Now We Can See
I picked the wrong month to give up scotch
Welcome to The Experiment, where if Nick Lowe can ask what’s so funny ‘bout peace, love, and understanding, we have some questions about what is so meritorious or even advisable about sobriety. This week we’re talking about drinking, and more specifically, not. That’s right; it’s a very special edition of The Experiment this week.
We pop the cork with “Women Who Drink,” an excerpt from Sarah Hepola’s deservedly ballyhooed memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. We chase that with a double shot of sobriety: “One Day at a Time” from my good friend Jamie Wollrab and an encore from Alfonso “Poncho” Nevárez with “How I’m doing.” And to clear our heads, Sonia Van Meter shows up with an order of fried galactic optimism with “The Glory of Trek.”
And of course, we always remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do (teaching robots empathy), read (Aliyya Swaby broke my heart), watch (welcome to my new religion, Apple TV’s Ted Lasso), and listen to (a stellar Roberta Flack reissue). Seriously, people, there’s TONS of good stuff to read this week.
And you get this for free, but if you insist, you can buy merch for 35% off, toss something into the tip jar, and pre-order my book. Or you can just enjoy this newsletter and share it with friends, because that’s why we’re doing this in the first place.
But first, are you doing a Dry January?
I am taking the month off from the sauce along with 13% of my fellow Americans. For those of you unfamiliar with the annual practice, many people give up alcohol for a month after the holidays. In the states we call it Dry January, or Dryuary. Britons call it Dry Jan, which for me recalls an especially whiny member of TV’s Brady Bunch and is the better for it. Apparently most of us have never even heard of a Dry January, to which I say, liars. And for those of you whose month-long shore leave from whisky river survived the January 6 capitol invasion of Meal Team Six, good on you. Dryuary lost a lot of soldiers that day.
My reason is a combination of those listed above. Yes, I’ve been drinking too much. Yes, I need a reset, and yes, like millions of you I was drinking more during COVID-19. All of this is true but falls short of the whole truth, which is that living through Donald Trump’s America is more than any sober man should have to endure. I got through the 2016 campaign and the subsequent cruise up the Congo River that was the last four years like a lot of you — one blessed bent elbow at a time. Whisky made it easier to fuzz the nagging question about just how seriously we were to take a wannabe Mussolini who lacked the good sense not to look directly at an eclipse.
“It is an iron law of history that those who will be caught up in the great movements determining the course of their own times always fail to recognize them in their early stages,” wrote Stefan Zweig in his memoir, The World of Yesterday.
Whisky made it easier to fuzz the nagging question about just how seriously we were to take a wannabe Mussolini
Zweig was a celebrated novelist, playwright, and journalist from the Austro-Hungarian Empire who was famous all around the world before World War II. But that’s the funny thing. He had no idea he was living in the time before World War II. He thought he was living in a time of progress and cosmopolitan brotherhood. When he first heard of Adolf Hitler, “the name meant nothing particular to me,” he wrote. “We did not notice the danger. Those few writers who had gone to the trouble of reading Hitler’s book did not look seriously at his program, but laughed at his pompous prose.” Hitler, they said, was “a mere beer-hall agitator who could never be dangerous.”
A buzz just made laughing at the horror of the last few years easier. Listening to loved ones say they were going to give him a chance after he ran the most nakedly racist campaign since Richard Nixon, seeing the media proclaim “Today, he became president” whenever he managed to read from a Teleprompter, whenever we were told we were overreacting and shouldn’t take him literally, whenever reporters traveled to a Pennsyltucky diner to divine the economic anxiety of working class (read: white) voters, whenever we were told, “Fuck your feelings,” whenever we were blamed for “cancel culture” for demanding a long-overdue reckoning with racism, whenever a liberal leader’s slightest imperfection somehow counterbalanced another “both-sidesism” when the President of the United States of America broke a law on live television, was found to have illegally used campaign funds to pay hush money to his lady friend, blackmailed an ally with foreign aide to force them to do opposition research on his political rival, or refused to agree to the Marvin K. Mooney Rule of Democracy which is that if you lose you leave… Yes, I know it’s a lot. The Trump presidency was an unbroken run-on sentence full of tweets of fury, signifying everything but appearing as unserious as a drunken clown at a child’s birthday party. Sure, it’s in bad taste, we were told, but don’t you think you are making too big a deal?
Sometimes there really is a wolf.
Sometimes there really is a wolf, and this isn’t the first time a free people didn’t listen. “It is difficult to rid yourself, in only a few weeks, of thirty or forty years of private belief that the world is a good place,” wrote Zweig.
A drink or several just made it easier to quiet the questions. And then the pandemic set in, and everything sped up and stopped at the same time. On television every day the President of the United States told us… Oh, never mind. You were there. Last year was a blur, a delicious, amber-colored, peaty, numbing blur.
