Kristi Noem and the Changing Definitions of “Justice”

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem
(NBC News Photo)

Audiences who read my blog without knowing me personally, might be surprised to learn that I used to be outspokenly conservative. You wouldn’t know it from my current positions, obviously, and I never cottoned to bomb-throwers like Rush Limbaugh, whom I repeatedly caught voicing opinions in areas where he clearly lacked accurate information. But I pinched political viewpoints extensively from thoughtful, information-based conservatives like Thomas Sowell and P.J. O’Rourke.

Therefore, when stories like the Kristi Noem scandal grab national attention, I don’t just read the reports as they exist. I also test the narrative against the person I used to be. My current progressive self reads Noem’s slaughter of a disobedient hunting dog, for the unforgivable transgression of behaving like a puppy, as pure cruelty. Yet my conservative self, thirty years ago, would’ve seen what Noem probably saw, a transgression of established moral authority.

As a conservative, I believed the Chestertonian myth that the existing order exists for a reason, and all change must prove itself to exceedingly high standards. If existing power dynamics disadvantage certain groups, then the established order must somehow recognize such disadvantage as the price of stability. The existing moral authority might be heartless to individuals, and might create disruptions in localized communities, but it harmonized society overall.

Humans tend to believe the universe is essentially just. Prior generations saw justice descending from God, that life’s rewards and consequences represented the manifestation of what Adam Smith called “the invisible hand.” Even non-religious people frequently see universal justice. Karl Marx’s belief in the Grand Synthesis, which would overthrow capitalism and establish economic utopia, remarkably resembles the Christian Book of the Revelation, without recourse to theism.

P.J. O'Rourke

People like Governor Noem define moral authority reflectively. As parent, provider, and giver of moral instruction, she has broad authority to impose her will on those deemed subordinate. But she has that authority, basically, because she has that authority. Having children makes her the final authority for those children’s moral upbringing. Buying a dog gives her power to impose her will on that dog. Children and dog exist, morally, to obey.

In using words like “justice” and “morality,” I’m deploying concepts that lack absolute, agreed-upon definitions. For brevity’s sake, let’s accept Michael J. Sandel’s definition of justice, as not just payback for crimes, but also the distribution of life’s necessary resources to maximize the good. Sandel road-tests several definitions of justice, never completely landing on one. However, even without resolution, his terms feel useful here.

Aristotle’s definition of justice, filtered through Sandel, might read: every person has a role, and justice prevails when every person finds and completes that role. But Friederich Nietzsche wrote a codicil for our postmodern world. In Freddy Nee’s mind, social roles exist to corral the peasantry. The morally developed man (and, for Nietzsche, moral development is male) doesn’t conform to such roles. The morally autonomous Übermensch makes his own.

Moral authorities like Governor Noem, therefore, aren’t subject to the rules they impose on others. One doubts Noem, a mother and grandmother, would tolerate a minor under her moral authority torturing an opossum in a trap, and would recognize animal cruelty as a frequent precursor to hurting humans. Indeed, according to Noem’s excerpted account, she considered killing her dog, Cricket, acceptable, because Cricket first killed domesticated poultry.

Michael J. Sandel

In other words, Noem has the unique authority to kill the disobedient. Cricket only has killing authority when granted by Noem, who reputedly tried, and failed, to train Cricket as a hunting dog. Specifically, a bird dog. Noem expected Cricket, only fourteen months old, to make the moral distinction between game birds, whose deaths became acceptable under Noem’s guidance, from farm poultry.

It’s almost enough to turn me vegan.

American conservatives often disdain Nietzsche because he disparaged Christianity. (Nietzsche’s father, a Lutheran clergyman, died when Friederich was only two. One wonders which Father little Freddy actually rebelled against.) Yet conservatives embrace one key Nietzschean principle, that moral authority comes from imposing the strong person’s will on subordinates, not from transcendent forces one might call “God.” Might, as Aesop taught us, makes right.

Taken together, Governor Noem probably wouldn’t accept the slogan “the cruelty is the point.” For her, the action wasn’t cruel, it was just. Yet her definition of justice differs from Chesterton or Aristotle, both of whom wanted to defend an existing order. Instead, Noem imposes justice from above, as an extension of her ordained moral authority. That represents a massive and unexplainable cleft from the conservatism of my childhood.

Netflix Presents: the New, Improved Jimmy Carr!

