The Ricochet Podcast - Comrades In Arms

Episode Date: September 12, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file This week, Mollie Hemingway sits in for Peter, and of course we cover Syria, the Russians, and the President. Then, we’re joined by authors Tevi Troy and Rod Dreher. Tevi discusses his new book What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House. Later Rod Dreher discusses his piece Story Lines, Not Party Lines and the dearth... Source

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This is nonsense. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Molly Hemingway sitting in for Peter Robinson. I'm James Lalix and our guests today are Teffy Troy and Rod Dreher talking about taking back and reshaping the cultural narrative. Also, 9-11, Syria and Putin.

I for one welcome our new Russian overlords, a podcast that led us to be having. There you go again. Welcome, comrades. It's the Ricochet Podcast, where all cues taken from Mother Russia, the way things should be. We listen to Russia, we love Russia, we do what Russia says. And here with us today from glorious America is Molly Hemingway, sitting in for Peter Robinson, and Rob Long out in California. Hey, guys, welcome to the podcast.

So you just bailed on the accent right there? Well, at some point, yeah, it becomes embarrassing. At some point, one of you starts speaking to me in Russian and it's revealed I don't know what I'm doing. So here we are and there's a new day of donning and the first thing we have to talk about, besides welcoming Molly, of course, we're so glad you're here holding. Hello, Molly. Hello. I'm practicing my golly gee willikers so I can be like Peter.

Just like Peter. Just like Peter. Just throwing a couple of jeepers from time to time. You have to be scandalized by literally everything that's happening in America today. Peter's ability to do the genuine jeepers is one of those things that you can't fake. The other problem, however, is that just on the cusp of the release of brand new iPhones, and here, of course, we've just lost 37% of the audience, which regards any sort of talk about these things and the wars

of platforms that attends them as the greatest waste of human intellectual endeavor ever. They're not wrong, by the way. But bear with us here, because this has happened to me. Just before the latest, newest, greatest, most spangly thing ever is introduced, like two weeks before, you destroy the phone that you have,

leaving you with a choice. Do you remain voiceless and out of touch and wait, or do you buy something right before the newest and greatest comes out? Rob broke his phone seconds ago. Rob, what are you going to do? I don't know. I don't know. Normally, I don't care about breaking them because they're always a little bit broke and I smash them all the time. But this one is smashed sort of beyond repair.

It's just – it doesn't really work. And the problem is because you had on that phone audible.com stuff, which you wanted to go to. And we've got to tell you that Audible, incidentally, is the proud sponsor of this podcast. And you can go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet to get your free 30-day trial and free audiobook we'll tell you a little bit more about them and that's the hint of course for rob and molly to come up with audiobooks at the bottom of the hour but right now back to the story of how rob destroyed his phone how did you do it and you know james before we go any further we need to say welcome back to all of our listeners who didn't join ricochet when we moved the podcast behind the paywall.

The podcast is now free again, which means there are thousands of you who don't have skin in the game, meaning you're not a member of Ricochet.com. Now, let me tell you what this means. What this means is that other people who are members are kind of supporting the organization, and we would like to ask you to do that too. Ricochet.com is the fastest-gr growing, most interesting, witty, civil conversation on the web. And what we're trying to do is knit the center right together in a civil conversation that happens daily. You can join the conversation. You can start conversations. You can simply read what your fellow members are saying. You can interact with our contributors and members. You can become part of a fast growing network of-right thinkers and movers and doers and readers and talkers.

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I just – I was pulling a mug out of the little cupboard there to get my coffee for our podcast. I already don't – I don't believe this story already. I was ordering my manservant. I was shouting at the house boys. No, I did, and I dropped a little – a tiny little espresso cup on – just square on the – flat square on the thing. And it hit it and it smashed it and it – ordinarily these things, they smash and then it just cracks the glass and no big deal, right? This cracks the glass and it's all wavy and it looks like a tequila sunrise. You know what I mean? The whole thing was a tequila sunrise.

Now, Molly, do you have one of those indestructible Motorola Star Tracks or an Okie or something that can survive being put in a fridge in an Indiana Jones movie and nuked? I just want to say I'm one of those people who couldn't care about phone conversations and I do have an iPhone, but I don't even know what, you know, if you said, what kind of iPhone do you have? I wouldn't know the answer. Oh my God. Oh, you're my wife. I see. I've got it. Good. I understand. It was reminding me that I would have never gotten a cell phone if it weren't for September 11th and we're taping this on September 11th. And I, um, I was here in DC on that date and I couldn't get ahold of anybody and nobody could get ahold of me. And that Saturday I went and got a cell phone and it just, um, and it, and I've thankfully never had

to use it for the reason why I thought that I had to get a cell phone, but it's an unimaginable thing now, isn't it? If something happens and you can't instantaneously reach out to the people that you believe might be peripherally affected. See, I always thought that was a feature of not having a cell phone. I didn't want to be contacted at all hours of the day. I wanted to be able to go away. And then I realized that, yeah, that I would – if a plane was hitting, I would like to be able to call my mom or whatnot. But on that bright note. Yeah, I've always liked them, right?

So I've always – when I had one, when they first came out, I mean I had one of those brick phones and I loved it. I loved it because I spent some time in a car in LA and then when they got smaller, it meant I didn't have to be in the office all the time. So I was always a huge fan of them and I still am a huge fan of them. I understand people who don't like them. But for me, they are – they have given me enormous amount of freedom and I paid for it, right? I paid for it by also being tethered. Constantly accessible. Constantly accessible.

But I actually found that I've mastered it in a way that I didn't expect to do. We just have to get there. And I am pleased to think that maybe we are evolving to that point where people are getting there maybe or am I being too optimistic? It's a whole new set of neuroses because on one hand, yes, you have the tremendous freedom that it provides. I look at the blinking message light at the phone in my office and I laugh at it. It's like these people are people who I really don't need because anybody who I need to talk to has got my phone number. It's like this little trap. On the other hand though, here I am sitting drum drumming my fingers, waiting for my daughter to text

me because she forgot to text me the moment she got to school, so naturally I assumed that she was hit by a car. Her and her friend, which is why her friend didn't call to say, oh, I'm so sorry. In any case, what I'm always curious about is the fact that somehow the phone has not worked its way into pop culture as much as it has. It's this sort of

pervasive thing that's such a part of the oxygen, so you don't find songs or movies or anything else about it. It's this sort of pervasive thing that's such a – it's part of the oxygen. So you don't find songs or movies or anything else about it. It's so big in the culture that it hasn't penetrated the pop culture because that would be so obvious, which raises the question though. If I'm trying to think about who was the first president ever to have a phone, who was the first president to have a cell phone, things like this. All these little elements of the way that pop culture affects presidents is something you never think of because presidents are like dad and dads don't have pop culture. Well, you'd be wrong. And that's why we've got Tevi Troy here to talk to us about the very subject.

Don't worry, Syria 9-11, we're going to get around to this, but this is interesting stuff. He's a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, a writer and consultant on health care and domestic policy, frequent television and radio analyst, and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, Fox Business, CNBC, and The Jim Lehrer Show, among others. His new book is What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted, 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House. We welcome him to the podcast. Welcome. Yes, I am here, and I've also been a guest on Ricochet before. I'm glad to be on it again.