America needed a reset, and so did I. Now I have to see things clearly and live with the discomfort. Armed mobs storming capitols never show up well-dressed. No one carves sonnets into doors. It is hard, when looking at a shirtless man in a viking helmet, to see anything other than a sorry sort who deserves to have his teeth caved in by a crowbar. I have not been this angry for this long for years. Whisky never solved any problems, and I know violence is not the answer, but they both seem like good options right about now.
It was easier to pretend that Trumpism was a ridiculous hypothetical before he incited his followers to attack the capitol and beat a police officer to death with fire extinguishers. After the events of January 6 — and truly I have no patience for the academic tomfoolery to police the names we give to that national trauma — Godwin’s Law was written into the United States Code. Arnold Schwartzenegger compared the attack to Kristallnacht, an anti-Jewish pogrom, and I appreciate his sincerity, but this wasn’t that.
Hitler looked like a doofus when he showed up, too. January 6 was a farcical failure, like Hitler’s beerhall putsch, in which a little light treason and dead policemen earned him a few months in prison. Trump was only trying to hold onto power, not exterminate a race of people. At this point, Trump poses a greater threat to our democracy than to our safety. He still cuts a ridiculous figure of incompetence over our national skyline. Hitler built the Autobahn. Trump couldn’t even schedule infrastructure week. He will exit stage far right next week the same minoritarian fraud he has ever been.
Trump is no Hitler, but about half of his followers seem well-suited to Naziism. In his seminal post-war analysis of mass movements, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer argued that it would be hard for “a Hitler or a Stalin to rise in a country with an established tradition of freedom,” by which he meant his adopted homeland of the United States, because “the tradition of freedom … is a tradition of revolt.”
Hitler built the Autobahn. Trump couldn’t even schedule infrastructure week.
I’ll give the January 6 insurrectionists one thing. They are revolting. Apparently the Obertwitterführer was horrified to survey his Instagram Army on Fox News and discover them oh so déclassé. To paraphrase Pogo, we have met the enemy, and he is tacky AF. And thanks to their enthusiasm for anti-social media, their shenanigans were instantly broadcast to the world for us all to doomscroll.
Trump did not send his best, their brightest. A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken January 10-13 found that 85% of Republican voters do not think Trump should be disqualified from holding office in the future, 56% say he bears no responsibility at all for January 6, 66% say Trump has been acting responsibly since the election, 60% say Republican leaders should continue to “follow Trump’s leadership,” and 48% say Republican leaders have not gone far enough to support Trump’s unsubstantiated, go-home-you’re-drunk allegations about having the election stolen from him. The problem all along wasn’t Trump but the 71 million Americans who wanted to re-up for another four years of idiot-mitten fascism. If the brown shirt fits, you must acquit.
“We are none of us very proud of our political blindness at that time, and we are horrified to see where it has brought us,” wrote Zweig.
Wes Anderson based The Grand Budapest Hotel very, very loosely on Zweig’s memoir. Both end darkly, if cryptically. Zweig was Jewish. When the Nazis came to Austria, he and his wife left, first to England, then to New York, and finally to Brazil, where they, heartbroken at seeing a once vibrant Europe succumb to violence and hatred, died of an intentional drug overdose in 1942. They were not American and can be forgiven for not believing in happy endings.
It falls to us now to see this thing through with clear eyes and full hearts. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it took a bit longer to rebuild all of western Europe. We can no longer afford the benumbing luxury of the blood-alcohol content of 2020. Trump’s autogolpe was a no go, and his Gravy SEALs are on the run, but only for a while, and neither those who take Trump literally nor his Republican apologists who take his voters seriously are going away on their own. It’s time for America to sober up and put down this rebellion of fools. And for that, we’re going to need a theme song. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “Now We Can See” by The Thermals, who are going to play us out.
Women Who Drink
by Sarah Hepola
Sarah Hepola is a helluva writer, the kind who when I read her prose I want to abandon mine. If she drank like she writes, hoo doggy. The New York Times called her 2015 memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, “a win-win. She got a better life. We have this book.” She’s at work on her second book now. In the meantime, she graciously allowed us to run this excerpt, which is so good I want to cry.
One Day at a Time
by Jamie Wollrab
When Jamie Wollrab told me he was giving up drinking, my first thought was “Damn, there goes one of my drinking buddies.” Luckily, I kept that to myself, and to this day that unspoken reaction ranks as one of my biggest regrets. As a counterpoint, one of my greatest joys has been seeing Jamie become himself in full in recovery. Jamie is fully alive now and was gracious enough to share his thoughts about getting sober with us in his debut in The Experiment.
