Dear Reader,
Happy April Fool’s Day! (Don’t worry: no foolishness in this week’s edition; everything’s real.)
It’s feeling more and more like Spring each day here in Montana. We actually have tulips (the leaves, at least) coming up that we planted last fall, and we’re hoping they’ll make it through the various frosts and light snows that usually come between April and June.
Orpheus Ascending, the show I’d been in rehearsals for since the middle of January, had five solid performances this past weekend, and it was a joy to perform as part of the stellar cast. Millie also had the lead in her final high school show, and their three performances went well. Thanks to everyone who came out to see either (or both) of us on stage (and thanks to my friend, Jake Aharonian, for covering for me last week here at Second Drafts).
With two months of school left, we’re getting excited about two graduations (one from college and our final one from high school), as well as just beginning to think about summer plans (it’s looking like everyone will be in town for most of it, which will be nice).
Much here to consider this week (so much so, that you’ll have to click the link to read the entire email, as it got a little long), so have at it. As always, thanks for reading Second Drafts.
Craig
P.S.: As a reminder, you’re welcome and encouraged to email me directly with feedback, ideas, links, etc. at cmdunham [at] gmail [dot] com. Just know that, unless you specifically tell me not to, I may quote you here (though it will always be anonymously).
Hot Takes
“Will Smith Issues Apology to Chris Rock, Says He Was ‘Out of Line’ and ‘Wrong’” - Unless you’ve been living under a rock this week, you probably heard about actor Will Smith slapping (I wouldn’t call it “hitting,” as Smith’s delivery was that of a second-grade girl; I’ve seen better punches thrown on the playground) comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards ceremony this past Sunday. At issue was Rock’s “G.I. Jane 2” joke making fun of Smith’s wife, Jada, and her bald condition stemming from alopecia.
Here at the end of the week, all parties involved seem to have made amends, which is good, but I confess this has been one big Hollywood eye-roll for me. Consider:
Rock is a comedian; making jokes (often at others’ expense) is what he does. That doesn’t mean it’s right, nor do I support what he did, but it is what he does (and doing so apparently hasn’t hurt ticket sales for his stand-up tour).
Pinkett-Smith said less than a week before the show that she “didn’t give two craps” what people thought of her bald head. So, she didn’t care…until she did.
Smith, taking his cue from his wife’s upset reaction, overreacted and became a hero in the eyes of some for defending his wife…but also the butt of jokes on Twitter questioning where his chivalry begins and ends when it comes to the “open” marriage he and Pinkett-Smith are famously known to have.
Richard Smith (the man for whom Will Smith won the Oscar later that evening for portraying in the film, King Richard) called out the Oscar winner, saying, “we don't condone anyone hitting anyone else unless it’s in self-defense.” Richard Smith was accused of having broken the ribs of his wife, Oracene, in 1999.
Whatever you make of these shenanigans, the overarching lesson is (once again) this: stop taking cues from Hollywood as to edifying speech, turning the other cheek, marital fidelity, and keeping quiet when you lack credibility to speak.
Bonus lesson: if you’re going to throw a right hook, learn to do it right.
El Hombre Is Coming Back to St. Louis
Our family lived in St. Louis for six years, during which the Cardinals—led by Albert Pujols—won two World Series and endeared themselves forever to my girls. Thus, it broke our hearts when Albert went west to play for the California Angels, as well as last year for the (I can barely bring myself to say it) Los Angeles Dodgers.
But, at least for the remainder of spring training, all is right with the world again as El Hombre is coming back to play one more year and retire as a St. Louis Cardinal.
I so want this to go well. Albert is 17 home runs short of tying PED-user Alex Rodriguez for fourth place on the all-time list and 21 short of becoming the fourth player to hit 700 homers. With just 19 hits, he can pass Eddie Collins and Paul Molitor to reach ninth place on the all-time hit list. As for RBIs, he's just 64 shy of passing Babe Ruth for number two on the all-time list there as well.
Most importantly, however, Albert will be in the Cardinal dugout everyday, modeling for younger players what it means to play St. Louis baseball and finishing an epic baseball career with the team (and town) who loved him best. Heck, he might even redeem for me the DH position being in the National League this year.
Welcome home, Albert. I wish we still lived in St. Louis for this, your final year.
Of Fools & Follies
Earlier this week, a 40-year-old Montana man lost his life to the claws and jaws of a grizzly bear, the first such death reported in 2022. According to this AP News report,
“A Montana man who went missing while hiking earlier this week was killed in a suspected encounter with a grizzly bear north of Yellowstone National Park, authorities said Friday. The victim was identified as Craig Clouatre, 40, of Livingston. No details were provided on where he was found or why a grizzly bear was believed responsible for his death.
