Mailbucket #6: We Can’t Help You
Also: The perils of explaining a joke
Dig if you will this picture: We get more good long emails than we can possibly process on our weekly paying-subscriber Members Only episodes, so we periodically break out the ‘Bucket around these parts and see what you pour in. (Previous iterations: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5.) And though we typically aim to be helpful, honesty compels the realization that sometimes aid is beyond our grasp.
From: Kathleen
Subject: Hoping You Can Help
Date: May 27, 2024
Dear Fifth Column Team,
I am sending this message to you hoping you can help. I have been sending this message into the wind hoping someone would return an answer -- but nothing has come my way. I am therefore trying a more specific approach to obtain an answer to my inquiry. Hopefully, you will be able to do something.
My question is, "Do you know how to or know someone who can have Donald [Trump] officially declared a domestic terrorist? He has certainly incited violence against our country and proclaimed disdain for the Constitution and the rules within it. Be great if someone who knows how [is] willing!"
I hope you can help with this. I really do not want to live in an autocracy. I feel the Republicans have turned into the American Taliban. It really is scary.
Thank you for your time and hopefully your assistance as well. I would like to add that I find your broadcasts extremely impressive, intelligent, and inspiring. Thank you for all you do.
(Thanks for the nice words, Kathleen. Alas, we can’t help you. Or at least, not in the way you intend.
The Fifth Column has no authority to “officially” declare anyone a terrorist, let alone someone who has not, as far as I’m aware, committed, orchestrated, or issued a direct and actionable threat to commit or have others commit acts “dangerous to human life.” It is true that the January 6, 2021, ransacking of the Capitol by a crowd that had just watched Trump urge them to go “fight like hell” indeed proved dangerous to human life, and it is further true that some of the convicted rioters were given sentencing enhancements for domestic terrorism despite not being successfully prosecuted on terrorism charges. But as the ever-meticulous libertarian journalist Jacob Sullum [no fan of Trump, in case that needs to be said] has serially pointed out, prosecuting the former president on any criminal charge related to the Jan. 6 riot faces an uphill challenge of proving beyond a reasonable doubt the required elements of knowledge and intent.
Basically, to legally satisfy your desire, Trump would probably have to be convicted in United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, and then given a terrorism sentencing enhancement. These outcomes seem unlikely, though certainly not for lack of prosecutorial exertion, as Trump’s conviction last week illustrates. At any rate, this exercise of due process under the law, imperfect as it may be, seems far preferable to giving a podcast or anyone else a magic wand to declare some person a terrorist, particularly if the open motivation is to prevent him or her from winning an election.
Speaking of terrorists, that’s what the Taliban are, as well as being murderously Medieval authoritarians. I wouldn’t just be “scared” if Republicans were turning into an “American Taliban,” I would be arming up for a civil war. I am not, to be clear, arming up for a civil war.)
***
From: Bob U.
Subject: Complaint About “The Fifth Column” Podcast
Date: May 27, 2024
Hello. An email to register my disgust with your “Fifth Column” podcast and let you know that I am un-subscribing after about two or three years of listening.
The problem comes from a specific comment made by Michael Welch in your May 24 episode, #456, about 15 minutes in. Welch, speaking to Kmele, said, “You lie, boy!”
Mr. Welch, I think you know that you can’t call a black man “boy.” And, Kmele, you can’t permit this.
That crossed a line for me. And I don’t like to draw lines. I tend toward giving people wide latitude when expressing themselves.
Granted, it (the “You lie, boy!” comment) was said during a moment of levity and supposed hilarity. It was during tangent upon tangent after mention of The View discussing whether Caitlin Clark benefits from “pretty privilege.” Dismissive jokes follow, and then you guys brought up Anna Kournikova, soon followed by mention of Paige Spiranac. Kmele said he didn’t know who Paige Spiranac was, and a humored Welch pounced and said, “You liiiiie, boy!”
Sheesh. I figure Welch’s wording was basically a slip of tongue. Everybody’s guard was down. But still — sheesh.
I was offended.
I’ve often thought that your podcast trio skates on thin ice with tone when matters of race come up. Moynihan hijacks the discussion with jokes that run near danger and the line of decency, the group dynamic gets a bit odd but there’s often chuckling, Kmele goes too quickly to his affected “black guy” voice and the results aren’t as funny as you seem to think.
Anyway, to let you know where I’m coming from, I’ll mention that I’m a black man, age 58, in Dayton, Ohio.
Take care, but I’m out. I’ve heard enough.
(Thank you for listening, Bob. I’m not here to talk you out of your decision and sense of disgust, but I can correct one small error of interpretation: My offending phrase was no “slip of the tongue.”
