Weekend Reads (May 25): Trump, Kid Rock, Religion and Science, Doge (RIP)
Recommended weekend reading for May 25, 2024.
Note: There will be no “Weekend Reads” edition for June 1, 2024; I’m taking a much-needed vacation during which I’ll be unplugging as much as possible. That said, June’s playlist will still be sent out to subscribers. Regular programming will resume after I return.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Writing for Christ and Pop Culture, Cameron McAllister argues for the “comic” case against voting for Donald Trump.
To those tempted to take a tragic view this election season, I would counter that the Christian vision of reality is, in fact, a comic one. We are not locked with our political opponents in a zero-sum game that necessitates “extraordinary means” or the temporary bracketing of one’s prophetic witness. The universe we inhabit is roomier than that because Christ has made it so.
Related: Christian voters continue to support Trump en masse, seeing him as “a champion of Christianity and patriotism.”
A.J. Jacobs is spending the year living constitutionally, that is, “expressing my constitutional rights using the tools and mindset of when they were ratified in 1791.” Which, among other things, means carrying a musket around New York City in an attempt to better understand the Second Amendment.
I’d never borne arms in public. So I decided I would express my Second Amendment right to do so on the Upper West Side. I put on my tricorne hat, held the gun leaning against my right shoulder, and marched out my building lobby.
And march is the right word. The idea of carrying a musket on Columbus Avenue was so bizarre and norm-breaking, I felt I had to act with confidence or I’d never do it. So I strode purposefully, looking straight ahead.
[…]
I bore my musket on the streets of New York — and I bore it alone, with no one else marching beside me. Which brings up a question: Is going solo really originalist? Or was I meant to bear my musket as part of a group?
This is the heart of one of the major disagreements about the Second Amendment’s original meaning. Was it about the rights of individuals or about the rights of state militias?
For many years, Kid Rock was the brash epitome of the rock n’ roll lifestyle, but in recent years, he’s fully embraced Trump and MAGA — much to the consternation and confusion of those who know him.
Kid Rock wasn’t always like this. When he first broke through with Devil Without a Cause in the late Nineties, on the heels of an alt-rock era whose biggest stars — Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell — were often cripplingly conflicted about the very idea of stardom, Ritchie made rap rock full of swagger, bravado, and party-starting anarchy. Even as he began hinting at a rightward political lean in the late 2000s, he still managed to inhabit a cultural middle ground, crossing boundaries between musical genres and political ideologies with an easygoing, can’t-we-all-just-get-drunk-together nonchalance. Whether he was performing with Run-D.M.C., (briefly) marrying Pamela Anderson, or getting into a fight at a Waffle House at 5 a.m., Kid Rock’s very existence felt like a 100-decibel reminder that rock & roll was supposed to be fun. Rolling Stone itself was all-in on this version of Kid Rock, twice putting him on the magazine’s cover solo and declaring him “the king of old-school partying and take-no-prisoners boasting.”
Over the past decade, though, he’s grown increasingly polarizing, eager to troll liberals and engage in one culture-war dust-up after another. He’s wrapped himself in all things Trump and become as much a fixture of the MAGA Cinematic Universe as Steve Bannon, Mike Lindell, or Kari Lake. In fact, just before we crowd into that van for the Fox News appearance, Ritchie flashes his cellphone toward me to show he’s calling the man he now winkingly refers to as “one of my besties.” Trump doesn’t pick up. “I was going to tell him I’m going on Laura Ingraham,” Ritchie tells me. “He loves to watch when I do Fox hits.”
Walter Chaw pays tribute to actor Dabney Coleman, who died earlier this month, and was best known for playing terrible men in movies like 9 to 5.
He played the kind of men responsible for standing in the way of social progress and he made them so ridiculous and feeble that they’re laid bare for the paper dictators and women-fearing misogynists they are. We’re in a period now where we’re losing an entire generation of character actors and stars and it’s terribly painful. With social media and our Balkanized viewing habits, we’ve also lost our ability to isolate the small percentage of the nation’s Archie Bunkers for their hostile, regressive beliefs. Compounding the tragedy of losing Coleman now is how his death feels symbolic of the passing of a particular kind of hope that we might find common ground with our ideological opponents.
When Courtney Gore campaigned for a Texas school board, she vowed to battle the leftist and progressive indoctrination of her county’s children. But after she got elected, she couldn’t find evidence of any such indoctrination — which put her at odds with fellow Republicans.
The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”
Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”
Religion and science are often portrayed as diametrically opposed to each other, but that need not be the case.
Essop sees the often-strict divide between science and religion, especially in places where he’s lived and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States, as a barrier to the free exploration of ideas. Discussing evolution and the origins of life, for example, in such environments could lead to stilted conversation.
“That’s where religion has been sidelined in a way, because the two, work and religion, are viewed as separate domains. Personally, I think they’re an integrated whole.”
From her studies, Ecklund thinks that accepting the existence of religion in a scientific context can help to encourage diversity. “Our studies show that people may be kept out of science to some extent because they’re religious, either that they don’t ever go into science, because they think religious people can’t be scientists, or that they feel like they have to hide that they’re religious.”
In considering the future of Mere Orthodoxy, Jake Meador reflects on how online publishing has changed and evolved over the years.
What the advent of social media did was further democratize the process of sharing information and discussing it with others. With the Facebook News Feed or a Twitter handle, you could access a far simpler content management system (if one could even call it that) than anything you’d find on WordPress or Blogspot and you had guaranteed connection to friends and it was very easy to see how many followers a person had, how many followers you had, and so on. And so the open internet of the blog era was replaced by the closed internet of social media.
We are, I think, now moving into a new era — or rather we are several years into that new era already. What happened to the social media internet?
Meador also weighs in on the recent Harrison Butker kerfuffle, though not necessarily in the way you might think: “A virtuous quiet life defined by kindness, humility, service to neighbor, and integrity in one's work is good in itself, and it establishes a kind of social capital which can then be spent when necessary.”
Some recent research suggests that nearly 40% of all web pages that were created in 2013 have disappeared due to “digital decay.”
“The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life… but even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view,” the study reads.
Via 1440. The (relative) ease with which one can publish on the web also means that it’s incredibly easy to let that same content fall by the wayside or disappear altogether. Stop paying your hosting bill, or shut down your WordPress or Blogger account, and all of your webpages, blog posts, etc., go away.
Finally, Kabosu, the Shiba Inu who inspired the popular “Doge” meme, passed away this week after suffering from leukemia and liver disease.
In 2010, two years after adopting Kabosu from a puppy mill where she would otherwise have been put down, Ms Sato, a teacher from Sakura, east of Tokyo, took a picture of her pet crossing her paws on the sofa.
She posted the image on her blog, from where it spread to online forum Reddit and became a meme that bounced from college bedrooms to office email chains.
Kabosu also became the face of Dogecoin, one of the world’s most valuable cryptocurrencies. WeRateDogs gave Kabosu their highest honor, a 15/10.
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