“Toughness” Obsession Finally Gets Too Dumb
One of the dumber developments on the Right in recent years [and cousin, when it comes to dumb developments on the Right in recent years, business is a-boomin’] has been this obsession with “toughness.” Every political defeat suffered by Republicans in the last decade can, apparently, be chalked up to insufficient “toughness.” Why did Mitt Romney lose to Barack Obama? Because he wasn’t tough. Why couldn’t Senate Republicans in 2014 repeal Obamacare? No toughness. Why didn’t Mike Pence single-handedly overturn the 2020 election? He lacked the toughness! There is no political failure that cannot be overcome by doubling down on stiff-necked, obstinate “toughness,” y’see. It has nothing to do with political limitations such as lacking support among the broader electorate, or having insufficient votes to override a presidential veto threat, or, y’know, the law.
Donald Trump got elected almost entirely on the idea that he was “tough,” which, even all these years later, is still an incredibly strange thing to say [if you ask me] about a rich-kid city-boy who never did anything outside of an office and has a fondness for Broadway showtunes. He seems like the type of guy that has soft, moist hands; and that if he so much got slapped in the face during a fight he would fail to hold back tears. But I digress. Even his supposed toughness, however, proved insufficient; he was unable to accomplish most of his campaign promises — building a wall on the Mexican border, repealing the Affordable Care Act, “draining the swamp” [whatever that means practically], etc.
Back during the 2016 primary, when Donald Trump’s tough guy schtick was still new and novel, conservative radio host Glenn Beck reminded people that Trump’s philosophy of “punch back twice as hard” actually was in direct contradiction of the most basic Christian doctrine. Fellow radio host Sean Hannity, who at the time had apparently just started taking karate classes down at the YMCA or something, responded by saying that his martial arts teacher did teach him to hit back twice as hard:
I used to think Sean Hannity’s “my karate teacher knows better than Jesus” bullshit was the dumbest manifestation of this toughness obsession, but good news: there’s a new leader in the clubhouse!
South Dakota governor [and rumored possible Trump vice-presidential pick] Kristi Noem wrote in a soon-to-be-released memoir about, well, killing her dog. Per the Guardian:
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.
What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed — and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season. […]
She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.
By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”
Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”
Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin.”
When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.
Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.” […]
Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean,” because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.
Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit,” the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”
The response, which you would’ve expected if you’re not a psychopath, he mostly been a massive and collective “What the actual [expletive]?” It seemed to catch Noem off-guard, if her attempted cleanup is any indication. First, she tried to write it off as merely offending effete liberal sensibilities:
The liberal media thinks we shouldn’t kill dogs with shotguns instead of training them, y’see, they don’t understand real Americans who know when it’s time to kill their dogs! But once it became clear that the backlash was both widespread and bipartisan, she attempted this explanation:
It was 20 years ago! And it was technically legal in my state! Why are you people so upset that I killed a dog for basically no reason during the Bush administration?
As it happens, I know a little bit about dealing with aggressive dogs. Our previous dog sounds similar to Cricket — aggressive toward other animals, not above biting people. There were several times when I certainly thought I wanted to shoot him. I don’t really like talking about it, but toward the end of his life he had one of his “episodes” and bit my older daughter. In that moment, I could have strangled him to death with my bare hands and felt nothing while doing it, and I would have been within my legal right to do so, I suppose. But I didn’t, because [to the best of my knowledge] I am not a psychopath. I think there’s something to be said for showing restraint and compassion toward dogs, even [perhaps especially] the ones with behavioral issues. Sue me. My wife and I spent a lot of time, money, and effort training that dog; I understand it’s not for everyone. But if it wasn’t for Noem, there were assumedly plenty of other people who would have been willing to do so well before “the gravel pit” became a viable choice.
I’m honestly glad that the backlash to this has been so thorough and bipartisan, because in a way it shows that there still are issues that enjoy bipartisan agreement and aren’t simply exercises in negative partisanship. I still think it’s probably literally true that Donald Trump could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his supporters would excuse it, but it’s good to know that such considerations apparently don’t extend to some generic Republican governor.
I think it also shows a cynical miscalculation on Noem’s part. I often point out that Donald Trump seems to have a quite low opinion of his own voters, but it takes a particularly low opinion of voters to think “I bet this story about me killing a dog will ingratiate me to these rednecks, especially if the media gets outraged by it!” I’m sure there is some number of voters out there willing to take Noem’s side, but not enough to overcome the vast majority who are repulsed by it. Which is probably a microcosm of the electoral challenges of the current iteration of the Republican party: There aren’t enough rural voters to make up for turning off wide swaths of suburbanites.
