Where We Are This Week

Valentine's Day, Tucker goes to Moscow, Mayorkas gets impeached, and an 80-years-late movie review.

Love and Valentine’s Day have nothing to do with each other. I love the former and despise the latter. The first Valentine’s Day my wife and I spent together, I bought her concert tickets and she bought me a candy bar.

There is no compulsion between us to purchase boxes of chocolates or giant teddy bears (thank goodness) and for a while, we spent our nights eating at Waffle House. That was until the trend caught on, and Waffle House started dressing their tables with white tablecloths and little vases of flowers. It was cute and all, sure, but it really defeated the purpose of going there to be contrarian - as we so love to be.

I don’t hate Valentine’s Day because it celebrates love. I hate Valentine’s Day because it commoditizes love. It’s the epitome of our pop culture. Take, for instance, Alicia Keys, and her biggest hit ‘If I Ain’t Got You’; a song that won’t be written in 2024. I hesitate to call it ‘timeless’ because the lyrical content is so dissonant from the ad campaigns of the biggest hits today that it feels like it’s from an entirely different generation.

Keys’ eschews material goods for the love of her partner. ‘Everything means nothing, if I ain’t got you.’ Oh my gosh, how lame would it be if someone unironically sang that today?

Modern Lovers

We didn’t watch the Super Bowl at our house, but we did tune in to see the halftime show. Alicia Keys made a brief appearance during Usher’s performance to sing a few bars of maybe the greatest pop love song of the 2000s. I don’t understand what happened to her music after that record, but I’ll always appreciate her for her lyrics and unmatched vocal performance on that song.

Performing that song in the middle of an event specifically made to sell you things you don’t need and to rake in untold sums of money is the juxtaposition that will have been lost on 90% of the audience. ‘If I Ain’t Got You’ is anathema to anything you hear on Top 40 today; it’s almost unbelievable the song is only twenty years old.

Being in love is infinitely cooler than what’s in your wallet. And maybe, being in love and listening to that song as loud as possible is even cooler than that.

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The Putin Interview

Last Thursday evening, moments after I finished writing this column, I watched Tucker Carlson interview Russian President Vladimir Putin. Much fuss had been made over the fact that Carlson would even dare to interview the war criminal Putin which is odd because I thought that was the job of journalists.

Putin, since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has proved to be an elusive figure to Western media, so certainly the interview piqued my interest. Unfortunately, however, I wouldn’t characterize the conversation as particularly edifying. Putin trotted out the same talking points and non-answers I would have expected over 2+ hours.

Before I mention any substance of the interview, there’s something else I’d like to discuss: how to spot propaganda. If Putin has been such a hard figure to pin down for an interview, why now? And why Tucker Carlson?

Of course, to answer either of these is speculative but we’ll give it a shot. I’ve actually overplayed my hand here. I’ve no clue as to why now Putin grants an interview with a Western journalist. Russia is winning the war in Ukraine and presumably, holds all the cards in a negotiation. Moving on.

Tucker Carlson, before the interview, states that no other Western journalist has even tried to interview the Russian President since the beginning of the war. This is simply untrue and has been refuted by major news outlets and Putin’s spokesperson alike. All other comers except for the former Fox News host received a rejection in response to their requests yet Carlson is invited into the Kremlin for an intimate conversation.

Putin, and his team, must believe that Carlson’s audience is the most amenable to his message of all Western outlets. While Carlson isn’t exactly a Putin apologist, the isolationist and pseudo-anti-American tendencies of the new right might offer a soft landing for the former KGB officer’s message.

That being said, I was pleasantly surprised at how well Carlson conducted the interview. He allowed Putin to express himself at length and pushed back a handful of times in requests for clarification or to point out contradictions. What was at the very top of my wishlist for this interview was Carlson to press Putin on his jailing of WSJ Evan Gershkovich which he did - admirably, I might add.

Maybe the only surprising tidbit of information that Putin offered was his reasoning for invading Ukraine in 2022. He cited NATO aggression and expansion, of course, but the other reason - the one he spent thirty minutes on its preamble - was that Ukraine was not a legitimate country; that it was predominantly comprised of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers, and therefore he implied, belonged to Russia - or at least those parts.

I’ve maintained that I find it implausible that Putin would risk nuclear war by invading a NATO country, but Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia all share those things in common with Ukraine as well as all being former Soviet states. So, while, I still don’t expect new incursions anytime soon, his reasoning certainly didn’t rule it out.

