in favor of free speech at the helm of — or even close to — a media company.
So where is Timothy O’Brien making this argument? Bloomberg. Who runs Bloomberg? A billionaire who happened to be a presidential candidate in the last cycle. We live in an unserious world.
P. J. O’Rourke died yesterday at the age of 74. He was one of the best conservative pundits of the last 50 years and certainly the funniest. He also had a keen eye. In his 1990 classic Parliament of Whores, he provided a spot-on synopsis of the people you meet at a protest rally. Tell me if these descriptions from 30+ years ago still don’t ring true:
World Council of Churches sensible-shoe types who have self-righteousness the way some people have bad breath
Angry black poverty pests making a life and a living off the misfortunes of others
Even angrier feminists doing their best to feminize poverty before the blacks use it all up
Earnest neophyte Marxists, eyes glazed from dialectical epiphanies and hands grubby from littering the Mall with ill-Xeroxed tracts
College bohos dressed in black to show how gloomy the world is when you’re a nineteen-year-old rich kid
Young would-be hippies dressed exactly like old hippies used to dress (remarkable how behind the times the avant-garde has gotten)
And some of those old hippies themselves, faded jeans straining beneath increasing paunches, hair still tied into a ponytail in the back but gone forever from the top
His powers of observation set him apart from other writers, especially those who tried their hand at satire. He understood his targets better than the targets understood themselves.
As O’Rourke grew older, he softened the sharp edges and some of his thinking got a bit pear-shaped. He drew the ire of conservatives everywhere when he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. I was not a fan of Donald Trump either, but O’Rourke’s powers of observation betrayed him that time:
Dorothy and Toto’s house fell on Hillary. I endorse her.
Munchkins endorse her.
Donald Trump is a flying monkey.
Except what the flying monkeys have to say, “oreoreoreo,” makes more sense than Trump’s policy statements.
Not that Hillary makes much sense either.
Hillary is wrong about everything. She is to politics and statecraft what Pope Urban VIII and the Inquisition were to Galileo. She thinks the sun revolves around herself.
But Trump Earth™ is flat. We’ll sail over the edge. Here be monsters.
O’Rourke was wrong about that. Hillary is more of a monster in real life than anything O’Rourke could imagine over the edge. We’ll leave that aside. Where O’Rourke made his mark, and where his legacy will reside, is in being a proto-Mencken for our age. And let’s say it — his bon mots were pretty bon:
There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now than there are facts— the country has shortages of practically everything.
Or this:
The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors— psychology, sociology, women’s studies— to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you’d have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.
Or this:
Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner’s Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.
But above all, this:
The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a huge piñata — a papier-mâché donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budget and other goodies. The American voter is blindfolded and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard.
We all need our sticks and few wielded a more elegant brickbat than the Irish kid from Toledo. RIP,
David Strom, writing on Facebook, sums up what I’ve been wanting/trying to say for much of this past 23 months:
Follow the science is a bullshit phrase, not because science itself is bullshit, but because science at best can only provide input and data on what are not scientific questions.
Science is a branch of knowledge seeking. It is not equipped to provide answers to what are in fact judgment calls. Public policy is at its root about making judgement calls–weighing risks and rewards, costs and benefits, and of course balancing competing rights and goods.
And in fact, no actual scientist believes that the scientific method is, in and of itself, superior to the other methods of seeking knowledge: history, logic, math, philosophy, and so on . They’re all just different tools to similar ends.
Science can help us better understand risks and rewards (when done well, with good data, and the right questions), but it can’t help us weigh those and come up with a “right” answer. If you have ever had a difficult conversation with a doctor you understand this. Doctors give you information upon which you make medical decisions, but in the end they ask you what you want to do based upon your own set of values.
When somebody tells you to “follow the science” they aren’t just making claims about what the science say (and in many cases it isn’t clear), but also to accept their values about how to weigh the costs and benefits.
Consider this extreme example of how important values are in making judgements about behavior (not a public policy example):
Alex Honnold is the world’s best “free solo” climber, and is admired by millions for his skill and grace. He is also, by any measure that values survival above all else, utterly insane. This is true of extreme athletes in general.
