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How dry is it?
This newsletter comes to you from suburban Phoenix where this week we had a little rain. Big news because it's the first precipitation here since Aug. 22.
Yes, it's been very dry. I had to tell a neighbor planting sod that the green side goes up.
The first hours and days
The early hours of the second Trump administration were a purposeful blur of executive orders, misdirection and defiance that served three purposes:
They delivered quick promised action on border, energy, gender, tariffs, trade and other issues Trump supporters had cheered along the campaign trail.
The sheer volume of executive orders made it close to impossible for resource-starved media to fully and accurately report on what all had transpired.
And they pushed forward a hodgepodge of controversial issues into a single already-crowded news cycle, distracting and exhausting even those citizens trying to pay attention.
By making himself the world focus of attention for a second time, Trump has proved he is the master-marketer, having honed his skill and instincts in real estate, wrestling, casinos and reality television.
Some of the people he’s invited into the center ring will enrich themselves at the expense of others, and Trump will applaud them. He and his wife, after all, are cashing in with Trump-branded crypto tokens, some being purchased by people who complain about the price of eggs. I wonder if he’ll repeat his boast about not paying taxes.
Three things that make me grouchy:
The Oval Office is again occupied by a pugilistic personality who has normalized previously unacceptable and disqualifying behavior. It will have a lasting effect on America’s culture and future.
Number 47 has so infected the Republican Party that many of its members seem willing to empower an imperial presidency.
His wholesale, reckless pardon of people implicated in the January 6th insurrection has effectively populated a private militia ready to “stand by” at his request, with newly-restored gun possession rights, a loyalty and indebtedness to Trump and experience that says violent behavior can be forgiven.
Worth the watch
I’ve known about Adam Kinzinger since he was a 20-year-old upstart member of our local county’s governing board 27 years ago.
I know him a lot better now that I’ve seen the new movie, “The Last Republican.”
You probably know him best as the only Republican to serve alongside Liz Cheney on the U.S. House committee to investigate the January 6 attack. That’s the group that got the pre-emptive pardon from President Biden who feared its members would be a target of Trump’s promised “retribution.”
You may also know Kinzinger as a 20-year military veteran who retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard or as a senior political commentator on CNN.
This documentary traces Kinzinger’s last year in Congress as he withstands the consequences of trying to hold Trump accountable. It also serves as part of a firm footing that might lead Kinzinger to presidential candidacy three years from now.
If he looked courageous for taking a tough stand in Congress, he tells the camera, it’s because he was surrounded by cowards.
He was one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump and greatly regrets they didn’t seize the moment to re-take control of the GOP when it temporarily ostracized Trump. Instead they fell silent.
“I thought, naively, that there’s no way people aren’t going to wake up to this.” He was wrong.
Then Kevin McCarthy visited Mar-a-Lago to make nice with the future once-again president.
While much of the movie’s focus is on behind-the-scenes work of the Jan. 6 committee, we also learn about the lasting impact Kinzinger’s street fight with a man trying to stab a girlfriend had on the future congressman. We meet his wife and now three-year-old son. And we laugh out loud when we see a photo of him as a young Civil War re-enactor. The movie, in fact, is surprisingly funny.
It’s in limited theater release now and will be streaming at some point. I suspect there was internal disappointment it didn’t get an Oscar nomination for best documentary.
Through the lens
Many years ago President Johnson came to our town for the funeral of Adlai Stevenson, his ambassador to the United Nations.
I was a college student at the time, disappointed my part-time newspaper employer didn’t seem to need my help with its wall-to-wall coverage. So I stood along the street where the presidential motorcade would pass so I could get a look at the president. (We’re talking Lyndon, not Andrew, Johnson here, if you have to ask.)
I did see LBJ as his limo drove past. But then I realized my glimpse of the president at this moment of local historical import had been through the viewfinder of my cheap Vivitar camera.
I thought about this as I read Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction of Experience.
A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Rosen warns of peril in some of our technological choices, to “consider what we are losing, as well as gaining, when we allow new technologies into our lives, and to question the motive of the companies so eager to have us ‘share’ ourselves with them.”
The tech may be convenient, fun and novel, she writes, but it’s also causing some human experiences to disappear. Too often, she says, we’re doing something just so we can broadcast it.
Information about pleasure is not the same as experiencing it. Even our “hobbies become so geared to documentation and public performance that we lose the singular experience of enjoying them in the moment.” Witness all the cell phones in use at the college football championship.
If Facebook existed back when I snapped my LBJ photo, I’m sure I would have shared it with “friends.”
But Rosen insists we’re losing something when first-hand experience disappears. Playing online games is far different than face-to-face social time. Porn is different than real sex. Earbuds isolate you when you’re on your morning walk. That interior cruise ship cabin with the “perfect” high definition “window” isn’t the same as looking out and seeing, hearing and smelling the actual sea.
Rosen says we regulate alcohol, tobacco, firearms and gambling. Maybe technology should be on that list as well.
Trash TV
I’m actually a little embarrassed to admit that I watched the two-part Netflix documentary “Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action.”
My justification is that back in the days when Springer and his syndicated TV show were controversial, my letter-to-the-editor was printed in The Chicago Tribune. (Chicago was Springer’s home base). Here’s how it read:
The proliferation of TV talk shows coupled with the chase for ratings has driven the shows’ producers to find the most bizarre topics and guests they can. The smuttier, the wilder, the flakier the better to feed our voyeurism.