The Silence of Our Friends
I have a general rule against debating strangers on the internet. It’s a fairly recent rule I’ve instituted for myself — there was a time when I would spend an inordinate amount of time and energy arguing with strangers about this-or-that issue, until one day I simply realized: I don’t enjoy this. I don’t like being the sort of person who argues with strangers on the internet, I don’t like the way it makes me feel, and — perhaps the most important realization — who gives a shit that someone on the internet has a dumb opinion? People on the internet tend to become caricatures, and there is no utility to arguing with cartoon characters. I only care about the opinions of two types of people: Those with large audiences and influence, and those I know personally and whose philosophy falls within a fairly narrow window where I think a debate might be productive. Which is to say, if you think, e.g., the earth is flat, or that the proletariat should seize the means of production, or that Donald Trump is a divinely-ordained figure in our politics, well, vaya con Dios, we have nothing to say to each other. But if I’m comfortable debating politics with you, I mean it as sort of a compliment on my end: It means I think your ideas make for an interesting discussion, that you’ve put some thought into them, and/or that I think you’re reasonable enough to know better. [If I don’t argue with you in public on the internet, that’s not a sign I think any of those things are untrue, it just means I don’t want to be the reason any trolls crawl out from under their proverbial bridges.]
On Friday, however, I kinda fell off the wagon. A friend of mine shared a post from Linda Sarsour, who you might remember resigned from her leadership position in the Women’s March for “being too slow to show […] commitment to fighting anti-Semitism,” which is a polite way of saying that she was so comfortable with anti-Semitism that she didn’t even recognize [or it didn’t bother her] that she was facilitating it. She has also, like many of her fellow travelers, said things like Zionists cannot be feminists, likened Zionism to white supremacy, and engaged in basically every stereotypical form of leftist anti-Semitism. Anyway, she was quoting a viral tweet from a former Bernie Sanders staffer and Democrat political operative who said “A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue.” Now, that is just manifestly false. I mean, I can think of at least a handful of a student protests in which the students were completely and utterly [and sometimes dangerously] wrong:
I wrote the other day that college protestors have had “Selma Envy” since the 1960s, but I think a corollary to that is the fact that contemporary protestors also have something like “Selma Rationalization Disorder.” They seem to think that because the college protestors of the 1960s had an inarguably just cause, that they — by some imagined transitive property of also being college protestors — have the same moral legitimacy. And it’s nonsense. It just stuck in my craw, so I left a comment under my friend’s post saying as much — it’s manifestly untrue that every student protest has been inarguably correct, and moreover, this particular student protest movement is [unintentionally or otherwise] supporting terrorism. And as soon as I left the comment, I felt immediate regret and thought of that Louis CK bit about unthinkingly arguing with his three year old about whether fig newtons are actually called “pig newtons” — “What’re you doing? Why? What is to be gained?”
I had casually flicked a hornet’s nest because I was annoyed, and now I was going to have to deal with it. It wasn’t exactly Enter the Dragon, but I was pretty obviously outnumbered. It started out fine enough — the usual “how dare you oversimplify such a complicated issue and smear an entire movement protesting genocide based on one picture from Fox News, that’s just bad faith.” And that’s at least part of why I don’t debate strangers on the internet — I do many things, but two things I don’t do are watch Fox News and argue in bad faith. I pointed out that there are multiple examples from multiple campuses of students doing things like carrying Hezbollah flags, carrying signs saying things like “Globalize the Intifada,” saying things like Jews living in Israel should go back to where they emigrated from, and chanting things like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” and “There is only one solution, Intifada Revolution.” [And just to close the loop on the “genocide” claim, there is no plausible definition of “genocide” that describes Israel’s military actions in Gaza. That’s rhetorical base-stealing.]
Now, for those who may be unaware, Hezbollah is to Lebanon what Hamas is to Gaza: an Iranian-funded paramilitary terrorist organization with a long history of killing Israeli civilians. Moreover, the Intifada was a terrorism campaign against Israel, most notably in the early 2000s. With this in mind, what could “globalize the intifada” or “Intifada Revolution” plausibly mean other than “attack Jews worldwide”? That sort of gives away the game, doesn’t it? If the object of opposition is the state of Israel, what would be the point in globalizing such an effort? [Unless…] Similarly, what could “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” possibly mean, other than the dissolution of the state of Israel, i.e., the sole Jewish state? And this isn’t some fringe, minority opinion within the movement, either — at least not judging by the video coming out of places like Harvard University. We can agree that places like Harvard and Columbia are prestige universities in America, yes? And we can agree that it seems like a majority of these crowds are engaging in these chants, yes? Since Friday, a group of students at Columbia occupied one of the main halls on campus and hung banners from windows — one simply saying “INTIFADA” and another saying “Glory to the Martyrs.” So…y’know, “it’s complicated,” or whatever. And I’m even willing to grant that some/many of these students are merely getting caught up in the youthful exuberance of populist protest, but the fact remains that they are saying the sorts of things that people who support terrorism would say.
