Pecking Order

The NYT published a piece (h/t Instapundit) on perhaps starting to not shun your right-wing kinfolk. The folks at Instapundit found something different in it than I did; what caught my eye was the following setup coupled with a later line:

The setup:

I met Matt Kappler in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician’s license.

The second line, after they begin surfing together:

It helped that in the ocean, our places in the pecking order reversed. Matt’s a very good surfer — one might call him “an elite” — and I am not. According to surfing’s unwritten rules, he had the right to look down on me. But he never did. His generosity of spirit in the water made me rethink my own behavior on land.

The author who thinks 'our places in the pecking order reversed' edited Yale's humor magazine and now writes for McSweeney's and the Onion. How did he ever imagine that he outranked a licensed electrician and expert surfer? Just because he wrote some speeches that a politician pretended to believe long enough to read them? 

Still, the open-mindedness is refreshing.

Matt and I haven’t really changed each other’s minds on major national issues. But we have changed each other. His fearlessness in consequential surf made me more courageous. His ability to go “over the ledge,” launching himself off breaking lips, helped me curb my overthinking. Ostracizing him wouldn’t have altered his behavior — and it would have made my own life worse.

That's not nothing.