Noemwhere to run, Noemwhere to hide

I read a book! You know which one...

You know what I hate? When you desperately want a job. Like, with all your heart. And in order to get that job, you have to jump through millions of ill-defined hoops in order to convince both power-hungry Republican donors and a mercurial, vainglorious former President that only you have the unique combination of loyalty, shamelessness and Red State every-woman appeal to be an ideal American Vice Presidential candidate. And one of those hoops is publishing a vanity biography with a title like “Unbowed: Lessons in Not Bowing” or “The Courage of Our Bravery: An American Story (of Fearlessness)”. But the problem is, you already wrote a book like that, just a couple years ago, when you were toying with your own run for the Presidency, which means that you already used up most of your best stories. So you go back to the well. You reach back for anecdotes that your previous publishing team wisely advised you to cut. Have you done anything else that was folksy and tough? Well, there was the time you killed a dog and a goat. And have you ever acted like a true stateswoman? Well, you probably met Kim Jong-Un once. Who is to say you didn’t?

Again, I hate when that happens.

This morning, I read Kristi Noem’s new book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. There’s no cool way to say this, but I did so because I am a Kristi Noem Literary Completist. I both read and wrote an essay about her first memoir, Not My First Rodeo, because not only did Noem grow up in the same region of South Dakota as my family, but she was shaped by the same core tragedy as both of my parents (all three lost their fathers to freak farm accidents when they were in their early twenties). Not My First Rodeo is not a good book, nor does it seek to be. It is the self-conscious project of a political striver, a means to an end. It is, however, a fascinating work of mythology— about the West and who belongs there; about gender as both a powerful biological force and a seeming non-factor in a conservative woman’s life; and about a version of this country where we owe very little to each other.

No Going Back is a much weirder and even less successful book than its forgotten predecessor. The prose this time around reads like an unholy amalgamation of a fire and brimstone CPAC address, various treacly LinkedIn posts about #leadership, and the kind of sarcastic t-shirts on offer at a Black Hills gift shop. The book ends, for example, with Noem’s proposal for how she’d spend day one if she were President. There’s a lot going on here! I did, in fact laugh at the subhead “Boy, Would I Do Things Differently from Biden,” but not at the other jokes.

Sounds like a busy day! And also a truly bizarre way to end a book. I have a feeling that the “Duh” Proclamation is not going to catch on, but I’ve been wrong before.

No Going Back also features the most befuddling collection of epigraphs I’ve ever seen in print (usually, she pairs a quote from a Good Leader, like herself or Margaret Thatcher or Trump, with one from a Bad Leader, such as Mitt Romney or former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Adern, but sometimes she forgoes that convention to just share lines from her favorite movies, like The Predator or The Grey instead). It’s also sweatily padded in order to justify its own existence— Noem tacks on a couple addresses that she gave to the South Dakota state legislature just to hit a book-length word count, and there’s an extended description of a get-to-know-you activity she once participated in at a leadership seminar (they tossed a ball around a circle). There are multiple passages about how Trump is great, and others about how Republicans who aren’t Trump are awful (Nikki Haley, for instance, is painted as a mean girl who acts like a lone wolf, in contrast to Noem, who welcomes other women into her post-feminist Wolfpack). At one point, she claims that, after her first term, there were only two remaining problems in South Dakota (the weather and lack of a strong pro-homeschooling law), but she took care of that last one, thank you very much.

You don’t need me to tell you that it’s a bad book. Since news about le affaire gravel pit went public last week, the only thing our divided nation has been able to agree on is that Kristi Noem is now public enemy number one. In a morally compromised world, she gave us a tremendous gift. All of us without the specific sin of killing a gregarious puppy named Cricket have been granted permission to cast the first, second, and third stones.

Before I started reading No Going Back, I assumed that I wouldn’t have much to say about the whole dog situation. It just felt like there wasn’t much to add. Like the millions who have already weighed in, I’m not a huge fan of killing animals, but that point has been made by now.

As it turns out, though, Cricket’s murder is even more central to the book’s tightrope walk of a core project than I anticipated. That particular anecdote pops up, jarringly, in the middle of Noem’s chapter on foreign policy— right between fawning tributes to far-right leaders like Italy’s Meloni and Israel’s Netanyahu and the author’s presentation of her own Noem Doctrine. Since I read the e-book edition, I don’t know where Noem’s fabricated story of being tough enough to stare down Kim Jong-Un fit in to the chapter, but it matches the broader narrative theme. When you’re the Governor of South Dakota and you need to prove that you’re ready to be Vice President, you grasp at every real or imagined gravitas straw you can find. There’s also some telling context that I missed from the various public retellings. Cricket’s crime wasn’t just youthful exuberance, it was that she messed with Noem’s bottom line. Her happy yapping ruined a carefully staged pheasant hunt at the Noem-run destination ranch.

