Philip Nell’s Was the Cat in the Hat Black? sparks debate over racial subtext in Dr. Seuss, while Andrew Clavin dismisses it as performative activism—then pivots to North Korea’s Guam threats, praising Trump’s firm stance and comparing it to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sebastian Gorka warns against appeasement with dictators, slams "lazy journalism" for distorting White House coverage, and defends Trump’s Russia policy amid media frenzy. A Wall Street Journal study reveals Trump voters’ socially conservative yet economically moderate profile, with cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage as election pivots. The episode also critiques modern dating culture’s obsession with physicality over connection, contrasts it with Robert Mitchum’s Thunder Road—a moonshiner’s defiance of prohibition—and ends with a dark joke about nuclear war during a "Clavinless weekend." [Automatically generated summary]
Here's a new book I'm sure you'll want to buy and read unless you prefer to just stick a fork in your eyeball for free.
The book by Philip Nell is entitled, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books.
I know, that fork in the eyeball is looking pretty good, isn't it?
In a wonderful article over at Newsbusters, Tim Graham delves deep into Philip Nell's philosophy.
Nell apparently believes that there may be racism hidden in our favorite children's books, and that if he can ruin our enjoyment of those books, he might be able to pick up a couple of bucks and some publicity without ever having to do anything worthwhile.
Thus, Philip Nell asks the all-important question, is the cat in Dr. Seuss's cat in the hat books really a black person?
If you answered, no, you knucklehead, he's a gray and white cat, then you may not be an English professor like Philip Nell.
You see, Philip Nell is an English professor, and so he has enough free time on his hands to look deeper into the substrata of the cat in the hat books.
He says the cat's top hat and white gloves show that his character has its roots in minstrelsy, the practice of white performers pretending to be black in order to entertain people instead of writing useless books about the cat in the hat.
Now, to me, the question of whether the cat in the hat was really a black person seems simple.
If you remember the story, the cat in the hat bursts into the home of two children and turns the place upside down while teaching them the important lesson that it's fun to have fun, but you have to know how.
Obviously, if a black person did that, he'd be arrested.
So the question answers itself.
But Philip Nell also opposes Babar the Elephant.
He says the Babar books present colonialism in a good light because Babar becomes more civilized and European and is thus more greatly admired by his native people.
This also happened to Gandhi and Bishop Tutu, but they didn't have the funny long noses, so it doesn't count.
An article about Nell's book in Time magazine suggests that we combat the hidden racism in children's books by asking our children some important questions while we read the books to them.
Like, whose point of view is this story favoring?
What kid wouldn't love to be asked that in the middle of reading his favorite book?
If nothing else, Philip Nell's book has proved that the cat in the hat was right.
It is fun to have fun, but you do have to know how.
Obviously, Philip Nell doesn't know how.
Or maybe he just didn't listen to the cat because he doesn't like black people.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is ticky-be-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshi-tipsy-topsy, the world is it-easing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hoora, hooray!
Oh, hooray!
All right, boy, it is the Clavenless weekend is upon us already.
That was the fastest week.
We are just, that's how entertained we are.
We're just that entertaining.
We have Sebastian Gorka, advisor to President Trump.
He's going to join us to discuss the news of the day.
Subscribe to Humiliate Them00:02:37
And meanwhile, so we're going to stay on Facebook and YouTube so you can watch the interview.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't subscribe.
You should subscribe to thedailywire.com to support us, but also to be in the mailbag.
We had a good mailbag yesterday, answered questions.
All the answers were 100% correct and changed people's lives, some of them for the better.
And if you subscribe for $100 a year, you get the leftist tears tumbler.
So you can drink your leftist tears cold or hot as you prefer.
Also, you know, my wife was saying, my wife yelled at me yesterday.
She said, I'm picking on Michael Knowles, you know, because I was saying, if you go on and review the show and maybe subscribe on iTunes, the show will move up the ranking.
It's not a question of how many people listen.
It's how engaged you are.
And I was making fun of Knowles, and Knowles is doing a wonderful show, and his went up.
He got people to review it, which I never paid attention to.
And so his show went higher than mine.
I was saying we should destroy him.
Don't do it to destroy him.
I'll destroy him personally after the show.