Science can tell us nothing about whether what he is doing is admirable or is just off his rocker, but if you watch any interview of him he seems perfectly rational–he just values preservation of his own life as less important than the things he gets from performing his craft.
It’s no different for a ballet dancer or football player, who both sacrifice their body and endure horrible pain to create their art/sport. They balance the risks and rewards based upon their own judgement of what is important. And obviously the answers vary by what individuals value most.
I’m going to emphasize this next bit:
Public policy exists in that same realm, although on a different scale. And public policy in a pluralistic society means that decisions about such matters are made with an eye to balancing the judgments of millions of people and finding artful compromises that garner enough support to be maintained. It’s why we have elections.
“Follow the science” is nothing more than a bullshit way to tarnish the values of people who have different visions of the good society. Science doesn’t speak to values and morals. Ask Josef Mengele. Science is just one of several means to get knowledge. A useful way. But no scientist can use it to tell you whether Monet is a great artist or not.
And yet we have bred a generation and change that believes science…
…no, conclusions given by people in real or rhetorial lab coats = morality.
Want to get docked a letter grade on your argument?
Call it “evidence-based”.
Seriouslly.
We are seeing this phrase from an awful lot of groups, especially media, to try and market themselves as authoritative, objective, and “not fake“.
(Dishonorable mention to Minnesota and National Public Radio who’ve been leading with the equally-dumb “fact-based”).
The phrase isn’t “meaningless”, per se – but it does prey on the gullibility of the audience.
Virtually every argument that goes past the level of the thesis statement is based on some kind of “evidence“ or another, including every single conspiracy theory that more than three people share.
The flat earth theory is “evidence-based“: the evidence is too narrow in scope, obsolete or just plain wrong, but it is in fact evidence.
Phrenology – the practice of medicine based around measuring bumps on peoples heads – what evidence-based. It turned out the evidence led to a faulty conclusion.
Hair strand analysis -= the story of the structure of hair – was considered as infallible as DNA is today, for purposes of evidence in criminal proceedings. The “evidence-based” study of hair strands was considered so authoritative it sent many people to death row over the years.
But it turned out that the interpretation of the evidence, as knowledge of other ividence grew, meant that hair strand analysis turned out to be completely useless for establishing identity, and is today not a whole not more respected than phrenology or the flat earth theroy.
Evidence is not a conclusioni. It’s not distilled truth, in and of itself.
Evidence is the “table stakes” in a rational, informed debate that gets us, eventually, to the truth.
Anyone who treats that phrase otherwise deserves a sound mocking.
We need a new word to describe an establishment conservative, someone who claims to be conservative but is always willing to stab in the back any truly conservative movement (the Tea Party) or candidate (Trump.) StabCon, as in, “Geez, Romney is such a StabCon.”
It is well established that the Constitutional right of habeas corpus can be suspended in times of rebellion, insurrection and war. We’ve spent the last year learning that any governor can suspend the Constitutional rights of religion, assembly, and private property by declaring an emergency, no questions asked. Nevada is now the cutting edge. Bureaucrats describe unapproved statements as a ‘public health crisis’ so the Constitution no longer protects dissenting speech. And, of course, the CDC wants guns declared a ‘public health crisis‘ so the Constitution no longer protects the right to keep and bear arms.
Pretty much the only thing that is Not a public health crisis is my blood pressure going up when I see my tax bill rising, year after year. That’s perfectly okay.
Trouble Down Under. You can tell it’s a mob of vicious Neo-Nazis by the woman walking her dog. All Neo-Nazis bring their dogs to the rally. Those police are safe when firing on unarmed civilians protesting government regulations because Australians have no guns to fire back. Pro tip: do not try this at home.
Dominant liberal culture is, if nothing else, fiercely rule-abiding: they get very upset when they see anyone defying decrees from authorities, even if the rule-breaker is the official who promulgated the directives for everyone else.