One of the popular themes from the past week of Noem-scolding has been speculation as to why the Governor thought it was a good idea to include such a macabre, unsympathetic story in her audition tape for the Vice Presidency. The simplistic liberal answer has been, as it often is, that “the cruelty is the point.” I worry that’s too reductive and self-congratulatory, though. The broader point of the chapter isn’t just to show Trump and an imagined Republican base voter that she can be evil and vindictive, but to present a very specific view of how the world works and why she’s uniquely poised to tame it. Here’s the Noem Doctrine, by the way.

America first but not America alone.

Peace through strength

Fight to win

Our military is a force for both kindness and killing

Immigration is a national security issue

Our intelligence community should be spying on China, not on law-abiding citizens.

The Cricket story, far from being an anomaly, is actually extremely illustrative. Why did Cricket have to die? Because she wasn’t good for business. But what reason did Noem use to justify the death (as well as the subsequent killing of a nasty goat who apparently smelled like urine)? That they were dangers to the children. This is how the world works. There are innocents to be protected, menacing forces to be exterminated, and leaders who get final say as to who is in each group. And while Noem might have picked a particularly over-the-top anecdote to show that she’s the protective leader America needs, there’s a Thatcherite intentionality to that choice as well. Is a woman capable of enacting the bloody logic of Pax Americana? Well, not just any woman, mind you. That’s why God gave us Kristi Noem.

So yes, because Americans are (rightfully) grossed out by stories about killing puppies in cold blood, Noem is currently a subject of universal derision. Even Trump himself now considers her to be too toxic an asset to include on his ticket. But the irony is that the foreign policy worldview that Noem advances in No Way Back is, in fact, the bipartisan consensus. We are told, again and again, that only some of us are welcomed under an umbrella of protective care. It’s the reason why there are a million Gazans crammed into Rafah right now, holding their breath, praying that for the first time in months the world might finally view them as human beings rather than collateral damage. Peace through strength. Fight to win. Militaries as forces for kindness and killing.

Kristi Noem breaks my heart. Not because she killed a dog, but because for all the lies that she has apparently told throughout her political career, I trust that she’s being honest about her core values. The stories that she relates about her late father paint the picture of a man who was gruff, cold and frightened of the world outside of the gates of his private property. In No Way Back, she relates an anecdote of him tearing out the seatbelts in a new truck merely because they were mandated by the government. What a sad, small way to live your life. What a tragic lesson to pass on to your kids.

For as much as Noem argues that her and her father’s values are uniquely South Dakotan or uniquely American, though, I know for a fact that there’s nothing inevitable about these ways of looking at their fellow human beings. Like Noem, my parents too carry with them the memory of rural South Dakotan fathers who died too soon. The difference, though, is that both Russell Bucks and George Gelston taught their children that the work of a lifetime was to open their hearts not merely to their own families, nor merely to the Whitest enclaves on the South Dakota prairie, but to every human being. They taught them that the world was not easily divisible into good guys and bad guys, but that everybody was entitled to safety and love.

The bad news is that, while Kristi Noem has lost the current battle of public opinion, her worldview is, in fact, the current international governing consensus. The good news, though, is that it’s never too late to choose a different path. It’s not about whether we can decry a power-hungry politician’s bizarre dog-killing anecdote. It’s whether we’re able to break with such a small, frightened view of what it means to be human, the belief that some of us must be sacrificed so that others can be safe; the belief that the guns, bombs and borders will ever make us whole; the myth that our hearts are only large enough to care for a small fraction of the human community.

End notes:

• Thank you, again, to the protestors. And remember, you don’t have to be a college student in a tent to stand against war, for Gaza, and for all human life right now. My go-tos for action continue to be the USCPR and the American Friends Service Committee.

• Two more Barnraisers Project mini sessions coming up! May 15th and 21st. More info here. These have been so much fun.

• Like Kristi Noem, I also wrote a book about a set of lessons forged on the South Dakota prairie. It has gotten significantly less press than No Going Back, but for a good reason: No dogs were harmed in the writing, editing or production of the narrative! And unlike Noem’s book, I think you’ll find it warm and welcoming, like an outstretched hand. I’d love if you could pick up a copy. Also: major media outlets, if you’d like to talk to an author with something to say about America’s heartland but who has zero (0) dog murders to his name, you know where to find me.

• I debated paywalling this post, but because I’ve been asking folks to buy the book lately, I’ve been wanting to make as much of my writing here available to all. With that said, if you have the means and would like to support my work, paid subscriptions make a tremendous difference.

• Speaking of the book, I’ve got events coming up (with more to be announced soon).

  • MINNEAPOLIS, MN: MAY 23RD, 7:00-9:00 PM CT at the Minneapolis Friends Meeting. So many great groups co-sponsoring this one. I can’t wait. RSVP here.

  • MILL VALLEY, CA: JUNE 4TH, 6:30-7:30 PM PT at the gorgeous Mill Valley Public Library. Details here.

  • VIRTUAL ORGANIZING TRAINING HOSTED BY THE WHOLE WASHINGTON TRAINING (the incredible grassroots effort to get universal healthcare for Washington State). JUNE 19TH 6:00 PM PT. RSVP here.

• It’s been a while since I’ve shared a song of the week. Feels like I’d better justify the pun I made in the title, though, right? Let’s goooo, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.