The Ricochet Podcast - God of the Two-Faced Podcast

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

Ok. We lied.We swore that we we're going to take this week off. But we're not. So just like Janus, the two-faced God of Duality, we're here to kick down the door of the New Year and not be content with bidding farewell to just 2023, but a whole century worth of old years.James Lileks is your guide as we dance through a hundred years of New Years and then he takes your questions while heading into 2024.

On the occasion of your New Year's celebration, my fellow Americans and I extend our very best wishes for the prosperity and well-being of the government and the people of Vietnam. This is Ronald Reagan, President of the United States. I'm speaking to you, the peoples of the Soviet Union, on the occasion of the New Year. I know that in the Soviet Union, as it is all around the world, this is a season of hope and expectation. Happy New Year! Happy New Year, dear comrades! Years from now, they'll be talking about it. They'll be talking about this great, great thing that we did.

Welcome, everybody. Happy New Year. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 672. I'm Jamesilex here in Minneapolis, where it's bright and it's cold, and we're looking forward to a new year. I don't know why, because there's just no point to New Year's, is there? We all know that nothing changes. Nothing changes except the rent is due, really. I mean, the whole idea of New Year, new me is ridiculous. You come up with some resolutions and things you're going to do, and we all know that they found her

on the rocks of February, if not earlier. I actually find it easier to make little tiny changes and resolutions that I know that I will be able to fulfill. I vow to have a small chocolate mint-covered pretzel every day after lunch. I think I can do that. I vow, actually, this is my New Year's resolution, every day, thanks to the miracles of Apple Music, to listen to one new artist that I've never heard before from start to finish

and not give up after 15, 20 seconds because it's auto-tuned and thumping and the rest of it, but really actually to try to learn something new musically every day. That's not hard. It's the things that make you get up and go someplace and do something like work out or quit something that you love that you don't want to do. That's the stuff that never works. So I don't know why we put ourselves through this. Well, we do because it's January, right? And January is the start of everything new. January, as we all know, is named after, right, Janus, Roman god of doors. First learned about him when I was a kid. First of all, I was freaked out by him because he had two faces. He had one normal forward facing face and then one in the back. I thought, how does that work exactly? How do you manage all that sensory input? Why would you want two? If you have a cold, does the back nose run at the same time as the front?

Allergies. You've got four eyes that are going to be driving you nuts. And how Roman is it really to have a God of doors? I mean, these guys, you understand after a while the appeal of monotheism, because when you have gods cluttering up absolutely everything, the God of desks, the god of chairs, the gods of pens, the gods of dog, everything. Everybody's got a dog. You figure something comes along and says, no, there's just one. It's going to simplify things. We're going to bundle it all into one.

But then, of course, human nature being what it is, that gets complicated as well with saints and what they're in charge of. I put three people in a room with one thing. And at the end of the day, two of them are going to gang up against the other as to what the one thing means. Anyway, I was wrong as a kid and just thinking that Janice had to do with doors. No, he had a lot more to do with that. He was the God of beginnings and as such was regarded by many in those days. And Lord, the complexity of Roman deities and their stories. He was the first. He was the number one guy.

He started everything out. So when you started the day, you prayed to Janice. When you started a new business enterprise, you prayed to Janice. When you prayed to a god, you prayed to Janice, just because there's beginning of everything. And if you go back and look on your Wikipediaipedia you will find that he was also related to the god of portals because they had they had a different god for portals as for doors okay i don't know why they needed that i don't know if they had to do some reconciliation sessions there where they divided up okay you're gonna have harbors he's gonna have doors you're to have warehouse openings. He's going to have like business doors and the rest of it.

But, you know, when you study the whole story of Janice, it turns out that he ravaged some nymph and in the process made her a goddess. And she's now regarded in their view as the goddess of hinges. The goddess of hinges the goddess of hinges it's not the most it's not the biggest job you can have i suppose in the pantheon and if you're a guy who fixes doors for a living i imagine that you probably would be burning some salt and some you know some spelt to her every day before you went to work, but really. So yes, Janice got a doors, but of so much more. And lest we think, however, that it's kind of silly to have a got a doors, they had a got a hinges and a got a knobs too. And that just sounds like something that you should just say as an epithet when you're disappointed in something.

Oh, God of knobs. Well, there was a person who had to sit by the door, of course, like me right now, who is there between the thing from which you come and the thing into which you go, being the next year. And that person was named after the god of doors and beginnings, Janice. And from that, we get janitor. So in a way, when we say a janitor and we see the people around the building doing what they do to clean things, it's actually part of an old and noble tradition. And for all we know, the janitors for 2000 years have been part of a secret society, actually, that knows all, sees all, and actually keeps everything working. I know without them, nothing gets picked up and thrown away. So thank you, janitor, today.

