Everybody's Doing a Brand New Dance Now

Come on, come on, and do the Substack motion with me

How many months have I been avoiding this? At least a year, I know. All the other bloggers were starting Substack newsletters, but I resisted for the simple reason that I don’t need more work. Setting up a Substack is so easy, they say. Yeah, if you like filling out online forms, it’s a piece of cake, a walk in the park, but I’ve always despised that kind of stuff, and then there’s the financial angle where they demand everything — biometrics! — to sign you up with Stripe.

Reader, how handy is your bank account routing number? Like, do you have that written down somewhere you can just lay your hand on it when, after wading through 14 or 15 screens of data solicitation, scanning in a photo of your driver’s license, etc., you get to the prompt about GIVE US YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER!

(Image: VSECU)

It’s a hassle, because I don’t keep that information handy. Like, who even has a checkbook nowadays, right? My wife handles all the financial stuff and, when I got to Screen Number 17, where Stripe asks for the account number, I was like, “Yeah, I’m totally screwed.” Because my wife was in Ohio visiting family and … Forget it.

A Life of Habitual Sarcasm

All that time was completely wasted, this newsletter is not yet “monetized,” and there goes an hour of my life I’ll never get back. My Substack’s called “Born Lucky” for a reason, you see, and that reason is bitter sarcasm.

Sarcasm is a bad habit, which I acquired early in life. There are very few circumstances that do not provoke my sarcastic tendencies. It’s the preset default of my sensibility, and probably I could pay a therapist thousands of dollars for enough sessions to discover why I am this way, but what benefit would that knowledge be? Besides which, therapy is for people with more money (or better insurance) than me. If you’re rich, you go to therapy, because why not? Right? Pay somebody to listen to you bitch and moan about your problems, which seems to me a ripoff. What I want is for people to pay me to hear about my problems. Or better yet, pay me to tell them about their problems — to start with, let’s talk about your lousy posture. What’s with all this slump-shouldered slouching around, huh? Stand up straight, boy!

Well, you probably wouldn’t pay me for that kind of advice — which, by the way, it’s perfectly good advice — so what makes you think you’re going to benefit from the advice of a licensed therapist? Psychotherapy is a racket, a scam to enrich psychology majors. If you actually knew any psychology majors in college, you should never be deceived by this scam. Meet a girl in a pub and she says she’s a psychology major? Yeah, she’s guaranteed to be a wackjob, a complete basket case, certainly not the kind of person you’d ask for advice. And yet there are many fools (with better insurance than me, I guess) who think they’ll get better by talking to a therapist …

Here’s an idea: If you think psychology majors can be helpful guides to better mental health, go ask Jeff Goldstein about Dr. Deb Frisch. Trust me when I say, Jeff’s story will cure you of any illusions you might have about the profession of psychology.

That’s what we might call an “inside joke.” Circa 2006, Deb Frisch was sufficiently notorious to be newsworthy, but few are the survivors of the Old School Days of the blogosphere. Everybody’s just doing social media now, or else they’ve switched over to Substack. Professor Glenn Reynolds a/k/a Instapundit, famed as the “Blogfather” for encouraging so many nascent bloggers back in the day, nowadays has his own Substack, and just the other day — via a link at Instapundit, of course — I learned that my old blog buddy Juliette “Baldilocks” Ochieng is now a Substacker, and finally I decided I might as well endure the ordeal of signing up myself.

(Aside: Just remembered that Instapundit’s wife is actually a Ph.D. psychologist, and perhaps my general disdain of the field is somewhat exaggerated, but of course, they’re not all bad, certainly not as bad as Deb Frisch. Anyway …)

A Newsletter About … Nothing?

Why should someone who has a blog — rather a successful and well-established blog — also have a Substack newsletter? That was the nub of my resistance to the idea of doing more work, besides my innate laziness. There had to be some rationale, something extra that I was offering readers in a newsletter, and I was at a loss to think of what that might be. Sitting here typing out my first Substack post, I still have no idea why I’m doing this, like George and Jerry, pitching a show “about nothing.”

