The New Yorker Presents: Another Nuanced Take on Middle America

Apparently the guy who founded Cabela's, the behemoth of an outdoor store that figures prominently in the exurbs of many of the large cities of this great nation, passed away last week. I don't know anything about the man. I don't know much about the stores. I think I bought a pair of pants at the one in Denver before a backpacking trip. I also think it would be cool to take Owen to the one in Wichita sometime and blow his toddler mind. That said, I have a limited dog in this fight. However, reading Amy Merrick's brief account of his life in the New Yorker, I couldn't help but feel how ridiculous her view of the man's life is. Now, this is the New Yorker. If you are looking for a nuanced take on Middle America it is probably not the place to go. I think that in order to be hired by that esteemed publication you have to register a "San Francisco vegan gardener" on the smug scale.

Merrick gives short shrift to Dick Cabela's literal rags-to-riches story, instead focusing on his connections to the NRA ($1 million in donations for a company doing $3.5 billion in annual revenue does not strike me as extreme, especially seeing as they sell firearms) and how he is just like those Duck Dynasty guys who we all know are knuckle-dragging homophobes. Therefore, he is probably a gun-loving, knuckle-dragging, homophobe himself who Merrick somehow crams into the problem of gun violence among inner-city youth. Seriously. Here is the final paragraph:

Of course, what it looks like to have guns in the hands of kids depends on where you live: Do you envision 4-H members shooting at a paper target in an empty field, or teen-agers settling a dispute in an urban neighborhood? In his interview with LaPierre, Dick Cabela lamented his struggles to attract a younger audience, presumably unaware of the double meaning of his words, “We’re losing our youth, big time, especially in the inner cities.”

I don't know that Cabela's explicitly caters to the gangbanger set, and I don't know that many an inner-city murder is committed with a hunting rifle, but this is the standard crappy journalistic practice of guilt by contrived association. Notice it is entirely unclear the context of Cabela's quote in this article. Is he lamenting the fact that inner-city kids are not buying guns at his stores? Plausible, but unlikely. More likely is the fact that kids these days, especially city kids, can hardly be bothered to go outdoors. But that would mean reading Cabela with charity (as well as crediting him with some degree of business acumen).

The most frustrating part of Merrick's article is that there is the seed of a legitimate point here. When I began the article I had thought I was going to enjoy it. We do mythologize the outdoors as we pave it over with parking lots and condos and strip malls and Cabela's stores. But anyone who has listened to "Big Yellow Taxi" in the past 40 years could tell you that. I wanted Merrick to go deeper. Was Dick Cabela somehow cynical about the outdoors and using our idealization of nature as a convenient way to make a buck? Do Cabela's customers prefer their outdoor experience to be climate-controlled and taxidermied? We don't ever get a meaningful answer to these questions.

Further, these critiques always strike me as a bit silly coming from people who live in gargantuan cities. Merrick cites the St. Louis store and how the building of Cabela's wiped out forest and wetlands. Which is true, no doubt. But do you know what lies just west of St. Louis and stretches for about 700 miles? Open space, wetlands, and forests. Punctuated ever so briefly by Kansas City, Topeka, and my fair city. So while I am not a huge fan of urban sprawl--the one thing that frightens me about the prospect of moving back to Denver someday is having to drive through that hellscape on a regular basis--I wonder if the same complaint would register from liberal quarters over the building of some All Faiths Peace and Love Center or some such nonsense. I guess what I am driving at is that it is chic these days to support the outdoors, perhaps nowhere more acutely than in cities where nature is mostly eliminated and always safely contained. It is easy to be romantic about something you never experience. These people want the great outdoors to exist in case someday they choose to partake. Whereas if I walk three miles in any direction from my home I am in the middle of nowhere.

The most striking part of Drew Magary's GQ piece on the Duck Dynasty clan was how much he was awed by their actual abilities and willingness to live out their ideology. He saw himself as a pansied city boy and he felt like he was missing out on something with his coddled life. I wonder if what Magary saw in Phil Robertson couldn't be said about Dick Cabela. That he was a true believer in the power of nature, but also a shrewd businessman. Merrick makes these two positions out to be contradictory but I don't see how they are. Davy Crockett also embodied the frontiersman and he was a self-promoter and a politician. It takes little imagination to unite the two.

While I doubt the title of Merrick's article was selected by her, the obit in no way answers the principle question in any meaningful way. That might require research. Better to listen to one interview, raise the specter of the NRA, and make dubious connections. In the end we don't really know anything more about Dick Cabela, the store he built, the nation that supports it, or the plight of inner city youth. Just more confirmation that those people in flyover country say and do the darndest things. 