Jimmy Carr in his newest special, Natural Born Killer (Netflix photo)

Content warning: this essay will directly address the vulgar, transgressive, and sexually violent themes common to Jimmy Carr's stand-up comedy.

Jimmy Carr’s latest Netflix special, Natural Born Killer, features an extended riff on the fatuousness of the phrase “date rape.” He suggests that the qualifying prefix is a nicey-poo addition that makes the crime less horrific, mainly for the perpetrator. This sounds particularly weird coming from Carr, whose content has often featured sexually transgressive themes. Carr’s stock character is a shitty, libidinous satyr. This is just the first time he’s felt compelled to justify himself.

I have a particular fondness for one-liner comics. Milton Jones, Jack Handey, Gary Delaney, Steven Wright. Jokers who don’t require lengthy contexts to understand their punchlines, they just zap us with abrupt reversals or insightful wordplay. Short, incisive jokes often reveal deeper truths. With Jimmy Carr in particular, whose routine involves teasing audiences’ bottom limit, his transgressive themes often reveal that his audience, no matter how jaded they think themselves, still has a bottom limit.

Carr loves jokes he knows defensive interests will hate. In past one-hour specials, he’s lobbed out what he calls “career-ending jokes”; this time, he boasts of his intent to get “cancelled.” Not for nothing, either, as his routine has involved jabs at the disabled, the Holocaust, religion, and women. He’s previously told rape jokes, and jokes which imply he’s a drug-addicted pedophile. The above-mentioned “date rape” diatribe comes only after delivering a trademarked rape one-liner.

To his credit, Carr’s transgressive jokes make himself the bad person, never the victim. Unlike, say, Louis CK, Carr doesn’t use his aggressive tone to garner audience sympathy or wallow in self-pity/; you’re supposed to hate his stage persona. But Carr has always played that persona with winking acknowledgment that, like us, he’s in on the joke. His character knows what an awful human being he is, and invites us to participate in the pile-on.

This time, Carr doesn’t do that. He delivers a lewd joke, then counters with an explicit explanation of why we shouldn’t find such content funny. Not just once, either: he breaks character multiple times, sometimes for several straight minutes, and culminates the performance riffing extensively on the importance of consent. As he lectures viewers why we shouldn’t have laughed at the joke he just delivered, we wonder: who is this guy wearing Jimmy Carr’s face?

Louis CK

Perhaps there’s an autobiographical reason for Carr’s reversal. He became a father for the first time in 2019, aged forty-seven. At approximately the halfway point of this performance, he includes a nearly three-minute narrative of how he feared his child’s premature birth might’ve blunted his edge. The story ends with him realizing he still had it, apparently deaf to the irony that a one-liner comedian just took nearly three minutes to establish one punch line!

I’m reminded of Jimmy Kimmel, another Jimmy famous for working blue who attempted to reinvent himself. Kimmel, previously co-host of the basic cable raunch-fest The Man Show, turned into an advocate for radical empathy when he transferred to broadcast TV, frequently turning weepy-eyed at expressions of injustice. His former co-host Adam Carolla, meanwhile, has become a Fox News and right-wing podcast staple, doubling down on his basic cable persona. Again, audiences seek the authentic Jimmy.

Please don’t misunderstand, I believe both Jimmys could have their secular “come-to-Jesus moment.” As a former basic White conservative myself, I know irreligious conversions happen. Yet Carr attempts to do double duty, delivering the transgressive joke before lecturing us on why our laughter makes us bad people. His fatherhood narrative ends with a coat-hanger abortion joke. His consent riff is him lecturing a young audience member on when it’s okay to “get your dick out.”

Because there’s definitely a place for such content. We laugh at Carr’s blue material because we recognize something of ourselves. No matter how enlightened or empathetic we’ve become, we possess the same vulgar, libidinous id; becoming an adult doesn’t mean we’ve defeated those tendencies, only that we’ve learned to conceal them in public. Carr is funny because when he delivers his raunchy content, he helps us compartmentalize that side, and leave it in the theater.

This time, I’m left confused. When I laugh at Carr’s blue material, then he lectures me directly on why his own content wasn’t actually funny, I wonder: have I changed? Or has he? Previously, Carr encouraged us to leave the unrestrained id with him, onstage. Now, he lectures us, and I feel compelled to conceal my laughter. I can’t relinquish my id, because I can’t admit I have one. So it comes home with me.