”Nothing!” (Image: YouTube)

Is this a problem? Not for a Professional Journalist (which I actually am, by the way). In fact, the whole point of being a Professional Journalist is that you can write about anything — whatever topic the editor assigns — and if I’m qualified to write about anything, then certainly it should be easy to write about nothing.

Have I introduced myself? That’s the other problem with starting a Substack: Whereas after more than 15 years of blogging, I’d attracted a regular readership to whom I was as familiar as an old shoe, the Substack audience may have no clue who I am, and may be tempted to Google me, with God knows what results. True story: In 2007, I flew down to Atlanta to interview Herman Cain, who had just recovered from a bout with cancer and was reviving his career on talk radio. When I got there and introduced myself, I said, “Don’t Google me,” and Herman smiled: “I already did.”

About four years later, after I’d left The Washington Times, started a blog and become a campaign correspondent for The American Spectator, I found myself on Election Night 2010 in Boca Raton at the victory party for newly-elected Rep. Allen West, and got a call from my buddy Steve Foley (a Tea Party operative whom I’d met during a campaign in upstate New York) who said he’d just started a “Draft Herman Cain” website, to get Cain as a 2012 presidential candidate. What did I think? Was I in?

Well, I said, I’d have to see what Sarah Palin was going to do. So the next day, as I was on the road for the 1,200-mile drive back home, I called my source with Team Palin and asked, “Is she in or out for 2012?” The response was … diplomatic, you might say. So I asked, “Red light? Green light? Yellow light?” The answer: “Yellow light” — a wait-and-see attitude. Then I immediately called Steve: “I’m in.” From that point on, I was the journalistic cheerleader for the Cain Train, as we called it. At first, people thought I was crazy, because Herman wasn’t even an asterisk in the opinion polls at that point, but by September of 2011, he’d zoomed to the top of the crowded field, and I was vindicated in my prophetic vision. “Born Lucky,” you might say.

It would perhaps be arrogant to assume that any reader is actually interested in the story of how I spent more than a decade working my way up from the lowest rung of newspaper journalism — starting out as a $4.50-an-hour staff writer for weekly in Austell, Georgia — to become an assistant national editor at The Washington Times, then a published author, blogger and correspondent for The American Spectator. Rather than bore you with such a tale, my intent is to make a more important point, namely that success in any endeavor is seldom a matter of mere luck.

Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men.
-- Proverbs 22:29 (KJV)

When I was a college sophomore, one of the assigned readings in our American Literature anthology was a selection from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Amazon Affiliate link.) Franklin explains that his father often quoted this verse from Proverbs as an admonishment, and that Franklin was amazed to learn that, at least in his case, it was literally true, when he became an American ambassador to Europe: “I did not think that I should ever literally stand before kings, which, however, has since happened; for I have stood before five, and even had the honor of sitting down with one, the King of Denmark, to dinner.” That kind of belief in the value of hard work is part of our American heritage and, despite my natural laziness, it was from an early age my determination to get ahead by out-working others.

Ah, but who wants a reputation as a dreary grinder, a workaholic? So here was a lesson I learned from my youthful attempts at fronting rock bands: Always look like you’re having fun onstage. However much sweat you’ve poured into your rehearsals, when you get on stage, your performance should appear effortless.

If you’re willing to go the extra mile, to put in long hours of burning the midnight oil — working when nobody else is around to see it — your subsequent success will seem mysterious to others, and is likely to excite the kind of jealousy expressed by Ferris Bueller’s sister: "Why should he get to ditch when everybody else has to go?"

Jennifer Gray in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Image: YouTube)

What his sister hated about Ferris was the ease of his success, his happy-go-lucky attitude, and the seeming unfairness of his superiority in getting away with things. He was simply better than others and, while Ferris was widely admired by his schoolmates, this made him an object of envy by his more conscientious sister, who believed that success properly belonged to those who strictly follow the rules.

Who decides the rules, and who is benefited by strict enforcement? If the system works, then the benefit of following the rules should be obvious to everyone, and the rule-breaker should be generally unpopular. In what sense does the American public education system “work”? Is it not the case that the most affluent and influential Americans send their kids to private schools? Can you guess who considers their kids too good for public schools? The people running the public schools: “Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates and Illinois Education Association official Sean Denney send their kids to private schools while devoting their time to fighting against poorer parents’ rights to send their children to similar schools.”

