The Beclowning of America
After the hurricane of fire in Los Angeles, we need to rebuild our news infrastructure
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I have never believed or for that matter approved of anyone who says they have no regrets in life. Really, not one thing you wish you could go back and redo, like choosing not to buy Yahoo! stock in 1995, or Google in 1996?1 I get it, of course. The point is to accept the past in order to live in the present, and that’s all well and good, but I still regret that I didn’t save Chester.
Chester was a good dog. A golden retriever with a lush, golden coat, Chester had a smile for everyone and never barked until that one night when we thought the downstairs neighbors were cooking something foul-smelling again. My girlfriend and I were trying to get to sleep, but Chester, quite uncharacteristically, was barking and making a fuss. I lost my patience at him and should have chosen my last words to him with greater care, and that’s piled on top of the main regret. Also, Chester never barked. I should have listened.
I don’t remember our housemate knocking on our bedroom door and yelling for us to wake up. I do remember getting out of bed and looking through the kitchen into the living room that was full of fire, which meant we couldn’t get out the front door, and the window in our bedroom would be too much of a jump. The window in the bathroom next to our bedroom was our only possible exit.
I should have listened.
Without thinking—or, for that matter, putting on a single stitch of clothing—I grabbed my girlfriend and led her out of our bedroom and to the left into the bathroom. Again, without thinking, I opened the window that was a lot smaller than I remembered, punched out the screen, and climbed through, cutting my left shin badly on the metal frame. Later that night an ER doctor stitched me up, and when I notice the scar these days I think about what happened next.
I wasn’t thinking. My girlfriend, I knew, was physically capable of climbing through the window. I stood outside the window, naked and bleeding, yelling at her that I was ready to help her through the window. She was thinking, though, and she would no sooner leave Chester in a burning building than anything in the world. But Chester was too big for her, and panicking. As she struggled to lift him through the window high off the floor, I knew she couldn’t do it.
I could have, though. At the time I was a college rower with complete confidence in my strength. I could have wrestled Chester through that window, and because of me my girlfriend had to leave her beloved dog to die of smoke inhalation in the bathtub. She was sobbing when his barking stopped and she didn’t stop for days. You’re goddamn right I have regrets.
The firetrucks, by the way, arrived too late to save anything. What wasn’t reduced to ash smelled indelibly of smoke. The smell we misjudged as awful cooking was a smoldering electrical fire that Chester was trying to warn us about. I lost a lot, including precious clothes I inherited from my late uncle, a Doritos football phone I was fond of, my entire music collection in that pre-streaming era, my Ironman road bike, and much more, but I don’t regret any of that. There’s something about standing outside naked and watching your house burn down that resets the counters to zero.
Sometimes the most accurate predictions come from the longer horizons. In Dec. 2023, Joe Biden warned, “The greatest threat Trump poses is to our democracy, because if we lose, we lose everything.” In that same month, Donald Trump told a rally in Iowa, “Thanks to crooked Joe’s breathtaking weakness, the world is going up in flames. The whole world is up in flames.”
Well, apparently they can both be right, though I have a hard time ascribing the hurricane of fire in Los Angeles to Biden’s infirmities. Obviously, the fires are caused by a confluence of drought, high winds, and the accelerant of climate change.
Just as obviously, though less remarked upon, our ability to successfully govern ourselves in a democracy is falling victim to another confluence of antisocial media, the slow death of the news industry, and Trumpism. My friend Frank Spring calls this “The Bullshitening,” and though I would never stoop to such coarse vulgarity—heaven forefend!—it’s a good name for our inability to rise to our own defense.
Perhaps if Los Angeles had exploded in hell flames a year ago, or if this had happened in a less iconic city not filled with celebrities who have para-social relationships with millions of Americans, then maybe we would not have beclowned ourselves as a republic. Because as literally horrifying as it is to see a great American city burn while friends and relatives join the more than 100,000 who had to flee their houses, seeing how we are responding as a country is humiliating.
If Trump, whose first instinct in response to the fires’ outbreak was to call Gavin Newsom “Governor Newscum,” had not been elected, then Elon Musk would not have attained this pinnacle of political power. If he were “reduced” to being merely the richest man in the world, then him posting that the Los Angeles Fire Department “prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes” simply because the LAFD released a “racial equity action plan” four years ago, maybe we could have more successfully and correctly categorized his reaction as the unserious reaction of an increasingly silly man.
