Well, my face isn’t totally unstuffed-up yet, but I think the nasal quality has dropped out enough to record, and I want my shows to hit the top of the week again.
This is the Isaiah Berlin essay
And this right here is the last chapter of the Myth of Sisyphus by Camus
Hey Everybody—
Today we’re releasing the seventeenth SFD Short, but by far what’s more important is that today is Muellermas, when a fabled, twinkle-eyed elf named Bob Mueller gives us the gifts me most want.
I’m watching the press briefing with Sarah Huckabee Sanders right now and they’re coming at the White House, even though SHS’s blithe, blasé mendacity is making me want to rip my ears right off of my head right now.
What makes someone alright with, willing to be paid to, spew lies from this podium? To cover up the worst kind of wrongdoing? What happened to you, Sarah? Man this makes me sad.
Musical credit this time goes to krackatoa
I’ve been thinking about patriotism in the US for a long time, long enough to have written this for the College Dems’ newspaper back at Georgetown. There’s something about how everybody wants to be a patriot without ever considering what the term might really mean; something about the way it is, for us, tied up with the State and the Military (it was no accident that we broke out Patriot missiles and the Patriot Act in the wake of 9/11); and something about how the Right in the US today has latched rabidly onto the term that all make me pretty uncomfortable.
These are, undoubtedly, self-described American patriots. And especially when I wrote this episode, over the weekend of the Charlottesville White Right march and murder, it seemed as though my discomfort was getting more and more relevant.
All of these guys would call themselves patriots. And the word ‘patriot’ itself seems to give them an excuse to ignore any self-analysis, like the way the 82nd Airborne were a not insignificant part of the Allied war effort against the Axis powers. It’s telling that the minutemen are the only part of the Revolution they remember and the only iconography they include in their self-image when in fact the real firepower of the Founding Fathers, the stuff that made our little uprising stick where a thousand others didn’t, happened not in the field but in scenes like this:
And finally, for reasons that probably won’t become clear until the end of the episode, here’s this the Ballet Amalia Hernandez doing what’s popularly known as the Mexican Hat Dance, to the “Jarabe Tapatío:”
I’ve got that video start to set when the Jarabe does, but if you want to lay eyes on some of the dances you might see to “Guadalajara” or to the “Son de la Negra,” which ends the episode, go ahead and rewind it and you will. Here are the three kids who played “Maria Chuchena,” the huapango music from where I used to live in the Sierra Gorda, in Querétaro.
I couldn’t tell you who Camila Cabello is from Eve, but apparently she’s popular in Mexico along with the US. I’ve got her in here because I think it’s a pretty apt example of how “Mexico Lindo y Querido” is always welcome, even at some teeny-bop pop concert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNBU_BMCkg
But here’s Vicente Fernandez, Chente, doing it right:
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Another SFD short brought to you already by SFD.
I’m going to be starting up a Patreon, probably sometime next week, and when I do, for the first thirty days, signing up with me will result in Patreon sending bonus cash to Robert Morris, the guy I talked to the other week.
So when I get on that, think about signing up for a buck a show so that I can keep making this podcast and keep eating beans and corn and, sometimes, squash.
Keeping these brief, enjoy the show, tell your friends.
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
I want to talk about alternate realities. Not the multiverse kind or the virtual kind, but the kind that exist all around us. I watched Spotlight recently and none of us have been able to look away from that train-wreck of an election or this early administration, so hopefully enough of us have seen enough of all three of them to tie this post together.
Everybody, and I mean everybody, lives in their own reality. From the time you pop out of the womb, you begin aggregating a set of facts, or what seem to you to be facts, about the world around you. And that set of facts makes up your reality. The differences in our realities range from the sacred to the very mundane. Maybe I believe in God and you don’t, maybe you thought that dress was yellow and I thought it was blue. There may be some ultimate arbiter of what’s real—Plato’s realm of the forms or an Abrahamic God or a grand unifying theory of physics—but until one of those things speaks up, we’re each left with our own discrete perceptions of the world. When our differences are small, like that dress, they don’t impede our getting along. When they get bigger, they trip us up in proportion to the magnitude of the difference.
Almost nobody in the 15th century really thought the world was flat (and it may be a very long time since anybody’s actually thought that), but if we imagine, for the sake of argument, that Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Spain in 1492, did think the Earth was flat, we can see how they and Christopher Columbus would have a difficult time plotting a new route to India.