That's all I'm saying. It being the beginning of the year or the end of the new, depending on the end of the old, depending on when you're listening to it, I'll bet you're wondering. I hope there's a roundup of this year because I really would like to revisit all the awful things that happened and confirm my priors and revel in all the things that went awry and weep and moan and rent garments and the rest of it. I'm really not in the mood for that. You can find it elsewhere, but I find year-end summations to be tedious, to be honest. Oh, we have lots of

actualities as to what happened, and we might get to those, but there are two things that I want to do. One of them is I posted on Ricochet. You know, ricochet.com. If you're listening and you're not a member, you should be. I mean, really, I've been trying to shame you into it for all these years now. No, shame's not the word. No, cajole.

Welcome you. Extend a hand to pull you through the portal of Janus to the place where you've been looking for the Internet for a long time, the home of sane, civil, mostly center-right conversation. So I posted on Ricochet in the member feed, which you can't go to unless you're a member, some questions to see if anybody has any questions of me about anything. I'm going to try that. But I also thought rather than looking back at the year here, it might be instructive to go back to 1924, 1934, and briefly look at what January 1st looked like at the front page of the paper. What were they concerned about? Well, for example, let's take a look at 1924. I just

happen to have it right here in front of me, thanks to newspapers.com. Big headline. And I do this to remind you that whatever we think is the most important thing going on in the last year, they were thinking that then. Were they right? Were they wrong? Was it actually going to affect human history in the years to come? Well, January 1st, 1924, the Minneapolis Journal. Big headline. Top above the fold whole page

obergon halts war on rebels delay is ordered awaiting arrival of arms from u.s now obergon is probably forgotten i had no idea i had to look him up it has to do with mexican revolution so we were supplying arms to them we were involved in our border state we were supplying arms to them. We were involved in our border state. We were having troubles with Mexico 100 years ago. It was a stunning surprise. Below that, another headline, bits of wreckage from Dixmude was broached, they had to explain what it was. But after a few days of newspapers, of course, everybody knows what Dixmude is. And in this case, Dixmude was a Zeppelin. And as such, as you might imagine,

came to a not entirely felicitous conclusion. Zeppelin airship built for the Imperial German Navy, unfinished at the end of First World War. Reading this off the top of my head obviously no wikipedia uh it exploded in midair on the 21st of december toward 1923 off the coast of sicily killing all 52 people 42 crew and 10 passengers says wikipedia this is one of the first great airship disasters preceded by the crash of the British R-38 and the U.S. airship Roma, and followed by the destruction of the Shenandoah in 25, the British R-101 in 1930, 48 dead, and the Akron in 1933, 73 dead, and the Hindenburg in 37,

20, 36 dead. So does the Dick's Mute matter to us 100 years later today? Probably so, in that it was part of a pattern of these things going up kaboom that led to the diminished interest, shall we say, in flying around in a great ball of gas. So that's that. That was 1924. worried about the weather there the mercury had dropped to 16 below in minneapolis which is not surprising entirely and it was a sedate reveling because uh you couldn't drink so much anymore oh and uh let's see uh yes a furnace had exploded and 25 families were shivering somewhere in minneapolis front page news so that's 24 um Part of it is, I think, the newspapers... Well, it has to do with the newspaper you read. That was the sedate journal for the respectable people. The Star probably

reported about a whole bunch of people doing nasty things. Well, in 1934, I'm looking at it right now. 1934, January 1st, that would be 90 years ago. What's the big headline at the top? 35 hurt in 86 crashes. 35 people hurt in 35 crashes, or in 86 crashes.

Now, that was the toll for the year. It wasn't like 86 people had wrecked their car that night. But below that was a big deal about the conference rum bill. What the conference room bill is. Oh, it's just rum about letting people drink more because it's 34. That's pretty much it. The whole front page is car crashes.

It's cold and you can drink pretty soon. Something here. Oh, Chicago murders were up 10% over the course of the year. And Octave Thanet novel novelist, was ill. Here's one of your moments of realizing that all fame is fleeting. Octave Thanat. You have any idea who that was? Pen name of a woman who was very popular and wrote an awful lot of novels and was well

known, and obviously so, by the fact she's on the front page. But she had the diabetes and she would kick off about a week after that. Octave Fennett. Never heard of her before. Used to be a household name. Take note, writers. That's what happens to us all. 1944, as you can well imagine.