The real threat is that millions of unsupervised latch-key kids are coming home to a TV menu that a decade ago wouldn’t have been programmed even during the late-night hours. How many of these elementary and junior high -age kids are growing up believing the peculiar is ordinary, that kinky is normal? That crude, lurid, risqué and abusive behavior is standard and noteworthy (if not laudable) behavior?
Springer’s show, you know, once featured a man who left his wife and two daughters to marry a horse. And a guy who sliced off his own penis. Dramatic confrontations and physical fights were routine.
Topics and guests had been conventional and ratings poor until Springer brought on producer Richard Dominick, who apparently has no shame. Meanwhile Springer was silently complicit as producers set up explosive, chaotic segments that exploited people. One guest was killed by her ex-husband after they appeared on the show.
In 2014 Springer discovered remorse. “I’d like to take this opportunity,” he said on a radio show, “to frankly apologize for everything I’ve ever done in television. I have ruined the culture.”
He seemed sincere, yet the show went on—unbridled—for another four years. Among the final episodes: “Hooking Up With My Therapist” and “Stripper Sex Turned Me Straight.”
Springer died two years ago of pancreatic cancer.
A raw western
It’ll be no surprise if Mormons are unhappy with “American Primeval,” new on Netflix.
A highly-fictionalized series full of scalps being slashed and bodies pierced with arrows, it draws attention to a very real black mark on the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Here’s the historical context: Mormons had already settled in Utah when the United States acquired the area from Mexico in 1848. Church leader and territorial governor Brigham Young, fearing a repeat of the persecution his group had suffered back East, declared martial law when President Buchanan sent 2,500 troops to Utah.
In a five-day siege on a wagon train headed through southern Utah to California, members of the “Nauvoo Legion,” a militia made up of LDS members and supplemented by Native Americans they had recruited, killed at least 150 settlers. The question of whether church leaders ordered or sanctioned the killing, known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, remains unsettled.
In describing the series, Netflix says, “There is no safe haven in these brutal lands, and only one goal matters: survival.”
Acting by Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin is quite good. The six-parter is an authentic if grimy appreciation for how hard life was in the West 175 years ago and a glimpse into a tragic occurrence.
Another view of Abe
Who knew Dale Carnegie wrote an interesting biography of Abe Lincoln? I didn’t until a friend handed me a 1932 volume that had been part of a relative’s library.
Lincoln the Unknown won’t rank among the most scholarly volumes about Lincoln, but it surely is among the most absorbing and accessible.
In his forward, Carnegie wrote he felt a “genuine need for a short biography that would tell the most interesting facts” about our 16th president. So he spent three years talking to people who, for instance, had parents or friends who knew Lincoln, and spending time and actually writing in locales important to Lincoln’s life.
Carnegie tells about defiant Civil War generals, about an early Lincoln plan to gradually free slaves by the year 1900, and about how Lincoln was besieged inside and outside the White House by people seeking jobs. Once, when Lincoln was suffering from what Carnegie describes as small pox, Lincoln reportedly said, “Tell all of the office seekers to come at once, for now I have something I can give to all of them.”
Read Lincoln the Unknown and you’ll gain interesting insights into Lincoln’s private life and character. Carnegie goes deep into Lincoln’s unhappy marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln. He writes that one man who had felt greatly insulted by Abe’s wife demanded he make his wife apologize. “I regret to hear this,” Abe is reported to have responded, “but let me ask you in all candor, can’t you endure for a few moments what I have had as my daily portion for the last fifteen years?”
Carnegie writes, “The great tragedy of Lincoln’s life was not his assassination, but his marriage.”
A lot of scholarly research has occurred and many good books about Lincoln have been published since Carnegie published his work, but if you’re looking for a Mississippi flatboat full of good Lincoln stories as we approach the 216th anniversary of his birth, Lincoln the Unknown should be known to you.
Colleges and taxes
JD Vance must have been conflicted on the first night of the first day of the second Trump presidency, substantially interested, I suspect, in watching his alma mater, Ohio State, play Notre Dame for the national football championship while he was also expected to hang with the Trumps at a series of celebrations.
In the end, Ohio State won the trophy but had to share the spotlight with Trump’s inauguration and first-day flourish of activities.
Also receiving diminished attention was an excellent op-ed in the Jan. 21 Washington Post by Mitch Daniels, who served as Indiana’s governor, then Purdue University’s president.
Headlined “College football has turned pro. Let’s talk about those tax breaks,” this opinion piece applauds how college athletes are now able to cash in on their talent just like, for instance, a college musician.
But Daniels argues colleges’ tax-exempt status should vanish when it comes to sports revenue that now totals in the billions.
“Nonprofits collecting revenue not contributing directly to their mission are supposed to declare it as ‘unrelated income,’ and pay taxes on it. How long,” he writes, “will colleges be able to maintain the fiction that their sponsorship of professional football is for the purpose of advancing education?”
And while we’re at it, let me ask another question:
Which school will be next to join the Big Ten? Greenland University or the University of Panama?
Thanks for reading!
wonderful, as always Steve. Prescient and enjoyable commentary, glad you shared your interests. This "Extinction of Experience" book fascinates me -- as someone who has spent much time behind the camera lens, I often remind myself to put it down and just soak in the moment. I enjoy nature photography when I'm out in the woods -- what motivates me is to look at what I'm seeing -- light, particularly close-ups of flora and fauna -- and see them in a more indepth way and contemplate them through the lens. But you are correct, a lot of this activity is "Hey, look at me, I'm here" at a memorable event, game, etc.
I am delighted to see you on Substack, and I hope it brings you a ton of new readers. Congrats for making the transition to this platform.