Ep. 100: "Tertiary Lobster Fork"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: Good, good, good.
Merlin: How are you going?
Merlin: I'm doing good.
Merlin: I have a dusky voice from having a cold.
John: Oh, you do have a dusky voice.
John: I sound dusky.
John: You do.
John: You sound like the stage manager of a southern theater company.
Merlin: Listen, I'm glad y'all are going to be out here.
Merlin: We're going to need to get them mics and we need to take and sweep out that whole area before y'all get out there.
John: Got to sweep out that whole area.
Yeah.
Merlin: take and take and i i i grew up did you was that was that in parlance when you were a child take and take and is that is that purely a southern uh thing yeah i don't know what that means yeah you need you need to uh you need you need well first of all you always say you need to you need you need to take and move them boxes oh take and move them boxes no we didn't speak that way up here
Merlin: I may just do this all the time now.
Merlin: My favorite is the kind of Southern fellow who has a voice that's real dusky like that, but also a little bit effeminate.
Merlin: A little effeminate.
Merlin: A little effeminate, but he's not.
Merlin: It's kind of a Georgia thing.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Sure.
John: There's that Southern twang that almost sounds like Brooklyn nasal.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: It's sort of almost a Jersey squeak.
Merlin: Well, you got me thinking about this many, many episodes ago, talking about how many... I can't stop.
Merlin: I'm sorry, I'm sick.
Merlin: You got me thinking about this with the number of people in the South that are from the British Isles, from Scotland and Ireland.
Merlin: And now it's funny.
Merlin: I do kind of notice...
Merlin: Some similarities.
Merlin: It'd be fun to have a language person sit down, take and sit down with you and be able to illustrate those similarities.
John: I would like to sit with a language person.
John: I'd like to take and sit.
John: I'd like to take and sit with a language person for a long time.
John: I would love to talk to a language person.
John: I love language people.
Merlin: You know, of all the pedantic people that are out there, language people bother me the least.
John: Oh, yeah, the real language people.
Merlin: I love language stuff.
John: I do, too.
Merlin: I really like the language stuff.
Merlin: I hope my daughter loves words.
Merlin: How could she not?
Merlin: Well, I am, I don't even know the word, probably hyperlingual.
Merlin: Megalingual?
Merlin: What's a nice Latinate word for literally never stops talking?
John: Mondo.
Merlin: Mondo verbal.
Mondo verbal.
Merlin: Yeah, you know, there's not that many things.
Merlin: I don't really care how she turns out by and large, but I hope she likes music and I hope she likes words.
John: Yeah, we got a lot of words going on around here.
John: We're trying to get... Your kid's wordy.
John: She is wordy.
John: She's a wordy little baby and we're trying to... One of the things that made me who I am is that at a pretty young age, I think probably like pre-memory,
John: I realized that listening was the secret.
John: Like listening... Overhearing adults.
John: Like listening in on adult conversations was going to be the...
John: It's going to be where all the real information was exchanged, you know?
John: And so I was a, not an eavesdropper, but I would, you're a kid, right?
John: Nobody expects that you know what's going on.
John: I would just go sit on somebody's lap and just sit quietly and listen to the adults talk.
Merlin: They kind of forget that you're there.
John: They absolutely forget your hair.
Merlin: I think they get used to, I know this is true for me, where, like, I think you get so used to kids, with little kids, when they hear anything, they start remarking on it, or they try to change the subject, or they want a cookie or something.
Merlin: If a little kid's around and doesn't say anything, they could pick up a lot of information.
John: Well, and it worked for me until I was about 15.
John: I would just come sit in the room and sit quietly and listen to them, and I, you know, I knew enough to know...
John: that my contribution was not valued when they were talking about politics or or economics or something i i didn't have anything to offer but i would just sit and listen and i listened until i listened until i didn't understand and then i listened more and
John: So I'm trying to impart that to my daughter because it's the core of my understanding of the world, right?
John: And my little girl right now thinks that the first thought that comes into her head is the most important thought that anyone's ever had.
John: And we could be standing in a house that's on fire talking about exit routes.
John: And she would say, an orange is like an apple.
John: And think that we should all stop what we're doing and appraise the wisdom of that idea.
John: So I'm trying to explain to her, basically through enforcement, that she needs to shut up.
John: She needs to shut up and listen.
Merlin: It's for her own good.
Merlin: She'll get a lot more intelligence that way.
John: That's right.
Merlin: She'll gather more intelligence.
John: It's how you gather intelligence.
Merlin: Shut up.
Merlin: I think I've done that with – well, for some reason now I'm thinking of Daniel Plainview, that movie you can't watch because of the music with the little kid.
Merlin: And whenever Daniel speaks, his son listens.
Merlin: His son sits there in silence and is clearly listening to everything that he's saying.
Merlin: Can you imagine that?
Merlin: Can you imagine having a little kid that would just sit there and listen and think about what you had to say?
John: You know, that's my dream.
John: All I want to do is teach.
John: All I want to do is teach my child.
John: But right now she is resistant to being educated by me, which is why I'm taking my show on the road.
John: I'm going to go teach the town.
Merlin: It's about time.
Merlin: Yeah, I heard about – I want to talk about that.
Merlin: I mean I've said this with – I want to say with Jess.
Merlin: But truthfully, when I say to my daughter, I don't know how to get her into the please and thank you route.
Merlin: I really believe in the please and thank you route.
Merlin: It served me well.
Merlin: I learned – I think I told you this.
Merlin: At a young age, I became somewhat obsessed with etiquette.
Merlin: And I was a very lonely kid and I would read any reference book that I could put my hands on.
John: Did you read that Miss Manners?
John: No.
John: She's a poser.
John: But that Miss Manners book, that first one she put out, that's like six inches fat.
John: For me, that was Amy Vanderbilt.
John: Oh, Amy Vanderbilt.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I think I told you this once before.
Merlin: I think it was either Amy Vanderbilt or who was the other really famous etiquette person?
Merlin: Well, what's her but?
Merlin: Yeah, the other one.
Merlin: Post.
Merlin: Emily Post.
Merlin: Emily Post.
Merlin: We had a hardcover etiquette book at our house.
Merlin: It's always interesting to ponder how anything ended up in your family.
Merlin: Sometimes you look back and you're like, why do we have that in our house?
Merlin: That's weird.
Merlin: And we had this book that was, like you say, seriously, it was at least three and a half inches thick.
Merlin: Hardcover book from the early 60s with illustrations by Mr. Andy Warhol.
Merlin: interestingly enough.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Back when he was just an illustrator.
Merlin: And, um, but I read that thing, man, I, I knew from tiny forks, you know, I knew everything.
Merlin: I knew about like, you, you do your, uh, you do your napkin and you fold it in half for dinner.
Merlin: You fold it in quarters for lunch.
Merlin: I knew all this stuff backwards and forwards, you know, like you, I knew how to make a, uh, hospital corners on a bed.
John: That's right.
Merlin: I knew all this stuff when I was like nine, it was super weird.
John: You gotta know how to make hospital corners.
John: If you're ever going to learn to short sheet a bed.
Yeah.
John: See, nobody gets their bed short-sheeted anymore, and I think something's been lost.
Merlin: People don't understand.
Merlin: Education is not a buffet.
Merlin: You have to go in and work through the courses.
Merlin: You can start with the forks on the outside, and you move in.
Merlin: That's how education works.
Merlin: If you don't understand that reference, I can't help you.
John: Looking at my bookshelf right here next to my desk, there are the first four books.
John: The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, which is a three-inch wide book.