Hold Onto Sixteen As Long As You Can

John Mellencamp

Classic rock radio stalwart John Mellencamp got an unwanted attention boost this week when a month-old video of him abandoning the stage went viral. Apparently Mellencamp paused to speak directly to his audience, something musicians frequently do, but an audience member heckled him to shut up and resume playing. An outraged Mellencamp quit playing partway through “Jack and Diane,” leaving an arena audience in the lurch.

Several sources, including Fox News, spun this event as Mellencamp feuding with the audience over politics. Like most “heartland rockers,” including Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, and John Fogerty, Mellencamp’s politics skew left. This should surprise nobody who’s listened to Mellencamp’s lyrics—but apparently, several audience stalwart haven’t done so. Listeners are often gobsmacked to discover that their favorite heartland rockers are progressives who don’t just love being rural.

This spotlights a growing rift between artists like Mellencamp, and the largest number of their fans. We saw something similar when former New Jersey governor Chris Christie mentioned his love of Springsteen, and Springsteen responded by duetting with comedian Jimmy Fallon to mock Christie’s performance as governor. These rockers maintain the leftist, anti-establishment passions of their youth, while their audiences have become more conservative and revanchist.

Pop history tells us that “heartland rock” emerged in the middle 1970s: Springsteen’s first hit, “Born to Run,” hit the Billboard Top 40 in 1975, while Tom Petty’s first hit, “Breakdown,” barely creased the Top 40 in 1977. However, this ignores that both artists never developed legitimate star power until the 1980s. It also disregards both Bob Seger, and John Fogerty’s original band Creedence Clearwater Revival, which had their first hits in the 1960s.

Bruce Springsteen

From its origins, heartland rock bore a contradiction. Though its chief songwriters have pressed progressive politics and a disdain for capitalism into their lyrics, their musical stylings were persistently conservative. Fogerty deliberately channeled musical stylings from Delta blues and Memphis soul, while Petty’s sound grew, like Spanish moss, from the swampy slumgullion of influences in his inland northern Florida upbringing.

Thus, conservative audiences who don’t listen deeply have always thought their favorite heartland rockers spoke directly to them. The most famous example, of course, must be Ronald Reagan’s attempt to conscript Springsteen into his 1984 reelection campaign. But my personal favorite comes from TikTok. A whyte-boy in a backward ballcap and a pick-em-up truck shouts “Thank God my mom didn’t raise no f**king liberal!” before tearing off scream-singing with CCR’s “Fortunate Son.”

The complete failure to understand the left-leaning message in these lyrics might seem baffling, except that I once shared it. I’ve written about this before: listening to classic rock radio during my rebellious teenage years allowed me to consider myself forward-thinking because I engaged with the injustices of the Vietnam era. By pretending to care about injustice back then, I allowed myself to passively participate with injustices occurring right now.

There’s nothing innately conservative about consuming media shallowly, but in my experience, people who don’t parse for greater depth usually have conservative politics. Conservatives love surface-level readings. My lifelong Republican parents encouraged me to reject deeper textual analysis of literature, even when high-school English teachers graded me for doing so. Listening to classic rock at the surface level often rewards conservative readings of its time.

Heartland rockers were classic rock before the “classic rock radio” category was invented.

John Fogerty

Surviving heartland rockers like Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Melissa Etheridge continue recording, but they haven’t had Top 40 hits since the middle 1990s. Fogerty, who’s always had a contentious relationship with the recording industry, hasn’t meaningfully charted a single since 1985. Though they all continue touring, they’ve become oldies circuit staples, their concerts consisting primarily of songs first heard forty, fifty, or more years ago.

Like the artists themselves, their audiences have continued aging. The greasers and slicks who got energized for Springsteen’s fight against small-town malaise in 1975, now have mortgages, student debt, and children. Such material investments in the status quo encourage, if not principled conservatism, at least a desire to ensure they didn’t invest themselves in hot air. The audiences have grown away from the artists they admire.

Perhaps the most telling fact is whom these artists now influence. Jake Owens’ “I Was Jack (You Were Diane)” and Eric Church’s “Springsteen” were massive country hits, channeling the artists they name-dropped. But both songs reduce their tribute subjects to mere nostalgia for whyte audiences. These artists, now in their seventies, have become the thing their teenage selves rebelled against. There’s no coming back from that.

