Where We Are This Week

The currency of memory, the presidential debate, and the latest Tucker Carlson controversy and why we need heroes.

As kids, we spent a lot of time with our parents. A lot of time at home, a lot of time in the car, a lot of time outside — doing whatever, you know, just doing something. We were always doing something.

My mom messaged me earlier this week telling me that she and my dad were sitting in the car, watching the planes at the airport. We used to do that as a family; they took my niece at least once a week to our small airport by the baseball parks to watch the little planes take off and land.

She said she only wished her two little kids were there watching with them; necks craned in the backseats.

As we kids get older, we do less together. No more car rides, fewer hikes, less basketball in the driveway.

I think about that aspect of life a lot; the tragedy that you can’t do some things forever, the depressing truth that there’s a last time for everything.

In Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, a book that’s part concentration camp memoir, part psychiatric dissertation, he addresses the transitory nature of life and our propensity to grieve for the time gone by.

“I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment,” he writes. “They are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from the transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.”

Every day this week, I’ve watched my little girl ride her first bike. She can pick her feet up, balance, and coast down our driveway. Seeing her accomplish something new is a proud moment for her father — especially one for whom bicycles played such a large part in his childhood.

Already, I’m considering the time when I don’t have to catch her when she’s going too fast. Already, I’m thinking about the time when she doesn’t hold my hand to cross the road. Already, I think the days of her falling asleep in the middle of the woods on my back might be gone; traded for her stubbornly climbing the rocks and walking the trails herself.

It’s hard not to be sad about those losses, but as Frankl suggests, they’re nothing of the sort. Nothing can erase the memories we’ve already made; the realities plucked from the ether and recorded into the eternal ledger.

What’s gone can’t be repeated but that’s not to say it can’t be revisited.

“Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with,” he continues, “I should say having been is the surest kind of being.”

The future is always being warped and altered, forever looming in the out-of-reach distance. The past, however, has been sheltered from the buffeting winds of time and is granted the dignity of having existed.

For no matter how many more times I sit in the back of my parents’ car to watch the planes or how many more times I get to watch my daughter wobble on her bike, those moments have been converted from the possible to the absolute, and are mine, ours, forever.

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The Debate’s Split Decision

First of all, I’m only writing about the debate because I feel like I have to.

We’re now 53 days away from the election and we’ve only had one debate between the presidential candidates. We’re now 53 days away from the election and we’ve only had one debate between the presidential candidates.

That’s not a typo, I just typed it twice.

Donald Trump refused to debate his primary opponents but has managed two on-stage appearances. Kamala Harris stabbed Joe Biden in the back Brutus-style so she ‘missed out’ on the first debate leaving her with just one lone performance.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. The Republic is alive and well.

After Tuesday night, Donald Trump announced he would not be participating in a second debate — so, I hope you greedy little hippies got enough political discourse for one election cycle because we’re going to be riding on fumes for the next two months.

I hate these debates for a lot of reasons — not least of which is the fact that I feel the need to defend Donald Trump.

In his declaration that Tuesday night was his one and only verbal joust with Kamala Harris, he said that only a ‘prizefighter’ who loses immediately requests a rematch. This leads one to infer that Donald Trump believes he won — surprise, surprise.

Unfortunately, however, I don’t think the night was his. It wasn’t a knockout or submission by Harris by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m thinking the judges had her up on their scorecards.

The debate platform isn’t for readers (or writers) of this newsletter. It isn’t for anyone who’s shooting up that straight dope on a weekly or daily basis. It’s for the normie who’s only just now realizing they’ll have something to do on the first Tuesday of November this year.

Many of Trump’s digs on Harris were like inside jokes for the right side of the political aisle. He didn’t say ‘tax on tips,’ he just alluded to it; he didn’t quote Harris’ missteps or radicalism, he just pointed in that direction. Maybe his habit of addressing an audience that hangs on his every word is a hindrance in this setting. The television viewer is different than the rally-goer, they don’t know the punchlines. They don’t know the intricacies of every knock-knock joke.

In general, the undecided voter who is relying on debate performances to determine which way they’ll go isn’t an erudite observer, they’re a retail shopper. They don’t know what they want, you have to spell it out for them. You have to put it right in the shop window.

When it comes to foreign policy, what I think was surprisingly Donald Trump’s most successful domain as President, the average American voter isn’t familiar with the ways in which Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine or Hamas wouldn’t have attacked Israel if Donald Trump was president.

And, honestly, when you hear it from a known braggart like him, it’s not very believable — despite the fact that it’s objectively most likely true.

Trump is a known quantity and has a relatively low ceiling for amassing political support from the middle or across the aisle; this is evinced by his steady polling throughout the tumult of this election cycle — his own assassination attempt, Biden’s withdrawal, Kamala’s coronation, etc. Every moment that Kamala Harris isn’t falling apart on stage is a loss for the Republican Party.