But please do go on and review the show and make sure it moves up over the rankings and humiliates them, no matter what my wife says.
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Let's Think About What We've Done00:15:42
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All right, we're going to talk as soon as we have, let me know as soon as we have Sebastian Gorka on the line, and we will talk to him about the news of the day because there's a lot of stuff going on.
Obviously, the North Korea thing is, you know, they keep saying it's heating up, and it's really rhetoric so far.
I did like the Kim Jong-un saying he was going to send missiles off the coast of Guam.
Basically, the missiles that he's talking about are not very accurate.
They're really, he says we're going to send them like 30 miles off the coast, and they're accurate to a range of around there.
So, you know, he's trying to blow up Guam.
The last time they set off these missiles, these particular missiles that he's talking about, I can't remember the name of them, three out of four of them blew up.
They'd failed.
So, I mean, the guy really has a big mouth.
And, you know, whereas our nuclear weapons arsenal is pretty good.
So he's kind of messing around.
This guy is out of his mind.
And I really like everybody was so hysterical about Trump saying he was going to bring fire and fury.
But that's what I want.
I want this guy over there thinking, like, how crazy is Donald Trump?
You know, I don't know.
Anyway, the other thing that's really been interesting, oh, you know, there's this interview going around.
We should play this.
1999, Donald Trump talking about whether he might run for president is talking to Tim Russert.
And this is back in the day, right, when the Democrats are still telling us, this is after Clinton told us, oh, we've got to make a deal with North Korea.
It's going to be great.
And Trump, here's in 1999 saying, you know, not so great.
You say that you, as president, would be willing to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea's nuclear capability.
First, I'd negotiate.
I would negotiate like crazy, and I'd make sure that we tried to get the best deal possible.
Look, Tim, if a man walks up to you in the street in Washington, because this doesn't happen, of course, in New York, but if a man walks up and puts a gun to your head and says, give me your money, wouldn't you rather know where he's coming from before he had the gun in his hand?
And these people in three or four years are going to be having nuclear weapons.
They're going to have those weapons pointed all over the world and specifically at the United States.
And wouldn't you be better off solving this really potentially unbelievable and the biggest problem?
I mean, we can talk about the economy.
We can talk about social security.
The biggest problem this world has is nuclear proliferation.
And we have a country out there in North Korea, which is sort of wacko, which is not a bunch of dummies.
And they are going out and they are developing nuclear weapons.
And they're not doing it because they're having fun doing it.
They're doing it for a reason.
And wouldn't it be good to sit down and really negotiate something and ideally negotiate?
Now, if that negotiation doesn't work, you better solve the problem now than solve it later, Tim.
And you know it, and every politician knows it, and nobody wants to talk about it.
Jimmy Carter, who I really like, and he went over there.
It was so soft.
These people are laughing at us.
Jimmy Carter undermined Clinton and really convinced him to go ahead with this stuff.
You know, it really, he says he really liked him.
That was back in the days when he was a Democrat.
But, you know, so he's been talking about this.
And it is true that everything that's happening now, he inherited.
I mean, you cannot blame him.
And yet the press, no matter what this guy says, no matter what Trump says, it's always going to be the most negative approach they can take to it.
So anyway, Kim Jong-un is threatening Guam.
The guy in Guam is happy that Trump is standing up to him.
We have the governor of Guam had this to say.
As far as I'm concerned, as an American citizen, I want a president that says that if any nation such as North Korea attacks Guam, attacks Honolulu, attacks the West Coast, that they will be met with hell and fury.
What I'm concerned about is if a U.S. senator says, initiate an attack and causing a war, and remembering that there in the Mariana Islands, this is American sovereign soil.
This is 600-mile archipelago of islands similar to Hawaii, where there are over 200,000 American citizens.
So it's important that as we make decisions, that those folks that are in a position of leadership, that they understand, too, that war is the last option, because not only will tens of thousands of American military forces and dependents be affected by a regional war, but because the Western Pacific has American soil in it, then a couple of hundred thousand Americans could get caught in the crosshairs.
So that's Eddie Calvo, the governor of Guam, saying he's happy Trump is saying this.
We're Americans over here.
We want a strong president standing up to him.
We have Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the deputy assistant to President of the United States, Donald Trump, and also one of the most articulate and enthusiastic defenders of the President of the United States.