Well, yeah. Headline. Nazi escape bridge destroyed by Italian coast leapfrog raid. Yanks take more hills, eighth gaining. All this meant something very specific to people in 1934. They would know where the eighth was and what they would know what the eighth was and where they were and what they were doing. Russ drive perils, Nazi River Army. That's a headline.

Russ drive perils, Nazi River Army. That's a headline. Russ Drive Perils Nazi River Army. A couple of the, oh, Russ Spoil Nazi New Year Party was below that. So you get the feeling that the Russ, our allies, of course, good old Uncle Joe, are on the move, and the Nazis are on the back foot. Other than that,

it's pretty, oh yes, little tiny story down here at the bottom of the paper. 29 bombers lost in raid. 29 U.S. bombers lost in a raid. Front page, but below the fold. You're used to that nowadays. Well, you can well imagine. Come 1954, well, hey, it's a swing and happy time is right. Everybody's enjoying hula hoops and rock and roll and everything's great.

And McDonald's and shakes and tail fins and happy time. Minneapolis star, January 1st, 1954. Lead headlines. Parents of seven shot after New Year party in city. Right below that and big type as well. Two killed by hit run cars. Hello, that. Right below that and big type as well. Two killed by hit run cars. Below that, blast out door, fells gunman. So that was that.

Parents shot, two killed, and somebody shot a gun out the door and killed somebody who was moving around. Good times. But a small story about a GI who changes his mind and quits the red POW. An American war prisoner, a guy who defected Claude Batchelor of Kermit, Texas, decided he was going to go over to the other side, to the Norcs. And it turns out he didn't like it very much. And thereafter, he came back with his hat in his hand and was jailed. Later got out and went to work as an accountant. Died about 20 years later later so 54 is pretty violent 54 is looking violent let's look at 1964 what would your

presumption of 1964 january 1st be well uh as it turns out it's all local news mastrian requests court to transfer trial to duluth big trial trial. Nobody cares what it's about now. But there's a little story down at the bottom. Two U.S. officers are wounded by Viet Cong. And that, of course, is going to absolutely consume everything. Perhaps the story of most lasting significance is one little tucked away in the front page. Biologists join hunt for life on Mars. Hmm. Their tools, of course, were not as sophisticated as the ones we have today but they were trying they were looking it's entirely

possible that night that 2024 will be a pivotal year in the search for life on or the attempt to put life on mars that life being us if uh elon musk's rockets all work and his desire to get us there gathers esteem 1974 which of course is a horrible year area shivers in record cold is the major headline mayor quits gas prices up u.s to permit heating oil gas to rise one cent a nation four additional nations to raise crude oil prices brit British began three-day week to save energy. The temperatures were 20 below in Minneapolis, and the price of

everything was going up. So, yeah. 1974. We were pretty much sure that we weren't going to have any gas in the future. It was all going to run out in about four or five years. Of course, the idea that the prices would go up and that would spur more exploration and the rest of it.

No, we were all very much concerned about our alternative forms of energy. And we weren't coming up with any synth fuels. That was big. I remember that. But we were all going to get used to not being able to drive very much when those days were over. We were, of course, wrong. And I can't really think of any era other than the early seventies in which so many erroneous beliefs were adopted by so many.

It seemed to be, that was a starting point for people thinking incorrectly or in incorrect decisions. Because when you look at, you know, you look at 1944, well, what were they doing? They were fighting the Nazis. That's generally what you want to do. You look at 1934, and they were getting rid of the ridiculous criminal enabling prohibition and saying it was a civilized thing to enjoy a glass of whiskey. And well, my view, that's pretty much the way to go too. And in 1924, in the paper, I didn't note this, there was a note from Calvin Coolidge at the top telling everybody in America that we are a good, strong, prosperous nation. We believe in

ourselves and we believe in the future. And that's a good way to go. But in 74, everything seems to be just falling apart here. So look at 1984. Now, you would think, of course, 84, America's back, mourning in America and the rest of it, but you have no idea if you weren't there at the time. Excuse me. There was my cough button. I used to be in a radio station. I used to have a cough button. You have no idea how much the newspapers in 1984 were generally preaching doom and misery, that everything was bad because of that Ronnie Raygun guy, right? Well, 1984, Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 1st, it was a Sunday. Military takes over Nigeria.

No bloodshed reported in fifth coup since 1960. And you remember that military coups in Africa seem to be the sort of thing that would populate your paper about once every four or five months or so. Nobody paid any attention to them and nobody cared. Mondale calls for removing Marines from Lebanon without 45 days. This is what Walter Mondale would say. Force without purpose is weakness, not toughness. The vulnerability of our Marines undermines, not preserves our credibility.

