Kelly Clarkson Was Right
It's about to get all hopepunk up in here
This week The Experiment brings you novelist Phoebe Fox, who tells us how reading has helped her understand her family better, and Robin Whetstone goes grocery shopping in post-Soviet Moscow, where a woman completely loses her mind over cheese. Also, I give her a T-shirt.
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to, like HBO’s Lovecraft Country, which portrays racism as a monster, which I suppose it is. And I finally discovered Ciara. By the way, if you usually skip over the “What I’m Reading” section, this is the week to dive back in. I tried to pare it down just the essential reads, and it’s still one of our longest reading lists. I guarantee you’ll learn something fun.
But first, did I ever tell you about Ann Richards’ big, red toothpick?
I came to Texas in 1994 to work for Ann Richards. She was running for re-election against George W. Bush. She lost, and badly. It felt like I had been dumped by millions of people, all at once, and in public. Our campaign manager, Mary Beth, looked at how poorly we were doing with white men and warned us not to cross the street in front of pick-up trucks driven by white dudes “because he’s probably trying to run you over.”
On election night, Ann’s granddaughter Lily, asked the Governor if this meant she was out of a job.
“Honey, this means everybody you know doesn’t have a job,” Ann told the then-second grader.
The campaign was like that, filled with good punchlines to soften the blows. I had a job interview first thing the next morning and am sure that my hangover contributed to me not getting hired. Lacking better options or any clue what I was doing with the rest of my life, I went into the campaign office where I discovered that misery did in fact love company. Every campaign I’ve ever worked took on the personality of its principal. In this case, the Governor was sober, so we did not drown our sorrows at the office. A chocolate cake was ordered from the bakery down the street and consumed in the conference room, most of us sitting on the floor like children, wanting someone to tell us it would be OK.
I remember so many details. The cake was so good I assumed it must have been made for fancier people, and for the last 26 years it has been the chocolate cake against which I have measured all that have come since. Ann wore a denim jacket with black leather sleeves and a Harley Davidson embroidered on the back. She was glowing again. She had lost her glow in the later stages of the death march that her re-election campaign had turned into, but the loss had returned it to her. But I guarantee you that everyone there remembers one detail above all others, for after she finished her piece of cake, she took out the biggest, reddest toothpick you ever saw and cleaned her teeth right in front of us while Mary Beth tried to console us. And if you think I didn’t stare in naked amazement then you have a better opinion of me than I deserve, and I wasn’t the only one. We still talk about it when we see each other.
And the Governor said what I have long considered one of the dumbest things people say:
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” she said to murmurs of agreement.
Until recently, I could not abide that saying, as my life to that point had presented me with ample evidence to the contrary and nothing since had persuaded me that saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” was anything other than a mindless aphorism on par with “everything happens for a reason.”
And then I discovered Ryan Holiday, whose excellent daily emails eventually drilled into my thick skull to diagram, with erudition and patience, the vastness of my wrongness. Usually, he starts by noting that Ernest Hemingway rewrote this part of A Farewell to Arms 46 times before landing here:
“The world breaks everyone,” he wrote, “and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”
Ryan likes to point out that the world is undefeated in 4.5 billion years. The T-Rex is just a fossil memory to this planet. Volcanos go extinct. The biggest monsters in history are just that, history, as will we be some day. Even Keith Richards will die, as will everyone who just made that hacky joke in their heads about how we really don’t know that yet, and that includes me.
And until we die, the world will try to break us. Eastern philosophy is better at this than we are, and especially better than Americans. We think everything going well is normal, and things going badly is the aberration. Rejections, injuries, and setbacks are normal. In fact, you can expect to experience five to six traumas in an average lifespan, according to Dr. Michaela Haas. This is why Hemingway wrote that you have to let the world break you. It’s so you can put yourself back together.
I’m not leading to a “gotta roll with the punches” conclusion, though how that phrase came into being puzzles me. Did fisticuffs so often occur on hillsides that rolling away became the preferred response to physical violence? (Just looked it up; it’s a boxing term for moving away from a punch to lessen its impact.)
This whole business of becoming stronger in our broken places has some science backing it up. Psychologists used to believe trauma had mostly negative effects because the people who sought treatment were the ones suffering. Resilience was considered rare, but apparently humans are a lot more resilient than previously thought. In fact, studies show that post-traumatic growth is about twice as common as post-traumatic stress.
The studies indicated that the PTGI has good internal validity, acceptable test-retest reliability, and scores on the scale are approximately normally distributed. The results also indicated that women tend to report more benefits from traumatic events than do men, and persons who have experienced these events report more positive changes than do persons who have not experienced extraordinary events.
