An aspect of the modern conservative disposition is that we like the arts, culture and technology to be interesting and exciting, but we prefer government be boring, a stabilizing force while we act up in other areas. But it’s never boring now and likely won’t be in this century. Too bad.
[F]or the anti-Trump right (insofar as such a thing exists outside the Dispatch break room), Pelosi’s departure is a grim symbol of the Duma-fication of Congress. It’s fitting that the most formidable Democratic legislator in modern U.S. history will leave office in 2027 on the same day as the most formidable Republican legislator in modern U.S. history. Serious institutionalists like Pelosi and Mitch McConnell have no business in a branch of government that no longer exists as a serious institution.
I could probably rank this list, but I fear I’d see it misrepresented as “my constituents’ most important issue is …”, whereas my real most important issue is the impeachment and conviction of Donald J. Trump, who defiles everything he touches.
Remember: the theory behind Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution was “that’s what impeachment is for.” Well, put on your big-boy pants and take out the trash.
(I was reminded yesterday that my sanctimony toward sleazy politicians is a persistent feature. I voted for McGovern because Nixon was a crook, McGovern an honorable guy I disagreed with on just about everything. I don’t vote for Democrats often, but I’ve found creative ways not to vote for Trump’s corruption and rapacity nonetheless.)
Clueless
A driver smashed into pedestrians and bikers on the beautiful French island of Île d’Oléron.
I’m so excited for the investigation to reveal the motive behind someone driving their car into random French cyclists and screaming “Allahu Akbar.” I don’t know about you, but he sounds like a Christian nationalist to me. Anyone else smell a fresh pine and cinnamon Bath & Body Works candle? This guy is all in on Replacement Theory, I just know it.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.
This is the first Joan Didion I’ve read. I’m told that it’s not her best, but it was plenty good enough for me.
Me, too
(Yes, I know it’s more than a little absurd that I’m writing a post about a TV show that ended its run eight years in the past. The thing is, I almost never watch series when they first appear. I usually turn to them, instead, years later, after I’ve heard enough praise that I feel like their quality has been adequately verified to justify my time and attention. This way of proceeding has never let me down. And anyway, in an era of streaming, there’s nothing to keep a decade-old show from becoming someone’s big new discovery years after it drops.)
I’m with him on not rushing to watch a new series. Most of them are trash – precisely as most of all art, music and literature are trash. It was ever so. What’s good will endure.
Well, I didn’t know them, and much as I love big words this may be the last time I ever use them.
Snippets
Mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. (Flannery O’Connor)
Foul is fair and fair is foul. (Shakespeare, though I was thinking of John Maynard Keynes’ distillation of his case for temporary rapacity.)
What Stephen A. Smith is to sports talk, Tucker Carlson is to obsessive anti-Zionism. Rich Lowry
All civilizations are as transitory as the people now in cemeteries. And just as we must die, so too must we accept that there is no return to a civilization whose time has come and gone. (Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar via Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul)
The people [Trump] picks tend to be a grab bag of personality disorders who squabble and fight for power, he tends to screw them over when they annoy him, and they’re all quite annoying. (Ken White, Refuge in Kakistocracy, Popehat)
The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of a person, but that it shows far too little. Pope John Paul II via Isabel Hogben
Populism is fundamentally a form of suspicion. Yuval Levin on the Remnant podcast.
We need to be a big tent so as to include neo-Nazi and Nazi-adjacent people, [and] if you have a problem with that, you need to get out of the tent. Jonah Golberg on the Remnant podcast criticizing the “popular front mind” on the Right.
Dick Cheney couldn’t get over Jan. 6. Ramesh Ponnuru (That’s got to be among the most understated things I’ve seen this week.)
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
[Ted] Cruz was an intellectually serious politician of the kind who would quote Hayek and reference Milton Friedman off-the-cuff in private conversation until he discovered—and this is a thing with Texas politicians—that there was more juice to be had from pretending to be the good ol’ boy that he is not than in simply being the Ivy League lawyer he is. Cruz’s current position in American public life is that of a piteous and contemptible figure. … [F]or the moment, he is still a senator caught between the fringeward push of his radicalizing party and the centerward pull of his state’s urbanizing electorate.