Here is where I am going to commit the sin of explaining a joke. [Note that this is separate from claiming that it’s funny.] The French have a concept in humor they call “second degree,” which [per the link here] involves “sarcasm and irony,” is often “related to topics that are taboo to talk about,” can “be used to say the opposite of what the speaker actually means,” and “can come across as dark, which is why it is extra important not to take it at face value.” Such instances are routinely built on layers of reference and back story, where part of the fun is knowing that not everyone knows every aspect of what is being referred.
So: To begin with, I know, to a degree that listeners could only begin to suspect, how much Kmele claiming ignorance of Paige Spiranac is a hilarious lie. As such, I immediately called him out on it, because that is part of the fun of what we do, and as soon as I thought of “You lie,” I recalled the most famous modern deployment of that particular phrase—by Rep. Joe Wilson [R – S.C.], during Barack Obama’s September 2009 health care policy address to a Joint Session of Congress. Which, in the infamous and unscrupulous hands of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, was transformed into a racist event by the addition of an unuttered suffix:
Surrounded by middle-aged white guys -- a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club -- Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.
But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
In channeling Maureen Dowd’s imaginary racist, there were additional layers of irony, in that Kmele obviously doesn’t self-identify as belonging to any racial category, and that ANY notion of him being somehow inferior/subservient to me is transparently ridiculous, as evidenced by a simple eyeball test, his famously expensive tastes, and the fact that my own two offspring refer to him as “King Kmele” and wish that he would adopt them so that they would (they believe) become rich. Kmele is a “boy” to me as Moynihan is teetotaler to alcohol: It’s the opposite of what’s true, and therefore fertile for attempts at second-degree humor.
Again—none of this is to say this or any of our jokes are funny, though they do make *us* [and, not unimportantly, a fairly sizeable audience] laugh with some frequency, in part because transgressing taboos is a reliable if easily overdrawn source of mirth. But it’s definitely not for everybody, and I wish you well.)
***
From: Alex Muka
Subject: Advice on How to NOT Grow My Substack
Date: May 31, 2024
Hi fellas,
Loved the last advice episode and decided I needed some myself.
I wanted some advice on how to NOT grow my Substack. I've been hovering at just under 100 subscribers and would like to keep it that way.
First off, I would HATE for you all to read it and enjoy it.
Here are some articles I am sure you would NOT like and suggest you do NOT read.
(definitely NOT for Kmele)
I would equally HATE if you happened to click on any of these links, liked any of these pieces, and subscribed.
Again, I am looking for advice on how to NOT grow my substack. Any guidance is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Alex Muka
(Sorry, Alex, I don’t understand second degree humor.)
***
From: Mark P.
Subject: The Witch Trials of Alvin Bragg
Date: May 31, 2024
"waaaaaaahhhhhh it's a novel legal theory.....😥 whaaaaaaaaa "
"It's never been... tried in this way before... [sniff sniff]... 😥 whahaaaaaaaaa"
"Alvin Bragg is a big..... [sniff].. meanie." 😭
^^Put that in the show notes and then people can just skip that segment.
(Thank you, Mark, for illustrating the seriousness of your critique, and the depth of partisan commitment to due process and legal norms, particularly in a presidential election year.)
***
From: Nolan
Subject: A Qualified Defense of Writing Programs
Date: May 29, 2024
Dear Sirs and Curs (you know who’s who),
I’m writing to disagree with you and make a context-heavy defense of graduate writing programs for Ian, who emailed in on the most recent Members Only show asking if he should attend one. You fellas are probably right about writing programs overall, but I did an MFA in fiction (at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, if it matters) from 2013-2016, and for the following reasons, I have no regrets:
* It was funded. A 2/2 teaching load got me a full tuition waiver and a stipend of a little over $20,000 a year (if the stipend has kept up with inflation, that’s $437,000 in 2024 dollars). For god’s sake, don’t go into debt for an art degree, but if you’re passionate about it, it’s worth doing for poverty wages. $5,000 per class taught is probably more than you’d make adjuncting, anyway.
* I didn’t plan on paying the bills with writing. I finished my degree and immediately got a two-year R.N. degree from a respectable community college with a loan totaling about 30% of a single semester at Columbia, which my hospital paid off when I instantly got a job. Everyone else I’ve kept in touch with is either teaching, working in academic administration, or doing some actual job like lawyering or developing mysterious financial-newsletter licensing deals in Japan. I like nursing; scraping dried diarrhea off the thighs of a 300-pound woman who fell out of bed three days ago and finally got around to calling an ambulance is way less debasing than submitting stories and apologetic I’m-a-cis-het-white-dude bios to fucking Black Warrior Review. And I can still write.