That's right. That's right. Welcome back. Absolutely. glad to be on it again. That's right. That's right. Welcome back. Absolutely. Glad to have you back. So from the book, give us some examples of presidents consuming pop culture. What did Eisenhower watch? Eisenhower loved Westerns.

He would watch them on TV. He'd watch them in the movies. He'd read books about them. And he even used them in diplomacy. So he watched Westerns with Nikita Khrushchev, then told him that he would watch Westerns with Stalin, and Stalin would declaim the Westerns afterwards as these imperialist capitalist nonsense and then watch them again the next day. So they both liked watching the Westerns together. Well, yeah. Hey, Tev, it's Rob in L.A. How are you? Hey, thanks for the great blurb.

Well, happy. It was a great book. Stalin was a huge gangster movie fan. He would actually run them over and over again in the Kremlin. He had a little screening room there, and he loved those Warner Brothers gangster movies. But if we could just bring it up to now, there is no doubt – I mean I don't think you can – I mean there's no doubt that we have a president right now absolutely in touch with popular culture, right? I mean wouldn't you say that? That's absolutely true. I mean, he watches TV. He knows what's going on. He makes references that maybe only among us on this call that Rob understands because they're very obscure TV references.

But he knows who he's talking to. He's reaching out to certain segments of the electorate, and he's getting them on his side. But he's very savvy about his use of pop culture. Right. So, I mean, just talking to him about last night, the speech he gave last night, the last the last bunch of moves he's been making politically. How does he stay so out of touch then? Yeah, well, that's a good point. I mean, when you spend so much time focused on the popular culture, sometimes you may get a little too removed from the serious business of governing tension. I talk about in the book.

You need to understand regular guy appeal in order to get elected, but sometimes you need to have affinity with the great ideas in order to govern appropriately. Also, by being so overexposed in pain on these entertainment shows, people may not take him as seriously, and it may even diminish the office of the presidency once he tries to deal with an issue of import like Syria. I'm trying to think, though, of the exact references that he makes.

It's more that he seems to have the vocabulary and the style of pop culture without necessarily being up on what Miley Cyrus did the other day. I mean, I'm not sure that he would know his Alan Thicke from his Robin. What is it just that he's got that pose, that vernacular, that language? I think it's both. I think he's made references, like, for example, to Snooki when he was trying to get his health care bill done. He said he was going to do an exemption to the tanning tax for John Boehner and Snooki,

and everybody laughed and thought that was great. And other people around the country were saying, who the heck is Snooki? But he also does have that vernacular, and he also knows which shows to appear on. He goes slow jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon. What slow jamming he was trying to appeal to really understood that and thought it was cool. Tevi, this is Molly Hemingway here. And you just mentioned Snooki. And Snooki was actually in your original title that you wanted to title this book.

Is that right? And can you tell us why you changed the title and what the change in title means about the book? Yes. So the original title for the book, when I did my book proposal, was From Cicero to Snooki, How Our Culture Shapes Our and Us. And the publisher, who is rightfully, I think, said that the Venn diagram between people who know who Snooki is and the people who know who Cicero is does not intersect. And I think they were right about that. They also, this was in 2010, 2011, were right in that Snooki is no longer a relative construct today, whereas Cicero is just as relevant as ever.

Yeah, and it seems to me, what's interesting about that, though, is like, do you get into that in the book? If you're talking about these timeless classics that Jefferson read versus Obama making jokes about Snooki, how does that affect actual presidential policymaking or does it? Well, I think from the perspective of people who look back 200 years from now, I think they will be equally able to understand Cicero and the John Adams references to Cicero as we do today, whereas 200 years from now, people will say, what the heck is a Snooki? So relying on the timeless classics is always a smarter move from a governing perspective and from the standpoint of presidential stature. I don't think watching reality TV really has an impact on presidential policy, but I do talk in

the book about instances where pop culture has had an impact on policy or more often where books have had an impact on policy. Interesting. So you're talking about what people watched, what people read, what people tweeted. What was the most interesting thing in terms of what someone watched? I'm curious. I was really struck by Jimmy Carter watching 480 movies in one turn. He went to the White House projectionist, yes, there was such a thing at the time, and he said, I would like to see only family-friendly fare. The White House projectionist said to him, well, you're not going to see many movies that way. And so he changed his policy. He watched these 480 movies, including The Godfather and Star Wars and Manhattan twice in the three weeks it opened, which was during the energy crisis in the U.S. at the same time. So he was actually the only guy to watch an X-rated movie that we know of in the White House.

It was Midnight Cowboy, which was later downgraded to an R. So he watched movies all the time, but I don't think he really understood how movies spoke to the American people. Where do they find the time? I mean, all we hear about is how busy they are. I think we know where Jimmy Carter found the time, but I don't think he really understood how movies spoke to the American people. Where do they find the time? I mean, all we hear about is how busy they are. I think we know Jimmy Carter found the time. But it's like two and a half hours. Four to eight movies is...

That's two to three a week. Two to three a week. Yeah. I'll tell you, presidents don't work like we do. I mean, you get home at night and you probably have to work on scripts and write your pieces for NR. But presidents, at the end of the day when their meetings are done, if they don't have a social obligation, they're pretty free because people are doing the work for them. That's not a knock on presidents. What they do is very hard.

But what I have found is that throughout our history, presidents have had time in the evening to read and sometimes take advantage of it. Teddy Roosevelt would read two to three books a night. He was an obsessive reader. So yes, presidents do have some leisure time, and they use it. I think that's the purpose of the book, to show what the different purposes are and why it's important. Hey, so let me ask you this. So I mean just to pivot a little bit on – we have a strange we have this we have a strange kind of uh conflagration today of two uh two events we have the the anniversary sort of this grim anniversary of

9-11 today and and um so it's hard not to think about uh the who was president then this famously out of touch inarticulate, not very sprite, not very sophisticated president. And who's president today? Guy just gave a speech last night which nobody for the life of them could quite figure out. Famously smart, famously sophisticated, famously plugged into popular culture. And both responding to events, both responding to what they perceive as American threats, both responding to what they perceive as a worldwide coalition, both trying to get Americans ostensibly at least to agree to military action abroad. Where is being plugged into the culture or plugged into what ordinary Americans do every day or watch on TV or read or think about? Where does it help shape their message to the voter? It seems like the out-of-touch guy who couldn't talk and really had no idea and probably even

to this day has no idea what's on TV and I don't know in the last movie that George W. Bush saw, but I'm sure it was something way old, right? Where does that fit in? Because it's hard for me not to draw a comparison between two presidents, especially this morning, and not think a lot more – I mean I sort of admired him when he was president, but a lot more highly of George W. Bush even now in the wake of this sort of bizarre behavior on the part of a fairly amateur hour president the past two weeks.