How are you doing?
It's good to see you.
We've never met the United States.
It's a wonderful place to fight.
It's wonderful to finally electronically meet the great Claybonator.
I appreciate that.
And I appreciate knowing that at least somebody in the White House is listening so that we can set everybody straight over there.
Now, we've been watching this North Korea thing, and I think that the press has reached a level of peak hysteria over, well, they reach a level of peak hysteria over everything the president does.
But you yourself have compared this to the Cuban missile crisis, and I remember that.
That's not a good thing.
That was a very near miss.
Do you really think things have ramped up that far?
Look, I like to use a quote from a Holocaust survivor.
I used to teach before I came to government.
I used to teach our military and Norfolk Warsman about how the jihadis think.
And I used a quote from a Holocaust survivor who was asked after his whole family was killed in the death camps during World War II.
Somebody asked him a really facile question.
So, what's your take-home from your experience?
What's the big so what of the Holocaust?
And this 80-year-old man said, Oh, that's easy.
When a group of individuals repeatedly says they want to kill you, sooner or later, you should take it seriously.
And whether it's Nazis, whether it's the Soviet Union with 20,000-plus nuclear warheads, or whether it's the hermit regime that is constantly saying that they are acquiring these weapons to use them against us and now says they're going to actually bomb Guam, at what point do you say, bastard, enough is enough, and say diplomacy and more importantly, the attitude of 1938 Munich,
appeasement does not bring what you expect it to bring when you're dealing with dictators.
So I think the analogy stands.
I think the analogy stands, Andrew.
So John Bolton says basically we're going to have to choose between military action now and living with a nuclear North Korea.
Are you convinced that that's where we are, that those are the choices we have?
I think the choice is very, very much the decision.
There's a decision tree moment right now, whether we go left or right.
And the decision tree branches in Pyongyang.
It is up to North Korea.
Rex Tillerson has said there is a very easy signal you can give.
He gave it three days ago.
He said, if you stop ballistic missile testing, if you swear you're not going to do illegal ballistic missile testing, you will understand what happened at the UN Security Council on Saturday when everybody, including your rich uncle China, said no more, no more.
They have no friends.
They've got no friends left.
Russia voted.
Think about all the insanity of the Russia collusion delusion, the Russian concussion, right?
They voted with us to stop this.
So did China.
The ball is very much in North Korea's court right now.
So the New York Times ran a piece.
I mean, they have been one of the most hysterical venues for reading about the administration.
And they ran a piece saying basically that the administration is at odds with itself, that everybody is taking a different tack.
The funny thing is, it doesn't seem that way to me.
I mean, it seems like there's a little good cop, bad cop going on, but everybody seems to be saying pretty much the same thing, though Donald Trump uses Donald Trumpian language.
They all seem to be saying the same thing.
That's my impression.
Is that what's going on?
What is it that you usually call it in the New York Times?
There used to be newspapers.
A former newspaper, yeah.
The former newspaper.
How is it that the gray lady doesn't understand that the Secretary is a diplomat, that the Secretary of War runs the military's machine, and that the president is the commander-in-chief?
I mean, you know, Rex Tillerson isn't going to say bomb anywhere because he's a diplomat.
And Secretary Max Magdogmatis isn't going to be talking about nice meetings in Vienna at swanky hotels to do diplomacy.
So, you know, this is how a government works.
Rex has the mandate for diplomacy.
And when he said yesterday, or was it the day before?
The president used the language he used.
Why?
because the diplomatic language has not brought the results we expected.
So when he says fire and fury, that's the commander-in-chief's right to say that.
The man who's going to do the mechanics of any military response, if there is one, is the Secretary of Defense.
And the man that does the diplomacy is Secretary Tillerson.
That the New York Times doesn't understand the division of labor in a modern nation is appalling.
And you have to laugh because if you don't laugh, you cry.
It is absurd.
It is truly absurd.
Let's talk a little bit about Russia.
I mean, I know this obviously gets up the president's nose.
Now there's a word that Paul Manafort's house was raided by the FBI, which does seem to ramp up the Mueller investigation.
I mean, when you raid a house, you have to have probable cause that a crime has been committed.
It means that when they raid it, instead of just coming over and executing a search warrant, it means that they probably have a suspicion that he will get rid of information.
