Rod Dreher's Blog, page 461

The Law Of Trump Truthiness

This morning, the Tweeter-in-Chief dug himself in deeper:

As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2017

…to terrorism and airline flight safety. Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2017

Yesterday’s story: It didn’t happen.

Today’s story: If it happened, I had a right to do it.

Well, that’s confidence-building.

It’s important to note that nobody questions the legal right of the president to reveal whatever classified information he chooses to reveal. In fact, the Washington Post pointed out in its initial story that presidents do have that right. The question has to do with the wisdom of releasing the specific information that he is reported to have done. Trump is engaged in misdirection with that tweet.

And he is undercutting what H.R. McMaster said yesterday in Trump’s defense: that the Post story was “false”. This morning the president claims that he did in fact share information with Russia in that meeting, information about the kind of things the Post claimed, though Trump did not address the Post‘s specific allegation (that the specific nature of the data Trump shared would allow the Russians to figure some of the country’s most important national security secrets out). Notice that Trump does not deny the central claim of the Post’s story, but rather appears to defend himself by saying that he broke no law with what he told the Russians, and that he did it for good reasons.

If the denials from McMaster and Tillerson put you at ease yesterday, Trump’s tweets this morning ought to have you at the edge of your seat again. Trump may be this week treating McMaster and Tillerson like he treated his own press team last week: sending them out there to say one thing, then with his own undisciplined mouth (or tweeting fingers) cutting the limb off behind them.

TAC’s Noah Millman writes in The Week about why this is a very, very big deal. Excerpt:

President Trump has been caught acting in a cavalier fashion before, like using unsecured communications devices, including family members in meetings with foreign heads of state, and discussing North Korea’s missile tests in an open dining room. And America’s intelligence officers reportedly warned allied countries prior to the inauguration not to share intelligence as freely as they had for fear of shared intelligence making its way into hostile hands through the Oval Office.

But if this new report is accurate, then a rubicon has been crossed that cannot be retraced. And in the absence of “tapes” revealing that no conversation took place, why should anyone believe even the most strenuous denials?

America’s military and intelligence services are therefore faced with a difficult dilemma. The only way to preserve America’s assets will be to routinize the violation of the chain of command by cordoning off the president from information that he properly needs to make informed decisions. Moreover, in order to reassure foreign allies, military and intelligence services will need to show their willingness to violate the chain of command in this fashion. It will need to become an open secret that the president of the United States is, in effect, no longer the president.

The threat this poses to America’s democratic and constitutional system should not be minimized.

How, exactly, do we run a country in which the Commander-in-Chief cannot be trusted with the nation’s most important secrets? This would be a vital question in the country in question were the Ivory Coast. But we are not the Ivory Coast; we are the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, possessing enough nuclear firepower to end life on earth.

As Noah says, if the top military and intelligence brass withhold information from the Commander-in-Chief for the sake of protecting national security, civilian control of the military is compromised. Would such a state of affairs be tolerable?

Noah suggests that we could be looking at grounds for a military coup to protect national security from this reckless president. He says that Congressional Republicans had better start considering constitutionally sanctioned methods to remove the president before something even more traumatic to the body politic happens.

At a minimum, Congressional Republicans need to take the lead here in finding out exactly what Trump said to the Russians. Our constitutional system provides for checks and balances. If Congress doesn’t press the White House on this until they get clear, credible answers, who can? Do GOP Senators really want to carry Donald Trump’s water?

I love that Trump gave us Judge Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. But there is nothing that he or any president could do for conservative Christians that would justify tolerating a president who is so cavalier and incompetent with national security. The country has to know what, exactly, Trump said to the Russians. It is naive to take anything this White House says at face value.

“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore.’” So said candidate Donald Trump a year ago. And so here we are: Please, please, we can’t win anymore.

UPDATE: The conservative commentator Erick Erickson says he knows one of the sources of the Post’s story — and that gives it credibility to him. Excerpt:

And the source is solidly supportive of President Trump, or at least has been and was during Campaign 2016. But the President will not take any internal criticism, no matter how politely it is given. He does not want advice, cannot be corrected, and is too insecure to see any constructive feedback as anything other than an attack.

So some of the sources are left with no other option but to go to the media, leak the story, and hope that the intense blowback gives the President a swift kick in the butt. Perhaps then he will recognize he screwed up. The President cares vastly more about what the press says than what his advisers say. That is a real problem and one his advisers are having to recognize and use, even if it causes messy stories to get outside the White House perimeter.

And:

This is a real problem and I treat this story very seriously because I know just how credible, competent, and serious — as well as seriously pro-Trump, at least one of the sources is.

God’s Garage

A reader e-mails:

Christ is risen!

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I’m an Orthodox Christian (try to be).

I want to share with you something I am doing that has a bit of “Benedict Option” about it.

Nine months ago my youngest brother was going through some difficulties with his faith, and we decided to meet on a weekly basis to explore his experience further and to encourage each other to

Andrey Demkin/Shutterstock

stay on the path. Within a month, our meetings swelled into a group of fifteen guys (friends and relatives) with regular meetings occurring in my garage ever since. Over the summer we met weekly, we now meet fortnightly.

The meetings we have nicknamed God’s Garage. The meetings start at 9pm and finish when people have had enough, usually 2-3am. Any discussion about God can go on forever, and that is why I think the meetings work well.

These days, so much of what is said is superficial. When we gather in the garage we have a rule that we will stick to the things that matter in life. The guys love it. Because the guys that attend are guys I interact with throughout the week — our kids go to the same school, we go to the same church, we see each other in the local area — there is a sense of community that is developing between us. By no means do we see ourselves as somehow better than anyone, or somehow outside of the church; in fact our local priest is invited to attend.

It used to be that when we got together, we talked about football. At times we would talk about the modern project and how we are losing the culture war. Now we talk about the inner life. In a way, we made the life in Christ a part of our cultural narrative by gathering in His name.

God’s Garage has become a place where guys pour out their feelings and then gather their bearings in the light of our church teachings. We studied the Beatitudes for four months. We wrestled with Christ’s words and the fight that took place is, I think, necessary. Too often, our examination of our lives is put off by the suggestion of a sandwich or a minor delight that comes to distract us. I think we have started developing awareness that the Truth is out there — a thing that the modern project can obscure if we are left to our own devices.

