This week, Merlin and John talk about:
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Table of Contents
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The Problem: You’re not gonna go to Unalakleet, referring to John getting a free ticket from Alaskan Airlines when he graduated High School and being able to use it to go somewhere where you would never otherwise go.
The show title refers to the people in Hawaii who are not native to the islands but have been living there for 15 years and don’t want any new foreign people (Haoles) coming in.
They are recording this on a different day on a different time. It is not Monday and it is not too early, but Merlin is always ready for John.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
Merlin’s project The Tastes of my Youth, pineapple juice, no more pineapples in Hawaii (RL206)
Merlin is doing a new thing called ”The Tastes of my Youth” where he revisits tastes of his youth. He has a 6oz (180ml) can of Dole Pineapple Orange juice, which is very good. It is all from concentrate and it comes in a can so you know it is healthy. In gym class in 10th grade they had a drink dispenser for juice and there was Bluebird Orange Juice, which he has never heard of anywhere else. It mostly tasted like pineapple and he always enjoyed it. When you get the concentrate you get the pineapple aspect to it. A pineapple is just a concentrated orange.
You don’t encounter pineapples anymore as you used to. Like people in gorilla suits and quicksand they might be a thing mostly of the 1970s. In the 1970s John spent a lot of time in Hawaii and there were pineapple fields as far as the eye could see. It was pineapple fields forever (reference to Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles), ”Living is easy with eyes closed” (lyrics from that song) One of the great things about going to Hawaii were sugar cane and pineapples, and all of that stuff is gone now because it is so much cheaper to grow that stuff elsewhere in Central and South America and in Africa. Those fields in Hawaii are either fallow and it is weird to go there and not see that stuff. Why don’t they just let the pineapples grow wild?
For a long time we talked about peak oil, the point where more than 50% of the oil that could be gotten from the Earth, which let to a lot of interesting discussions, written about by James Howard Kunstler. Merlin found that stuff very absorbing in the 2000s, and setting aside slavery, so much of what happens in America in the last 150 years is based on incredibly cheap energy. You could not have Walmart without ships running on relatively cheap fuel. Merlin is reading a book about Walmart right now. Today Walmart is extremely interested in environmental sustainability, not at least because it is cheaper, but then the fuel prices went down.
The other factors why you wouldn’t grow pineapples in Hawaii anymore are that labor is more expensive, there are a lot more regulations because it is America, land got increasingly more expensive, and when you are talking about a multinational corporation that wants to make 10 million pineapples as cheaply as they possibly can, and if fuel prices are low they can fill up an Exxon Valdez with pineapples because it is already expensive to get pineapples from Hawaii to anywhere. The countries are Costa Rica, Philippines, and Brazil.
Merlin not enjoying Hawaii that much, The Alaska-Hawaii relationship and the $100 ticket (RL206)
Merlin was not a good match for Hawaii. He has trouble relaxing and sometimes he is a difficult acclimator. There was a time when it would take him 3 days to enjoy anything that wasn’t at his house. Hawaii felt very foreign, not least because the people of Hawaii don’t love people coming there, it is not the warmest welcome, and he also didn’t like the food. Like Scottish food you are either all about it or you think: ”I can’t believe this is food!” Hawaiian food is really made out of the worst elements of 4 different kinds of food. It is the worst Japanese food, the worst Portuguese food and the worst American food and John loves it. A pile of rice with breaded chicken with a fried egg covered in gravy, it is called Loco Moco.
Hawaii doesn’t feel foreign to John because in the 1970s the 49th and 50th states had a very special relationship. Alaska entered the United States in 1959 and Hawaii in 1960. There was a brief period when they made US flags with 49 stars, but not for very long. By 1970 both places had been US States for 10 years and it was still very new. Merlin associates it with Hawaii Five-0 or The Brady Bunch and for his whole childhood his mother really wanted to go on a vacation to Hawaii.