Go back and read that last bit again. People are likelier to experience post-traumatic growth not in spite of the trauma but because of it. Do you realize what this means? Hemingway’s been peer-reviewed, as has Marcus Aurelius: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
We are, by any measure, going through a collective trauma right now. Even if we’re doing well and not one of the millions who lost a job or is relying on food banks, we’re all sharing in this experience in some way. Each of us is playing a role in the largest behavioral change in human history that immediately preceded the largest civil rights protests in our history during a presidential campaign that feels like the end of the world.
There’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere. If our country is experiencing a perfect storm of trauma, which is likelier to lead to beneficial growth than long-term harm, then we would expect to see sprouts of positive growth all around us, and in fact we are.
We’re adopting more dogs, taking more walks, going on more hikes, reading more books, and exercising so much that the United States can’t keep dumbbells or bicycles in stock. Social distancing forced innovations that resulted in a Democratic convention that was actually fun to watch. Americans haven’t been this enthusiastic about voting since before YouTube was invented. We are more mindful consumers now, shopping locally more, demanding more sustainable options. We are wasting less food. And working from home will change how we work in the future in ways that were unimaginable in February.
“People are seeing a different world,” said Leslie Perlow, a professor at Harvard Business School who has long evangelized for reforms to office life. “That’s going to create the revolution to change the way we work. A lot of this is possible in a way we never knew.”
Telecommuting post-COVID will allow families to spend more time together, which to parents of school-age children does not seem like a good thing right now. I can see how hard this is on all of you trying to deal with children while you’re in a Zoom meeting. I can see the cracks showing. But I can’t help but think that this time will end up being a happy memory for a lot of families that will end up closer than they otherwise would have.
We are all in this together and in fact always have been. It took humanity’s mass digital migration to make us all hyperaware of our connections to each other, and in many ways we are the better for it. We can never go back to normal. We can either stay broken or rebuild with resilience, like the new buildings in San Francisco engineered to survive earthquakes. And if we step out of the negative feedback loop we’re in, we can see that our accommodations to this pandemic are actually evolutions.
For a long time, I told myself a story that the 1994 election was a traumatic event, and I suppose it might have been. Instead of going to work for her administration in a second term, I went to work for a company where I gained two mentors, both of whom remain my friends to this day. Shortly after that, I started an opposition research firm in a rented bedroom, and five years ago I gave it to the employees. One of them is my wife, and she has built it into one of the top firms of its kind in the country. If Ann Richards had defeated George W. Bush, the world might have been a better place, but I’m not sure I would have lived a better life.
Oh, and Lily, the Governor’s grand-daughter? She now works for a senator who, if things go well, will be vice president of the United States of America this time next year. And if that happens, it will be in part because of, and not in spite of, the traumatic events of this year. Turns out her grandmother, and Kelly Clarkson as well, were right. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
But “everything happens for a reason”? Yeah, that’s still dumb.
Why Phoebe Reads
by Phoebe Fox
Phoebe Fox is the author of A Little Bit of Grace and the Breakup Doctor series; a past contributor and regular columnist for the Huffington Post, Elite Daily, and She Knows; and a former actor, entertainment reviewer, and radio personality. She’s been around the block, so why is she terrified to publish this essay about what’s she’s learned about her family through reading? You haven’t met her family.
Did our early troubles with my father and stepfather mean that my family, like Garp’s in John Irving’s wild ride of a novel, was “pre-disastered”? (Spoiler alert: Nope.)
Red Ticket: The Three Cheeses
by Robin Whetstone
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s, Robin sees a lady come unglued over the selection of cheese. Also, I give her a T-shirt that’s more of a benediction. And there’s the rainbow cars, which we really drove. But this is mostly about the cheeses, which isn’t really about cheese.
I knew exactly why the woman was screaming. It was the cheese, she said. The cheese was what finally pushed her over the edge.
RIP
How we’re getting through this
Making succotash
Driving the speed limit
Not crying (you’re crying)
Learning the “Dutch Reach”
Playing with the electoral map
Learning Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling
Clicking to end hunger — really — do this
Making healthy and easy banana “ice cream”
Listening to Ryan Holiday talk with Mark Manson
Buying Walker Lukens’ album of Willie Nelson covers
Buying a Pete Carroll T-shirt, a Pete Carroll lunch box…
Learning what Van Halen has to teach us about cooking
Hiring someone to lead a competitive intelligence team in Dallas
What I’m reading
Dr. Aaron E. Carroll: “When It Comes to Covid-19, Most of Us Have Risk Exactly Backward”
Too many view protective measures as all or nothing: Either we do everything, or we might as well do none. That’s wrong. Instead, we need to see that all our behavior adds up.
