Binging America
How do we witness what is happening and not lose what we love about this world?
Shortly after the 2016 elections, I was getting barbecue with my friend Lippy, who is one of the best and funniest people I know. We don’t talk politics that much, because we mostly agree except when we don’t and that our real lives — marriages, children, careers — are more important for us to deal with when we’re lucky enough to get together. A regular life provides enough drama for a good lunch, and witnessing each other is the kindness our friendship provides. So it wasn’t completely out of nowhere when we were driving to lunch and Lippy says, “You know, I’m reading the entertainment section of the paper first these days,” and I felt that so deeply that it surprised me. I was glad I wasn’t the only one.
Last week I argued that consciously withdrawing attention from the President wasn’t just good for our mental health but our democracy — basically, paying attention not only comes at a cost to us but manifests a reality star as president. And that’s all true, but so is our duty to witness what is happening and to survive it intact. How can you engage with this democracy and not lose what you love about life?
For me, I have become aggressive in my consumption of new music. I use the Shazam app to discover new songs on TV, on commercials, even in restaurants, and then I download then into my Recently Added playlist that I listen to on an evolving loop. New songs cycle in as older songs shuffle off to the broader song list to be rediscovered later. I play it relentlessly to establish this soundtrack in my head to insulate myself from the world outside my head. The story behind Jamie Cullum’s “Taller” exists in my head with Trump’s contention that Mars is part of the moon, and I know which one is the world I want to live in.
Seeking out what is good in this world feels like a betrayal to those in the fight as well as to those who sleep in cages under metallic blankets crying for their mothers, to the staggeringly high number of people in this boom town who go to bed hungry, to the children who are given “The Talk” about how not to get murdered by the police. What right do I have to tell you that Gloria Gaynor has put out a gospel album that sounds fresh? (Seriously, listen to “Back on Top.”) The respite of joy that a good chord progression can provide me feels like the worst indulgence when state legislatures are LARPing The Handmaid’s Tale.
The problem is that we’re binging America like we binge television. Linda Holmes wrote in the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter about the moral challenge of watching a show like When They See Us, the Netflix miniseries about the Central Park Five. (It’s good. Watch it. I wrote two short paragraphs about it on Wednesday. Click here and scroll to the bottom.) She wrote that when you’re watching something like this, looking at your phone for a distraction is literally looking away from the truth.
Things like Roots and When They See Us are supposed to be painful — that's part of the point. You are meant to absorb some sense of the horrors of slavery, or of coerced confessions; that's part of what animates the filmmaker. To turn away, even temporarily, feels cowardly. Who am I, or who are we, to need a break in the middle of a series because we cannot withstand even watching a story about something that happened to people in real life? It's a fair question. Very fair.
I have to make a confession. Remember that audio of migrant children crying for their mothers at the detention center? I remember what many of you wrote about it, the horror and rage it inspired. I never listened to it because I worry that if I have those tiny voices inside my head that I’ll never draw a happy breath again, so I listen to the crescendo of Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” and wait for the drop. This country that I love is becoming a living nightmare, but inside my head Mitski Laycock is singing at night for the birds who will sing in the morning.
How do we witness what is happening and not lose what we love about this world? How do we make sense of nonsense without losing our minds? A week ago I linked to Stephen Colbert’s interview in The New York Times, and it’s been bugging me because he is speaking directly to this question.
As it turns out, what Colbert and his show offer — an “explicative deconstruction of the day’s news,” as he puts it — is exactly what many people want. “It’s so confusing today,” said Colbert, who is also an executive producer on Showtime’s animated comedy “Our Cartoon President.” “And that confusion leads to anxiety, and the anxiety makes the audience want the jokes.” Which, Colbert added, is “the same reason we want to do them.”
For a while my wife would get up every day and watch Colbert. She tried listening to news podcasts, but often they would play a recording of the President saying something, and his voice seemed out of place in our bathroom. His voice doesn’t belong there, and the news was a horror, so out with the news and in with the comedy. Listening to Colbert talk about the news felt better.
Colbert has lived through his own horrors. He lost his father and two brothers at a young age, and he turned to comedy albums to ease him from a traumatic reality into sleep.
