America's new game show: “Tribalist or nah?”
What your take about the Rittenhouse case reveals. Also: Buddha, Jesus, Lin Manuel, eclipses, fedoras, WWII, weed, Lennon/McCartney, comedy pitches, David Sedaris, Milton Glaser, & Bob Dylan.
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Tribalist or nah?
How people felt about the Rittenhouse verdict felt like a new game show: “Tribalist or nah?” Thinking this kid is 100% a hero or a villain reveals more about the opinion-giver than it does about the actual case.
Of course, that didn’t stop the HTH (hot take heads) from spouting off. There should be a captcha thingie forcing you to prove you've watched an alleged crime from every angle before you're allowed to post about it on social media. Because only a tiny fraction commenting seemed to have any idea what actually transpired that tragic night. (Watch this video breaking down the whole sequence of events if you’re curious.)
For lefties, you’re right! The kid is a moron who never should have been there and especially not with a gun. (A wannabe medic who carries an assault rifle? What’s next? A firefighter who arrives with a truck full of gasoline?) The way right wingers are embracing this doofus is sad and gross. And it’s scary how this could chill future protests.
To those who cheered the verdict, you’re right too! There's no way there was evidence to support a conviction. Rittenhouse had a gun pointed at him by one dude, was whacked in the head with a skateboard by another, and the other guy…well, here’s The Daily’s Michael Barbaro summing up what the jury heard about Joseph “shoot me n-word, shoot me n-word” Rosenbaum:
So what the jury would have absorbed here is testimony that Rosenbaum was mentally ill, perhaps unstable, behaving erratically — at times violently — that he initiates an encounter with Rittenhouse in which he’s chasing Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse is trying to convince Rosenbaum that he, Rittenhouse, is not a threat, but Rosenbaum persists and ultimately seems to grab after Rittenhouse’s gun.
It’s all ugly AF, but the jury got it right. Due process is good, mob justice is bad. (It’s absurd this is a hot take these days!) This is what we want from our justice system. Is there a double standard? Sure, but that doesn’t mean we should advocate for both sides getting done dirty. Ideally, you want laws applied to others the way they would be applied to you. And if the laws are the problem, then let’s fix those.
The real culprit here is our insane gun culture. This kid was an incompetent gunt (that’s what I’m gonna call gun nuts from now on) who was out of pocket that night and created harm instead of reducing it – yet it was all legal in our “good guy with a gun”/Charles Bronson approach to gun laws.
I want to ask the gun rights folks: Does it matter if you're bad with your firearm? Can we at least have some sort of test for gun owners like they do for drivers? The government can take your kids away if you're a crappy parent but can’t yank away an AR-15 if you’re a panicky teen who thinks Kenosha is some kind of first-person shooter game and that feels off.
And btw, gun fans need to stop with the whole “technically, the AR-15 isn’t an assault rifle” counterargument like that proves anything. OK, fine, I don’t know the specifics of gun terminology. You win. USA Today called it an “assault-style weapon,” so how about that? Or maybe we just go with Assault-ish like it’s a new Kenya Barris show. Regardless, it did a super job at killing people so it was a salty something.
Gobbling
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Keep that feedback coming (always great to hear from readers), check the archives, and spread the word. Thanks!
Quickies
🌀 You can tell everything you need to know about Buddha and Jesus from their abs.
🌀 Remember how that flight attendant taped that dude to his seat and gagged him? Comedians should be allowed to do that with hecklers.
🌀 Talkspace/Betterhelp will do to therapists what Uber/Lyft has done to taxi drivers.
🌀 Peak middle-aged white woman is mistakenly calling him Lin Manuel Noriega.
🌀 Eclipses are overrated. "This is an amazing thing...and you can’t look at it!" Gee, thanks a lot. Anything else transcendent that I can't engage with? Maybe some version of the Northern Lights but looking at it gives me leg cramps?
🌀 Men love WWII stuff because it's a reminder of when men actually did hard things.
🌀 Pretty amazing that America thought it could install democracies in the Middle East when it can barely even keep one going in America.
🌀 Just created a CRT NFT and broke the internet!
🌀 One red flag about NFT art: Everyone hyping it has complete crap taste in art. I’d never want to visit an art museum run by crypto bros: "In this wing, we have our collection of digital kittens driving Lambos while playing Minecraft, bruh!"