Cruz is (or should be) smart enough to have figured out by now that he is never going to be president, and he ought to allow himself to be liberated by this and take on a new role—one that the genuine Ted Cruz, if there is anything left of him inside the chrysalis of grotesque opportunism and self-degradation in which he has enveloped himself, would be well-suited to undertake: defending the Constitution and the American order from a sustained assault that is coming from within his own party.
It would not take very much: “No, Mr. President, you may not willy-nilly create a new national sales-tax regime with rates based on how you’re feeling that day, even if you call it a tariff; no, you may not federalize the Philadelphia police department or deploy troops in U.S. cities based on whatever phony emergency pretext occurs to you in between social media posts; no, the states are not your ‘agents,’ and they most certainly do not have to do ‘whatever the president of the United States tells them’ to do, even if you put ‘FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY’ in capital letters. And if you refuse to honor the constitutional limits on your office, then you can be removed from that office—with my vote, if necessary, though I would regret it and would probably lose my Senate seat as a result. But there are things more important than winning the next election.”
No, I do not think Cruz has it in him.
But he is starting to reach the stage of life when, to borrow David Brooks’ formulation, it is time to stop thinking about one’s résumé and start thinking about one’s eulogy.
Almost everything I knew about him, and particularly his professional accomplishments and opinions, made me think that Brett Kavanagh would be a good Supreme Court justice, and I haven’t been disappointed.
Why “almost”? It wasn’t really the Christine Ford Blasey accusations, but it was related to them: Brett Kavanaugh was an underage, binge-drinking party boy.
That was never in dispute. And I hate that. From him, there wasn’t so much as a “when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish” acknowledgment. I don’t care if his parents winked at it or even bought the beer.
Now I don’t recall anyone else who was bothered enough even to shrug it off with “boys will be boys.” I seemingly stood alone in thinking underage binge drinking a blot on his character and fitness to uphold the law — all of it, including the parts that inconvenience him.
It’s not okay, and if that makes me a prig, so be it.
There is no possible religious neutrality in schools. So there!
Please let’s not blather about religious “neutrality.” So called secular education is not neutral, but reflects a bias against faith in favor of irreligion.
In fact, even that way of putting it is not precisely accurate. It isn’t that public schools have no god; in fact they place many gods before God. Superficial thinkers suppose that unconditional loyalties – whether of the “woke” or another variety — don’t count as religion just because they don’t use the word “god” for their gods. But the crux of the matter does not lie in the words they use.
I take a different minor issue with the first paragraph quoted than Budziszewski himself does. What “secular education” does is inculcate indifference. Purporting to teach children what they need to know without telling them anything about religion tacitly tells them that they need not know anything about it.
And this is not a straw man. The two-hundred-page course guide for Advanced Placement (AP) course in U.S. government and politics “doesn’t mention Christianity or the Bible—not once, even though it professes to cover ‘the intellectual traditions that animated our founding.’” (Mark Bauerlein)
But that’s not the same as teaching hostility toward religion (“irreligion”).
On the point about unconditional loyalties I couldn’t agree more. I just don’t know what we do about it. Deschooling Society?
DOGE
I have had a faint hope that we would discover that DOGE has begun modernization of software and strategic use of AI in the agencies they blitzkrieged immediately after our latest Presidential inauguration.
But they appears at this point to have been engaged in pure, nihilistic destruction — a style that, along with vengeance-destruction, appears to be what this 47th Presidency is all about.
Capitalist Economy
Pay no heed to the man in the management handcuffs
This person ran a legendary publishing house, and was also a jazz lover. He was a fan of my writing. We exchanged some emails, and then had a phone conversation.
“Ted, I love the book you’re writing,” he told me. “The sample chapters you sent are outstanding. You’re a special writer, and I’d love to sign you a contract. But…”
My head was already spinning. These people typically pay out big advances. I could finish the book and pay all my bills—no sweat! But before I could pursue these daydreams any further, this famous editor went on:
“I’d love to sign you to a contract. But I can’t.”