John: The second book, The Ann Landers Encyclopedia, A to Z. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Merlin: So if you need a little guidance, you just go to the index?
John: Ann Landers Encyclopedia, A to Z. And this book was published in 1978.
John: Cuckolding.
John: Cuckolding.
John: Page 128.
John: A to Z as, you know, up to 1978.
John: The third book is The Reader's Encyclopedia.
John: edited by William Rose.
John: Uh, what is his name?
John: Uh, William Rose Bennett.
John: And then the, the fourth book, I swear to you, my friend is miss manners guide to excruciatingly correct behavior.
John: Nice.
John: And you know, miss manners.
John: Um, sure.
John: She, she, she was a, she was a, uh, you know what?
Merlin: Come lately.
Merlin: I spoke, I spoke inadvisably.
Merlin: And for that, I apologize.
Merlin: I've always enjoyed her most on talk shows.
Merlin: I thought she was a wonderful talk show guest.
John: She's a very witty writer, and she makes... She's kind of foxy, too.
John: She's pretty foxy, and she makes the etiquette seem... It goes down with a spoonful of sugar.
John: But she can be a bitch, too.
Yeah.
Merlin: That's the game, man.
Merlin: Don't hate the player.
John: You know, you would think in high school that I would have been sitting around just learning to roll doobies and flicking my switchblade into a log.
John: But in fact, I was reading Miss Manners' God's Excruciatingly Correct Behavior front to back.
Merlin: I find those books extremely calming.
Merlin: I think I used to really like, because of my somewhat turbulent and
Merlin: weird childhood i i think i really enjoyed things like the brady bunch as a cultural touchstone and i enjoyed reference books i enjoyed things that showed that there was a gentle order to life yes yes i really really did i think there's still a part of me that looks at that and doesn't just kind of cackle ironically there's a part of me that says like wow you know ideology used to really work for us well and the sense that like
John: The sense that Miss Manners had, which was like, oh, dear.
John: Oh, my dear.
John: Did you really just fold your napkin across your... Did you really just tuck your napkin into your shirt?
John: Oh, darling.
John: And you could just hear her gently.
John: And I don't think she would even reach out and take the napkin away herself.
John: She would always keep her hands to herself.
John: But she would just indicate to you... She would use the napkin tong for what was provided.
John: And the feeling like, oh, there's a right way.
John: There's a right way and a wrong way.
John: And like...
John: I was sitting at a fancy dinner the other day, and I had my elbow on the table.
Merlin: Oh, I still feel bad when I do that.
Merlin: I still feel guilty.
John: And I felt bad.
John: I felt bad.
John: And then I realized that I was going to keep my elbow there.
John: I was going to keep it there knowingly.
John: Because I had a mind to.
John: And that if there was any rogue at this dinner party who could have a mind to keep his elbow on the table, it was going to be me.
John: But you had to know, I mean, I had a constellation of thoughts rolling through my head and that, you know, that I was somewhat playing the riverboat captain.
John: By putting my elbow up there and leaving it there.
John: And the problem was there was no one else in the room that could even tsk at me.
Merlin: So they couldn't appreciate what a subtle cue that was for you to make that decision to have a mind to put one elbow up there.
John: No, I was dying to be... You're a jazz man.
Merlin: You know exactly what you're doing.
John: Exactly.
John: I was dying to be tisk-tisked by somebody so that I could twirl the end of my mustache and, like, dip my white dinner jacket in the consomme.
John: But no one tisk-tisked.
Merlin: That's sickening.
Merlin: No one knows up from down.
Merlin: Because no one knows.
Merlin: No one knows that you're playing at social and cultural mores.
Merlin: No one even knows that anymore.
John: You can't even riff on stuff because nobody knows the tune.
Merlin: Okay, I'm going to give you two bullets on this.
Merlin: I honestly feel this.
Merlin: I should feel terrible about having said this bullet number one to my daughter, but it's really true.
Merlin: Which is, first of all, the please and the thank you thing, it's such a simple bit of social lubricant.
Merlin: And nobody – no matter what, even if you're being like a faux civil British person, like it's still nice to say please and thank you.
Merlin: It's nice.
Merlin: Or ma'am or miss or something.
Merlin: Like it's really, really nice.
Merlin: But I've told her the truth.
Merlin: I've said, Ellie, you will get away with so much in life if you can learn to genuinely say please and thank you for things.
Merlin: Because people, if you want something done, ask for it as a favor.
Merlin: And somebody is much more likely to do it.
Merlin: Could you please pass me the salt?
Merlin: It sounds so much better than give me the salt.
Merlin: It really does.
Merlin: That's – I mean, truthfully, I think it's just something – it's going to be a while before she learns that that's just a nice thing to do and that she'll appreciate it too.
Merlin: But honestly, you do get away with a lot.
Merlin: But bullet number two, this is huge.
Merlin: And I did not get this.
Merlin: I was looking through – I was like, I know you're a Buddhist.
Merlin: It was like looking through the text, looking for the part about how to lose my ego but not learning that the real point was something much –
Merlin: Is that the Buddha bell?
John: That's my Buddha bell.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: What is that?
Merlin: Number 12?
Merlin: Rung 12?
John: I'm up there.
John: I'm up there looking back.
John: Don't talk about Fight Club.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Number 16.
Merlin: There are no homonyms.
Merlin: But this is – I forget where I first read this, but this is one of those things I probably had to read 11 times before it really sunk in.
Merlin: and this is what makes uh with the judith uh judith manners what's her name you know the lady yeah yeah judith martin judith yeah judith manners is that you you learn that the point of etiquette i'm going to say this slowly and carefully even though i know you know this for our listeners the point of etiquette is not to be fancy it's not to be prescriptive it's not to have a bunch of rules for no reason other than to try and make people feel bad no quite the contrary etiquette exists
Merlin: To make true etiquette when you get down to the real like black diamond level of etiquette, it's not about rules.
Merlin: It's about doing everything you can to make other people feel comfortable.
John: That's right.
Merlin: And that's what people don't understand.
Merlin: If all they do is read the rules and correct people on whether they're using the right tertiary lobster fork.
Merlin: then they're missing the point.
Merlin: The point is not to make somebody feel bad about their fork.
Merlin: The point is to know we know that at this point in the meal, if we've all read the same book, we know which ones of these to use and we can enjoy this.
Merlin: But ultimately, it's about making somebody feel welcome and not make it a big deal.
Merlin: Even if they put a glass on your table without a coaster.
Merlin: Find a way to make them feel at ease about that.
Merlin: You can make them feel at ease, but you're both trying to make each other feel at ease and that's what etiquette is.
John: That is the judo of mismanners because
John: I was trying to get at it a second ago.
John: Not only would she not reach out and touch your napkin, but she would somehow make it seem like your idea and that she was there to help you.
John: She was there to, yeah, as you're saying, make it easier.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Gently guide you toward this thing that's very sensible.
John: Oh, let me get you a coaster.
John: Oh, let me help you.
John: It's a very gentle but firm kind of knowledge of the way things are.
John: And you're right.
John: It's like the rules of language.
John: This debate is happening all the time.
John: Why, why doesn't language, why doesn't English now just become a free for all?
John: Why, why do we follow these archaic grammar and spelling rules?
John: Why, why don't be everybody just be talking how they like B?
John: And, uh, you know, of course I am on the side of, I am on the side, like, like the members of the French Academy.
John: I believe that the language evolved just fine right up until the point that I decided that it should stop.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: But no, I mean, I love the evolution of English, but the core rules...
John: I adhere to and I espouse.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: And I mean, I think we can all, anybody, you know, who's done a little bit of book learning, may even been to college, will appreciate the fact that language evolves.