Sincerely,

Theo

I love this. Theo and his crew are acting like the “creative minorities” that Pope Benedict XVI said Christians in the West would need to be in the post-Christian era. I hope this becomes a thing. Would you be interested in doing a God’s Garage at your place?

Moscow’s Man At 1600 Pennsylvania

What a dangerous incompetent! 

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

Trump most likely did not break the law:

For almost anyone in government, discussing such matters with an adversary would be illegal. As president, Trump has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that his disclosures broke the law.

But this is utterly beside the point. As the Post story goes on to say, quoting someone with knowledge of the conversation Trump had with the Russians, the president went off-script and was bragging to the Russians about the quality of the intelligence he gets.

This is yet another example of Trump being in way over his head, and not understanding how to act like a president. I don’t think for a second that this is evidence that Trump is intentionally in the tank for the Russians. I think he’s just that vain and dumb. He gave to the Russians intelligence that’s so sensitive we don’t even share it with our own allies. And he didn’t do it because he deliberated with his national security team and decided it was in the best interest of the United States to reveal this information to the Russians. He did it because he started running his mouth and didn’t know when to shut it.

Trump supporters, you know very well what you would be saying — what you would be screaming at the top of your lungs, for good reason — if Obama or Clinton had done this.

We now have to worry if the President of the United States is a national security threat because of his character. One more bit from the Post:

U.S. officials said that the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders, but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points — and often ignores those.

“He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it, and that has big downsides,” the second former official said. “Does he understand what’s classified and what’s not? That’s what worries me.”

Read the whole thing.  Every day is a new adventure. The Russians must be laughing till their sides hurt. Our allies must be scared to death about what damn fool thing the American president will bumble into next because he does not take his job seriously, and apparently thinks it’s a reality show.

We are paying prices we never imagined we’d pay for keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

UPDATE: Yes, my hair is on fire over this. At what point does the Republican Congressional leadership have a responsibility to defend the country by denouncing the president? What could they actually do other than invoke the 25th Amendment? Here’s the relevant section:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Unless some new information is to surface blowing the Washington Post story up, the President of the United States cannot be trusted to keep highly classified intelligence information out of the hands of American adversaries. This kind of recklessness is a national security threat. And we are only four months into this administration. 

If Congress were to remove the president under the 25th Amendment, it would be seen by not a few people as a coup. Can you imagine the political instability that would follow? Would that be worse than the instability Trump’s incompetence is causing? Our allies can no longer trust us with their most closely guarded secrets, because that’s how President Trump rolls.

At some point, and that point is coming very fast and hard, some important Republicans on the Hill and throughout the executive branch are going to have a decision to make. This is not going to get any better.

UPDATE.2: National Security adviser H.R. McMaster issued the following denial this afternoon, without taking questions:

A brief statement for the record. There is nothing that the president takes more seriously than the security of the American people. The story that came out tonight as reported is false. The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries, including threats to civil aviation. At no time, at no time, were intelligence sources or methods discussed. The president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known. Two other senior officials who were present, including the secretary of the state, remember the meeting the same way and have said so. Going on the record should outweigh the anonymous sources. I was in the room. It didn’t happen. Thanks, everybody.

Josh Marshall comments:

McMaster’s specific denials remain what I noted about his statement given originally to the Post. They deny things the Post story does not allege. As I read it, the Post says Trump revealed classified information from which sources and methods information can be inferred, not that he discussed them directly. It’s quite possible Trump may not even know that level of detail.

That part is a classic non-denial denial.

But McMaster adds at the top: “The story that came out tonight as reported is false.”

The “as reported” is a hedge. But more fundamentally saying “the story” is false can mean anything. He doubles down later. “I was in the room. It didn’t happen.” But again, what didn’t happen? The only reason I can think of to be totalizing in general and lawyerly and non-denialing in the specifics is that you’re trying to deny something that actually did happen.

Even though I think these statements are far more general than they may seem, it’s just as true that McMaster is putting his credibility on the line for Trump.

The Post story reports an alleged event so deadly serious that people who claim it happened have a moral responsibility to come forward, even if it means resignation. McMaster’s on-the-record denial is not conclusive, for the reasons Marshall says, but it does put the anonymous leakers in a bad position. Again: if the Post reported accurate information, then its sources should out themselves, for the sake of national security. If not, then I hope Trump will find the leakers, expose them, and fire them, because what they have said is unconscionable. The Post cites “current and former U.S. officials” alleging this about Trump.

Contra McMaster, this is what the Post story alleges:

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

Note well: the Post does not allege that the president discuss intelligence sources or methods. Nor does it allege that he disclosed secret military operations. What the Post does say is that Trump discussed “aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner.” I think Marshall’s reading is correct.

But when McMaster says flat-out that the story “as reported” (whatever that means) is “false,” that’s pretty clear. McMaster is highly respected. Either’s he’s taking a bullet for Trump, or these anonymous sources are trying to destroy Trump by peddling lies.

The stakes could hardly be higher.

UPDATE.3: Tillerson puts out the same lawyerly kind of statement:

During President Trump’s meeting with Foreign Minister Lavrov, a broad range of subjects were discussed among which were common efforts and threats regarding counter-terrorism. During that exchange the nature of specific threats were discussed, but they did not discuss sources, methods or military operations.

The Washington Post does not say they did this.

Jake Tapper:

2/ former Intel agent tells me: "Great. That doesn't matter from an intel perspective. If Trump said 'oh yeah, ISIS is making'" X with Y…

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) May 15, 2017

4/ The president could have disclosed details from a SAP without disclosing sources and methods –that's not the point. Point is the info…

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) May 16, 2017

6/ McMaster says story "as reported" is false – that means if there is even one detail in it that is wrong he could discount whole thing.

