Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

March 2024

Baseball

DEM BUMS:

The Last Of The Brooklyn Dodgers (Richard Staff, 2/19/24, Defector)

The team moved west 40 years before I was born, but I’m familiar with Brooklyn fan dedication through my grandfather, Duke. He’s 88 and still has a bedroom drawer full of Dodger cards; they have pinholes through them, from when he’d put the team’s depth chart on his cork board. To distract from the agony of the subpar Mets seasons he subjected me to—no reason to be more specific, here—he’d tell the story of listening to Bobby Thomson’s pennant-clinching home run from the Polo Grounds on his radio. Used to the sound of cheers being a good thing on the home Dodger broadcasts, his mother came into the room celebrating what she thought was another trip to the World Series for the Bums. Seven decades later, he remembers wanting to throw the radio to make that cheering stop.

“Our fans got attached to us players in a different way,” said Carl Erskine, the only surviving Dodger to take the field during the team’s 1955 World Series win. “Of course the players who perform well always have a good following. I wasn’t exactly a superstar, but I had people who identified with me. I had a fan club, a bunch of teenage girls who all wore number 17 with a president, a vice president, and so on.” The world has changed in many ways since then, but a mid-rotation starter having a fan club of his own has never been normal.

“Many years later,” Erskine continued, “I went back to a function in New York and all these grandmothers showed up to meet me at the card show. They were all the teenage fans from the club, just a little bit older now.” He laughed when he told the story. “I didn’t have any of them tell me they named their kids after me. But it could’ve happened.”

Legen has it that one of the few times in his life the Grandfather Judd from the (Sunday) sabbath was to go to a 1955 Dodgers World Series game.

Sport

TAKE A WALK:

The Tiger Tamer who pushed a wheelbarrow the length of Britain was the TikToker of Victorian times (Laura Smith, February 27, 2024, Sunday Post)


He was a circus showman, big cat tamer, seafarer and writer, but walking great distances with a wheelbarrow is what made Bob Carlisle a media sensation in the late-1800s.

Edinburgh-born Bob sparked a short-lived but frenzied obsession with wheelbarrow endurance walking after he pushed a wooden wheelbarrow from John O’Groats to Land’s End and back in 1879.

The Scottish adventurer would give today’s top social media influencers a run for their money, says historian and History Extra content producer Dr Dave Musgrove.

Thanks to his clever self-promotion tactics, newspapers covered Bob’s progress as he walked 30 to 40 miles a day and crowds flocked to see him along his route.

More the Forrest Gump.

End of History Israel/Palestine

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY:

Saudi Arabia: The Chimera of A Grand Alliance (REUEL MARC GERECHT, Liberties Journal)

Which brings us to the current Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country — easily the most detested Saudi royal in the West since the kingdom’s birth. With the exception of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who is the most indefatigable Middle Eastern dictator since World War II, MBS is the most consequential autocrat in the region. And the prince made a proposal to America — a proposal that may survive the Gaza war, which has reanimated anti-Zionism and constrained the Gulf Arab political elite’s decade-old tendency to deal more openly with the Jewish state. To wit: he is willing to establish an unparalleled tight and lucrative relationship with Washington, and let bygones be bygones — forget the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and all the insults by Joe Biden — so long as America is willing to guarantee Saudi Arabia’s security… […]

When it came to cult worship, Saudi kings and princes had been fairly low-key compared to most other Middle Eastern rulers. Yet MBS’ sentiments are, again, more modern. He has effectively established a police state — the first ever in Saudi history. His creation is certainly not as ruthless as the Orwellian nightmares of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria; it is neither as loaded with internal spies nor rife with prison camps as Abdul Fattah El-Sisi’s Egypt. But MBS’ Arabia is a work in progress. Those in America and Israel who advocate that the United States should draw closer to MBS, so as to anchor a new anti-Iran alliance in Riyadh, are in effect saying that we should endorse MBS and his vision of a more secular, female-driving, anti-Islamist Saudi Arabia without highlighting its other, darker aspects, or that we should just ignore the kingdom’s internal affairs and focus on what the crown prince gives us externally. This realist calculation usually leads first back to the negatives: without the crown prince’s support of American interests, Russia, China, and Iran, the revisionist axis that has been gaining ground as America has been retrenching, will do even better. And then the positive: Saudi recognition of Israel would permanently change the Jewish state’s standing in the Muslim world — a long-sought goal of American diplomacy.

