Mailbucket #7: Pronouncing Kamala

Also: A badass photographer, and do I really hate David Sacks?

As mentioned in Episode #438, reading your July emails all in one big gulp was quite the journey. Helluva decade, last month was.

But! Since news is transmogrifying too quickly, and since we haven’t done a Members Only emails episode in a hot minute, it’s high time for a new Mailbucket (previous incantations: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6), to see what kind of insanely detailed personal testimonies and/or drinking confessionals you have in store for us, at lengths otherwise indigestible on the pod. As ever, I do some light editing for house style, insert the odd hyperlink, and respond in italics. LET’S GO!!!

From: Ranjith

Subject: [Original Pronunciation of “Kamala”]

Date: July 23, 2024

Guys, thanks for reading my last email and for all the laughs. Moynihan’s Indian accent is the second worst Indian accent I’ve heard; my wife’s being the worst. I can’t wait for my 1-year-old and 3-year-old to grow up, to see how much shit they are going to give their father for his accent and his head-nodding.

I also wanted to clarify, by the way, that I’m not voting for Trump because I like him, or [that] I’m MAGA. It’s more of a vote against Democrats than anything else. I would gladly vote for a piece of rock, if it said it would have some kind of border control, be pro-merit, and anti-DEI. I’m not a fan of Trump’s economic protectionism, but I would put up with that for his Nixon-like, I’m a madman so don’t mess with me stance in fostering peace in the Middle East, or deterring Iran, Russia and China.

Anyway, coming to the main topic, after listening to your last episode, I wanted to say [that] I grew up in the same town in South India where Kamala Harris’s mom is from. Tamilians don’t pronounce “Kamala” as Kaaa-ma-la or Ka-maaa-la. They say it as Kuh-muh-la. Ka like Kmele, ma like in money, la like in labile. All three syllables are of equal length, are short, and there is no stress on any of them.

So you can imagine how infuriatingly absurd I find all this talk about how racist it is to mispronounce her name, when no one, not even she herself, says it right in the first place. Very emblematic of the Democrats -- misplaced priorities, rush to play the victim, and being completely wrong while at the same time being so annoyingly sure that they’re right.

(Not gonna lie, you had me stumped with labile….)

***

From: Jonathan

Subject: The Syntactic Ambiguity of Kamala

Date: July 24, 2024

Hey guys. Big fan, British listener, grammatical pedant here.

I was thinking about Michael, Eli [Lake] and Olivia [Reingold] discussing the meaning of Kamala’s terrifically vapid phrase “What can be unburdened by what has been” on the Honestly pod recently. While Eli nailed it by calling it an appeal to “historical illiteracy,” there are other potential interpretations. Seven so far by my account:

What can be, unburdened by what has been
Just imagine it! Imaging what could exist -- what we could DO -- if only we could be untethered from everything that has come before. Because that pesky stuff we call history or whatever is keeping us back from doing better stuff. So I want you to imagine it in your mind’s eye -- we can do anything once we rid ourselves of the lessons of the past.

What can be unburdened, by what has been?
It’s a genuine question, this. There is much that is burdened, and so, much that we would like to unburden. Have we ever asked ourselves what could be unburdened if we were to use what has been, in order to unburden it? I know I haven’t.

What can be unburdened by what, has been
If unburdening is our goal, how do we effect this unburdening? What if we were to match the burdened with each other and see if they are able to do the unburdening themselves? Well funnily enough this has already happened. What CAN be unburdened by what, after all it has been, already.

What can be unburdened by what, has-been

Let’s put this succinctly: What can be unburdened by itself. Clearly you can’t imagine this, you unimaginative has-been.

What can, be unburdened by what has been
Oh sublime forces of the universe, I call upon thee to bring forth all that is, that can! I hereby command you, conjured realm of the possible: Be unburdened by what has happened before!

What can, be unburdened by what has been?

To be honest, I’m no expert in what can or cannot be unburdened. But I hope that what has the capacity to be unburdened, has that burden relinquished by using what has already happened to effect the unburdening process.

What, can be unburdened by what has been
There is a thing called “What.” Why? Who knows, but it exists, and it can be unburdened by another thing called “what has been.” What is what has been unburdening what of? We do not know.

No, I do not consider this time well-spent.

(On the contrary: This is time EXQUISITELY, even excruciatingly, well-spent, even if I lack the experience with hallucinogens to quite grok #3. Also, I hope your British pedantry didn’t mind my American copy editing!)  