Unfortunately for the red team, it wasn’t even a fair fight. Repeatedly, the ABC ‘moderators’ jumped in to fact-check the former president and, at times, debated him outright. Several times Harris was given what would have been challenging questions if they hadn’t been laden with caveats from a sympathetic interlocutor.

The moderators also left Harris’ mic hot for several exchanges, allowing her to fight her opponent from the clinch; delivering a few sharp elbows when decorum eroded into argument.

In political terms, it wasn’t a prizefight. It was a three-on-one alleyway knifing. Calling it a debate is reprehensible.

The whole thing is a sham but when it’s all you’ve got, it’s all you’ve got. Trump will have to do better next time. No bragging, no reference to Haitian immigrants eating pets — and I can’t stress this one enough — no discussion about rally size.

But, we already know there won’t be another. A full four years of discourse crammed into one, disappointing, 90-minute verbal assault on informed consent.

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The World’s Greatest Ahistorian

Ask France who the villain was. Or Poland. Or the Soviet Union. Or the Jews. Or the Gypsies. Or the English. Or the Americans.

Last week, Tucker Carlson had a Darryl Cooper on his podcast. Cooper describes himself as an amateur historian and runs a history-themed podcast called Martyr Made. His twitter account is popular amongst an alternatively disposed right-leaning audience.

Cooper was introduced by Carlson as ‘the most important’ and ‘most honest’ historian of our times. Cooper then went on to claim that it was Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, who was the real villain of WWII.

Cooper goes on for two hours in front of an agreeable audience of one in Carlson where he bravely questions the official narrative of World War II. He says that Churchill was a warmonger and was itching to embroil the Allied Forces in a global conflict — that if he had let sleeping dogs (who had already invaded Poland, those sleepy pups!) lie, Germany would never have invaded France or the Soviet Union.

Of course, it’s ahistorical. The Third Reich and the former German Empire felt as if they had gotten a raw deal at the Treaty of Versailles. It’s also idiotic as for centuries the German Empire had made a habit of conquest and territorial control of places that were decidedly not theirs.

Cooper went on to say that the ‘millions and millions’ of deaths of ‘prisoners’ in Germany were accidents; that Hitler had no coherent plan for the war. Didn’t we just do this last week?

Cooper, who has previously claimed that France would have been better off under Hitler than under the current leadership that led to that dreadful opening ceremonies Olympic performance, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and has repeatedly engaged in antisemitism on X, never explicitly mentioned the Holocaust when he was talking about those accidental deaths.

But, he did say ‘millions and millions’ of deaths of prisoners, foreign, political, and domestic. Soviet prisoners of war only amounted to a little over a million in number so how is his math adding up?

And how could one construe the rounding-up, the mass incarceration of, and the mass execution of six million Jews as anything but intentional?

‘Whoops, Hanz! We sent those dirty Jews to the gas chambers, not the showers!’

‘That’s the third time this week!’ the other would reply.

Rewriting the history of WWII and the heroics of the West by conservative talking heads like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson — two of the most popular podcasts in the world — is the same old ‘just asking questions’ routine.

It’s the Right’s 1619 Project. Bogus history fueled by ideology.

Since then, Tucker Carlson has whined on Charlie Kirk’s show, that he was just letting the guy talk because he has some ‘interesting’, ‘possibly controversial’ viewpoints — and that he’d much rather live in a society where you have the freedom to say those things than have your speech be censored.

Yes. Duh.

That’s quite the motte-and-bailey routine from Carlson; calling him America’s most important historian then saying ‘I was just letting him talk and I’m now I’m getting cancelled!’ Sudden laughter.

Criticism isn’t cancellation. Everyone who was outraged by the 1619 Project was justified, and all vocal critique and disgust were warranted. The same applies for this instance.

Just when you think conservatives might have a little momentum, they shoot themselves in the foot with arguably the most influential voice in right-wing politics for the last 15 years. Not everything is to be torn apart, not every established narrative is false.

Is the West perfect? No. Certainly, FDR and Churchill weren’t. Are they historical figures that are beyond reproach? Of course, not. But we need heroes.

The world was made better by the Declaration of Independence; Thomas Jefferson’s potential indiscretions pale in comparison to his contribution to the modern world. Winston Churchill valiantly led the West into a war with a tyrant without becoming one himself.

If they’re not heroes, then our story isn’t worth telling. If they’re not good enough to be heroes, flaws and all, then who among us are? If they’re not heroes, then our story isn’t one with telling.

Then the question becomes: what story is being told in its place?

To a better next week,

Cheers,

~FDA