Search teams on the ground and in helicopters had been looking for Clouatre after he went hiking on Wednesday morning with a friend, possibly to hunt for antlers, and was reported overdue that day, according to the sheriff. The search began that night concentrated on the Six Mile Creek area of the Absaroka Mountains, located about 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of Livingston, Montana.
‘They split up at some point later in the morning,’ Park County Sheriff Brad Bichler told the Livingston Enterprise. ‘When the other man returned to their vehicle and his friend wasn’t there, he called us and we began searching.’”
I was particularly interested in this story, as my son-in-law, Bruce, is also an avid shed hunter (he and my oldest daughter, Maddie, started a small business called Shed Straps to display found antler sheds) who happened to be shed hunting in the area where Clouatre was mauled. Last Saturday morning, I received a text from Maddie saying,
“Bruce went shed hunting at around 6:30 a.m. in Livingston. He got to the trailhead and met some guys on horses who were looking for a missing person on the same trail. Bruce swapped phone numbers and continued on his way.
After a few miles, he found the camp of the missing person and took a right turn instead of following some elk prints left. He climbed up a ridge and through about three feet of snow (his waterproof leg covers broke, so his socks were soaked all day). His snowshoes kept getting stuck under the snow because it was melting.
He then got a call on top of the ridge that they had found the guy. If Bruce had turned left near that campsite, he would have found the body of Clouatre, a 40-year-old man who was shed hunting and was discovered by a bear last night.
That bear was still around, and since the snow was so deep, the places Bruce could hike were limited. There was a helicopter that bumped the bear and apparently made it run up the ridge (Bruce discovered this as he climbed the ridge and found its tracks). He had to follow the bear tracks for a while just to get out of there.
He never ran into the bear, but honestly, if Craig hadn’t run into the bear yesterday, that very well could have been Bruce. He got home pretty shaken up, cold, and exhausted last night around 9:30 p.m.”
Life gets pretty real, pretty fast when you’re in the Montana mountains, especially when you’re cold, alone, and the wildlife lives up to its name. While bear attacks on humans are rare, they do happen. According to the same AP News article,
“Since 2010, grizzlies in the Yellowstone region have killed at least eight people. Among them was a backcountry guide killed by a bear last year along Yellowstone’s western border. Guide Charles ‘Carl’ Mock was killed in April after being mauled by a 400-plus pound male grizzly while fishing alone at a favorite spot on Montana’s Madison River, where it spills out of the park.”
In case you need a visual of the power and terror involved in a grizzly attack, here’s a great scene with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Hugh Glass (one of the early Montana frontiersman) in the movie, The Revenant (warning: not for the faint of heart).
Brutal. Still, as real as CGI and a guy in a bear suit make it seem, I can only imagine how being on the receiving end of an actual grizzly attack would be so much worse.
Pillars & Phenomena
Why am I writing about something as gruesome as a bear attack? Partly because it’s been on my mind, but also because, believe it or not, the Bible makes the claim that dealing with fools and folly is even worse. Proverbs 17:12 says,
“Let a man meet a she-bear robbed of her cubs rather than a fool in his folly.”
Think about that. The Bible suggests that dealing with a fool in his folly is worse than coming face-to-face with a bear. I don’t mean at all to minimize what happened to Craig Clouatre (in fact, my heart goes out to his family; if you’d like to give to their GoFundMe account, you can do so here), but I am struck by the verse and what seems like (but can’t be) hyperbole that something could be worse than a bear attack.
It makes me wonder what fools and follies the writer is talking about. Which fools and what follies are we not taking seriously enough to see as threats?
As a starting place, I remember reading an intriguing 2004 book by Jane Jacobs called Dark Age Ahead. Jacobs, an urbanist, argued North American civilization showed signs of spiral decline comparable to the collapse of the Roman empire. Her thesis focused on “five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm.” They are:
the nuclear family
education
science
representational government and taxes
corporate and professional accountability
Some say that Jacobs was too pessimistic in her analysis, but I think time (or at least the past 18 years of it) has fallen in line with many of her observations and analyses.
Five other aspects—I’ll call them “phenomena,” as they are more modern and unique to our 21st century experience (though it’s not like they’ve never existed in history)—that I would add to Jacobs’ list are:
gender dysphoria
identity politics and virtue signaling
cancel culture and censorship
hyper-partisan media and selective press coverage
economic inflation
Though we could fill plenty of pages on each of the above, for the sake of brevity, I’ll try to limit my thoughts to a couple of paragraphs for each concerning the foolishness I see involving and surrounding these pillars and phenomena. Again, the question to keep in mind: how serious are we in thinking about each?