Hmm. Well, we all know where that went. Let's see. Navy Flyer tells Jackson. Oh, the Syrians are treating him well, says Navy Flyer, who was talking to Jesse Jackson. The Flyer had been nabbed by the Syrians and Jesse Jackson, who in those days was a frequent intermediary element, had gone to speak to him. And then my favorite headline of all, which you probably can repeat in any newspaper for any place at any time, for whatever reason, I quote, growing reports may indicate growing problem.

Let me run that one by you again. Growing reports may indicate growing problem. Now, it has to do with sexual abuse of children, but that's kind of an evergreen, as we used to say. Come 1994, we're sort of getting into the common era, aren't we? 1994 seems to be part of the world in which we inhabit right now. South African leaders plead for calm because there was a shooting spree in Joburg. And then there's something about a local gambling racetrack. And that's about it for international news. Everything else is local because the paper had realized, oh oh we don't need to reprint the new york times we can tell you what's going on here so 94 if i remember correctly it's pretty good

we didn't think so at the time no we were under the boot of clinton we uh were worried about uh jack buddha knocking down our doors uh on behalf of the irs which is not an unreasonable thing to believe but we were going through this whole strange we were beginning perhaps the whole knocking down our doors on behalf of the IRS, which is not an unreasonable thing to believe, but we were going through this whole strange, we were beginning perhaps the whole strange 90s paranoia bit that you saw in the X-Files and Art Bell and all the rest of it, Y2K, and this feeling that something was coming. And it was, it just wasn't anything that we were expecting at all. The old black swan, or the two of of them appearing in the skies of New York,

which means we go to 2004, which is the last year I'm going to do here. And the headline is Americans party under orange alert, which is something that may not mean anything to anybody in the future, but at the time it did. This was three years on, and the main headline on New Year's Eve was still something of the sort of, we could be bombed, and we're looking around, and we're nervous about it. But no, nothing happened. Year after year would go by, and nothing would happen. And we would become accustomed to nothing happening. I don't know about you, though. I don't see any of these gatherings to this day without thinking something might happen. Why

wouldn't it? While we may have cleared the decks of some of the bad actors back in the day, they seem to reassemble and cohere and redouble their efforts to do something about us, Satan Magnus. Great. Also a big prediction here in the headlines of that paper. War and politics will co-star in the news of 2004 to come. You think? I think it's possible. And I think the same thing will go here.

We will be discussing the two wars ongoing in 2024. We'll be discussing politics, which will seem like an absolute, complete, and total mess, which it will be and often does, because it's only from the distance of time, when passions cool and the winners and the victors write the histories, that we tend to think that everything else moved smoothly. It doesn't. Although the machinations underfoot this year seem particularly egregious wouldn't you say but that's for a 2024 podcast with mr's may uh rob long and and peter robinson i had asked on the ricochet page whether or not anybody had any questions for me. And I think if they, let's check here and see what they said and see if there's anybody who went to the wrong page. See if anybody who does, you know, this is the point usually where I'd go to a spot, but we're giving a little break.

We're going spotless this week. I could probably from memory give you a bowl and branch for free. I could probably, from memory, tell you about all the wonderful spots that we've had in the past that have made Ricochet possible. But the thing is, it's really people like you who make Ricochet possible, who commit to every month ponying up a small amount of money to say, yes, I want this thing to go, and I want to be able to contribute. I want to be able to comment. That's the great thing. There's some science that I love and I go down into the discus and man, I tell you,

you just have an image of an awful lot of really unhappy people who just love to do nothing more than sidle into the room and issue a conspicuous piece of flatulence and then wander out as though some great witticism has been, has been has been deployed and it's the thing i like about a ricochet is that i am constantly abraded by other people's mulish disinclination to agree with me or what i have in my head so civil conversations with people that you've had civil conversations with for a long time and who think differently about things is a big plus as opposed to just marinating in the bath of everybody agreeing with everybody else. Oh, there are 14 comments on this. Let's see.

Well, Don Tillman, who spells his name backwards, says this is an opportunity for a record of the greatest number of segues in a podcast. I don't i've had one why because i haven't had to go to an ad and b because i haven't had the the the the steel bar in the spokes of rob long and his ability to derail any segment that i wanted to do jenna stocker who by the way is also writing for Center of American Experiment around here and is an absolutely fantastic writer. This is just great. I wanted to start writing 1940s mystery novels, too. I said, if you had a chat with a young James Lilacs about your life since childhood

and what you're up to now, what would he be most surprised to hear? That it all worked out. That it all worked out. That it all actually happened. I mean, that's the thing. I became what I wanted to become. I went where I wanted to go and I did what I wanted to do. I was a kid in Fargo reading the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper.