You understand what I'm saying? It just seems very strange that we have a president so tone deaf right now who was so tuned out but had you know he stood on top of that rubble uh you know a few days after 9-11 and connected with people in a way that i don't think this president ever could yeah i'll make a couple of points on this one thing that bush was good at was clarity of message you may not have liked he may have called him a cowboy but you knew where he stood you knew what he was standing for when he said, this is what we're going to do, people understood it. With Obama, his sophistication, which intellectuals like, and they say it's evidence of a sophisticated mindset and real decision of this is his ability, which helps politically, to spread out and segment his message to different groups. He's hitting different groups at different

times to send out different messages, and he's effective at it. But on the diplomacy front, pop culture can play a role here as well. George Bush tells a story about meeting Tony Blair and taking him to Camp David, and not really sure how well he would be able to get along with Tony Blair, who became eventually a very strong ally in the War on Terror. And after dinner at Camp David, he asked what movie they wanted to watch, and they agreed to watch Meet the Fockers. And Bush said after that, he knew he was going to get along well with Tony. As opposed to, you know, I've got the entire Merchant in in ivory here on blu-ray which is yeah

right yeah you're british ergo you must appreciate this troy this is great i can't wait to uh to take a look at the whole book too because that's this this is uh this is fascinating stuff there's more to come on this and we advise people to uh to go to ricochet and take a look for the conversations about this book and heck pick it up too the namechet and take a look for the conversations about this book. And heck, pick it up, too. The name of it is, as you can tell, What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted. And right there you can just see the downward diminution of

American culture, right? Well, 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House is what he covers, and we thank him for being on the Ricochet podcast, and we'll see you the next time with the next book, if not sooner. It's a great book. Great book. Thanks, Tevi. Thanks a lot. The thing is, is that I'm of the opinion that while Obama, as I said in the question I asked him, has a good grasp of the look and feel of the popular culture, whether or not he actually

understands it is a whole different matter. I don't think so. I think that he has a superficial gloss on it that he mistakes for an absolute comprehension of the whole thing, as with so many other things. The problem is sometimes if you looked at some candidates and you said, Governor such and such, which do you prefer really? The American values as espoused by Hank Hill or by Peter Griffith or by Homer Simpson. And you might get that deer in the headlights smile as the guy tries to process whoever the hell these people are. You want somebody who actually knows what these archetypes are. And if these guys have been cartoon figures in American culture for 10, 15 years,

that actually means something. And there's something you can learn from studying what those characters are about, as opposed to having your cultural references stop at the Flintstones, which tells everybody that you're just not paying attention. Now, the other hand, of course, is to get the snooty intellectual who will look at these and say, well, I don't know about the other two, but the Homer Simpson that I know, of course, is the Homer Simpson of The Day of the Locust, a character in a Nathaniel West novel, which itself was a devastating critique on the essential frailties and banalities of Hollywood. Is that the Homer Simpson to whom you mean? That's not going to work with the American people. But if you are curious about the fact that there actually is a character named Homer Simpson

in a great book in American literature, you can listen to it free at audible.com. That's right. Day of the Locust, one of the two great novels by Nathaniel West, is read for you by William Atherton, who's absolutely a perfect choice for the role, as a matter of fact. And if you go there to ricochet podcast or to audible podcast dot com slash ricochet, you can claim your free book and read Day of the Locust, hear it and understand that they were saying about Hollywood 50, 60 years ago what people are saying about it today. That's my choice for the week. Molly, Rob, what would your book be for Audible this week?

I think it's this is not necessarily a fun book but I think it's a brilliant book and if you haven't read it we're now far enough away from it that you can read it you can listen to it and it's very gripping it's called The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

narrated by Alan Sklar it's really a terrific book. It's very slow – not slow. It's a fast-paced – it's almost written like a thriller and it just – it brings you all the way up to 9-11 and shows how Al-Qaeda grew, how it pulled itself together, how it raised the money, how we missed opportunities to nip it in the bud. And it's all horrible because, of course, you know how it ends. But it's fascinating. It's really, really fascinating and it's a brilliant book. And I think it's a perfect thing to listen to because you know how it ends.

But Today of All Days, it's a great book, great work of history by Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower. Speaking of knowing how something ends, I've been recently getting into this revisiting of literature or movies that I've already seen or books I've already read. And so my pick is The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It occurred to me that I read that in my young 20s, really enjoyed it. I would really like to read it again, hear it again, and reconsider it with my immense wisdom of now being in my late 30s. Right. You first encountered it in your younger and more vulnerable days. Right. And I'm very curious to see if it holds up.

There are these things that were very influential when you're younger and then you revisit them and you're like, actually, Better Off Dead does hold up. You liked it when you were a kid. You still like it when you're an adult. I'm just kind of curious if that'll have the same effect. We'll see. Better Off Dead is one of Fitzgerald's least known stories. Is that the one with the spotty guy from the Young Ones

and the Brits and what's her name? Phoebe Cates? Is that the movie I'm thinking of or is that something else? Better Off Dead, which I think people mostly know from the I Want My Two Dollars theme that continues throughout the movie. Is Phoebe Cates in that?

No. Who is it? It's like... Yeah, that's my husband weighing in from the background. No, no, no. Just tell her that's Daylight 7, the computer that you have. I can see the spinning tapes and the blinking lights and everything. No, that is another girl. That's actually a really good description of the role my husband plays for me all the time.

I just ask him questions and his pop culture spits out an answer. No, wait. You don't know Better Off Dead? I am shocked and appalled by this. This is a great John Cusack film. It was that really weird director name. No, I do know it.

Savage Steve. Exactly. It mixed animation actually claymation. No, that's a marvelous movie. That's an absolute marvelous movie. The Mountain of Cocaine. That's a high 80s film, and I think we were having this debate on Ricochet the other day. Somebody wanted

to go back to 1980, a pivotal year where we had the miracle on ice, where Ronald Reagan, that's where we started to pull ourselves out of the trough. I have no nostalgia for 1980, but for 1982, yes, because that's when, as Drew in Wisconsin pointed out, the engine of the 80s started to kick

and the actual culture of the 80s started to work. The 60s bled into the 70s. The 70s bled into about 80, 81 until we finally had this two – this three-pronged culture going on. There was the pop culture, which got its enthusiasm back. It wasn't turning out depressing, screechy, preachy Norman Lear stuff all the time. There was the pop music culture, which had rejected disco and was coming out with actual tunes. And then there was this whole punk thing that was seething underneath that was all part

of the safety pins and the jagged types and the do-it-yourself. The culture was vital. And even though I was on the side that said, this doesn't make any difference. We're all going to be nuked by Ronald Reagan, man, soon. I still eventually had to realize that I was having a pretty good time. Now, here's the question I have for both of you. There's a narrative about the 80s was that it was the beginning of greed, that it was

Ronald Reagan's stupidity and all of these things, that when people look back on the 80s, it was a bad time. That's the story. That's the narrative. The 90s were the great time, okay? Now, controlling these narratives, shaping them, and coming up with stories that people like is what we're going to talk to with our next guest. But before we go to him, let me just ask you guys, are the narratives, the stories

on the 80s and the 90s just cooked, just baked, and there's nothing we can do about them? Molly? Well, I don't know. I understand that that is what you hear particularly in academia. I think everyone's collective memories are quite different. I don't know. I think that you have to have some perspective that comes through decades. It'll come through that that was a very pivotal decade for all sorts of things, including, I think, was when we woke up to the idea that Islamist terrorists wanted to kill us. I think we didn't quite get how big of a problem that would be, but that was where we were really – that's when we really started to engage that idea.

I don't know. I am a big fan of 80s music. It sort of is holding up well in a way that I think maybe some 90s music isn't. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. You know me, James. I always hate these narrative conversations.