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) May 16, 2017

UPDATE.4: Great piece on the Lawfare blog talking about the potential effects of this story. I had not thought about this:

Seventh, Trump’s screw-up with the Russians in the Oval Office raises the stakes for whether he records conversations there. Last week, Trump tweeted that “James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” This threat set off a raft of speculation about whether Trump records Oval Office conversations and, if so, what his legal duties are to preserve those recordings. The speculation continued through today, when Sean Spicer studiously declined to address whether any such recording system exists. If such a recording system does it exist, the conversations recorded could go a long way towards answering the mysteries above regarding why the President gave this information to the Russians, and whether he violated his oath or some other law in the process. We thus expect the incident with the Russians to put even more pressure on the White House to answer the question whether the recording system exists.

If Trump does have a recording system in place, then he may have a recording of his meeting with the Russians. Congress has to get to the bottom of this. If there is a recording system there, then Congress had better subpoena those recordings, which are protected under federal law. First, it has to be determined whether or not there is a recording system there.

Also, Lawfare makes it clear that this is not an apparent violation of the law, because POTUS has the right to declassify whatever he wants to, for any reason. But that does not get Trump off the hook by any means. The question, if he did this, is why he decided to reveal this information to the Russians.

Not illegal, but it could be impeachable:

Fifth, this may well be a violation of the President’s oath of office. Questions of criminality aside, we turn to the far more significant issues: If the President gave this information away through carelessness or neglect, he has arguably breached his oath of office. As Quinta and Ben have elaborated on in some detail, in taking the oath President Trump swore to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” to the best of his ability. It’s very hard to argue that carelessly giving away highly sensitive material to an adversary foreign power constitutes a faithful execution of the office of President.

Violating the oath of office does not require violating a criminal statute. If the President decided to write the nuclear codes on a sticky note on his desk and then took a photo of it and tweeted it, he would not technically have violated any criminal law–just as he hasn’t here. He has the constitutional authority to dictate that the safeguarding of nuclear materials shall be done through sticky notes in plain sight and tweeted, even the authority to declassify the codes outright. Yet, we would all understand this degree of negligence to be a gross violation of his oath of office.

Congress has alleged oath violations—albeit violations tied to criminal allegations or breaches of statutory obligations—all three times it has passed or considered seriously articles of impeachment against presidents: against Andrew Johnson (“unmindful of the high duties of his oath of office”), Richard Nixon (“contrary to his oath”), and Bill Clinton (“in violation of his constitutional oath”). Further, two of the three articles of impeachment against Nixon alleged no direct violation of the law. Instead, they concerned Nixon’s abuse of his power as President, which, like the President putting the nuclear codes on Twitter, is an offense that can only be committed by the President and has thus never been explicitly prohibited in criminal law.

There’s thus no reason why Congress couldn’t consider a grotesque violation of the President’s oath as a standalone basis for impeachment—a high crime and misdemeanor in and of itself. This is particularly plausible in a case like this, where the oath violation involves giving sensitive information to an adversary foreign power. That’s getting relatively close to the “treason” language in the impeachment clauses; it’s pretty easy to imagine a hybrid impeachment article alleging a violation of the oath in service of a hostile foreign power. So legally speaking, the matter could be very grave for Trump even though there is no criminal exposure.

This approach to sensitive information does not appear to be a one-off. President Trump has previously taken heat for his cavalier attitude towards safeguarding classified information, for example when he openly reviewed plans related to a North Korean nuclear test in the Mar-a-Lago dining room in full view of other diners or when he appeared to inadvertently confirm the authenticity of leaked CIA documents on Fox News.

If this happened, then it is too dangerous to have this man as president, and he should be impeached. If you are POTUS and don’t know to watch your mouth when senior officials of the Russian government are standing in your office, you cannot be trusted with anything.

The Internet Vs. Our Humanity

Most of us love the Internet because we can get lots of neat things for free on it. Like music, for instance. Here’s a short piece about the new head of YouTube and his relationship with the music industry. He promised to work hard to stop uploading of copyrighted content.

But a simple search of YouTube will show that there is still a major problem with illegally uploaded content on the service. Searching for “full albums” will pull up classic albums like Bob Marley’s Legends, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory, as well as new releases like John Mayer’s The Search for Everything, and Humanz by the Gorillaz, which points listeners to an illegal download link in the event the album is blocked by Warner Music Group. And that’s just the first page of results.

A deeper search pulled up immensely popular albums from the ‘00s like 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, Lady Gaga’s The Fame, and Katy Perry’s One of The Boys, as well asE•MO•TION by Carly Rae Jepsen, the last two albums from both Jessie J and ArianaGrande, and Imagine Dragons’ entire catalog.

You might be thinking, “So what? How does that hurt me? I get great music for free.” Well, it’s stealing. I make my living in part by writing books. What if my work were available for free online? Aside from the money taken out of my pocket dishonestly, there would be very little incentive for people to try to make careers in writing. Writing is hard work, and you usually do it for little monetary reward. If you knew that the moment you published something, it would be taken and given away for free, you would be much less inclined to do that thing, and certainly you would find it much harder to make a career doing it.

We are so used to thinking about things in terms of consumer satisfaction that we don’t fully grasp what’s at stake in the economic and cultural model being built around us. The book to read now is Move Fast And Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. Its author is Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, and a man who has spent his life working in the top ranks of film and popular music. The YouTube theft is exactly the kind of thing he’s talking about. This goes far beyond music, to the very core of our society. We are so obsessively focused on the now that we are not thinking about “the arc of history and culture” — and what we are losing. Let me explain.

Move Fast tells the story of how those three companies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — have established a virtual monopoly on news and creative content, and what that means for artists and for the public. Taplin writes:

To be a young musician, filmmaker, or journalist today is to seriously contemplate the prospect of entering a profession that the digital age has eroded beyond recognition.

We all know the story of how the Internet has more or less destroyed newspapers and bookstores. What is less well known to the general public is how it has destroyed the music business. Taplin tells the very personal story of the late Levon Helm, his friend, and how the digitization of the music business (and the royalties model it created) impoverishes artists. Did you know that artists make next to nothing from their tracks being heard on Spotify? “One hundred thousand people listen to your track,” writes Taplin, “and you make less than $500.” This is a great deal for consumers, Taplin says, but a terrible one for artists, musicians, writers, and other creative types. It has never been easy to make money in creative fields, but the structural barriers now are almost insurmountable, as Taplin explains.

