This week, Dan and John talk about:
The show title refers to John’s tendency to go all the way back to provide historical context when he is just asked a simple question.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
John’s daughter’s relationship to dolls (RW234)
John got his headphones working today because he is recording at his ”old” normal space. His new normal space is sitting at the dining room table in his new house, his old normal space is in the basement of his daughter’s mother’s / partner’s house. From his vantage point now there are visible to him 21 Barbies and 2 Ken, a couple of the Barbies are teenage Barbies. When his daughter was little, like every thoughtful parent his generation, they were anti-Barbie because Barbie communicates the wrong values to their Generation X.
When they introduced those new Bratz dolls everything about them was awful and it made him pine for a time when their only problems were that Barbie had an unrealistic body shape and had impossible to stand-upon feet. For some of these identity issues and modern problems John doesn’t have a dog in the race. Barbies were ubiquitous when he was a kid, they were everywhere, but he is not emotionally connected to them.
In trying to raise a daughter in the modern world where she loves and appreciates her body but also lives in the world and is reading fashion magazines, watching television, communicating with others, and taking in all the tidal-wave of information about beauty and her body that she gets from other women and from culture driven by women, Barbie seemed like small beer compared to how difficult it was going to be just to navigate other little girls in school. The thing that was going to make her worried about her shape was not going to be the doll she played with. It was going to be the other kids informed by their parents and it reverberates out to 1000.
John said: ”No Barbies!” He wanted her to play with trucks because he liked playing with trucks, but she was not interested in playing with trucks from the earliest age and she was very interested in dolls. He had to work hard to find dolls that didn't look grotesque. He would go out on shopping trips, go to multiple stores, just trying to find a baby doll that looked like a baby and not like a hideous daemon or some painted lady or some doll that was made to suck a plastic tit. Dolls are gross now! It is not that their body shape is wrong, but their eyes are not proportionate to a human face and they don’t look like a human being.
They have made this doll according to some calculation where a baby is going to respond to big eyes, but that is not what a baby looks like. This is a freaky thing. John went all over and he was eventually able to find baby dolls that looked like a baby. Dan thinks that all dolls are freakish.
In the 1970s John’s mom bought his sister a doll. It was an expense, she went to the nice toy store and bought her a doll the size of a real baby. She looks like she is a toddler, you can dress her and put shoes on her, she is not an infant, and they still have it and John’s plays with it although it is 45 years old.
The Barbies came in not at once, but once the flood gates were open. Their earliest one is probably from 1965, a lot of them from the mid-1980s, definitely a few from the 1970s. There was a collection of Barbies of the World, international Barbies, Spanish Barbie and Ethiopian Barbie, Chinese Barbie that all had stands and were wearing the outfit of their nation, all of these babies came in through cracks in the door. They are all different shapes and sizes, contemporary Barbies are mindful of realistic looking women's bodies, the older Barbies are different, some of the Barbies were trend-Barbies of their era, so they also don't look very human and their facial proportions vary so much that when you put the wrong two next to each other you think that one of these Barbie isn't from Earth.
You can't take the shoes off of this one and put them on every other one, although a lot of them you can, just like in real life. It is interesting that Ken has flat feet. When he stands in his bare feet he just has feet, whereas Barbies has little pointy hoofs for the heels. The teenage Barbies, the Skippers, if not flat feet, at least they have flatter feet. John’s daughter has started to be interested in talking about heels and how difficult they are to wear and what they are about and they have been having high heels conversations lately, part of it prompted by the Barbies and interacting with their shoes. Her mother wears heels and John’s mom said they all wore 4” heels all the time every day, but the day she retired from corporate life she stepped out of her heels and never put on another pair of heels in her life. Dan’s mom tells a very similar story. Instead she bought some sparkly tennis shoes that she wears when she goes to the Symphony.
Lucy Hodgman, John Hodgman’s daughter, had American Girl dolls, and so does Dan’s daughter. They are very expensive American Girl dolls, there are very big stores that are just about the American Girl doll, you can book an appointment to get the doll's hair done and clothing for the doll, there are accessories, dogs and cats for the dolls, it is an industry. You can buy one off the shelf, but you can also customize them and the kid can dress like the doll and get the same clothing for themselves. A lot of girls that feel misrepresented by the mainstream dolls can get an American girl doll that looks like you and has the same hairstyle and hair color and eye color and skin tone and everything else that you have. Lucy gave them one of her old American girl dolls when John’s daughter was young and that doll has had a long life, she still is in regular play here in Normandy Park, Washington, but John is feeling the transition happening, the 10.5 year old beginning to morph into an older child.
John’s daughter being home from school again (RW234)
They went back to school in person on September 5th or whatever, and by September 8th a kid in the lower elementary had COVID and by September 10th a kid in her class had been in contact with someone who had COVID and by the next day that kid had COVID, so now they are not in school anymore. It took 3 kids in the school as a whole to make that choice. Dan had more cases than that in his kids’ school, although not in any of the classes that either of them are in. It seems like every few days there is a case and if they hit a certain percentage they might reevaluate in-person classes.
They shut it all down at John’s daughter’s school, so his daughter is upstairs on her computer. She has watched a video on some learning style and she is being asked to condense it into a short essay what the video was about. John was talking to her about how to do that, and between the two of them this has always been a place where there was a communication gulf because John loves to tell you the story of a thing, he could spend 20 minutes telling you about a 10 minute video, while she has always been someone where when he asked ”How was school?” she would give one or two word answers.
From a young age John was always working with her, saying: ”This will be something that will happen your whole life! You will be asked to have a report on an event. You will go to a fancy dinner, you will go to see a movie, you will take a class, and when you come out someone is going to want you to summarize what happened. It is a skill that you have to develop if you don't have it innately, to be able to recall and summarize things that happen to you!” She is receptive to the idea, but she is not a storyteller in the ”You are not going to believe what happened to me today!” sense.
