Firehose #107: About Last Week

Also: Happy birthday, Mr. Moynihan!

You will forgive us for being a tad on the weary side.

Since last we Firehosed, we did two live shows at listener (and above-pictured instigator) Mike Reed’s great Constellation club in Chicago (streaming both, thanks to our new best friends at 2Way); had drinks with around 300 of you very fine people, recorded two more episodes at the great last-minute space cobbled together on impressively short notice by our older best friends at Substack, worked our day jobs in the usual unforgiving chaos + limited time-window of a major party political convention, and managed to sneak in at least one or two listener food recommendations for this fantastic if wretchedly managed city. We will get to much of the aforementioned below, but just wanted to speak for the lads & extended family: What a treat that was! Let’s do more of it, sooner.

And before I go any further, thank you thank you THANK YOU for so sweetly and generously helping exceed the GoFundMe target of $15,000 for the celebration of my late nephew Zach Alessi’s life. Our family will never forget this.

* All right all right all right, let’s hop to it. Night 1 of our two-night stand is available to watch on (and hopefully embed from!) the YouTube machine. In it, you will, ah, experience beloved one-eyed Fifdom trainwreck Ben Dreyfuss, veteran of past episodes #83, #97, #148, #214, Members Only #129, M.O. #140, #392, and M.O. #180. Attempted to be referenced therein was this classic piece of Dreyfussology, “American Columnists Won't Stop Whining About American Tourists Ruining Europe. But Guess What? Europe Sucks.” Let’s see if this works:

Huzzah! In the audience and making a brief cameo or two was Chicago resident and National Review contributor Jeff Blehar, co-impresario of the great Political Beats podcast, on which I have talked (at great length!) about the Beach Boys and R.E.M., Moynihan has analyzed The Smiths, and Kmele has broken down Marvin Gaye.

What else did we talk about Friday that I could annotate, besides Kmele’s balls (or lack thereof)? Oh yeah, people seemed to like our Q&A discussion about the wherefores of media condescension toward flyover country. I’m tinkering on an overdue essay that explores some of that, but for now here are three still-relevant pieces from three different decades: Me in the National Post 21 years ago about how the post-1960s consolidation/“professionalization” of newspapers led to the conscious jettisoning of the economic lower-third of the reading market (pay no heed to my over-optimistic headline & closing grafs). Then a 2017 Jack Shafer/Tucker Doherty research/analysis in Politico on how “The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think.” Finally, two weeks ago, right here on Substack, Ted Gioia performing an autopsy on “The Death of the Magazine.”

* Second show was a good deal different than Night 1 (despite Ben’s attempt to ruin it at the end):

People really dug guest Austin Berg of the Illinois Policy Institute, talking about how his beloved Chicago “is the greatest American city, and the worst-governed American city.” Here you can see in its entirety the IPI handwork titled Local 1: The Rise of America's Most Powerful Teachers Union.”

* I leaned into some of Austin’s (and George Will’s) fire for the first of my five Reason dispatches from the DNC, “Democrats Unburdened by What They Have Done to Chicago: This is what you get when politics is untethered from governance.” The finishing of that piece prevented me from joining The Reason Roundtable this week, so my chair was filled by … Ben Dreyfuss! Who thank God was no longer staying at our AirBnB:

* Monday also saw the first of three Reason outside-the-DNC dispatches from live-show mic-handler and official merch-hawker Nancy Rommelmann (#79, Special Dispatch #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111). Since they were all on the theme of fizzled protest action, let’s list them in chronological order: “Muted Outrage and Aspirational Crowds,” “The Anarchist Dreams,” and “An Over-Orchestrated Rebellion.” (There’s also a compilation video of her Twitter reportage.) The second of those two stories ended with Nancy getting pushed around a bit by a cop after accompanying some fence-hopping demonstrators:

“Don't hurt her!” a protester shouted, which I thought was kind of adorable and which I caught on video, just before finding a small egress to the other side. Two men pulled me through—thanks guys—and into the waiting path of another journalist pal calmly taking in the proceedings.

“Hello Nancy,” he said

You’ll never guess who.

* Speaking of ‘Ol Reaction Face, he did not lack for productivity on this his birthday week. Tuesday, as foreshadowed in #439 w/ Steve Kornacki, saw the posting of an Honestly conversation with the Kornack’s fellow numbers/politics/gambling lunatic Nate Silver, talking both about the presidential election and Silver’s new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.