Andrew Napolitano, the legal guy on Fox, was saying this means that Mueller is trying to turn Manafort and move up the ladder in classic FBI style.
Does this bother?
I mean, has this agitated people in the White House?
No, it's what happens in the West Wing, what happens in the Eisenhower building, is not what the New York Times, CNN, Politico, or Huffington Post wants you to believe.
The idea that we run around with our hair in five seconds saying, oh, no, Mueller's done this.
Oh, no, you know, grand jury has been impaneled.
The fact is the president has been clear.
Jad Kushner has been clear.
We have nothing to hide.
This administration has.
We are the toughest administration on Russia in eight years.
Let's just think about what we've done.
What we've done with sanctions, what we've done with Syria, what we've done with Crimea, what we've done with fracking alone.
I mean, this is the ultimate.
You talk about this on your boss all the time.
My friend Chris Plant, I listen to two podcasts.
It's you and Chris Plant here in D.C. Chris has a great phrase.
For the left, reality is optional.
They live in an alternate universe.
No, it's an alternate universe.
We have the stock market breaking its 27th record.
We have a 73% drop in illegal migration.
We've revitalized NATO and Mosul has been liberated.
When the BD asked me to come and talk about Anthony Scaramucci, I say, no, I'm not going to, because that's not news.
Let's talk about ISIS.
Let's talk about the economy.
That's what Americans want to talk about, and that's why they listen to your show.
Well, thank you, if indeed I hope they are.
But the thing about Anthony Scaramucci and the chaos and the tweets, I shouldn't call it chaos, the staff changes in the White House and the tweets from the president, because he does seem to get angry about the Russian investigation.
And as I've said on the air numerous times, I don't blame him.
But it does seem to distract from the legislative agenda.
If there is one place where the administration seems not to be able to get things going, it is wrangling the cats in Congress.
I mean, there was just this exchange between the president and Mitch McConnell, where Mitch McConnell says his expectations are too high.
And Donald Trump said, yeah, well, you've been promising for seven years to do this.
But one of the things that did bother me was that some of this stuff in the White House was going on while they were debating the health care bill.
And I wanted to see Donald Trump, who really is a good, he's very persuasive when he pays attention and when he focuses on this.
I wanted to see Trump kicking butt in the Senate and getting those guys in line.
Is there any truth to the idea that there is distraction in the White House that keeps the legislative agenda from getting through?
Look at the track record.
So let's get rid of the miasma of fake news and the fake news industrial complex.
Look at the number, just the number of executive orders and legislative initiatives this president has brought.
He's blown Obama's record out of the water by factors, not by percentages, but factors.
So no, there is no truth.
And I understand, I especially understand the basis concern with Obamacare and et cetera.
But the president made a strategic decision.
And, you know, it's a pro-democracy one.
So let's start for a second.
He said, you know, remember, this is the man who is going to wipe out democracy, according to the left.
He said, we have, you know, right?
We have separation of powers, we have checks and balances.
And he said, I need to make America safe.
So I'm going to use executive orders to bring my immigration measures to book.
I'm going to unleash our military, not to nibble at the edges of ISIS, but to annihilate them.
I'm going to do the stuff the executive is good at.
Now, Obamacare, the GOP has been talking about replace or repeal for seven years.
And we made the president made a strategic decision.
Let's allow Capitol Hill to follow through on seven years of promises.
Maybe it was a mistake to make that decision and say, okay, show us what you can do, because clearly they failed.
It's not our intent to do everything because there's a reason we have a Congress.
There's a reason there's a House of Representatives and a Senate.
So it's actually respect for the protocols and the traditions that made the president say, okay, Obamacare, show us what you can do, Mitch McConnell.
And this is where we are today.
Let me ask, I have one more question and I'll let you go.
Steve Bannon's Legacy00:06:30
I have to ask about this Wall Street Journal piece yesterday that basically went after Steve Bannon, who is obviously Satan in the minds of the press.
And it's funny, you know, I know a lot of people who really dislike Steve Bannon.
I knew Steve when he was a Hollywood guy.
He was never anything but gracious and polite to me.
That was my entire experience of him.
But I do know a lot of people that I trust and love who've had terrible run-ins with him.