On one hand that is great because she doesn’t want to tell you about her dreams, John really has to ask her about her dreams, but on the other hand all through school that is a big part of what they ask you to do: ”Read this book and then summarize it!” Now John is the teacher or her mom is the teacher. She doesn't like to do online school, she wants to be in school with the kids. Dan’s are the same way. They do not like it, they do not want that, they hate it more than Dan does. His son probably is okay with it because he can be in bed until 2.5 minutes before the class needed to start. He is a man of leisure and he is not excited ever about being in class, going to school, being there physically, but he does prefer in person.
Dan’s son being a real teenager now (RW234)
Dan’s son is very much a teenage boy in every and any way that a teenage boy could be a teenage boy. All of the stereotypes, he does all of those things, he stays up way too late and will stay up on his own too late secretly, he hasn't been trying to sneak watching porn or anything, but all of the other teenage stuff, not like he thinks he is too cool for things, but the crazy enthusiasm that little kids have for everything is now gone.
He watches lots of very short YouTube videos that are all bass-boosted and over amplified, showing a rat running down an alley to a bass-boosted hip hop rap song that is unintelligible and the video is about 7 seconds long. ”Dad, watch this video, it is only 7 seconds!”, but any video that is only 7 seconds is not a video that he wants to watch, but he won't stop. At Dan’s age it takes him 7 seconds to shift focus, or to just get your eyes in focus.
He gets home and the first thing he does is to take his socks off, leaves them there, doesn't even make an attempt, he is not even trying to put them away until Dan reminds him of it, and then he can do the Mommie Dearest thing where the socks just stay there or he will put them on his chair a little passive aggressively. He has become someone who Dan just absolutely loves to hang out with. He felt that way for a while, but over the course of almost 14 years of his life…
They watch the James Bond movies together, they have watched tons of movies and TV shows together, some of them action-adventure, like Bond or Mission Impossible, and he is present enough to understand that a Roger Moore film is filled with out-of-touch, out-of-place values and misogyny and campiness, he is not interpreting it or absorbing it at face value. They can have a conversation about those things and that is super-cool!
Even just a year ago they really couldn't do it yet because he was not yet on the intellectual level Dan wanted him to be. They have watched the Big Lebowski and he appreciates it and notices little subtle details in it and picks up on some of the themes of the movie, which is so much fun and so rewarding for Dan.
John talking to his daughter about 9/11 (RW234)
That is on the cusp for John, too. They started to have conversations about things… kids are exposed to a lot of contemporary thinking without being given a ton of depth to the context, and John is all about deep background. There is a rule at school that you are not supposed to do this and she understands it at the surface level why the rule, but she wants to know first of all, why is it true the thing where there needs to be a rule, but then she started to come at it like: ”Well, if that is true, why is that the rule that they came up with? There are a lot of things you could do about the problem they are trying to solve.” and John loves that and she enjoys that kind of conversation with him because he gets to do the thing where he goes: ”Well sweetie, in 1820 there was a man and he owned one boat, but then he got a second boat…” and she sticks with him through that stuff.
She will hang in the conversation a lot longer than she would if he started to talk about a lot of other things. There are a million times in a day where he starts: ”In 1820…” and she turns around and is gone, but there are questions that she comes to him about where she has heard enough times that she recognizes that this is a thing that adults are really exercised about and they have come up with a rule about it that we are all required to follow, but there is something about it that doesn't square.
The other day she asked: ”Tell me about 9/11!” - ”What do you know about 9/11?” - ”Not much!” She has heard about 9/11 a lot in the ether, in the same way that he had heard about December 7th, 1941. John’s dad fought in World War II in the Pacific and was in and out of Pearl Harbor throughout the war. They went to Pearl Harbor when John’s was younger than his daughter is now, and they went to the USS Arizona, all of his dad’s buddies fought in World War II, so that war was very present for him, also because from the time he was born all through the 1960s World War II movies were a dominant form of dude movie and his dad loved watching those old World War II movies! It was the late movie on TV.
John watched those movies with his dad, so World War II he thinks about it a lot, the way we decided to remember that war and how uncomplicated it was. You could sit down and watch a movie of some GI’s and they were going to do some thing and even if they were hard-bitten and nasty, even if they were Telly Savalas, they still were Americans and you knew that as bad as Telly Savalas was the Nazis or the Japanese were worse.
9/11 is a weird ghost that haunts everything. The wars that it precipitated were not clear, not very present. If we lived in Oklahoma City, in Lexington, Kentucky or somewhere other than the Ivory tower of Seattle, Washington, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might be more viscerally present in our lives just because there would be veterans around us all the time. Culturally John’s 30s and 40s during which time these wars were raging he was in a Rock band and in a completely different context. The number of people he met in other bands who had served in the armed forces were vanishingly small.
Mike Squires was a Marine, they had a lot of people come to their shows who were active duty military or veterans, but they were always trying to in Indie Rock and Art Rock to establish themselves outside of the context of military identity. They were always quick to say: ”Yeah, I am in the Air Force, but I am really into Iron & Wine!” You could hear them in the barracks trying to differentiate themselves from their fellow soldiers. Everybody listens to Rapper Country, but they were really into this niche music. John was the niche, not the mainstream.
His daughter didn't grow up in a world where there were veterans all around her, and the ones that were all around her were veterans of a different era, not the contemporary culture of 20 years of American war. Austin is probably an Ivory tower relative to the rest of Texas. If you live in Waco you probably have a lot more elbow to elbow contact with the warrior culture. When she hears 9/11, it floats past adults whispering about it. Obviously she has never heard anyone be snide about it or anything other than reverent, but the reverence isn't then connected to a sense of reverence around American patriotism that is omnipresent in our lives. There are probably a lot of people for whom 9/11 fits into their cosmology because they talk about America and terrorism and war and patriotism all in a tone of voice. It is part of their culture, part of their religion.
9/11 is a foundational moment, it is the day that will live in infamy. For us 9/11 is a precipitating event, but it is not a thing that we carry in our hearts. It doesn't define our outlook. It has forced us to spent the last 20 years defining ourselves along lines established in rule-books that we would never have signed off on.