Look, I think people feel nostalgic for past times. They feel nostalgic for the 90s. Some kids are having 90s revivals now. In terms of pop culture, this and that, I don't think any of this stuff really matters. It matters to us because we live through it and we suffer through part of it. And some of it was great. Some of it wasn't great. And I'm not really sure you I'm not sure those arguments really, really have any value when you talk about. I mean, look, just be politically. I mean, maybe Molly can help me out here. A bizarre thing happened yesterday, right?

A bizarre thing happened in Colorado that no one could have predicted, which is the recall elections. Gun control recall elections overwhelmingly succeeded. So two Democrats who were very pro-gun control in very pro-Obama districts were recalled. And about a week ago, or over the weekend, a polling group did a poll and found that one of the incumbents who was facing recall was going to lose by 12 points. And they spiked the poll because they said, well, this can't be right. And she lost, and she was recalled by 12 points. And none of that you could have predicted.

None of that sort of fit into the scheme. None of that fit into the narrative. That's all bananas, right? I mean none of that anybody knew was going to happen, and it shouldn't have happened in those districts. And I don't know whether that means those districts are going conservative or not. Who knows? But it does mean that there's some kind of – there's some immeasurable things happening. I mean I'm just talking about today anyway.

There are immeasurable things happening today among people who are probably not totally on our side but are partially on our side and are winnable. That's all I can say. When you began that whole thing, and those are good points. We need to get back to Colorado. But you began all that by saying you hate this narrative conversation. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, I just say when we talk about how the people talk about the 80s and it's the greed. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that's kind of our thing because we live through it. But if you're not one of our – it doesn't have any – it doesn't mean anything if you're not our generation, James. If you're younger, you don't – Oh, I would like to disagree. I would like to use the gun example as an example of the power of people thinking in terms of narratives, which is particularly a problem with journalists. They like to have a set narrative that they use to discuss something. You are absolutely right that what happened yesterday in Colorado was amazing. I mean, I was reading the Denver Post story and they said they couldn't recall if a Republican had

ever been elected in Pueblo, which was one of the cities that just recalled their state senator. The Colorado Springs person who was recalled was actually the president of the state senate. Yes, state senator. This is like a huge deal and it's really weird. The people who were fighting for the recall were way outspent, way outorganized, and they still managed to accomplish this great thing. But as I was reading the Denver Post article, it was like you could tell the reporter was just struggling to make greater meaning out of any of this because it went against all of the narratives that they're used to playing along with. And so you know if it were the equivalent, like if there was a recall because someone had enacted restrictions or protections for unborn children, you know that this would be national news.

The narrative would be set. Everybody would understand. People are bristling against pro-life legislators. And it really speaks to how much journalists use narrative discussions to frame the news, shape the news and convey meaning and values to readers and viewers. Right. And the 80 narrative is important because it's a container that we give to the next generation to tell them exactly how things were. And if the narrative says that it was bad, evil, that it was a time of oppression, that there was a time of a horrible job market, it's a lie, frankly. It's a basic lie.

Yeah, but people don't say that now. People look at the 80s now as a golden age. I mean, my god, it was the recovery. It was a fast-growing economy. Everybody was working. The stock market was booming. People – if anybody thinks about the 80s now, it's with like this kind of like rose-colored glasses that it was a fantastic time. And that's great.

And when that narrative shifts, that's great. But you have to tell them why. You have to flesh it out and tell them why, that this is an example of the sort of politics – I mean the sort of economic policies that we want to put in place again. Sure, sure. And the strength idea versus the Ruskies, again, a good thing, especially today when up against a defanged military, a defanged Russia, which doesn't exactly have the big, bounteous, bumptious Red Army it had before. We had a president who folded or was this just brilliant Machiavellian strategy on his part. Molly? I would have to say that just for one second,

we have to recognize that Vladimir Putin is the most sophisticated and the most I would say smartest and the most

strategically brilliant world leader today. Former KGB guy who could have seen that coming. He is without a doubt the leader of the world. I would like to refer to another leader of the world, which is Roger Ailes. Someone had pointed out that Roger Ailes had actually come up with this plan in 2012. He said that if he were president, what he would do is get Russia to handle the Syrian problem. But what I think is so funny about this, and I thought it would be hilarious if people knew that this was Roger Ailes' plan, but it's not that the end result here is horrible necessarily. It's just that we got outmaneuvered

by Putin of all people. We got outmaneuvered by Putin, of all people. We got outmaneuvered into this horrible position of weakness. And you want the muddled thinking, the complete embarrassing. I mean, it was just horrible. And again, it's not that the outcome is the worst situation. It's just that our trip there has damaged our credibility so much. It's just an embarrassment all around. Well, we have a president who made a big deal about something and then he then he's clearly backing down and clearly trying to figure out a way. And what's what's most embarrassing about it is the furious desire, the pathetically childish need on the part of the most embarrassing secretary of state we could ever imagine, John Kerry. I mean, thank God he was never president. My God.

Just seeing him and reading about him, it's almost repellent, this cartoon figure of this tiny, tiny intellect of a person, this almost biblical incompetence claiming

at the last minute, no, no, no, this was my idea all along, which is ludicrous, right? This ludicrously childish need to make us I think it's everybody realizes it except for journalists who are still doing that coverage for Obama and his team. I mean the way it seems to me is that Obama said – I spoke last year about this red line and everyone said, yeah, we kind of wish you hadn't. And he goes, OK, well, I did. So we're going to go to war. And everybody says, no, that doesn't seem like a very good idea. And he's like, no, really. And your credibility is on the line.

If we don't go to war, we're going to go to war. And everybody said, no, you really need to stop it. And then he says, okay, I'll stop it. And then the journalists go, isn't that brilliant? It's like, no, it's not brilliant at all. It's embarrassing. But they still have this, they treat him like a special little puppy or something.

Like, oh, we can't hurt him. So we have to pretend that he was smart here. And with the Kerry thing, likewise. I mean, you see that taken seriously, that this gaffe was somehow intentional, as if he could intentionally tie his shoes. Our dog is so smart, and he has such great taste. He only pees on the very expensive Persian carpets. Well, what I love about this is listening to people who say, hey, man, what's different

about this than George Bush? I mean, George Bush went to the UN, and he was going to have inspections, too. I mean, the same thing, right? They just drag it out there looking for Maran Iraq. What what's different about this than George Bush? I mean, George Bush went to the UN and he was going to have inspections too. I mean, the same thing, right? They just drag it out there looking for Iran-Iraq. What's so different about doing it about Syria? The difference is everybody knew that George Bush was going to smash Iraq if he didn't find anything. And after a certain point, kaboom! Shock and awe!

From the sky. And this is all a reason not to do anything. And I do find it funny that George W. Bush was mocked for including Poland in his coalition of the willing. And remember, everyone was like, oh, he's including Poland. That's how desperate he is. But when you add up all the countries that he had, it really makes Obama look bad that he literally couldn't even get Great Britain in. I mean, what a complete failure.

And whatever else you want to say about George W. Bush, he spent 18 months making that case for war. He did get the global community. I didn't support that war, but he did make the case, got everybody involved, had an actual plan. You can disagree with the plan, but he had a plan. So if you're so incompetent that you're making George W. Bush look like a brilliant war strategist – I was going to say –

Strategist. I wanted to say strategizer in the spirit of George W. Bush. You know you're really failing and he really has failed. But saying that – oh, he's got Poland on is like saying my work has appeared in the Baton Rouge Advocates. People say, well, where else have you gone? Well, besides the Baton Rouge Advocate, of course, there's Dallas Morning News. There's the National Review, the South Florida Sun-Saturday, the Washington Times, the New York Post, and all those places. Halliburton.

