What if this was your last Christmas?
For some of us, it will be. So what are you going to do with this one?
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re happy that People on Twitter are back to being mad about normal things, such as how many buses South Bend has. Yes, we’re losing a 9/11 every day and our emergency rooms are overrun, but can you believe how hypocritical Marco Rubio was when he got upset over a naughty word?
This week we’ve got Jack Hughes continuing his obsession with Dan Quayle in “The GOPfather Coda” and Sonia Van Meter with her weekly recap of Star Trek: Discovery in “S3 E9: It’s the Philippa Show.”
We also have merch now with our fancy new logo, and as always we have tips on what to do (donating to the Bail Project), read (Sally Jenkins’ brilliant column on the Cleveland Indians), watch (Uncle Frank), and listen to (Moses Sumney’s “Me in 20 Years”).
But first, can I tell you about something I’m ashamed about?
I really don’t want to tell you this, but I’d feel dishonest if I didn’t. This isn’t the first time I’ve posed the question about how you would spend this Christmas if you knew it was your last one. Almost 10 years ago, I was writing a nationally syndicated column, and a friend was dying of leukemia. She had just graduated from law school, gotten married, and landed her dream job at the FBI. She was in Seattle, trying to get into a clinical trial that represented her last chance, and a bad one at that. I was at my mom’s place on the Olympic Peninsula. It was Christmastime, and it would have been nothing to drive over to see her and meet her husband, but I didn’t. I was scared.
Instead, I thought, This would make a good column. So I called her, and she gave me the damned goods, advice from a dying newlywed on how to spend Christmas. The column reads fine, but it’s a moral failure. I did not do the hard thing and show up for her, much less do the completely obvious thing and invite her and her husband to join our family’s Christmas celebration. She would have enjoyed that, but I could not look death in the face. I was a coward, and an opportunistic one at that.
We all have a chance to look at death now and to make moral choices about how to spend the holidays. The FAA urged Americans to stay home and not mix households over Thanksgiving, but the Sunday after turkey day was the busiest air travel day during the pandemic. Now we’re fighting about how to spend this Christmas.
On a work call this week, one colleague said she fought with her sister about whether to spend Christmas together. Another, in Los Angeles, told his cousin whom he considers a sister that she could not come by the house directly after getting off the plane from Idaho. I had to cancel a trip with a friend to Guadalajara. I knew it would break his heart. I knew that he was counting on it. But I saw the look in my sons’ eyes when I told them of the plans and knew I was doing the wrong thing. This Christmas, doing the right thing hurts people acutely.
The virus doesn’t care if you have a normal Christmas, but neither does it make itself obvious. Yes, we’re losing a 9/11 every day, but there are no people jumping out of burning skyscrapers. There is no one walking down the street calling, “Bring out your dead!” Most people who get it recover. Most of us have broken some rules. Most of us are fine, and those who aren’t are hidden away in hospitals and nursing homes, closed off from view. Our brains become accustomed to the warnings of scientists, and the virus tempts us indoors. Why are you making such a big deal about this? I’ve been careful. It’ll be OK. It’s just us, and two other couples, and my friend…
So what we see is what we know not to be true. This is the part of the horror movie where things seem normal, and some of us are acting like the characters in the movie, not knowing that there’s a jump scare coming soon. Don’t go to the wedding, we want to shout at the screen. Except we really end up shouting at our relatives who think we’ve lost it.
This is the part of the horror movie where things seem normal.
And tell the truth… It does feel like normality is returning. In October, Donald Trump refusing to agree to a peaceful transfer of power was a big honking deal. Now his threat not to leave the White House on January 20 barely makes a splash. You probably didn’t even hear about it. He might not leave the White House, but he’s not renting space in our heads anymore.
We’re back to getting upset about pre-2016 things, like Marco Rubio’s risible hypocrisy at naughty words. Our trust in institutions — the military, the post office, public schools — cratered in 2018. Now public confidence has returned to pre-Trump levels. I don’t know whether this is a return to normal or a regression to a mediocre mean. Are we really returning to normal, or is this just emotional muscle memory?