I had to go to the library to get it. It was the missive from the big city. It was the, it, it, it, it told me what was going on in the big town to which I'd only been a couple of times once as a small boy, when we paid an extraordinary visit, absolutely magical visit, really stayed at a Howard Johnson. I'd never seen one of these things before orange roof with that little turquoise top 31, I'm 34. How many flavors of ice cream? It was just that futuristic lobby building that you that that that you drove that dad went into to get the keys i

mean i'd never seen anything then we went to southdale and an enclosed mall the likes of which of course did not exist in fargo there were birds indoors in cages two-story cages in the winter singing oh it was great. I loved it. I wanted to go there. And every visit I paid to Minneapolis Next only reinforced that. And what I wanted to do was to write and I wanted to be in newspapers.

I wanted to write for the Minneapolis Star. So I wanted to be a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune when I was growing up. And I am. And that's, I don't know what more to say about that, except what a relief it all worked out. Am I disappointed that I wasn't challenged or didn't have

bigger ideas? What if I decided that I wanted to be a columnist for the New Yorker? Well, I don't want to be one of those. I'm happy here where I have an audience that surrounds me and has surrounded me since the early 80s when I started writing in the college papers. So that might be it. I might be surprised to learn that it worked out completely. Thank you, Jenna. John Stanley writes, the Vikings used to play in the Minnesota cold, but now the Vikings play indoors. Is the move indoors linked to a lack of Super Bowl appearances? No. I don't think so. I think it's

something else. I think it's a curse. It's a curse that hangs over us. There's something deep in the marrow of the Vikings fan that is unable to be happy, that knows that at the end of it, we'll never get there.

Never. It'll never happen. It was supposed to happen this year. It was supposed to happen this year. Kurt was great. JJ was supposed to have after last year. But we lost fourth straight and then, you know, went through four quarterbacks. So no, it's not going to happen.

Hi, John continues. Is the willingness of the fans to suffer outdoor in the cold a link to post-season victories i could be you know you look back at the old shots of the vikings playing in the in the snow and the snow gathering on the eyebrows and the caps of the people in the stands still cheering and you think they're a heartier people than we are, for God's sake. A, yes, perhaps so. B, they're drunk, though. Pretty much sure that everybody had a nip of some snowshoe grog or peppermint schnapps, some fine Phillips products in a flask that kept them warm. But yeah, that's the way football is meant to be played.

Bruisingly endured in the outdoor elements. But on the other hand, I've been inside the new stadium and it's absolutely gorgeous. And I've been there when it's cold outside and I'm happy to be warm inside. So yes, I'm a member of that debased, debauched, effete, indolent, sybaritic crowd that can no longer endure

the way things used to be. Wisconsin Con, WI Con said, you work for the star tribune are you and there are some other noteworthy and other while not worthy there are still at least local papers still in existence but the model doesn't seem viable nothing new there but are you seeing any viable replacements emerging uh no yes and no what we're trying to do here at the newspaper of course is to transition to all digital that's the future hate to say it sorry tree industry sorry delivery guys and i mean and sorry everybody who loves the newspaper, including me. But the move is to all digital. The problem, of course, is what's that word I'm looking for? Money. The problem is getting people to exchange goods in exchange, their money in exchange for our goods and services. Because I was on Reddit

the other day and somebody had posted a story from the link from the Star Tribune, a very important story from the Star Tribune, a story that only we had, if I believe correctly, that we had gone out and sent somebody. We paid somebody to go there and look and do and research and come back and write it. And then we had put that information on pieces of paper, handed them to a distribution system that put them all over town and also put them up online for something that we paid for. And the person said, you know, well, I'm not going to pay for that. I'm not going to pay for news. Okay. All right. I get that.

Now, if somebody doesn't want to pay for something because they don't like the bias or they don't like what's being written. Nobody's obligated to pay for anything. But if you would like local reporting, you generally have to pay somebody to go out and do it. The old days of relying on the blogosphere, that's not going to happen. The blogosphere is an adjunct. It's a necessary corrective. It's good. People do a lot. I mean, people do. There are people who have their niche and they do it. I'm not sure they do it as much as they used to before. But generally, no, you have to pay. And so you got to hand over some money.

Now, who do you hand over the money to? In our case, we are a brand. We've been around. We've been doing this for 150 years. And we have a track record. And we have the standards of objectivity. I know what people say, but I know what goes on here, and I know what we believe, and I know what the ideas and the ideals are. So the model that emerges is going to be two or three competing online sources, which will eventually require either A, you to pay, or B, somebody behind the scenes to pay for it, and you don't know who they are. So I like our model.

