Firehose #158: Half a Mile from the County Fair

Also: We’re all Lemmy now

A critical component of your pre-Semiquincentennial 1,500 Mile Drive Through America challenge is the local county fair. Did you go to it? Did you miss it? No matter: Try the next county over, and if necessary, the one over from that. Corn dogs and pig races and Nirvana shirts and ATV tents and fancy chickens and tall-ass cows and weathered carnies and taxidermied bobcats and machine-gun booths and milkshake lines and babies galore. Even if you miss Cheap Trick on opening night, you can always spin Live at Budokan back home. Good luck staying mad at Americans after all that.

* Birthday boy Michael C. Moynihan this past week interviewed the great Larry Charles – Seinfield writer, director of Borat (and Masked and Anonymous!), and author of the new memoir, Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter:

* Ol’ Hollywood also brought onto his Report the star of the lostest of all Fifth Column Lost Episodes, criminologist Peter Moskos. The two talked about Moskos’s recent book, Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop:

* Pursuant to our conversation in Episode #520, I wrote a Reason piece this past week headlined “Trump: The Erratic but Potentially Effective Peacemaker.” Here’s one paragraph:

Intractable problems tend to get that way for a reason, as do leadership/followership ruts. If and when the path to this Trumpian process toward peace breaks down, the what-next questions have implications far beyond the millions of Ukrainians and Russians grievously affected by the ongoing carnage. The Trump administration, as the formerly hawkish Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated explicitly, is accelerating beyond the post–Cold War unipolar moment into a more competitive dynamic where regional powers extend spheres of influence. Are Europeans, eight decades after World War II, finally ready to embrace a starring role in their own damned neighborhood?

* Cleansing Lemmy break. After Members Only #272, alert listener Nolan G. sent in an email with the subject line, “Is your dad Lemmy Kilmister?” Intrigued, we read on:

Fellas,

The first 30 minutes of this podcast (metal, Kmele’s proportion predilections) made me think of a great clip of Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister answering fan mail that YouTube fed me years ago. In the clip (linked below), Lemmy reads a letter from a black kid who loves metal and gets shit from his friends and family for it. His response somehow boils the entire Fifth Column podcast down into a 60-second soundbite, complete with flashes of each of your individual personalities. I’ll leave you to guess which of you is represented where in the following lines: “You cannot be just one color. If the bloody thing is ever going to work out properly, then we all have to intermarry and screw each other blind and get to be coffee-ish…Should you be penalized for giving people joy? Screw ‘em!”

Anyway, when did each of your moms [redacted]?

Here’s the clip:

* Been a heavy week for some past Fifth Column guests. Most notoriously, former national security advisor John Bolton, who we conversed with five months back in #493, had his house raided by the FBI, reportedly in connection with the retention of classified documents. Olivia Reingold (#453) had a breakout piece for The Free Press about the underlying medical conditions of the Gaza children whose photographs were used to illustrate famine stories … and then experienced the kind of backlash you might expect. And, OK, so this is more hilarious than heavy, but our friend Jamie Kirchick (#55, #347, #394) wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times titled “Why Epstein’s Furious Grip on Washington Holds,” in which he went after a half-dozen politician-touted conspiracy theories, and one of the singled-out pols, Rep. Ro Khanna, reacted with a Twitter meltdown, saying that Jamie’s “real anger with me is I have called for a Palestinian state,” and calling him “Mr Chick.” (The latter, frankly, will stick.)

* Speaking of the Old Gray Lady, our pal Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427) and his Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) got the Strange New Respect treatment from the Paper of Record, with the telling headline/subhed combo of, “A Critic of Universities Is Rallying to Defend Them in the Trump Era: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has long been a critic of progressive campus culture. Now it’s taking on new, and surprising, targets.” Some bits I found of interest:

FIRE, based in Philadelphia, has an annual budget of about $32.3 million and a staff of 120, including a litigation department that will soon number 20 lawyers. But it files relatively few lawsuits, instead often relying on strongly worded letters, campus campaigns and media outreach.

“FIRE’s real innovation was realizing you could fight a lot more cases in public opinion than in court of law,” Lukianoff said in a video interview from its satellite office in Washington. “It’s much cheaper and faster.” […]

FIRE’s influence has soared. Donations from individuals and foundations grew from $7.2 million in 2015 to $36.5 million in the fiscal year just ended. But [FIRE’s role publicizing a controversy involving Halloween costumes at Yale] left lingering hard feelings at Yale and other campuses, where some still resent what they see as a willingness to demonize progressive students who, in the end, were exercising free speech.

Jason Stanley, a philosopher who recently left Yale for the University of Toronto, said FIRE helped create a road map for the Trump administration’s current campaign against higher education. “The moral panic about leftism on universities is largely their fault,” he said. […]

Far from being a chastening moment for FIRE, Lukianoff said the Trump administration’s current “war” on Harvard and other elite universities has vindicated its critique.

“If they’d listened to us 15 years ago, none of this would be happening,” Lukianoff said.

[Jason Stanley, before exchanging the county fairs of America for the land acknowledgements of Canada, joined us in November 2020 on Episode #210.]

* This is the “ancient Chinese secret” commercial referenced in #520:

* Comment of the Week comes from Jim McFadden:

Here’s a story for Kmele: When I was 20 years old, I was in (unrequited) love with a girl at my college. She loved another. We both attended a late-night guitar pull on our campus quad one night during finals week where the target of her (also unrequited) love played several songs. As she and I walked back to our dorm, she told me, “l just love a guy who can play guitar!” Showing an unusual amount of discipline for me at that age, I waited two days until I completed all my finals before lighting out for a guitar store and spending all the money I had on a guitar. This was the only summer during high school/college in which I didn’t work - spent the whole summer learning to play James Taylor and Kris Kristofferson songs (this was the ‘70s). Drove my dad up the wall. First day of the next school year, I showed up at her dorm room and proceeded to serenade her with my entire set list. Once I was done, she said “very nice”, and I realized it wasn’t that she loved any guy who played guitar - she loved that THAT guy could play guitar.

The lesson here is that you can definitely learn James Taylor songs as a beginner if you are hormonally driven to do so.

Walkoff song, I learned this Friday night, peaked at #62 in the charts. AYFKM?