🌀 The problem is people who tell the truth are boring and shameless liars are fascinating.
Videos
📺 Fedora Fan: I watched a behind the scenes discussion of “Love Life” on HBO and let’s just say it was a real wakeup call for me as a hat guy. Click below to watch on YouTube.
📺 Weed is medicine: And that’s got me rethinking my lifestyle. Click below to watch this quick Reel on Instagram.
5-spotted
1) The Red-Blue Happiness Gap asks if liberals focus too much on individual powerlessness and trauma.
Liberals, essentially, may be fueling not only our own unhappiness but our own inertia with a political theory of systemic power and individual powerlessness. That is: If we believe that everything, or almost everything, is the result of systems and inequities beyond our control — including our own opportunities, positions, and futures — then we cede our internal locus of control; we are primed to be less resilient and less effective drivers of our own lives and of political change.
2) How Lennon tried to disarm McCartney during a fight: “It’s only me, Paul.“
McCartney made plain that he could see the absurdity of it all: “People said to me when he said those things on his record about me, you must hate him, but I didn’t. I don’t. We were once having a right slagging session and I remember how he took off his granny glasses. I can still see him. He put them down and said, ‘It’s only me, Paul.’ Then he put them back on again and we continued slagging. . . . That phrase keeps coming back to me all the time. ‘It’s only me.’”
3) A new way to think about the value of your work: You should be too expensive at least 40% of the time.
The next time you’re speaking with a potential client, whether it’s a newspaper, magazine, brand, or anything else, consider both the value you can offer them — based on the thing you’re making, what their audience gets from it, and your expertise — and the value they can offer you in terms of stability, interesting work, and meeting your ideal hourly rate. When we consider value, we may consider upping our rates beyond our ideal hourly rate for something that has tremendous value for the client, like a landing page for their website or a ghostwritten thought leadership piece. This part is a bit squishy, because it’s often based on gut, but we’ll often add a solid 25% to the overall price if we sense that the client is getting a piece of work that will benefit them for years to come. And if they can’t meet the rate you need, you walk. In fact, you should be too expensive for some clients. (Wudan was once advised to be deemed “too expensive” at least 40% of the time.)
4) Joel Stein on the good and bad of pitching a comedy show. Includes what execs say is the best one-line comedy pitch ever.
It turns out I do a lot right: I tell a personal story that led me to the idea. I explain why it’s relevant to our cultural moment without ever saying “cultural moment.” I deliver my pitches in about 12 minutes, which they say is the perfect time because a pitch should never be as long as the actual pilot episode. I don’t place my Emmy in the Zoom shot, mostly because I don’t have one. I don’t egotistically refer to older series I created as “my show” — again, mostly because I don’t have any. And rather than speak at them, I include the executives in the conversation, which Kramer had told me was key. The best pitch…[was] “Crazy ex-girlfriend: You’ve either been one or had one,” after which everyone started talking.
5) David Sedaris Knows What You’ll Laugh at When No One Is Judging
You don’t want to make somebody feel bad. You don’t want to belittle somebody. You don’t want to heap stuff on them. But there’s something to be said about developing a thick skin. Like, I wrote an angry email recently to Audm because they were doing a New Yorker story about the making of “Midnight Cowboy.” They quoted John Wayne, who said it was a movie about a couple of bleep. So I wrote to Audm, and I said why did you bleep out the word “fag”? You’re quoting John Wayne in 1969. Of course John Wayne said that. Bleeping out the word is treating me like I’m some sensitive flower.
Bonus:
Thanks for reading!
-Matt
The end stuff
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Two quick points:
1. Re: The Rittenhouse verdict-- A lot of people are screaming (virtue signaling?) that the system is broken. It's worse than that; it worked exactly as it was designed. I 100% agree that everyone is entitled to due process and that this case was ugly all around. I'd also argue that our legal system--including gun laws-- need an overhaul.
It was also a given that this case would be used as a political football. Rittenhouse was either going to be martyred by the right (if convicted), or made into a golden boy (if acquitted).
2. I only recently learned that the word "Elvis" is written into Dylan's hair on that album cover. Who knew?