His argument goes beyond that. More:

Monopoly, control of our data, and corporate lobbying are at the heart of this story of the battle between creative artists and the Internet giants, but we need to understand that every one of us will stand in the shoes of the artist before long. Musicians and authors were at the barricades first because their industries were the first to be digitized. But as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has said, “Software is eating the world,” and soon the technologists will be coming for your job, too, just as they will continue to come for more of your personal data.

Taplin warns that “the techno-determinist path will ultimately lead to deep social unrest.” He’s right about that.

Jonathan Taplin agreed to speak with me on the phone recently about his book. Below are slightly edited (for clarity) excerpts of our conversation, interspersed with passages from the book. I’ve been meaning to write about this for weeks, but I misplaced my marked-up copy of the book, and only just found it.

RD: Nicholas Negroponte’s argument in his acclaimed 1995 book Being Digital was that digitalization would “decentralize control and harmonize people.” Those are literally his words. But that’s not what happened, right?

JT: You had to get the scale really quickly, and you had to own the whole system. Peter Thiel says that monopoly is really the only way to make money in a digital business. Both Google and Facebook are monopolies. What ended up happening was that we ended up re-centralizing the Web completely. These two companies, plus Amazon, are really the only ways people get their information. They become these funnels through which every publisher, blogger, has to get their information out through them. This is what you call a monopsyny [a market situation in which there is only one buyer — RD].

Can you give an example?

In the year 2000, when iTunes was really beginning to happen, if you sold a million copies of a song on iTunes, you as the musician or rights owner could make about $900,000. If you sell a million streams on YouTube today, you can make about $900. That stream has basically impoverished everybody but the Taylor Swifts, Beyonces, and JayZs of the world, who make most of their money through tours. I ran this thing called the Annenberg Innovation Lab, where our theory was that by the end of next year, there will be five billion smartphones in the world. But today they’re saying that you can’t make any money off of digital files anymore.

There’s an old saying: if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. This is a new form of capitalism. I call it monopoly surveillance capitalism. I spent two days at the beginning of this week at the University of Chicago, at a conference on monopoly. Even the most conservative economists at Chicago had to admit that the fact that two or three organizations have a monopoly on the data on your life create problems as a society that we have never had to think about.

An aside: a business like Amazon is in a position to dictate to content producers. In Move Fast and Break Things, Taplin gives an example using my friend and former boss:

In June of 2009, James Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, testified in Congress about his negotiations with Amazon over publishing the newspaper’s content on the Amazon Kindle. Amazon demanded 70 percent of the subscription revenues, leaving him with 30 percent to cover the cost of creating 100 percent of the content. This, he noted, could hardly be characterized as a fair business deal.

No, it cannot. Shortly after my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming was published in 2013, Amazon got into a big fight with Hachette, the publisher. Amazon played hardball, and started delaying delivery for Hachette titles. Customers who wanted to buy Little Way from Amazon were told that it would take six weeks to deliver the book. Sales dropped. They were doing this to all Hachette authors … because they could. This is what it means to have the book retail market bigfooted by a monopsyny. Again, you may think, hooray for Amazon, getting cheaper prices for consumers, but one downside of this is that one mega-corporation has this kind of power over the distribution of books. Once they have destroyed all the bookstores, what then?

Another quote from the book:

If 1999 was the high point of the music business, the onset of Napster and all the pirate sites that sprang up after it was shut down was the low point. Those sites turned the recorded music industry from a $20 billion business to a $7.5 billion business. Imagine if any other industry had been cut by two-thirds because of counterfeiting.

Back to the Q&A with Taplin:

Are we at the mercy of technology-driven markets? 

No. It’s not like they can’t deal with this. There’s no pornography on YouTube. When somebody tries to upload that on YouTube, the computer shunts the images to a place where a human has to look at. They could do that with almost anything. They have the technology. They don’t want to because it violates their business model.

What’s especially interesting about your book is that you demonstrate how these economic and technological forces really are waging a highly consequential war on culture. 

The idea of community at a local level, of going to someone’s house and having three or four people sit together and sing, that gives me as much pleasure as any record I’ve bought in the past five years. What’s sad is this country used to have many regional music scenes. I remember traveling with Bob Dylan and the Band back in the day. If you went to San Antonio, the music was distinctly different from the music in New Orleans. The New Orleans music scene was distinctly different from the music scene in Memphis. And so on — there were all these regional scenes. Now we essentially have a mall culture. We’ve wiped out most of these music scenes. There’s a small nub of the hip hop scene that holds on to some regionalism in places like Atlanta and Dallas, but that’s like the last vestige of anything that says ‘I know where that comes from, I know what that speaks from.’

Taplin is not a Luddite, certainly, but he says that we must not praise disruption for the sake of disruption. He writes, “Disruption of critical cultural infrastructure is only worthy if the replacement is more beneficial to the society at large than the original institution was.”

 

Consider what is likely to come, and come quickly, to our society as the result of automation. Here’s a clip from the Q&A:

The issue is that robots and artificial intelligence are coming pretty quickly. Unless there is a resistance, it will just plunge ahead. And then at some point, we’re going to have to deal with this issue. People like Marc Andreesen and bother ig venture capitalists said that the robots will hold all the stupid jobs, but we’ll just invent jobs that we don’t know about yet for the unemployed people. I don’t think that’s true. If you’re a 50 year old auto worker replaced by a robot in the GM plant, you’re not going to go train yourself to be a hotshot coder and go work for Google. They’re not going to hire you. They don’t want old people. They want young kids who will work 85 to 90 hrs a week and live on Pepsi and pizza. I think the uprising will come from the people who voted for Trump, but who are going to realize in two or three years that the jobs aren’t coming back. They’re going to be pissed off when they realize that they’ve been sold a bill of goods.