The Story of the Human Body

In his epic history of Western culture, From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun identified multiple tendencies or impulses that tend to infiltrate the Western mind and Western culture with remarkable regularity. Such things as  individualism, self-consciousness, and emancipation. One of the most common is what Barzun calls Primitivism, the notion of some bygone day before everything got screwed up and how we ought to return to the wisdom of that period. We see this in multiple philosophers--prominently in the American scene Thoreau and Emerson and their Transcendentalist friends and heirs. It is alive and well today in the Paleo-diet and people who wish we could all churn our own butter and drink milk straight from the cow. Pasteur, I scoff at you.

What is interesting about the impulse toward primitivism is that we often see it in conjunction with the embrace of most other modern technologies. Think of the Paleo-eating Cross-fitter who listens to an iPod while working out and can't wait to blog about how totes great Paleo-eating and Cross-fitting is on the interweb. While it is easy to poke fun at little inconsistencies like this, in this case it is germane to the topic. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors really were so much healthier than us I imagine that we cannot abstract this fact to one root cause, i.e. diet. Plus, I don't know that bacon was a part of the average hunter-gatherer diet. (Sidebar: Seriously, what is with bacon these days? I get it; it tastes good. It always has, but now we can't seem to leave it off of cupcakes or out of mixed drinks. I was at a bar with a friend the other night and there was a whole pig's worth of bacon in a plastic bin behind the bar to add to drinks. Beer, please. No meat required in my drink. A pig still has to die for you to get bacon. Make his sacrifice worthwhile, folks. I would be super pissed if someone killed me and then put one of my ribs in a glass as an accoutrement, gotta have that rib flavor!, to a Bloody Mary.) The first time I see someone on a Paleo diet hunt a mastodon with a homemade spear I will tip my hat to that lad or lass. Until then, you can take your disgusting Paleo pizzas (!) and eat them in silence. No one wants to read your blog about them.

All of this is a very roundabout way to say that I just read a book by Harvard biologist and anthropologist Daniel Lieberman (he of Born to Run fame) called The Story of the Human Body which tackles issues of Paleo-living, human evolution and adaptation, and the way the modern world has pretty much wreaked havoc on our bodies (except for all the no longer dying from bad diarrhea or plagues transmitted by rat poop anymore).

I intend to blog through some various parts of the book that appealed to me. This is a true test of my devotion to writing. I got the book through interlibrary loan since I am trying to spend less money on books and therefore only have it for five more days. So, if this is my only post on the topic (I said above that I intend to write more) I will say a couple of things here that I found important.

One conclusion that Lieberman draws and which is terribly true of the human race is that we are super bad at taking the long view of things. A donut right now that is front of me and is a chocolate cake donut with peanut butter frosting or not getting diabetes or worse yet, eating a carrot instead. We always take the donut. Lieberman argues that is precisely because we are programmed to do so. Food used to be scarce and our freakishly huge brains want energy now and they want it fast. The donut gives more, quicker than a carrot can. 

Further, we always minimize future risk and at the same time we give ourselves way too much credit for self-control down the line. I will eat this donut today and then run 72 miles and do 6,000 push-ups tomorrow. No problem. Combine these two things and no amount of educating or raising awareness will keep people from drinking sugary soda, eating fried foods, sitting all evening in front of the television, taking the escalator, driving three blocks to the grocery store, or, God forbid, drinking a Bloody Mary with a piece of bacon in there. (Sidebar: Seriously, people, seriously. Did I miss the earthshattering study that said bacon makes you live to be 112 and poop rainbows and be able to compete in all of those adventure races with the live wires and mud pits? I must have missed that.)

Lieberman's argument is that cultural evolution got us into this mess, not some sort of rapid degeneration of human biology, and that it will have to be cultural evolution that gets us out. He therefore advocates what he calls a paternal libertarianism, with the aim of weaning people off of the sandwiches called the gutbuster and soda cups that could double as an aquarium. The libertarian part is that McDiabetes can sell the gutbuster; the paternalistic part is that junk like that starts getting taxed like cigarettes or booze. Really, this seems fine to me. People hem and haw about Bloomberg and the soda thing in New York and that was a dumb move, but what if instead of limiting the size (extremely paternalistic) he had raised the tax on all sodas. We spend 20% of our GDP on health care in this country. Which is a lot. And the reason we tax cigarettes and booze is because, on average, a habitual smoker and a habitual drinker cost more to the state. A higher tax, and one that is completely voluntary, helps offset those costs down the road, at least in principle. 

The same is almost entirely true for fatty fried things and drinks with bacon in them (can't get away from this, sorry). Now as a casual partaker in various spirits it does not bother me in the least that they are taxed higher than paper clips or funny t-shirts. Similarly, as a casual partaker in something called the Big Daddy Bacon Cheeseburger (with wild fries and a soda) it would not bother me in the least to pay an extra dollar or two for making the short-term excellent decision to eat this delicious monstrosity.