So the Wall Street Journal says that Steve Bannon and his alt-right minions are basically waging war against McMaster and go after anybody who is in a different faction.
Fantasy or reality.
Bogus.
Totally bogus.
I mean, really.
You know what this is?
It's lazy journalism.
Instead of actually finding out what's going on, you exploit the tropes that people expect.
There's got to be the Goldman Sachs globalists vying for influence against the Pepe the Frog nationalists.
It's just lazy.
It's just hackney.
You know, well, you know, I thought as the son of immigrants, as a son of a man who escaped from a communist political prison, I thought I was adequately cynical about the media.
I had no idea.
No idea.
I mean, when I came in January 20th, I swear to you, I got a Bible here.
Okay.
I'm going to swear on my Bible.
Okay.
80 to 90% of the stories I read in the mainstream media about the West Wing have nothing to do with reality.
Not only that, they are 180 degrees out of whack with reality.
I just read an article yesterday that I am on the short list to be strategic communications director of the White House.
False, not true.
You know, this is just 80%, huh?
That's right.
I can't explain.
80%.
80%.
I've come in and I've read articles.
I was in the room when the issue was being debated 36 hours beforehand.
And the story is diametrically opposed to what was happening in the building at the time.
It's lazy journalism.
It's cheap.
It's lazy.
It's saddening.
Still, they have a psychological block with November the 8th.
They can't get over the facts.
The New York Times said 92% victory for Hillary on the day of the election.
What did the Huffington Post say?
98%.
Guys, you're bankrupt.
You're morally, ethically, and technically bankrupt.
Well, tell Steve if he ever wants to come on.
We would love to have him on the show to talk to him.
Thank you very much.
You are really one of the president's most eloquent defenders.
He's lucky to have you.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka, thanks for coming on.
I appreciate it.
It's just it.
Just keep doing what you do.
Thanks, Drew.
Thanks a lot.
Really interesting.
I mean, I have to say, like, if you're the president of the United States, we want that guy talking for you because he really does defend him and makes a case.
All right.
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All right.
Well, that was a really interesting interview.
And I mean, I think, you know, obviously he means to come on and defend his chief.
And he does it with real eloquence.
He's very well spoken in all this.
But swearing on a Bible that 80% of what you read in the press is not true.
And, you know, I try not to bring a lot of this stuff on.
I look very carefully at where the sources are.
You know, they say sources close to this one, sources close to that one.
Because remember, every source, just like every person, has a motive, you know, is trying to sell a certain bill of goods.
So when you're looking at an anonymous source story, you have no way to judge where that guy is coming from, where that source material is coming from.
And I know there are great reporters out there, there really are.
Voters Not One Sided00:03:26
But some of this stuff, you know, if you're in the White House and you hate Bannon and you're on the other side, you might be feeding them one side of the story.
If you like Bannon, you might be feeding them the other side of the story.
So that was, you got Dr. Gorka's take on it, and I thought he was really interesting on North Korea.
I mean, they really are taking a strong line.
Here is a poll that I, a study that was in the Wall Street Journal this morning that really got to me because it kind of reversed what the conventional wisdom is.
The conventional wisdom about voters in America has been basically that the left has won the culture war, but the right has won the economic argument.
The idea is that we all know that free markets and free minds do better for people, but we all want to be, you know, we're all fine with gay marriage and abortion, and that basically that is over and the left has won.
The voter study group, which has brought together a bunch of people from different political points of view, it's not a one-sided, it's not a one-sided group.
A guy there named Lee Drutman recently looked beyond the simple left-right paradigm in a questionnaire asking the voters from the 2016 election to identify both how they voted and how they felt about various economic and social issues.
Then he mapped the results.
We have the map up here.
They put the dots, obviously the red dots are Trump voters and the blue dots are what was her name?
Hillary, that's right.
I forgot, you know, like, I don't know why.
I don't know why I forgot that.
It must be because she doesn't matter anymore.
It must be because she just doesn't matter anymore.
I think that's what it is.
And while most Hillary Clinton voters were deeply liberal on both the social and economic axis, the surprise was the Trump voters who were very conservative on social issues, but moderate on economic ones.
By Mr. Druttmann's count, 73% of all voters were left of center on economics.