We’re not only losing an economic model that holds society together, but we are also embracing cultural amnesia, Taplin maintains. And as he writes in the book, “Cultural amnesia only leads to cultural death.” From the Q&A:

One of the saddest things being a professor – my basic courses were called Technology, Entertainment, and Art – what was really sad for me is that most of my students had very little historical knowledge of what happened in America, but they also had very little cultural knowledge. They knew nothing about Louis Armstrong, for example. He’s one of the most important American artists who ever lived. These kids had no idea who he was, and honestly, not a deep desire to find out, either. That’s a problem. I cite Gabriel Garcia Marquez saying, “I cannot imagine how anyone could even think of writing a novel without having at least a vague idea of the 10,000 years of literature that have gone before.” If you study Hemingway and Fitzgerald, they read everything they could get their hands on from the past. It helped form them. But today, young people don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t really care. It’s discouraging.

I told Taplin that even though I’m a cultural conservative and he is not, most of what he writes about in Move Fast and Break Things resonates deeply with me. I asked him if he identified in any way with cultural conservatives. Taplin replied:

 

 

I would say that in some sense I am a conservative, in the sense that I want to conserve a culture that I think is dying. The biggest star on YouTube until he blew up was Pewdiepie. His whole shtick was to play video games, and people would watch him play video games, and he would grimace. This guy had more followers on YouTube than Beyoncé![Note: He currently has over 55 million followers. — RD] This guy had no talent for anything. To my eyes, this was so symbolic about the end of a culture. In the sense that I worry about us destroying what’s good and what’s profound and what’s deep, then I guess I’m a conservative. Where I differ is that I have friends who have deep gay relationships in my church, people who have been together for 20 years, and so I cannot think that they are bad. I’m one of those “everybody’s in” Christians. That’s where I tend to break with what most people think of as a  ‘culturally conservative’ viewpoint.

Still, I said, there’s a tremendous amount of overlap between people like you and me, both profoundly concerned about what the ideology of consumerism is doing to our culture. Taplin responded:

Perhaps there’s some kind of meeting of the minds here. You used the word consumerism. If we all have mall fever, that’s not helping anything. That’s not helping us make any progress as a society. The problem I’m trying to confront is quite frankly, the people who make advertising are getting better and better at embedding into your head the ability to deliver a message to you at just the point where you think you’re hungry. It’s frightening. In my book, I talk about how Amazon and Google are putting speakers in your home that have microphones on all the time so they can absorb more consumer data about you to make you want things you don’t even know you want. Is that the world we really want to live in?

My daughter lives down in New Orleans. She’s a capital appeals lawyer. Her job is to go once a week to Angola State Penitentiary to talk to her clients on death row. She found that her church and her ability to get away from social media was the only way for her to keep her head on straight. Ray Kurzweil thinks that the idea of the chip in your brain will be a great thing. Google will now be forever embedded in your brain, and you won’t actually know whether you’re using your computer and your brain. You will eventually cease to understand what’s you and what’s your advice. I want to resist that.

 

 

 

So do I. In the chapter of the book that spoke most directly to me, Taplin asks, “What does it mean to be human?” — especially in “the age of digital addiction.” Taplin cites research showing that neuroscientists are working to create Internet apps and suchlike designed to hook users. In talking about this by phone, I told Taplin about Columbia professor Tim Wu’s recent observation (in his great book The Attention Merchants) that William James had it right: we are what we pay attention to. I mentioned Wu’s unusual praise for monks, who share the same insight into human nature, and who build their lives around habits and techniques to focus their attention rightly.

It turns out that Jonathan Taplin and I agree that the Benedictine monks have a lot to teach us in the resistance. In his book, he writes about how much he learned from a retreat at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Benedictine monastery in northern California. There is no cell service or wifi there. Taplin writes:

Aside from the chanting of the monks in the chapel, no words are spoken there — which is of course the point. At home I am just as guilty as anyone of trying to watch TV, check my email, and talk on the phone at the same time. But I think we all have to take vacations from our devices.

… I am not a Catholic, yet I find the monks’ prescriptions to be helpful, a model of how I want to live in the world. The idea of an examined life is missing in our current digital rush. Perhaps following the monks’ example of devotion to their community would be too much of a sacrifice for most of us, but when I was immersed in their fourteenth-century songs my mind kept wandering to the events that had occurred two seeks before in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine church parishioners were killed y a racist kid named Dylann Roof. When you think that the families of the slain churchgoers were able to forgive the shooter, you can only marvel at the power of their faith. Never was the difference between community cooperation and individual separation more starkly outlined. I’m not sure my faith would afford me that amount of grace in the face of such evil, but I am awed to see it exist in this hateful political climate we inhabit. I kept thinking of how powerful this sense of community was.

Yes. Yes! The connectedness we all experience online is only a simulacrum of real community. And, “being human” is not “fulfilling all desires,” but rather requires contemplation, discernment, and the control of our desires. We have built and are building a world where that is less and less possible.

Read Move Fast and Break Things. This book is prophetic, and key to understanding the dynamics driving our culture off the cliff. We make heroes of our destroyers, and we don’t understand what we’re doing. This is not a left vs. right problem. This is a challenge that implicates every one of us.

 

Stop Demonizing The White Working Class

A reader sends in this strong Financial Times piece based on an interview with Joan C. Williams, author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Williams is a left-wing feminist academic in her sixties, but she became something of an expert on the WWC because she married into it, and began studying it. Excerpts:

To the WWC, Clinton seemed the epitome of an out-of-touch, condescending, PC-spouting professional. Female professionals aspire to successful careers, so Clinton talked about smashing the “glass ceiling”. But Williams thinks the glass ceiling meant little to WWC women, who knew they couldn’t reach the top even if they were WWC men.

More:

He also promised WWC men the masculine factory jobs that progressives said had gone for ever. This is how Williams sums up the two parties’ offerings to the WWC in recent decades:

Republicans: We’re going to deliver you jobs.

WWC: How?  Republicans: Give money to rich people.

WWC: How are you going to give us jobs, Democrats?

Democrats: Oh, we’re going to give more money to poor people, we’re going to create equality for women. 

And so Trump prolonged the alliance between the WWC and the Republican business elite. When I ask what he has delivered to the WWC since his election, Williams cuts me off: “Dignity! He delivered the biggest FU to my crowd that they have seen in decades.”

She thinks that her fellow progressives are learning none of the lessons they ought to be learning from Clinton’s defeat:

So far she’s unimpressed. “Just read the frigging New York Times, listen to NPR [National Public Radio], key outlets of the progressive elite: story after story of an outpouring of compassion for immigrants.