Merlin: It always has evolved.
Merlin: It will evolve.
Merlin: But, you know, let's put it in the simplest way possible.
Merlin: It's nice to know the rules before you break them.
Merlin: And it's really nice to know the rules before you unknowingly break them.
Merlin: Because the older I get and the more
Merlin: I don't always speak with precision, but when I do speak with precision, it helps me think with precision.
Merlin: Because words mean things.
Merlin: And these five words that people use almost interchangeably really mean different things.
Merlin: And the subtlety of the differences in their meaning is really amplified when you use them correctly.
Merlin: I think that matters.
Merlin: I think it really does matter.
John: It does matter.
John: Somebody asked me the other day, you know, I'm somewhat, not notorious, but...
John: Not even infamous, but I don't even think lauded.
John: There are three to five percent of the words in English that I pretty clearly mispronounce.
John: And someone said to me the other day, like, you always say that word wrong.
John: And you know that it's wrong.
John: Because, like, other people have surely corrected you.
John: Why do you do it?
John: Why do you still say that and so many other words?
John: Like, wrong.
John: And I thought about it and I said, well, I do not prefer the way that everyone else pronounces it.
John: And she said, but I mean, that's how it's pronounced.
John: And I said, but I just don't prefer it.
John: You sound like Bartleby.
John: A little bit.
John: The word she was referring to was the word that everyone, I guess, agrees is pronounced comely, which I do not prefer.
John: I prefer to say comely.
Merlin: That sounds much nicer.
Merlin: She's a comely young woman.
Merlin: Comely does not sound like a compliment.
John: Comely is a disgusting word.
John: Comely is a beautiful word.
Merlin: A comely young woman sounds like the victim of unexpected bukkake.
John: That's right.
John: A comely young woman is the opposite of a homely young woman.
John: She's comely.
John: that's good i like that it is how i've always preferred it it is your prerogative that's right and so and so when people say comely i i flinch a little and when i say comely it usually like around and this is the problem because around the room it takes people a second
John: To figure out what I'm saying.
John: Well, that's good.
John: They're going to think a little bit.
John: That's right.
John: That's a little moment.
Merlin: Oh, forgive me.
Merlin: I made you think a little bit.
John: My bad.
John: There are so many words like that in my private lexicon that I just mispronounce because my pronunciation is the one I prefer.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I can't remember if I invented this.
Merlin: I probably read this somewhere.
Merlin: Grudge pronouncing.
John: Hmm.
John: Oh, you're very good at that.
Merlin: There are some things that I will always say a certain way, and I'm happy that other people are starting to pick it up.
John: Yeah, artisanal.
John: Artisanal.
Merlin: No one should say artisanal.
Merlin: That's disgusting.
Merlin: Why are you saying that?
Merlin: It's not artisanal.
Merlin: All baked goods are artisanal.
Merlin: Otherwise, it wouldn't be baked goods.
Merlin: Really, you've hired artisans?
Merlin: Is that what you did?
Merlin: You hired an artisan?
No.
Merlin: You didn't hire an artisan.
Merlin: You hired some union guy to come in and make you buns.
John: You don't know when an artisan's there.
John: You don't know if it reveals themselves.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: It's like you can't call yourself a poet.
Merlin: You could say you write verse, but you should never say you write poetry.
John: Yeah.
John: Let your teacher praise you.
John: Don't praise yourself.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: We should write a book, John.
Merlin: I don't want to make a big deal about it, but I'm just saying there's a lot of ways that we could help people.
John: Well, what I don't understand, as far as I can tell, for my whole life, I have said Sasquatch.
Merlin: That is the received pronunciation that I received.
Merlin: Sasquatch.
Merlin: Sasquatch.
Merlin: During the Bigfoot flare-ups in the 70s.
Merlin: In the 70s, Bigfoot flare-ups.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: There had been Bigfoots before, Bigfeet before.
Merlin: Sorry, my bad.
Merlin: I think it's Bigsfeet.
Merlin: Bigsfeet, Gentlesperson.
Merlin: Bigsfeet.
Merlin: Bigsfeet had been seen historically, and then there was a rash.
John: There was a rash.
John: There was a rash.
John: Do you remember Leonard Nimoy's... In search of.
John: In search of.
John: 100%.
John: With the Bigfoot screaming in the dark.
Merlin: Do you remember the screaming in the darkness?
Merlin: The Bigfoot with the blurry footage.
Merlin: That's in Washington, right?
John: Yeah, that's in Washington State.
John: We have a lot of Bigfoot here.
John: Bigs feet persons.
John: And so I always said Sasquatch.
John: Yeah.
John: But apparently...
John: Somewhere along the line, everyone else in the world agreed that it's pronounced Sasquatch, which I think is a terrible, terrible pronunciation.
John: Sasquatch.
John: It's vulgar.
John: Sasquatch.
John: Comely Sasquatch.
John: It's a Sasquatch.
Merlin: Sasquatch.
Merlin: That sounds so much prettier.
Merlin: Isn't that nicer?
Merlin: It sounds like a delicious soft cheese.
John: Wouldn't you rather be a Sasquatch than a Sasquatch?
Merlin: What about words we're losing like niggardly?
Merlin: It's very, very difficult to get away with niggardly today.
John: Well, yeah, the problem is that it's a word that... It's a great word.
John: But so many dummies have blanched at it that the people in between, the non-dummies, who know what the word means, still feel it's incendiary because non-dummies have made a practice of worrying about what dummies think.
John: Yeah.
John: This is like half the problem with the modern age.
John: There are all these middle non-dummies who are like walking around on pins and needles because some dummy might misunderstand them.
Merlin: Just to capture this wall, I think one appendix in our book is definitely going to be the taxonomy of dummies.
Merlin: It's going to be like a big pyramid.
John: We could go on and on about dummies.
John: But it used to be, this is the thing, middle, let's call them middle dummies.
John: Middle dummies used to aspire to attract the praise of non-dummies.
John: And now middle dummies only aspire... Middle dummies now only act in fear of, like... In fear of the dummies.
Okay.
John: You see what I'm saying?
John: I think so, yeah.
John: I'm not really explaining it very well, but it used to be that the middle brow aspired to the high brow, and neither one concerned themselves at all with the low brow.
John: But now the low brow dominates, and the middle brow is on pins and needles at the prospect of offending the low brow.
John: And so they devote all their energy because the highbrow is out of fashion.
John: The highbrow has all these overtures or all these negative connotations of exclusivity and...
John: Wealth and privilege, dare I say, privilege.
Merlin: Yeah, but also warring with the middle dummy, middle brow thing to kind of want to appear a little fancy maybe.
Merlin: So when you say middle dummies, middle brow, middle dummies, I think of like – what's a good example?
Merlin: Whom?
Merlin: Whom?
Merlin: Whom shall attend the opening of the rectory?
Merlin: Yeah, whom shall?
Merlin: With Margaret and I. It's like, well, you got like three problems in that one.
Merlin: Like there's several different things in that sentence that didn't really need to be that way.
John: I really feel like whom shall would be a great DJ name.
Merlin: DJ whom shall?
John: DJ whom shall.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, see, you know, I've never been worried about fancy.
John: You know, like, fancy is this, and I think that this goes back to what you were talking about before, the great influx of Irish into Appalachia.
John: Like, there's all this Appalachian worry about being too big for your britches.
John: This sort of Nashville concern that you not act above your station.
John: And that has...
John: whole class structure that that used to be a part of is gone now and there's just this residual sort of grease stain in the culture of a feeling that lines up with all these other aspects in the culture where the lower
John: The lower and the cruder is considered more real.
John: The more vulgar is the realer.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, because it's the language of the quote-unquote people.
Merlin: It's closer to the truth, and it's not trying to cover up half-truths with fancy words.
John: Right.
John: And so that has this false friend...
John: in the humility or the desire not to brag or to put on airs.
John: And the false friendship with the idea that vulgarity is closer to truth has produced a culture-wide sense that...
John: I mean, seriously, that people should be flying in their pajamas, which is, as you know, the beginning of the end.
John: And I'm speaking now as the human envoy for the UFOs.
Merlin: Yeah, somebody who gets out of the shuttle to the airport vehicle with the buckwheat pillow already around their neck.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: This is not a society that is ready for any kind of serious advancement.
John: Yeah, no, not at all.
John: These are people who one of these days are going to go through airport security and it's going to just direct them right into the Soylent Green grinder.
Merlin: I used to think it was just peculiar to this show that you would talk about the airport security line.
Merlin: But I'm starting to think that whatever comes from the super train generation, there's going to be something involving something like the TSA line.
Merlin: Because that seems to me that that is the nexus for everything that drives you crazy about this country.
John: It's just like the Walgreens situation.
John: They are training us.
John: they are training us through this gradual increase in indignity to just go into the hopper, just go through the, the branding cage into the, you know, they're just feeding us through one, one after another.
John: And now they're looking at x-rays of us naked.
John: And we just, we just say, Oh, okay.
John: And then that's good.
John: Branding cage.
John: Indignity has become patriotic.
John: Absolutely.
John: And then pretty soon after the, after that, uh,
John: After the x-ray, they're going to have us walk through a darkened tunnel.
John: Just a short darkened tunnel.
John: You'll be able to see the end.
John: And then pretty soon, it's going to get a little bit longer.
John: It's going to have a turn in it.
John: So you can't see the light at the end.
John: But it's okay.
John: You can trust us.
John: It's like some kind of Temple Grandin thing.
John: Yeah, we just have to send you through this darkened tunnel that has a turn halfway through.
John: And then at a certain point, the turn is going to get closer.
John: So you're going to have to get through a little gate or a little kind of like...
John: uncomfortable squeeze in the middle.
John: That's right.
Merlin: The Patriot Tunnel has to evolve to address the problems with terrorism.
John: It's what we have to do, and then one day you're going to squeeze through that little gap and turn the corner right into the saw blades.
Merlin: Don't call it an abattoir, though.
Merlin: That's a little too fancy.
John: It's a freedom knife room.
John: Right into the saw blades.
John: I elected...
John: to have a pat-down search the other day.
John: Nice.
John: And it was so invasive and characterized by a kind of like banality.
John: Like I said, all right, you know what?
John: I'm not going to go through your x-ray machine.
John: I'm on a layover here.
John: I got three hours to kill.
John: I'm going to see what this, I'm going to get the pat down.
John: How do you like them apples?
John: Right.
John: And so the first thing they do is kind of try and dissuade you.
John: Like, oh, it's going to be a long time.
John: It's like, yeah, I know it's going to be a long time.
John: Like, I got all the time in the world.
John: You guys put your leather gloves on and let's go.
John: And so then they usher you through the little gate and they hold you over on the side while all the other people go by.
John: And I'm standing there with a kind of superior look on my face like, I got the time.
John: Let's go through the pat down.
John: And then here comes the guy.
John: And he's talking to somebody across the room.
John: And he puts his plastic gloves on.
John: And then he starts giving you a full-on fucking pat-down.
John: Like...
Merlin: He doesn't do that date rapey explanation.
Merlin: They usually do the date rapey explanation.
Merlin: Like, sir, I'm going to be firmly touching your genitals.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Sir, I'm going to run the back of my hand across your anus.
John: Maybe some of that, but I mean, like right away.
John: They go into your pants now, right?
John: Don't they go into your pants a little bit?
John: They do.
John: And right away I regretted...
John: I regretted coming over.
John: Like this was so much more vulgar than whatever year of my life I'm going to lose by being irritated by a teenager operating a machine made by Halliburton and sold to the government, you know, for 50 times what its list price should be.
John: But this guy, you know, some dope is just like, he's just pressing on me.
John: in a way that is transparently unnecessary.
John: Like, honestly, I'm, you know, like, I understand that, that you have to do it because people could self-select and then be covered with plastic explosives.
Right.
John: But, like, this is a – there's a punitive aspect to the way that they do it.
John: Like, it is clearly punishment meant to dissuade you from ever doing this again.
Merlin: Yeah, if a Kurt Vonnegut alien were to, like, write a paragraph on what –
Merlin: he or she alien was seeing they would basically say that there there is a system that is in place to make sure that everybody will follow an unnecessary rule and anybody who doesn't follow the unnecessary rule will be made uncomfortable in front of other people for not following the unnecessary rule that's what it really kind of looks like super super uncomfortable and you know i like spent the rest of the afternoon kind of like
Merlin: Punitive.
Merlin: Your word punitive.
Merlin: It really feels like we're going to make an example of you.
Merlin: We're going to waste some of your time.
Merlin: You know how inconvenient this is for me.
Merlin: It would be so much easier if you would just go through the porno scanner.
Merlin: But now I'm going to make this a little uncomfortable for you, but not uncomfortable enough that it's actionable.
Merlin: It's going to just be really humiliating for you.
John: So I'm traveling with my family the other day.
John: And I had encouraged them all to get the pre-check card back when I believed that there was any value to the pre-check card at all.
Merlin: I just heard this story on another show.
Merlin: Tell them.
Merlin: This is where you go.
Merlin: John has been approved for Black Diamond Lane, right?
John: And we get to the airport and we print out our tickets.
John: We're all traveling together.
John: We're sitting next to each other in an aisle.
John: There's four of us.
John: And two of the people have pre-check on the top of their ticket.
John: But I and my three-year-old daughter do not have pre-check.
John: And so we get to the woman at the security desk.
John: And she points...
John: Half of our party down the pre-check lane and half of our party into the other lane.
John: And I said, you know, we're all traveling together.
John: And she said, doesn't matter.
John: And I said, you know, this is a three-year-old girl.
John: Like, do you honestly believe that I would... I mean, is there a terrorist in the world who would...
John: Who would take his three-year-old as a false flag?
John: As a beard?
John: A bomb beard?
John: Three-year-old baby?
John: But this person has already... Their mind is already...
John: shut off sir i'm gonna ask this individual to move out of the pre-check lane yeah and so you know so right away you're just you're in the hopper and if you make any fuss about it you just it's there's only one option which is that you don't fly today like the police come because either you acquiesce or you don't fly
John: And we get all the way, you know, and I'm standing there and I'm like taking my belt off and I'm taking my wallet out and I'm just feeling like so much, I'm just feeling that perfect storm of resentment and frustration and powerlessness.
Merlin: A little bit of resignation.
Yeah.
John: Well, but I can't succumb to resignation.
John: That is the flaw in me.
Merlin: I mean, the word that comes to mind, this is not a word that I use lightly because of the connotations, but I think it's frankly depressing.
Merlin: It makes me depressed.
Merlin: It makes me depressed how much clothing I have to take off to go get on a plane and then stand there and get dressed in front of other people.
Merlin: I'm not like a modest person, but there's something actually depressing to me that this is what it's come to.
John: it's deeply depressing and, and, and it is, and you sit there and you feel like you could not, you could not design a system that is more sort of like, it's just the lowest level of debasement, right?
John: You can't complain about it because it's such a low level.
John: It's such a like mild shock and,
John: you can't really enlist, I mean, even the fact that you and I are devoting this much time to talking about it, there will be a certain number of people who roll their eyes and say, whatever, first world problems, whatever.
Merlin: Yeah, people who don't travel.
John: Yeah, dummies who like to say first world problems in response to things that they don't want to think about.
John: But, like, culturally, to have arrived at a place where there is no
John: there is no way that you can assure the world.
John: There are no bona fides.
John: You cannot say, can we just accept that I am no threat to everyone?
John: It is not necessary to assume, and this is the thing, I guess, it is not necessary for a civilized society to assume a priori that every person is a threat until proven otherwise.
John: And it isn't a one-to-one correlation that
John: Either everyone is a threat or we have to target people by race.
John: And this is the premise that's kind of advanced to us.
John: Like, well, either everybody has to suffer or we have to resort to profiling because those are the only two options.
John: And it's like, no, those aren't the only two options.
John: They really aren't.
John: There are a lot of people of all races, colors, and creeds that are no threat.
John: The vast, vast majority.
John: The number of people who are a threat are such a tiny, minuscule percentage.
John: Percentage of a percentage.
John: And that are only, as a people, as a civilization, that the only solution to that tiny percentage is
John: is that every single person who wants to move about shall be debased and treated as a criminal.
John: That each person who wants to travel for pleasure or business needs to be mugged by a cop.
John: before they can just move you know move to the next stage to the next stage of what is going to be a further debasing process like you know now you have been now you have been x-rayed and fingered and now you have to go sit in a broken chair in a fart tube and maybe you'll get half a can of club soda and
John: while the plane sits for three hours on the tarpon.
John: Right.
John: Like, this whole process is like, it speaks to a brokenness in the grand experiment, which I am a vocal proponent of.
John: You know, the idea that we, as human beings, are evolving positively, and culture is evolving positively, and we are building on what we have made, and we are creating...
John: We are working toward a utopia or working toward a betterment of our condition as people.
John: And I've always believed in it.
John: And this kind of like base police statism...
John: It's so antithetical to it.
John: And it is depressing.
John: It is humiliating.
John: And it is infuriating.
John: And I cannot resign myself to it.
John: I don't know how to protest it.
John: which is part of what's humiliating.
John: But I can never just... I can never walk up to that security line and just turn into a cow because I really do feel like there will come a day when they will like...
John: When they're going to start hurting a certain percentage of the people over into a dark room and you never see them again.
Merlin: Totally.
Merlin: And it's part of the problem is that it's a proxy war.
Merlin: I think you need to be very careful in life about how many proxy wars you decide to fight.
Merlin: Because when you start a proxy war, you go beyond some kind of initial problem, whether that's –
Merlin: A proxy war starts out with a good enough idea, which is that there's this thing out there, this really, really bad thing that happened, or this really, really bad thing that almost happened.
Merlin: And now we're going to put all this stuff in place to make sure that that never happens again, even though we really know it's never going to change what's already happened.
Merlin: It can't change what's already happened.
Merlin: But now there's going to be this whole new set of new...
Merlin: I mean, how many people who died having a department store bombed in the 80s by the IRA really had that strong of an opinion one way or another about how things went with the troubles?
Merlin: That's an extreme example.
Merlin: But in this instance, now, you know, I mean, the most obvious example being like the underwear bomber or the shoe bomber or the whatever bomber.
Merlin: I mean, our response to something...
Merlin: That didn't even work.
Merlin: Like a bombing tactic that didn't even work that was really implausible to begin with is to now have everybody take up their shoes or whatever.
Merlin: So now we've got this entire force of people who aren't even cops.
Merlin: They're subcops.
Merlin: They're barely security guards.
Merlin: They know it doesn't work.
Merlin: This is well documented.
Merlin: They know that all this stuff is theatrical.
Merlin: But they have to take it extremely seriously.
Merlin: And now they are –
Merlin: Feel free to disagree.
Merlin: But perhaps I think somewhat understandably they're mad at us if we don't play along because they're just doing their job.
Merlin: We're trying to do our job just being normal people.
Merlin: But now that proxy war is – it's taking – there's just the basic dignity of being just a normal American who can move freely and trying to, as you say, put us through this little sluice of indignity to make us kind of kowtow.
Merlin: To this – the basic concept that we are being protected by doing this and we are not being protected by doing that.
Merlin: That's the really galling part of this.
Merlin: If you honestly thought – there's 2,500 people in this line right now and we know that one of them has explosives in their ass.
Merlin: By all means – well, I would say maybe just cancel the flight if you know that, if you really know that.
Merlin: But are you really going to search everybody's ass?
Merlin: For a balloon full of explosives?
Merlin: No, because you know it's all bullshit.
Merlin: You know that none of that stuff is true.
Merlin: And it is about more than just first world problems.
Merlin: It's about this is a country where you used to be able to move freely and be able to do stuff.
Merlin: Now you show up on lists and you don't know why and you can't get taken off the list.
Merlin: But the proxy war part I think becomes important because now, like every kind of proxy war, you start out by non-solving a problem or a non-problem.
Merlin: And now on top of that, you've got all of these new problems as a result of that.
John: Well, the primary new problem is I cannot be alone in traveling through airports and basically thinking the entire time about all the different ways I could sneak a bomb through here if I really wanted to.
Merlin: That was just going to say.
Merlin: This to me became extremely – I see this now probably one out of three times I travel.
Merlin: I see this exact same thing happen, and each time it blows me away.
Merlin: You'll be standing there and watching people, seeing little kids get searched for bombs, and then somebody –
Merlin: Pushing a what I would estimate to be probably a 100-gallon garbage pail on wheels is waved through.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Because they're an employee.
Merlin: Yeah, they have a pass.
Merlin: And they've been checked and stuff.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: So somebody making $10.50 an hour gets waved through.
Merlin: It's not a question of class.
Merlin: It's a question of just read one fucking spy novel and figure out how you would do it.
Merlin: You know what you would do?
Merlin: You would go to a disgruntled pilot and have them do it.
Merlin: It's not going to be, it's not going to be the old lady with the medicine and the gallon of water who doesn't understand the three ounce rule.
Merlin: Anyway, everybody's fighting the last war.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: But that, but then that, that's what you have these knock on effects.
Merlin: Proxy war is maybe not the best term for it, but I think when you, when you try to have these little, uh, the dramatis persona of people who are trying to have a life play out these little political plays and then act, you know, we're not supposed to act like we know anything's fucked up about it.
Merlin: I,
Merlin: I mean, how can an intelligent person do that for 10 years and feel great about it and feel really proud?
John: Well, the thing that concerns me is that something, I really do feel this way.
John: Something has been lost in just the span of my adult life.
John: Where the idea of living by example has almost like completely gone awry in our culture and has been replaced by this like...
John: this cultural war that's happening in a thousand different ways that don't need to be detailed.
John: But the idea that as the United States, in our role, in what we used to think of as our role as like the aspirational
John: where no matter where you lived in the world, you would aspire to come to America to live free and have opportunity.
Merlin: We showed that impossible things could happen and that it could be sustained at scale.
Merlin: Impossible things.
John: And all the criticisms of that, that America's wealth is a result of exploitation of an unexploited country that we stole from people, etc., etc., etc.
John: All those taken in and, you know, like...
John: accepted and assumed as valid criticisms still the united states as a democratic experiment was for a very long time the place where human ideas taken from all around the world were sort of put into practice like let us try these ideas and there are there are innumerable ways that
John: there were secret societies and that the whole thing was just a cia uh you know like a fake radio station the entire time etc etc but in but in actual fact like the human experience the human experiment was and is still being played out in america
John: better than anywhere else and more on a greater scale and with like with more factors right there's no other place in the world that has as many people of different races cultures and creeds all trying to come to a consensus live according to common rules and
John: And with a system that allows those rules to evolve in real time to reflect new ideas and new cultures coming in.
John: The rules in America are so much different than they were 20 years ago, and for the better...
John: Because of the influx of all these new ideas.
John: And we are uniquely flexible to assimilate all these different new concepts.
John: And a lot of that flexibility is because of our diversity.
John: But something is lost now that we are no longer leading by example in terms of...
John: assuming like taking acceptable risks that yes people are going to get hurt that yes it is messy that yes every once in a while every once in a while somebody is going to sneak through with an underwear bomb
John: In all frankness.
John: Because you cannot eliminate all crazies.
John: You cannot stop all predators.
John: And it's crazy to try.
John: And so somewhere on the scale, the practice of democracy and the practice of freedom has to look like it.
John: This is my beef with Washington, D.C.
John: right now.
John: You remember going to Washington, D.C.
John: when you were a kid.
John: You'd walk right up, driving down Pennsylvania Avenue, standing on the sidewalk, get your picture taken in front of the White House.
John: It was open and democratic looking.
John: The president of the United States lives right there in that house.
Merlin: Yeah, with glass windows.
John: Yeah, and yes, there's a fence because he doesn't want people playing frisbee on the lawn, but that fence is just a fence.
John: And yes, there are security people, but you don't see them.
John: And there's the capital where all the government is.
John: It's all right here, laid out in this beautiful city.
John: It's not deep inside a cave.
John: Even if there are bunkers.
John: But the appearance of America was very appealing and very open, and that was intentional, even as we were fighting wars in Indochina on the sly.
John: But now you go to Washington, D.C., and it looks like an armed camp.
John: Everywhere you go, there are black SUVs full of black-clad machine gun-carrying Secret Service and park police and 50 different kinds of cop.
John: The entire area around the White House is barricaded with tank traps.
John: I mean, seriously, like tank traps.
John: And Black Hawk helicopters are flying over the city at all times.
John: And again, it is, as you're saying, complete security theater.
John: But it's 100% the wrong impulse.
John: That isn't the theater...
John: That we need to be playing.
John: Our theater needs to be the theater of confidence and calm.
John: And to play this theater of a security state, it's deeply anti-American.
John: It is profoundly anti-democratic and like fills me with rage because it's an insult that I think borders on treason, an insult to the idea of America and the thing that I love about America and the America that I would die to defend, you know, and I, and, and I,
John: All of the eagle tattoos and freedom chants or whatever are garbage, jingoism, if you can't walk down the street in Washington, D.C.
John: without feeling threatened by our own police.
John: If you can't fly from Seattle to San Francisco without feeling like you are not just under surveillance, but presumed guilty.
Merlin: Demonstrate to us that you're not a threat.
John: It's antithetical to the American way.
John: And to the American way that existed all the way through the Reagan years, all the way really through the Clinton years.
John: And again, I hear the chorus of...
John: of uh finger waggers who want to tell me all about the secret secret like behind the scenes governments and all that but i'm talking about the appearance the the temperature on the street the feeling that america had that other places didn't you know if you got off the subway in berlin in 1987 yes there were
John: There were armed police standing around because the presumption then was that there were a million Soviets on the other side of the fence.
John: But in America, there were not tank traps around the White House.
John: If the tanks get that far, and I know that the tank traps are there to keep Timothy McVie and his Freightliner van from getting up close enough to the White House to break the windows.
John: But
John: But it's a, you know, there is a way to close Pennsylvania Avenue and decorate it with flowers.
John: You know, there are ways to do these things and make it not appear that you're playing a video game.
Merlin: It seems like it's such a Dick Cheney move.
Merlin: It is.
Merlin: It is, and that's what I... I think his legacy, in some ways, one of his many wonderful legacies for this country is going to be shit like that, which is, you know, this entire theatrical thing that is going to keep, you know, pretty much any C-minus attacker from really doing anything to us.
John: well do you remember that scene in california a few years ago where those two bank robbers had machine guns and they walked down the street some uh supposedly with impunity just firing their machine guns all around and the cops the the story that the cops told oh they didn't have enough firepower they were totally outgunned yeah and and like 2 000 cops
John: were outgunned by one guy and a machine gun and his friend driving a car and so the the response from law enforcement nationwide to that was listen the bad guys have these really powerful guns and so we need to we need to double down we need to militarize because there are these these bad guys with guns now
John: Through the history of America, there have always been bad guys with guns.
John: They have always had as modern a gun as you could have, right?
John: I mean, the sniper in the clock tower in Austin back in the 60s was a Marine sniper with a sniper rifle just shooting at students.
John: Like, it was never a question of firepower.
John: But because this guy's got an automatic or a semi-automatic weapon...
John: You felt it immediately.
John: Like all of a sudden the cops are wearing black fatigues everywhere.
John: And they're driving around in SUVs with blacked out windows.
John: And the police have always wanted that.
John: But there were civilian checks on that kind of thing.
John: Like the civilian population said, in general, we don't want the police driving around in tanks looking like Gestapo.
John: It's not what we want.
John: We want police walking, swinging their billy clubs.
John: And harassing teenagers, but sitting in soda fountains.
John: And we want the police to protect us, to look like they protect us, to look like members of the community.
John: And in the last 15 years, the police have, through this sort of hero-worshiping cult...
John: and the general militarizing of the United States.
John: Now, everywhere you look, the cops have combat boots on, their pants are bloused, they're carrying sometimes three guns, and they look like paratroopers.
John: And particularly at any kind of big gathering, all of a sudden, even the cops that are in normal uniforms run home and get their paratrooper outfits on.
Merlin: And what kind of job are you dressing for at that point?
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: If my kid is lost in a department store or something or something happens and somebody has to go up and ask for help with something, you're now walking up to somebody in paramilitary gear with three guns.
Merlin: What is that person's job?
John: What is their job and what do they think their job is to help you?
Merlin: If you spend five years of your life walking around with three guns and body armor all the time, you're not going to think of yourself as a community police officer.
Merlin: That's exactly right.
Merlin: You're thinking of yourself basically as Army Reserve.
John: And if you are coming to a peaceful gathering in your town, in the town square, and you show up and there are a line of cops dressed like army rangers...
John: night patrol do you go to them for help if you if you lose your wallet or do you i mean do you like stand on the other side of the square and eye them warily like i'll take it a step further for that matter if you think something is kind of odd or something you you know you want to make a note about to somebody you see something you want to say something you
Merlin: Well, kind of.
Merlin: But I mean, yeah, obviously, obviously, if you find this terrorist threat, you have to tell them about it.
Merlin: But just something as simple as like I would be I would be it seems to be inadvisable to go to to go to that particular arm of law enforcement with anything but like a desire for deadly enforcement.
Merlin: I mean, you know, the finer tools are not going to get used nearly as much as like pepper spray and three guns.
John: That's exactly right.
John: Like, like these are not police who are, who are projecting that they are helpful or that they are kind or that they are thoughtful or considerate.
Merlin: You know, they're even human.
Merlin: They, they, they basically, they're like storm troopers a loaded term, but in the sense of being like an anonymous enforcer of some kind of an order that you never even heard.
John: Right.
Right.
John: So, fast forward a couple of years from now, where the technology to have one in three of those people be a robot.
John: I mean, we really are.