I do. And there's more to it. And, I mean, if you just have a – I'll just shut up about it. Just that's it. Wycon goes on to say, I get most of my local news from our local talk radio station. Their coverage is better than the local broadcast news and less biased than the local paper. Okay. I don't know where that is, but where do they get their news?

Where does the talk radio place get their news? I mean, in the old days, I remember when I worked for KSTP, KSTP AM 1500, our news department was run by John McDougall, who was an old TV guy, and Bruce Gordon also. And it's kind of a rip and read is what we, you know, the wire, you rip the wire off, you read the wire, you didn't have any guy, you didn't, we didn't, KSTB didn't have a lot of guys going on the field for the AM version, right? And not many talk radio stations have guys who go out and report. So if they do, great. He goes on to say, there's a need, but outside those dying papers and the patch, whatever that's considered, do you see anything on the horizon?

It seems like there's another reason people are more focused on D.C. versus their local cities and states as there just isn't the coverage of states. That's the problem. That's why you need local organizations devoted to covering your state. So pay for it, is all I'm saying.

Stad, I had said that my promise to you is no tiresome depressing recaps of the year and stad said but quote tiresome and depressing and quote is you at your best jk goes on to know do you miss doing national review cruises and are there plans to start them up again i know the nr institute still has them do i miss doing the national review cruises and are there plans to start them up again i know the nr institute still has them do i miss doing the national review cruises yeah i don't know um yes yes i do very much so because i love going on cruises can't get my wife to go anymore because she thinks she's she doesn't want to fall overboard uh although we might do some river cruise because I guess you can swim the shore. I loved them because I loved meeting everybody and talking late at night at the night owl session or at the sessions at the crow's nest bar. I love being in the Caribbean. I loved being part of the NR enterprise. I really did. It was great fun. And I may do it again. The Institute is

having them at Alaska. And the problem is, is that they need to get enough people. If they have enough people, they can bring on the second tier talents like myself. And as I said to them when I was there, went out to the National Review Christmas Party in New York, I said, you know, I do offer a full spectrum service package here. I'll talk a lot at dinner. I'll talk a lot in the evening. I actually will engage people at breakfast or on the ship anywhere, not just at the meetings.

Full customer service. I'm your customer service guy. We'll see what happens. Full-size Tabby. Thanks for asking, Stad. Send him a letter. Tell him you want me. Full-size Tabby says,

I would enjoy hearing some of your most memorable or interesting, surprising experiences covering the state fair over so many years. Huh. That's interesting. State Fair. I hadn't thought of that in a while. Mostly, it's these quotidian moments

that don't really add up to anything except for a deep and abiding love of the entire enterprise. I mean, I was never there when anything big happened. Was I? I don't think so. I wasn't there when the bull escaped and ran through the crowd and killed itself by dashing its head into a fire station. happen later. I have done dozens of shows where I stand on this little stage in the broiling sun

with a neon-hued yardstick trying to get the audience to pay attention to me. Those all blend into one. I mean, I'll have a guest who will talk about eating crickets, and I'll eat some cricket peanut butter. Another guest will come by with a flight of local beers and I'll drink those in the sun and then fall on my head. And all I remember about the fair is just its existence and then its non-existence. The fact that I usually show up the day before when everything is just getting set up and all the grass is green. And they're working the fryers and the smells of everything is just absolutely just wonderful. It's waiting to happen. It's fresh and it's new. And the,

the, you know, the sprinklers are making those are on the, the, the flowers glistening in the morning light. It's just, but it's not the fair cause there's not a lot of people there. There's not a lot of people walking around with stupid t-shirts and,

and, and expressions of expectation and small children and old people. And it's not the, and old people. It's not the fair without the people. And so when I show up and plunge into it, it's just what it was last year, and the year before, and the year before. Even though it's changed, somehow that place is gone. That place is a new sign. That's new.

It's still just the fair. And it goes back maybe to what I was saying before about that trip to Minneapolis, because now that I think about it, that first trip to Minneapolis, when I said the birds were in the cage in the winter inside, that wasn't true. Couldn't have been because it was fair time. We went to the fair. We went to see the twins at Met Stadium, but we went to the fair as well. And as a very small child, I stood there and looked up at this gopher in a turquoise and white sort of, you know, music man suit with a straw boater and his cane. And I associated him with a state fair, which I was just in love with, too, because I'd never seen anything of its magnitude. I'd never seen anything with so much noise and joy.