And this is what our man Henry Olson, who is so good at predicting elections, this is what Henry Olson has been saying.
That basically we want a safety net.
We want to know that we're not going to fall through the cracks.
We want to know that if the factory leaves town, our children are not going to starve.
And we think the government should be rich enough to help us with that.
Most of the remaining Trump supporters were quite moderate on economic questions.
After the election, the so-called Never Trumpers, this is an article in the journal.
After the election, the so-called Never Trumpers claimed that each of their favored candidates would also have beaten Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Druttmann's figures show what a pipe dream that is.
A presidential candidate like Ted Cruz, who defines himself primarily through right-wing economic policies, begins with nearly three-quarters of the electorate in the other camp.
Such a candidate isn't likely to go very far.
Now, I don't know, that's a little unfair to Cruz because Cruz is very socially conservative, but that's my instinct, too, that Ted Cruz could never have won that election.
While the great majority of voters were liberal on economic issues, a small majority were social conservatives at the top of the diagram enough to swing the election to Mr. Trump.
The crucial differences between the two parties came down to social concerns, including pride in America, immigration, and especially moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
The social conservative awakening that helped elect Mr. Trump came when voters recognized that the liberal agenda amounted to something more than a shield to protect sexual minorities.
It was also a sword to be used against social conservatives.
Sex And Lenses00:06:49
And that's what I think too.
I don't think people really care what gay people do.
I don't think they care if they get married.
I don't think they care if people are, you know, I mean, who goes, who lies awake at night worried about whether some guy he doesn't know wears a dress or not.
What they're worried about is their rights to act on their conscience.
Because here's the big surprise.
Your conscience is actually more important than your sexual equipment.
What you do, protecting your conscience is actually more important than protecting your sex life.
Look, I want you to have whatever sex life you have.
I could not, I seriously could not care less what people do as long as it doesn't scare the horses and that it's done with adults and that it's consensual and people, it's just not my business, okay?
This is might not be what I said to you if you were my pal sitting here.
I might say, you know, you might want to live your life a different way, but if I don't know you, it's none of my business and I don't want the law kicking down your door to get into your bedroom.
But the thing is, once you start to say to me that I have to like it, I have to love you, I have to participate in your wedding, then to me, that is just way, way out of line.
And I'll tell you, you know, I want to bring this to a larger question about the way we look at sex in this society at this moment.
But first, first, you can't see what I'm saying if you can't see.
And you can't see if you're not wearing good glasses or contact lenses.
And many of you, I know I, stopped wearing contact lenses because it was just too expensive to get the good ones.
I'd wear them too long so they, you know, I wouldn't be spending all this money.
They start to hurt my eyes.
It was really bad.
But that was because just about four companies have controlled 97% of the contact lens market until now because now there's Hubble, H-U-B-B-L-E, and they will sell you premium contact lenses online so that you can get a fresh pair of lenses every single day, 60 contacts for 30 bucks.
That's $1 a day, okay?
$1 a day, and they come to your door.
This is half the price of other brands.
You go to HubbleContacts.com and you can get your first two weeks for free.
These are quality daily lenses, half the price.
Contacts are expensive because of this monopoly that these guys are breaking through.
Hubble sells directly to you so they can offer contacts for half the price and they can send you to an optometrist if you don't have a prescription today because you got to get a prescription, obviously, for your good contacts.
Getting contacts has never been more convenient or affordable.
No more overpaying or overwearing.
Go to HubbleContacts.com to get your first two weeks of lenses for free, 15 pairs of lenses for free.
You really can't beat that deal.
Hubble is offering my listeners two weeks of free contacts, hubblecontacts.com, and you can get 2020 Vision for half the price.
That's HubbleContacts.com.
You know, people say that our society is sex obsessed, but I don't think that's right.
I don't think it's sex-obsessed.
I think it's spirit-deprived.
I think that we, it's not so much that we look at the world through our sex lives and our sexual, and think that our sexual proclivities are our identities.
It's that we don't understand that our identities, that we are spiritual creatures.
We have let people talk us out of what we know for a fact.
You know for a fact that you are you.
And, you know, I was reading this, this New York magazine has a sex diary, okay, where they ask people to, you know, they ask New York, typical New York readers to record a diary of their sex lives.
