• Yesterday was Cinco de Mayo, 2025, meaning it has been 20 years since 5/5/05, when BD and I went out to a Delco bar for discount margaritas and I wound up meeting my future wife. 20 years!
And today is my late mother’s birthday, so let me revisit her getting the last word — carved in stone — in her decades-long theological argument with my dad. “God is good.” (All the time.)
• It’s currently subscriber-only, but McMansion Hell takes a look at Trump’s bedazzling of the Oval Office: “The McMansionization of the White House, or: Regional Car Dealership Rococo: a treatise.”
Much like the gilded bathroom at Mar a Lago where Trump stored his stolen classified records, most of this decor is available from the Big Box. Or, rather, it had been. We sold those glue-on foam curlicues, but they’re made in China, so I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be carrying them. But the gold spraypaint is still in stock. Aisle 5.
• A similar aesthetic of glittering ostentation was found in the pages of old Richie Rich comic books. Michael Mechanic writes fondly about this mis-remembered fantasy character — a spectacularly wealthy gazillionaire who was also kind and generous: “Why Is Everybody Hating on Richie Rich? The beloved character used his fortune for good, unlike certain zillionaires.”
• Some of the worst people you’ve ever heard of also love some of your favorite books. “How Tolkien is whispering in the ears of America’s most powerful men,” by Lee Konstantinou.
This goes deep into Silmarillion territory to explore the reactionary appeal of Tolkien. (My response to these folks is simply this: Hobbits. The little, decent folks the powerful ignore are the key to the whole thing. Absolute power loses because it cannot comprehend that there is anyone out there who is not seeking to wield absolute power.)
• Mark Evanier is correct about hospital food.
• Spoiler warning for this meditative, wide-ranging essay by Sheldon Pearce: “In ‘Sinners,’ the blues is a portal between this world and the next.”
This piece — “Hoodoo vs. Holy Ghost: The ‘Sinners’ Controversy” — isn’t nearly as ambitious or rewarding, but it does include this fine comment from Tricia Hersey, responding to the holier-than-thou gatekeepers criticizing the movie: “They’re ‘calling everything demonic BUT white supremacy and capitalism,’ which are ‘the two main demonic things killing us and robbing us,’ she wrote.”
• Here are a couple of good, candid posts about Growing Up White Evangelical. First is Holly Berkeley Fletcher on “The Best Faith EVER!!!!” That’s about church camp and “Cry Night” and “Spiritual Emphasis Week” and all the sleazy manipulation involved in ensuring that kids will “re-re-re-dedicate their lives to Christ.” This is all horribly familiar and it reminds me of a key turning point in my own faith, which happened during a church youth group “Winter Retreat.”
Just as our guest speaker — exactly the sort Fletcher describes — was winding up for the Big Altar Call moment, I experienced a sudden, overwhelming sense of conviction that God had to be getting tired of this bit. How many times could someone get saved and saved again and dedicated and re-dedicated — all before the age of 17 — before it just became absurd? And how could such absurdity be pleasing to God? I was convinced that this was a spiritual conviction, sent by God, and was certain that God was telling me to stop going forward in response to these vague, emotionally fraught invitations. (That didn’t go over real well with my youth pastor, at first, but to his credit once I explained it to him, he kind of understood what I was saying, and why I never again “came forward” at those things.)
The second piece is from perfectnumber, reviewing Linda Kay Klein’s book Pure, “a book about the aftermath of purity culture.” The book — and the post — discusses sex with frank honesty and candor, and offers a look at the damage that can be done when we refuse to discuss sex with frank honesty and candor. perfectnumber finds Klein’s book helpful and I’m sure many others who grew up in evangelical purity culture will find her post helpful.
• The title for this post comes from “Treat Her Right,” which was first a hit for Roy Head and the Traits in 1965. I was most familiar with the George Thorogood version from 1988 and so I’d never seen Roy Head perform the song and had no idea he could dance like this:
Anyway, given the continuing Ponderous Discourse over the Crisis Among Young Men and/or Boys, I would simply like to bookmark this song as a resource for some future syllabus for deprogramming/resocializing incels and whatnot.
Head seems a bit too focused on the potential quid pro quo — “treat her right” and, as a consequence, she will treat you right — which makes his recommendation of generosity seem more transactional than a matter of genuine mutuality. But even so, he is recommending generosity. And the “story” he describes is, quite often, accurate enough.
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