Just the term Vacation to Hawaii has the smell of Cholitas rising up through the air, although they don’t have Cholitas there. Merlin has that, he has Ulcerative Colitis, but it is in remission, he is alright. Magnum P.I. is only 20 years after Hawaii became a state and it is still very much new turf. Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, which were newish carries that were making a play to be bigger than just regional airlines had a $100 reciprocal ticket from Anchorage to Honolulu, when back then you wouldn’t go anywhere for less than $700-1000 and Alaska was such a different animal.
When John graduated from High School Alaska Airlines gave every graduating Senior in Alaska a free ticket to anywhere in Alaska. You could use it to visit somewhere like Barrow or Unalakleet or something where you would never otherwise go. You were probably not going to go to Unalakleet as part of your job, but if you got a free ticket why not go there. John left Alaska immediately after graduating and he didn’t come back after his free ticket had expired, but all of his High School friends got together and flew to Kodiak which is not exactly the most exotic place to go and they sat and drank Stroh’s beer in their cold shitty hotel room while it rained outside for three days and then they flew home. That was a waste! They could have gone anywhere, like to Nome.
John’s family went to Hawaii all the time because of the $100 ticket and because it was a direct flight, you didn’t even have to go to America, and Hawaiians came to Alaska and most of the stuff on Waikiki was still little shacks with no windows that were bars with little Tiki lanterns out front. If you went 5-6 blocks off of Waikiki the streets were dirt roads and it still felt like a small town. Obviously the Hilton Royal Hawaiian was there, there were some hotels along the strip, but if you got down the road a little ways it was so Hawaii and so chill. At that point there was no hostility to outsiders because outsiders were contained.
John’s family would go to Maui, which was the hidden gem because no-one had ruined it yet. The streets were dirt for most of the island and it had little towns carved out of the wild. It was paradisiacal. Now it is a constant traffic jam, but it is still incredible. Merlin went to Kauai, and everybody there feel encroached upon, even the Haoles that have been there 15 years feel like they are the OG Haoles and they don’t want any new Haoles. But is there a person anywhere in the world who isn’t mad about new people coming in?
New Zealand encouraging people to move there (RL206)
The other day John read an article about New Zealand saying that many towns were really encouraging people to move there, old sheep farming towns. There are towns in Nebraska and Kansas where all the young people have moved away and John is not sure if the people of those towns are encouraging people to move there as much as they are just surrendering, taking deep breaths of their oxygen machines, hoping that the lord comes soon. In New Zealand they are incentivizing people to move to these small towns. The pictures of these places seem idyllic, but anybody who has read a real estate magazine knows that you can take a pretty good picture of a place.
Maybe that is the future and we should move to New Zealand. Merlin has been there and it took him maybe 48 hours to seriously contemplate moving there. He took all 43 folders there and he was there for the really cool conference Webstock 2011 where they wanted him to talk about their Inboxes and he cried on stage and lots of people liked it (see recording here).
Until you have been somewhere 2-3 times it is hard to make a sane reckoning of what is happening there, but the vibe there is crazy. People there are unannoyingly and unironically friendly and kind. They are neighborly in some ways, but not in your face. Every cup of coffee, every McDonalds, anything he had there was just about the best of that that he ever had. It takes them fucking 20 minutes to make a cup of coffee in New Zealand, which is where he got into Espresso. It is a lot like Canada with nice people and a lot of civic pride that is not annoying.
Patriotism, civic pride, stopping the conversation at racism or gun rights (RL206)
America has ruined civic pride for a lot of countries, they have even ruined civic pride for America. John is still trying to have civic pride and national pride. Watching Whitney Houston sing the Star-Spangled Banner at the Superbowl (1991) still gives a bit of a goose. ”Yeah, America!”, John said that yesterday. It is the great experiment and they are still trying. USA! Then somebody fucking throws a can of Skoal at him. What he was just saying has nothing to do with guns, for the love of Christ!