Another libertarian paternalistic suggestion is restricting the sales of fatty foods and sugar-bombs to children, in the same way we don't let them buy booze or guns. I remember in eighth grade we somehow got free of school for a bit (legitimately, I never ditched, mom) and we went to 7-11. Do you know what I bought? I still remember. I bought a full-size bag of Doritos, a hot dog, a Slurpee (of course the biggest they sold), and a bag of Skittles. Fortunately this was a rare, and in hindsight entirely abused freedom, but there are some kids that eat junk like that everyday. Increasingly, we are calling them diabetics. That is a problem. Foremost, for those kids. Then, for those of us who have to pay for that treatment for 60 years while modern medicine keeps them propped up. When we can't trust the kids to make good choices, and you can't trust kids, and increasingly you can't trust the parents, it seems right for the state to step in.

There is a lot more worth discussing in this book. Hopefully, I find the time and the inclination (evolution, after all, predisposes me to conservation of energy). If not, hopefully that functions to whet your appetite. 

Faith & Change

Christian Wiman:

In fact, there is no way to return to the faith of your childhood, not really, not unless you've woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you'd been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life--which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived--or have denied the reality of your life.

I don't think Wiman means in any way that the source or grounding of our faith changes--God is not so mutable as to change as we age, Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever--but that the way we experience and interpret faith changes as we go through life. It has to. Otherwise that faith becomes idolatry, a dull imitation of faith by rote, more important to us than growing and experiencing God. If we cling tight-fistedly to our adolescent or childish understanding we might still believe something at the end of our life, but it will not be a faith equipped to deal with life.

As I read this I thought about the failings of the Jesus People that I wrote about a few weeks ago. The type of faith they promoted was inherently based on a youthful and immediate interpretation of Scripture. Acts 2 without Acts 5-28. 

Lance Armstrong and Willful Blindness

I had the chance last week to read Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever, a page-turner with a bit of a hyperbolic subtitle. It is, obviously, about Lance Armstrong and the cover-up of his decades of doping and his rather vindictive streak against anyone who spoke out about him. 

It was a great book, deconstructing the Myth of Armstrong--Cancer Survivor, Warrior, Beater of the French--that he built to insulate himself from accusations of doping. I was blown away at times by just how fiercely competitive the man is. In the end, when he agreed to do the Oprah interview and come clean (sort of) about his history of doping and general a-holeishness, it wasn't to alleviate some burden on his soul or to try to seek restitution and move forward with his life, but because he hoped that it would shorten his lifetime ban from competition and allow him to be a professional triathlete. I still have trouble believing that he feels he did anything wrong. The last believer in the Armstrong myth might be Armstrong himself. Which is very sad and quite pathetic.

As I read I recalled how vigorously I defended Lance in the midst of his unworldly winning streak at the Tour. The accusations were out there, of course, but I never gave credence to a single one. And this wasn't merely because I wanted to believe that someone could come back from cancer and do something as incredible as what he was doing, but also because I had a very sharp ethnocentrism at the time that told me that Americans rule and all of those frogs griping about drugs are just sore that one of our boys went over their and whupped them at their own game. USA! USA! Rumors of Lance's douchiness were everywhere at the time, but he was OUR douche. So it was less a matter of thinking Lance was a great dude and more of a matter of thumbing our noses at the French. Which is very strange. And allows us to blind ourselves to horrible realities. But we all do this.

I listen to Rush Limbaugh some at work. Never on purpose. The guy I share on office with likes conservative radio and if I don't have something else on first I get to listen to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Dave Ramsey, the conservative trinity. President Obama could disarm Iran, get unemployment under 4%, balance the budget, and drink some of Rush's tea during a press conference and the next morning Limbaugh would still be calling him a wimpy socialist.

Limbaugh is an extreme example and it is only to illustrate the point. When our default is opposition we are blinded to glaring realities. Like the fact that Obama is probably not the antichrist. Or that the French might have actual reasons for believing Armstrong is doping, such as HE FREAKING WAS THE WHOLE TIME! But when Obama=bad or French=arrogant + jealous then we get to skim over the harder truths. We can say, well I wouldn't Lance to date my daughter, but screw you Frenchies. 

My guess is that most of the people who defended Lance for so long did so for the same reason. If it was a British guy who did the same thing or, God forbid, a Frenchman it barely would have registered over here. Who has heard of Miguel Indurain? But he was our national hero, and in the wake of 9/11 we were looking for national heroes. We were also pissed at the French. The timing makes sense and Lance exploited that well. But the shoe eventually dropped, as it had to. And those of who were so willfully blind for so long were confronted by a harsh light.