“Do I feel sorry for immigrants? Yes. But that’s not the point. An outpouring of compassion for immigrants, in the absence of offering dignity to the white working class, will hurt immigrants because it’s just another expression that elites have ‘feeling rules’ — who you should feel sorry for.”

Read the whole thing.

Or better yet, here is the famous Harvard Business Review essay she wrote in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s win. This is the basis for her book. Here’s a really interesting excerpt, based on her point that the white working class is not the same thing as the poor. In fact, the WWC tends to dislike the poor:

Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.

Progressives have lavished attention on the poor for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to social programs targeting them. Means-tested programs that help the poor but exclude the middle may keep costs and tax rates lower, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.

J.D. Vance’s much-heralded Hillbilly Elegy captures this resentment. Hard-living families like that of Vance’s mother live alongside settled families like that of his biological father. While the hard-living succumb to despair, drugs, or alcohol, settled families keep to the straight and narrow, like my parents-in-law, who owned their home and sent both sons to college. To accomplish that, they lived a life of rigorous thrift and self-discipline. Vance’s book passes harsh judgment on his hard-living relatives, which is not uncommon among settled families who kept their nose clean through sheer force of will. This is a second source of resentment against the poor.

That resonates so deeply with me. As you may recall, I grew up in a WWC home. My dad was the first in his family to go to college, but he was working class to the bone. He had nothing but charity for poor people who tried to better themselves. When he was a kid, everybody he knew was poor, including his family. But poor people who, in his view, weren’t trying, but were living off the government — man, the class contempt was strong. He also couldn’t stand rich people who got their fortune by inheriting it. He admired self-made men. The people Joan Williams describes are my people, for better or for worse. This helps me understand something my folks told me about why my sister resented me: she could not understand why I made more money than she did by writing. To her, that wasn’t real work. I was in some sense cheating.

It is hard to express to people outside the white working class how much dignity matters to them — and that there is no more reliable measure of dignity than the ability to support yourself and your family on your own, without government handouts. Fair or not, this is deeply interwoven into the culture, and if you don’t understand that, you will never understand the WWC.

This is good too:

“The white working class is just so stupid. Don’t they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year. But to them, the Democrats are no better.

Both parties have supported free-trade deals because of the net positive GDP gains, overlooking the blue-collar workers who lost work as jobs left for Mexico or Vietnam. These are precisely the voters in the crucial swing states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that Democrats have so long ignored. Excuse me. Who’s stupid?

One key message is that trade deals are far more expensive than we’ve treated them, because sustained job development and training programs need to be counted as part of their costs.

At a deeper level, both parties need an economic program that can deliver middle-class jobs. Republicans have one: Unleash American business. Democrats? They remain obsessed with cultural issues. I fully understand why transgender bathrooms are important, but I also understand why progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic.

Back when blue-collar voters used to be solidly Democratic (1930–1970), good jobs were at the core of the progressive agenda. A modern industrial policy would follow Germany’s path. (Want really good scissors? Buy German.) Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs. Clinton mentioned this approach, along with 600,000 other policy suggestions. She did not stress it.

She also says her fellow progressives need to stop demonizing the police:

I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. I don’t. If I had to, I might make some poor decisions too.

Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.

Read the whole thing. 

And buy her book, White Working Class. It’s very practical. That line she has just above, about what happens when the WWC realizes that Donald Trump is not going to fix the jobs problem, is something we had all better get ready for. Trump is busy blowing up his own presidency out of his personal vanity, but the issues that brought Trump to office are not going away. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I haven’t seen too many national-level Republicans or Democrats who sound like they’ve learned the most important lessons of Trump’s rise. They seem to think of him as an aberration.

‘Our Caligula Moment’

Last night a friend, a staunch populist conservative, texted to say, “We are having our Caligula moment.” The Trump thing, of course. I thought of that reading Andrew Sullivan’s column this morning, especially these paragraphs:

The core concern was always deeper than this. It was that Trump doesn’t understand the Constitution he has sworn to protect; that he would abuse his executive power, to lash out at enemies; that he would undermine the rule of law by trying to get his way, consequences be damned; that he would turn vital democratic institutions, such as the Justice Department and the FBI, into mere handmaidens of his own interest, rather than guarantors of the public’s. And it is clear to me that the firing of Comey — while within the president’s Constitutional powers — falls squarely into this category. To fire someone who is conducting an investigation into your own campaign cannot help but be seen as an interference with the rule of law. It is to cast doubt on the integrity of that investigation, and its future. It undermines public confidence that the executive branch can enforce the law against itself. It politicizes what should not be politicized. It crosses a clear line.

And it also crosses a line when you keep lying brazenly about why you did it. You don’t pin it on Rod Rosenstein. You don’t pretend it’s about “showboating.” You don’t ludicrously argue that you’ve just finally realized that Comey did Hillary wrong. You don’t also say that you were going to fire him anyway. You don’t say the FBI was in turmoil under Comey, when it wasn’t. And you don’t say you want to get to the bottom of the matter when you have already declared the entire story a hoax. More to the point, you don’t lie about all these things and then go on television and blurt out the truth: “When I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russian thing with Trump and Russia … is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.” Read that again. The president has just said on national television that the Russia investigation was in the front of his mind when he decided impulsively to fire Comey. He has admitted he wanted to remove the FBI director because his investigation — which is fast intensifying — was targeting his campaign. That is called obstruction of justice. His spokeswoman yesterday reiterated that, after the Comey firing, the administration hoped the Russia investigation, which was trivial, would be wound up soon.

Sullivan is right about this. Like Sullivan, I am skeptical that there is a smoking gun in the Russia inquiry, and I believe that Comey has made mistakes that could justify his dismissal. But Donald Trump has now admitted openly that frustration with the FBI investigation of his own campaign led him to fire Comey. Sullivan says that’s obstruction of justice that requires impeachment.