Merlin feels so inoculated with Twitter in particular. The whole men’s rights, white power, anti-immigrants cluster is probably still the fringe, but not as much as it used to be. It is everywhere and it is awful. Millions of people share that kind of ideology so much so that John is intrigued that the progressive thought leaders are now increasingly trying to write think pieces in Atlantic Magazine style long-form articles saying: ”Wait a minute! 100 million Americans share a cosmology in which these ideas are a foundational underpinning of a world view!” it is not just something that is tolerated, but it helps people bond together who formerly had seemingly nothing in common in what we thought of as civil discourse.
In a lot of these cases, what we see as the overt deal-killing racism implied in a lot of what gets said they see as eyerollingly unimportant small-R racism that you should just get over. What they are seeing in some of those philosophies is something else and the Liberal side stops at the racism wall and is not interested in whatever is on the other side because the racism inherent in it blocks them from going further into this idea, and the 100 million people who are able to get through that wall and live on the other side of it go: ”Yeah, yeah, yeah, racism, racism!”
There are so many different languages, like the gun rights stuff. From the Left we have just arrived at a place where if you speak positively about guns we stop at that fence because on the other side of that fence we hear rationalization and justification for machine gun killings of kids in schools, but the 100 million people on the other side of that fence go: ”Yeah, yeah, yeah, guns symbolize and represent this other stuff!” and there is eye-rolling about the things that matter to either side of it and we cast one another in the most exaggerated possible role as an antagonist.
The premises of the world views of Liberals and Trump supporters (RL206)
Many of John’s High School friends being Trump supporters
John is on Facebook, unfortunately, he doesn’t know why, and it gives him as much pause as Twitter does. He doesn’t curate either thing very well and he gets tons of evil all the time from both places, and mostly the Facebook evil is in the form of really long essays about people’s current medical treatments, which is not really evil. Looking at people’s pictures of dogs on Instagram is maybe the most evil, but you can’t say that and now John is going to get 50 tweets from people and their dogs.
John knows a lot of people from High School who support Donald Trump and he goes over onto their threads to lurk, he is not trying to argue with anybody and he is not even commenting. If he does comment it will only be a LOL. There are 3 LOLs: The ”Lol.” is the grammatically correct one, there is ”LOL” and then there is ”lol” All three of them can be deployed in different ways and John routinely carries on a conversation with something else where they are screeding at him and he will reply with all three of those LOLs throughout the conversation, which is fucking amazing. Some people still haven’t gotten on board the LOL train and the ROFL train. ROFL was so great for so long, it sounded like the Hamburgler.
John is lurking on Facebook threads of High School friends and there is a lot of humor in this group of guys and gals who support Donald Trump, it is split much more cultural than by gender and a lot of women are massive Trump fans. There is a ton of humor and light-heartedness about the way they talk, but in a style of humor that on the other side of the cultural fence is characterized as punching down, it is humor at the expense of other people and then they go: ”Why can’t you take a joke?” They feel under assault because now there are blacks everywhere and lying, dishonest Hillary, and also there are only a billion Christians in the world, so of course they are a minority.
All of those people would probably identify as Christian, but they are not Bible thumpers, they are beer-drinking hell racers, Alaskans with big trucks who like to shoot guns and: ”Fuck the world!” and they think of themselves as fun and they can take a joke. Merlin and John were raised in a culture where the: ”Why can’t you take a joke?” style of bullying was the norm and somehow through the course of their lives they have arrived at a places where that is a pretty bad way of socializing people.
John’s ex-girlfriends not being online because most of them were luddites
The only people who follow John online who avidly disagree with him are High School friends or trolls. None of his ex girlfriends are on social media. For many years every woman he dated was a luddite, he doesn’t know why, but the thing that attracted him from across the room was something on the order of: ”Does that girl have leaves in her hair? She does!” and he would go over and go: ”Nice leaves!” - ”Fuck you!” - ”Should we take this to a third location? Because I am intrigued by you!”
There are some ex-girlfriends in his past that he would just like to talk to, like: ”Hey, it has been 15 years! Just checking in!”, but the only way he has of knowing anything about their continuing existence is that some friend of a friend of hers is on Facebook and every once in a while something would float by and he would see a picture of the back of her hair.