“Why not?” I asked—and even I could hear the plaintive note in my voice.
“Well, I’m sure your book would sell. But we evaluate books on their projected sales during the three years following release. If a book doesn’t have a three-year payback, we don’t do it.”
“I don’t think I understand this,” I whimpered in reply. “What are you saying?”
“It’s simple. Your book will probably sell for the next ten years or more. But I can only consider the first three years in making an offer—that’s why I have to turn you down.”
Okay, I understood discounted cash flow even better than this editor. I could give you a lecture on the Capital Asset Pricing Model in my sleep. In my early days, I made a living doing this kind of analysis.
But this way of thinking is wrong in the world of arts and culture.
…
When I tell editors that my books demonstrably sell for 25-50 years and longer, this is a turn-off. They actually hate it when I say it.
They won’t be around that long—editors constantly change jobs. They don’t give a hoot what sales will be like in the year 2050. They want something with cocktail party buzz for the six weeks following publication.
That’s the world they live in. But I don’t—and I refuse to move there.
There’s a lot more where that came from because Ted Gioia is a freakin’ polymath. His has become (probably) my favorite Substack that doesn’t focus on religious subjects.
Work-life balance
I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million. I’ve signed up my alma mater as a client, connected with billionaire mentors and secured deferred admission to Stanford’s M.B.A. program. When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.
… I averaged 3½ hours of sleep a night and had about 12½ hours every day to focus on business. The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull and struggled with anxiety. But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company.
So that’s the world he lives in. I don’t, never have, and I refuse to move there — or to recommend it to anyone I care about.
Culture
Gay race communism
Now, Cracker Barrel is updating its décor and branding—slightly. The bulk of the update is a brighter, less cluttered interior design, but the “controversial” decision is to change its logo. The company removed the old white guy in overalls sitting by a barrel, and now just has a text-only sign that reads “Cracker Barrel.”
And people are losing their minds, claiming that it has gone “woke.” What seems to have sparked this brouhaha is a tweet saying that the store has “scrapped a beloved American aesthetic and replaced it with sterile, soulless branding.”
This prompted an outraged “WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!” tweet from Donald Trump Jr., that loyal guardian of all that is homey and traditional in American life. The very popular End Wokeness Twitter account proclaimed: “Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino should face charges for this crime against humanity.”
Chris Rufo then came out with a Cracker Barrel delenda Est pronunciamiento:
Alright, I’m hearing chatter from behind the scenes about the Cracker Barrel campaign and, on second thought: we must break the Barrel. It’s not about this particular restaurant chain—who cares—but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be “wokification.” The implicit promise: Go woke, watch your stock price drop 20 percent, which is exactly what is happening now. I was wrong. The Barrel must be broken.
Now, it’s true that Cracker Barrel has done some LGBT marketing stuff, probably as a result of being criticized for alleged discriminatory policies in the 1990s. But maybe also because gay people—and people who aren’t particularly horrified by gay people—might like good, affordable breakfasts, too. They’ve also tried to cultivate Hispanic customers. I’m not sure this means they’ve been taken over by the Latinx reconquista.
I am also, shall we say, skeptical that a few old website screenshots of these efforts are proof that, in the words of Federalist co-founder Sean Davis, “Cracker Barrel’s CEO and leadership clearly hate the company’s customers and see their mission as re-educating them with the principles of gay race communism.”
Jonah Goldberg. It’s enough to make me want to try to remember that I keep forgetting to eat at Cracker Barrel.
What nihilists can’t believe
It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good.
I just can’t root for a guy who looks like Caligula
My libertarian and anti-state impulses incline me to be favorable toward Julian Assange, but I’ve never been able to shake how much he looks like John Hurt’s Caligula.
Technology
The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Brought to you by the letter “D”
Dust and decay, ditherers upon the doorstep of death itself; dried- up ghosts of daisy-chain days that were once dappled with dew and delight.