While I appreciate the willingness of Glenn Greenwald, a man of the Left, to call out the hypocrisy of our Ruling Class, this observation isn’t quite right, actually. Dominant liberal culture is all about rule promulgation, not necessarily personally abiding by rules. As time goes on, the pretense fades, and why wouldn’t it? Nothing ever happens to the Ruling Class.
Dobie Gray, a more perceptive social critic than our man Greenwald, was all over this way back in ’65:
I’m in with the in crowd I go where the in crowd goes I’m in with the in crowd And I know what the in crowd knows Any time of the year, don’t you hear? Dressin’ fine, makin’ time We breeze up and down the street We get respect from the people we meet They make way day or night They know the in crowd is out of sight
Back in ’65, the term “out of sight” roughly meant cool, fashionable, au courant, like that. Some 56 years later, out of sight has a more conventional meaning: in the shadows, behind the curtain, holed up in nondescript office buildings in and around the Beltway. Our in crowd is an industrious lot, and they keep coming up with more rules at all times, whether our Congresscritters weigh in or not.
Any time of the year, don’t you hear? Mocking fools, making rules
But many of our fellow citizens don’t hear, nor are they listening. Instead, we all hear our animatronic Leader of the Free World as he is sent out to joust with the Teleprompter.
We make every minute count Our share is always the biggest amount Other guys imitate us But the original’s still the greatest
As I pointed out yesterday, I didn’t have a lot of personal sturm und drang during the “lockdown”. Life changed, of course – but I don’t think I especially did.
I was listening to an NPR science show a few weeks back. It discussed new discoveries about the interconnectedness of pleasure and pain – literal pleasure and pain,, in this case, and their role in addiction.
Doing something pleasurable triggers a jolt of dopamine – which is pleasant, and makes you happy. Doesn’t matter what the pleasure impulse is – a small victory, a shot of bourbon, sex, a good TV show, it all triggers dopamine. Of course, there’s an inner pendulum of sorts – as the body experiences pleasure, it pushes back, so the pleasure is followed by nearly equal, nearly opposite pain. Sugar is followed by crash; Big victory is followed by “so, what’s next?”.
One of the article’s many points was that humans have more stimuli for dopamine now than ever before; 24/7 entertainment, smart phones, porn on demand, drugs from caffeine to Fentanyl and everything in between. Humans aren’t built for all the pleasure modern times presents them; eveolutionariliy, everyone in the world is a virtual Norwegian Bachelor Farmer, expecting an aescetic life.
And this past 19 months have stripped away a lot of the stimulation people used to get – and made some of the more transient ones, video games and cell phones and the like – old hat. Buzzes get old; to quote the great psychiatrist Axl Rose, “I used to do a little but a little didn’t do it, so a little got more and more”.
And “creatives”, I think, are much more addicted to more dopamine, more need for stimulus and variation, than most.
And those are the ones writing the extended laments of the misery of thjis past two years.
Back around the fall of 2020, in respect to the mewling avalanche of navel gazing in the media and among parts of my social circle about how 2020 was “the worst year ever”, I made two observations.
Tell that to anyone alive in 1942, or 1916 (or the 1918 Influenza), 1861, or any of the various Bubonic Plagues. Those that didn’t hit you with a brick would laugh a bitter, condescending laugh.
Worst ever? It wasn’t even the worst in my lifetime, from my perspective.
This last observation was a little controversial in some parts of my social circle – but among years in my life, 2020 might have cracked the bottom five, maybe. Just off the top of my head: 2008 was horrible, 2003 was a grueling slog of unemployment, 2000 involved all the fun and frolic of a divorce and 1988 was a hideous morass of depression.
So – 2020 was #5 on the *hit parade. At worst.
I posted that list on another, lesser social media platform than this blog. And it drew…
…well, some agreement, and a particularly harsh reaction from some parts of my social circle.
I’m not going to say 2020 was fun – it was terrible, and for reasons that went beyond Covid. And 2021, so far, is worse; more people in my life, speaking for myself, have died of Covid this year than last year. Again, neither year comes close to topping any of the years I listed above.