The right not seeing the problems of their actions
In that world there is a tremendous feeling of togetherness and light-heartedness and a feeling like they are the only people left in the world who even have a reasonable outlook on life and over here on the Liberal side of the fence they are all a bunch of thumb-suckers and concern-trolls. What are we so bent out of shape about? We are the ones who get to redefine the idea of gender not being binary, we are the ones who are fucking everything up, we are the ones imposing an agenda, and that informs their narrative.
The things on their agenda are either status quo things that they would like to maintain, or things they perceive to have been traditional things which have been encroached upon and they would like to regain that turf. They think about themselves of just holding the line of what Normal is and they see us on the other side having a radical and encroaching agenda.
Hearing the litany of descriptions of people who represent now millions of people John has to resist his own knee-jerk reaction to say: ”They are all idiots!” and try to get inside that culture a little bit to see what it is like from in there. All the people at the Trump rallies that we look at and go: ”Oh my God, they are the worst!”, the only thing missing is a baseball hat with two beer cans in it and fucking straws coming down, but from within that Trump rally they think of themselves as having a blast, and Trump is having a blast. It is a monster truck show and from the outside we look like a bunch of joyless grave people.
Merlin just listened to 3 episodes of a podcast about how horrible life would be if Donald Trump became president, called The Trumpcast, it is very good and very opinionated and very well done. Those people see how scared we are, how terrified and powerless so many people feel.
Calling to a meeting where they are not looking for cis-males
Earlier today John was on a conference call with a city agency, a group of 20 people with 18 sitting around a conference table while John was laying in bed, talking to them with his podcast setup. At one point someone spoke up and said that they were looking for people to participate in an event that is targeted at young women of color and she said as an aside to the people in the room: ”Anyone here who wants to get involved in this, please talk to me after the meeting, and sorry, we are not really looking for any cis-males!” Within the context of this conversation in was self-evident that she was looking for people that these young women can identify with, it is why this event is happening because young women of color are not represented.
From within a Donald Trump rally, from the men’s rights organization or the Gamer Gaters, what is the problem? You are excluding the people who are never allowed to be excluded, and you are using a term that they find unnecessary and potentially offensive. The argument would coalesce in: ”What would happen if I said that we were having a meeting and no women of color are allowed?” - ”You mean every meeting that has ever happened for the last 250 years?” There is a libertarian logic to that: No regulation of any kind is the purest form of life and as soon as you start instituting roles you are already on the way to totalitarianism, especially if those rules affect me! If there were no rules about who could go to meetings then it would just be back to neighborhood stick fights (see RL164).
Where is my parade?
Affirmative action as a notion was the moment at which some number of carriages on the train of progress just got unhooked because it was a leap of logic, a leap of faith, or an understanding that redress is even possible and that redress would be beneficial to all. The benefits of equal rights for all are not a machine to newly privilege another group over you, they are not taking anything away from you, but it is an attempt to continue to perfect the notion of the American experiment, a continuation of progress that we have made throughout time that benefits everyone.
We have watched wealth disseminate, and we are so consumed with how wealth is concentrated right now, and it is unfairly grossly concentrated in the 1%, but even 60 years ago people were still routinely starving to death around the world in numbers that would astonish you even now to look at. As a human race through technology and democracy we have turned the Earth truly into a garden of plenty and life-expectancy has doubled and education has doubled, people are so much more educated and cared for, just think about medical care for old and young people.
You can make a case with a combination of science and philosophy that has been improving our material life, our political agency, and our belonging, a case of affirmative action and social justice which in the context of reparations naturally offends people who aren’t making a philosophical leap because they say: ”My grandfather had it hard! Nobody ever gave me free money! Where is my parade!”, the logic where you are only seeing reparations in terms of a cash-out or an unfair advantage, rather than seeing it as a part of this grand experiment: What are our theories about political science where we can raise the bar for everybody.