* I met great people. Even in academia, even in a field where they actually print “Certified Pussy” on your diploma, people aren’t uniform. Nobody in my time there was fresh out of undergrad; our ages ranged from mid-twenties to mid-forties, and most of us didn’t have backgrounds in academia. The whole structure of a workshop is listening to diverse peers tell you why something you poured yourself into isn’t as good as it could be, and then to do the same for them. There’s a lot of space to disagree, and a lot of opportunity to learn. I had a conversation with a member of the poetry faculty (who happened to be a middle-aged black woman) in a Wendy’s line. She asked me if I would ever write a story from the perspective of a black woman. I hemmed and hawed, and she challenged me with something like, “Isn’t taking on others’ perspectives the point of fiction?” It was a teaching moment Kmele would have approved of, I think. (There are caveats here, of course. My program was small—9 fiction writers and 9 poets, with only 6 people per workshop. Maybe I happened to hit a particularly amiable bunch, and maybe Things These Days really are different. If you end up in a small group and they are uniform and want to make your writing different instead of better, you could waste a couple years trying to play to the wrong audience.)
* I graduated before Trump was elected and everybody lost their goddamned minds. If possible, try to go back in time and attend a program before 2016.
* Teaching was great. I taught a few classes, but my favorite was freshman rhetoric and composition. I got to write my syllabus, which included readings from “The Case for Reparations” and a short Kevin D. Williamson piece called “The Case Against Reparations.” There was no revolt. We also had the opportunity in 2016 to hold class discussions about news stories, like maaaaybe there were some drawbacks to a place like Emory College vowing to find and punish whoever had chalked pro-Trump slogans on their sidewalks. I would love the opportunity to teach a rhetoric class again, now that the Fifth Column has distilled my poisonous ideas about the value of free speech and hearing diverse arguments.
Basically, if you really care about writing and know what you want your fiction to be, then a good, funded (for the love of god, funded) MFA program can be an opportunity to focus on your work and get a humanizing glimpse into the murky world of Academia. (I can’t speak to journalism school, but I’ll take the gents’ word that it’s garbage top-to-bottom.) So, cautiously, I disagree with the boys on this one.
Nolan
P.S.: This is way too much to read, but I wanted to take a minute to commemorate Mike Madonick, a coarse, openly conservative Jewish Santa Claus who migrated to midwestern academia from New York real estate. He passed in 2022, but until then, he was the heart and soul of the UIUC poetry department, and not at all what you’d imagine a man in such a role to be. He had an unapologetic sense of humor—I once heard him say to an undergrad, “No one cares what you think, you’re Asian,” and he left me notes after fiction readings that said things like, “Nice reading, douchebag.” He also pulled me into his office once to tell me how happy he was that my marriage had stayed strong during my time in an institution that was “designed to drive people apart.” He lived for his students. I think Moynihan, especially, would have liked him. In October 2022, a memorial service was held for him, during which, per his request, a group of former students travelled to Illinois to do a posthumous roast of him. I’m sure he’s drinking from a flask of Stroh spiced rum in hell as I write this. Wherever you are, Madonick, go fuck yourself.
(This is marvelous, thank you Nolan. Always love me some directly relevant experiential testimony!)
***
From: Eric
Subject: Your Last Episode Epitomized Touching Grass
Date: June 1, 2024
Gents (Moniyhan included),
7 whiskeys in doesn’t negate from what I’m saying here, but reinforces it. Matt, you have often said that more of us need to touch grass. Your last episode, however conscious you guys were of it or not, was a great example of that. Yes, as others in the Fifthdom have noted, you dropped your much smaller bomb of an episode before the bigger bomb of the Trump verdict, which I suppose garners a collective womp womp for getting the timing wrong.
But no!
Every fucking outlet apparently has nothing to do but to talk about this, and your latest convo, while touching on the case for sure, was actually a nice respite for the inevitable noise about the case. But more importantly, it was a reminder to calm down, sit and think. Examples: Rafah, Kmele’s fantastic interview, the absolutely great MM overview of the Panthers, and your post mortem on the fact that you guys need to go into the self-help business given all the needy folks asking for your relationship advice (both terrifying and epic, but I’m all for it!).
I have a favor. And mind you, give me a ding ding ding for being a subscriber since 2021. Make the rest of this year more about grass touching. It’s about to get crazier and crazier. And we need you guys to hold it down for us more than ever. I don’t know what that entails necessarily, but since I started listening to you guys, I’ve been both more informed about politics and yet less anxious about it. We (or maybe just I haha) need that more than ever.
Moving on to whiskey number 8.
With love and all that good vibe shit.
(You know, Eric, I was gonna end this Mailbucket with another ball-busting email, for thematic and rule-of-5 reasons, but this was so swell, and the grass is so touchable right now, that I included yours instead. Thank you! Now here’s a relevant picture from today):
You need a call in line for leaving voicemails, but also you should NEVER check it.
After years of subscribing I am unsubscribing because you deigned to explain a joke.
Ok, fine, I’m over it…you’re lucky Mikey. This time.