The prince clearly knows how much Benjamin Netanyahu wants Saudi Arabia’s official recognition of Israel. The Israeli prime minister has loudly put it at the top of his foreign-policy agenda. (Before the Gaza war, it might have had the additional benefit of rehabilitating him at home.) The prince clearly knows how much American Jewry wants to see an Israeli embassy in Riyadh. And after some initial weariness, the Biden administration now wants to add the kingdom to the Abraham Accords. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan recognizing Israel was good, but Saudi Arabia would be better. Although the White House certainly hasn’t thought through how the United States would fit into an Israeli-Saudi-US defensive alliance, whether it would even be politically or militarily possible, the administration proffered the idea before Biden went to Saudi Arabia in 2022 — or echoed an earlier, vaguer Saudi suggestion of a defensive pact — as part of Riyadh’s official recognition of Israel. Given the importance that MBS attaches to things Jewish, he may well believe his offer of Israeli recognition gives him considerable leverage in future dealings with the United States.

Joe Biden paved the way for MBS’ go-big proposal by making one of the most embarrassing flips in presidential history. Biden came into office pledging to reevaluate US-Saudi ties and cast MBS permanently into the cold for the gruesome killing of Khashoggi and, a lesser sin, making a muck of the war in Yemen, which has led to the United States, given its crucial role in maintaining and supplying the Saudi Air Force, being an accomplice in a bombing campaign that has had a negligible effect on the Shiite Houthis capacity to fight but has killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Yemeni civilians. (In civil wars, it is hard to know who is starving whom, but the Saudi role in bringing starvation to Yemen has not been negligible.) Fearing another hike in oil prices before the midterm elections, Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia, fist-bumping MBS and getting not much in return except reestablishing what has been true in US–Saudi relations from the beginning, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt hosted two of King Ibn Saud’s sons in Washington: everything is transactional.

We conspire to deny Arabs the self-determination we claim is universal and then wonder why we are unpopular.

Film/TV Sex

GYNECOLOGY AS DESTINY:

Barbie and the Franken-Feminists: The recent films Barbie and Poor Things try to reinvent the woman—and fail. (Noah Millman, January 26, 2024, Modern Age)

There’s a lot of gleeful mockery of the overtly retrograde sexism of the manosphere, as well as the general idiocy of men, all deserving targets. But what was most striking to me about this vision of the corruption of Barbieland is not its sexism but its sexlessness. The Kens may have taken over, but they and the Barbies still don’t have the foggiest idea what they might have to do with one another. Ken still wants Barbie’s attention—but why? The corrupted Barbies now want to fawn over the Kens—but why? Ken’s transformation doesn’t transform the Barbies into sex slaves; it transforms them into simulacra of them, forms without content.

Is that true to the experience of prepubescent girls and boys? Perhaps. In our porn-saturated age, kids still don’t really understand what sex is, but they’ve usually seen quite a bit of it before they are ready to understand, and that does prompt a certain amount of confused playacting (playacting that can nonetheless become all too real). But it’s still deeply ironic that Barbie, a toy that was originally based on a German novelty sex doll named Lilli, not only doesn’t have any interest in sex but doesn’t seem to know what sex is.

What’s more notable, though, is that Gloria, who comes from the real world and has infected Barbie with her adult fears, doesn’t enlighten her either. Her much-quoted eleven o’clock number is a passionate rant about the impossibility of being a woman, which turns out to be the key to deprogramming the Barbies from their masculinist brainwashing. But it offers no explanation for why women might be vulnerable to male emotional demands, or, indeed, why Ken would be in Barbieland in the first place. It’s also striking in that regard that Gloria’s own husband is a completely useless appendage, that we have no view at all into the nature of her adult marriage. It’s more troubling still that Gloria’s daughter is largely an appendage as well; the director of Lady Bird surely knows how to portray a mother–daughter conflict, so the fact that Gerwig barely sketches one in here tells the audience something important about the nature of the project: that she’s primarily interested in peddling sentiments, ones that come prepackaged in a box just as surely as Barbie does.