I was absolutely leveled. But every night I went to sleep listening to George Carlin’s “Class Clown,” “Wonderfulness” by Bill Cosby, “Richard Nixon: A Fantasy,” by David Frye. Then later Steve Martin, “A Wild and Crazy Guy” and “Let’s Get Small.” Comedy allowed me to go to bed. It gave me a moment of release and happiness. I know that’s true.
That moment of release, whether it’s Steve Martin or Anderson .Paak, helps us all deal with this, because as Colbert says, “When you’re laughing, you’re not afraid.” Colbert isn’t spending a ton of money on jokes. If you watch his show closely, most of what he does is to repeat back what the President said or tweeted in a funny voice, remixing our reality star president from news into comedy. Taking the President literally and interpreting his tone as normal is to twist our understanding of the world into a knot. Repeating his words as absurd sets everything back into place so we can deal with the world on terms we can live with.
I wish I had a good answer for how to remain happy in unhappy times. Maybe it’s to be in this world but not of it. Maybe it’s putting away childish things while children are in cages. I keep returning to music, keeping the soundtrack in my head fresh, downloading new songs every week, cataloging this culture we’re trying to save while I consider not feeling incredibly guilty about it.
What I’m reading
Big change that doesn’t seem that big: “For the first time, U.S. adults this year will spend more time using their mobile devices than they’ll spend watching TV.”
Household wealth has hit a record high in the United States, which means it’s probably smart to start looking for economic canaries. Here’s one: “Homes that were resold within 12 months after being purchased made up 7.2% of all transactions in the first quarter, the biggest share since the start of 2010, Attom Data Solutions reported Thursday. Meanwhile, the average return on investment, not including renovations and other expenses, dropped to 39%, an almost eight-year low.” The profiteers are getting out of the market, y’all, which is not good for “cities on the verge of a housing crisis.”
This also isn’t good news for the economy: “Already, more than 7,150 store closures have been announced by U.S. retailers in 2019, according to Coresight Research. And it’s not even June.” The record for a full year is 8,139 closures in 2017. Walmart, Costco and Target are doing well because spending by low-income consumers is up 6 percent this year. Consumer debt is at an all-time high, which means if the economy turns — and the disappointing jobs report indicates that it might be, as well as the news that the trade wars have wiped out the Trump tax cuts for the middle-class — then poor people will stop spending first, which will accelerate contraction in retail, and then the layoffs start, and people will spend less money, and pretty soon we have another economic meltdown.
Speaking of meltdowns, the HBO miniseries has increased tourism at Chernobyl by 40 percent. You could say tourism is exploding, but that would be awful and frankly beneath you. And holy crap but Russia is making its own miniseries about Chernobyl.
Employee activism is on the rise. So what happens when some of your employees want you to stop making movies in Georgia but others want you to stay and fight for what you believe in by engaging with the community? The suggestion box first became sentient, and then it divided.
Calling your cable company and threatening to cut the cord unless they sweeten the deal doesn’t work anymore. Here’s why.
Huh. Boeing made a 737-900ER that runs on biofuel.
This is why I will never complain about the heat in Texas ever again.
When YouTube decided to ban accounts with hate speech, this probably isn’t what they intended.
GPS causes your hippocampus to atrophy and could make you more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease.
Turns out that having fathers take time off to help when a child is born results in mothers needing less anti-anxiety drugs.
Dude: “we found that people relied more on the same advice when they thought it came from an algorithm than from other people.”
I didn’t know “green-mailing” a company was illegal now, that the incarceration rate in this country is at a 20-year low, that pregnancy is as taxing on a body as running a marathon or completing the Tour de France, or that camel milk might be the next super food.
What I’m watching
So there’s this hip-hop artist named Solvan “Slick” Naim, and he loves his dog Bruno, so much so that he put his dog on Instagram. Bruno became an Instagram star, and Netflix gave them a series that Naim wrote, directed, and starred in. Right now all of these words would make me not want to watch this show, but here’s the thing: It’s Bruno is good. It knows exactly what it wants to do and nails it. Because each episode is only about 15 minutes long and it has an off-kilter vibe (Can we call it comic realism?), it’s tempting to think this is a Gen Z take on alternative comedy. It feels loose, but Naim has tight control on the tone. All of which makes me excited that Naim is writing and directing a hip-hop musical version of Romeo and Juliet for Netflix.
What I’m listening to
The final word goes to “Slick” Naim (get it?) and his feel-good anthem, “Turnt Tonight.”
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