Reality intrudes on our illusions of normalcy, and our emotional outbursts reveal our reality. We cry when we see trucks leaving pharmaceutical factories in Michigan. We cry when we see Sandra Lindsay, a Jamaican immigrant, get the first shot in the states. Doctors, nurses, and orderlies dance in celebration when the first vaccine shipments arrive at the Boston Medical Center, and we cry. Recognizing that help is on the way forces the awareness that we are still in peril. The joy of the vaccine’s arrival coexists with the misery it will soon alleviate.
We need to be safe. We also need each other. I failed in my obligation to my friend on that Christmas long ago by not including her in our home. Asked how she thought people should celebrate Christmas, she said, “Surround yourself with people who don’t expect you to buy them things. Every Christmas, we present the people we love with a glut of objects. We don’t necessarily present them with our love, we present them with objects.”
Taking that advice now endangers them and us, flipping the moral construct. Each of us has conflicting duties to each other now: stay inside, and stay connected. Our duty to stay away from each other does not negate our basic human needs to love one another. Quarantining is social chemotherapy. It’ll either kill the coronavirus, or us.
Quarantining is social chemotherapy.
That puts us here this Christmas, containing contradictory multitudes: joy with misery, love and loneliness, hope and death. But has there ever been a time when those did not all exist in our lives simultaneously? The pandemic has only heightened this turmoil like a color-intensifying filter on Instagram.
That was her last Christmas. Some months later, I learned of her passing while I was at a family wedding on a beach in Florida. For many — perhaps for me, perhaps for you — this will be our last Christmas, and none of us have easy choices on how to spend it. But we do have a greater awareness that our choices this Christmas matter. So I pose to you in earnest what I put so shamefully to my dying friend: If you knew this was your last Christmas, what would you do?
We have merch
Why yes, we do have a new logo. Thanks for noticing. We’re quite happy with it. So happy, in fact, that we set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, hoodies, and even tote bags now. I’ll be there after the show. Come on by and say hi.
The GOPfather Coda
by Jack Hughes
Jack Hughes is truly obsessed with Dan Quayle. I don’t think Dan Quayle’s mother thought as much about Dan Quayle as Jack Hughes does. This week, Hughes compares Quayle’s political resurrection of sorts to The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, AKA Francis Ford Coppola’s recutting of his 1990 box office failure.
S3 E9: It’s the Philippa Show
by Sonia Van Meter
People, I’ve got to admit I asked Sonia Van Meter to write these episode recaps for selfish reasons. I’m the guy sitting next to her on our purple couch when she watches all manner of Star Trek, and I’m like a distracted puppy. I don’t pay super close attention, and I only catch every other word when I am. When the shows lose me, I ask what in the heck is going on, and that’s when Sonia looses a torrent of arcane knowledge about how something something something and she’s lost me. She knows more about the Star Trek universe than, I suspect, the one we actually live in. So I thought getting her to recap these episodes would help me understand Star Trek: Discovery, which impressed me for its inclusive casting, production values, and general derring do. This week’s recap is a great example, because people, I saw this episode and paid attention, but I didn’t see half the stuff she did. This is a good one because she gets to focus on one of her favorite characters, Philippa.
Who we’ve lost
This chairman
This mayor
This priest
How we’re getting through this
Bursting into tears
Going on virtual dates
Making midnight pasta
Beach combing for treasure
Donating to the Bail Project
Making chickpea harissa soup
Bringing rocks home from the moon
Pureeing sweet potatoes and tart apples
Signing a letter to ask that Texas help colonias
Addressing racial disparities in the NOLA bar scene with a cool T-shirt
What I’m reading
Wendi Aarons: “Scarface if Written by Texting” - Wendi Aarons might be the funniest writer in Austin.
“You wanna duck with me? Okay. You wanna play rough? Okay. Say hello to my little friend!”