The places which Rod Dreher has appeared, and we welcome him back to the podcast. Rod Dreher, thank you very much here, and welcome back, sir. It's a pleasure to be back. We are happy to have you here because we've been talking about, almost as if somebody set this up in advance, knowing you to be back. We are happy to have you here because there's, we've been talking about almost as if somebody set this up in advance, knowing you'd be here, uh, the strength of pop culture and narratives and storytelling.

You've got this great piece that we linked to at Ricochet. That's about the, what you called the death of storytelling amongst conservatives. If you could just give us the praises of that so we can, we can laud it to the skies or pick it apart like a flock of angry crows. Well, the point of the piece was to talk

about the power of story to convey worldview. And so many conservatives today tend to think that if we just get the best position paper, the best op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, then we'll turn things around, that politics themselves and policy is sufficient to turn things around. And what we've done,

we have completely outsourced or ceded, I should say, the ground of storytelling in popular culture to the left. And I talked about in my piece in The American Conservative, I gave several examples of the power of storytelling and to move minds and to shape politics and culture. But the thing I started with was talking about, in my own case, I've been writing for years from the right about small towns and the need for a quenchy conservatism, the need of communities to rebuild communities and things like that. But I never actually lived it out until my sister Ruthie got cancer down in our hometown in Louisiana and died. I was able to see through the story she lived out in town, the way she spent that 19 months struggling with her illness and the way the community came to her and surrounded her and held her up and her family up through this crisis, I was able to see all the arguments,

the theoretical arguments I'd been making all these years incarnated. And it affected me so powerfully to see what this actually means to be lived out in a narrative, a real-life narrative, that I quit my job in Philadelphia and moved back home. So that affected me in that way. And I think about other people who've been affected by stories. And stories are just a much more powerful way to change people's hearts and ultimately their minds than pure argument. Hi, Rod. This is Molly Hemingway, and it's nice to have you here. I think there's another thing about storytelling that's worth reflecting on, which is that I'm thinking about this because I was reading a Harvey Mansfield essay on journalism recently, and he was making the

point that one of the inherent limitations of journalism is that it claims to transmit facts, and it doesn't want to transmit more than facts. And this leaves an inability to talk about culture and tradition. And so I was thinking that it made me immediately think of your essay on storytelling because storytelling is one of the – it doesn't work without actual facts or information, but it is the most effective way to transmit culture and values. The thing I wonder, though, is how do we get people who are writing right now and are very comfortable in that sort of op-ed policy wonk style of writing, how do we get them to understand the value of incorporating story and therefore aspects of culture and tradition? Well, when I think about that question, Molly, I think about how quickly same-sex marriage came to triumph in our culture. And it happened, and I think the

proponents of it will agree too, it didn't happen by steady logical argumentation, though that was part of it. It happened by the media and others steadily telling stories about real life gay people and helping people in this country to realize, hey, you know what? You know gay people. You know what their lives are like. And I happen to be an opponent of same-sex marriage, but nevertheless, I think it was a brilliant strategy because it made people, ordinary people, sympathetic. And I find myself to be... Go ahead. I wonder if the solution there then is to think about it again in terms of storytelling. What we have sort of forgotten in this discussion is talking about the value of,

say, fathers or mothers, the value of kinship. And these are things best told through storytelling, right? Well, that's right. That's right. I mean, since I've been back in my small Louisiana town, it's just amazing the things I learn about human nature just by sitting on the back porch and listening to old men and old women talk. It's something I wouldn't have had patience for before because I've always been trained as the kind of person, as an editorial writer and as a columnist, like make the argument. And I do think argumentation is important, but man, when you sit around and you listen to these old people talk about how complicated life is, it really does just change your mind and make you at least open yourself up to nuance

in ways that just doesn't live on the op-ed page like it does in stories. Hey, Rod, it's Rob Long in L.A. How are you? Just fine. So I got a question. So I'm going to tell a story. I'll tell a story about a family, and they lost their health care because a guy changed jobs and then kid got sick and then they didn't have health care. They couldn't afford it and the kid – they went bankrupt or the kid died or some terrible story. healthcare system, which hypothetically might exist, in which we have a free market system in which that would create an affordable marketplace of hypothetically better choices.

You see my problem? It's hard for me to tell a story about something that doesn't exist. It's easier for me to tell a story about how government can come in and solve everything. I mean I tell stories for a living and I'm always looking for an easier story to tell because it's simpler. And if I can come up with a simple mechanism, government program, to tell that story, I'll do it. So what do you suggest to the kind of people who write and the kind of people who are on our side? How do they get past that?

It seems like that storytelling advantage the other side has. Yeah, because the other side, they tend to lead with their heart, right, and to try to find a sympathetic character and play them up. And look, these people exist. But I think your question, Rob, makes me think about what's going on now with Syria in the Middle East and the plight of Christians in the Middle East. We can see from what's happened in Egypt recently and what happened in Iraq after the war there, we saw the unintended consequence for Christians of our well-intentioned policy. And so I think you can take the real-life story of these people and point out what can happen when you go in there with the best humanitarian, best intention, liberal policy of freedom, knocking a dictator over, but it has unintended consequences. That's a really powerful conservative story. But as you say, it's already happened. We have real-life examples to point to. I'm as

flummoxed as you are about the healthcare thing, because it is... This guy, Sam McDonald, I wrote about in my American Conservative story. He's a libertarian who works at a hospital in Pennsylvania, and he can go down and tell stories about the real life people he sees and how they get screwed over by the system we have now and how Obamacare may not help them out. But you've got to get journalists down there who are willing to at least open their minds up to the possibility that there are other ways that conservatives might have a point and then look for examples to validate those principles. And so you would argue that, I mean, all the work I've done with school choice, there's always that problem where it's hard to tell people a story about something that doesn't exist.

Except I think it – Oh, sorry. No, no. Go ahead, Bonnie. I just – I think that sometimes we forget that we have all these powerful stories of – for instance, it's easy to tell a story about what happens when school choice doesn't exist. And those are very powerful stories. Or it's easy to tell stories about how government bureaucracy can stifle creativity or can destroy lives also. And we just need to, we sort of deceive ourselves if we think that the facts of the case are more important than talking about the lives of the people in play. And I think this is particularly important for conservatives

as it relates to women who are particularly going to be caring more about relationships with other people and storytelling is obviously all about relationships. Let me just jump in and impress everybody. How about this? Even if we tell a story that shows the failure of government to run a public housing system, to run a public school, to run anything, the solution is going to run a public housing system, to run a public school, to run anything.

The solution is going to be, from the popular culture, well, then we just need better government. Government needs to do a better job. It's never dynamite it and try something new. It's always go back to the same old idea. So, Rod, let me ask you this then. How do we tell these stories

in such a way that doesn't... Because the right, when it comes up with something that is trying to make a point, makes a movie or a television show about it, is awful. Generally the examples that I've seen have been saccharine, tendentious, just weird.