And the Fargo Fair, the North Dakota State Fair, happened about two blocks from my house. And it was smaller, as you can well imagine. And at night, I used to sit there on my steps in Fargo and hear the fair, the distant sound of it and the screams and maybe the chuffing of machinery and the rest of it. And I would swear that days after the fair was over in the summer, I could still hear it. So I always loved the fair. And to walk into the one in Minnesota was just the world. It was just the world as it should be with its wonderful fried foods and its corn dogs and its malts and its spin art. We would make spin art, which involved taking these little things of paint and putting them on a spinning piece of a spinning canvas. And the fumes were so carcinogenic that it's a miracle anybody from my generation made

a past 50. So I love the state fair and full-size tabby notes. One of the delights for me of state fairs is that they draw such a variety of people. And that's absolutely true. Here's everybody you don't see in the course of a day, course of a week, course of a month. This is Minnesota. These who are, this is what we are. Whatever you

think about your group, no. Steve C., how do you manage your time? You come across as very productive and yet appear to wander off into tangents a good deal of time. Me? What? Digressions? Well, since I have absolutely no set things to do over the course of a day. I have long ago set my own routines. My day goes on rails, and it always has. When I was back in college writing, people used to note, you're the only guy who says he's a writer who actually writes. That's my secret. That's what I do.

I make time. I would sit down every day. I'm going to do this now. I'm not going to do that then. I'm going to do that over there. This is my pinball time. This is my writing time. This is my walking time. And I stick to it. And sometimes it makes me incredibly unflexible and I get twitchy if I moved off the schedule. But Monday through Friday, life is on rails. The weekend, the chalks are off. Madness, madness. But that's how I do it.

I just and I have set and I do different things at different times so I don't get bored because I get bored very easily. Don G, who would like to remind us that C-A-G-W is a scam. And by that, I hope he means that the anthropogenic global warming, right? Goes back to W.I. Conn about the Star Tribune, me working there in notes. Young adults get their news from TikTok. I did not see that coming. Newspaper existed before the advertising model. Will they exist after the collapse of advertising?

Just a different kind of advertising. We still have ads. We still have lots of ads. We still have people go out there and sell them, and we still have people who use us as a medium to get to the people who want to buy this, that, or the other. That's great. We'll never be without ads. And that's one of the things that we got going for you. It just pains me to look at the ads of the old papers. And it's not just because there were so many. I mean, downtown had Dayton's department store, Donaldson's, Sears, Penny's.

It had Powers. It had all of these stores, each of which would take two, three pages out in a Sunday newspaper. The quantity of retail advertising in the old newspapers was astonishing. The newspaper on Sunday would be 370 pages thick. We're still the third largest Sunday newspaper in the country, but we don't have that.

But it wasn't just the big ads. It was the little tiny ones. I mean, the profusion of stuff, either for scab medication or scrofula or Qatar, moving on to a little tiny thing for Golden Guernsey milk and salt and all the rest. The eye could linger on the page of an ordinary newspaper on a Tuesday afternoon and find three dozen things to think about, and that was just one page. So we will exist after the collapse of advertising. But by the way, if you look back at the oldest newspapers, they have ads. I've looked at newspapers from the 18th century in England. They have ads.

If you look at newspapers from the 19th century in America, the front page is almost all ads. And so, yeah, they just didn't have a lot to sell. But Lord, all ads, shoes, books, sheep, metal things. things uh gld3 purveyor of splendid malpropisms that's great reagan member i should note uh says uh in response to my thing about being tiresome and depressing he says uh or she there are at least five of us ricochets on the alaska trip this coming summer can you weasel your way into being there i'm working on it i'm working on it the only problem is is i am also sort of kind of sort of obliged to do a show in England, I think. I'm booked at a theater. Another story. Stephen, best book and movie you have read and seen this year? I don't think of them in terms of years. And it may have been that the best movie that I saw this year was something

that was from three or four or five years ago. I mean, I see a lot of old movies. I was impressed with Parasite, for example. Takes me a while to get to some things. And that's the problem with that. And likewise, I think the best book that I read, I mean, how do you define best? Is it going to be Thomas Sowell's latest?

It should be, could be. It's great. Or is it a novel that I reread because I'd forgotten how it went and I was at the beach and I wanted a detective story? Or is it simply because it was a Roman detective story that I read at the beach earlier in Cancun that kept me interested, not for its vivacious prose, not for its spellbinding mystery, but simply because I knew the characters and liked them and wanted to spend some time with them in this sort of reimagined way of what we like to think Rome was.