Now we are at a place where this has been so poorly explained that we have lost half the country. John does put the blame on the intelligencia, the academy, for having done such a poor job of articulating what the project is. Within academia they also perceived themselves to be a threatened minority. The college life and the ivory tower folks saw themselves as revolutionaries, too, at war against a majority of dummies, and they used the same inflammatory language of resistance and war, that we were under siege and in a lot of ways we were going to impose these theories because if people didn’t like it they could suck it.
The failure of the Liberals to make their case properly
The crucial step of trying to get people to rally an to get people to understand and to get onboard, the academy stopped even pretending. Now we have utterly failed to get everybody to understand what we are trying to accomplish. Every single group of people feels like they are the minority and they all feel like they have to defend themselves. Not many people today would describe themselves as stupid, and there are not that many Americans who would describe themselves as being uncommonly fortunate and privileged. Everybody got their reasons for why they think the way they think and do the way they do. There is a failure of imagination on the Liberal side and a failure of empathy to understand why people are saying what they are saying in the way that they are saying it.
There was an article in The New Yorker by a guy (George Saunders) who was going to go to a Trump rally to see if he could make any friends and he did! People would say: ”We have to build a wall!” - ”What about this one situation where this gal was born in Mexico but brought to America when she was 3 months old and got a parking ticket and now she is being deported?” - ”Is she a good person? There should certainly be exceptions” Merlin doesn’t think in a year people are going to give a fuck for Donald Trump. They are there because he represents a deep anger and discontentment with what is happening in America.
Merlin was reading an article by Dave Eggers in The Guardian where he goes to a Donald Trump rally:
”See that?” the man in front of me said. He was pointing to a jet’s white trail in the sky above us. “That’s the air force. They’re spraying shit in the sky.” I’ll call this man Jim.
Merlin is mad about Donald Trump, too and thinks he is a dangerous man, but just yelling across the aisle is not going to make this better and the further we will dig ourselves into a completely untenable situation.
People apologizing for their privilege, mainstream feeling under siege, not taking the leadership
Right now whenever someone speaks about privilege there is an aspect of recrimination and apology in it. No-one talks about their own privilege with any pride, certainly not on our side of the fence, but when you talk about white privilege you have this thing and you are sorry for it and you are trying to amend for it, which has become a term of art for a form of shame at your privilege. The issue in our culture at large is that no-one is acknowledging that they are in charge. Everyone is a victim, which is true for the Liberals as much or more than for anyone else.
There is no intellectual or cultural tradition that doesn’t describe itself as under siege, including all of the rich preppy guys at the Yale Club in New York City who are circling around their Gin and Tonics and saying: ”They are coming at us from all sides! We are the last of a dying breed!” No-one in America will acknowledge that they are the establishment, and that means that no-one is in charge and no-one has to take responsibility. Right now effectively the Liberals are the establishment. Their candidate is going to win the presidency (Hillary Clinton did not win the election 5 months later) and their candidate has been the president for the last 8 years and liberal ideas are ascendent and have been for a long time.
We feel under assault because there are 150 million people on the other side of the aisle who are throwing spit wads at us and who want guns to be unregulated and abortion to be illegal, but really they benefit from Liberal ideas, too! The degree to which they acknowledge that or don’t is just a failure of language, a failure of comprehension, but at some point the people with privilege, who for all intents and purposes is every American listening to this podcast regardless of race or gender, you have electricity and a computer and you are smart enough to be listening to this Phoney Award winning podcast, you are the intellectual 10%.
To accept that mantel and to say: ”I am part of the leadership and I have a responsibility not to think of myself constantly as a victim under siege, but I have the responsibility to be the adult in the room!” and to say: ”Here are our ideas and why they make sense! Here is the larger world we are trying to construct!”, a world where fairness does predominate, where a rising tide does life all boats, and it is some version of socialistic, capitalistic, democratic, secular, whatever this cloud of ideas that we all bathe in and pick-and-choose grapes from, to create a world view that we can proudly hold up and say: ”I do have privilege, the privilege of being a person in this culture who is responsible for this world that we are trying to make!”