But now he’s kinda-sorta in co-charge of an unaccountable and extragovernmental effort to rip up the bureaucratic state who owns a major platform to disseminate news. No sooner did Musk shoot off about DEI than Greg Gutfeld expanded on that point in a discussion about the fires on Fox News:
When they say it's DEI -- when I say it's DEI, let's say I say it is DEI -- it's not my fault. You know, I can blame the policy because you put the policy forward. You put it into my head. You boasted about it. You talked about equity and inclusion until you were blue in the face. And now when incompetence comes into question after pushing it so openly, it's our fault to have that thought in our head?
DEI is credibility Ozempic. You know when you see an overweight friend? And suddenly they lose a ton of weight? Do you attribute it to a gym routine or a low-carb diet? No, you go, that person's on Ozempic. Now you may be wrong. But because Ozempic is everywhere and talked about, you assume it's Ozempic.
It's the same with diversity hires. You see an incompetent minority in a leadership position, you think DEI hire because that's what was sold to you. And it's unfair to that leader because that leader might actually have the qualifications. They might have done it the hard way. But you don't know that because of DEI. The difference between DEI and Ozempic is at least Ozempic works.
And if Trump, who came awfully close when called upon to place his hand over his heart at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, had not won, then Mark Zuckerberg would not have dismantled fact-checking at his growing social media and tech empire that now includes Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.
It’s bad enough that the reality of a representative democracy requires citizens to hold space for intellectual cowards and moral simpletons, doubly so if they are billionaires. Which, you know, nifty. Even morons get to be Americans. Yee. See also: haw.
My problem with these two winners of the Most Deserved to Be Punched in the Face Olympics isn’t their politics or their wealth. It’s that between the two of them, they control how most Americans under 40 get their news. And their choices with their social media platforms, combined with their pell-mell investments into AI, have corrupted the American experiment to such an extent that many now believe that all of Los Angeles has been evacuated, all the water is gone, Gov. Newsom is resigning, the LA fire chief is trans, and the Hollywood sign is on fire. None of this, of course, is true, but if you go on their verdammt platforms, you will swear otherwise.
More than a 100,000 Los Angelenos have become climate refugees, and the most powerful people in this country are blaming it on the diversity efforts of the Los Angeles Fire Department. This is the Beclowning.
By the time my grandmother arrived the next morning, I was feeling good and sorry for myself. Not about Chester, mind you, but for all my stuff. I was an insufferable 20-year-old who didn’t appreciate that he had a dad who took him and his girlfriend in in the middle of the night after a quick trip to the hospital. I could have been happy to be alive, sorry about Chester, or empathetic about my girlfriend’s grief, but no. I was sorry about my stuff, and I shared my tale of woe with my grandmother.
I called her Tutu. She was part Hawaiian and glamorously lovely, but the most important thing about her was her determined optimism. Good luck complaining around her. I thought, what with my house having recently burned down and with it all my stuff, I might be allowed to indulge in a little woe-is-me.
I was not. She stopped me right away, perhaps in mid-complaint.
“You know what?” she said. “Think of all the things in your closet that you had that didn’t fit quite right. Or that you didn’t really like. Now you don’t have them. And when you buy new things, you can only buy what you like. You can start over fresh.”
And I did, or at least I tried to. I don’t own a single thing now that I bought then to replace all my stuff, and the girl and I parted ways before we graduated. But my Tutu turned my head around, and it’s stayed that way ever since.
I’ve been thinking of what my Tutu said as people in Los Angeles understandably mourn their stuff, but there’s a bigger point to be made about The Beclowning. We’re not stuck with the existing ways of producing and sharing news. Just because something is aggressively awful now doesn’t mean we have to sit still and let it keep ruining our experience in this country. We can vote these numbskulls out, yes, of course, but more than that we can create a news infrastructure that can sustain a democracy.
You know all that old stuff you didn’t like? You can delete it. You can start over again fresh.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
Further Reading
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself.
I bought stock in a company that I thought would make PowerPoint presentations a thing of the past. Reader, it did not.
Jason,
Two comments:
1. I’m sorry about Chester.
2. Is Trumpf’s hand over his heart or over his stomach?
Happy New Year
I lost my dog Moby recently. He was almost 15... losing a dog is so sad. But you were only 20 and I remember when I was 20. How much I didn't value, the wrong things I did value... it's part of life to be that young and to make mistakes. You're right though about regret... we all have regret. At least those willing to be honest about it... great piece Jason.