The Weird-Enough Wizard of Odds

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 51
Ralph Bakshi (writer/director), Wizards

In a post-nuclear future, humanity has become a visitor on a fairy-covered Earth. But that hardly means everything has become peaceful. The wizard Avatar serves as advisor to the president of Montagar, a bucolic forest nation where citizens teach children to husband the soil and distrust technology. But Avatar’s twin brother Blackwolf rules an autocratic kingdom and yearns to conquer his brother’s lands. He’s discovered a tool which may make that possible: literal Nazi propaganda.

Animator and writer Ralph Bakshi made his name in the 1960s and 1970s creating films that pinched the Disney aesthetic, but were adamantly not intended for children. His 1972 comedy Fritz the Cat became the first animated feature to be rated X. But he always dreamed of returning to the science fiction and fantasy themes which first propelled his interest in drawing. 20^th Century Fox shared his vision, at least hypothetically, but flinched upon release.

Blackwolf sends robots to invade Montagar, causing chaos and destruction throughout the forest. Avatar and his bodyguard, Weehawk, capture one robot and recondition it to serve the interests of peace. Because Montagar has neither army nor weapons, Avatar and Weehawk commence a quest to find and stop Blackwolf inside his own lair. Accompanied by Avatar’s apprentice and love interest Elinore, they must seek an enemy who has learned how to bend masses to his will.

Bakshi worked mostly without support from mainstream studios. Though he regularly got distribution deals with companies like Fox or Warner, he assiduously avoided working for them directly. He especially hated Disney’s influence which, after Walt’s passing, had become ingrown and moribund. (Disney’s decline wouldn’t reverse until the middle 1980s.) This gave him remarkable creative freedom, like fellow indie animator and Disney refugee Don Bluth, but forced him to work within shoestring budgets.

This freedom results in a big, sloppy product which revels in its excesses. Bakshi’s team clearly had oodles of fun creating this movie. Its disco-era morality is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and shows distrust not only of the nuclear weapons looming over the Cold War, but also the technology which made such weapons possible. It also emphasizes that, no matter how enlightened True Believers think their society has become, violence always looms around the horizon.

Perhaps Bakshi’s upbringing contributes to this. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he grew up mostly in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Foggy Bottom, Washington. These East Coast cities were rife with bigotry, including both antisemitism and legal segregation. Though Bakshi’s family made it to America in time to avoid the bloody excesses of World War II, he grew up seeing the ideology that had been crushed in Europe, making its nest and laying its eggs over in America.

left to right: Weehawk, Elinore, Avatar, and the robot Peace in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

Bakshi’s world reeks of moral binaries. He depicts the forests of Montagar as bucolic, lush, and stranger to violence. Blackwolf’s kingdom of Scortch is sooty and industrialized, occupied by orcs and trolls. (If this sounds familiar, well spotted: Bakshi would direct the first big-screen Lord of the Rings adaptation in 1978, a failure upon release.) When Blackwolf’s modernity forces a confrontation with Montagar, only Avatar’s small adventuring party upholds Montagar’s deep anti-modernist conscience.

20^th Century Fox gave Bakshi a distribution deal for this movie at the same time it bankrolled an ambitious young director named George Lucas. Struggling after a string of bad decisions, Fox was willing, post-1975, to support riskier ventures. But it kept both Bakshi and Lucas on tight budgets, forcing both to pay out-of-pocket to complete their projects. Bakshi created fantasy crowd scenes by rotoscoping vintage Swedish historical epics, and intercutting snippets of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

The finished produce horrified Fox and drew lukewarm responses from critics; Fox accorded Wizards a limited release. Unlike Star Wars, Wizards never overcame this limitation, and though it returned a profit, the outcome was small enough to sour Fox’s relationship with Bakshi. This movie never found its real audience until home video, when college-aged audiences started getting high and gawping at the movie’s Technicolor spectacle. It was, in that sense, a product of its time.

Sadly, Bakshi’s lurid adult style never found its mainstream breakthrough. His only big-studio production, Cool World, died so horribly, it ended his career; he mostly does illustrations and comix now. Yet periodically, new audiences discover this forgotten gem, and seemingly admire how unashamed it is. Wizards is overblown, messy, unsubtle, and garish. It’s also dated fun, and audiences apparently never get tired of its unapologetic energy. This movie embodies everything Bakshi ever did right.