How I’m doing
by Alfonso "Poncho" Nevárez, Jr.
My friend Alfonso "Poncho" Nevárez, Jr. did not run for re-election to the Texas legislature, where he was a colorful character in Austin, as famous for his Austin apartment full of electric guitars as when he allegedly threatened and admittedly put his hands on a Republican state lawmaker for calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement on people protesting an anti-immigration bill. After the last session, Texas Monthly called him “hotheaded, assertive, mischievous, and prone to brawling,” which could be read as a compliment but was intended differently.
Lately, he’s been most famous for accidentally dropping an official state house envelope at the Austin airport. There are two things about this envelope that matter to his story: inside were two grams of cocaine, and on the outside of the envelop was his name.
This piece originally ran August 7, 2020.
The Glory of Trek
by Sonia Van Meter
We must say goodbye to Sonia Van Meter, but not before she sends us off on the joy ride that was the season finale of season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery. Lordy, what a ride.
Who we’ve lost
This history professor
This ER physician
This priest
This 32-year-old
This Tuskegee Airman
This nana
This take
How we’re getting through this
Eatin’ worms
Finding graves
Naming dogs Max
Teaching robots empathy
Doing the lasso locomotion
Buying unregulated sperm on Facebook
Struggling through a new circuit workout
Learning Thelonious Monks’ tips for musicians
What I’m reading
Ronald Brownstein: “Republicans Confront the Consequences of Their Doomsday Rhetoric” - h/t Paul Begala
Democrats over the past decade have generally grown tougher in their portrayals of Republicans too, and no shortage of them have described Trump as a racist or a threat to American democracy. But even leaving aside the (considerable) extent to which he’s justified those labels, there’s still an imbalance: Democratic candidates, with the need to build coalitions that are more diverse both demographically and ideologically than the GOP’s, are much more likely to pledge to work with Republicans than to portray the party as endemically extremist. The equivalent to Republicans labeling Democrats as socialists or Marxists would be if the Georgia Senate candidates—much less Biden—described Republicans as authoritarians or fascists. In competitive races, that simply does not happen.
Jonathan Chait: “Republicans Oppose Impeachment Because It Makes Them Look Pro-Riot” - Love a good logic inversion in the morning
I detect a wee logical flaw. If Republicans are concerned about being lumped in with the rioters, they could vote to impeach the president who incited the riot. That would refute the charge quite effectively.
Ryan Holiday: “From America’s Oldest Veteran, Here Are 9 Lessons On Living” - Keep living, don’t die
The most animated Richard ever got was when he told me a story about the enormous pecan tree in his front yard. It seemed like an ordinary tree to me, until he told me his dog planted it seventy years ago. They had a pecan tree in the back, and the dog would grab the nuts and bury them in the front yard.
With glee, Richard told me how eventually the tree grew and now it’s so big it’s nearly pushing up the foundation of his house. He loved the absurdity of it—a dog planting a tree! He was laughing at it still, seven decades later. The philosopher Chrysippus supposedly died laughing at a donkey eating his figs.
Monica Hesse: “Trumpist masculinity reaches its high water mark” - Monica Hesse is a treasure for the world to find.
A whole taxonomy of Trumpist right-wing manhood could be developed from the Internet investigations, wanted posters and arrest affidavits now trickling out in the wake of last week’s riot at the Capitol. En masse, the photos show a conglomeration of weird beards, ammo and camo, and looks-like-somebody-got-a-Bass-Pro-gift-card-for-Christmas raging White masculinity.
Ann Hornaday: “The Trump cult has obliterated the line between citizenship and fandom, with deadly results” - Ann Hornaday, the Post’s chief movie critic, is one of my favorite social commentators
Rather than kicking ass and taking names, they looked like asses and made memes.
Ezra Klein: “Trump Has Always Been a Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing” - That feeling when you want to kill cynics uncynically
The problem isn’t those who took Trump at his word from the start. It’s the many, many elected Republicans who took him neither seriously nor literally, but cynically. They have brought this upon themselves — and us.
Mark Manson: “Why Good Minds Believe Bad Ideas” - h/t Ryan Holiday
The whole problem with social media is that the narratives that spread the furthest and loudest on these platforms tend to be anti-establishment and contrarian. These are the narratives that get repeated the most often, and therefore these become the narratives that come to define our culture.
But these narratives are hollow. They tear down structures but build nothing back up in their place. They point out the flaws of our experts and institutions and disregard the many things they get right.
This is why we’ve seen so many grassroots protest movements around the world the past ten years with no real aim or policy ideas—from Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party all the way up to the shitlords and morons invading the US Capitol last week.