The problems I had with the interview weren’t until the comments Carlson made afterward. Speaking with an Egyptian journalist, Carlson was asked why he didn’t press Putin on his record of political killings and assassinations.

"Because those are covered and because I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following: that every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people. Sorry, that's why I wouldn't want to be a leader," Carlson said.

It’s fine to me that Tucker didn’t ask the question, that wasn’t what the interview was about. And yes, American leaders and special ops have done some appalling things, and if we weren’t grading on a curve, every nation would fail the test miserably. Even still, America still miles ahead of Russia.

Although, that’s not an accolade of which to be too proud.

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Impeachment Fever

United States Congress is now handing out more impeachments than Oprah gave away free houses. You get impeached and you get impeached! Everyone! Check under your chair.

In the latest of performative politics, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas - or Cuban Jeff Bezos as he’s known in some circles - was impeached in a narrow 214 -213 vote on Tuesday. With the impeachment vote, Mayorkas becomes, for his handling of illegal immigration at the Southern border, the first-ever presidential cabinet member to be impeached. So, I suppose congratulations are in order.

This tops my list of things that don’t matter; it doesn’t matter for three reasons. One: Mayorkas has not engaged in, nor is he being accused of criminal conduct. Second: Mayorkas isn’t crafting border policy, he’s simply enacting the will of his boss, Joe Biden. Third: Democrats control the Senate. There is absolutely no way the Senate spends more than thirty seconds counting the votes against confirming the secretary’s impeachment.

So, why did Republicans do it? Revenge of course! “My name is Mike Johnson. You impeached my President. Prepare to die,” he was heard saying on Capitol Hill.

Democrats did certainly lower the bar with their pair of impeachments of former President Donald Trump, so it’s apparent that Republicans have taken notes and adjusted their tactics to the new rules of the game. It’s understandable but, boy, if it isn’t a massive waste of time.

A few weeks ago, there was a congressional hearing about Hunter Biden where he chose to make a surprise hearing. What was going to be a mundane day in Congress turned into a wrestling match for the microphone. Everyone from Nancy Mace to Marjorie Taylor Green was clamoring to get their shot at the President’s son since the press was now present. It was irrelevant what they were there to discuss originally, this was an opportunity to go viral.

Mace called Hunter Biden the face of white privilege while MTG insisted that he was scared of her. If you recall, there were still not one but two wars going on at the time alongside a crisis at the border. Yet, these are the displays they’d rather be acting out - hoping to get a clip so that they can send it out in their next fundraising campaign.

This is what American politics has been reduced to. Why should it matter that your impeachment efforts will inevitably be shot down by the opposition-controlled Senate (Trump’s impeachments similarly failed thanks to a Republican majority in the upper chamber) when they hit you first?

I used to advocate for Republicans - or Democrats, whoever’s turn it was - to take the high road. I believe it was Michele Obama who said, “When they go low, we go to Netflix.” But I’ve since shed my naive optimism that maturity will ever be represented at the federal level.

Impeaching Mayorkas does nothing to improve the situation in Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico. It doesn’t even seek to hold the responsible party accountable for their policies. All it does is evince the fact that we don’t have a government, we have a few hundred men and women playing Survivor in business attire.

To their credit, however, three Republicans joined the Democrats in voting against Mayorkas’ articles of impeachment. Representatives Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, and Tom McClintock of California voted in the negative and cautioned other members of Congress that impeaching a cabinet official for doing their job as instructed sets a dangerous precedent.

“We have to stop using these impeachments — if you have policy differences, we have other tools,” Buck said. He continued by saying that impeachment has “become a partisan game that, when it comes to constitutional interpretation, really should be above this.”

Good for them, those losers. They’ll be the first voted off the island.

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Make Propaganda Great Again

Last year, I read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow. The book wasn’t bad. The plot was a little contrived; the main character had been in the aristocracy of imperial Russia and instead of being shot for that crime - like the rest of his comrades - had been sentenced to live out the rest of his days confined in the Hotel Metropol in the newly formed Soviet Union.

The author took great pleasure in using the opportunity to expound upon the greatest of Russian exports in culture and art throughout the novel. As someone who likes Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky (I didn’t even have to look up how to spell their names) that part was fun. What I didn’t expect, however, was to be introduced to the spectacular American piece of cinema that is Casablanca.