Sounds good. Wait, wait, wait, had I written, was my name on them? It was a long, long show, yes, to put it that way. I mean, how much of it just is that the right really doesn't have enough people on its side who know all the wonderful little tricks of the trade

to make these things as manipulative as we want them to be? I think that's a huge problem because I can remember myself when I was in high school, the only person I knew, the only teacher I had who cared about storytelling was a very liberal. And she was the one who encouraged me with my own writing and with my own interest in art and music. And I thought that meant that the only people who cared about these things were liberals. And so I became a liberal. In college, I got

educated out of my sentimental liberalism. But it was really true that when I was on campus running the editorial page of our campus paper, I kept going up to the conservatives and say, please come write for us. Please come write for us. They didn't want to do that. They wanted to complain about the newspaper, how biased we were, but the people on the campus left, they were willing to write anything we asked them to. And I think that conservatives often find it so much easier to complain about the situation that exists with liberal bias, both in the arts and in journalism, than get out there and learn how to tell these stories ourselves. Yeah, Rod, I totally agree. James knows I complain about – I complain about conservatives complaining all the time.

I never do anything about conservatives complaining, but I do complain about it. So I have a question for you just to talk about – just to be practical for a minute. Who in the past has done this well? Who's been really good at this? Who could we model – who could we look to in the past or even in the present as a model? And who do you think has those chops now on the horizon?

I'm not asking you to pick a candidate or anything, but just who do you think has got the right idea? I have to go back to Tom Wolfe, who was such a brilliant writer. I mean, he's in Eclipsefe, who was such a brilliant writer. I mean, he's in eclipse now, I think.

I watched crazy about his last book. But Bonfire of the Vanities and some of his reported essays are just perfect. And you didn't really know that Wolfe was a conservative. Wolfe was just a great writer who used details to evoke certain passions and to point out things, point out failures of the liberal society. And but you read him. Most people I knew, I was introduced to him, in fact, by my liberal teacher because she loved Wolf's writing and she didn't have her defenses up against, oh, he's a conservative because she just loved his writing. And that made her think about things. So I look to Wolf as a great example. But I don't know who the Wolf is among us right now. I don't see anybody. I see people in fits and starts. I try to be that

person when I can. But it's really hard because we've trained up an entire generation of conservatives to think that the be-all and end-all of conservative public life is in activism, political activism, or writing op-eds for conservative outlets. And we have to start somewhere. And I think that if we can get more conservatives to go into academia and put up with what all conservative journalists have to put up with in mainstream newsrooms, we can begin to turn things around. I don't think it's in books. I mean, I love Tom Wolfe, and I'll disagree with you on his latest novel. I think his latest novel,

I've enjoyed it more than anything since Bonfire. But did Bonfire, the vanities for all of its success and all of its serialization and rolling stone of all places, change anybody's mind about racial maw-mawing? No, it didn't. And the painted word didn't change the fact that art is still driven by theory. And from Bauhaus to Auerhaus, it did nothing about the rise of meretricious architecture,

whether or not it's German-inspired or not. We love Wolf. Those are great stories, but maybe books aren't where you go. I mean, one of my favorite books, I think one of the great books about individualism and the importance of the individual in modern society versus the state is, of all things, a clockwork orange, which on every level, theoretically the way it's written, the construction of it, is an absolutely brilliant book that a guy wrote in about three months while drunk. And when that book was revealed to the American people in movie form,

the eventual repentance and transformation of the character was removed by the director to make this hero a symbol of unrepentant evil as opposed to a cautionary tale about the state versus individualism. So even if we come up with the greatest book,

forget about it. I mean, the guys who thought that we're going to turn society around by getting Atlas shrugged in the theater, no.

You've got to have guys on the cable level who are writing characters like for Parks and Recreation where a lot of people are looking at values that we believe in espoused through attractive, interesting, funny characters. That's how you change things. I think that's how you start to shape people, change people's ideas, make it OK for them to like Ron Swenson, make it okay for them to like this kind of character.

Hey, Rod, do you know who James is talking about, the character on the show Parks and Rec? I'm afraid I don't. Well, he's a character – I mean I think that – I mean I'm now extrapolating, James, so I could be wrong. But I think that the character was – he's sort of a very, very committed libertarian, unapologetic libertarian, and I think he was written to be sort of the kook. And then as what happens sometimes when you're writing a character, you find the humanity in that character and that character – because whenever you have a character who's got principles, they tend to get a lot of – the audience tends to gravitate to that person the way it is in real life. People who have principles just tend to be a little bit more admirable and he became very popular.

He is a very popular character on that show and there are people who did not know they are libertarian, right? Or there are people who thought they were liberal who now believe in more libertarian principles of individual liberty and small government for for whom Ron Swanson has been their Virgil. He's led them into this inferno. I mean is that a small-bore version of what you're talking about or is that not really? Because it seems to me you're talking about something more elevated version. Well, but no, I think that it has to – you make a really good point there. We need to not tell people what they ought to think but expand their options, expand their boundaries for what they were permitted to think about homosexuality, and have forbidden people with a more traditionalist point of view from having a place in the public square. And that is how they've changed minds. I remember Stanley Crouch, the black critic,

criticized Spike Lee back in the 80s, because Spike Lee said, we African Americans need to start controlling our image in cinema. Stanley Crouch said, no, that's not right African-Americans need to start controlling our image in cinema. Stanley Krauss said, no, that's not right. What we need to do is expand our image in cinema, give people a broader idea of the possibilities for African-American life. And I think that that's a great lesson for conservatives, too. You look at a show like Friday Night Lights, my favorite show of all time. That was not a political show. But if there was a more conservative, small-town, basic, decent value show on television, I don't know what it is.

No, I agree. I think that in fact, I think there are a lot of people who feel that that way about Breaking Bad, who feel that way about a lot of shows that are that are they're not explicitly conservative, but seem to touch a chord in people seem to be about values that even if they're under siege, they aren't breaking bad. They are renewed. They are people struggling with real issues, and all the sides are provided. Well, Walker Percy, the novelist, said he is a very devout Catholic, but he was very rarely open about Catholicism or religion in his fiction. And he was once asked about that, and he said, because the language itself has been exhausted, people have so many defenses up about being explicit about religion. So I have to work indirectly. And I think in a way that's true about

conservatism, because so many people in Hollywood and in the entertainment media and in the news media are so defensive about conservative principles, conservative ideas, that we on the right who are creative have to learn to work indirectly. It's not a matter of trying to deceive anybody. It's a matter of trying to get yourself heard. Right, right. Let's come up with a big, blustery, charismatic character who espouses all the right ideals, but in his personal life is nasty to his child

and punches photographers in the street and ends up chattering away in a cable network somewhere on the weekends. Let's do that. Let's come up with, let's call him, let's call him Ballack's Aldwin, and then we'll use him to lampoon the culture so much that people have no choice to flock to our side. Rod, thank you for being on the show. Go on. Okay, just before we go use them to to lampoon the culture so much that people have no choice to flock to our side rod thank you for being on the show go on okay just before we go i want to say do you not think that that bonfire the vanities paved the way for rudy giuliani i mean there's no direct

comparison i mean no no cause and effect thing there but could it not be possible that he made it it made it possible for people in new y to let somebody like Giuliani into their imagination? I think that's – I mean I think that's a really good point. I had never thought of that, but I think that's really true. People forget what a controversial figure he was in New York City for what were in fact a lot of unmotivated and unjustified, very grandstanding arrests on Wall Street before he ran for mayor where he arrested a lot of – all the insider trading scandals which happened during the greed-soaked 80s. He – a huge portion of those people just sort of people just had no evidence or reason to arrest him. But yeah, I think that book shaped the city – a citizen's idea of how bad the city had gotten. I'd never thought of that before. I'd never thought of that before.

