4 days ago
‘Sister Wives' is a pretty good way to understand all of America
In today's edition:
Let me put on my ombudsman hat for a moment.
Ah, yes, it appears that the last time Monica Hesse wrote about the TLC reality program 'Sister Wives' was January 2023, concordant with her claim in today's essay (italics mine) that 'one benefit of being a columnist is that every couple of years I get to subject all of you to a close analysis' of the show about Mormon polygamists. It's her prerogative to return to the subject. Nothing to be done.
And thank goodness, because the column is just great. Monica goes big, contending that 'Sister Wives' is 'the most American show' — and not just because, as she observes, 'at one point all the wives are involved in multilevel marketing schemes; at one point everyone's trying therapy.'
No, this is about rupture and repair. For the uninitiated, the multi-wife family has fractured by this, Season 19 of the show, and is just trying to figure out how to keep going 'when everything has burned to the ground,' Monica writes, 'but the cameras keep showing up.'
Hence, America and the grand challenge our nation faces: to 'try to remember what we have in common,' Monica says. 'Try to envision what it could look like if we could ever put it back together. Try to remember that a family is still a family and a country is still a country no matter how much you hate each other.'
That, and the multilevel marketing.
Chaser: Okay, I know you're dying for it: Here's Monica's 2023 column on 'Sister Wives,' right as the marriages broke up.
From Partnership for Public Service CEO Max Stier's essay on our secretary of state turned national security adviser turned acting head of the U.S. Agency for International Development turned acting archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration.
Talk about putting on different hats — Marco, when do you find time for you?!
That might be a concern for Rubio, but the concern for the rest of us is that with so many responsibilities in Washington, the overstretched secretary can't possibly do them all well.
What's more, Stier writes, the four jobs are 'not just burdensome — they are incongruous with one another'; he explains how leading both State and the National Security Council is akin to acting as player and referee at the same time. And then the Archives perch simply has nothing to do with Rubio's other work or expertise!
Rubio is far from the only official in this pickle. Stier pulls together a long list of appointees doing double duty. Such impossible multitasking, he writes, shows President Donald Trump's 'contempt for the federal agencies and the sound stewardship of taxpayer dollars.'
Chaser: If Rubio can find the time, he would see in Haiti an object lesson in the costs of global apathy, Lee Hockstader writes.
Rubio also ought to be plenty busy in a couple of his caps handling the revocation of U.S. visas for Chinese students with ties to that country's Communist Party, after many instances of espionage on elite American campuses.
Marc Thiessen peers in on Stanford University, where a student newspaper investigation last month exposed some dramatic spying. He writes that the school is a perfect case study for how Beijing infiltrates U.S. education. One wild tidbit from what the student journalists told Marc:
'In conversations, Chinese students would report, 'Every single week I'm asked to meet a handler where I'll be asked to talk about the research I'm doing, the directions that research is going in, how that research is progressing and how we could reimplement that research back in China.''
Chaser: Checking in on our other modern adversary — Canada — security experts Greg Pollock and Imran Bayoumi write that a Canadian defense buildup could get the U.S. and its northern neighbor's longtime friendship back on track.
It's a goodbye. It's a haiku. It's … The Bye-Ku.
Quadruple duty
Makes Marco feel for TV's
Nonmonogamists
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