Firehose #152: What We Did on Our Summer Vacations

Also: Second Sunday penciled in for noon ET

One of the best perks for being a paying subscriber to The Fifth Column is that you usually get to join our monthly Zoom conversations on the Second Sunday of each month. (Sometimes we do limit access to those who subscribe at the Never Fly Coach level, as was originally promised; but 90 percent of the time it’s for anyone who pays and shows up.) These meetups, descendants of our Covid-era lifeline convos (for everyone involved, believe me), typically feature weird pets, delightful babies, an astonishingly high percentage of electric guitars, the occasional live painting, filibusters on crypto, Moynihan calling on attractive ladies, some frankly hot listener gay charisma … and just a whole lotta memorable moments and long-term connections forged. Why don’t some of you freeballers sign up for a month, try it out, see whether it’s worth it? Tomorrow’s Second Sunday is tentatively scheduled for noon ET.

So yeah, we took a week off, though have been filling up the scoreboard since. What did we see out there in the wild? As discussed on Episode #514, we saw America, bay-bee!

Ben Dreyfuss is right: America’s the best, regardless of stupid politics, and let’s all go out and see more of it, mmmkay? Flag thus waved, let’s get to the week that was:

* Really? We’re just doing Epstein for the duration? Well, let’s send Herr Moynihan to talk sexcrime Friday with old pal Ethan Strauss (veteran of #185, #333, #383, Members Only #151, #408) on Random Offense:

* On Thursday, I wrote a Reason piece pegged to Wednesday’s NYC mayoral endorsement by the United Federation of Teachers, under the headline, “The People Who Wrecked N.Y. Schools Love Zohran Mamdani: Democrats are politicking as if their COVID-era derangements don't matter.” Here’s a chunk:

Zohran Mamdani favors the UFT's already aggressive wish list but wants to go even further than his vote-grubbing competitors and endorsement-wielding predecessors by advocating the end of mayoral control over the Department of Education, replaced by an alphabet soup of "co-governance" entities that would inevitably be controlled or heavily influenced by—you guessed it!—the teachers union. Not even Bill de Blasio, the only UFT endorsee to win the city's top slot during the past 35 years, went that far.

Befitting someone who is not just a Democrat, but a democratic socialist, sometimes Mamdani's education policy positions land to the left of the Democratic Party–supporting union. The UFT, for example, wants to de-emphasize but still retain the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), which historically has determined which students are admitted to eight of the city's nine elite public high schools. As my colleague Emma Camp noted last month, Mamdani, a graduate from one of those schools and a former SHSAT tutor, said in 2022 that he wants to abolish the test altogether, in the name of desegregation. […]

Think of Mamdani's educational approach as containing two sharp prongs of a large pitchfork: On the left is his progressive/millennial antiracism/desegregation, which goes further than the union feels comfortable in attempting to dismantle any perceived bastion of exclusionary privilege. On the right is his big-government commitment to giving teachers even more of what they want than traditional Democrats will.

Basically, it's a rerun of NYC educational policy circa 2019–21, albeit with a tad more social media pizazz. But here's the problem with that particular one-two punch of wokeness and union deference: We tried that during and after the challenge of COVID, and the failure was so profound that it wrecked New York schools.

* Speaking of quirky New York head-tilters, Moynihan on his Report Thursday talked a lot about David Byrne and the Talking Heads with Jonathan Gould, author of the new Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York scene that transformed rock:

* Didja see the new superhero movie, the one with arch-villain Matt Taibbi?

Much dumb crap has been spurted about the movie’s immigration politics (and Ukraine/Russia! And…Israel/Gaza??); if you insist on imbibing such theatrics, allow me to recommend the aforementioned Mr. Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, M.O. #129, M.O. #140, #392 & M.O. #180). Spoilers-hinting excerpt:

[I]n America—at least in theory—you are not defined by the sins of your father. You don’t have to be a shoemaker because your father was a shoemaker. You don’t have to be a supremacist because your father was a supremacist. You don’t have to carry forward the violence, or the ideology, or the bloodline. You can walk away from it. You can choose something else.

And that’s the most radical promise of the American experiment: You can be free—not just in speech, or in worship, or in trade. You can be free from your inheritance.

Superman doesn’t need to make a pact to end his bloodline. He just needs to believe in something better. And raise the next generation with those values.

That’s not assimilation as erasure. That’s assimilation as liberation.

That’s what makes the themes of this Superman story very American, pro-immigrant, and utterly unfashionable.

We’ve lost the ability to distinguish between confidence and cruelty. Expecting immigrants to adopt liberal civic norms used to be seen as a sign of belief in the system. Now it’s treated like an act of violence. But civic assimilation isn’t oppression. It’s how pluralistic societies function without falling apart.

* Moar Moynihan: On Tuesday, he interviewed Malcolm Bricklin, “The man who brought the Yugo to America.”

* Reminder that The Reason Roundtable is taping live at The Village Underground in NYC on July 15; get your tickets here. Also, this week I shall finalize details of our weekday meetup at the July 23 Mets-Angels game…. And please clear some NYC calendar space for July 29.

* Comment of the Week comes from MacKenzie Madison Murphy:

Matt buying a replacement car:

Apologies for the abbreviated nature of this Firehose; vacation cobwebs + summer heat + a 5,700-word Mailbucket, etc. Walkoff comes from the wonderful farewell tribute to the immortal Black Sabbath: