Ep. 278: "Felix"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line was recorded on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018.
John: Hi Merlin.
John: How's it going?
Merlin: How's your tooth?
John: Missing.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Next topic.
Merlin: In a week.
Merlin: You haven't had time to fix it in a week?
Merlin: No, I haven't even called the dentist.
Merlin: Should we come clean?
Merlin: I feel like we should come clean.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Never come clean.
Merlin: Never come clean.
Merlin: Stay dirty.
John: Always stay dirty.
John: That's right.
John: Stay dirty, my friend.
John: Let them figure it out.
John: My tooth.
John: I need to call the dentist.
John: I should have done it today.
Merlin: It's okay.
Merlin: It's all right.
Merlin: It's all right.
John: It'll be fine.
John: I'm sure it'll be fine.
John: It's a big rainstorm today here.
John: Big rainstorm.
John: Yeah, you know, in the morning, it was clear and almost sunny, and now the big storm's coming in.
John: Big storm.
John: And I have a—I don't know if you are interested in the weather.
John: My family really cares about the weather.
John: Your memory serves.
John: Your mom goes pretty deep on weather.
John: Oh, my sister's even worse.
Merlin: Oh, really?
John: Susan.
John: Yeah, they just—all they want to talk about is the freaking weather.
Yeah.
Merlin: I thought Susan was more like looking at the stars kind of situation.
Merlin: Oh, she loves looking at the stars, too.
Merlin: Stars are a kind of weather.
Merlin: Stars are what we call old weather.
Merlin: We're seeing a star.
Merlin: What did a star look like millions of years ago?
John: Isn't that mind-blowing?
John: You know, the entire universe could be just a molecule in the end of your finger.
John: Whoa.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: So you're saying it could be in my finger?
Merlin: I'm saying it could be in your finger.
Merlin: The universe does not know where that thing has been.
John: In the GMCRV.
John: We could right now be a molecule in the thumb of some giant being who has his thumb up his ass.
Merlin: Do you think kids still get tripped out when they think about things like that?
Merlin: When you go through that like stony, like first time you really contemplate the idea of infinity, the first time you wonder if we're all seeing the same color green.
Merlin: You think kids, these millenniums, you think they still have those kinds of reveries?
Merlin: You have to.
Merlin: I worry that they don't.
Merlin: You have to.
Merlin: But you've got Netflix and you've got the Snapchat stuff.
Merlin: You know, they don't have time to contemplate things that are recursive and hurtful to the brain.
John: It's not, you know, I think that we didn't have them in the popular culture, and so when you heard something like that in Animal House, when Donald Sutherland is passing a joint around, and they're like, whoa, you know, it actually had the force of novelty.
John: Sure.
John: And I think if you grew up, you know, soaked in stuff,
Merlin: it would be a little bit harder to get to that place but absolutely the moment it actually occurs to you i think it's still got to be like i have a terrible time blowing my daughter's mind i've tried so many times i've been i've been trying to get her freaked out about infinity for years and she still she still isn't freaked out by it by infinity how does she i mean i still struggle with um
John: With string theory, I think about it all the time and I just can't, there's just some things I can't resolve.
John: I mean, does P equal NP?
John: This is a big, this is a question.
John: I'll check Reddit.
John: But we, I mean, you know, multiple universes.
John: I mean, you could sit and think about it.
John: at great length, still mind-blowing.
Merlin: I think it's one reason I was so attracted.
Merlin: I had very little exposure to philosophy before college, and then I read some existentialist stuff in my gap year, and I got very interested in philosophy because it seemed kind of like a universe in a finger with a graduate degree kind of thing.
Merlin: The idea of epistemology was very fascinating to me.
Merlin: How do we know what we know?
Merlin: That would just turn my brain.
Merlin: Maybe I'm just a simple farm boy from Cincinnati, but that kind of thing would just bend my brain.
Merlin: You think, therefore you are.
Merlin: I did a paper on Descartes.
Merlin: I remember in the final paragraph, maybe second to last paragraph, it had this very memorable line.
Merlin: So who is this guy we call God?
Merlin: That's the kind of work I was doing in 1986.
John: You know, don't put Descartes before Day Horse.
John: Oh, come on!
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: You are a dad.
John: I really put that in a paper.
John: Oh, no.
John: So I had a professor who allowed us to be creative.
John: This is in the History of Ideas?
John: History of Ideas.
Merlin: And I did a song about Descartes.
Merlin: If it was in the style of Jonathan Richman, I think I could really get into it.
Merlin: It was pretty close, yeah.
Merlin: The mind and the body, they're such different things.
Merlin: Well.
John: I think I actually said, we can't recant this.
John: Oh, my God.
John: There was a lot of that stuff in it.
John: And, you know, it was 1991.
John: Sure.
John: The other students were like.
Merlin: Berlin Wall, you know.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
John: That's fun.
John: That's fun.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: You know, there are a lot of things that constitute an education, aren't there?
Merlin: Oh, yeah, don't let your school get in the way of your education.
John: Oh, thank you.
John: Thank you.
John: Don't let your ontology recapitulate your phylogeny.
Merlin: Said the 30-year-old guy.
Merlin: It's a 30-year-old townie with the bong.
Merlin: I need to change the life since I went here.
Merlin: Being radical used to really mean something, man.
Merlin: Play my tape.
Merlin: Play my tape.
Merlin: Hey, you want to buy my CD?
Merlin: Let me guess.
Merlin: Is it almost all reggae?
Yeah.
John: I went to the Women's March the other day, and one of the great things about big marches... I mean, this is a while back.
Merlin: Sure, this is... God, how many weeks ago at this point?
John: But one of the great things about those rallies is that there is always a kind of... There's always a sort of a gray area.
John: I wouldn't personally consider it a gray area, but some people clearly do, where they want to use that opportunity to...
Merlin: uh also pitch their their big program oh yes every every demonstration whatever is of any size i've ever been to you could maybe call them fringe characters but you get you got people with a very important message and they're going to use that as a platform yeah like in a in a big rally like that like of course the labor unions are there and they're saying
John: You know, we want you to support the labor union because we have a lot of women in the union.
Merlin: Yes.
John: You know, and you can make a case like, oh, OK, right.
John: This is a, you know, absolutely.
John: Right.
John: It's still a cooptation of the idea, but you can kind of go with them.
John: But there was there were a group of guys standing there, all men, by the way, holding a banner that said support.
John: the freedom struggle of Palestinian women.
John: And then they had a bunch of material about how Israel was committing a genocide.
John: And it was like, hmm, all right.
John: I mean, maybe if there were some women that were holding that banner, it might go a little bit further.
John: But it seems like you just tacked the word woman onto the end of that.
John: Right.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: They slathered on some woman sauce.
John: They put some woman sauce on there.
John: And then there was a group that was like, protect the elephants.
John: Especially the women elephants.
John: Which was like, hmm, that's another iteration.
John: And then at a certain point, oh my God, I really just wanted to be... Because there was a certain kind of corner where the march was turning that a lot of these people had arrayed.
John: And I just wanted to be in a knee-length leather car coat from Costco, standing there going...
John: You want to check out my CD?
John: You want to check out my CD?
John: It's all about women.
Merlin: Your leather cowboy hat.
John: All these songs are about women.
Merlin: What's up?
Merlin: I have so much respect for women.
Merlin: I can only get it out on the Phillips Compact Disc format.
Merlin: It's all in there.
Merlin: I definitely have respect for women.
Merlin: Women.
Merlin: Women.
Merlin: They are somebody.
Merlin: Sometimes they confuse, but they know the news.
Merlin: Women.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: Break my heart and make me fart there, women.
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Merlin: Yeah, you know, it's true.
Merlin: It shows you how fractured things are.
Merlin: Things are fractured.
Merlin: Things feel very fractured right now.
Merlin: Oh, they're so fractured.
Merlin: They're very fractured.
Merlin: You don't remember a few weeks ago there was a problem with the Congress.
John: I don't even remember how long ago it was.
John: And I was telling you in the after show, in the dark show.
John: Yeah, the dark show.
John: You can only get to it through tour.
John: Yeah, you can't listen to Roderick on the Line.
John: Roderick on the Line after Dark, because it's only available to subscribers.
John: Please remember to like and subscribe.
John: But I was counseling you not to, not to follow.
John: Not to fret.
John: Not to fret about the Congress, not even to follow that story.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: but i know it's hard i know it's hard it's hard it's hard yeah what did you know okay so you went to this march did you go to the big one last year uh last year i had a little bit of a complication that kept me out of the march okay but but you went this year what are your impressions of the uh of the march um
John: How's your tooth?
John: Should we pivot?
John: Once the march got going, it's really exciting.
John: There's a lot...
John: about that march moving forward that felt exactly how you would hope it would feel a lot of empowered little girls with signs their dad made for them well you know there are those there's the there's the comedic aspect of it which is kind of fun but you know i was marching behind like several women that were wearing hard hats and they all had jackets on from the carpenters union
John: And they weren't marching as part of a union.
John: They were just carpenters who had their hard hats on and were like, fuck yeah, this is exactly kind of the story that... They're telling a story by their presence, and that story is a story that often gets neglected.
John: We don't typically look at a construction site and...
John: And see into it.
John: It's just buildings are getting built and we don't see who's there and we don't see the inner politics.
John: And when we talk about equal pay for equal work or we talk about the workplace, we kind of typically picture of an office environment.
Merlin: Yeah, but I mean, also, I mean, first, I want to stipulate I am not making fun of these movements or of this march.
Merlin: I'm merely groaning about the situation in life.
Merlin: But, you know, you think about, go back to Flashdance, and it was like, oh, it's a sexy lady with long hair who's a welder.
Merlin: It was more that kind of story.
Merlin: I don't mean to stop your story, but part of it is that it feels like so many of the amazing and wonderful and overdue changes that have happened in the last 5 to 15 years are widely adopted and loved by 90% of the people on our side of the aisle.
Merlin: And so many of those changes are so threatening as to be...
Merlin: Deniable to people on the other side of the aisle.
John: But this is a good example of one that I feel like there's no one in America on either side of the aisle.
John: Ninety eight percent of the people in America, I think, would look at at one of these women in her hard hat with her union jacket on and go, yeah, fuck, yeah.
John: There's no one in America anymore that thinks there shouldn't be female carpenters.
John: Right.
John: And I think that everyone in the most conservative voter in Alabama—
John: Um, is not going to, I mean, there, there are going to be people, they're going to be dicks and, and like, they're going to be dicks who, no matter what their political affiliation, when a, when a woman shows up to do the work on their kitchen, they're going to go, Oh, a woman's doing this job.
John: And there are going to be dicks that are both men and women that do that.
John: I mean, I'm sure that there are women that open the door to their house and there's a woman carpenter standing there and they say, oh, I expected a man.
John: You know, that kind of thing is just a sort of cultural thing.
John: like ignorant or not ignorance it's just like a cultural probably it's a lack of exposure i mean if you've got if you've got some richard scary idea in your head from the late 1960s it's understandable that that's a little bit shocking it doesn't mean that you hate it but it could certainly at least be shocking yeah right it's like lowly worm yeah shows up to do your kitchen work and you're like you're a girl worm who lets that mr fromble drive
John: He's got a lot of problems.
John: There are plenty of cops in Richard Scarry's world.
John: I don't know why they don't.
Merlin: But Sergeant Murphy is just as careless.
Merlin: He literally rides a motorcycle onto a plane full of people.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: You're right.
John: Something doesn't end up in that world.
John: But the other thing that I saw in this rally, I'm talking about just people that were marching very close to me.
John: There were two women in their 60s, and they were both about five feet tall.
John: And they were...
John: At first, not clearly a couple.
John: They were just two diminutive ladies in their 60s.
John: But one of them was holding a small hand-lettered sign that wasn't even a sign.
John: It was just kind of like a piece of notebook paper that she had written on and laminated.
John: And it said, we're not going back.
John: And as the march progressed, I realized, oh,
John: my God, they're married.
John: And they give every indication of having been together for 40 years.
John: You know, they have the comfort with one another that just is like, it seems like they've probably been together for a long, long time.
John: And they're not demonstrative.
John: They're not even really holding hands.
John: They're just walking together with this sign, we're not going back.
John: And it was...
John: So powerful.
John: And I honestly believe, having traveled as much as I've been lucky to do in America and around the world, that most people on either side of the political aisle confronted with these two actual human beings...
John: are not going to be against it.
John: The people that are against gay marriage are against it because they're against an idea that they think, and they're against a notion that we're trying to cram it down their throats.
Merlin: It feels like a threat to their idea of what a family is, which they would say delegitimizes their... Again, it's like Ghostbusters.
Merlin: It's like, you're ruining my childhood by being married.
Merlin: Right.
John: Right.
John: But if they were living in a place where they knew these two, and there are couples like this in Alabama just like there are in Seattle.
John: Yeah, 100%.
John: When confronted with actual people, pretty much everybody, with the exception of a few crazy zealots, is going to look at them and go, oh, well, I mean, I make an exception for my...
John: for my aunt and her friend.
Merlin: Especially because they're not too vocal about it, maybe.
Merlin: There's this one guy I work with who's really nice, and he's nearing retirement age, and I'm pretty sure he's special.
Merlin: But he gets a pass because he's real low-key about it.
Merlin: He's not in my face about it.
John: And it's not the perfect world that we would
John: that we, on the left, like idealize where everyone is absolutely like completely forward facing about who they are and accepted broadly by everyone.
John: You know, it is a kind of, on the right side of the aisle, there's all this tremendous kind of like, what we think of as prehistoric social thinking.
John: But confronted by actual people, pretty much everybody is like, you cannot deny a thing like that.
John: You can't look at them and say to their face, like,
John: No, you should not be entitled to this.
John: You should not be entitled to this happiness.
Merlin: Nobody would ever stand in front of those people.
Merlin: I mean, on the one hand, you get the idea of some kind of Richard Spencer type, like yelling at them.
Merlin: But after having a 10-minute, 15-minute conversation, maybe you're on a plane or something like that, it would be a hard-hearted person to turn to them and say, well, I understand what you're trying to do here, but this is antithetical to everything that America is, and I think you're evil.
John: Yeah, I mean, and you do see that.
John: I mean, there are definitely parents that reject their own children.
John: Fewer and farther between.
John: I think what's I think what's crazy about Trump.
John: I know we never talk about politics.
John: I think what's crazy is that.
John: He has finally given the lie to the idea that politically conservative people are the scolds and the moralizing finger-waggers.
Merlin: They're going to hold...
Merlin: privately and publicly, they have a standard that they will hold people to.
Merlin: For a long time, you would see that played out in terms of like, well, you have to make this cake.
Merlin: You don't have to make this cake for gay people, or you do not have to provide women's health care services, because, right, I mean, there's those sorts of things.
Merlin: But then when you see what's happening...
Merlin: With the fairly well-documented allegations against the president, it just doesn't seem to matter, and Mike Pence is totally cool with it.
John: It just doesn't matter, right?
John: I mean, it's not even that Trump had relationships with sex workers while his wife was pregnant.
John: He had a four-month-old son.
John: Trump is famous for riding on that private jet...
John: With that pedophile guy who would get like teenagers.
Merlin: I mean, he was the source of a lot of the New York Post stories about Marla Maples.
Merlin: I mean, he was the one that encouraged her to go out and say it was the best sex I've ever had.
Merlin: He thrives in that environment of people thinking he's a very competent horndog.
John: But I think it's really interesting because...
John: During the Clinton years, when Bill Clinton was being hounded for his dalliances and his indiscretions and his predatory behavior, we...
John: I think assumed that that was being motivated by this religious right that we've been talking about for 40 years and that they were that they were prigs and they were pursuing this out of a sense of this sort of moral.
John: Like, overactive moral indignation.
Merlin: Yeah, but post-moral majority, whether you agreed with them or not, and I happen very much not to agree with them, you had to at least give them the credit of saying, well, you know, whether or not this is something that they enjoy doing, they feel, by their faith and ethics, they are obligated to call these things out on anybody where they see it.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: It's a kind of mission.
John: And that gave some clarity to the division between left and right.
John: Because we on the left could look at them and see like, okay, they are bound by a code that includes their religion, it includes their culture, and it is internally consistent.
John: So they are an understandable and worthy adversary, even if we don't agree.
John: I mean, we don't agree with a lot of the fundamental premises, but they are acting logically.
Merlin: At least they're not inconsistent as far as we can see.
Merlin: I'm avoiding the word hypocritical, but at least on the face of it, they may have been prigs, and I utterly disagree with them, but there was an internal consistency to their asshattery.
John: But it also contextualized us, right?
John: Because as liberals, we were progressive, we were empathetic, we were the ones that were open-minded.
John: And now, or maybe relativistic is another word.
John: Relativistic.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: You could see, you would see the context in something and this liberal artsy thing of saying like, well, yes, but yes, but so we wouldn't necessarily see it as a zero and a one.
Merlin: Right.
John: And we were multicultural.
John: We were able to say like, well, we, you know, we need to incorporate things from around the world.
John: And sometimes these cultural differences can be advantageous.
John: Um,
John: You know, it was a kind of it.
John: That was how we saw the social aspect of left and right.
John: And that wasn't always the case.
John: You know, back in the back before World War Two, back before the civil rights movement.
John: The Republican Party was mostly focused on economics, and they had a pretty liberal view about what a person should be able to do in the privacy of their own home.
John: From a certain libertarian standpoint, it was a tentpole.
John: Yeah.
John: And it was the Democrats that were all about segregation, and they were all about, you know, the Democrats before World War II were not, like, socially progressive.
John: Sort of the opposite.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: But now we're in a situation where the right side of the aisle has pretty much, for the most part, said, you know, although we're Christians and although we, you know, we believe in God and country, we think Trump's doing a great job.
John: And although he is like a coke-fueled, like, prostitute-abusing, like...
John: I mean, he's basically, he personifies everything that we would normally hate.
John: He's a parody of the late 80s.
John: Yeah, we just love what he's doing.
John: He's sticking it to the liberals, and that's what we love.
John: But what's crazy is the left have become the scolds.
John: Like, we are in an era right now where the left is extremely moralizing and very...
John: Very much like driven by a kind of collective energy that is, you know, that's using shame and using a lot of the sort of things that we would have 40 years ago.
John: called moral majority tactics, I guess, in service of a different ideology.
John: But it's a very strange role reversal because that's the thing.
John: When I went back to my high school reunion in Anchorage, right before the election, and I talked to a bunch of my pals who were all golf pros and snowmobile salesmen and...
John: And diehard sort of Trump people.
John: They were like, you don't see what's coming, bro.
John: And I was like, yeah, I see what's coming.
John: A Hillary Clinton administration where the world moves into the future.
John: And they were like, no, no, no.
John: No, that's not what's going to happen.
John: Trump's going to win.
John: And I was like, there's no way in a million years Trump's going to win.
Merlin: Yeah, even he didn't think he was going to win.
John: Yeah, and they were like, no, no, no.
John: You don't get it.
John: You don't see what's happening.
John: And in talking to them over the course of a long reunion weekend, I realized, oh, they think they're the fun ones.
John: They think they're hilarious.
John: They think they're the ones that know how to party.
John: They think they are the ones who have the real temperature of what America's all about.
John: The sort of Ted Nugent version of what's fun and cool.
John: And they...
John: looked at me and my culture i mean they know i'm fun right but they look at that liberalism and they think you guys aren't fun you don't have fun anymore you just are so uptight and you're so but you know this this this caricature of the left as being sort of what we used to say about the moral majority just like no fun and caught up in in arcane and archaic
John: ideas about what people are.
John: And I was just like, that was kind of, that was kind of when I got off Twitter, I realized like, oh shit, I don't know anything anymore.
John: I'm completely, I'm in the upside down now.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I heard something on a political podcast I was listening to this morning.
Merlin: A guy said something that I thought was... It's one of those things where once you can't unhear it, it's such a useful paradigm.
Merlin: There are certain kinds of issues where people rarely go back...
Merlin: to their original feeling people tend to only go one way and he said he was talking in particular about daca and how like once you know these people who are daca recipients and like once you've once you've met them once you've talked to them um
Merlin: you're very rarely going to become more strident about thinking they should be thrown out of the country.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And he also used the example of gay marriage, where, honestly, a big part of it, in addition to certainly, obviously, I mean, this sounds so stupid, but stuff like, you know, maybe Ellen DeGeneres, but stuff like seeing more gay people on TV and knowing more gay people were out there that weren't dangerous pedophiles, that was certainly part of it.
Merlin: But another part of it was, once you meet two women who've been together since the 1960s,
Merlin: and are very smart and charming, you don't go, oh, boy, this makes me even madder about this.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: There aren't that many people who start out pro-gay marriage and then go the other way.
Merlin: There aren't that many people who start out pro-DACA and go back the other way.
Merlin: I don't have a huge filter for this.
Merlin: It's a two-hour-old idea to me, but I'm really interested in this idea.
Merlin: How many issues are there like that?
Merlin: Once people get enough exposure to the actual people, they look at the thing really differently.
Merlin: I'm reminded of that Peanuts comic where Linus is arguing with Lucy and he says, I love humanity.
Merlin: It's people that I hate.
John: I think that's absolutely true.
John: And I think it is about abstract thinking.
John: You know, the...
John: Once you are, once you're capable of seeing things at one abstraction, which by which I mean, like not the people immediately in front of you, but you meet, you meet that couple that's been together since the sixties and then extrapolate that to imagine that there are more of those, um, that level of abstraction, because we here in Southern Washington, you know, the, there was that McSweeney's article the other day that, that parodied, um,
John: the uh the journalists that are like going around talking to trump voters it was just literally the next thing i was going to say yes isn't that hilarious yeah but there was one of those uh here in washington where some reporter went down to the conservative um like southwestern corner of washington where they grow a lot of cranberries and said like you know how's it feel down here now that um you know now that we're cracking down on immigrants um
John: And the sheriff and almost everybody they talked to was like, well, we want to crack down on immigrants because they are they're rapists and criminals coming into the country.
John: But what that law has done is it.
John: Like they came and got my neighbor, Pablo, who's a great dude.
John: And he's, he's not a raper.
John: He's been here for years.
John: He was like, he was invaluable to the community.
Merlin: And then they came and got those guys that have been working on the, they might say every single talking point that everybody on the left has been saying, right?
Merlin: I mean, down to like, like this, like this Polish doctor in Michigan who doesn't know Polish because he's been here since he was three.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: right it's like oh my gosh you you how could you send him back there there's not even any place to send him back to he's never been there and you're like yeah that's that sucks that's kind of why we think this is a bad idea but they know but everybody has their pablo right but they don't extend it right they don't extend it to the abstraction of of uh and that's why statistics are so interesting like
John: I follow this guy on Twitter named Max Roser, R-O-S-E-R, who is a statistician.
John: And he really stays kind of above politics.
John: He just... Just looks at numbers.
John: I think he's German.
John: And he, you know, not to stereotype, but he's a German statistician.
John: And he's always posting these graphs and sort of very interesting...
John: takes on on things just just crunching the numbers but you look at the numbers and it's like well i mean my mom sent me something the other day that was like uh immigrants from sub-saharan africa have such a greater percentage of graduate degrees i mean they're like a far greater college graduation rate than people who are born in the united states yeah and it's just impossible to argue with the statistics um
John: But again, that is an abstraction that it's, I think, much easier for people to see the abstraction in the other direction, which is, well, I watch Cops every week and every single person they pull over and the rest is black.
John: I can't believe I used to watch that show.
John: Therefore, every criminal in America is black.
John: Right.
John: Because that's what's on Cops.
John: And...
John: That's much easier to apprehend than, wait a minute, the people that are immigrating to the United States from other countries are the best educated and best qualified people because it's really hard to immigrate to America.
John: You have to put up with so much shit.
John: It's insane.
John: Yeah.
John: And even people that are entering the country illegally are people who are aspiring.
John: They are people that are seeking something great.
John: And not people that are complacent or lazy or dumb, you know?
John: Nobody makes it all the way to America and gets a shitty job from wherever they're coming from because they are just lazy, you know?
John: They're enterprising.
John: But it's, you know, I don't know.
John: Speaking as someone who's a liberal...
John: It's very hard for me not to feel like... It's not just that my views are...
Merlin: better it's that my views are more accurate and that's well maybe at least in your own head slightly better tested right well or i mean just just there's just so much there's just so much reckoning going on about strangers there's just so much reckoning going on about millions of people who
Merlin: are disadvantaged culturally in a way that so many of that 32% or 36% are not.
Merlin: And yet they have found some way to find a grievement in every cultural improvement in the last 50 years.
Merlin: Every, every time somebody who's not them gets something, it's a zero sum game.
Merlin: Like everything, everything that somebody who has always been treated like shit for their entire life gets is necessarily one less thing that they get in their mind.
Yeah.
Merlin: That tends to be the, yeah, it tends to be the feeling.
Merlin: But then like today, oh, sorry, a couple weeks ago, the president has decided, you know, because he's saving coal, so now he's going to put a tariff on imports of solar energy things.
Merlin: Solar energy, one of the bright spots, if you like, to coin a pun.
Merlin: One of the bright spots in growth like one in five new jobs suppose something like that as it is in solar It's going way way up while coals were going way way down And now they're making it more costly to have this this huge exploding growth growth area that actually could benefit the people Who still think they're gonna be back in the mine any day now?
John: But and that's an example of a thing that I think is really intriguing about the cultural divide that we're experiencing right now which is that
John: I think that there are a lot of people in America that will celebrate that event based exclusively on this idea that it's a big middle finger to the hippies.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And I mean, I drove across the country a couple of years ago when I bought my Suburban, which admittedly is a hilariously like old janky American truck.
John: And through the whole center of the country, I encountered many, many times those guys who are burning coal, which is they put a giant smokestack on their diesel truck and
John: And they adjust the mixture so that when they slam on the gas, it just sends huge black clouds of smoke out of their tailpipes.
John: With no purpose other than to give you that Ted Nugent fuck you thing.
John: And they're not driving those trucks in the middle of San Francisco.
John: They're driving them in Nebraska.
John: They're saying, fuck you, to the idea of a liberal.
John: There aren't any around them.
John: They're just doing it as a middle finger to people who aren't even watching.
John: And that conviction, that strong, strong feeling that the real enemy is...
John: is this caricature of someone kind of not unlike you or I. But certainly, we are closer or more adjacent to this caricature than we are to the audience at a Darius Rucker concert.
John: But this idea of someone...
John: with a college degree who thinks they're smarter than you who wants to quote unquote ram down your throat these ideas that that really have nothing to do with the fact that you get along pretty well with your gay neighbors but have everything to do with the idea that we are we have a vision which is of this uh this future universe where
John: where there's no manufacturing in America anymore, that it's all been outsourced and the government is in charge of everything.
John: Take your guns away.
John: Take your guns away, except that the government allows you to do whatever you want, including be a pedophile or sex with animals or whatever it is that they extend this process.
John: criticism out to you know like this weird this weird idea of a liberal as someone who both wants to have complete
John: lawlessness on one side, what they consider lawlessness on one side of the world.
Merlin: Well, they want it to be this like Caligula and Bacchanalia on the one side, even as they're taking away everything that gives your life meaning and joy.
John: Right.
John: So you're no longer allowed to worship your God.
John: You're no longer allowed to salute your flag.
John: We don't support the troops.
John: We don't allow you to have guns.
John: We tax all your money away to give it to undeserving poor people.
John: Abortion-having trans people.
John: Abortion-having trans people who are just living on welfare.
John: And this is the vision of the world that we...
John: That they perceive us desiring.
John: And a lot of us are dupes, right?
John: We are leftist dupes of... We haven't taken the red pill.
John: We haven't taken the red pill.
John: That's right.
John: The Jews are controlling our government.
John: And and we are just like in thrall.
John: We're in this kind of daze of of almost like romantic thrall to the idea of inclusiveness that is going to.
Merlin: create a world where we're under uh sharia law but it's also it's almost like some kind of like a 50s movie where there's a there's a working ranch and some uh sissy dandy in a suit comes to visit and then wants to tell them how to run a ranch right or like yeah is sitting in the sitting in the um sitting in a carriage fanning himself with a with a lace hanky and then telling you how to run the ranch while he's sitting on his ass mining bitcoin
John: Well, in a way, it's closer to the character of the environmental protection guy in Ghostbusters 1.
Merlin: The real hero of the movie.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: In the rereading of that movie, you know?
Merlin: Yeah, he's the only good guy in the film.
Merlin: He's the only reasonable person.
Merlin: It's true, this man has no dick.
John: When you watch that film, everything about it is like this guy is the worst version of a Carter administration bureaucrat.
Merlin: The only way he makes money is by causing trouble and hardship for hardworking Americans.
Merlin: For hardworking Americans who are just trying to bust a ghost.
Merlin: It makes them feel good.
John: And it's politically a weird movie because the Ghostbusters are academics and they're like devil may care.
John: But they're really –
John: I mean, when you look at it now, sure, they're they are, you know, they're kind of politically pretty Trumpy in terms of of how they approach dealing, you know, dealing with government bureaucracy watching almost any thriller from the last 30 years.
Merlin: The bad guy is always the administrator, right?
Merlin: Well, no, but also just the good guys.
Merlin: I mean, certainly you could go if you go back to something like Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood.
Merlin: But I'm talking even like I rewatched Taken, which is a movie that I like a lot.
Merlin: I hadn't watched it since the last election.
Merlin: And I just watched it the other night and I was like, wow, this is really it's kind of a testament to how dads are right.
Merlin: And and by any means necessary, we do what we need to do because daughter.
Merlin: I mean, it's really it is it is in some ways very much like a Death Wish kind of movie in a lot of ways.
Merlin: I mean, I mean, just like that, just like the the not authoritarian.
Merlin: What's the word I'm looking for?
Merlin: But like, oh, like in that movie, it's just like he keeps worn.
Merlin: Have you ever seen Taken?
Merlin: No, but I get it.
Merlin: And now he's got to go rescue her from all these Eastern European baddies.
Merlin: And of course he just beats, it's a great movie.
Merlin: He beats the shit out of everybody, kills everybody and saves them.
Merlin: And then like you were shown that once and for all, dad always knew what was right.
Merlin: And finally that violence that he has had inside of him all that time was there for a good reason.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, that's the, that's the lesson to be gleaned.
John: That's the cookie cutter thriller lesson, right?
John: The, yeah, the, uh,
John: The quiet, stern dad.
John: Who's just been pushed a little too far.
John: Yeah, had the truth about the world the whole time.
John: And that libertarianism combined with that sort of, I guess, what now we would just describe with no other conditions.
John: We would just call it patriarchy or a patriarchal mentality.
John: I mean, that's like, it's riven through everything.
John: And there was a time until recently where our take on that was a lot more complex than it is now.
John: And it doesn't feel like this is a time when we can afford to be complex.
John: This is another thing that has caused me to
John: to feel personally like this is just a time for me to sit out.
John: And it's because it's very hard for me to look at things and not look at them and try to see the complexity in them.
John: And when you want to talk at least publicly now about ideas that are complex...
John: You're immediately challenged because it doesn't because complexity just doesn't like revolutionary.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: If we're living in a bicameral world now that feels very black and white.
John: And so you can't say like you can't really approach anything, at least publicly, at least in a public facing way.
John: without taking a pretty dogmatic side.
John: And I just can't swallow it.
John: But in our history, a lot of the things that we look at and say, that's what is American.
John: That's what made us exceptional.
John: That is what we have always talked about as the American spirit.
John: And it isn't.
John: It isn't inextricably connected to white supremacy or to patriarchy.
John: There are attitudes that are distinctively American that have made us proud for 200 years.
John: And those ideas are like individuality, individualism, I guess, more than individuality.
John: Um, and that can do spirit and that, um, uh, I mean all that, all that sort of, uh, go get them USA rah rah stuff.
John: But there's a lot of, there's a lot interesting about it.
John: There's a lot that's true about it.
John: And, and I think on the right side of the aisle, they feel like they are the, the inheritors or the protectors of some of those enshrined ideas that,
John: And and on the left, I mean, you know, there are a lot of liberal patriots and I and I include myself.
John: Like when I see people on the left say America is a garbage country and always has been.
John: I'm like, I'm sorry, you're wrong.
John: Like, you're just deeply, profoundly wrong.
John: And that might feel good to say.
John: And that might feel like you're on the side of the revolution.
Merlin: But it was an evolving garbage fire.
Merlin: Like, the strides were taken every few years where things got a little better in one way.
Merlin: I know they were not always good.
Merlin: And sometimes it does take a miniature revolution.
Merlin: But that's, what is it, the long arc of history, right?
Merlin: Is that, like, things really have gotten better in many quantifiable ways for a lot of people.
Merlin: And it's taken a long time to get around to other people who need that.
Merlin: and that progress was being made for a time it's it's that progress is still being it's weirdly it's weirdly putin-esque though to to find this both sides ism and go like oh well you know unless you were this kind of person it's like well yeah that was true but like we're working on that that actually is that actually is getting better it's yeah it's i mean i know that's super easy for me to say but i think there's evidence out there that until fairly recently things really were on a pretty interesting upward incline and now
Merlin: Now, I think it's just a waiting.
Merlin: I mean, I hate to cut to the chase, but a lot of it's just now a demographics game.
Merlin: It's just a matter of waiting to age out the assholes.
John: Well, it is, but I mean, I don't think it's easy for you to say.
John: I think it's a challenge to remind ourselves that if you watch the news every day and if you see...
John: If you see the bad things that are being reported in the way that they are, like, yeah, this feels like a time where we're falling back or where evil is ascendant.
John: But actually, things are getting better every day in every way, and the rule of law is going to triumph.
John: And, I mean, what you don't think of is 10 years ago, all the terrible things that were happening, all the people that were getting deported.
John: Well, if we can survive 1968, we can survive almost anything.
John: Well, sure.
John: We can survive 1985.
John: But, I mean, I think it's... Yeah, go ahead.
Merlin: You're breaking up a little bit.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: The recording?
Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: Are you a bit torrenting?
Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: I hear you.
Merlin: Do you hear me?
Merlin: I hear you.
Merlin: I think you're fine.
Merlin: Do you hear me?
Merlin: Yeah, keep going.
Merlin: I'll put a marker here and take this out.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I think you're all right.
John: I just, I mean, I believe in the American experiment.
John: I don't believe that the United States is a trash fire.
John: I think if you go back to 1780 and you look at every other nation on Earth...
John: and compare our founding to theirs or to their status then.
John: And if you go back to 1900, if you go back to 1865, if you go anywhere in history and do a line-by-line comparison to what was happening in the United States, you're going to find that there aren't very many places that you can look at and say,
John: uh oh wow the u.s was really evil compared to right i mean the united kingdom abolished slavery a lot uh sooner than america did but sooner by a factor of 40 years like it's not like it's not like britain had outlawed slavery in 1500 and we were some kind of south africa that persisted like it was an evolving process and
John: To look back at the history of America and say that we have blood on our hands is only to fail to look back at the history of the world and see that everyone has blood on their hands.
John: There's no nation on Earth that is absolved.
John: The nation of Belgium continued to exploit America.
John: their colonies in Africa until the fifties and exploit them in ways that would, would, you know, uh, burn your eyebrows.
John: Oh, is that like the Congo?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: What's a Belgian colony?
John: Yeah.
John: The Congo, uh, which is an enormous, the, the entire, uh,
John: Central Africa and they, you know, they were I mean, they were brutal there, but nobody looks at Belgium and says like, oh, what I mean, I guess the Belgians do and people in Europe that know that story.
John: But the whole idea that like America is a terrible place is just it's just wrong.
John: We have been in we have been setting the tempo for 200 years for the extension and expansion of rights to the greatest number of people.
John: And political rights and social evolution, like it's been happening here.
John: And other people have, other countries have been following in our wake.
John: And I know there are a lot of Europeans who want to point to their own country's contributions to that.
John: But I think you would have a hard time making a case that certainly that many countries in Western Europe
John: have been working on that project any earlier than about 1960.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, I mean, so, and, and the United Kingdom, obviously like a separate, uh,
John: They have a sort of separate dispensation, but it's not like they've been a liberal democracy this whole time.
Merlin: But, you know, I'm rehashing something that everybody has said every day for over a year now.
Merlin: But the part and why I've read about Congress in particular is that, you know, whether or not.
Merlin: James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, Warren G. Harding.
Merlin: You've got these characters that you run into that maybe aren't the best example of American exceptionalism.
Merlin: But by and large, most people who are in the White House at least bought the best lies about America.
Merlin: You've got to bring Harding into this?
Oh, my God.
Merlin: But at least, but I mean, most people, whether or not Bill Clinton is the best human being or, you know, George, I mean, I'm not here to rehabilitate the reputation of George W. Bush, but boy, by comparison.
Merlin: I know, isn't it amazing?
Merlin: But I mean, at least, I mean, George W. Bush may have been a not very bright, dry drunk, but I think in his heart, he probably believed a lot of the better truths and some of the more interesting lies about America that let us be able to get through it from week to week.
Merlin: And certainly I think Barack Obama believed it big time.
John: Do you remember two years ago, we still said things like George Bush was the worst president in history?
John: Oh, I know.
John: I know.
John: Two years.
John: And now he just seems like, oh, if we could only go back to a day when the president knew which side of his body his heart was on.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: But on the one hand, though, you've got somebody in there who clearly...
Merlin: i mean setting aside all the narcissism and all that kind of stuff but it's somebody who clearly does not like the actual the real stuff that has made america great and has no respect for the agreed upon lies that made america pretty good he just doesn't care he's fine to burn it all down i'm even going to set aside the mental stuff for now but just even just the ability to like as they say you know he's going to be persuaded by the last you know general that he talked to as far as what he thinks from now on
Merlin: that's all bad enough like i actually think we could survive that fine but the check on that should be people who know better in congress whatever side you're on and the fact that this is i mean i understand the whole basis of there's reason they call it politics it's not paul a friend like i get that but like there's just there's something so upsetting to me about how you've got this paul a friend i'm sorry it took me a second
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Merlin: But, you know, you just keep hoping, you know, you guys, you know, what is it?
Merlin: I posted a...
Merlin: I posted a really cool painting of Cthulhu the other day with two guys in a rowboat rowing away from it.
Merlin: And the New Yorker stock caption I gave to it was, well, let's not diagnose from a distance.
Merlin: It's like, how far is it going to go?
Merlin: Before we say this is, I mean, is it...
Merlin: the worst the thing that keeps us all up is it going to be little rocket man shooting at us what's it going to be before people go dude you got to dial it down like you've got to at least learn to pretend like you're the president and like who there's just nobody doing that and and that and so i guess what i'm trying to say is that like i am not here to whitewash and i choose that word carefully whitewash over the very problematic history of the united states but like there is
Merlin: There is a self-fixing nature to America that takes a long time that I do believe in.
Merlin: I don't know if I'm always right, but I do at least believe in that.
Merlin: It's just that I don't believe that's happening right now.
Merlin: And even just look at the EPA.
Merlin: People are saying it might take 30 years to undo what's already happened to the EPA.
Merlin: There's stuff like that that is just like at a time when the environment is just crumbling.
Merlin: And the numbers are there for all of this stuff, and nobody's standing up.
Merlin: I'm sorry, I'm just screaming into the wind.
Merlin: No, it's okay.
Merlin: It's so maddening to me that there are not... Everybody keeps talking about the grown-ups in the room.
Merlin: Well, you know, you've got 100 grown-ups over here and over 400 on this other side.
Merlin: Why aren't they being the grown-ups?
Merlin: Why aren't they?
Merlin: It's because, well, some of them benefit greatly by being able to not get this guy mad at them on the Internet.
Merlin: And then there are other people, I guess, they just don't have the political will or...
Merlin: votes to be able to do anything of substance but like seriously like what is it going to take you know to get us anywhere to near back to where we could be to just even even get back there there's stuff that is as bad as the 50s and 60s right now happening it's like we lost like 50 years somewhere the thing is that
John: All any of us have is the news.
John: And one of the things that we always said about the internet from the very beginning was that, I mean, and this was often talked about as a strength in the early days.
John: You would be able to tailor your newsfeed so that it fit your interests.
John: You have met your interests.
John: And now we are living in a world where you can tailor your newsfeed and everybody's watching their own individual newsfeed.
John: And the one that...
John: that people like us are watching is in full-on panic mode all the time.
John: And so it looks like a doomsday scenario.
John: That isn't an accurate picture, right?
John: This whole like the EPA, the damage to the environment is going to take 30 years to correct.
John: Well, no.
John: It depends on how you read what's going on.
John: Like there is damage being done, yes.
John: But there has been...
John: There have been a lot of improvements.
John: The damage, even during the Obama administration, we were still doing a ton of damage.
John: It's not like we went from Avatar to Blade Runner in two weeks and then we'll never get back to Avatar.
John: Like it's a continuum and progress is being made.
John: So on the one hand, I just, I always caution like
John: You get into a news cycle and news is built on creating panic in people.
John: It's very, very hard to take one big step back and not be in a state of panic because, in fact, panicking feels like action.
John: It feels like you're engaged.
John: It feels like you're doing something to be in a state of anxious panic.
John: anxious stress all the time but like my I do believe that with Trump there is no putting that genie back into the bottle like something has changed like irrevocably but what Trump and the Congress are I think
John: is a product of basically 50 years of ground game that the conservatives have been playing that the liberals have failed at.
John: And partly it is in the nature of the two animals.
John: Like liberalism thinks of itself as an overarching world view.
John: We are the people that believe in the philosopher king.
John: We believe in the idea that if people are educated, they will make good choices and that we need to bring education to places.
John: If people only were educated, if they could only see, then they would naturally be liberals.
John: And so that's been our focus for ever since the civil rights movement.
John: We need to, for instance, busing is an example of a program where we just wanted people to interact with each other.
John: We were attempting to combat the separatism of the races by like almost –
John: force wedging them together and this was based on a on an idealistic premise that we could educate people by showing them and that that was going to create this world and on the right they had a very much more pragmatic approach to American politics which was they said we're going to get
John: people elected to the local school board and to the county council.
John: And once we get somebody in there, then we're going to gerrymand...
John: The districts so that the district.
John: Once we get into the treehouse, we're going to pull up the ladder.
John: That's right.
John: We're going to draw the line now so that this district no longer includes any black neighborhoods.
John: And the district is going to look like a paint splotch.
John: But that doesn't matter because we're not trying to.
John: create a world of egalitarianism.
John: We're not trying to work according to a premise that all people aspire to their highest selves.
John: We're trying to get political power in the Congress.
John: And we're going to do that methodically.
John: We're going to do that with a kind of military like strategy.
John: And when people were getting, you know, this is 25 years ago,
John: We started talking about like, wait a minute, all these school boards are denying evolution.
John: Who are these ding-a-lings?
John: But from the leftist perspective, we were like, well, that's just some small town, dumb little Oklahoma problem.
John: And evolution is a widely accepted theory.
John: Any smart person believes in it.
John: And so we're not going to worry about it.
John: We're not going to go try and put our own people on those school boards.
John: We're going to assume that things are, you know, that our higher selves will win.
John: And now we're living in a world where the Congress is not made up of people who
John: who went to college, started a successful business, had an altruistic sense of American political process, fought in the good war, and go to Washington trying to make a difference.
John: We're looking at a Congress that is full of people that were strategically sent there to accomplish a pretty narrow mission, which is
John: basically hamstring the government, limit its power, and return the right to decide whether evolution is true or not to the local school board, which we've already stacked with people.
John: And that has been the Republican game for 50 years.
John: And it's just a strategy.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
John: And on the left, we considered ourselves above that kind of college football.
John: Like ground game.
John: We had none.
John: Our ground game was all devoted to, again, this basically long history premise of
John: Which is the more educated people are, the more affluent they are and educated they are, the more they will take an interest in civics, the more they will, as you were saying, you know, once you have a complex idea, you very seldom go back to a simple one.
John: But what we didn't understand was you can't just go in someplace, hand them a complex idea, hand some kid a complex idea, and all of a sudden that idea trumps his parents and his grandparents and his church.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: So anyway, we've done a very bad job of playing football.
John: And the political situation we're in right now is a product of that.
John: And I think that and the Republicans have done or the I'm sorry, the conservative side of the country has done a very good job of characterizing us as shrill, out of touch, because because every time we advance a really great theory, we also it's very easy to to pick and choose among the theories promulgated by the left and find one that seems wrong.
John: bonkers to a church going person in Ohio.
John: And then all you have to do is put that on your brochure and say, look what the liberals want us to do.
John: You know, they believe that they believe that all kids should have sex change operations.
John: And it's like, what, what, what, what, where'd you get that?
John: You know?
John: Um, but that, but there are a lot of grandmothers in Ohio that that's all they need to hear.
John: Yeah.
John: So how do, how do we get our ground game back?
Um,
John: I don't think that it's in the nature of liberals to have a ground game because we're, because we, that's not how we think, but we're, we have to acknowledge that we're losing in a battle between like, you know, in a battle between a team that has a ground game, we're not doing a good job of convincing.
John: And I don't know how to improve that.
John: I don't know how to get Neil deGrasse Tyson out to the world.
John: And I don't think that an Oprah presidency is the way.
John: But like...
Merlin: I do like how many women are running for office.
John: Oh, it's fantastic.
John: Seattle has our first female mayor in a hundred years, basically.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, I could just think of half a dozen reasons why that is a good and encouraging sign.
John: Even in conservative places, I mean, you can't argue with female legislators.
John: I think they, particularly in Congress, they,
John: I think a majority female Congress would be such a different animal.
John: It wouldn't matter whether they were all Anita Bryants.
John: I think you would see just a different mentality.
John: But I don't know what to...
John: I don't know what the antidote to the present moment and the feeling that we are on the constant verge of war, famine, catastrophe.
John: Funding our government for three weeks at a time.
John: I mean, that's just it's it's insane.
John: But, you know, again, it's not unprecedented.
John: And as you were saying, it's not just in 68 in 72.
John: In 1972, George Wallace ran for the U.S.
John: presidency on a race, like a strictly like a racist.
John: But I mean, he still has up until through the 90s.
John: He had strong Thurmond.
John: Right.
John: It's bananas.
John: Right.
John: I mean, there's there's there have there have been crazy, crazy, crazy times before.
John: And I mean, obviously, like I was talking to somebody the other day, like.
John: Movies in the future who want to cast someone in the role of the president of the United States, what are they going to do now?
John: Like it used to be that if you wanted the president, even if it was like a science fiction movie or a future movie, you found someone who.
John: That seemed serious and now how do you cast the president?
John: It could be it could be Bobcat Goldway go like you could have anybody's right?
John: So that definitely is like a That's a trip, but I I mean every time I every time I see a bunch of young lawyers sitting Indian style on the floor at an immigration building like frantically
John: doing pro bono work to file injunctions, I'm reminded that this is a fucking great country.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Look at what happened at the airports when the travel ban came down.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, as horrible as everybody felt about that, that was an amazing moment.
Merlin: Imagine if that hadn't happened.
Merlin: Imagine if the presence of that kind of pushback had not been in evidence at that time where we might even be now.
John: Well, and that's if it hadn't happened, that's where you look at your country and say this this place is full of decay and rot.
John: But it did happen.
John: And then you're able to say, like, I have faith in this.
John: I have faith in who we are and what we're doing.
Merlin: We should stop soon, and I need to not be sad.
Merlin: We went to see, you know, an okay movie.
Merlin: It was not a fantastic movie, although it's a movie my daughter has now declared.
Merlin: It was definitely her favorite musical and might be her all-time favorite movie.
Merlin: Which is The Greatest Showman, starring Wolverine.
Merlin: And it's the very, very heavily fictionalized story of P.T.
Merlin: Barnum.
Merlin: But long story short, one of the kind of goofy narratives in this is how good he was in some ways.
Merlin: P.T.
Merlin: Barnum?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Giving humanity to his oddities and how they made this family out of the Bearded Lady and General Tom Thumb.
Merlin: And I swear to God, this is an actual thing that happened that made me feel so good.
Merlin: And I don't know, I can't tell she's just doing this to make me feel good.