No one can or should emerge from that world-historical shock without a heightened sense of life’s transience. It is the lockdown, the pause in “busy-ness”, that has been infused with more meaning than it can hold. What started as twee high jinks about banana bread became a sour reappraisal of modernity by its principal winners: the educated, the urban, the mobile.
It is mortifyingly non-U, in fact, to say that I enter the post-lockdown world with no new angle on life. But there it is. I am going to go out as much as I did before, thanks. I am going to travel as much as the friction of new rules allows. If some urbanites crave an Arcadian life, I encourage them to find it in the obvious places instead of bending cities to their tastes. To the extent that I have changed at all, it is in the direction of more speed and zest: passing some of my forties in an Asian megacity is a goal now, as it never was before.
No doubt, my failure to have a Damascene lockdown reveals an impoverished imagination. But then which side is more bovinely stuck in its ways here? What stands out about the great odysseys of the soul I keep reading is their familiarity. Metropolitans have always been prone to credulous nature-worship. Families have always been prone to urban flight. Mid-life ennui has always been dressed up as some fault with the outside world. What is new is the respectability that such attitudes have acquired over the past year and a half. In other words, the lockdown hasn’t changed these people any more than it changed me. It just dignified existing impulses.
It’s been a longstanding issue — how does the Catholic Church deal with politicians who are Catholic, but who actively support policies inimical to the faith? Especially now, since Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic, is in the Oval Office? The nation’s bishops are meeting this week and the matter is coming to a head:
This week at their annual spring meeting, the bishops of the U.S. Catholic Church — the largest faith group in the country — will debate the meaning of Communion and whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be barred from receiving it. The conversation and a vote among the church’s top clerics could have significant ramifications because it centers on one of the most intimate moments of Catholic worship and binds it uniquely to a specific political and policy position.
Intimate moment isn’t quite right; rather, the Eucharist is central to the faith. And within the Church, the centrality of the Eucharist means the stakes are high. But if you’re going to rely on the Washington Post to explain the matter, you’re going to get dogma of a different sort:
The vote comes after two decades of deliberate, passionate focus by Catholic political and theological conservatives to make abortion a litmus test for the sacrament, while church teachings on poverty, climate, racism and authoritarianism, among other things, become more subjective to follow. It also comes after years of hardening toward abortion opponents within the Democratic Party.
Much of that description is doubletalk, frankly. We have 2000 years of history with the Church and arguments about politics have been part of that history from the outset, but poverty has always been an ongoing concern. The default position of Catholicism is faith and works, which is why Catholics build hospitals and schools everywhere they go. And ascribing passion as the prevailing emotion for conservatives is cute, when you consider the behavior of the pro-choice side.
I, like Joe Biden, am a lifelong Catholic. Biden is an ostentatious sinner, but so am I. Understanding my faith has been an ongoing effort for me, especially since the Vatican II teaching I received was equivocal on many issues. I am a graduate of a well-regarded Catholic high school in Wisconsin (Top 50 in the country — just ask them!), but the quality of the religious instruction I received wasn’t very good. Scarcity applies not only to economic matters, but also to clear moral instruction. And in this Archdiocese, which harbored monstrous priests for decades, even the clearest moral instruction is tainted. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and many other Catholic politicians benefit greatly from this loss of trust. But Biden is a Catholic in a secular world. And I cannot know the condition of his soul; assuming that I do would be a sin as well.
Biden is also a symptom of a larger malady. As time has passed, Catholics in the West have been following the same dismal path that mainline Protestants have followed — the buildings remain, but the people aren’t coming. We still get decent attendance at my parish, but the faithful parishioners are aging rapidly and many young families are otherwise engaged on Sunday.