John: I read on Twitter the other day that somebody's, I thought, really smart comment that people are always bitching that we were promised flying cars.
Yeah.
John: But if you were born any time after 1970, what you were really promised by science fiction was a dystopian police state.
John: And in fact, the promises of science fiction are coming true, so quit your bitching.
John: And it was a very clever tweet, but also, like, it really resonated with me, like, oh, right, right.
John: If you were born in 1930, maybe you were promised flying cars.
Merlin: Yeah, or like a house of the future.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: A certain kind of high-tech leisure.
John: That was all World's Fair 1962 stuff.
Merlin: Popular science kind of stuff, yeah.
John: By the time 1980 came around, science fiction was just like, oh yes, it's going to be a cesspool ruled from on high by robots.
Right.
John: And either you're living on Elysium or you're not.
John: And I feel like the solution...
John: You know, we have to start now, and we have to start now by not resigning ourselves to these minor indignities on behalf of the TSA.
John: Like, it is possible to roll back the police state mentality, but it requires that we resume a mentality that, like, cultural-wide...
John: culture-wide, a mentality that favors peace and tranquility and consensus over divisiveness.
John: And in a way, that means that our hyper, hyper worship of individuality needs to be somewhat tempered.
John: You know, the idea that every single person has a right to whatever their... To whatever myriad, like...
John: bullet points they can come up with to describe their own individual identity like that premise that each person's individual identity identity is is uh is a status rather than that we each are that that our status is derived through the like the the the welfare of the group
John: That no one of us has a status greater than another if the lowest part or if any quadrant of the group is not well cared for.
John: Then we all lose status.
John: And that's a lost art.
John: And it was never articulated before because it was presumed in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
John: And on all sides now, every single person in America has this kind of strange combination of Appalachian, frat boy, rebel status.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Every single person is a rebel status.
John: And if everyone's a rebel, there will never be any peace.
John: We deserve to live in a police state if we're all rebels all the time.
Merlin: You mean like cultural pop culture rebels?
Merlin: Or do you mean like going to the compound kind of rebels?
Merlin: It sounds like you're talking about just coming up with built-to-purpose artisanal entitlement one person at a time.
John: I mean, when you think about it, the one thing that unifies a newly out trans sex worker and a Alabama frat boy investment banker deacon in his church, the one thing that unifies them is that neither one of them is going to let anybody tell them what to do.
John: Neither one of them is going to let anybody define them.
John: And culturally now, this dominates our conversation on every side of the political spectrum.
John: Nobody's going to tell me who I am or what I can do.
John: And I can be anybody I want to be.
John: And you're not the boss of me.
John: That is the American consensus now.
John: And it is dull.
John: It's dull and it leads us down this path where we are children.
John: And so the cops are doing what comes natural to them, which is, we need more guns.
John: We need more authority.
John: Because that's the cops.
John: That's what they will always do.
John: It's what they've always done.
John: Right.
John: But there's no one to stop them now.
John: They're never going to say, you know, let's just have two guns.
John: It's not the cops job to say, we need to have a more civil society.
Right.
John: And so as police, we're going to accomplish that by putting our guns away.
John: Like, the cops are never going to do that.
John: Right.
John: That has to come from... That has to come from... Well, and...
John: It has to come from a new coalition of people from all walks of life who say, no, my individuality does not take precedence.
John: You can tell me what to do.
John: I will...
John: I do agree that although this law does not seem to apply directly to me, although I don't have any kids and I am being taxed for the public schools, I'm going to just... I'm just going to... I'm not... It's not that I am going to...
John: uh just give a stop complaining about my taxes to the public schools i'm going to i'm going to gratefully give my tax money to the public schools to educate my neighbor's kids because that's how you make a better world 20 years from now and no one's preaching that anymore
John: I think that used to come from the churches.
John: It used to come from just your normal sense of community.
John: It wasn't a thing you could even reasonably argue.
John: It was just the John Burt Society and the wingnuts way, way out that would ever argue that we shouldn't be taxed for public schools.
Yeah.
Merlin: I guess I just feel like the stuff that bugs me in all this, there's – there's always the boogeyman of the various dystopian futures that we call out and worry about.
Merlin: But there's something like particularly –
Merlin: enduring about Kafka to me.
Merlin: Because in a Kafka novel or Kafka story, the part that's the most disturbing is you don't know why it's happening.
Merlin: That's the thing that really gets me.
Merlin: So I take your point in particular about things like the police.
Merlin: That's their job, right?
Merlin: I mean, the police are always going to want things that make it easier or less difficult to do police work.
Merlin: The people who gather intelligence are always going to want everything they need to make it less difficult to gather intelligence.
Merlin: There's never going to be a day when they say, you know what?
Merlin: We don't really need all these phone records.
Merlin: The part that I find so troubling and the part that I think is going to lead to more and more credibility problems at many, many different levels is this whole like, well, this is just how it is.
Merlin: That's the Dick Cheney-ness of it.
Merlin: It's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, no.
Merlin: I've got photos here of what cops looked like 20 years ago.
Merlin: I got photos now of what they look like now.
Merlin: They're still probably real good people, but I can't tell because they're wearing masks and riot gear.
Merlin: Why is that?
Merlin: And when do we get to – is that just how it's going to be now?
Merlin: And why is it that this person got picked out of the line and not that person?
Merlin: Why is it that suddenly – I mean there's just so much opacity –
Merlin: to this all-consuming need to control all things.
Merlin: I don't have a prediction on whether that's going to lead to a revolution or something, but I think it certainly hurts the credibility of anybody who's trying to do something good in government.
Merlin: When you increasingly say things like,
Merlin: You can't fly.
Merlin: And I can't even tell you whether you are or aren't on a list and what you can or can't do to do about it.
Merlin: I'm not even having this conversation with you right now.
Merlin: To me, that's why Kafka, the Kafkaesque component of this is what makes it so deeply troubling.
Merlin: It's one thing to say like, okay, there's a real bad guy.
Merlin: There's this classic villain who's doing all this bad stuff to that.
Merlin: But I don't get that feeling at all.
Merlin: It's more like, again, whatever, the Hannah Arendt banality of evil thing.
Merlin: It's just a bunch of people doing their fucking job.
Merlin: It's just their job is to create more and more opacity about this non-solution to what's increasingly starting to seem like an unsolvable problem.
Merlin: What's the problem?
Merlin: Well, the problem is security.
Merlin: What does that mean?
Merlin: I mean, how much further do we have to go?
Merlin: I mean, how much further will we go in these directions where –
Merlin: Things just keep getting weirder and like the more that we ask questions about, the more suspicious that we seem.
Merlin: I'm not a wingnut.
Merlin: I'm not out here saying like – I don't even have a conspiracy theory.
Merlin: I just don't understand how you can be a reasoned member of a democratic society when you're just not allowed to have basic information about why things are operating the way they're operating.
John: And what's terrifying or what is so dispiriting is when Obama was running for election the first time, all of this stuff was true.
John: It was all happening all around us.
John: I mean, the fact that the Department of Homeland Security is even called that...
John: like it it was i thought that it was the i thought it was the broadest parody in the world until i realized they were serious yes like homeland security it's as nazi a thing you could say in english
Merlin: It's like you can almost see fatherland got crossed off.
John: Fatherland security is exactly what it is.
John: But we've accepted that.
John: We don't even say homeland security with a sneer anymore.
John: But when Obama was running, he was really selling it to us that it was time for a change.
John: And I mean, obviously, that was his slogan.
John: But also, yes, it is time for the left...
John: And the left's traditional relationship to the cops and to the army to step in here.