Merlin: But there's this moment where they're outside the Barnum Theater and they're being confronted and menaced.
Merlin: It was like something out of X-Men.
Merlin: It's all these local hoods with Donegal caps and dirt on their face who are going to kick their ass for being freaks.
Merlin: And it's like a shot of Bearded Lady, Chang'e Nang Bunker, the Siamese twins.
Merlin: It's the Bearded Lady, and then it's Zac Efron and Zendaya.
Merlin: the the beautiful slender actress and and she's kind of like what what is what is what why is that a problem and i was like well you know what do you think she's like i don't i don't understand because he's rich i was like no no uh because they're of different races and she actually made this face like hmm
Merlin: And I said, up until the 1960s, it was illegal to marry somebody of a different race.
Merlin: She looked like I just told her that there was a secret chocolate fountain in her room she didn't know about.
Merlin: She just looked at me like, you've got to be kidding me.
Merlin: I loved it for her.
Merlin: and i i really admittedly i'm looking for my happy place in this sad story but this is such a real thing um it's not a perfect thing their kids are still dicks but like it is just it's pretty fucking cool to me that she's never had a thought that anybody regardless of their race or sexual orientation or gender is they're all cool to her and that feels encouraging
Merlin: That feels, and I wonder if you have similar stories like that, where there's no longer a case where like, you know, when I was in first grade, my black friend was Skipper because there was one black friend at my school.
Merlin: I had a black friend.
Merlin: I was like Stephen Colbert.
Merlin: Hey, there's my African-American.
Merlin: You know, and that's not the case anymore.
Merlin: There's not one kid from Africa.
Merlin: There's not like that one kid.
Merlin: There's not even that one developmentally disabled kid.
Merlin: Like it's just a whole bunch of different kids.
Merlin: And like, if they want to kiss, that's going to be okay.
Merlin: And that feels like a pretty big move
Merlin: over Cincinnati, Ohio in 1976 to me.
John: I mean, in my dad's elementary school, there was a black kid whose name was John, and there was a white kid whose name was John.
John: Oh, God.
John: And so the teacher said, well, okay, from now on, you're Felix, as in Felix the Cat.
John: Oh, God.
John: And, I mean, this is 1927, and my dad ran into...
John: I mean, they were, you know, they were like black John white John.
John: No, no, it was Felix.
John: They were, they were, my dad and he were tight throughout school and then they hadn't seen each other in, in 40 years or something.
John: And they ran into each other on the street when they were both in their seventies.
John: And my dad said, John.
John: And he said, it's Felix, Dave.
Whoa.
John: And he had been Felix.
John: He'd been Felix his whole life.
John: Until he finally just accepted it because that's what everybody called him.
John: No, he didn't finally accept it.
John: I mean, from the time he was seven years old, he was Felix.
John: And he just I mean, it never occurred to him to not be Felix.
John: But I mean, he was my dad knew him.
John: And had known him as John, but the Felix identity had taken over him probably when he went to high school.
John: And he was just like, let's just...
John: I was about to say let's call a spade a spade, but that's not good.
Merlin: You win this one, Robert.
Merlin: Thanks for yucking on my yoke.
John: I don't think it's encouraging.
Merlin: It's not a black and white issue.
John: No, it's not.
John: I don't think it's encouraging that your daughter can't comprehend it.
John: I think it is the truth of the matter.
John: My daughter has never, and she's almost seven now, she has never referred to someone by their color.
John: Could you imagine that?
Merlin: I mean, not when I was maybe maybe not people who are 20.
Merlin: They hear that.
Merlin: Oh, gosh.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I mean, that's just how you would talk about people.
John: Sure.
John: And partly it is because we have because we're modern people also.
John: Yeah.
John: I have never said, oh, it's the black guy over there or.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, you know, the reason that they, you know, the reason that they're.
John: using chopsticks is because they're Asian.
Merlin: Well, yeah, I mean, everybody, I mean, to just put a big cherry on it, we were raised to believe that the easiest way to identify people was how they were different from the normal thing, which is me.
Merlin: I equals equals normal.
John: And my daughter does classify people, and her primary way is boy-girl, but then within girls, like,
John: She has two little friends and one of them is almost albino.
John: She's so light.
John: And one of them is from India.
John: And the two of them are very close friends.
John: And Marlowe sees them as indistinguishable from one another almost because they're both the same size.
John: They're both small.
John: And although, you know, to me, they look like the black and white chess queens of a very small and interesting chess game.
John: To my kid, they are classed the same because they're both littler than her.
John: Um, but so she has never even come to me and said, what's weird about this situation?
John: Like she doesn't.
Merlin: So much credit must also go to the teachers, staff, faculty.
John: I mean, but it, but it, but it is, this is the thing where I don't, I think like, I don't find it encouraging.
John: I find it fait accompli.
John: Like we are better and that can only produce.
John: They are better.
Merlin: Well, no, we are better.
Merlin: We are too, but I mean, I still have the memories.
Merlin: And knowing even my own behavior, Cincinnati was very, I'm going to use the code word, conservative town.
Merlin: Conservative is a very nice word for what went on in Cincinnati.
Merlin: I mean, it's about more than Larry Flint.
Merlin: Sure, it was a Ku Klux Klan headquarters.
Merlin: Oh, we had all kinds of things going on.
Merlin: You crossed the border over in Indiana, and it's like, ooh, it's...
Merlin: It ain't no Berkeley over there.
Merlin: But yeah, yeah, I don't know.
Merlin: It's it's it's strange, though.
Merlin: It's getting back to the Descartes and the fingernails.
Merlin: I mean, it is it's super interesting for like I'm not saying that they can't see that difference.
Merlin: But I mean, how different would that be from like deciding who your friends are based on like what color their hair is or like the length of their hair or like which backpack they have?
Merlin: It's like it would seem so arbitrary.
John: Well, but, I mean, kids are assholes, like you said.
Merlin: Kids are such assholes, yeah.
John: But, you know, my dad's teacher called the black kid Felix, but my dad didn't... My dad had friends of all races.
John: My dad's friends... You play basketball with the Japanese guys.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: You play basketball with the Japanese, and his best friend was black his whole life.
John: But my dad didn't...
John: uh that it would never have occurred to my dad to to say about somebody to describe somebody without describing them by their primary characteristic which was their skin color or race you know he would never have said like oh it's the tall guy over there it's like you mean which one well the one over there in the red shirt you know he would have been like it's a black guy well so that then then to you and i who grew up in or to you and
John: me to you and me it's the object of the object of the preposition to me who grew up in uh in that world like now when we're teaching our kids we don't talk like that and they don't
John: That's just not how they order the universe.
John: So when they talk to their kids, they're going to figure out a new ordering that somehow correctly... We just know Gleep Glop by the color of his backpack.
John: Yeah, the incredible mistakes that you and I make every day when we're...
John: saying whatever terrible thing that they're going to roll their eyes at us, at my terrible dad.
John: When I'm going to say, don't put Descartes before the horse, they're going to say, I'm never going to say that to my child.
John: That's so racist.
John: I really want to create a new world for them.
Felix.