The Nuclear Family
Despite cultural commentator David Brooks’ terribly-titled thesis that, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” his overall dual analysis—that the diminishing extended family is problematic, and the sexual revolution resulted in little more than reinforcing good old Hobbesian individualism—was right.
“This is the story of our times—the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms…The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it’s left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say—and so for decades things have been falling apart.”
As a solution, Brooks suggests tapping into the more ancient kinship/clan ideas, coining the phrase “forged family” for a family that is chosen rather than biological.
“Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin. It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.”
Brooks’ solution is too either/or than both/and for me. I’m not ready to give up on the nuclear family, particularly when adding the kinship of the “forged family” of my local church. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; we need to roll it better together.
Education
I don’t need to spend a lot of time here outlining the education problems in America, but I do have an easy solution: school choice that funds students instead of systems. Bonus: it may even solve the book battles over what students are reading!
I’ve written about school choice at length, and an overwhelming majority (74%) of Americans support it; we just have to get teachers unions out of the way to make it happen. Otherwise, in the name of the cult-like doctrines of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, we’ll be stuck with more stories like these:
“Students, Professors Demand Scholar be Allowed to Call on ‘White, Male, or Someone Privileged’ Last”
For parents who don’t care, fine; but for parents who do (and there are plenty who do), the time has come for state and federal funding to follow the students and not land in the bloated administrative budgets of the majority of government schools. More—not fewer—options will make American education better. We’re foolish (and insane) to continue doing the same thing over and over again while hoping for different results.
Science
When we’ve not been chastised to “follow the science,” we’ve kept busy trying to keep track of someone’s preferred version of it, depending on the end game. Nothing better illustrates this than the past two years we’ve been (and still are) dealing with COVID-19 and trying to make sense of the “expert” advice who got so much wrong in their “experting.”
Too many players with too many vested interests have been involved—politicians, some of whom were working personal financial deals in lock-step with spending decisions made; pharmaceutical companies, who stood to profit tremendously (and then some) from the demand for their products; and even the medical spokespeople, who seemed to rather enjoy the power afforded them in the name of “the crisis.”
The medical establishment may not gain back the trust of the American people if they continue with their “follow the science” rhetoric. Science is a method, not a mandate.
Representational Government and Taxes
This, too, is a category I don’t need to spend too much time talking about, but I have a suggestion as to what needs to be done inside capital domes and the White House: we need to get rid of the staff lifers whispering in and who have the ears of elected public officials from administration to administration. Who knows how much power these people actually have when they have such close access to those who actually have to go on the record with how they vote? (And don’t get me started on taxes.)
Corporate and Professional Accountability
If there is an area that Jacobs totally nailed in her evaluation of what will lead to the fall of our country, it is this one. Here, Jacobs speaks of the demise of self-policing of our business and legal institutions, weeding out corruption and people with lack of character from within. I would include the Church in this category as well, as some (not all) churches have done a poor job providing proper and thorough oversight of leaders before they failed, handling them (and their victims) after with poor integrity.
Gender Dysphoria
The problem here is that, in the conversations concerning our nation’s collective gender dysphoria, we are teaching our children (and convincing ourselves) that facts and truth do not matter. Case in point, as published in this article from Evie Magazine:
“Vivian Ware, Disney's diversity and inclusivity manager, announced in a video conference call that parkgoers will no longer use the phrases ‘boys and girls’ and ‘ladies and gentleman,’ which are now considered ‘gendered greetings.’ Disney has made this choice in an attempt to create a more welcoming environment, because apparently ‘boys and girls’ can be considered borderline offensive.”
None of this is happening in a vacuum; with Disney, there’s always a master plan:
“Disney has also made it clear that they're upping the number of gay characters in its films. This is all coming to a head as Disney employees staged a walkout of the company headquarters in order to protest the so-called Don’t Say Gay bill in Florida, which incidentally doesn't contain anything about being gay. It simply calls for teachers to stop talking about sexual orientation in the classroom with children up through the third grade.
It’s concerning that Disney is at the forefront of the trans agenda, particularly considering the fact that this company has an enormous impact on children and the way they see the world. Removing ‘boys and girls’ from the park’s vocabulary sounds innocent enough, but it's only the beginning of pushing gender theory onto impressionable children who deserve an innocent childhood.”
I’ve been skeptical of Disney for decades because of the monopoly and power they’ve had that has gone unchecked (or more accurately, unnoticed) by parents and families. But more concerning is the redefinition of terms and types—“boys and girls”—that comes straight out of Orwell and Big Brother’s playbook. When language comes to mean nothing, it can then be redefined to mean anything.