Are My Digressions Entirely Random?

Seventeen hundred words into my first Substack post, it’s time to introduce you to a Basic Blogger Trick with which readers of The Other McCain are familiar — the apparently pointless digression that turns out to be not completely pointless.

Writing long-form is frowned on in blogging, where the 200-word blurb was established as standard practice back in the day. The idea that some people might simply enjoy reading — good writing, for the sake of good writing — was alien to the mass-market clickbait mentality. The trick to getting people to read longer stuff is as simple as fishing — you “set the hook,” then reel them in. And along the way, it helps to deliver an occasional surprise, something unexpected. When you began reading this post, did you expect a Ferris Bueller reference? And after encountering that, did you expect it to turn into an indictment of hypocrisy in the public school system?

No, of course, it was unexpected, but what point was I making before going off on that wild tangent? “Success in any endeavor is seldom a matter of mere luck.” How many millions of words have I published in my career? I have no idea, but I’ve been doing it for a long time — and getting paid to do it — and during those decades of experience, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to do it.

"There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence…. At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three competing papers at the same time, under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in the morning, sports editor for another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling promoter, writing incredibly twisted 'press releases' that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.
"It was a wonderful gig, in retrospect, and at times I wish I could go back to it — just punch a big hatpin through my frontal lobes and maybe regain that happy lost innocence that enabled me to write, without the slightest twinge of conscience, things like: 'The entire Fort Walton Beach police force is gripped in a state of fear this week; all leaves have been canceled and Chief Bloor is said to be drilling his men for an Emergency Alert situation on Friday and Saturday nights — because those are the nights when "Kazika, The Mad Jap," a 440-pound sadist from the vile slums of Hiroshima, is scheduled to make his first — and no doubt his last — appearance in Fish-head Auditorium. Local wrestling impressario Lionel Olay is known to have spoken privately with Chief Bloor, urging him to have "every available officer" on duty at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad Jap’s legendary temper and his invariably savage reaction to racial insults. Last week, in Detroit, Kazika ran amok and tore the spleens out of three ringside spectators, one of whom allegedly called him a "yellow devil.”'
"'Kazika,' as I recall, was a big, half-bright Cuban who once played third-string tackle for Florida State University in Tallahassee, about 100 miles away — but on the fish-head circuit he had no trouble passing for a dangerous Jap strangler, and I soon learned that pro wrestling fans don’t give a fuck anyway."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’ 72 (Amazon Affiliate link)

Why would those paragraphs appear in a book ostensibly about the 1972 presidential campaign? It has been my contention for many years that Hunter S. Thompson’s work should be read as sort of a meta-critique of the journalistic establishment. In retrospect, Thompson is seen as a genius, one of the best writers of his generation, but he was an outsider, a rebel against the system, and after a few gigs for more-or-less mainstream publications, he found the freedom he needed as a correspondent for Rolling Stone which, at the time, was certainly not a mainstream journal. Imagine applying for White House press credentials to cover President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, when you were writing for a rock-and-roll magazine read by the kind of long-haired hippie dopeheads who hated everything Nixon stood for. One must recall that (a) Nixon was then waging a “War on Drugs,” and (b) Thompson had just the previous year published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Amazon Affiliate link) which rather clearly identified which side of that war he was on.

Hunter S. Thompson had a thorough contempt for the mainstream media, and his coverage of the 1972 campaign was a vindication of his critique. When Thompson first showed up in New Hampshire, George McGovern was seen as a hopeless long-shot, who merited scant attention from the national press. The clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination was Maine Senator Ed Muskie, whose chief rivals — according to the media establishment — were New York Mayor John Lindsay and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, not to discount the popularity of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who was sure to get his share of the “Solid South” vote.