John was reading some essay he wrote in mid-September of 2001, and the premise of the essay at the time felt very radical, but now it fits into a family of thinking. He wrote that the bravest thing for us to do is not go to war. It is essential that we not do the thing that it sounds like we are going to do, because going to war will not produce any of the results we think it is going to, it is basically giving aid and comfort to the enemy because they want us to fight them and it is moronic to fight them this way. Have we learned nothing from the several decades of fighting asymmetrical war against insurgencies that you cannot win?
It is not possible to bomb them back to the stone age. You can't win! So why would we think we could? Because our President is a dummy and represents a dumb way of thinking. Then he got to a place in every essay 3/4 of the way through where he started to chase his own tail around some idea and then he had 4-5 paragraphs talking about some guy in 1820 that had a boat, and then he got a second boat and then he abandoned the essay.
John has a whole file folder of essays where he is coming out of the gate and writes the first third of a really great scorching essay and in the middle he takes a step back and collects himself and is writing for a while acknowledging the counter argument and then he comes unraveled in the last third and rather than tightening it back up he goes into a long meditation on war and mankind and then he decides he can't finish this essay anymore and he is going to go make some Macaroni and Cheese and take a bath.
When John’s daughter asked him about 9/11, he started with: ”In 1917…” and a few times he had to go back to 800 AD, but he walked her through. There were a couple of adults sitting in the room when she came over, reading magazines or whatever, and they were listening along, and in a way she stayed more focused than the adults did. John was giving her all context for the longest time and she was putting it together, but who knows how much she is stitching it together into a fabric of understanding! John is talking about a lot of stuff that they will have to go back and talk about again. This is not the last time she is going to hear about the Balfour Declaration.
By the time John got to September 11th and started telling her the story, there is no way to tell the story without the horror. It is diabolical, horrific, and also an astonishing example of asymmetrical warfare, maybe the greatest example in all of history. How 30 people with almost no resources and effectively with Stone Age weapons accomplish this feat! John has telling her the story and, watching her, he was wondering if this was appropriate for her, was she emotionally able to hear this? It is like a horror movie! Is this going to give her nightmares, in the way that it gave us all of our nightmares?
She did spend a lot of time on airplanes until last year. Are airplanes not safe? John talked about hijacking and how hijacking became a political statement in the late 1960s / early 1970s and how it was a way that Palestinians could direct attention to their cause, where they had no resources of any kind and this was away they could get international attention, a way that they could try to wage a public relations war on Israel when they had not been able to wave actual war on Israel successfully.
There is a reason that we take our shoes off at the freaking airport. Standing in line going through all those machines didn't have to be that way. it is all she has ever known, but we used to just walk out to the gate. You walk through a thing that goes ”Beep!”, but in the 1970s that seemed sufficient. Before John was born there wasn't even that. For her to go: ”Oh, right. That is a thing! TSA isn't from nature!” Airports are absolutely not designed to have this feature, they were designed in the 1960s to be big beautiful temples of the future, and then we had to carve them up and make these antechambers and these bad lobbies and collapsible walls and all this stuff.
John was getting emotional talking about 9/11, not emotional like sobbing, but in trying to tell her the story recalling it in a way that he has obviously spent the last 20 years not needing to think about. There was a time when you put yourself in the Trade Center and imagined yourself there. John went to the top of the Windows on the World on September 1st 2001. He was living in New York that summer and was headed back to Seattle because the first Long Winters record was completed, it was going to come out in February of 2002 and he needed to put a band together to go on tour. It was going to be the first time he took his band on a legit record tour.
The Western State Hurricanes went down to South by Southwest once, played 10 shows with Death Cab up and down the coast, and John had been in Harvey Danger, but he never had an album come out and he had never gone on tour. That was happening in February and he was in New York and he didn't have a band or a practice space or a guitar and he had to come back to Seattle. The day before he flew home he went around and said: ”I am going to do some touristy things!” and he went out to Coney Island and rode the roller coaster and he went to the top of the World Trade Center.
He was just there and he stood on the roof! He was with a friend and they sat and talked about how you would blow up the World Trade Center. They had tried to blow it up with the bomb in the parking garage. If you are standing on the top of the World Trade Center, especially if you are a pyromaniac, you can't help but think: ”How would you blow this up? Imagine blowing this up! That would be insane!” It was a palpable experience.
After the talk he suggested to watch some videos and he explained what was happening. It is just unfathomable! Astonishingly she had never seen a video of it! ”Here is the north tower and it is already on fire because a plane hit it and people thought that it might have been an accident!” - ”How could a plane accidentally hit right in the center of a building on a bright blue day? There is nothing around it, how could it possibly have hit that accidentally?” - ”It sounds crazy, but at the time the alternative that it was on purpose was unthinkable! Maybe he was sightseeing and he got too close. Maybe he had a heart attack!”
It was astonishing, but the president didn't stop what he was doing. And then here comes the second one, and John told her where they all had left from and how many people were on board and what the hijackers were doing as far as we can tell what they were doing in that moment. ”Here you see the other one come around and here it is when it hits it and that is when everybody knew that this was a whole new world!”
John didn't show her anything to do with jumpers, a thing that is already pretty censored. You have to search if you want to know about that. It was all at a distance. He was watching her grapple with it. She is a child, and she doesn't have a ton of experience, she hasn't seen any Marvel movies, but she has seen the Star Wars movies, so she has seen epic disaster of the kind that people when they watch the towers fall all said: ”Wow! It is just like when an Imperial Star destroyer crashes into the surface!” She can see the world through that lens, but this clearly wasn't that.
John has checked in with her a few times since then, like. ”Hey, do you have any questions about 9/11? Anything you want to circle back to?” - ”Nope, I am good!” Invariably she is going to have something to add or ask. Just having tried to explain it to her and spending that hour with her going over it again, and he talked a little bit to her about the subsequent wars, although by that point that is a pretty low-ebb Denouement to that story in the sense that she doesn't want to know about our prolonged misadventure in Afghanistan.
