On tribal nonsense, working at the mill, leaving the GOP, manners in Britain, scenes from Scottsdale, and more
On Monday, The Atlantic published a piece that made a splash. It is by Adam Rubenstein and carries the title “I Was a Heretic at The New York Times.” What made a particular splash was its opening anecdote — telling as hell:
On one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.
The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed.
When I was coming of age — ’70s, early ’80s — there was a slogan: “The personal is political.” Everything was political: the food you ate, the clothes you wore, the music you listened to, the words you used, the friends you had. There was not a private sphere, really, an apolitical sphere: Everything was political.
This struck me as crazy, and bad for one’s health. It is ruinous, this mindset. Yet it is strong in the tribes. A rejection of this mindset, in my opinion, is important to health, both individual and societal.
• You know who was a “heretic” at The Atlantic? Kevin D. Williamson. (Read his April 2018 essay in the Wall Street Journal: “When the Twitter Mob Came for Me.”) He was hired and quickly fired by The Atlantic. Which is like hiring and firing Shohei Ohtani.
I think the Dodgers will keep him. As for The Atlantic: their loss, majorly.
• A news story begins,
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell was ordered by a judge to pay a man the $5 million reward he promised at a “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” about the 2020 election.
I forgot to enter. You?
• Let me urge your reading of a column by Daniel Hannan. (I could say that every week.) (I believe I do.) Its heading is, “The same fallacy that fuels nostalgia for coal miners is determined to keep us poor today.” If I start quoting the column, I won’t stop.
When I read it, I had a memory. I knew a man in a steel town — a town in the Ohio Valley. He spent his working life at the mill, then lived on in that town for about 15 years, I think. Bear in mind, this is a small town. It’s hard — it takes some work — not to drive by the mill.
Do you know he never drove by the mill, ever? Not once, after his retirement. He contrived some other way.
I found this powerful, and still do.
• Another Hannan column makes the following point: “. . . we live in an illiberal age, in which fewer and fewer people care about process when they happen to favour a particular outcome.”
Time was, we conservatives prided ourselves on “process over outcome.” They were for the outcome, the result, you see — process be damned. We knew that process was key to our whole liberal democracy, our constitutional republic.
I made this point on social media recently. A populist responded, “That’s a loser’s mentality.”
What it will win you is the American republic.
• Jeff Jacoby is the veteran conservative columnist at the Boston Globe. Earlier this month, he waxed autobiographical:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was an elected Republican Party official. Actually, it was in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in the early 1980s.
How about now? The “Republican Party I was glad to support in those days has become unrecognizable,” says Jeff.
He continues,
As a teenager, I gravitated to the GOP because by instinct I was conservative. In college, the more I learned about political ideas, the more comfortable I felt in the Republican big tent. Even before I was old enough to vote, I was active in my local chapters of College Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom. The first time I cast a ballot for president was in 1980. I cast it unhesitatingly for Ronald Reagan, who embodied the American conservatism I found so appealing.
Today, Jeff wants nothing to do with either party. “Like millions of Americans, I find myself politically homeless,” he says.
It would have been hard to find a more enthusiastic Republican than I was. I was an ardent Republican — for good reasons, I believe. I left the party (or the party left me) on May 3, 2016 — the night of the Indiana primary, when Donald Trump clinched the presidential nomination. I wrote about this in the next issue of National Review: “The Shock of Disaffiliation.”
And a shock it was.
Speaking of Indiana: I have thought lately of Mitch Daniels, who was the governor of that state. He can’t run in the Democratic Party because he’s a conservative. He can’t run in the Republican Party because he’s a conservative. He is politically homeless.
I think there ought to be a home — a party home — for the Mitch Danielses.
• A few weeks ago, there were many stories in the press about the Ron DeSantis campaign — about the Florida governor’s campaign for president, which went nowhere. Reading these stories, I thought of an old saying in sports: “You can’t fire the team, so you fire the coach.” In politics, the team often gets blamed: the campaign team. The strategists, the fundraisers, the ad-makers, and so on. But the problem may be the candidate — the product that the team has to sell.
• Another old saying — this one from politics: “You can have the solution or you can have the issue.” In the matter of immigration and border control, it seems to me that many politicians would rather have the issue than the solution. Senator James Lankford (R., Okla.) found that out in a big way (though he probably knew it already).
You know? This applies to personal life, too: “You can have the solution or you can have the issue.” Keep an eye out for it.
• Many, many dissidents — brave democrats in dictatorships — are scientists. Sakharov, of course, was one of the outstanding physicists of his age. Sharansky was a math-and-science whiz. Nemtsov was a physicist. Also Fang Lizhi, in China.
I was discussing this phenomenon with Perry Link, the China scholar. He alerted me to a passage from Fang Lizhi’s memoirs (memoirs that Professor Link translated into English):
In my later career as an educator, Party officials asked me many times why it is that students stray from Communist ideology when they go to college. Where does the “counterrevolutionary” education come from? They tied themselves in knots trying to figure out why students who were carefully selected for “good thinking” when they entered universities turned into “bourgeois intellectuals” once they were there. They took out magnifying glasses to examine every detail of campus life, inside and outside of classrooms, and asked school administrators to remove anything that came remotely close to “counterrevolutionary thinking.” But it never worked, and can never work, because what they call “counterrevolutionary thinking” is stuck inside of science. No course in a physics department is more counterrevolutionary than Physics 1. No one who understands physics can turn around and accept a claim that Marxism-Leninism is special wisdom that trumps everything else.
Superbly said. (Fang Lizhi’s memoirs are titled “The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State.”)
• Two writers for Golf Digest were having a discussion: “What’s your favorite synonym for ‘golf swing’?” I thought of the late, great Bill Strausbaugh Jr. — “Coach,” as his students called him. He disliked the term “golf swing.” He thought it gave his students the wrong idea. He preferred “motion” — “golf motion.”
He also disliked the term “grip.” He thought it led people to hold the club too tightly. He used the term “hold” — a “golf hold” (which oughtta be light).
Coach was a prince, as well as a master teacher. A legend in the Washington, D.C., area, and beyond.
• I have always loved British manners — loved them since first visiting the country after I graduated from high school, in 1982. Actually, I loved them before: through movies and television.
It stands to reason I would love British manners. I am (a) an Anglophile and (b) a conservative (traditionally understood).
“British manners are superficial!” I heard some Americans say, back when I was a teen. I didn’t care.
Madeline Grant, of the Telegraph, has written a sharp and painful column: “Britain used to be a polite and decent country. No more.”
Say it ain’t so. (And do read Ms. Grant.)
• Care for some music? For my “New York chronicle,” published in The New Criterion, go here. For a review of the New York Philharmonic, with Santtu-Matias Rouvali on the podium and Bruce Liu at the piano, go here. For a review of the pianist Yunchan Lim in recital, go here. And for a review of an evening with John Williams, go here.
• In Arizona, June is bustin’ out all over — even though it’s February:
I quite like these red jobbies (as horticulturalists call them):
I also like basketball in a driveway — a blessed, and even a reassuring, sight:
A man offers a library — personally. Isn’t it beautiful, in all senses?
This banner points to something I love about America: assimilation to the new while honoring ties to the old:
Frank & Lupe’s Old Mexico restaurant in Scottsdale is a venerable institution. And delicious. For starters, I have eaten chips and salsa far and wide — including throughout Latin America. Never had better than at Frank & Lupe’s.
Bless you all.
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