It's great. You know, Roman mysteries, there's a whole big genre of it, and they each have their own different approach to it. I'm kind of tired of the guys who got to go back to the well every single time to do the whole caesar thing yeah we know and more interested in the ones that come along later this series that i was reading which is not particularly it's a great literature but it's a it's a marcus aurelius view of it's a very

very upstanding view of Rome. Kind of cool. Mythed white male when talking about the Vikings in the snow and the rest of it says that that working that playing outside thing hasn't worked well for the Packers. Lambeau Field, 30 consecutive years

of Hall of Fame quarterbacks and just three Super Bowl appearances. Shut up, shut up, go away. And then they go back and they're arguing about this, about that again. And then painter gene hi gene how are you gene by the way who um has been with us for a long time has been on

several ricochet cruises and as you all know is the uh well there's there was there was you know on a cruise you'd see jane and you'd see dave and i miss dave and i used to work with dave here at the paper not at this building back at work with Dave here at the paper. Not at this building. Back at the old building. Back at the old building under the old management, which is so stupid that they took a man of his extraordinary talents and put him to doing some rote thing, not drawing as much as he could have. Just ridiculous. All you need to know really about management sometimes is they would take newspaper management is that they would take a man, talent like dave metheny and say why don't you why don't you edit the the entertainment calendar fools anyway gene asks any chance of lilacs post of the week returning i guess so

let the powers that be decide that um i think we still have the sounder for it don't we yeah i think we do or did i make that one up did i it doesn't matter if you could pick what time period in the u.s to live in other than now what era would that be i ask because you are such a collector connoisseur commentator of americana in architecture um i have always thought all my life that i would have liked to have been born in 1900 and uh and live 89 years. I think it'd be fantastic. You'd be a teenager during World War I,

and so you'd be an idiot 12, 14-year-old kid who was excited about war news and following it and the rest of it, and it all seemed terribly modern and terribly terrifying. You'd be in your 20s during the 20s, which would be, I mean, come on, just the jazz, the Charleston, the hooch, the flasks, the Fitzgerald, who wouldn't? You'd be in your 30s and probably settled a bit during the depression, which wouldn't be that great. But you know, it's not like everybody went on the breadline. I mean, there was still a functioning economy. It was just crippled.

And it was a fascinating time, a time of rapid growing sophistication in a variety of mediums. If you look at the movies of the 30s compared to the 20s. If you look at the movies of the thirties compared to the twenties, you look at the ads of the thirties, the magazines, the rest compared to the twenties, we grew up fast in the thirties to be in your forties and the forties would be, well, you know, again, following the news and your fifties and your fifties. That's the thing. We think of the fifties as being, you know, again, happy days, carefree. No, no, no. It was a difficult time. It was neurotic. It was anxious. I mean,

yeah, it had a lot going for it. There was much more cultural capital and cultural solidity. But at the same time, I mean, for God's sakes, imagine being somebody who had been through the Depression in World War II, looking at juvenile delinquents, looking at all these hoods and these thugs and saying, what is the matter with you? You know what we went and you're acting like you were born in some awful, horrible world. Come on, sleep up, you beatnik losers. And then to endure the 60s and the 70s. And then finally, in your 80s and your waning years, your dotage live until the Berlin Wall came down and we won. There had to be somebody who was 89 years old who was watching the Berlin Wall come down and realize we won, and then they died. There has to be. There has to be somebody who either turned off the television and went to bed and never woke up, or somebody who was in a nursing home and was not going to go gentle into that dark night and held his trembling hand with a remote up at the television and the wall and saying, I'm not going to turn it off. I want to see how this comes up.

They're tearing down the Berlin Wall. We won. Good. I can go. It happened to somebody. It's a nice note to go out on. And it's a good note to go out on here, too. Thank you, everybody, for listening to this.

And remember that you never see what's coming when it comes. All the things we're worried about today are things that we probably won't be worried about next year. There will be something else. And to gird yourself for it and remember that some days bad things happen, to state the obvious and the banal. But then the arc of history,

which is a term that I hate because it doesn't exist, moves in such a way that you're watching the wall come down. And in our lifetimes, we will see the equivalent of that in some other sense. We can't see it coming now just any more than we could see it coming in 1984 or 82 or 79. But good things will happen because we're America, because we are optimistic, because we are still free, and because we are the last best hope of Western civilization. And on that cheerful note, which I entirely mean, I thank you for listening. I'm James Lallix. We'll be back next week with Rob and Long, probably. Rob and Long and Peter and Robinson to join the Ricochet podcast.

And as ever, I'll see you in the comments. Not at Ricochet 5.0, because it's coming. But some point this year, we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 5.0. But for now, Happy New Year. Ricochet. Join the conversation.