It is the rare occasion when she would come to John and say: ”What do they mean when they say…” and he would have such a story to tell. She will come one day and ask: ”What was the Titanic?” and he will tell her the story of the Titanic and that will probably be a thing where you are like: ”Wow, I haven't thought about that in a long time. What a terrible crash!”
So far she doesn't seem to have anxiety about disaster. She is not worried about the end times. John has always expected the end times and has been preparing for it, but he was never anxious. During the Cold War he was ready for the bomb at any time, as we all were, he fully expected it. To a degree that is a trauma on his generation, but he didn't worry in the sense that it seemed inevitable and when it happened the ones that survived would have to figure it out and that would be hard, but there was no point in thinking about it until we get there, besides having some canned chili in the basement. There is only so much you can do. You can't have 50 years of canned chili.
John wanting her daughter to close her bedroom door at night for fire safety reasons (RW234)
It is not that she doesn't have anxieties about things, she does. She has always slept with her bedroom door open, but the other day he sat her down and told her that he wanted her to start closing her bedroom door at night. Her mother doesn't want her to because she leaves her door open, maybe because of the free flow of air, John doesn’t know. There is a cat in this house and they want the cat to come and go and visit them in the night. John explained to her that it is possible in the night that someone will have left the burner on the stove or there will be some problem in the kitchen.
She understands this because the stove gets left on in this house. Somebody will take the pot off the stove, dump it in the calendar, and they will forget to turn off the burner. When John takes a thing off the burner, with the other hand he turns the burner off. This burner doesn't get visibly hot and the little light that says that it is on stays on even after you turn it off because the light says: ”It is hot!”, so the light is no indication of whether the burner itself is on or off and your mind learns to ignore it. This is a pet peeve of hers that she comes by and says: ”The stove is on!” - ”Oh, Oops!” and John is always the one that is like: ”No, not Oops! You need to turn the stove off!”
John told his daughter that the stove gets left on, and she nods in acknowledgement and recognition. ”Often times a stove will sit there very hot and everybody will go to bed and then something happens, the cat knocks over a container of scabetti [sic] or a pot that had water in it boils all the water out and the pot gets really hot and it falls on the floor. Whatever! Here what happens when you are asleep and the door to your room is open and there is a fire in the kitchen: Your room fills up with smoke and before you even have a chance to wake up you have breathed in enough smoke that it has made you very sick, and you wake up, your room is dark and full of smoke.”
”Now, here is what happens if your door is closed: All of that happens out in the hall, it is not your problem, and when you wake up you wake up to the sound of the fire alarm and you have air to breathe and you have time to think and then you open this window right here and you jump out and you don't worry about anybody else. You don't worry about your mommy, you don't worry about the cat, you don't worry about me. Get out the window, down onto the grass, and then from outside you start yelling outside of everybody's window, go to the neighbors and yell!” He did all the 1970s stuff about touching the doorknob, towel on the floor, and all this other stuff. Stop, Drop and Roll he might have even covered.
The difference between shutting your door at night and leaving it open at night is all about whether there is ever going to accidentally be a fire in the kitchen, which is not a 0% chance. She nodded and then every day since then she has been absolutely methodical about shutting her door at night. When the last person leaves her room she says: ”Will you shut the door?” John said to her mom: ”I want her to start shutting her door at night!” - ”I don't want to know about it!” - ”What do you mean?” - ”Whatever reason it is that you wanted her to start shutting her door, I don't want to know the reason! Whatever your thing is, whatever your trip is, I don't want to know!” - ”It is important that you know! - ”I don't want to know!” - ”All right, well, I am going to talk to our daughter and you can live your own life however you like!” ”Fine, I will! I am going to leave my door open so the cat can come and go!”
John likes the door open, too. These two sleep like logs and he could be playing field hockey in the hall and the game could come bursting into their room and then go back out into the hall and it wouldn't wake either one of them. If you step on a floor board in the hall, if a thing on the other side of the house creeks, John wakes up from a dead sleep, and he listens. These two, you can come into their room and pet their hair, talk to them: ”Okay sweetie, I love you! It was a big day today! You did good!”, petting her hair, fast asleep. John would like to know how that would be like. They just lay down and go to sleep.
John’s daughter is like him, she tosses and turns, but her mother slips into a made bed, nose facing the ceiling, arms at her sides, and then in the morning she can slip out of the made bed and the bed is still made. She sleeps like a Sarcophagus. Now at least one of the people in this house has an understanding of fire safety and as far as John can tell it has not added to any anxiety. She does want there to be a chain of reasoning, and at least in her relationship with John he never say anything is true ”…because I said so!”, or: ”That is the rule and don't ask why!” because he is the same way that she is ”If this is the problem and then it turns into this problem that you feel you need to solve and this is the rule you came up with and everybody agrees that that is the solution?”
John teaching his daughter she can’t share all of her opinions in school (RW234)
Sadly, crazily, and this is something that just happened in their relationship recently, he had to say to her a couple of times: ”This is an instance where you can have these thoughts and feelings, they are absolutely legitimate, but if you say those things in school, you are going to cause a problem for yourself, there is going to be an uproar if you say what you just said to me to your teacher or to another kid at school! You can say it to me and you and I can talk about your thoughts, but there are some things that we as a society are not able to discuss. When you go to school you have to be circumspect about what of your opinions you share! That is sad, but it is as true of life as any other thing. There are lots of things in life that are sad! What you end up with in life are people that you can trust with your thoughts, and that is not everyone!” … until you become a podcaster and then what can they do to you? They don't know where you live!
John does wish that she could live in a world where she could ask all those questions of the other people in the world, but he wishes he lived in that world, too!
BONUS CONTENT
Dan has printed all the letters now and he is doing the old school thing where he crumples them up to get rid of them so that there is no chance of duplicates. But some in the past he was reading on his iPad.
Has religion been replaced by conspiracy theories? (RW234)
Hello Dan and John!
I am a female, 5’8” (173 cm) tall, weight 170 pounds (77 kg), salary $40K.