***

From: Tom

Subject: Rules of Engagement

Date: July 18, 2024

Gents,

Thank you all for your measured responses to the assassination attempt so far. I have friends and coworkers who have had some insufferably hot takes on it, and none of them seem to fully grasp the violent hellstorm we all narrowly avoided. You don’t have to like the guy or want him to win to know that, but Michael your line in the last Members Only was spot on. Some people just cannot be compelled by reason to change their minds. This truth will haunt us all.

To the question of “Why didn’t the sniper shoot TMC first?”, may I offer you the perspective of someone who also works in a security industry job with Kafkaesque nightmare rules. Without knowing the full truth, and as we are in the speculation phase still, my honest guess is that it comes down to the banal reality that, until TMC shot first, the sniper assessed that he did not have positive identification that the kid was a threat. The sniper needs to go down whatever checklist he’s given for rules of engagement (ROEs), and, I’m 100% certain, it includes positive identification of the threat. The roof TMC took position on was just too plausible to be a local law enforcement lookout, and the sniper isn’t going to know what every local yodel cop looks like through a telescope. In a scenario like that, the sniper avoids the personal risk of shooting a friendly. End the wrong man’s life, [and you] end career, end life as a free man, possibly. If he did have the shot lined up on the kid, I empathize with his hesitation. He’s doing the lawful thing by hesitating. We all got lucky.

I think the biggest thing that will change coming out of this is the communication that needs to take place between local law enforcement and the Secret Service. The inner/outer cordon they had set up failed, and a more detailed plan was needed. I don’t think this is about resources, a conspiracy, or Trump getting the Secret Service’s B Team. People will get blamed and fired, as things do, but the reality is much simpler than I think we’re all comfortable with. A comms fuck-up isn’t comfortable. 

And by the way, the acronym you’ve been waiting for is IRIMVE: Individually Radicalized Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist. You’re welcome ... or not.

(Thank you for this testimony, which I will note for readers was submitted July 18, so was written without benefit of whatever knowledge that has been produced since.)

***

From: Mike T.

Subject: A Wedding in Israel

Date: July 20, 2024

To My Favorite People and Moynihan,

Longstanding Never Fly Coach here. I cherish the sometimes sober sanity of your voices, and always nuanced questions. Cheers.

One of my close school friends is Israeli-American, now back in Israel. He’s also in an active reserve unit fighting in Gaza. Recently I went to his wedding in Tel Aviv. He always showed up for me in tough times, so I went, it was as simple as that. Now I am struggling to rationalize the horror of Gaza, and the ethics of what was a celebration. Maybe there’s a bigger lesson here for people, if I can’t find it yet.

Tel Aviv was remarkably similar to when I visited years ago. Everywhere construction, everywhere traffic, and that unmeasured friendliness that overwhelms any possibility of an equal showing. Israelis have been at war a long time. There is a firm resignation and an intense joy in between horrors that reminds me of my once-upon-a-time field trip to Afghanistan. Some hear incoming and sprint for shelter. After a while though, some just light a cigarette. And then some run towards it.

One such man I met was at the wedding -- we’ll call him Adam. Whenever there is a mission, Adam goes. He is a lawyer by trade, and has a beautiful baby girl. When asked how he felt about going in, about going back, he simply said “scared,” with a passing smallness that had no place in a description of this man. He said he goes because “this is the only home I have.” On one mission he watched as two people in long clothes approached a tank with their hands up. Once they got close, out came explosives that destroyed the vehicle and killed friends. In Gaza, “you don’t know where it’s going to come from,” and here I saw anger. Every building is a booby trap, every new angle a bullet. Or not. On another mission he saw a little girl in rubble and brought her over to their line. The building had a tunnel entrance. He took her back with his unit for medical care. And then I saw the fear in his face again. Maybe he thought of his own daughter.

Duty to his country isn’t an option. But he didn’t ask for this fight, even as he is determined to finish it. Now he worries that there is a separation from the Israeli public, that they have forgotten there are people fighting a war. Soldiers unable to work, to progress their lives, their families. When my friend decided to marry, it was important to Adam and the rest of his unit. The Rabbi pointed to the importance of choosing love and life despite the war. We drank and danced. The ceremony was a beautiful thing.

Now I read what Gaza is like for civilians, and it’s gut wrenching. Maybe celebrations in these circumstances are not in good taste. An observer could get into tactics and airstrikes (that was my expertise in the Air Force, happy to [share] another time), or discussions of Just War, as we often do. But we shouldn’t need to. They certainly didn’t. The wedding was about celebrating love for its own sake. Would you?

