Gallows Rumor

As my loyal reader has no doubt noticed, things have been a bit quiet in these here pages the last few weeks. There’s a very good reason for that: until last Friday, I was pushing hard to make a deadline, which had the twin effects of keeping me very busy and totally zeroing out my ability to write about anything else. Seriously, emails, text messages, everything fell by the wayside, as for the first time I could really feel the last big corrections being made on a book that I’ve been hammering away on for more than five years. As I approached the end, it dawned on me that the project was enormously ambitious, in a way that I’d never really understood before. Though the final manuscript is coming in at about 120,000 words — 450-ish pages, in print form, if the internet is to believed — I’ve written well over 200,000 words, all told, and thrown out nearly half of it. The book has long, highly technical stretches; it has 75 footnotes; it contains at least 27 named characters, almost none of whom can be removed from its plot without destroying the mechanism; it involves several real-world figures; it tracks with actual events in March and April of 2008 . . . I’ve got used to feeling a bit like a failure, because of how hard it was for me to write this book. I’m realizing now that the reason it was so hard was because it was an enormously difficult project to undertake. Holy crap. I really did all that?

In case you can’t tell, I’ve been working with my therapist on feeling better about myself, with interesting, if not perfect, results. I’m used to living in a constant haze of anxiety and self-loathing, a state of mind in which everything that fails to happen fails to happen because I’m a failure. For a long time, that was how I felt about this book. It had taken me so long to write because I wasn’t a real writer. I was struggling to end it because I was a dilettante. It wasn’t that it was an enormously ambitious novel about money and the American id — it was that I sucked. Now that I’ve finished it, I feel less that way. I still worry that it’s not good, but that’s a constant with me and my writings. I love them, I hate them, I cannot judge them.

But there’s another very good reason there hasn’t been much activity hereabouts for the last few weeks: I’m exhausted. I’m not exhausted from writing, though that’s also the case; I’m exhausted by the world, and its incessant spinning. I’ve had a lot of individual thoughts about what’s happening in the world right now over the last few weeks, most of them of the morbidly humorous variety, but things keep moving at such a pace that they get swarmed and dragged under by other events and other thoughts before I can even articulate them. And besides, I think I learned something from the late unpleasantness among the American electorate, and it’s not just that nobody gives a shit what I have to say: I’m wrong all the time. Not that I didn’t already know that. And not that I’m wrong about everything. But I had some unexamined assumptions — or, more like, semi-examined assumptions — that have proven to be untrue.

Chief among these is that I always assumed there were adults in the car who had their eyes on the road and their hands at ten and two on the wheel. I figured that Donald Trump, a fatuous gasbag, a transparent con-man, a villain of nearly comic book proportions, would be stopped. I thought that the unending torrent of scandal, the stern warnings of editorial pages, the uproar from mainstream politicians of both parties, the clear distain from every living President, and so on, would eventually dissuade enough people that he couldn’t win. I wasn’t optimistic about a Clinton presidency — though I do think she gets a bad rap, I think the political environment after a narrow political win in such a nasty election was going to be completely impossible for an old-school Democratic insider to navigate, especially one with so much baggage — but I was pretty sanguine about the Clinton campaign. And though it did take a spectacular confluence of events to beat her, she still lost, and by the lights I usually use to guide myself, that shouldn’t have been possible. I tried not to be one of the smug elites who sneered at Trump, especially given that I’m closely related to a fair number of people who voted for him. But it drove something home to me: the American experiment is fragile, and it may have shattered without my noticing.

I say that this assumption is semi-examined because the entire thesis of my book, and a lot of my political/economic thinking for many years, is exactly that there are no adults driving the car, just people, and even the smartest people are pretty dumb. How did I write 200,000 words on the themes of cognitive bias and rampant irresponsibility, and completely miss this? I don’t know. I wasn’t unaware of the history. Vietnam—>Watergate—>Iran-Contra—>Lewinsky—>9/11—>Iraq War—>Great Recession—>Tea Party—>Trump. That’s an unrelenting maelstrom of evidence that even the adults in the room aren’t really in control of anything, that they’re still making decisions based on self-interest, imperfect information, delusion, and group identity. And yet.