Identity Politics and Virtue Signaling
A reader recently emailed:
“…I was a bit concerned with your statement referring to the ‘unholy trinity of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity.’ I'm not sure if I've ever seen such a successful attempt at ‘othering’ people in just 6 words. Diversity is an acknowledgment that the entire world isn't made up of white, Christian, middle-class, straight, American males, and I personally would be mortified if I thought I was excluding anybody from anything. Every week in church we hear about how the kingdom of God is open to all. And as a white, Christian, middle-class, straight, American male, I would also be mortified if I somehow thought that anyone not in those categories deserved fewer rights or lesser treatment than I do, hence the equity. I am at a loss to understand why a percentage of our population believes that treating others, regardless of ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, or economic position, with kindness and fairness is something to be scorned. We even saw it with the confirmation hearings last week.”
A lot to unpack here—concern, judgment, redefinition, assumption of motives, white guilt, love, theological precepts, confusion, fear, disbelief, bias. It’s all too much to address in this space (and I get exhausted thinking about doing so), but let me just say this: as long as Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity are printed with capital letters, these words will always be idols in and of themselves, at the feet of which good people will be sacrificed not only for being the wrong color or having the wrong background, but also for being the right color and even having the right background.
When a Supreme Court nominee—of whom the President declared her color and sex as his first criteria for her selection—will not define what a woman is during a Senate hearing, she has been sacrificed on the altar of ideology by those who appointed her. Sadly, she will be resurrected and confirmed to serve as a priestess of that same ideology—to the detriment of the Court, the Constitution, and the American people.
Cancel Culture and Censorship
I’ve written about engaging culture before, and I continue to believe that bad free speech should be combatted with better (and more) free speech. The challenge is that Big Tech owns the platforms for much of that better (and more) free speech, which is why we as a nation should be thinking about those companies differently now. Dr. Anthony Esolen posted this new paradigm on his Facebook page this week:
“The large Tech companies—Google, Facebook, PayPal, and so forth—have now become the equivalent of public utilities, like the phone company. That is just a plain fact. Therefore they must be regulated, as the phone company is. The details of such regulation must be hashed out by the people's representatives, because otherwise we will have ceded our civil liberties to the oversight of private and faceless citizens and their hidden algorithms and their unaccountable judgments and decisions. Senator McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist, the House Un-American Activities Committee—these were absolute piddle by comparison with the power that Big Tech now wields, to stifle speech, and to expose to threats and punishment those whose speech violates the general understanding of public good that characterizes an exceedingly peculiar and small segment of our society—the workers and the managers in Silicon Valley.”
It’s an interesting idea. I have no idea if or how it can happen, but we’re foolish if we don’t recognize the danger of business as usual with Big Tech and not give thought to possible alternatives. Yes, many of our online platforms are helpful and free, but when something is free to the consumer, the consumer becomes and is the product.
Hyper-Partisan Media and Selective/Biased Press Coverage
A paid subscriber (click here to learn how to become one) recently emailed to say,
“You must be doing something right yet again, because I found this edition to be the usual assortment of things ranging from ‘how in the world can you possibly think that’ to ‘amen, brother.’ I drew a big chuckle some time back when you posted a note from someone who said something to the effect that she was Megan's hippy liberal friend and was alarmed because she agreed with you too much!”
Maybe it’s the Midwesterner in me, but I’m flattered when someone labels my writing as “the usual assortment of things ranging from ‘how in the world can you possibly think that’ to ‘amen, brother.’ FoxNews be damned, that’s what “fair and balanced” is supposed to mean.
While I’m pretty upfront about being politically, fiscally, morally, and theologically right of center (though I’m uncomfortable with the lack of nuance inherent in putting any of these on a spectrum), I’m glad to have readers like the paid subscriber above (as well as the free subscriber he mentioned in his email) recognize my attempt at hearing out and engaging with those coming from a different perspective.
In this era of news gathering, we have many options, but few objective ones. If you don’t have time to read all the rhetoric with your bias filters on (it’s exhausting, trust me), find a few people who do and follow them. Just don’t check out or give up.
Economic Inflation
Not a whole lot to say here, other than if we don’t recognize the foolishness of our currency losing its worth and value week after week due to inflation, we really are fools. We have to fix the supply chains; corporate America should be incentivized to implement more profit-sharing practices with employees; we need to cut taxes so people have more money to spend and invest; let’s drive down health care costs once and for all; we need to do a better job tracking allocated funds (especially ARP funds); and for crying out loud, the government has to stop printing and spending money.
Our Only Hope
I don’t have a slick or savvy conclusion for this week’s feature (plus, it’s late on Thursday night and I need to go to bed). So, let me simply end with the words of a trusted mentor from back in the day. It was Obi-Wan Kenobi who once asked,
“Who’s the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?”
Here’s to being neither.
Until next time.
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