Umair Haque: “We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying.”
But when radicalized young men are killing people they have been taught to hate by demagogues right in the open, on the streets — a society has reached the beginnings of sectarian violence, the kind familiar in the Islamic world, and is at the end of democracy’s road.
Sarah Hepola: “What the Pandemic Taught Me About Old-Fashioned Romance”
Ryan Holiday: “Dear Dad, Please Don’t Vote For Donald Trump”
Ann Hornaday: “The best-kept secret in documentaries? It’s all in the casting.”
Philip Kennicott: “The Republican convention messed with something more fundamental than logic. It screwed up our sense of time.”
At times, parsing the temporal logic felt a bit like reading an E.E. Cummings poem: The president will redo what he never has done, which was done unto him by he who will undo it.
Kyle Kondit: “Presidential Expectations and the Race for the House”
We’ve previously noted in this space a study by respected political scientist Robert Erikson, who suggested that some high-information voters may be likelier to split tickets against the party of a presidential candidate they believe is strongly favored to win the election as a way to put a check on the person they believe is the likely winner. This sort of dynamic may have helped down-ballot Republicans in 2016, who may have benefited from (erroneous) projections of a Clinton victory, contributing to the ticket-splitting we saw in highly-educated, suburban districts where Republican House incumbents performed well even as Trump was significantly underperforming usual Republican presidential performance.
Modern Love: “Making Space in Marriage, Even as the Walls Close In”
NBC: “Active shooter drills are meant to prepare students. But research finds 'severe' side effects.”
Nolan Peterson: “Taking the Train to War: A U.S. Air Force Special Operations Pilot Remembers a Tank Battle in Ukraine”
Alexandra Petri: “The terrible dangers of weaponized soup”
It is the perfect weapon. It shows no mercy, not even a ladle bit.
Psychology Today: “Seven Questions for Donald Meichenbaum”
Nathan Rabin: “I'm sorry for coining the phrase ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’”
Michelle Singletary: “Yes, your unemployment benefit is taxable income. But it shouldn’t be.”
Margaret Sullivan: “Fact-checking Trump’s lies is essential. It’s also increasingly fruitless.”
Glen Weldon: “In 'I'm Thinking Of Ending Things,' A Couple Gets Stuck In A Dreamlike Limbo”
But let's be real, or, you know, Real: That whole notion, especially as it's presented here, is a facile, boring one — the kind of pseudo-intellectual, solipsistic nugget of received, pre-digested "wisdom" you might remember getting spouted by the most tendentious, arrogant mansplainer in your college dorm, that one time at a party when he put down his acoustic guitar long enough to corner you over by the Funyons and demand you read Bukowski.
What I’m watching
Stay with me here: horror with monsters, but the real horror is racial violence. This isn’t H.P. Lovecraft. This is Black actors, show runners, and producers telling a story about racism in the world Lovecraft, a big ol’ racist, created. If all HBO’s Lovecraft Country had going for it was Jurnee Smollett (Friday Night Lights, Underground) getting to be all moviestarry, dayenu. But there’s a lot more under the hood powering this engine. The Pop Culture Happy Hour discussion about Lovecraft Country is well worth your time if you want to get more context before diving in; highly recommended is Glen Weldon’s winning, funny review.
That H.P. Lovecraft — troubled, imaginative, racist — should inspire a book and a series that centers Black characters, and that expressly uses his own creations to flesh out the inner lives he denied them in his own work, was not something he could have imagined. You can't help but wonder what the guy'd do, were he to somehow find himself confronted with that knowledge, a truth his White-supremacist mind could not begin to comprehend.
I mean.
There'd ... there'd probably be gibbering, right?
Gotta figure.
Stands to reason.
What I’m listening to
Resolved: Ciara and Russell Wilson are fly as hell. Wilson has taught me a lot getting my head right; turns out, he has a lot to teach about getting your heart right, too. Step-parents, you who do one of the most human jobs ever, this one is for you.
“And I think ultimately—you know the thing that I’ve learned the most and I think this is real, the thing that I’ve learned the most is that being a stepdad and then also having our little daughter as well, being a stepdad, you really find out what love’s like. It’s interesting. It’s easy to love somebody that’s blood and everything else, but when you can love somebody just like it’s your own child and everything else, that’s what real love is like.”
Russell Wilson loves so unashamedly in this video that I found it embarrassing, which I think tells you everything you need to know about the version of toxic masculinity I’m unpacking.
But that isn’t the song that turned me into a Ciara fan. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a year late to this party, but “Thinkin Bout You” is my new heartbeat.
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