What Thompson understood, however, is that the anti-Vietnam War radicals — who had turned the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago into a riot — were likely to have a major impact in the 1972 primaries. If the establishment candidates were to divvy up the same pool of voters (with Wallace harvesting his share of discontented populists and conservatives), then the adamantly anti-war candidate McGovern could pull off an upset. Thompson’s hunch proved correct, if just barely. Muskie stumbled badly in New Hampshire, where McGovern finished a surprisingly strong second. Wallace won Florida, but then became the target of an assassination attempt in Maryland. Lindsay proved to be a candidate without a constituency and, beginning April 4 with a victory in the Wisconsin primary, McGovern began to look like a contender, with Humphrey his last remaining obstacle to the nomination. By the time they got to the Democratic convention in Miami, McGovern had secured enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot, but it was no landslide and, in point of fact, McGovern had gotten fewer primary votes than Humphrey.

Still, the success of McGovern’s long-shot primary campaign showed that the media establishment had been all wrong in its forecast of the Democratic race and, even after McGovern began gathering momentum in April, most of the media were clueless as to which way the campaign was heading. Not that the Democratic nomination in ‘72 mattered that much, as events proved. Nixon was reelected by a landslide of historic proportions, and while the bungling of McGovern’s running-mate selection (the doomed Tom Eagleton) was seen as a major cause of McGovern’s defeat, the reality is that Nixon was likely to win no matter who got the Democratic nomination.

The larger point, what matters most about Thompson’s version of the story, is how badly the media establishment misread the terrain, and how badly misinformed the average reader of the Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, actually was — and still is. If you’re willing to accept the “news” to be a fair representation of reality, and not willing to do the work necessary to seek out information that doesn’t fit the mainstream media narrative, then you’re just like those pro wrestling fans who were willing to accept that press-release hype about “Kazika the Mad Jap.”

‘I Hate Illinois Nazis’

(Image: The Blues Brothers, via YouTube)

Having introduced myself and given you a rough indication of my anti-establishment journalistic philosophy, permit me briefly to praise the providers of this platform for their commitment to First Amendment freedom. A few months ago there was a lot of noise about an alleged Nazi problem on Substack. Certainly it is not the case Substack is pro-Nazi, but they are anti-censorship, and this distinction was apparently impossible for some self-described “progressives” to comprehend:

“Substack’s leaders … proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ … to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website … turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters ... But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.”

OK, so I won’t “overlook” the alleged “scores” of such newsletters, which you assure me exist, even though I’ve never encountered any such Substack content, and if it weren’t for all the progressive media people pointing and screaming about it, nobody would have known it existed. Can you explain to me again how these Substack Nazis are not “marginal or harmless,” when one needs a microscope to find them?

Progressive (noun) — someone who wants to destroy the Bill of Rights in order to protect “democracy.”

We’re living in a 21st-century Salem, and the folks who want to hang witches all claim to be “progressive.” Basically anybody who votes Republican nowadays is suspected of witchcraft — “white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi”! — and whatever actual danger there may be from such extremism is obscured by the hysterical paranoia of self-appointed witch-hunters like Casey Newton.

If everybody is a Nazi, nobody is Nazi. If you start exaggerating the extent of extremism by expanding the definition to include anyone you disagree with, don’t pretend that your diminished credibility is anyone’s fault but your own. That’s basically what happened to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which began putting dots on its annual “Hate Map” to represent alleged threats that reasonable people might doubt were very harmful. One of the tricks the SPLC employed was to list every local chapter of, e.g., the Eagle Forum as a separate “hate group.”

Well, first of all, Eagle Forum is about mainstream conservative as can be, founded by Phyllis Schlafly, whose 1964 bestseller A Choice, Not an Echo proved to be a political roadmap that eventually led to Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Secondly, however, shouldn’t a national organization be counted as a single group for the purposes of counting how many such groups there are? Every year, the SPLC would send out press releases hyping the Dangerous Rise in Hate Groups, based on this kind of phony counting, and their press releases would be dutifully parroted by the mainstream media, like Hunter S. Thompson warning readers of “Kazika the Mad Jap.”

Far be it from me to deny that there are dangerous kooks out there who might at any moment be provoked into committing some horrific atrocity. But one cannot minimize such risks by exaggerating them. Alas, at 3,600 words, I’m approaching the limit here, and must bring this introductory newsletter to a close. Let me know in the comments if you’ve enjoyed this and want to read more.

— RSM