Michael M. Phillips and Jennifer Levitz: “One Trump Fan’s Descent Into the U.S. Capitol Mob” - h/t Elie Jacobs
Sitting in his yard the day after he returned home, the court citation folded up in his Jeep Cherokee, he remained confident that someone will stop Joe Biden from becoming president on Jan. 20. He isn’t sure who. He isn’t sure how. But he is sure.
“There’s something getting ready to happen before the 20th,” he said.
Charles P. Pierce: “I'm Not Listening to Any Calls for 'Unity' From the People Who Fueled This” - In a war of words, you always want Charles Pierce on your side.
The gall. The sheer, unmitigated, steel-belted, gold-plated gall it takes for these people to make this argument, not a week after five people died in the worst battle in the U.S. Capitol since the Royal Marines blew town, can only be attributed to politicians who are confident that the forces of unreason and violence have their backs.
David Robson: “The myth of the online echo chamber” - We’re worrying about the wrong problems, people. Social media does not create echo chambers. Brains do.
Using a survey of 2,000 British adults, she found that the majority of people already reach outside their political comfort zone: they actively seek out additional sources that convey diverse views that do not match with their preconceptions. Indeed, just 8% of Dubois’s participants scored so low on her measures of media diversity that they could be considered at risk of living an echo chamber, visiting just one or two news services without other perspectives.
Aliyya Swaby: “Jordan’s story: Isolated, anxious and failing online classes, an 11-year-old Texas boy considered suicide” - Unbelievable reporting
One evening in early October, 11-year-old Jordan typed the following into a Google document:
“give me 10 GOOD reasons why I shuldnt kill myself here
Share here:”
No reasons were listed.
What we’re watching
I know I touted this last week, but Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology on Amazon Prime is worth your attention, especially the last installment, “Education.” Stick with it. It’s a bumpy flight, but they land the plane.
Ted Lasso is exactly what we all need right now, a relentlessly, radically optimistic coach who challenges us to hope. This show Gets Into It: divorce, toxic masculinity, hopepunk, joy, fraternity, growth, letting go… People the only mark against this show is that the premise is that a well-meaning straight white guy can come in and fix all your problems. Otherwise, this show is CPR for the transatlantic soul. As Stephen F. Thompson said on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, if you liked Friday Night Lights you will love Ted Lasso.
It is deeply warm-hearted. It'll hit you in that "Parks And Rec," "Good Place," Michael Schur kind of way. I found it increasingly moving as it went along, not only because it is a show about the transformative power of this one guy's decency, but it is also a show about these developing relationships between so many different characters on this show. This show cares about Ted Lasso the character, but it also cares about a bunch of other relationships, many of them unlikely, and I found basically all of them extremely satisfying. I loved this show.
The Journal’s Jason Gay was likewise won over.
I’m grateful for earnestness right now, to be honest. I’m far from the first observer to note how the warmth of “Ted Lasso” makes it an ideal escape at a time when merely glancing at the news makes anyone want to climb back under the covers. Not long ago, a Vanity Fair headline instructed “Bring Ted Lasso Energy Into Your Life”; The Ringer’s Miles Surrey wrote the show made him “want to be a better person.” Over this last appalling week, a few minutes of Ted has felt like prescription medicine. I don’t need to tell you these are not times of abundant positivity. Self-interest and cynicism abound.
Sometimes, you just want someone to say it’ll be OK. That’s why I’ve been turning to Ted Lasso, American optimist, soccer neophyte, who always sees a better day ahead.
It’s a fair measure of my love for this character that I read Gay’s piece and nearly started crying because I want to return to the world Ted Lasso created. If you have not visited, get your passport and get on a plane. Ted Lasso, the character and not the show, is the best of who we are. Watch Ted Lasso, and then go become Ted Lasso.
What we’re listening to
Whenever “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” or “Killing Me Softly” would come on the radio when I was a boy, mom would mention that she saw Roberta Flack back in the day. Come to find out that Flack, admitted to Howard University at 15, was a wunderkind who got discovered at a residency she had at an old club called Mr. Henry’s in DC. Pitchfork loves the reissue of First Take; I concur.
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If your new year’s resolution was to lose weight, try Noom, and you’ll quickly learn how to change your behavior and relationship with food. This app has changed my life. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works.
Headspace is a meditation app. I’ve used it for a couple years and am absolutely shocked at how much it’s taught me about managing my inner life. Try it free for a couple weeks. Don’t worry if you’ve never done it before. They talk you through it.
I now offer personal career coaching sessions through Need Hop.
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Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself comes out June 8 from Penguin Random House. There is no better way to support this book than to pre-order a copy. You’re going to love reading what really happened at the Alamo, why the heroic myth was created, and the real story behind the headlines about how we’re all still fighting about it today.