Structurally, Barbie is a quest narrative. The hero’s quest, initially, is to save her home, but after accomplishing that Barbie questions whether it is truly home anymore. It turns out what she really needs is to become a real girl—or, since she’s fully grown, a real woman. That makes Barbie a variation on Pinocchio, but the wooden boy wanted to be real from the beginning (at least in Disney’s animated version of the tale) and had to earn that privilege by demonstrating courage, loyalty, and other virtues despite being easily distractible (as boys so often are). Barbie’s quest for most of the film has been the opposite: to avoid becoming real. It isn’t until the end of the film that she has her “aha” moment and reverses course. She gets her wish, symbolized by her first visit to a gynecologist—suggesting, for the first time, that being a woman has something to do with being embodied as one, that womanhood isn’t only a matter of either false or raised consciousness. But we never do find out what Barbieland’s enduring purpose might be or how Barbie’s journey toward real womanhood might connect with the journey that the entirely real girls who play with her must themselves undertake.

Hilariously, the quest ends with her receiving the capacity for sex.

Music

“SPONTANEITY ACHIEVED”:

Miles Davis and the Recording of a Jazz Masterpiece (James Kaplan, FEB 26, 2024, Esquire)

The Five Spot was closed on Mondays, but on that March Monday Davis, Coltrane, and Evans had other business anyway: in Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio, they were joining the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb to begin making, under Miles’s leadership, what would become the bestselling, and arguably most beloved, jazz album of all time, Miles’s Kind of Blue. March 2 and April 22: three tunes recorded on the first date (“So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” and “Blue in Green”), two on the second (“All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches”). Every complete take but one (“Flamenco Sketches”) was a first take, the process similar, as Evans later wrote in the LP’s liner notes, to a genre of Japanese visual art in which black watercolor is applied spontaneously to a thin stretched parchment, with no unnatural or interrupted strokes possible, Miles’s cherished ideal of spontaneity achieved.


The quiet and enigmatic majesty of the resulting record both epitomizes jazz and transcends the genre. The album’s powerful and enduring mystique has made it widely beloved among musicians and music lovers of every category: jazz, rock, classical, rap. This is the story of the three geniuses who joined forces to create one of the great classics in Western music—how they rose up in the world, came together like a chance collision of particles in deep space, produced a brilliant flash of light, and then went on their separate ways to jazz immortality.

Film/TV

MAGA AND THE WORM (spoiler alert):

Dune: Part Two and the Death of Freedom (JOSEPH HOLMES, MARCH 6, 2024, Religion & Liberty)

[I]t’s the subversive themes of Dune: Part Two that stick with you after the credits roll. Because while the film ends with a victorious Paul Atreides, the film’s protagonist, who avenges House Atreides against House Harkonnen, he is far from a heroic liberator, as he morphs into a despot himself, waging a holy war against the rest of the empire that will lead to tyranny and genocide just as his dreams predict. Fans of the original Dune novels know that this was always Frank Herbert’s intent, to warn against how easy it is to embrace the worship of a messianic political figure who becomes a worse tyrant than what you had before.

Music

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

“What Was I Made For?”—Billie Eilish as Gen Z Icon (Liz Snell, 3/96/24, Rabbit Room)

Gen Z is the most self-marketed generation of all time. Like Barbie, Gen Zers how to make themselves into products for consumption. They know what sells. But do they know who they are? “I was an ideal/Looked so alive/Turns out I’m not real/Just something you paid for”—I wonder how many young influencers see themselves in that mirror. Eilish has said that at one point she felt like a parody of herself. It wasn’t until after she and her brother had written “What Was I Made For?” that she realized, “This is me. This is my life, and how I feel.”

Youth culture’s obsession with Billie Eilish seems to represent a longing for authenticity, for stars who are real and who can speak deeply to human experience, not just to the lifestyle of the rich and famous. I appreciate Eilish’s honesty both in her interviews and music, an honesty too often absent from Christian art. Eilish is thoughtful and creative and addresses important cultural issues with amazing awareness for someone so young. I applaud her probing, existential themes, but I wonder hope looks like in her world. She seems to be wondering, too.

“What was I made for?” It’s a question at the core of what it means to be human, at any age. It’s a timeless question, and Eilish sings it with all the quavering, searching restraint it deserves. Eilish is seeking the answer to this question through her music, and her fans are seeking along with her. Was I made to be exploited or to be powerful? Was I made to love myself or someone else? Was I made to be happy or depressed? Was I made to save the world or watch it burn? Gen Z is asking big questions. What answers are we going to give?