Michael Gerson: “Trump and his party are threatening our constitutional order” - I love a good Republican speechwriter column.
Trump combines the ambitions of a despot with the strategic planning and operational competence of a hamster. He is an evil mastermind without the mastermind part. Would our system have held firm in a closer election against a more talented authoritarian plotter? We have no idea. And the openness of the question should terrify us.
Sally Jenkins: “Native American sports mascots turned real people into flimsy props. Good riddance to them all.” - Sally Jenkins doing Sally Jenkins things here.
You want to see a culture canceled? Just go to South Dakota.
Paul Kane: “Senate’s octogenarians face the age question and whether it’s time to exit” - Kane gets to the surprising heart of it. Stepping down from the senate is an intensely personal decision for them with profound public impacts.
Every senator in his or her 80s sits atop one of the powerful legislative committees, which means many have a collection of aides and former aides working on K Street whose livelihoods are somewhat dependent on another Senate term.
So sometimes the advice they receive might come with a level of self-interest.
Sonia Rao: “Why filmmakers are so furious about Warner’s HBO Max deal” - Good explainer about why filmmakers hate the decision I love.
Because as convenient as it may be to watch these movies from your couch — unless you happen to have Roku, in which case, tough luck! — the artists behind them tend to argue it’s in the audience’s favor to see them in theaters. Nolan’s “Tenet” opened Labor Day weekend with numerous cineplexes still closed, and Patty Jenkins’s “Wonder Woman 1984,” the first simultaneous HBO Max release, certainly won’t come close to doing pre-pandemic numbers with a Christmas Day slot.
George Shultz: “The 10 most important things I’ve learned about trust over my 100 years” - I grew up loathing Secretary Shultz. This gives me a window into how he sees himself and the world. Remarkable thing, empathy.
Dec. 13 marks my turning 100 years young. I’ve learned much over that time, but looking back, I’m struck that there is one lesson I learned early and then relearned over and over: Trust is the coin of the realm. When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.
What I’m watching
Sonia Van Meter has discovered The Great British Bake Off, which means I can say “sponge” in a perfect Liverpudlian accent. This show is a big honking public controversy in a part of the world where they pronounce “controversy” wrongly. Here the GBBO is a balm of manners and mutual support. Pop Culture Happy Hour’s most recent discussion is a good place to start if that’s what you need.
My friend S.G. were talking how things used to be, and he mentioned this Monty Python skit I’d never seen before. If you want to giggle like a 13-year-old boy, you’re welcome.
Glen Weldon leads a long-overdue re-evaluation of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. He did not like Uncle Frank. I did, and if you read last week’s newsletter you know why.
What I’m listening to
My rock star cousin George Stanford has a Christmas band, the Sleighers, and one of their songs, “Maybe it’s Christmas,” played onCBS’s All Rise recently, but is all-time best Christmas song is the one he wrote for his lovely wife Nikole when she was pregnant with their first son, “Christmas for Two.” It might be my favorite song of all time.
Austin’s Riders Against the Storm have a new single, “Flowers for the Living.”
Daveed Diggs’ “Puppy for Hanukkah” is now my favorite hiphop song, and you can’t convince me I’m wrong.
Amaarae’s “LIKE IT” is a trip-hop afro-beat jam.
But the feature song this week is “Me in 20 Years” by Moses Sumney. It got all the way under my skin and lives in my muscles now. I’m not sure how to classify Sumney’s music and even less sure I’d want to. Here’s a link to his inventively staged Live from Planet Afropunk, a performance I can only either pay close attention to or have playing in the background.
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I now offer personal career coaching sessions through Need Hop.
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, hoodies, and even tote bags now.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some of the most fun I’ve had.
Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself comes out June 8 from Penguin Random House. There is no better way to support this book than to pre-order a copy. You’re going to love reading what really happened at the Alamo, why the heroic myth was created, and the real story behind the headlines about how we’re all still fighting about it today.
