--- title: Ze Frank on Crop Circles, Bulls, Palin and Progress | TIME description: Ze Frank offers another edition of 'That Makes Me Think Of' canonical: https://time.com/video/q0GducNF/ og:title: Ze Frank on Crop Circles, Bulls, Palin and Progress og:description: Ze Frank offers another edition of 'That Makes Me Think Of' og:url: https://time.com/video/q0GducNF/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/q0GducNF/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Ze Frank on Crop Circles, Bulls, Palin and Progress twitter:description: Ze Frank offers another edition of 'That Makes Me Think Of' twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/q0GducNF/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Ze Frank on Crop Circles, Bulls, Palin and Progress > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Ze Frank on Crop Circles, Bulls, Palin and Progress [Watch (HLS stream): Ze Frank on Crop Circles, Bulls, Palin and Progress](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/q0GducNF.m3u8) (2:57)  _Published 2009-07-11. Ze Frank offers another edition of 'That Makes Me Think Of'_ --- Jul 27, 2023 1:11 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Ze Frank on Diplomacy \(and Winking\)](/video/ruGDd8Od/) ### Ze Frank on Diplomacy (and Winking) [Ze Frank: That Makes Me Think Of...](/video/CubScmCS/) ### Ze Frank: That Makes Me Think Of... [Ze Frank: That Makes Me Think of...](/video/CW0t33r9/) ### Ze Frank: That Makes Me Think of... --- ## Transcript >> So in Tasmania, there were these bizarre events. Crop circles kept on appearing in medicinal poppy fields and the farmers wanted an explanation. Maybe it was some weird weather pattern, maybe aliens were trying to communicate with us but it turned out that the crop circles were caused by wallabies, which were like little kangaroos. These wallabies would go into the poppy fields, eat the poppies and then take off. But by this point they'd be so high that they'd wind up hopping around in circles. Last week a bizarre event in politics left plenty of people searching for explanations. Sarah Palin resigned as governor of Alaska in the middle of her term. There were all sorts of speculations. Is she gonna run for office? Was she just sick of her job or aliens trying to communicate with us? In her resignation speech, Palin said that she was taking her fight for what was right for Alaska in a new direction but she was a bit vague on what direction that direction was. But at the end of her speech she hinted at it with a quote that was mistakenly attributed to General McArthur. >> We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction. >> And it's true. Advancing and retreating can look very similar especially if your goal is simply to get away from wherever you are right now. It can be hard to tell. For example, take the Running of the Bulls which was celebrated in Spain last week. Who's advancing and who's retreating? From the bulls point of view, they could be like, " Why are all the people running? There must be something chasing us. We should get out of here ". And that makes me think of all the fancy stock market mechanisms that led to the financial crisis. Why are all these bulls running? I don't know but let's stay ahead of them. One little stumble and what we thought as progress winds up being a retreat to recession. But that makes me wonder what progress is. Is it moving away from something you don't like or towards something you do? Plenty of people call themselves progressives these days and progressive means advancing forward. But the definition of forward is changed quite a bit over the last hundred years of progressivism and critics say that modern progressives are just retreating back to socialism. To find out what the definition of progressive actually is, I went to the online journal Campus Progress which is an outreach for the Center for American Progress. I found an article called " What is Progressive ?" by a young man named Andrew Garib. Here's my attempt at a radical oversimplication. Conservatism sees the world and human nature as static and predictable. So progress is getting out of the way and letting people do their thing. Liberalism, on the other hand, thinks that government can help build ideal societies and progress is getting closer to those utopian ideals. But Garib says that progressives are different. They see the world as ever changing and dynamic and the notion of progress changes with it. I'm not sure if I totally understand what that means but I do know that if progress is a moving target, it can be awfully hard to figure out whether you're advancing or retreating. And all of that makes me think of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara who died last week. McNamara was seen as the prime architect of the Vietnam War but later in his life regretted not having withdrawn the troops sooner. McNamara experienced firsthand the difficulties of knowing when progress means to advance and when progress means to retreat. In the documentary " The Fog of War ", McNamara pointed to an excerpt from T. S. Elliot, perhaps giving one more view of the definition of progress. >> It reads we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Ze Frank on Crop Circles, Bulls, Palin and Progress","description":"Ze Frank offers another edition of 'That Makes Me Think Of'","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/q0GducNF/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2009-07-11T19:46:05.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/q0GducNF.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/q0GducNF/","duration":"PT2M57S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/q0GducNF/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```