And Glenn Reynolds on Instapund, an excellent, excellent site.
He posted one of these sex diaries of this woman who's trying to find a mate.
She has a matchmaker.
She goes on match.com, and she's a typical New York writer, New York reader.
She's, I don't know, she's in some kind of editorial type position and all this stuff.
Obviously, very well healed.
She has this description of her dates.
There's three dates in this diary.
I'm just going to read you one.
7.30 p.m., shower, blow-dry dress, agent provocateur push-up bra with matching lace panties, a low-cut, slinky top, white slacks, and high sandals.
I'm sun-kissed from my weekend in the Hamptons.
I look and feel like a million bucks.
8 p.m., excited.
I walked the few short blocks to the restaurant, which is smack between my home and the, she calls him bachelor number one because she goes out on three dates.
After an amazing meal and an okay bottle of wine, all we need to know is your place or mine.
We picked my place, 11 p.m.
Things seemed hot and heavy, but bachelor number one's penis is still flaccid.
I've been around the block enough to know it's him, not me.
He says, I have to tell you something, I feel a little vulnerable right now.
I have herpes.
And the only thing I can think to say is, wow.
And his response is, I can't believe you think this is a big deal.
Do you realize almost 70% of the population has herpes?
And she responds, I'd like to stay in the other 30%.
And it goes on and on like this.
And if you talk to people who date now, dating is dreadful.
It is dreadful.
And I would like to just suggest that the reason our sex lives are so out of whack is because they're all about sex.
That your sex life, you know, listen, this is not a judgment.
It's always all you ever hear is, you know, don't have sex because it'll do this.
Don't have sex because it'll do that.
Forget about that.
Forget about whether yes or no to have sex.
What about going out with someone to find out what they're like?
What about getting to know someone to find out what they're like?
What about, you know, trying to understand something besides what is going, you know, your place or mine?
I mean, that's, you had a great dinner with this guy.
The only question is your place or mine?
I mean, that's such a telling phrase, you know, and it's not obsession with sex.
It is deprivation of the spirit.
They have let, we have let people talk us into the fact that we're not here, that this is it.
This meat that surrounds us is all there is to us and how we should live our life.
And our identity is, oh, I'm gay, that's my identity.
I make fun of those guys on everyday feminism, not because they're loons, although they're loons.
I make fun of them because they're asking all the wrong questions.
They should be asking, you know, what is my moral approach to life?
What do I think is important?
What's the goal and purpose of my life?
And nobody asks that.
It's like, who am I?
Am I gay?
Am I straight?
Am I trans?
You know, it's like, that may not be the most important question in your life.
You know, Andre DeBus, who is a terrific short story writer, who became famous for a while because they made a movie called In the Bedroom that was a big hit.
But he was a Catholic writer, and he has one story about a girl who decides she's not going to go on any, what she calls naked dating.
She's not going to do naked dating anymore.
She's just going to date, and she's just not going to have sex.
She's not going to have sex.
And basically, that's when she meets the man of her dreams.
Thunder Road Serenade00:06:45
And it's like a very, it's very telling because it's not the lack of sex that does it.
It's not the lack of sex that does it.
It's the treating people.
When you put sex out of the occasion, you start to treat people as if they were spirits, and they are.
And that, because you're actually dealing with the truth of them.
All right, to get to stuff I like, I have to, before I get to the final stuff I like on Robert Mitchum, I have to say a farewell to Glenn Campbell.
Glenn Campbell died in his 80s, and people don't really remember, what they remember of him was he would get drunk and get arrested because he had incipient Alzheimer's and he was starting to go a little bats and he did a final tour with Alzheimer's and did a song, I'm Still Me.
But back in his heyday, back in the late 60s and early 70s, he was huge.
He was bigger than the Beatles.
He sold an estimated 45 million records.
And he was good, too.
You know, not to speak ill of the dead, but he was in the John Wayne version of True Grit.
And if you watch him, he's an amateur.
He's terrible in it.
But that just shows how big he was, that they put him in this major, major motion picture because people would come to the movie to see him.
His biggest contribution, he was a terrific guitarist, but his biggest contribution was as an interpreter of the songs of Jimmy Webb, who was one of the great American songwriters after the age of great American songs.
He did write the worst song, one of the worst songs ever written, MacArthur Park.
