50 more deliberate thoughts*

Well, 25. But with a 100% tariff imposed on each one--and riffs on Warren Harding, Jeff Bezos, Spinal Tap and more--it'll surely feel like 50.

Last week, my first crack at 50 Deliberate Thoughts, spurred on a groundswell of insistence that I do it again. If you didn’t read it, then you’re in the minority.

Despite being roughly three times longer than my typical column, it still sparked an “open rate” of over 52%, which is roughly the column’s average the past few months.

So, without further ado, here we go with another 50 25 deliberate thoughts.

1. I mean, people have been talking. They say it’s unbelievable, how well I write. They tell me, “Matt, YOU’VE GOT TO DO MORE OF THIS. Your writing is better than anything the FAKE PRESIDENT ever puts on Truth Social, which should really be called Anti-Truth Anti-Social, but what do I know? Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

2. I just took a glance at his oxymoronically, ironically and George Orwellian social media account. Farcical—absurd, ridiculous.

3. What does it do to a populace when they are subjected to the kind of idiocy and indecency emanating daily from YOU KNOW WHO? Yes, I mock-channeled the Wanna-Be Dictator in numero uno and again here in numero tres, to flaunt a little bit (“un poco”) of my Google-aided Spanish acumen.

4. Speaking of channels, even the mocking kind, let’s change it.

5. My recent awareness (eight seconds ago) that little bit is “poco” in Spanish brings to mind the terrific 1970s country-pop band by that name. Who doesn’t love Crazy Love?

5. In case you were wondering, Poco did not get their name from the Spanish translation of “a little bit.” Per Wikipedia, “originally, the new group was named "Pogo", after the Pogo comic strip character, but was changed when its creator, Walt Kelly, objected and threatened to sue.”

6. Filler, to make up for the fact that I had “5” twice. Formatting issues preventing me from re-numbering that second 5. Nothing to see here, move along…

7. About 15 years ago, I did a little PR work for a restaurant in Pullman, Washington that, a few years later, was threatened with legal action by another restaurant—clear across the country in Washington, D.C.—that had the same name. Birch & Barley in Washington state remains to this day; the one in D.C. is history.

8. Same type of thing happened with another restaurant client of mine, Burger Boss, just two miles from my home, in Elmwood Park. Only in this case, under threat of legal action by some other Burger Boss out there in the wild, my (by-then former) client changed its name to Burger MOOvment. That’s right, “MOO,” as in the sound a cow makes. Hmmm….

9. Not my favorite name change, but before and after the switcheroo: some of the absolute best burgers in the world. Channeling my inner Shakespeare: “This burger by any other restaurant name would taste just as delicious.”

10. For the record, Burger Boss didn’t pay me to write #9. And, like Twitter, I don’t call the restaurant by its newer name.

11. For longtime Inside Edge readers: were you expecting a routine narrative this week, after the historic 50-point pivot last week? This may well mark a new era, akin to Spinal Tap’s shift after Nigel Tufnel left the band.

    “You are witnesses at the new birth of Spinal Tap, Mach 2,” David St. Hubbins declared. “I hope you enjoy our new direction.”

12. It’s fitting that a Spinal Tap reference was my #11 this week. If you know, you know (IYKYK).

13. Did you know Spinal Tap is coming out next month with a sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. The 1984 “mockumentary” is one of my favorites, as I’ve noted before, and the band was sensational in a concert that I attended in Chicago in 1992.

    14. That Poco video sent me into a brief rabbit-hole, with David Gates lip-synching “Goodbye Girl” on American Bandstand. He wrote the song for the movie of the same name, which co-starred Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason, who was a college classmate of my mother-in-law at Webster University.
    
    I hazily recall Marsha and Pat might have been roommates, which before 2017 would have meant it needed to be fact-checked but now would be sufficient to establish as a cold, hard fact and/or instigate a Department of Justice investigation.
    

    15. I see from a few headlines floating around that there’s “no deal” coming out of Alaska from that summit Friday of the two historically epic scoundrels at the helm of the U.S. and Russia.
    
    16. OK, so at least we’re still at 50 states…for now. Agent Orange didn’t cede Alaska back to Vladimir Putin, some 160 years after “Seward’s Folly” brought the territory into the U.S. domain.
    
    17. In the summer of 1923, Warren Harding was the first sitting U.S. President to travel to Alaska. He died shortly thereafter in San Franciso as his “Voyage of Understanding” came to an abrupt halt.

    
    18. About a decade ago, I read a book about Harding, The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country. History doesn’t repeat exactly, but it echoes—and some echoes are REALLY LOUD.

    

19. Before becoming President, Harding was a newspaper publisher in Ohio. His campaign slogan in 1920 was “Return to Normalcy,” as he promised a return to a pre-World War I way of life in America. Harding, from everything I’ve read as well as historians’ evaluations, was one of our worst Presidents and had significant character failings, including but not limited to his tendency to have extramarital affairs.
    
    I bet he’d have been prolific on Twitter. (Yes, I know it’s not Twitter anymore.)

20. Well, maybe he is on Twitter?

    

21. This week, I began reading Marty “Not Related to Matt” Baron's Collison of Power, about his time at the helm of the Washington Post newsroom. By the time I wrap up reading that one, I suspect the narrative will feel like ancient history compared to how things have deteriorated so badly there. How much of that descent can be laid at the feet of Jeff Bezos?

22. Sorry to see Bezos’s mom died on Thursday. She was only 17 when she birthed her boy. Seeing news of her death sparked my recollection of an essay Bezos wrote for The Right Words at the Right Time, edited by Marlo Thomas. He told the story of how, as an adolescent, his grandfather pulled the car over on the highway after little Jeff had excitedly demonstrated his math skills by calculating how many years of his grandmother’ life she had reduced by smoking cigarettes. After instructing the child to get out, Grandpa took him to the side of the highway and imparted this message:

“Sometimes it’s more important to be kind than smart.”¹

Decades later, Bezos wrote about the experience. When I read the account, my esteem for Bezos soared—it suggested that he’d internalized that lesson and therefore would be the type of person I wouldn’t mind having an astronomically huge impact on society through his wealth and all the power that flowed from it.

Given recent events, including but hardly limited to the self-emasculation of the Washington Post as a journalistic watchdog, my assessment of Bezos’s impact on the world has evolved. (For those who might not know, he’s owned the Post for a dozen years and it’s a shell of its former speaking-truth-to-power self.)

23. Democracy dies in darkness. The Post adopted that slogan in 2017. Has it seemed especially dark lately, even by recent dire standards? The federal take-over of D.C. feels like a dry run. Which cities are next?

24. It's more urgent than ever that media stand strong and on the principles of being a genuine force that holds power to account. To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted (especially when so many of those who are comforted are corrupt).

25. Each of these posts is hereby subjected to the “It’s Past 1 a.m. 100% tariff.”

1. This is all from my memory of that essay in one of my favorite books of all-time. If you look it up and find some details are off, good for you. But the gist of this is true.