I don’t know if that constitutes actual obstruction of justice, and even if it did, there is no chance that the Republican Congress will file articles of impeachment against Trump. But give Trump time. That he behaved this way last week is clear evidence that everything in the first line of the Sullivan passage I quoted is true. Trump cannot help himself. If the nation finds itself at this place only four months into the Trump presidency, and nobody around Trump had the power to stop him from doing this, then is anybody willing to say that something like this will never happen again? This isn’t about preventing Trump from “draining the swamp,” or protecting the mandarins of the Beltway from populist challenge. This is about the rule of law, and a president who holds the norms of our democracy in contempt.

Republicans in Congress had better start asking themselves where the bright red line is. Maybe it’s when he appoints his horse as FBI director. Or Jared.

 

The Trouble With Trump

Some of you readers seem to think that I am focused on whether or not Russia hacked the US election, and that my disgust with Trump over the Comey firing has to do with a desire to get to the bottom of the Russia mystery. You’re wrong.

I don’t really care about Russia in this matter. I assume that they did try to hack our election, just as the US tries to do in many countries around the world. I think it’s important to get to the bottom of the story. But it doesn’t trouble me all that much.

Nor am I troubled in principle by James Comey’s firing. As has been reported this week, Comey was far from irreproachable in his stewardship of the FBI. Whether or not Comey was actually fired for legitimate reasons, there were legitimate reasons to fire him, if you follow me.

What does trouble me is the outrageous behavior of the president this week. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that he is completely innocent in the Russia matter, or at least genuinely believes himself innocent. It has become clear by week’s end that the reason he fired Comey, or at least a major reason, was the president’s frustration over the Russia case.

It has been claimed that Trump asked Comey privately for his “loyalty” — a claim that is completely believable, given that Trump is well known for placing a high premium on loyalty. For a president to ask the FBI director to pledge his personal loyalty is outrageous. The FBI director is under the president’s authority, as a member of the executive branch, but he must be loyal to the law. Period. That Trump doesn’t grasp this is … well, very Donald Trump, but it’s troubling to have a man like that in the Oval Office.

Second, Trump blew up the White House’s credibility (such as it was) by sending his staff, as well as the vice president, out to lie for him. In charity, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they were telling the truth as they believed it to be. Trump cut the legs out from under them later in the week with his NBC interview. Who can believe a thing the White House spokesmen say going forward? As Chris Wallace of Fox News said yesterday, a particular exchange on Friday between Sean Spicer and a reporter was stunning, especially coming at the end of a week like this one:

“That was what in Watergate they called a non-denial denial. He was asked specifically, is there a recording device in the Oval Office of the President of the United States? He said, ‘I have nothing for you on that.’ He could have said no. He could have said yes. He said I have nothing for you on that. That is a non-denial denial. Look, it may just be that the President is trolling the press corps and saying work yourself into a frenzy about this and turns out it nothing. But why would he do that? Why would he want to decrease the credibility which is already in question of this White House and comments made from that podium? It seems to me that you’re playing a very dangerous game with the currency of the credibility of the President of the United States.”

Watch the entire Wallace statement here.

Many of you pushed back on my claim yesterday that this Trump tweet constituted an attempt to blackmail the former FBI director:

James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

I can see why some of you read a blackmail claim as too extreme, but I stand by it. What Trump said here was an attempt to silence Comey with a threat to expose contents of a private conversation between the president and the nation’s top law enforcement officer. Again, I find this despicable as a matter of practice. But what is more troubling is the idea that the president is secretly recording visitors to the White House, even those who give him advice that might rightly be regarded as confidential. Trump may be bluffing here, but even if he is, he wants  Comey to worry that everything he may have told the president privately may be made public — this in an effort to prevent Comey from talking to the media.

Even if that does not bother you, even if you think that’s nothing more than hardball politics, you should be worried about Trump’s impulsiveness in this matter. Now Trump has raised the possibility that the president is secretly recording things in the White House — a possibility that means every single one of those conversations are, by a law passed after Watergate, available to Congress.  From CNN:

But it’s the court cases and laws stemming from Nixon’s secret recordings that could send Trump’s tweet backfiring.

That’s because Congress in 1974 passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act that designated tapes like those Nixon recorded as presidential records that must be preserved in federal archives.

“If Trump installed a taping system … those are federal records thanks to Nixon’s court challenges,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and Nixon expert.

That means it’s illegal to destroy presidential recordings and they could by subpoenaed by, say, Congress — which is part of the reason why no president since Nixon has installed recording devices in the Oval Office.

Trump and Comey had their consequential discussion over dinner. It is possible that the president had his smartphone in his pocket recording the conversation. If so, that recording is now federal property, and if Trump orders its destruction, he has broken federal law. I don’t know what it would take to get Congress to put any potential recordings under subpoena, but I hope it moves quickly to do so, to protect them.

Here’s the thing, as a purely political matter: Trump, in the space of a week, has personally caused the greatest crisis of his presidency, entirely through his own impulsive and undisciplined actions. He is blowing up his presidency all by himself. If Trump really has been secretly recording people he talks to in the White House, he was a fool to raise the prospect publicly, because now he has signaled to Congress and the public that these federally protected recordings might exist. Had he not sent the Comey threat tweet, he would be in the clear.

But Trump cannot help himself. Ever.

Trump partisans need to step back and think about what this means for the GOP’s agenda. Mike Allen writes that Republican lawmakers on the Hill are deeply discouraged over this week’s events. Why? In part:

This kills momentum on legislating, and unifies Democrats in opposition to everything they want to do.
This makes it easier for Democrats to recruit quality candidates and raise money for the off-year elections.
It sours swing voters.
It puts them on the defensive at home. They want to talk tax reform and deregulation — not secret tapes and Russian intrigue.
But mainly it reinforces their greatest fear: Trump will never change. They keep praying he’ll discipline himself enough to get some big things done. Yet they brace for more of this.

Few people would have predicted that even Trump could screw up this badly. But he has, and he has because he can’t control himself. Now he has put GOP members of Congress in a terrible position, especially those facing re-election bids in 2018 (as all House members do). Do they defend this president when his actions seem indefensible, thus enabling him to carry on? Or do they step away from them, afraid of what politically insane and possibly illegal thing he will do next?