I have always been happy to see our nation turn more and more away from organized religion. I am someone who has felt that organized religion is bad for our forward progress and against the inclusion of all peoples. Now I feel that unintended consequences of this turning way have come home to roost. It made sense that as we shed our religious biases, we would embrace the ”We are all in this together!” outlook and ”the rising tides raise all boats” school of thought. It seems however that what replaced religion is conspiracy theories are ”you are different than me!”-ism.
I would love to hear both of your thoughts on this. Thank you for the hours of entertainment and thought provoking conversations! — Terry
John is not a religious man. The cultural anthropology question is ”Is tribalism native to us? Is it built into the human design?” and in that case…
Dan thinks that there is something inherently natural about ”Us versus them”, even if it is only about Letterman vs Leno. That kind of thinking is baked into the human condition unless you work to unbake it.
Organized religion is somewhere up the staircase from our native selves. The whole course of civilization has been a gradual process of trying to domesticate our worst impulses and channel them into using organizing principles to make us better and to make us more effective. Religion was a very necessary step, it became more and more codified and became more and more structural and social and political. It was a process. Then government started to take over from religion and then better and better government until we got to a place in the 20th century where there started to be a new way of thinking, which was that government was the problem.
We were culturally evolving faster and faster over time. The Catholic Church lasted for 2000 years and democracy in the sense of post-Enlightenment democracy lasted about 200 years, so the pace of cultural evolution quickened. On the philosophy side of post-Enlightenment a lot of thinking happened that fed back into government and culture. Those things were reciprocal for a while in the 18th century and then philosophers were able to began to critique government directly. We weren’t talking about the the natural laws or the rights of man, we were talking about the means of production and we were talking about the will to power in ways that invited lay people into the world of philosophy as a tool to write editorials and to critique the education policy of the new administration.
Talk about asymmetrical warfare. They are so out of scale with one another because the progression from anybody outside of our tribe is an enemy and we are going to burn them or murder them to ”Our tribe is bigger. Their tribe is bigger. If we beat them in battle we are going to enslave them!” to ”Our tribe is this. Their tribe is that. When we meet them we are going to trade with them!” The March of civilization is increasing minutia and rules. ”We are going to meet them and we are going to trade with them, but we are going to secure some portion of our interest in this cargo and spread it among several businessmen to limit our risk!” That is a long way from ”Burn our enemies!”
At its purest form government is deeply, profoundly boring, and the people that love it are actuaries. It boils down to: ”How do we calibrate this law so that it does the best possible work with the least expense and the least collateral damage?” and we were doing such a wonderful job of getting in there and splitting hairs. On the other side the intellectual class was so thrilled with itself for being able to construct theories of the world and of the mind, so excited at how much they could elevate themselves above the mundane and create a new social class, a new aristocracy, that you could actually join and you could use your aristocratic power and privilege to to become new Lords, increasingly attempting to be at least a meritocracy.
There was a new kind of merit. Some pigs were more equal than other pigs. Introducing this into the firmament of the class of people that should have been most vested in making the world run better we put criticism over government as a higher accomplishment. You were no longer a theorist working in service of the human project, the project of government, the project of civilization, but you are now a theorist who was in opposition to the project, you were the one smarter, your theory was that this project was actually dehumanizing or whatever. There was a new mentality!
All of the founders, all the Enlightenment thinkers, all of the work they did in philosophy was an attempt to make government better, and all of the work of the 20th century and the late 19th century, and now it is exclusively the work of the Academy, was to ”make it better by ripping it to shreds”, and by applying the overarching theory of the the subliminal truth, which is that what we see is not what is real and what is real is hidden messages, hidden agendas, the conspiracy theory that is the unconscious mind or the inherited bias.
There is a lot in the leftist utopian project which is basically saying: ”What seems true isn’t and what is more true than what seems true is this theory of the world that you need to be smart to understand and once you understand it you need to accept it and then start to build policy around it and you are never going to know for sure if even the fundamental premise of it is true, you just have to believe it!” and that is a thing that the left can’t address about itself. It is at the heart of the unbridgeable gap between left and right.
For all of their insane philosophy on the right they in a lot of ways culturally are literalists. They put their hand on a thing and they go: ”This is true!”, for instance critical race theory or whatever. They can say: ”Well, there is this and then there is this. I am a poor person, why don’t I get this helpful treatment?” and critical race theory involves an understanding of history and of time and a belief in how history is culturally communicated and how things resonate through generations and how those resonations are more powerful than the tangible in some cases, or that they manifest in tangible ways, but over here, and the connection you can make is philosophical, to make a direct connection is impossible, but you make reverberative connections.
There is an enormous percentage of the population who is never going to understand that, let alone accept it as a governing theory and a way of governance. We went at some point not that long ago from the idea of making the law so that it was just, and we lost the small scale, the understanding that law is limited and it is imperfect, and it is a thing to be constantly honed, and we started to look at law as the enemy, that law is embedded in injustice and that you cannot have just law until you break the connection that law has two structures.
The problem is that those structures took 50.000 years to build, a constant slow climb, and the pace of that climb has been increasing and the challenges are more and more difficult as the world becomes increasingly globally singular. To start to make law and these 10.000 year old edifices the enemy, and to imagine that you can sweep them all away with a gesture and replace them with something more just and more functional is a reversion to the craziest religion John has ever heard! That is a faith, a list of Commandments, that is freaking J. Z. Knight level of disconnected from reality or history or truth.
You cannot just say: ”Things are true!” and have them be true, you cannot just wave your hand and dismantle things that you think are not fair and replace them immediately without any effort with things that are fair. It is an infantile view of the universe! It is not an uprising of the wrench-turners, the racists, and the uneducated, but it came in the other door, the one that we are never able to take a hard look at. The smart people are the bomb-throwers, the ones that looked at all of civilization and said it was too conservative, it moved too slowly, it was too entrenched and too based on primitive structures, and it all needed to go.