It’s left me shaken. By my lights, the first month of Trump’s Presidency have been just as ridiculous and troubling as I expected. From the spectacle of the President and aides examining documents related to a North Korean missile launch in the middle of a crowded restaurant with their smartphones on, to the blatant inhumanity and idiocy of his attempts to ban people from certain countries form the United States, it’s all exactly as bad as I thought it would be, and if I were still as sure of the roles that institutions and elites play in the society, I would be finding it hilarious. But Trump’s campaign was just as chaotic and ridiculous as his administration has been thus far. A huge chunk of the country either didn’t care, or didn’t care enough to abandon their political identity to guard against this. I realize now that one of my own biases, to which I was not previously totally insensitive but which it is difficult to police, is that I am exactly one of the elites that people were rebelling against by voting for Trump. My tribe is the tribe of the big city, the well-educated, the multicultural — the winners, more or less, of the last 40 years of American history. I’ve always been keenly aware of the privilege afforded to me by wealth, and I’ve grown increasingly aware of the privilege afforded me by my race over the last five years or so, but I think I missed the degree to which I was a part of an increasingly small class of people for whom the American story, the one white Americans have been telling themselves for a hundred years or more, continued to ring true. It’s true that liberals have lost a lot at the ballot box, and my own preferred political policies involve higher taxes and a more robust welfare state and slavery reparations and gun control and gay rights and so on and so forth — but every time taxes got cut, I benefitted; every time Hondas and Volvos got cheaper to buy, I benefitted; every time a new piece of technology emerged, I benefitted; every time urban renewal led to gentrification, I benefitted; every time a big city got more liberal, I benefitted. The practical effects of the national abdication of my agenda touched me, personally, very little, and so I think I came to believe that, in the end, the natural order was that life would march forward in more or less orderly fashion, and everybody would come to understand that the things that had made my life a richer, better place would eventually work for them. In short, I took my eye off the ball, and I feel like I just woke up to the reality that reason doesn’t win the day and the good manager model of bureaucracy and politics wasn’t the inevitable victor, in part because the good managers were almost all more or less like me. All of this despite the fact that I have no faith in humanity and a low opinion of people who have high opinions of themselves. Holy shit!

I’m meandering a bit now, but you should take this as evidence of how hard it has been to organize all my thoughts lately. That last, very long paragraph could be annotated in almost every sentence, and if I were writing this for something other than my blog I probably would be doing just that. Bleh.

One thing I want to be very clear about, however, is that, despite all the hand-wringing above, I have reached some conclusions, and they’re not all like, “I should empathize with Trump voters more.” In fact, as a person who has a tendency (to paraphrase baseball great Theo Epstein) to view the world from 30,000 feet, I actually see that set of gymnastics from people on the left as a self-defeating exercise in setting back their own agenda. It’s valuable to empathize with Trump voters more because they consistently vote against politicians and policies that will help them; but the point there is to get them to vote with you so you can implement your ideas. Going further than that would perpetuate the American story that most people of color have had to tell themselves for most of American history: what white people want, they get; if black and brown people benefit, it’s more or less by accident; and if white people want black and brown people to suffer, they will. Politics isn’t a game — it can be deadly — but it absolutely must be gamed.

This has got way longer than I meant for it to, so I’m just going to go into list mode now:

(1) I joined the Democratic Party. Despite being a liberal, I’ve never been a Democrat. I’m over that. The only power is in unity; the only unity is in party, at least in the American political context. Another semi-examined assumption: I have always preached that letting the perfect be the enemy of the good was ultimately destructive; and yet I’ve boycotted the Democrats because they were less liberal than I wanted.

(2) I re-registered to vote in OR-2, where the condo I own is. I spend a fair amount of my time there, and my vote matters more there. I own nothing in Portland; there’s a strong argument, actually, that almost all of my actual interests are in Bend — the family business, the family property, my own personal property, etc.

(3) Marching is good, and I plan to do more of it, but it matters less than other actions. It is important to confront Republican members of congress with what they’re doing, and what they’re enabling. That’s one of the ways in which empathy can matter — it’s tempting to view them as inhuman monsters but they’re not. They do not like to be shamed, yelled at, annoyed, or whatever. I think one of the reasons that Republicans are in power in this country despite the fact that their voters are a minority is that a lot of us gave up on this kind of thing.

(4) Resist at every opportunity, and that even includes symbolic shit like buying from Nordstrom. It will remind you of what’s important.

(5) Be wary of our own versions of Fox News and Breitbart. This is empathy, too — conservatives are not necessarily less than liberals; we are all human animals. It stands to reason that we would be susceptible to the same forces, ie, confirmation bias and apophenia. In fact, you can already see it happening.

(6) Facebook is for organizing, venting, and animal videos. It is not where you should get your news.

(7) It’s time to understand that the boogeyman of the “Mainstream Media” is in fact one of the most important sinews that has held America together, and buckling to the right-wing idea that it is lying or impossibly biased against you is empowering the forces of conspiracy, mendacity, and chaos. Read the Washington Post. Read the New York Times. Read the Wall Street Journal. Don’t suspend disbelief, remain critical, but do not cocoon yourself in liberal propaganda.

(8) Recognize allies when you see them. Backbiting and infighting are stupid.

(9) Spend a few minutes every day unplugged. Go running, or for a walk. Read a book. Put a cowboy hat on your cat. Play checkers with your kid. Smoke a cigarette. Take a bath. Play the guitar. Write a note to your girlfriend and tape it to the refrigerator. Eat an apple on the back porch. Go swimming. Juggle. Go to a play. Lie in your bed with headphones on listening to Wilson Pickett. Drink coffee in the shower. Watch a black-and-white movie. Try to read something in French. Wander around the library trying to figure out which book you want to read. Mow the lawn without earbuds in. Meditate. Ride a train over a bridge and look at the scenery.