Dear Reader,
In last week’s post, I mentioned I was trying to get out of Dodge to spend a weekend with my parents (visiting from Illinois) and our girls at Flathead Lake and Glacier National Park. It was a lot of driving (5.5 hours each way) and very smoky, but a good visit nonetheless. Of all the places we've lived, Bozeman is certainly the trickiest geographically and in stage-of-life considerations (theirs and ours), but we all make it work.
As the saying goes, “no good vacation goes unpunished,” and I came back to several big deadlines (more on that next week), my annual physical (I’m the healthiest unhealthy person you’ll meet), and a doozy of a reaction to the first of two shingles vaccine shots. Couple that with more smoke (though we’ve since gotten some nice rain in the past couple of days) and all the craziness going on in the world right now, and well, you knew I’d have to write about it.
I hope you’re up for reading (thanks, as always, for doing so).
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
“Fire the Military and Intelligence Bigs Who Bungled Afghanistan — Now” - At what point can we expect somebody to be fired or forced to resign over the Afghanistan debacle? Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, writing for the New York Post, goes beyond the question and calls for both:
“This is the biggest foreign failure in most Americans’ lifetimes, and there needs to be an accounting. The normal course of business after government bungling nowadays is that everyone involved tut-tuts a bit, then gets a raise and a promotion, while the government goes back to business as usual.
But in a sane nation, failure would be punished.”
A compelling argument, but one that I’m afraid will fall on deaf ears. With regard to integrity and leadership (and the accountability thereof), our nation hasn’t been “sane” for decades.
General Mark Milley. “Josh Harris’s Message Remains the Same” - Harris (he of I Kissed Dating Goodbye fame) was a key voice of the purity movement of American evangelicalism. Now a former pastor since having “deconstructed” his faith (I wrote about this pseudo-phenomenon in a previous post), Harris is offering to help others apostatize as well for only $275 a class. Author and professor Carl R. Trueman isn’t buying.
Author, speaker, and apostate, Joshua Harris.
The Juxtaposition Blues: Entering the Depths & Shallows of a Broken World
It was Sunday, October 7, 2001. I remember because I told myself I’d want to for later.
Later is now.
Megan (then five months pregnant with our third) and I had taken our two older daughters to a Disney on Ice production at the World Arena in Colorado Springs. Not one to get excited about Disney on anything, there I was with my two pseudo-captivated girls (ages 3 and almost 2) watching large-headed Disney characters skate to pumped-up versions of too-familiar tunes without a care in the world.
There I also was, trying to keep the girls’ eyes on the ice rather than following the endless parade of over-priced cotton candy and Disney paraphernalia/propaganda being shilled - section by section - to children whose capacity to resist the temptation was diminishing (eclipsed only by the deterioration of their parents’ patience from repeatedly saying, “No”) with every repeated pass.
Suddenly, there was a break in the action - seemingly unplanned, which is not the norm for tightly-scripted events such as this. The public announcer came on, asked for everyone’s attention, and then delivered this message (or a version of it - the exact words are a little fuzzy in my memory) in an almost celebratory tone:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we would like to inform you that, as of this evening, the United States has invaded Afghanistan by way of Operation Enduring Freedom.”
There was loud cheering and applause in the arena. The announcer continued:
“In honor of our troops, we invite you to stand and join with us in singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ after which we will resume our Disney on Ice program.”
I stood, but I didn’t sing - not out of protest (nobody really did that twenty years ago), but out of confusion. Here I was watching someone in an oversized mouse costume standing upright on ice skates directing a crowd of 4,000 men, women, and children - along with all the cotton candy and Disney dealers who paused long enough to join in - in singing praises to our country at the news that we had just invaded a country on the other side of the world.
The news and the experience did not seem to go together. Granted, this was less than a month after 9/11, so there was blood in the water. President George W. Bush had issued warnings and extended opportunities to the Taliban to turn in al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, thought to have been hiding in Afghanistan under their protection. There had been no satisfactory response, so this began the war - a “war on terror” - but we had no idea then it would take twenty years to end, nor end without victory.
It was all too surreal for my 30-year-old, father of two-with-one-on-the-way brain. I sat down at the end of the anthem and silently watched Mickey and Minnie and the rest of the House of Mouse re-take the ice. I mindlessly watched the concessions dealers resume their routes to tempt my children with sugar and sweatshirts. I watched my two girls - neither old enough to really know what was going on with either the show or the war - point back and forth between the latest ice skating character and the five dollar iced Juicy-Juice they thought they needed.
I realized then - perhaps for the first time (though it would not be the last) - that the challenge for me as a father, as a citizen, and as a Christian believer was not going to be choosing one world over the other. The challenge for me was going to be staying engaged in both despite my desire to reject each.
The Juxtaposition Blues
Like many this week, I’ve watched and read with disbelief the events in Kabul as the American military pulled out of our twenty-year occupation, the Afghani leadership and military collapsed, and the Taliban moved back in - all within 10 days. At the time of this writing, there are an estimated 10,000 Americans and 85,000 Afghani allies trying to get out of the country before the Taliban completely close things down.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the strategy and the execution of it - 20 years’ worth, actually - but history will have to sort out the dysfunctions and derelictions. I just don’t have the stomach for it.
I don’t have the stomach for a lot of things these days: pop music; The Today Show; poorly reasoned letters to the editor; Millennial parenting philosophies; mask debates; the youth sports industrial complex; televised game shows; “verb” churches; political parties (plural); the state of what used to be called “journalism”; Critical Race Theory; Geico Insurance commercials set to the song “Build Me Up Buttercup” - I could go on.