Which, not for nothin’, the Ayatollah of Iran — quite possibly the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — is a huge fan of these kids:
Anyway, after making what I thought was a cogent defense of my position, some schmuck burst into the comments like the Kool Aid Man, accusing me of supporting war crimes, at which point my friend simply deleted the post than let the discourse devolve further. Which is just as well, but I still found the entire exchange depressing; not least of which because I get the sense that if a bunch of students in, say, Alabama, were waving the Stars and Bars and chanting things about “States Rights” and “the South gon’ Rise Again,” I don’t imagine these same people would be falling all over themselves to point out the nuance of this complicated issue.
The Israeli-Palestinian issue in general is complicated, fine — though not as complicated as some people make it, I don’t think. What is not complicated, however, is the fact that the attack by Hamas on Israel last October was a defining event in the issue’s history; one that highlighted the impossibility of peace and coexistence between the Israelis and the Palestinians for as long as Hamas was the governing entity in Gaza. And therefore, supporting anything less than Hamas’s eradication is, I’m sorry, advocating that Hamas get a mulligan for the largest [and most wanton] massacre of Jews this side of the Holocaust simply because they’re willing to use human shields. And we have popular movements popping up on campuses all over the country clamoring for just that sort of mulligan, and people who should know better making excuses for it.
In the summer of 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, a black friend of mine [who is also one of the strongest people I know, incidentally] was uncharacteristically poignant in a message to me. He said his “soul hurt” seeing the state of race relations in the country, that he felt the value of his life and the lives of those like him was actually decreasing in the eyes of many, and that it was necessary for people like me — which is to say, people he trusted and whose opinion he valued — to be more vocal on the matter because such voices were hard to come by at the time. It reminded me of that quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about how “in the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
I hate to keep coming back to this well, but it’s been weighing on me. Circa 2020, we were told it wasn’t enough to be non-racist, we must also be anti-racist. And if we were unable to recognize our [even unconscious] contributions to systemic racism, we were obligated to “do the work” for the betterment of ourselves and society. It seems that sentiment doesn’t apply to anti-Semitism. No one is asking these protestors to “do the work” to recognize how they might be unintentionally anti-Semitic [while many of them are being intentionally anti-Semitic]. Worse, they’re excusing this egregious behavior under the guise of things like “anti-colonialism” or intersectionality. NBC News last night showed a brief interview with a Jewish student at Columbia, who said “a lot of people like that, I went to classes with, dinners with, that are chanting for the erasure of the Jewish state and the death of my family, so I do feel a little heartbroken by this.” And how could he not? At this point, the mere silence of some of “our friends” would be an improvement. In fact, their excuse-making makes me question their status as “our friends.”
What worries me about the tweet from the former Bernie staffer is the moral certainty with which he provides it. It reminds me of a quote from C.S. Lewis which ends with “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” He is apparently so convinced of his cause’s righteousness that he will hear no dissent regarding its excesses, even if such excesses would not be tolerated in any other context.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: 80s Movies
Clue: In this 1987 film, Sean Connery says, “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. That’s the Chicago way.”
The Untouchables
Today’s clue:
Category: Dogs
Clue: Though this dog is called “Rhodesian,” it actually hails from South Africa.
Dispatches from the Homefront
The other night, our older daughter called my wife into her room and was clearly concerned about something.
“So…y’know those things you have that go in your ears?” she asked, meaning my wife’s Air Pods.
“…yes?”
“…welllll, I took them without asking, and I put them under my pillow, and now I can’t find them, and I’m sorry.”
So my wife just lifts up the pillow, and the Air Pods were still there, just not where our daughter was reaching. My wife picks them up and starts to leave, when my daughter says “Wait, I still want them!” To which my wife replies “No, they’re not for you.”
“Do you know how it makes me feel when you say I can’t have things?” our daughter asks — apparently they’ve been working on talking about feelings at school. “It makes me feel sad.”
“Well do you know how it makes me feel when you take my things without asking?”
“…also sad…” our daughter sighed, knowing she’d been check-mated.