It is a revolutionary mentality, it is exciting, it feels young, it feels new, it feels you can reorder everything according to a book. Pick a book! You can reorder everything! Marx can write three books and in those books there is enough truth that you can with a wave of the hand take 50.000 years of gradual civilization and do it all over. The book has all the answers! It doesn’t, it can’t! There is no conspiracy, there is no solution. It is always going to be uneven, it is always going to be unfair, it is always going to be pock-marked and constantly broken.
You are taping up over here, you got a finger in the dike over there, and somebody just walked in and they speak a language you have never heard before and you are trying to understand them and get them integrated. This is the drink line, this is the food line, these tables over here reserved for the people that work late, and it is never going to be a system because there is no conspiracy. There is not a conspiracy against freedom and there is no way to make a conspiracy for it.
The religion that John is the most opposed to right now is the belief that there is something better than what we were working on all these thousands of years and that we had arrived at a place where we were making laws unprecedented in human history, that we are granting equal rights in a whole culture and nation to all people. Now from those lofty heights of 50-60 years ago we are back down in the weeds again, believing that there are 50 nations in the United States and every one of them has different laws and we are fighting, if you look at the COVID stuff. Dan doesn’t think that we have had more of a separation between people of one state and people of another in our lifetime.
There have always been in all 50 of the American States and in all the nations of the world, parts of those States and nations where the people who were trying to make an impact congregated and they were often where the river had a U-shaped bend or where there was a harbor and the U-shaped bend made it easy to build a bridge and that became the city of Vienna, and there was a good harbor and that became the city of San Francisco. There were other places in those States and countries where people were just trying to scrape by or wanted to be out alone, where they could have their own Tabernacle and not have to deal with other people looking in, and those were different universes.
But the group in Vienna made the attempt to rule, to devise laws, and to fund a police, and to build a church and a parliament, and the people that were out in the middle of nowhere they less tried to do that and they more tried to get their Banjos in tune and we never cared what they thought. Every once in a while all miners in Romania would get galvanized, march to Bucharest, and throw somebody out of a window, but then they would go back into the mines. Maybe Lech Wałęsa was able to convert that into a life in politics, but now we are living in a world where everybody out there with a Banjo also has a megaphone and has found all the other Banjos, and they are pickin’ and grinnin’.
They think that they are as smart as any congressman and there is enough of them to vote congressman in, and those Banjo-picking congressmen go to Congress and think they are smarter than anybody in Congress or smarter than the people who have dedicated their lives to working in the State Department, and they are in there, pickin’ and grinnin’ and all of a sudden they are telling women in Austin, Texas whether they can have a gynecological procedure. Go back to where you are more comfortable, around a campfire somewhere!
But the problem is that they are not uncomfortable in Congress, they are having the ball because they have one book they are basing their philosophy on! Whether your book is the Bible or Civilization and Its Discontents (by Sigmund Freud), it is only one book and you can’t base it on a book. There are a lot of smart people who read (Michael) Foucault and thought: ”That is it!” and they did keep reading, but all the books that they read were all by people who had read Foucault, and they got into a spiral, but they are the ones that are teaching now, they are the ones that are running the universities now, and they are echo-chambers. They are the ones that introduced cultural relativity that is biting us in the ass.
It sounded like a great idea when we felt like there were marginalized communities that needed to have their voices heard. What we didn’t expect was that the most vocal marginalized community in the United States was going to be Hillbillies. We were like: ”We are going to take Mark Twain out of the cannon and we are going to replace it with Beloved!” - ”Wonderful! Goddamn right!” and then half the country said: ”Oh, well, if we are going to take Mark Twain out, why don’t we put in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?” If culture is relative, if the big state and the mainstream culture is just up for grabs, if there is no cannon anymore, if there is no universally accepted form of government and representation, no rules, no handshake deals anymore, no laws apply, then we are going to also consider ourselves an oppressed minority: White Christians.
We are going to replace all those books that we also found oppressive because they were classist and they were written from a Northeastern intellectual perspective. We found those more oppressive than you did! We found your culture more oppressive than you found your culture, and we are going to replace it with the Bible as interpreted by Billy Graham, and we are going to replace it with whatever crazy-ass shit we come up with. ”The Democrats are eating babies!” Don’t you wish you had Huck Finn back in your freaking schools? That is a little bit of a ”Gen-X on hard mode” take, but it is not fucking both-sides-ing! The left and the dirt-bag left especially doesn’t know how to be self-critical. They are so convinced that their book, their Bible, is true and unassailable, and you are a heretic if you ask questions about it or if you just point out its inconsistencies.
It is a religious war we are having right now, and one of the religions is Evangelical Christianity and one of them is pseudo-intellectualism, and John doesn’t want to live under either regime! He wants to go back to the era not that long ago when we felt that religion was on the ebb and we were living increasingly in a world where science, not just a theory but demonstrable theories that had gone through the fire, and before a time when social theory was taken to be a literal science, when it was like: ”Man, we are close here! We are honing this and there is a lot of pain and suffering in the world and we can’t fix it all, but God we are getting close! Look at these vaccines!” In the 20th century a lot of bad things happened, but a lot of incredible things happened! We are just not reaping those benefits now, we are in a mini ice-age and John is probably not going to live to see the sawn, maybe his daughter will.
John’s daughter’s generation says: ”Shut the door of your bedroom at night to protect yourself from fire!” That is a thing. Let’s do that! That doesn’t have to be a law, but let’s not spend a lot of time thinking about all the ways that people continue to die in fires because shutting your door at night doesn’t prevent fire. It doesn’t end fire, but it does keep most people from dying of smoke inhalation. And then they sign the bottom of the document and they say: ”Next!”, like government!
John was in Bulgaria in a little bakery and he was talking to the baker. It was a sizable town, 60.000 people maybe, a big enough town that it had all the things, traffic whizzing by, traffic light, it was on an arterial between this place and that. Out in front of the bakery there was a manhole cover missing in the middle of the road (see RL17, RL57), and John asked about it because it seemed like an easy fix. It seems dangerous like it is. The baker spoke a little English, but there was a lot of pointing and Pig Latin, and he said that the manhole cover has fallen into a category where it is no-one’s responsibility.