(I love everything about this email, not least the high-quality prose, and the link to Orwell’s December 1946 musings. Which, despite trademark grumpiness/empathy/austerity, nonetheless advocated a celebration involving “half a turkey, three tangerines, and a bottle of whisky at not more than double the legal price.”

My feeling is that the rabbi was right: Celebrate love for its own sake, *particularly* in the face of death, fear, uncertainty, and all the horrible conflicted feelings brought out by war. That eyes-open high-spiritedness is one of the very best things about Israel. And hopefully, such festivity will also produce the same category of reflectiveness and compassion and self-doubt that you demonstrate here. It it’s *not* about humanity, and a desire for peace and family unification, then we are in a dark place indeed.

The world had an amazing winning streak for the quarter century between 1989 and 2014. It has been profoundly dispiriting to me that the wave crested around then, and has been retreating ever since. Locating and insisting on some moral empathy far beyond our national borders, as you do here and Orwell did a year and a half after his England helped defeat Nazi Germany, is something I wish I and everyone else did more of: for our friends in Israel, for the innocents in Gaza, and for those fighting and fleeing authoritarian socialism in Venezuela. Thanks for reminding us.)

***

From: Kristy

Subject: My Badass Uncle, Photographer of the Civil Rights Movement

Date: July 18, 2024

Hey y’all (I can say that because while I don't have Kmele’s melanin force field, I am a life-long southerner),

I just finished listening to Episode #218, where talk turned to the intrepid news photographer Evan Vucci and others who rush towards danger, and I had to tell you about my uncle, Sam Parrish.

Before he became the picture editor at The Nashville Tennessean, Sam spent the tumultuous ‘60s & ‘70s as a UPI photographer, covering among other things the Civil Rights Movement, including numerous MLK meetings and events, KKK rallies; and the Selma, Alabama march to the Edmund Pettus Bridge known as Bloody Sunday. His life was often in great danger due to his perseverance and disregard for his own safety in his determination to *get the shot*. 

In those days before cell phone cameras and the Internet, it was incumbent on fearless, mostly young photographers to get the pictures that lawless officers and politicians, Klan members, and other racist counter-protesters tried very hard to keep out of the papers and magazines. Weeks before Selma, Martin Luther King had scolded Life magazine photographer Flip Schulke for trying to assist protestors knocked to the ground by authorities instead of snapping away. “The world doesn’t know this happened because you didn’t photograph it,” King told Schulke, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Race Beat. 

A black family once helped uncle Sam escape from a Klan rally by having him lay down in the back seat of their car covered by a blanket while their children sat on him. An officer once grabbed a camera from Sam’s neck and pulled out the film with a big sweep of his arm to expose and ruin the images. Sam grabbed another of his cameras (see the attached photo of him wearing six), and caught the action, along with the officer’s clearly visible badge number (that one made the front page on papers all across the country). 

Sam photographed James Meredith (the first black man to enroll in the University of Mississippi) right as he was being shot [during] his March Against Fear. Meredith survived and the photo hung in The Hague in the Netherlands for a time. A young Andrew Young once pushed Sam off some church stairs to save him as he was snapping away when a car came speeding by spraying bullets at a crowd of protestors.

Born & raised then based in Atlanta, Sam knew all the players of the Civil Rights Movement, and has different things to say about them all. Most of them appreciated his presence, but he had at least one run in with a surly Stokely Carmichael. 

His name is largely unknown to history, as UPI did not run bylines for photographers; pictures were labeled simply “UPI” or “United Press International Telephoto.” The archive that remains (much has been damaged) is housed at Chapman University in California. He retained very few copies, as they were not his property, but my grandmother’s photo boxes were full of the typical family photos interspersed with pictures of things like train wrecks, Richard Nixon playing with a yoyo, and Coretta Scott King attending her husband’s funeral surrounded by honor guards’ bayonets. Years ago he gifted me one of his Nikon F-2’s, the lens dented on the side where he banged it getting out of a helicopter to attend the funeral of legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant. 

I’d love for him to be interviewed by someone who can do his memories justice, or we need to at least set him up with StoryCorps before too long. He’s in his 80s and still sharp, but time is of the essence (for us all, right? As the man said, it tolls for thee). 

Please see the two attached photos of Sam, the one carrying six cameras plus other gear, and a box of Black Kordite Large Trash & Lawn Bags for creating makeshift darkrooms in the field on the fly; and the other with some of his larger camera set-ups at one of the many space shuttle launches he covered over the years. 