R.S. Thomas, Anybody’s Alphabet, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000.
The Los Alamos Sin
As Freeman Dyson put it, the “sin” of the scientists at Los Alamos was not that they made the bomb but that they enjoyed it so much.
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium.
I was listening this afternoon to a choral composition by Eric Whitacre, who probably came onto my radar with this a few years ago.
The unfamiliar composition was playing softly, and I was multi-tasking, paying little heed to the words (though a few caught my attention a bit).
Then suddenly I heard something that jolted me. I’d never heard a chorus do anything like that before, and no wonder: it sounded unbelievably difficult.
It was in a setting of this short poem:
Listening to your labored breath, Your struggle ends as mine begins. You rise; I fall.
Fading, yet already gone; What calls you I cannot provide. You rise; I fall.
Broken, with a heavy hand I reach to you, and close your eyes. You rise; I fall.
The piece is titled You Rise, I Fall, and it’s part of the larger piece The Sacred Veil, Whitacre’s setting of a poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri. The poet describes it:
This work features a series of poems written about my relationship with my late wife Julie, her battle with ovarian cancer, and the grief I experienced as a result of her passing in 2005. This is the most intensely personal poetry I have ever written, and it evoked exquisite and heart-breaking music from composer Eric Whitacre.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I really don’t intend to channel Fr. Stephen day-by-day. You can subscribe yourself, after all. I don’t even intend to have Orthodox testimonials as a regular feature. That’s a worthy goal, but I bring nothing unique to such efforts.
But for the second day in a row Fr. Stephen has hit it out of the park, contrasting the Orthodox view of salvation to views common today – a theme that “recurs because it is so fundamental to the Christian faith and is at the same time largely unknown in our modern world.” Indeed it is.
Reduced to aphorism, the Orthodox view is that “Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.”
We have a problem that is rooted in the very nature of our existence, not in our behavior. We behave badly because of a prior problem. Good behavior will not correct the problem.
The sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit view that Christ indeed came to make bad men good strikes me as a variety of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
It is the deism that distinguishes the non-Orthodox view at issue today from the view that Christ came to secure the forensic declaration of our righteousness so we could get into heaven. This view I know first-hand to be common among evangelicals, fundamentalists and Calvinists – all of which I arguably have been in the past, though I would have denied being a fundamentalist.
Among the ramifications of the Orthodox view are some interesting comments Fr. Stephen makes about drinkin’ ‘n smokin’ and other fundy taboos.
I decided to blog when I saw how different my FaceBook posts were from anyone else’s. It seems the most interesting things in my life – things that aren’t too personal to share, anyway – are ideas I encounter. That’s a problem – people ought to be more important to me than they seem to be when it comes down to how I actually live my life day-to-day, week-to-week. That probably makes me a fairly typical intellectualoid 21st Century American. I’m working on changing that, so don’t expect me to blog as if my life depended on it.
G.K. Chesteron wrote:
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.
I’m perhaps the teetotaler, but I hope you’ll like at least some of the ideas that intoxicate me.
As I begin this conceit, I anticipate that I will have mostly links with a few comments. In politics, the links are apt to be from the New York Times or the Washington Post editorial pages – not because I’m under illusions that these liberal institutions are right about things, but because as NPR beats heck of of Rush or Beck, these serious papers put to shame most others simply as newspapers and as troves of interesting editorial thinkers – and my favorite, the Front Porch Republic blog. The comboxes at FPR can be pretty lame at times, but the contributors are top-notch guys (and a few gals) who are in the tank for neither major party.
In religion, Father Stephen Freeman’s Glory to God blog produces more gems-per-post than any other I’ve yet found. Subscribe yourself and eliminate the biased middle-man. Of course, he’s Eastern Orthodox, as am I; so if you’re not Orthodox, I venture you’ll find his thinking unusual – a different sort of Christianity than is normally seen in North America.
I’m not sure I’ve followed all the rules for a canonical blog. I picked a title, a subtitle, a theme, and posted an “about.” Then I posted this. So the look of the blog is itself a work in progress.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 