At this rate, Trump’s astonishing, world-historic win in 2016 may turn out to be a spectacularly Pyrrhic victory for the Republican party. Trump is giving the weakened Democrats all the ammunition they need to mount a devastating comeback. For conservatives like me who were pleased to see the GOP establishment take a walloping from Trump, and who would like to see the Republican party remade in a more populist way, the president is making fools of us all.

If this is “winning,” what, pray tell, is losing?

UPDATE: Michael Brendan Dougherty nails it. Excerpts:

Maybe you believe Donald Trump capable of involving himself in a foreign-led conspiracy that concluded with him becoming president of the United States, only to screw it up by acting in the most guilty way imaginable. But to my eyes this looks more like a case of the E word: Donald Trump was having another episode. He saw something he didn’t like in the media, got angry, and thought he could end it by sending out a pink slip. After all, “You’re fired!” had ended scores of storylines before, hadn’t it? That might sound like a defense, but it’s not.

The administration lied. Rod Rosenstein dutifully produced the official reason, that Director Comey had mishandled the investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal. But dozens of White House sources and a half-dozen Trump interviews this week confirmed that Comey was fired simply because he annoyed Trump. The giveaway is another word that has featured prominently in coverage of the firing and the potential candidates to assume control of the FBI: Loyalty.

Trump has this idea that the Executive Branch is an extension of the Trump campaign, the Trump brand, or even the Trump family. If the FBI director is someone whom Donald Trump technically employs, and Donald Trump can fire him, then it follows that he ought to be on Team Trump. Instead of being loyal to the country or the law, Trump imagines that everyone on the federal payroll ought to bend the knee. James Comey made the mistake of continuing to appear in headlines or stories that angered Trump, so he had to go. Sad!

Read the whole thing. 

UPDATE.2: Douthat’s right: Trump is nuts.  He might be evil too, but based on what we know about his personality, his firing of Comey could easily have been triggered by nothing more than Trump was tired of putting up with him. No conspiracy theory is necessary.

View From Your Balcony At La Scala

From Giuseppe Scalas

Reader Giuseppe Scalas took his children to the opera. Here they are waiting for the curtain to rise at La Scala. Can you imagine the sense of anticipation those girls are feeling in this shot?

Lord, Have Murse

Today I picked up a package from Saddleback Leather, a Texas-based purveyor of ultra-wonderful leather goods. It was one of those things in the photo: a leather front pocket pouch. I’m going to be doing some overseas traveling next month, and I wanted a bag that was durable, attractive, and useful — especially one that resisted pickpocketing. A few years ago, Julie and the kids bought me a Saddleback leather wallet for Father’s Day, and it has become one of my favorite things.

I opened the package today in the car with Julie sitting next to me.

“Is that for me?” she said, knowing that it wasn’t.

“No,” I said. “I told you that I was getting something for myself from Saddleback.”

“You said it would be a wallet. That’s not a wallet. That’s a bag. That’s a bag that I need.”

“Well, it’s mine. It’s going to be perfect for all that travel I’m doing in Italy with the boys.”

“But you don’t want to go around Italy with a murse.” That is, a “man purse.”

“A murse? That’s not a murse.”

“It’s a murse.”

“You’re just trying to shame me so I’ll give it to you.”

“So what if I am?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s a great bag and I’m going to use it.”

“But it would go so much better with me.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, I’ll buy you one.”

Silence.

“I’m not going to let you have this one.”

So, we get home, and my boys see the bag. Matthew, the older one, says, “Dang, that is one fine piece of leather.”

Ready for Italy

Lucas, the one going with me to the Palio in Siena, said, “You don’t want that, do you? Because I do.”

“No, it’s mine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! What is it with y’all?! Mom and I argued about this all the way home.”

Saddleback Leather’s slogan is “They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.” Maybe they will, but I can attest right now that they’ll fight over it before you’re dead. In fact, they might even kill you for it. Because those wallets and bags are so beautiful and well-made. They’ll last a lifetime. Hell, I wish I could count on looking even better as I age;, like Saddleback Leather products do.

Needless to say, the mail carrier will be delivering a follow-up package from San Antonio next week. You don’t think I’ve been married for nearly 20 years and learned nothing, do you?

 

Gallup On Post-Christian America

Gallup reports that the United States is now more socially liberal than it ever has been. Excerpt:

Americans continue to express an increasingly liberal outlook on what is morally acceptable, as their views on 10 of 19 moral issues that Gallup measures are the most left-leaning or permissive they have been to date. The percentages of U.S. adults who believe birth control, divorce, sex between unmarried people, gay or lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage, doctor-assisted suicide, pornography and polygamy are morally acceptable practices have tied record highs or set new ones this year. At the same time, record lows say the death penalty and medical testing on animals are morally acceptable.

And:

Of the 19 issues included in this year’s poll, 13 show meaningful change in a liberal direction over time, regardless of whether they are currently at their high point in Gallup’s trend. No issues show meaningful change toward more traditionally conservative positions compared with when Gallup first measured them. That leaves six issues for which there has essentially been no change over time.

Emphasis mine. Here’s the chart. Commentary below it:

In The Benedict Option, I write:

Today we can see that we’ve lost on every front and that the swift and relentless currents of secularism have overwhelmed our flimsy barriers. Hostile secular nihilism has won the day in our nation’s government, and the culture has turned powerfully against traditional Christians. We tell ourselves that these developments have been imposed by a liberal elite, because we find the truth intolerable: The American people, either actively or passively, approve.

Conservative Christians, let’s be honest with ourselves. This is not going to turn around anytime soon. The young woman at the Evangelical college asked, genuinely, “What’s wrong with just loving Jesus with all our hearts, like I was raised to do?” These poll results show what’s wrong with that as the only strategy Christians have. Loving Jesus with all our hearts is necessary, but not sufficient. We have to know what that love entails — and what it excludes. If it’s nothing but emotion, then the post-Christian culture will define its expression.

A reader writes:

I think what people miss when they call you a “retreatist” is simply the extent to which you are pushing back on the intrusions of the state, market, and mass culture. It is they who have grown, who have invaded every nook and cranny of life and every relationship. To build bulwarks and fortresses is hardly an act of retreat but rather one of counteroffensive.