Still, hope remains. COVID has actually helped our parish school, which remained open while their public school counterparts were on a year-long Zoom call with cameras off. Parents who would not have considered enrolling their kids in a Catholic school gave Catholic education a chance and many of them are returning this year. And there is tremendous energy in the Church, mostly in places that were once missionary lands. It wasn’t a coincidence that the current Pontiff came from South America, even though his worldview is decidedly European, but there is a decent possibility that the next Pope will be from Africa or Asia. A revival is not guaranteed, but the Holy Spirit hasn’t left the building.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this scene last week:
I first started paying serious attention to politics in about 1980. Like a lot of high school kids, then and now, I was somewhere out on what would be called “the left”; I wrote a platform for North Dakota Boys State (a statewide mock government program put on by the decidedly conservative American Legion) that called for systematic redistribution of wealth, abolishing nuclear energy and nuclear disarmament, and a whole bunch of stuff that would be pretty mainstream among the Bernie Bros today.
Three years later, due to the good graces of my English professor, Dr. Jim Blake, I had re-evaluated most of my assumptions. I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and never really looked back.
And I had no reason to. None of us did. Although the history books, all being written from the perspective of the Left, will never admit it, the two decades from 1980 to 2000 were, objectively, the last American Golden Age. I’ll squeak out an optimistic coda and add “so far”, but I’ll be honest – I haven’t been feeling it, but I’m a firm believer in acting like you want to feel, and so there is is. “So far”.
I’ll come back to that.
There’s no denying it was one of the high points of American history. We led an economic surge that brought more wealth to more people than any in history. We, as a nation, led a political surge that led to the collapse of one of the most evil regimes in history (although not the other one – so far).
Maybe it’s just the perspective of one guy’s lifetime – but I suspect you’d have to look long and hard to find a place and time when it was generally better to be a human.
Not just in material terms, but in terms of the tension between freedom and order, one of the hardest things about running a self-governing society, being in relative balance – and, more importantly, the general commitment to the system and process that kept all those moving parts in balance.
And it’s been downhill from there.
The arc from Morning in America in 1980 to last week’s skirmish at the Capitol – which, loathe as I am to come even close to Democrat chanting points, was a form of coup, not against President-Elect Biden, but against the states’ constitutional power to select electors – peaked…somewhere in the late ’90s – when one of the glories of the American system, gridlocked government, combined with a Peace Dividend brought about by the end of the Cold War (thanks, President Reagan), led to an outburst of technological, entrepreneurial and market power that brought so much wealth, and security, and general well-being, to so many people that it may have been as close to a uptopia, in some ways, as humanity can get. Because of the gridlock in government.
Somewhere between 1998 and 2005, things started to turn back south again. It’d be easy to point to the polarization of American politics, starting with the various Clinton scandals, through the fiasco of the 2000 election, the near-decade of squabbling over the War on Terror and the 2008 government-caused financial meltdown, as the cause – but it went in parallel with a lot of other changes in our nation’s political, moral and social lives that have led to their…
…I was going to say “culmination” last week at the Capitol. But of course, that’s not true. Last week’s sorry episode was, like last summer’s riots, and the social back and forth that gave us Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trump himself, and the movements that supported them all in a way that was increasingly “un-American” (I’m still claiming a meaning for that term), and if you think that was the peak, or trough, or any sort of ending to the story, you just haven’t paid attention to 20,000 years of human nature.
So let’s not call it a culmination. Let’s call it a checkpoint, on a path that may be going up, or down, but control over which We The People need to take before the phrase “We The People” is forever relegated to the museum.
How have we gotten from the peak of Western Civilization to…this, in my adult lifetime?
For the last few years, I’ve secretly left candy in the grandkids’ shoes on St. Nicholas Day, a family holiday tradition which stretches back five generations (that I know of) and possibly more. This year, my daughter decided the oldest grandson could take over the role. I’m no longer needed.
I said it was fine with me so long as she gave him the lecture I received from my Mom when I took over as St. Nicholas: He must keep the secret. The little kids are entitled to the magic of Christmas as long as it lasts, same as he was. Never break the spell. Allow them to believe.
I know in my head this is a good thing, passing the torch and involving the next generation. I know the oldest grandson will do a fine job. I didn’t really want to drive all the way over there in the cold and dark anyway.
In a metro area of 2.6 million, with probably close to 2 million cars, I have merged onto the freeway behind the same car – a Malibu with a distinctive sticker and a Purple Heart license plate – twice in one week.