Modern Economics as a Moral Instrument

Nick Romeo, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy

Most wage-earning workers with house payments and bills know the current economy cannot survive much longer. People working overtime cannot afford groceries, and housing prices are more exorbitant now than immediately before the 2007 collapse. But with Cold War rhetoric still discoloring all economic discussions, what alternatives exist? What, importantly, has worked in real-world scenarios?

Nick Romeo is a journalist, not an economist; he doesn’t postulate alternative economic models from dust. Instead, he travels to places which have implemented economics beyond the dictates of neoclassical capitalism, to report on what works, and what doesn’t. This may mean cooperative models, like the Mondragon Corporation of Spain’s Basque Country, or the direct democracy of Cascais, Portugal. Everything described here has worked somewhere, and could hypothetically work elsewhere.

In his first chapter, Romeo briefly stops through American postgraduate economics programs, examining how academicians teach contemporary economics. The discipline he encounters is self-righteous and exclusionary, with a strong historical disdain for history and the humanities. It assumes humans are rational and amoral, and mathematics can describe economics better than anything else. But an increasing number of academic economists are recognizing how purblind this approach is.

Only in this first chapter does Romeo engage in abstruse theorizing; everything else focuses on real-world accomplishments. But this theorizing helps establish Romeo’s thesis statement, further expounded throughout the book, that economics isn’t a science (he uses the term “pseudoscience” generously). Economics originated a moral enterprise and a branch of philosophy, and Romeo aims to recapture that humane foundation.

Not for nothing, Romeo writes, was the Mondragon Corporation founded by a Catholic priest, not an economist. More a federation than a centralized corporation, Mondragon deploys the skills of diverse workers, who have democratic control over their employers. Mondragon eschews love of money or worship of hero CEOs, both hallmarks of American capitalism, preferring to empower workers to take ownership of their work and workplace.

Despite his talk of morality, and his lavish praise of Mondragon’s Father Arizmendiarrieta, Romeo’s economics isn’t religious. It is, however, humanist, prioritizing workers whose labors turn raw material into wealth, and not either money or economic “laws.” For Romeo, economics should focus on getting food, shelter, and necessities to humans, and protecting the natural environment. Mathematical models fail if they don’t achieve these goals.

Nick Romeo

Romeo’s moral calculus emphasizes economic outcomes excluded from textbook considerations. Are jobs merely a nicety provided by the ownership class, he asks, or a social entitlement? When workers’ productivity and ingenuity create corporate wealth, should workers own equity? Does “making a living” mean mere subsistence, or does the economy owe workers something more? These aren’t theoretical questions, and Romeo boldly proffers field-tested answers.

However, this creates some fuzzy outcomes. Romeo admits that morally minded economic models, like True Cost, must make flying decisions about what constitutes meaningful externalities, and therefore its titular “truth” remains open for interpretation—and, sadly, misinterpretation. Likewise, he praises purpose-driven corporation models which protect workers’ rights, housing access, or environmental restoration. He politely elides the idea that corporations might harbor bad purposes.

Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), a democratic model Romeo describes across several chapters, he finally admits isn’t a single system. Some ESOPs give workers complete ownership over the companies their work has created, but others grant only nominal equity, less than a 401(k). Economic liberty, Romeo admits, comes from diligence, not from assuming the monied classes care about your outcomes.

Also, approaching his denouement, Romeo admits that economic circumstances change, and responses must change commensurately. He began writing during and immediately after the pandemic (mostly written thus, “the pandemic,” as though afraid of its scientific name, like saying Macbeth). As pandemic furor dissipated, the economy moved from stagnation to inflation, and he admits it’s necessary to back-construct responses from the models he’s previously explained.

Consistently, morality matters first. Throughout the Twentieth Century, politicians and economists have sought economic models they could deploy and ignore, like a well-oiled machine. Romeo instead describes economics as a moral instrument, to be nurtured, tended, and when necessary, replaced. I’m reminded of Distributism, a similar morally-minded economic model, which uses agrarian metaphors. We farm the economy, not grease its wheels.

Romeo shows economic models which prioritize care, cooperation, and human dignity. He doesn’t invent new systems from cloth, though he admits countless further untried systems exist. Instead, he encourages us to read economics as an opportunity to increase human flourishing, build stronger communities, and preserve the environment. We only need to treat economics as a liberal art, as it is.

See also: Why We Need Liberal Arts in the Business World