I've been a big fan of The Fifth Column and a paying subscriber since y’all helped me survive 2020, and more recently I’ve become a frequent contributor to the wild and crazy TFC Substack Chat [known] as kkmoresi. What an irreverent rogue’s gallery of disreputable hooligans that lot is; I feel right at home there. We try daily to reflect the spirit of our fearless leaders, y’all three ne’er-do-wells. Please keep up the great work!

(Bad. Ass. Also: ‘Fro!

Thank you so much for sharing, and what is it with all these listeners who write so good? I don’t have any experience/knowledge with such things, but I am confident there are civil rights oral history projects that would love to collect Sam’s memories. Maybe start with The Smithsonian?)

***

From: PureCapitalist

Subject: Why Does Matt Hate David Sacks?

Date: July 29, 2024

Why does Matt hate David Sacks? 😅

I work at a Big Tech Company™ whose culture has been completely captured by the usual suspects. Having people like David Sacks and Elon Musk publicly speak out against this cultural insanity is very welcome. Sure, it’s unfortunate there are only a few people who can afford to speak out, and maybe they’re imperfect messengers, but it’s better than nothing.

By the way, Sacks did a pretty good interview with Coleman Hughes last year: 

(I don’t hate David Sacks [or much of anyone else]. I don’t *care* about David Sacks. What I hate is that I am supposed to care about David Sacks.

Let’s give a less flippant answer. I do nothing whatsoever in my life to seek out the public commentary of David Sacks, but he is potent enough to appear in venues that I monitor. For instance, the Republican National Convention:

Did you like that speech? I did not like that speech, and was admittedly happy to mock its indifferent reception in the room. Sacks there made the morally fucktarded yet consistent-for-him claim that Joe Biden “provoked -- yes provoked -- the Russians to invade Ukraine.” It’s the “yes provoked” interjection, the look at me I’m saying something courageously based here!, that really ties the room together.

I have mentioned this a time or two on the pod, but me & my friends growing up in the aerospace-heavy Lakewood/North Long Beach area had the shorthand of “E.D.” to describe a certain tendency our fathers had in common. No, not Erectile Dysfunction, but what we called Engineer’s Disease -- the misapplied confidence that one’s brilliance in hyper-specialized professional category X meant that one was a room-overruling expert on topics Y, Z, A, B, and C. I fondly recall my dear old Dad trying to Mitteleuropa-splain to me in the mid-’90s, which, no.

Well, those were hardware-type, government-adjacent-salaried engineers, whose bluster was mostly contained within a small community perimeter. The software, V.C.-tastic successor generation, particularly in the social media era they (impressively!) helped build, have even more arrogances, along with giant, public-facing venues to broadcast them from. As I was mentioning in Episode #438, David Marcus’s Twitter essay about endorsing Donald Trump (retweeted by David Sacks, natch), is just a Silicon Valley classic of confusing one’s own boring political shifts with something bordering on the profound:

I am crossing the Rubicon and backing the Republican Party and President Trump.

Many — including a former version of myself — get trapped in a mental framework that becomes their identity and prevents them from radically evolving their thinking with new facts and information. I finally broke free from it.

My journey has been a gradual political 180 from where I stood in every previous election. It has been an eye-opening process of disenchantment, zero-basing lifelong beliefs, and rebuilding from there.

I’ll explain one more important-to-me component of this reticence (hey, you asked!). I have been doing journalism for going on 38 years (ouch!). I know that the conversational, breeze-shooting, and occasionally lubricated nature of this podcast may sometimes indicate the contrary, but the hardest AND most important part of journalism is making sure that everything you say is true, or at least appropriately hedged (a la, “I am ignorant about this topic, but this is my suspicion,” etc.). Particularly because I work in this subcategory called Opinion Journalism, people sometimes assume that if a person directionally agrees with me on Topic X, I should maybe not get sidetracked with how he botches Topic Y, or has a persistent habit of making overly absolutist statements and conspiratorial assertions.

My answer to that is: Nope. I don’t do that with Vivek Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, or Ron Paul. Not for Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, or David Brooks. Oftentimes, as I stressed in our conversation with Chris Rufo, this is merely a recognition/appreciation that we are engaged in different projects revolving around the same subject.

Here’s a challenge for you: Scroll through David Sacks’s Twitter feed, and keep two running tallies -- expressions of epistemic/intellectual humility vs. instances of absolutist hyperbole. When I see the latter flippant confidence applied to those rare issues I actually have a decent amount of knowledge about (say, the history of NATO expansion, or of Russian aggression in its Near Abroad), I will confess to a certain impatience. And ya know, other people have criticized woke-crap, too.)