There is a Ministry whose job it is to keep manhole-covers on manholes, but it is run by a guy who was appointed to the job by the governor’s brother and he farmed out that contract to the governor’s brother’s mother’s brother and when you go down to the manhole cover office and talk to the person behind the counter, they are not interested in helping you, there is no personal advantage to them, and they tell you to wait in line or to file a report, but nothing ever happens, so you will just stop going down there. For a while they would steal manhole covers from other neighborhoods, but then they kept getting stolen back because there is only a certain number of manhole covers and they are just making the rounds! No-one thinks it is their job.
What you have here is a failure of bureaucracy! It is something that in the United States we take completely for granted. If you had a missing manhole cover on your street and you called the 1-800 number, first of all, there is a 1-800 number, and second of all someone would answer it and there would be a manhole cover there within a day in almost every place in the United States and in most of Western Europe there would never even be a missing manhole cover, it is not even conceivable!
That was a moment where the beauty and the inseparability of bureaucracy from happiness and contentment and city life really dawned on John and he felt it viscerally. It is much less important that there be a universal declaration of the rights of man than that there be someone you can call to fix the fucking plumbing, that there is somebody on the other end of the line who comes.
This is ”Late 911 wears the late crown" (lyrics from 911 Is a Joke by Public Enemy): There is always going to be a feeling that when you call that number they are more responsive to some calls than to others, and that is invariably true, but eliminating the phone number, eliminating the bureau because the bureau responds differently in this neighborhood than it does in that doesn’t make it more equal, it is not replaced with a better bureau, but it is replaced with the absence of a bureau and you get manhole covers that never get replaced.
Let’s go back to a time when we all could depend on the Catholic Church. If you ask Mel Gibson when they stopped doing the Latin rights, that was the last time you could really trust the church to know what was happening.
Do Dan and John have any nicknames? (RW234)
Dear Dan and John!
Longtime listener, many time writer here. I am 37 years old, male 6’1” (185 cm), about 220 pounds (100 kg). I make about $80.000 a year as a High School math teacher specializing in statistics and calculus.
Do you have any nicknames that have stuck? John has talked in the past about people trying to call him things like Steamin’ John, but none of them have stuck. Dan has told stories from his childhood where adults would call him Danny, but he is an adult now and he puts forth a serious and professional public face. You both discussed how Merlin is a nicknamer, but few people seem to call you Dan Ben Jamin’ or Hot Rod. Do you have nicknames other than dad or Daddy, or are your name solidly and staunchly your only names?
Thank you for all the great shows! - Listener Rudd
Dan’s reply
Privately Dan does call John Daddy, and he is not alone. He used to be called Danny by his relatives and by teachers and by other students until he was late single-digit age when he did not like it anymore. It felt like a name for a child and he felt that he was more mature than that. He was more mature than his peers for the most part, but he definitely remembers vividly not wanting to be called that and telling his parents and relatives to not call him that anymore. His full name is Daniel and the first time he was in the new home room the teacher asked if he goes by Dan or Danny and he would say: ”Dan!” and he has been Dan since he was about 8. John thinks it is funny to think of an 8-year old named Dan.
Dan never felt like Daniel is his name, he doesn’t have any association with it and if someone were to say: ”Hey Daniel!” he wouldn’t even look up, it wouldn’t register with him unless he happens to be sitting at the DMV. In a way his actual legal name is his nickname. Daniel is the nickname. Dan is the name. If you want to change your name you could simply start using that name and it legally becomes your name. You do not need to legally change your name, you can just simply assume a new name and begin using it. There are federal laws and things like that. You could just have a new name, however it is much easier to prove that you are who you say you are if you go through the legal channel of getting it changed, but you don’t have to. You can just use another name, first name or last name, and that is now your name.
Dan thinks a nickname is a crutch for people who need some kind of accouterment to further substantiate themselves and John’s personality is big enough that he doesn’t need the crutch of a nickname. He could just be John, the name he is given, and he will let that do its work because the personality is there behind it. Nobody gives birth to their little child and they hold the child in their arms and they say: ”I am going to call you Machine Gun Kelly!”, but then they come up with their own name, they reinvent themselves, and it is very rare when someone else gives you a nickname, that this nickname is somehow positive, that you want to continue to carry it, and that you like it.
Circumstances through which a nickname has to be given and then perpetuated, you have to be involved in that as well actively. If you are 10 years old and you go bowling and you throw a strike and they call you Johnny Strikes. But you have to perpetuate that outside the context of the team, unless everyone on the team are also your friends who you do everything else with. You got to perpetuate that to the new people that you meet. When you graduate and go off to College, are you still Johnny strikes when nobody who was there that night is with you in College? You meet your new suite mate in your dorm and they ask you: ”What is your name?” - ”Call me Johnny Strikes! 8 years ago I was bowling and I got a strike!”
Or the reputation has to proceed you somehow, and you have to be the one who is perpetuating it: ”My friends call me Johnny Strikes! My name is John!” The whole concept of nicknames comes from neighborhoods, and we don’t have neighborhoods anymore. We don’t know the people on our streets, we are not a band of Hoodlum Kids running around late at night, their mom calling their name out the front door, wondering why they are not back for dinner yet. Those days are gone and nicknames went with them!
Rip-roaring Rad Dog Radical Rocking Righteously Rascalling Reefering Roderick
John thinks that Dan is right! Nicknames live in a neighborhood world. Only 40% of the people in the US have a College degree and that is already too many. 25% of the people in America should have a College degree, that is how it was in 1994. Now 40% of Americans have a College degree and nothing has gotten better. The introduction of all of those additional College degrees has not made the world smarter! We are immeasurably dumber! That is a direct result of the fact that you can’t have that many College degrees and have them be good College degrees. The additional 15%, none of those are good College degrees, and of the 25% College degrees in 1990 there were already 9% of those that weren’t any good.