That shouldering of the burden and refusal to think of yourself as someone who is constantly an oppostor (?) of defense is also an intellectual and spiritual leap. You don’t say the word privilege with a tone of apology, but you say: ”I am privileged to be able to say the following things! I am privileged to be able to come to you today and describe the world I imagine and the world we collectively are trying to imagine!”
Over time the way to have this experiment not devolve into what we are all afraid it is doing right now, the two-nations-scenario where in order to get from Seattle to Minneapolis you have to fly over hostile territory or have a passport to go across Red State Land, and Minneapolis and Chicago are up there in this weird Lake Town Country that goes up to Ontario. In order to not have that happen we are the ones who have to do it and make a better case that isn’t from our own state of victimization, but a case that is encompassing: ”Listen guys, we are not trying to be humorless drudges here, we are not trying to force you to all be gay, that would suck, we don’t want you to be gay, we just want the gay ones of you to be happy!”
John being criticized for retweeting the ShoutYourAbortion movement
One of John’s ex is the gal that is spearheading the ShoutYourAbortion movement (Lindy West) and John retweeted one of her tweets and he got a reply on Facebook from a guy whom he went to Gonzaga with, a Catholic college. It is a big, burly Irish-Catholic guy, taller than John, and bigger than John, and he has 8 little darling kids, he is a wonderful, hilarious guy who comments on John’s Facebook page all the time, he is a Liberal guy, but he is anti-abortion because every life is sacred, which is the initial premise of an encompassing world-view that comes from the fact that there is a soul.
From their perspective, just as we look back at our founding fathers and wonder how they could possibly have had slaves and simultaneously been writing those beautiful documents that are almost from a different time with different values, a large proportion of the philosophical Catholics imagine a future day where people will look back and wonder how their forefathers could have sat idly by during this genocide of souls. This guy is just one of thousands of people that John knows on that side of the fence, and some of them are really philosophical, but it begins at this initial premise.
He wrote: ”Can I please ask you to take this post down in respect of the millions of souls…”, with some inflammatory adjectives. He is in John’s orbit and John got into his sandbox, and he is a supporter of Obama and Hillary, but this is his little core issue at the center of his vision of the world. John didn’t write him back on fucking scented paper like he should have, but all he did was comment on his comment and said: ”In all honesty, we have a different foundational idea of the value of human life and I do not share your view that every life is sacred!”
If you say there is a small amount of sacredness to a life and it is not equivalent to the right to… there is a spectrum of sacredness… Make your own choice!… There is not, really. It is equivalent to: ”Why if we kill someone when they are 1 month old in the womb is it murder and when they are 8 months old in the womb it is not murder?” We have within our laws and our minds made some pretty arbitrary decisions, there is a spectrum, a lot of it is legal, a lot of it is moral… depending on your point of view, every decision that anyone has ever made is arbitrary because in a natural state we are just prey for tigers and we are very far down the river from that.
Different world views having different premises
Our decisions are predicated on prior decisions and the idea of sacredness is predicated on monotheism, that there is a God whose will is knowable and it is our responsibility as the stewards of that truth to make sure that that is enacted in every conceivable way on Earth.
John replied and said that they are foundationally never going to come to an accord on this because he doesn’t share his view that every human life is sacred. The problem is that people who have a belief that human life is sacred think that all laws and morals that we live according to precede from that initial premise. Why be good to each other? Why do we not kill and rape and thieve? Because human life is sacred!
The harder case falls to the Liberal in that situation, to say: ”I do not have a foundational belief that every life is sacred and yet I believe in morality and law.” Those things stem from an initial case that we have yet to describe. If you take away the idea that life is sacred and that there is a monotheistic God, then why be good to each other?
The founding fathers kicking the can down the road by calling it ”self-evident rights of man”
The Liberal case is making this argument from the a-priori self-evident Rights of Man, the philosophy of history that precedes from (René) Descartes, (John) Locke, (Thomas) Jefferson, and Augustine (of Hippo), and it has happened simultaneously with the theistic approach, that you cannot divorce these ideas from the source: a loving God. You can’t pick and choose, which is what gives the law authority. It represents something that is real, not something you just dreamt and that you believe maybe today and not a year from now when you have read a different book.