* Around then is when I published the abortive remains of what had been a killer opening night James Taylor piece (nixed because, um, Taylor didn’t end up playing), under the headline: “Democrats Just Can't Quit Saving Our Souls: Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton bring millenarianism—and messianism—back.” Later that day came what was far and away the best moment inside the DNC (which I wrote about in a piece titled “America Is Ready to Party”): DJ Cassidy’s American-music roll call. Check it out (preferably muting the Gavin Newsoms of the world):

* Wednesday we unlocked the Subtack loft (thanks, Chris Best!), and started getting busy. First up was #440 w/ Mike Pesca, vet of past episodes #343 & #418. Then, while some of us trudged out to either the arena or the protests, Moynihan and Batya Ungar-Sargon (#451) convened a Free Press livestream with the likes of Kmele, Olivia Reingold (#459), Marianne Williamson, Nina Turner, and God knows who else.

* The rest of us on Tim Walz coming-out night were subjected to, as I put it in a Reason headline, the “Party of COVID-19 Authoritarianism Improbably Rebrand[ing] as [the] ‘Party of Freedom.’” It was … not great for everyone’s blood pressure. Including La Rommelmann, who published an Atlantic piece titled, “The Democrats’ COVID Amnesia: Keeping schools closed for so long was a mistake, and the Democrats shouldn’t pretend Harris is responsible for opening them.”

* Thursday was #441 with emerging fan fave Alex Thompson of Axios (M.O. #215), breaking a bit of gossip about administration insiders thanking him for doing some of that early Biden-is-old reporting. Then various failed attempts to enter the United Arena, followed by a Substack-loft retreat, some YOU BETTER FILE IN A TIMELY MANNER TONIGHT, PAL messaging from your friendly neighborhood editor, then the second night of Free Press livestreaming, with cameos from me, Ben Domenech, Michael Tracey (#105), Pesca, Rommelmann, and probably many others but HAVE YOU FILED YET MATT??? (I filed.)

* On GTFO day, Honestly posted the results of Moynihan asking a variety of conventioneering Democrats, famous and not, what it means to be a Democrat.

So was it a fun week? C’mon, man, two live shows! Plus, any week you can enjoy a goblet of wine w/ Mary Katharine Ham (#345 & #430) is going to have some upside.

But on the flipside, Charles C. W. Cooke (#007!) probably read the room best, if by “room” we mean “Matt’s fatigued soul.” (Though to be sure, like Michael Jackson, I’m a lover, not a fighter.) Lengthy excerpt from CCWC:

How can I put this in a way that exudes nuance, finesse, love, and understanding? Oh, to hell with it: In this presidential election, in the year of our Lord 2024, I hate absolutely everyone.

I’m not angry about it. I’m not even upset. Somehow, I’ve remained cheerful and calm, despite the onslaught of irritation. Nevertheless, I hate everyone. I hate Donald Trump and J. D. Vance. I hate Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I hate President Biden. Since I moved to the United States in 2011, I have never once liked the president, so, in a sense, I’m used to this. But, even by those standards, this is a dire predicament. Of my own volition, I’m watching the unfolding of an election in which the two dumbest presidential nominees in American history vie to take over the White House from the dumbest president in American history. This contest has no redeeming features. It’s not amusing. It’s not edifying. It’s not even over — which would be a blessing in itself. It’s an endless, attritional, propaganda-infused slog. America, which is a wonderful country full of wonderful people, does not deserve this indignity. […]

We have come to take it for granted, but consider, if you dare, that the greatest predictor of a shift in vibes and polling this year is a candidate’s silence. Donald Trump put himself in a leading position by shutting up and then being shot by a madman. Kamala Harris overtook him by repudiating all aspects of her past via proxies and then allowing the press to turn her into an emoji. J. D. Vance would be better off if his catalog of internet-edgelordery had been scrubbed, and Tim Walz can’t speak without being trapped in a ridiculous lie. Were one of the two tickets to buy a bucket-shop vacation to Tahiti, they’d rise ten points in the polls. Elementary though it might seem, the optimal accessory for presidential candidates in the year 2024 might well be an industrial-sized roll of duct tape. […]

We face problems — some of which are the direct product of our feckless political class — but we are still the greatest, kindest, most exciting, most dynamic society that has ever existed on this earth. Our politics are eschatological, but the civilization they pretend to serve is fine. Not perfect, not catastrophic, fine. What is being served up by the political postulants of Washington, D.C., and beyond is a disgrace that does not intersect with the electorate. I hate them — all of them. Perhaps one day, I won’t.

Walkoff music reminds me of … me!