Remember, MacArthur Park is Melting in the Dark, all the sweet song that has absolutely no meaning.
You know, if you actually said the words, it's MacArthur Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet cream icing flowing down.
I mean, it's terrible.
But he also wrote some beautiful, beautiful songs, Wichita Lineman, by the time I get to Phoenix.
I think he wrote Gentle on My Mind, which is a beautiful one.
Here is just one, Glenn Campbell, just to remember the guy as he heads off to the next adventure, Galveston, which is about a guy in the Vietnam War thinking about the Texas town of Galveston.
Still here, you'll see her dark eyes She was 21 when I left Galveston.
Galveston, oh, Galveston.
I still hear your sea waves crashing while I watch the cannons flashing.
I clean my gun and dream of Galveston.
I still see her standing by the water.
Standing there, looking out to see.
And is she waiting?
It's really, Jimmy Webb was just a wonderful songwriter, and that's it is a lovely song.
Glenn Campbell, the great interpreter of Jimmy Webb.
So I remember back in those days, I actually went to Galveston, which is a seaside resort, and I was crossing the causeway, and they just blast that song.
I don't know if they do that anymore.
This is a long time ago.
All right, stuff I like.
The final Robert Mitchum film I want to talk about.
Robert Mitchum would have been 100, I guess it was last Sunday or something like this.
One of the great tough guy writers.
But this is not one of his best films.
It's one of those good, bad films.
It's really, really entertaining.
A film called Thunder Road.
And it's not actually the film I want to talk about.
But the reason the film is important and the reason I love to bring it up is because Thunder Road was partly written by Robert Mitchum.
And the word is that he directed it, secretly directed it, though it's Arthur Ripley, I think, gets credit on it.
So it's basically his project.
And it's about moonshiners.
And why is that important?
Well, moonshiners, obviously, the guys who made liquor and they were always fighting the revenuers, the IRS, who said they were making illegal liquor.
And they would come out and arrest them.
And they were always depicted in the press, and they still are, as these backwoods country bumpkins, you know, how stupid they were, kind of living, they just, you know, brain dead and all this stuff, kind of like the villains unjustified.
But the point of the movie is, why is the government bothering these people in the first place?
Why can't they make it?
If you can make your own liquor, why can't you make your own liquor?
And it doesn't actually come out and say that, but it just humanizes bootleggers.
And my favorite part of this movie, which, like I said, is one of those good, bad movies.
It's kind of bad, but so much fun to watch, is that Robert Mitchum co-wrote and sang the theme song, which is one of those great movie theme songs that describes the plot of the film.
So here is the theme to Thunder Road, sung by and written by Robert Mitchum.
Let me tell the story, I can tell it all.
About the mountain boy who ran illegal alcohol.
His daddy made the whiskey, some he drew the load.
When his engine roared, they called the highway thunder road.
Sometimes into Asheville, sometimes Memphistown.
The revenues chased him, but they couldn't run him down.
Each time they thought they had him, his engine would explode.
He'd go by like they were standing still on Thunder Road.
And there was Thunder, Thunder over Thunder Road.
Thunder was his engine and white lightning was his load.
And there was moonshine, moonshine, quenched the devil's thirst.
The law they swore they'd get him, but the devil got him first.
On the 1st of April, 1954, the federal man sent word he'd better make his run no more.
He said 200 agents were covering the state.
Whichever road he tried to take, beginning sure his fate.
Some his daddy told him, make this run your last.
Your tank is filled with hundred proof.
You're all tuned up and gas.
Now don't take any chances.
If you can't get through, I'd rather have you back again than pull that mountain dew.
And there was thunder, thunder over thunder road.
Thunder was his engine and white lightning was his.
Thunder was his engine and white lightning was his load.
Great stuff.
Moonshine to quench the devil's first thirst.
The law, they thought they had him, but the devil got him first.
Great, great, great stuff.
You know, I feel a little guilty leaving you to the Clavinless weekend with this threat of nuclear war hanging over your head.
Thunder And White Lightning00:00:18
So if you hear a loud whump and America suddenly becomes a better, more moral place, you'll know that Los Angeles has been destroyed.
We're gone.
But if not, survivors will gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show, and hopefully we'll see you then.