Fortitude by Dan Crenshaw

Author:Dan Crenshaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Right Sense of Shame

In America today, we too often look at personal failings as things to overcome, move past, or forget. Sometimes we should do one or all of those things, but we should also do something else: Learn our lesson.

The list of public figures who run headlong into self-inflicted failure—personal, political, or otherwise—and then reemerge shameless without having appeared to learn a thing, is long. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no opponent of redemption. Far from it. I certainly believe there should be space for reemergence from public scorn. I believe redemption is a trademark of an enlightened society. One of the more detestable social trends now is the mocking of redemption, and the dismissing of the idea that it is possible or even desirable. In place of a system of repentance, justice, and mercy we have a culture of mindless fury—an outrage culture. Outrage culture has contorted our ability to seek redemption and recover from failure, which in turn has contorted our sense of shame. Not only do we feel no shame for being outraged, but that same outrage incentivizes a lack of shame for just about anything—lies, dubious news reporting, scandals, even simple cases of clumsy commentary.

Redemption is harder and harder to come by. Take my experience with Saturday Night Live. It would have been easy to call for Pete Davidson to be fired after his infamous joke about my appearance in November of 2018, only a few days before my election. I remember finding out about the previous night’s skit. I woke up Sunday morning unaware of what had happened. I started my day as I usually do, checking the calendar on my phone. My first election to public office was days away and my Sunday was packed. After church, we would meet up with volunteers doing door-to-door canvassing for the campaign, and then head to Huffman, Texas, for a campaign event at the local bar, which meant I would need to change into jeans and boots after church. This was my routine.

Then I checked my text messages.

“Dude, SNL! You made it!”

“Those expletives, expletives, expletives at SNL.”

“Hitman in a porno. Brahahahaha.”

That was the general nature of the reactions. Keep in mind, my friends in the SEAL teams are cut from a certain cloth. The lengths to which we go to make fun of each other are often extreme, and as a result we grow pretty thick skin. That being said, we keep it in the family. My friends will often say, “I get to make fun of your injury, but they sure as hell don’t.” Lucky me, I guess.

So I looked up the clip on my phone as I made coffee. My Apple news feed already had a couple stories about it. “Wow,” I remember thinking, “how bad could it be?” I started the video. The skit in question was from SNL’s longest recurring sketch, Weekend Update. The sketch is a faux news segment where comedians poke fun at the biggest stories of the week.

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