People throw nicknames at John all the time, but they don’t stick. In his Junior year in High School a group of cool Monty Python-loving Seniors started calling him Rad Dog as a goof on him and played on it for a long time until it eventually became Rip-roaring Rad Dog Radical Rocking Righteously Rascalling Reefering Roderick (see RL261). They would say that whole thing to him every time because they were nerds and they made a joke at his expense, but at the same time they were kind-hearted nerdy seniors and they were also giving him props and it became a game for them to say it to John every time.
For a while John wrote in his High School newspaper with that as his byline, and by the time he was a senior Rad Dog had become a thing that people called him and he actually had it engraved in his skis. When he went to College he did not introduce himself as Rad Dog, it is so embarrassing to say, it is a nickname that came out of his neighborhood and the people who called him Rad Dog were his friends. The people in High School that didn’t like him were not going to call him Rad Dog and he wasn’t going to show up in the freshman dorms and be like: ”Hi, I am a hayseed from from Yokal Haller and my friends call me Rad Dog!” In College they tried and tried! The guys in his dorm threw every kind of nickname at him, but there there was never one like Johnny Strikes, where one night he got a bunch of strikes and he was Strikes from that on.
Dan thinks the best nicknames are going to be legit Mafia nicknames, like Johnny Two Guns or something. That is a real name. It can stick. But then again, that is all about the neighborhood.
John’s old roommate Shannon Patrick Kelly who comes up in conversation quite a bit on various podcasts, his initials were SPK and his nickname was Spike, but he also had little spiky dreads. In the 1990s that hairstyle was all the rage, the dreads were probably 5 inches long, they didn’t stand straight up, but it was a very cool mess of smaller dreads. He was always Shannon, there was nobody that knew him only as Spike, unless it was somebody at his work.
Hot Rod, John’s first email address
John ended up being Hot Rod because his first email address was given to him by his friend Andrew Friedman who had opened the first Internet cafe on Capitol Hill, capitolhill.net, and he would come in to the news stand where John worked and told him that John needed an email address in 1997 probably, but John can’t imagine why he would need to get an email and he still can’t, really. He came over one day and he had written down ten.llihlotipac|dortoh#ten.llihlotipac|dortoh.
Later Andrew got into trouble and he ended up selling the café to so some very lovely people who were working in the sex trades because at that time in 2001 an Internet Cafe on Capitol Hill was more useful as euphemistically you would say a brothel than it was profitable as a place for people to go and Usenet groups. At a certain point the guy that was running the server hadn’t been paid and he shut down capitolhill.net, taking John’s email archive with him. He actually got him on the phone and said: ”You can’t do this to me! This is my email address!” - ”Take it up with the people that aren’t paying me the money!”
It was before John would have known if it was possible to port it over into something else. He gave John 24 hours to to get whatever he wanted off of there. It was 4 years of him emailing his friends and who is ever going to want that? Now it would be pretty cool to go back and read emails from 1998! All of John’s friends who got emails from him from 1997 to 2001 all started calling him Hot Rod because that was what came in their inbox. That was a group of pretty close friends, but no girl ever called him Hot Rod, it was definitely a bro name.
No man has ever called John Daddy until Dan started calling him that, but that has become an increasingly popular nickname for him as he has gotten older with his lady friends. At first he was very shy of it, it was weird, but he has come to embrace it because it is absolutely true.
John is John Roderick for all the people in comedy and all of the people in music. They call him by his full name to differentiate him from John Flansburgh or John Hodgman. There is just a giant pile of Johns and they all just get either called by their last name our their full name. You either say Hodgman or you say John Hodgman. You say Flansburgh or you say John Flansburgh. People probably call John ”Rodrick” (without the ”e”). When you say Hodgman or Flansburgh it doesn’t echo as a sports thing, not like ”I was talking to Benjamin” To call Dan for Benjamin sounds like something a coach would do. ”Hey Benjamin! Hit the showers!” Dan has never really been called that intentionally, but it is a common mistake because he got two first names.
John accidentally calling Ted Leo for Leonard
John on The Best Show with Tom Scharpling a few times over the years and one time in 2011 he was on tour somewhere else and Tom had John call in because it was a Christmas show and he wanted John to sing a Christmas Carol over the phone. John played Santa Claus for 10 years at least in Seattle and he has a lot of Christmas bona fides. John called in and Tom was having his Christmas show and John asked who was there and Ted went around saying all the names and this guy Leo says something to John and John replied and Leo said: ”The last person that called me Leo was my High School field hockey coach! Don’t call me Leo!” - ”Oh, I am sorry. Is it Leonard?”
John could hear everybody in the studio laughing and he could hear the vibe over the phone that Leonard is not happy with John calling him Leonard either. It was only later that John learned that it was Ted Leo and John had only heard the Leo part and he called him Leonard. Ted is a little bit high-strung and paranoid anyway and this was before they had met and become friends. Ted’s band the Pharmacists and The Long Winters played the same venues, and they toured at the same time, so they were often on tour and John would get to a place and there would be a poster for Ted Leo & the Pharmacists two nights later or two nights before, they were either just been there or they were right behind them. In a 350 capacity room, if The Long Winters sold 195 tickets, Ted would sell 300.
They were at the same level, but Ted was more successful, and that always inspires in John an instant dislike for a person, if they are at the same level, except slightly better. John wasn’t familiar with Ted’s music, but in talking to the club agents there was that kind of vibe always happening. When John discovered that he had accidentally dissed Ted in a way that made everybody in the studio crack up and hopefully made people all around America who listened to The Best Show on the Eastern Seaboard either crack up at Ted’s expense or hate John because he had insulted their hero Ted gave him a warm feeling for probably another year before he actually met him.
He had spent all those months slightly seething at the fact that when he would open the alternative paper for the week of March 17th the featured show not to miss was Ted Leo & the Pharmacists and then two days later a smaller blurb for The Long Winters. Unfortunately after John got to know him and like him he never called him Leonard again and he should have done that and called him Leonard the entire time, that would have been a fun little neighborhood jape, the neighborhood of 2005 Indie Rock! John hasn’t talked to Ted in a while, the next time it comes up he might call him Leonard, but it might be too late.