Of course, I’d heard about it growing up. I remember my sister, who consumed movies from that period as if she were a member of the silent generation herself, watching it. Other than that, though, it had gone completely under the radar.

If you’re unfamiliar, the movie takes place in 1941, in Casablanca, Morocco (then occupied by France), and centers upon an American named Rick who runs a local watering hole. In the film, played by Humphrey Bogart, Rick, who historically had always remained neutral in contentious matters, must choose between the woman he loves (Ingrid Bergman), and helping her husband flee the clutches of Nazi Germany.

Not to spoil anything from an 82-year-old movie, but, naturally, good old Ame-RICK-an - as pointed out by my brother-in-law - does the noble thing; he lets go of the woman he loves (self-interest) and joins the resistance to the Nazi regime by helping her husband escape (self-sacrifice).

The movie came out in 1942, one year after America entered World War II, and is pure, unadulterated American propaganda. Germans are bad, the French are fickle and pitiable, and the United States is strong, collected, and heroic.

There’s a trend in modern political thought to rewrite history. With Oppenheimer having come out this summer, everyone from Tucker Carlson to Nicole Hannah Jones has come out with their own half-baked hot takes about how America’s actions (like the bombing of Dresden or the nukes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) during WWII were reprehensible. It goes without saying that civilian death is a tragedy worth avoiding at all costs, but only the laziest of armchair historians could suggest that the actions taken by the Allied Powers weren’t an understandable conclusion given the

circumstances.

It’s easy to suggest there must have been a more peaceable solution when you’re advocating for it outside of a concentration camp or a bombed-out London.

Yes, WWII, as all historical events do, deserves a nuanced telling, yet, I have no reservations about the pure pro-American sentiment in Casablanca.

Leaving the politics aside for a moment, from a cultural standpoint, I can’t help but be jealous. The film's production is Hollywood magic from back when the place still had some to spare. It doesn’t take a discerning viewer to tell that the movie is not, in fact, shot on-site in Morocco but that’s not the point. The setting isn’t the star of the film, the characters are - or rather, the moral positions they represent. The set design itself is akin to a theater production, it’s not immersion that the production was after but the idea that if you paint part of the picture, the audience will fill in the rest.

Casablanca manages to assert moral clarity on the debate of America’s role in the world - and the call for man to rise above his self-interest - without ever condescending to the audience. This, in particular, is in sharp contrast to the majority of cinema today. In just over an hour and a half, the filmmakers have made their case, and you’re imploring Bogart’s character to do the right thing the moment they set foot on the runway.

Let’s talk about the cast. Humphrey Bogart made clear to me how tiresome the modern leading man is - the Timothée Chalamets and Jeremy Allen Whites of the world. They’re all made to be effete and brooding, products of an overly decadent and sympathetic society. You’re made to feel sorry for their inadequacies and fragility, not to demand for them to sublimate into something greater. Not, Bogart, though.

Rick makes no apologies for his aloofness and asks for no pity from the audience. He may be a victim of circumstance (falling for a married woman, having the wrong politics, etc.) but seeks no retribution. Rick doesn’t pontificate on the decision he’s forced to make nor does he react in petulance that he’s been offered the chance to make his own destiny. Resolute and laconic, he deliberates just long enough to ensure that he makes the right decision.

Lastly, and not to sound too much like my mother, it was so refreshing to watch what essentially boils down to a romance movie with no sexually explicit content. Modern Hollywood must think it’s mandatory for an actress to appear nude in order for you to empathize with the character. Sex is seldom a plot catalyst yet it is this ubiquitous feature of every blockbuster picture that comes out these days.

Yes, Ingrid Bergman was alluring. No, I didn’t need to see her topless to be convinced of that fact. That the main characters were able to maintain such dignity and mystery throughout the film despite their compromising situation is what makes the plot inspiring.

It’s a story at once universal and uniquely American. The United States is in the singular position, both due to our geographical isolation and relative independence, that we can abstain from any global or regional conflict. Due to our hegemonic power, however, we’re often entrusted with the fates of our fellow nations. Like Rick and the letters of transit he was given from Ugarte, neutrality was never a viable option. Not when the lives of Ilsa, the love of his life, and Victor Laszlo, a prominent figure in the resistance, hung in the balance.

To a better next week,

Here’s looking at you, kid,

FDA