John: And we need to cleanse our palate.
John: We need to have a juice fast, a nationwide juice fast.
John: And we are going to poop out some hardened fecal matter.
John: And we're going to come out the other side.
John: And we are going to demilitarize, really, was a big part of his message.
John: And closing Guantanamo and all the other – restoring the rule of law.
Merlin: Did he actually at one point say that he was going to have the most open administration?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Wasn't that actual words that came out of his mouth at some point?
John: They were words that came out of his mouth.
Merlin: Even as the number of these national security letters has gone off the charts and –
Merlin: The numbers are just not adding up.
John: It's a calling.
John: It isn't just that, but he eliminated not a single thing.
John: And so when you look now at the past six years...
John: And you realize that Obama and his administration have accepted all of those George Bush era militarizations as fait accompli.
John: You know that a Hillary Clinton administration is not going to back Trump.
John: is not going to back any of that stuff off either.
John: Like, she has to appear to be as hawkish as the most hawkish Democrat, because, you know, traditionally, that would be the number one attack you would make on a female president, is that she's not tough enough, you know?
John: She's not going to roll back any of these security platforms.
John: So what you have come to is that, really, the Democratic Party, the left...
John: the left choice in america is now as invested in a police state as the right and it isn't it isn't working anymore there really does need to be a new conversation
Merlin: where we start with the premise that we are not at we are not at in constant war well and start with the premise that this guy's this is fucked up it's just that it doesn't feel like there's any everybody seems to be kind of grimly nodding along about this horrible situation that nobody likes but we have to deal with and i just don't feel like there's been like a collective exhaling where everybody goes you know what this is fucked up
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: We need to get a couple things.
Merlin: We need to get our mind right about a few things.
Merlin: We don't want to be dummies.
Merlin: We don't want to get attacked because of carelessness.
Merlin: But I mean how much longer can we keep moving in this particular direction and just close our eyes and think of England?
Merlin: It's like there's something that's got to happen where we just go, look, it's fucked up.
John: The exhale.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean I don't know what that looks like and I just fucking hate politics so much.
Merlin: But I don't know what kind of solution you can have because that's a conversation nobody wants to have.
Merlin: Nobody wants to be the one who sticks their head up, especially if they're trying to get into office.
Merlin: Nobody wants to – like you say, nobody wants to stick their head up and go, you know what?
Merlin: This is pretty fucked up.
Merlin: Well, and what – I mean here's the other thing then, John.
Merlin: It's like we can't even really know how much terrorism has been stopped because then that would be –
Merlin: harms the security to let us know what's actually happened.
John: Yeah, it would be dangerous because not every third person walking through an airport is thinking, now, if I had a Coke, let's see, if I had three shampoo bottles that were full of the three components that make plastic explosives, and my friend had three shampoo bottles, like, how many terrorist plots have been foiled?
John: Like, okay, let's assume all of them.
John: Or, I mean, it is irrelevant, ultimately,
John: To the to the question of and this is the this is the question of automating armies, you know, and this was the problem with the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place before we even invaded Iraq.
John: There was from Rumsfeld.
John: This like hard on for technology where he felt like he wasn't going to have to put.
John: American lives at risk.
Merlin: He thought it was – I think it seems like he thought it was going to be basically like the Allies rolling through Europe in World War II but with like space lasers.
John: With space lasers, right.
Merlin: They were going to give us flowers and there would be little American flags being waved and our guys would have their big bubble helmets on and walk around with space lasers.
John: Space lasers, and they'd be talking to each other on heads-up displays, and the Taliban would lay down their guns or their sharpened sticks or whatever it was that he thought they had, and we would be greeted in Afghanistan like liberators and conquerors.
John: Finally.
John: Finally, the Americans are here.
John: Because everybody knows in Afghanistan and Pakistan, traditionally, they welcome invaders.
LAUGHTER
John: But the idea, and the military keeps moving in this direction.
John: You know what would be good for business is an American invasion.
John: You know what people love?
John: They love to see American invaders, particularly robot invaders.
John: I can't actually see their faces, but I'll bet they're nice.
John: The military is talking about this.
John: One in three, one in four soldiers now being a robot in the next 20 years.
John: Are you serious?
John: This is the big position paper now.
John: A big part of that is the support staff can be
John: can be replaced with robots.
Merlin: So not drone planes, but like drone people.
Merlin: Drone people, absolutely.
Merlin: Probably more like a drone vehicle dash person.
John: Well, yeah, vehicle person, but it would be a situation where they could reduce the living humans that constituted a brigade and still have a brigade strength of force because they would replace the humans that they're taking out with robot helpers.
John: And, you know, and then robot friends.
John: And then, yeah, robots, you know, first the robot cooks.
John: Yeah.
John: And then the robot ninjas.
Merlin: Maybe, yeah, maybe they could use like farm equipment.
Merlin: They could kill two birds with one stone.
Merlin: They could go in and maybe they could have robot farm soldiers.
John: Well, it'll be a grenade thrower and then he'll be pulling a plow.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, or maybe he could pull out some, you know, some of the natural resources, get out some of the base metals.
John: Right.
John: It's a lot like super training.
John: Also digging diamonds.
John: It's a little bit of a military.
John: A diamond digging soldier bot.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: But what that presumes is that whatever foreign policy we're trying to affect is not worth an American life.
John: And...
John: And if we can remove American lives from the equation, then we no longer have a problem at home because we no longer have moms on the TV crying about their dead sons.
John: Oh, I see what you're saying.
John: And if we are no longer losing soldiers...
John: And if robots are cheaper than soldiers, and they are, then it's not like we would ever reduce the defense budget.
John: We would just have more and more soldiers, more and more robot soldiers.
John: And with less and less political cost, less and less investment, and a much, much lower threshold of...
John: of engagement like already we are bombing people from drones and and despite you know and we have a we have a listener to roderick on the line who is a drone pilot are you aware of that you told me about that yeah and he has a he has very strong feelings that the drone program is ethical and that uh you know under tight control and is a you know is a service to our country and
John: And he's written a book about it that he sent me, and it's a very interesting book.
John: But the standard, the ethical standard for what it takes now for American technology to kill somebody, I mean, it's been on the way for a long time, but – and in a way, carpet bombing –
John: carpet bombing a city from 50,000 feet and like drone attacking somebody in the desert of Yemen.
John: There's not a, you know, you can't really make a case that carpet bombing is any more discreet, certainly.
John: But, you know, we're right up against the Monroe Doctrine here.
John: You know, we are essentially assassinating heads of state
John: non-states in contravention of like our own law.
John: And
John: And what we're trying to do is eliminate our investment in the sense of if we can take our soldiers out, if we can take our human cost away, and this is true in the police too, like they are not willing to put a policeman in a situation where he might get injured because it looks bad and it feels bad.
John: And so in order to keep the policeman safe,
John: They militarized them to the point that we are now facing a wall of black-faced, like, armored cops.
John: And at every step of the way, it's like, right, I don't want a policeman to get hurt either.
John: But...
John: Actually, the risk of getting hurt is part of the job of being a policeman.
John: And the reality is if you send one cop in his shirt sleeves into a group of agitators, nine out of ten times, he's going to be able to relate to them on a human level and diffuse the situation.
John: And if you send 25 cops dressed as robots to confront those agitators, 99% of the time it's going to turn into a fight.
John: And the risk has to be that that one cop, one out of ten times, is going to get hurt.
John: And if you're not willing to take that risk, then you set up a situation where we're all fighting always, all the time.
Merlin: And nobody's saying please or thank you.
Merlin: Sad, though.