I have asked questions my whole life and never once drawn blood. Nobody has ever answered one, so it’s hard to be sure.
I don’t usually read liberal professors, but Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s newsletter comes to my work email (I signed up in 2024 to keep an eye on her), and on Sunday she wrote something I felt in my body. For the insecure tyrant, she says, quoting a Nobel Prize winner named Elias Canetti, “all questioning is a forcible intrusion…like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim.” People know me as a guy who’s just asking questions. I’ve also been on the receiving end of one, and Canetti nailed it.
She’s talking about the President banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House on Friday, which our man at the White House covered. By Saturday morning their reporters had been turned away at the gate without their passes. What the professor misses is who was bleeding. By her own guy’s definition, every question those outlets ever asked was a knife, and the President told reporters, “I don’t want them in my office. I don’t want them here.” Anybody who has taken a follow-up question at work knows the sound of a man who has lost a lot of blood.
Then, according to NBC, CNN and MS NOW did their live shots from the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street, right across from the gate. Canetti would call that a second stab.
I’m Just Asking Questions, and Nobody Gets Hurt
My questions are a different animal. I’ve asked the same three since the flooring days: why a two-by-four is an inch and a half by three and a half, who decided my water filter company was a pyramid, and what’s in the store-brand caulk. Not one has been answered. Let that sink in.
Answering is where it gets you. The professor says an answer feels like submission, and I’ve been submitting twenty-six hours a week at the hardware store since 2019. On Tuesday a retired shop teacher named Lyle Ostrander, 71, asked me where the masonry bits were. Aisle 9, I said. He turned the package over under the lights for a long while, the way shop teachers do, and asked, “Are you sure? These are for wood.” That second one went in about four inches.
Turns out I’d already done what the book says. I insulted him (“Lyle, if you knew where everything was, you wouldn’t need me”) in front of the whole key-cutting line and barred him from aisle 9. The professor calls the White House the President’s “safe space.” Aisle 9 is mine. Doreen, my manager, had to walk Lyle over to the masonry bits herself, all the way down in aisle 12. When Denise asked Sunday night whether I’d actually read the Canetti book, I reminded her she’s asked not to be mentioned.
Ben-Ghiat Has a Door Policy Too
Ben-Ghiat takes questions on Zoom every Friday, and only paying subscribers get the link, so a professor who spent her Sunday defending people who ask questions charges admission to ask her one. I’m on the free list, which is where they put a guy who’s just asking questions. Say what you want about the President, CNN got into his house free until the day he took the badges. Follow the money.
She also says CBS News got a lot less critical of the President after the Ellisons took over, and now the Ellisons’ Paramount wants Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. CBS didn’t make Friday’s list, so they must be asking better questions. And before anybody starts in, none of this has anything to do with Paramount’s CEO being the son of Larry Ellison, an ally of the President. Some people smell a conflict. I smell a family business.
Lyle came back Saturday. From the key machine I watched him ask Doreen where the wall anchors were, and she just told him, right there in front of the paint counter. That’s how it starts. Doreen has an answer for everybody, which is how you end up working for the customer. What I’ve got is curiosity. And I’m full of it.
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