Bret: Agree. Isaiah Berlin was right when he said that “dry atheists seem to me blind and deaf to some forms of profound human experience.”
Frank: But there’s a big chunk of the MAGAverse for whom the pantomime of religion permits as many of the seven deadly sins as they wish to rack up. (And they’re racking like crazy these days, with greed and gluttony getting especially vigorous workouts.) Mouth enough dogma, sprinkle your conversation with enough references to Christ, maybe drape a cross around your neck and all manner of cruelty and corruption is forgiven. Seems to be Hegseth’s calculation.
Bret: That’s been an issue with Republicans for a long time, and with any political movement that sets itself up as the camp of virtue: They oppose all vices except the ones to which they happen to be drawn. In fact, if there’s one saving grace to Trump, it’s that he never really presented himself as anyone’s idea of a saint. And he tore the mask off some of the hypocritical primness that used to define the party. Notice that I’m saying something modestly nice about Trump, who, as you rightly noted, has an ineradicable authenticity that Vance can never have.
Frank: Even Trump and Vance can’t ruin many of this country’s greatest sources of pleasure and pride. Like … ranch dressing!
There was much written during the World Cup about foreign visitors’ infatuation with various quirks of American cuisine and culture, and in The Wall Street Journal, Ben Cohen noted their affinity for ranch dressing, which coincided with the Hidden Valley Ranch brand’s efforts to expand ranch’s reach. Here’s a paragraph on that, referring to Nick Higgins, the brand’s general manager:
Inside the Hidden Valley headquarters in Oakland, Calif., Higgins and his colleagues study all kinds of food and ask themselves a simple question: Will it ranch? The answer is yes. Of course it will ranch. Veggies, salads, pizza, wings, fries, caviar, pickles, cottage cheese, ice cream — they’re all eminently ranchable. And now that anything can be ranched, everything is getting ranched.
That’s American ingenuity, Bret!
Bret: And one more Journal story of note: As the tournament drew to a close, the paper’s Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg reported on another way visitors fell for the States, no matter their feelings about our politics:
They fell in love with the hash browns at Waffle House. They discovered the brisket sandwich of Buc-ee’s. They lamented the lack of public transportation options, then marveled at Waymo. All of it was eye-opening. The scale of our shopping malls, the size of our highways and the cornucopia that is the Costco frozen-food aisle.
Always nice to be reminded — Vance et al to the dismaying contrary notwithstanding — that there’s really something precious to this land of ours.