But what’s exhausting is how it all runs together in a way that we have to deal with. We watch a sad news report on the latest in Kabul on television or online and are then hit with a 30-second commercial featuring animated bears reassuring us that, despite our love for Charmin toilet paper, there will be plenty for everyone, so “Enjoy the go!”
This tension is what I felt 20 years ago at the juxtaposition of a grave solemnity of something as serious as war with the inane ridiculousness of pop culture. Writing about it here and now, twenty years later, the emotion feels even more overwhelming.
Somebody raise up B.B. King and find Lucille. I’ve got “The Juxtaposition Blues.”
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Of all the writers I’ve read, former New York University professor Neil Postman has most shaped my thinking in making sense of these juxtapositions of the modern era. Writing pre-Internet (or at least pre-public access to the Internet) in the 1980s, Postman’s words in his seminal 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (his 1993 book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology is also worth a read), are as accurate today as they were prescient then:
“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation…[It] is not that television is entertaining, but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience…The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining…
…Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
As much as Postman provides an objective look at what is (still) going on in the way we engage with our world through its various forms of modern media, it is the following thought - long, but so worth following in full - that speaks to the angst this week has held for me, probably you, and possibly so many throughout the world:
“How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.
You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran?
I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold.
Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news.
Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”
Ugh. It’s so depressing that he’s so right about what so many of us now feel.
Not Surprising, But Wearying
That next morning in Colorado Springs, 2001, I wrote the following in my journal:
“Yet another numb moment in time as we apparently went offensive in the war against terrorism yesterday. Because of the unbelievable news coverage of three networks and the Internet, the entire historical implications of all this seem completely and totally surreal. We in the United States - or at least I in the United States - truly know very little of fear in our own land. What must it be like to be a refugee on the border of Afghanistan? I can only imagine how awful so much of life there has been and now is for those millions of people.
As I watched the reports of this new war yesterday, there was a scrolling headline across the bottom of the screen announcing that Los Angeles had experienced a small (2.9) earthquake as well. Wars, rumors of wars, earthquakes? It all sounds end-time-ish to me. Our civilization and existence here on Earth is only going to get worse, both according to Scripture as well as the evil in the hearts of men. God, have mercy.”
Ironically, now on the backside of the American occupation of Afghanistan (with the Taliban connecting with potential and powerful future allies China, Russia, and Iran), Haiti just suffered a major earthquake - this one a 7.2 on the Richter scale - on Saturday, leaving more than 2,100 people dead and thousands more injured. The Covid-19 pandemic - just months away from its two-year anniversary - with its Delta variant is causing grief and death to varying degrees across the world. Forest fires continue to ravage the western U.S. (including Montana) with little relief in sight.
Culturally, we have Cooper as a new vaccination “influencer” on behalf of the White House (complete with cameo from Press Secretary Jen Psaki). When he and other big tech magnates aren’t censoring social media, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg thinks work would be better in a “metaverse” as virtual avatars of ourselves, as if we needed more - not less - time away from our screens and with actual live humans.
Oh, and there’s also an entire new industry of stealth digital recording devices on the market for school kids to covertly record their teachers in class to capture any political, gender, or racial propaganda espoused. Which is worse? Teaching kids to question the authority of their teachers, or kids being taught by teachers unworthy of that authority to begin with? Regardless, you can get it all on video.
It’s wearying to think about all this. Just last night, after seeing video of an Afghani mother handing her baby over a fence to an American soldier for him to take, Megan and I began talking about how to get on a list somewhere to foster/adopt a baby or two. For some, giving money makes sense (recommendation: to get more of your money to those who need it, check with your church or denomination as to relief funds to support before writing checks to another non-profit with higher administrative fees).
However we process or whatever we do, we have to commit ourselves to not look or walk away. We have to face both the depths of despair of war as well as the shallows and surfaces of our culture. As I wrote a few weeks ago, as Christians, we have to engage with - not pull back from - our world and its need for Jesus, the only Truth Who personally answers the four classic questions of existence:
Who are we? (Matthew 5:1-16)
Where did we come from? (Colossians 1:15-23)
Where are we going? (Revelation 22)
How should we live? (Mark 12:30-31)
Lord, have mercy on Afghanistan - the Afghanis, the Americans, the Taliban.
Lord, have mercy on America - the rebellious, the redeemed.
Lord, have mercy on me, a saint who sins.
Post(erity): “Tragedy Capturing”
Each week, I choose a post from the past that seems apropos of something (of course, you’re always welcome to search the archives yourself whenever you like).
This week’s Post(erity) post - “Tragedy Capturing” - is from April 18, 2007, and speaks to the news industry with more insights from (you guessed it) Neil Postman. An excerpt:
“I've since limited my following of the [Virginia Tech shooting] story to the Internet (though part of ABC's ‘special’ with Diane Sawyer - complete with cross-fading pictures of victims set to slow, dreary music - almost snuck in before my nightly X-File last night). Reporting the news has gone beyond reporting the news; it's all about ‘tragedy capturing’ now.”
Peaches’ Picks
For her pick this week, Peaches asked me to throw in this shot from her latest modeling gig for Cold Smoke Coffeehouse. (She recommends the Puppuchino.)
Fresh & Random Linkage
“The Hacker Who Stole and Gave Back $600M Has Been Offered a Job and Reward from the Company He Stole from” - That’s one way to highlight your applicable skills and experience.
Until next time.
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