When Jefferson and Ben Franklin collaborated in the Declaration of Independence and came up with the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, they were kicking the ball down the field because how do you hold these truths to be self-evident? They were playing off of the intellectual tradition as they saw it, of their immediate forebears, of John Locke and so forth, this deist rights of man, but deism was a leap that maintained the existence of a God.
Here we are, almost 250 years later (John still has the bicentennial quarters) and we are still kicking the ball down the field from the Liberal side and we continue to do a poor job. Merlin talked about this yesterday with his daughter. They are really into Hamilton in their house and there are so many great lines they were talking about and she asked him again which one of those had slaves, which was Jefferson, and although Merlin is often on Jefferson’s side on a lot of issues, but he totally had slaves and he had sex with his slaves. They all had, except Hamilton because he was poor. Merlin adds a few lines from Angelica Schuyler’s song and is really happy that he managed to work in some Hamilton through the side door.
Black Lives Matter
John wants those of us who share this Liberal world to do more self-examination. There is so much Merlin is not going to fucking talk about on this podcast, but think about this one: He is very simpatico with the ones that say: ”Can we stop killing the black people?”, which is a bold stance. The leap from ”Let’s stop killing the black people!” to ”Guns are to blame for this!” is not even a leap for most of Merlin’s friends and Merlin likes to see fewer of the guns, too, but making that leap you are strangely close to saying to a lot of people in America that they are responsible for black people being killed.
The harder thing to get your head around is that even if you take the guns out of the equation and you say that the white cops in the South do not see blacks as full humans, the Left takes on a very lecturing tone, they have the culture where they take in this American stuff, we say very briefly something about our own privilege to indicate that we are on the good side, like ”As a white ally” that mitigates our experience just enough that we absolve ourselves of complicity, and then we immediately adopt a hectoring and lecturing tone toward everyone else that we presume are less enlightened.
In the meantime they are largely living in white enclaves, largely benefitting from systems that are more or less systematized segregation, and there isn’t enough real reckon. It doesn’t have to take the form of prostration, it doesn’t really involve even being apologetic, fake or otherwise, but it is a real acknowledgement of power without shame. Shame does not accomplish anything, except to making it all about you. The people who resist the Black Lives Matter narrative, it is not just that they feel they are taking their guns, that is way down the line, but they are afraid that we are saying that the cops are…
To a lot of people the statement Black Lives Matter means to the exclusion of other people, and the fact that black lives matter is going to translate into more entitlements for them that are not afforded to me and I am also poor, and where is my parade? How do we get out of this reflexive state of Liberal apology where every statement is preceded with a caveat that you acknowledge that your voice isn’t the voice that is needed here, or whatever, into a place where we are actively trying to make a case and we are actively trying to be articulate about it, it begins with us acknowledging what our case is.
John thinking his whole life about the word choice of the founding fathers
John has spent his entire life trying to figure out what those words ”behold these truths to be self-evident” mean. He has turned those words over in his head. The founders were really at odds with one another about this and John’s understanding of it is that Jefferson’s first draft used a lot more quasi-religious language and it was Ben Franklin who made the suggestion of the term ”self-evident” because Jefferson was maybe more of a deist and initially said ”behold these truths to be sacred” and Franklin was the one who said that this implies too much God, let’s change it.
That collaboration between the scientific New Englander Franklin vs the scientific Southern philosopher Jefferson, the push and pull between those two intellects, it is such a kick-the-can-down-the-road moment. If he had said ”sacred” we would be a different country and we would be arguing it from a different place because people who share John’s world view would be at a disadvantage right now because if it isn’t sacred then what is it, and the whole edifice starts to crumble, and Franklin planted this pole there with ”self-evident”, ”undefined” and it has given us 250 years to debate, and here we are still.
Outro
Merlin ends the show saying that all feedback goes to moc.elpmaxe|enilehtnokciredor#moc.elpmaxe|enilehtnokciredor. Get out there and vote!