But since it contradicts my earlier point about the ineffective nature of literature, I'm going to pretend that I never heard it and refuse to incorporate it into my worldview. Thank you so much. I will talk to you again. And that was a great... Thanks, Rod. Very good. Take care, everybody. Thank you. We have to have Rod on again because we didn't have a chance to talk about the CrunchyCon stuff, which I

always love because I always love to get into it because like Rod like rod i i like to go shop at whole foods and you know buy organic arugula and um i don't know it always always feels like i'm undercover i understand that rob i like to go to whole foods for a different reason i like to go there because all the brands are just imaginary things that don't exist in my world and i go to trader joe's where I recognize the brand. I go to the supermarket where everything is all the Archer Daniels Farm Midland.

But I go to Trader Joe's. What planet in the federation are these exquisite items coming from? Didn't you love the store brand names of the old days? Like there used to be a supermarket in California called Lucky. And the store brand was Lady Lee. Yes, yes, as a matter of fact. I used to be a supermarket in California called Lucky, and the store brand was Lady Lee. Yes, yes, as a matter of fact. Yeah, I used to love that. And I have a lot of matchbooks from Lady Lee. Well, here we are so many days after talking and chattering about things like books and movies and popular culture and what the president tweeted.

And this is 9-11, of course. On that day, did either of you think that this is where we would be? Let me put it to you this way. Molly, on 9-11, if you had stopped in the horror and the reaction to everything that was happening and thought 2013 is going to look like this, where did you think this was going? And are we where you thought we'd end up? D.C. at that time. And I do remember, and I think a lot of people say this, thinking something along the lines of this is a very different reality than the one that I thought I'd be living. And I didn't really have the capability of looking 10 years into the future. But I imagined in my ideal scenario that we would enact justice against the people who had done this

to us and then kind of go back to living as we had before. And I envisioned that as like carpet bombing Afghanistan and then just being, remaining who we were as Americans, freedom loving people. And so I was sort of disappointed on both counts. We didn't really do a good job of destroying our enemies. And then we let, we let them win kind of. We, we've, we now live totally different lives. And so this is a much worse scenario than I hoped for. On the other hand, I thought maybe there would be much more terror on our soil, and I have to be honest about that even as I reject our security state. Rob? Well, I sort of agree with Molly. I thought there'd be much more – I thought we were going to live in a world with regular acts of terrorism.

And that actually was – people forget. That was kind of the sophisticated interpretation of those events. America is just going to have to accept living with more terrorism. That was what we had to do because of a whole bunch of different things. But that was what we had to learn to live with. And so I'm surprised that we're not living with more of it. And let me make a – if I can make a crazy point that one of the things that happened in that Camp David weekend right after 9-11 when Bush got all these guys to get together. They all sat around in a circle and thought, what are we going to do? And there are all sorts of sinister interpretations of what they decided to do. We're going to invade Iraq even though they

didn't do anything. We're just going to use this as a premise to invade Iraq, all sorts of like all the conspiracy theories. But one of the things that I think – no one really knows who said it. I think it was Paul Wolfowitz said was if you go around the region and you look at Syria at that point, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, all the countries in the region except Israel of course, Jordan. What you have there is stability, not instability. We have achieved stability in the Middle East. Those are regimes that have not changed hands for 30-plus years. Maybe what the region needs is some instability because if those people are worried about their own throne, they won't have the time or the money to fund Osama bin Laden.

And that is a horrible, horrible, horrible, dark, sinister, nasty, just incredibly evil, I guess. Not evil, but horrible way to look at the world. But it is partly the way they looked at it. And they brought instability to the Middle East. That's what happened looked at it. And they brought instability to the Middle East. That's what happened. We invaded Iraq and we brought instability to the Middle East. There is really no other way to look at the Arab Spring and the revolutions that have taken place there for good or ill.

There's no way to look at that other than to say that instability was brought to the Middle East by the American invasion of Iraq. And we've had – what is it now? Twelve years of relative peace or relatively free of terrorist attacks. I don't know if those things are connected. I'm just suggesting that those are data points in space. Those are dots in space. They can be connected that way. So Middle Easterners literally cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

Well, but that happens when regimes are obsessed with protecting themselves and are fighting a civil war. They have a hard time funding international terrorism. Molly, I heard you leap in. Yeah, I mean, and like you're talking about, that was kind of the idea was that we could draw everybody to Iraq and hurt them there. But I'm not entirely sure that I agree that we're so free from the terrorism, even though I am surprised by the lack of it. And you think about like what happened in that,

on the street in London this year to that soldier. You look at Benghazi. They're still able to attack Western or American interests pretty well. Benghazi's in Libya and in London you got one crazed man walking down the street. We were talking about

the guys who were going to go to the Mall of America and dump anthrax into the ventilating system. We were going to talk about smallpox sweeping the country until half of us were erupting in pustules. We were talking about the guys who were going to go to the Mall of America and dump anthrax into the ventilating system. We were going to talk – talking about smallpox sweeping the country until half of us were erupting in pustules. We were talking about everybody having a go bag in the back of their car in case there's a propane explosion that takes out half your infrastructure for energy. I mean right afterwards, right afterwards came the anthrax, right, which was the strange, bizarre, almost amateurish second wave that everybody thought was connected. People forget that. It was like there was this resonant blow of 9-11 and then there were all these jittery things around the edge that kept the culture just absolutely at twitch. But by Christmastime, of course – I mean by Christmastime, the Northern Alliance and the American military had, boom, smashed it.

And we thought this has turned – this is ours now and this is a march. And I thought that it was going to be Afghanistan, that Iraq was going to, would fall once we were there doing something, you know, like putting a – like destroying their energy infrastructure, funding rebels. I mean doing something and that North Korea would be contained. That's what I thought was going to happen. I remember after Baghdad fell, the Weekly Standard had a cover story that said, on to Tehran. I mean that was practically the mood. This was a theater in this war and we were on

the aggression. And what happened after that was eight years of really bad mismanagement of Iraq, which you can't help but not place at the feet of the Bush administration. I think it's more than that though too,

which is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how different people are different for very good reasons. And I think that the Bush doctrine was such that he really thought that we could just bring democracy to people who don't have the same intellectual foundations as we do. I don't think people realize the differences of living in a society governed by Judeo-Christian ethics on something as simple as the separation of church and state. It's foundational to us.

It's impossible in Islam. So just that naivete and not understanding the strength of religion in people's self-conception and their understanding of what's possible in a given state. I think it was not just bad war management. There were some fundamental problems with our entire approach. Well, post-war management. I mean you go in and you debathify the place and all of a sudden the remnant civilian infrastructure that kept the place running is gone and what do you got? You got squat.

You got in an icing squat. Right, but that's what I'm saying is that in the dark view of the world, that's preferable. Right? That's preferable. Right? That's preferable. That was not necessarily – it's not necessarily a trait of the Bush family to want their resources staying at home or they fight a civil war at home and everyone is fighting in the streets in Damascus and not fighting and not planting bombs in the streets in New York and LA and San Francisco and everywhere else. So that – we live in a horrible place, a horrible world. We're a terrible species. So we do terrible things to each other.