Identitarianism Republican Liberty

LIBERTIES:

Notes on a Dangerous Mistake (Michael Waltzer, Liberties Journal)

Several groups of rightwing intellectuals hover around the Republican Party, defending a stark conservatism. But there is a very different group, definitely rightwing, that is equally disdainful of Republican conservatives and Democratic progressives — who are all at bottom, its members insist, liberals: classical free-market liberals or egalitarian liberals, it’s all the same. These ideological outliers call themselves “post-liberal,” and they aim at a radical transformation of American society. Their overweening ambition is based on a fully developed theology, Catholic integralism, but the political meaning of this theology has not yet been fully worked out or, better, not yet revealed. A small group of writers, mostly academics, constitute what they hope, and I hope not, is the vanguard of a new regime and a Christian society. They have mounted a steady assault on liberal individualism and the liberal state, but so far they haven’t had anything like enough to say about life in the post-liberal world — not enough to warrant a comprehensive critique.

I wrote at the beginning that I would provide my own defense of liberalism. The description above of the post-liberal state and society — that is my defense of liberalism. Individual choice, legal and social equality, critical thinking, free speech, vigorous argument, meaningful political engagement: these are the obvious and necessary antidotes to post-liberal authoritarianism. Above all, we must treasure the right to be wrong. The post-liberals are actually exercising that right. They shouldn’t be allowed to take it away from the rest of us.

Conservative Thought W

RETURNING TO COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM:

Conservatism’s Path Not Taken: In the age of Trump, the right should revisit the neglected Humanist Conservative tradition (JEFFERY TYLER SYCK, JAN 10, 2024, Persuasion)

This brief sketch highlights the five main strands of Humanist Conservatism.

First, it is committed to compassionate capitalism. Humanist Conservatives believe that free market competition is vital to a healthy economy, but that the sometimes-brutal tendencies of capitalism must be offset with generous welfare and jobs programs. Instead of slashing welfare (as Fusionists want) or drastically expanding the regulatory state (as National Conservatives want), Humanist Conservatives long for a more efficient entitlement system that gives money to those who deserve it without unnecessary bureaucratic bloat. Through a generous, semi-public healthcare system, solvent retirement plans, jobs programs for the unemployed, and other reforms, the United States can work to revitalize all geographic areas and not just its urban centers.

Second, Humanist Conservatism seeks to preserve communities. It directs much of its energy towards ending the gradual collapse of American civil society. It adopts this stance partly out of the conviction that human life is best lived in a community with others, but also out of a belief that genuine self-government can only exist in those institutions we inhabit in our daily lives. In practice, this means using government to support and shield what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons”—those intermediary institutions that stand between the individual and the state such as school, church, trade union, town hall, and so on.

Third, Humanist Conservatism stands for pragmatic internationalism. It understands that no nation can simply ignore the universal struggle for freedom across the globe. But Humanist Conservatives also appreciate that promoting international harmony and human rights is no easy task—that to advance such goals requires a painful awareness of our own limitations. In our current moment this would mean providing critical support to allies like Ukraine and Israel. However, it would also mean avoiding the hawkish war mongering that is common on the right. There is no reason to level all of Palestine, provoke a coup in Iran, or goad Vladimir Putin into attacking NATO. Humanist Conservatives understand better than most that as bad as things are now, they can always get worse. The goal of foreign policy is not just to improve the international situation but to prevent it from deteriorating.

Fourth, Humanist Conservatism promotes a pluralist society. It seeks to build a state whose main purpose is to protect the rights of individuals and ensure a multitude of cultural communities can live in harmony. Rather than arrange a battle royale between secular progressivism and our distinct cultural traditions, as National Conservatives do, pluralism permits both to exist harmoniously.

Finally, Humanist Conservatism embraces moderate politics. Polling data shows that most voters are relatively moderate on issues like abortion, transgender rights, and guns. Humanist Conservativism reflects the views of this largely neglected demographic.

These five principles offer a viable alternative to Fusionism and National Conservatism alike. Humanist Conservatism is moderate, broadly appealing, and committed to human flourishing.

The future of all American policies is the past of W.

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