And I think the calculus of the Bush administration how, if that was the approach that we were going to take, how it would require daily, monthly, annual vigilance for decades or, you know, it never stops because the moment that you, you give up on that approach, it comes to your shores. So I think that, you know, we, we ended up getting involved in something that we almost can't get out of. Hopefully we can get out of it. Here's a thought experiment, which is sort of nasty and dark, and we should probably come up with something pleasant

because we've got to wrap this up. But if there is another, God forbid, event, first of all, I don't think that there can be another. Whenever I walk into a plane now, I mean, that's the biggest change since 9-11 for me. You stand there in the concourse.

They line you all up and you go in according to your group, whatever it is you're doing, and thinking, if one of you guys tries something, we're going to take you down. And I always know – I always pick out the big guys that I know are going to be the guys who are going to be the ones who are going to jump on the guy who tries to do something. Well, it's never really me. It's always somebody a lot more worked out than me. I mean I like to think that I'll help, but that's what we do. I know I will. That's why I keep my classic iPod with 160 gigabytes because you put that thing in a sock and you whip it around. You can really do some damage.

We all think that. That's why Flight 93 was not successful from the terrorist point of view because the guys on Flight 93 knew what they were up to. And so knowing what they're up to kind of was the biggest form of protection we have and that we had then. So in a way – but just if something were to happen, I think the American people are a lot more – I don't know what the word is, weary or world weary or aware now than they were then. They won't be shocked. I don't think – I think the political fallout will be smaller. I think that there'll be, if it were

to happen, I don't think there'll be a lot of finger pointing. I think there'll be sort of an understanding, this is the kind of way, this is the world we live in. But I think there'll be also a demand for a response. There will be less of a conversation about the response and more about the demand for a response.

Less of a desire to moderate the response for humanitarian reasons if we're weary of anything it's not war i think it's weary of expecting expecting that part of the world to behave and weary about having to pretend about what care having to pretend that we care what happens to it i think that's what you got out of the last 10 years and we were talking about this last week you know gave it a shot didn't work out fine good luck Good luck with that, guys. Because war weariness, the term used for America before, in World War II, people had war weariness

because everybody knew somebody who went over there and died. There was a star in the window of every house when you walked down the street. When you went to the store, there was a big sign telling you to turn in your used fats, let alone your pots and pans. When you went to the movies, there was a little bit there before about a bond drive. Number six, back the attack.

Man, number six and number seven and number eight. War weariness is every single ad in Life magazine had something to do with it, whether it was Dixie cups or toothbrushes. When war completely suffuses a society like it just did, like it did in the 40s, that's when you get a war-weary culture. We got tired of hearing bad news that was happening in the 40s. That's when you get a war-weary culture. We got tired of hearing bad news that was happening in a distant place. And that was what war-weariness became translated to.

So that, I think, you're right. Our future response will be much, much different. But the other thing that's changed is this, and I'll stop here after this to be like Peter. One last statement is that I remember that day very, very well because I was home all day with my daughter, my one-year-old daughter who's playing on the floor with absolute delight in the sunbeam holding up toys for me to look at while the television is playing horrors.

And I'm looking. This is the world into which you are born. Wonderful. And I hit at some point record on my DVR and got a lot of footage of what happened. Now, the next time this happens, we're going to have a lot of footage and it's going to be high def and they're not going to be able to take it away as they seem to have done with what they did with 9-11. All of that footage of the attack and the smoke and the jumping just by some common

agreement on the part of our betters disappeared lest we brutes take the wrong lesson from this. Yeah. They can't do that again the next time. I agree. That's a very good point. What is amazing to me is – as a 48-year-old man, and we're talking about something that happened 12 years ago, – in terms of sort of media and communication and technology, it was a vastly, vastly different world. And I think you're absolutely right. I would also say just on a more pleasant note that the – that I remember – the one thing I do remember about 9-11 that wasn't a positive thing but was – turned out to be a positive outcome was that I discovered a writer named James Lilacs.

That was really how I found out who you were. I started reading you. I don't know how many months afterwards but it was in that time. And I actually feel like the entire conservative blogosphere for whatever – I hate that term. But the entire conservative community online really started in the wake of 9-11. It did. It did. On Ricochet, we've been discussing our memories

of 9-11, and I actually made that same point. It was the day that I discovered blogs. I was just so desperate for information, and it opened up my eyes to so many things, and that is a wonderful blessing, and there are many others, too, but that was a really good highlight. Yeah, Fred Cole, right? Is it Fred Cole's post?

Is it on the member feed or are we going to move it over? It's on the main feed. I remember just turning the typewriter every day or the word processor or the computer and just trying to find a way to channel the immense amount of piss-off-it-ness, if that doesn't violate the COCs, because I was just furious. And you don't want to be ruled by that. You want to shape it, understand it, put it to good use,

turn that glowing metal into a tool that you can use. But, yes, so many people were galvanized by this and turned to find people who also were saying, yes, yes, I understand, I know what you mean, I agree, because we would turn around and half the people people who also were saying, yes, yes, I understand. I know what you mean. I agree. Because we would turn around and half the people that we would know say, well, man, this chicken's coming back to roost.

This is what we got coming to us. You know, now it's going to be raw. I mean, we forget that there was an immediate, total, absolute split between where we should go and how much of a defensive fetal-like posture we should take. But that's another podcast. We've got to go. We've had great talk. And Molly, it's been a great pleasure to have you here as well. Thank you very much.

If only you had a podcast of your own that people could turn to. Oh, they do. My husband and I have The Hemingways. And we have a new one up just from last week. So you can hear. And we even have our patented Fight of the Week as part of that podcast. You can hear my – What was the fight of the week?

Oh, my husband who – okay. So we went to Portland and that's where he's from and he was showing me all around but he had no game plan for our journey. I am very German and I wanted to know exactly where we were going and so we had a little breakdown right there on the streets of Portland in the Pearl District. He won, as he usually does, but that was our fight this week.

So as the German, you had a plan and then you were eventually defeated. Got it. Exactly. You can catch Rob, of course, at the Glock. After destruction, after great destruction. Rob and the popular group Glock talking about pop culture and the rest.

And you can catch me at lilacs.com and here and there and Ricochet. Rob, Molly, thank you very much. We'll see you down the road. And thanks to everybody in ricochet.com for listening. And remember, if you want to thank audible.com for being one of the sponsors of this thing, then why don't you go over to audible.com and get something for free. What kind of a thanks is that? You can't lose.

Audiblepodcast.com slash Ricochet for your 30-day free trial and your free audiobook. We thank them as ever for sponsoring. We thank you for listening. Thank you. I'm just somebody shoot me so I can shut up already. See you next week, fellas. Bye. see you next week fellas bye chapter one

he adored New York City he idolized it all out of proportion Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no, make that, he romanticized it all out of proportion. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Uh, now let me start this over. Chapter One.

He was too romantic about Manhattan as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him New York meant beautiful women and street smart guys who seemed to know all the angles. Ah, corny, too corny for my taste. Let me try and make it more profound. Chapter one. He adored New York City.

To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in... It's going to be too preachy. I mean, you mean you know let's face it i want to sell some books here chapter one he adored new york city although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture how hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage. Too angry. I don't want to be angry.

Chapter one. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be. Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Ricochet. Join the conversation.