The Surprise of Happy Endings
What's a proper hopepunk resistance in this funhouse of distorted reality?
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re going to mention 9/11 only once, and then in passing. Except for Jack Hughes, who examines our political reality in another universe where 9/11 didn’t happen. Me? I’m trying to figure out how to make my way in a world that doesn’t even pretend to make sense anymore.
As always, we recommend things to do (changing playback speeds on Facebook videos), read (this New Yorker piece on Russian press crackdowns), watch (this sermon), and listen to (Yebba’s “Boomerang.”)
And if you’re new here, consider subscribing. There’s no charge, and it’s generally free of side effects.
But first, did I ever tell you about the time I chaperoned a band trip to New York?
My oldest played trombone at a fine arts magnet high school, and when the band made their quadrennial trip to play at Carnegie Hall in 2016, I signed up to chaperone. There were two big surprises: The first was that these teenagers, who preferred eating at the McDonald’s in Times Square to Joe’s Pizza in Greenwich Village or Joe’s Shanghai in Chinatown, absolutely killed in Carnegie Hall. They played so flawlessly that I tried not to breathe lest I offend the fates that led us all to that moment of perfection. Did I mention the concert was on Father’s Day and that after the show I walked with my younger son through Central Park under blue skies before showing him the Natural History Museum? The day was only marred by my walk to the concert that morning. Not once did I get lost and have to ask a stranger for directions. Surely, in New York City, someone would have had the punchline at the ready.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice, practice, practice.
The other surprise came a couple nights before when I led a pack of students to the Broadway 50th anniversary Tony-nominated revival of Fiddler on the Roof. This show was big when I was a kid but had disappeared from cultural currency by the time I was the kids’ age, so this show was effectively as fresh for me as it was for them, and maybe fresher than it hit the ears of adults in 1964. For them, World War II was a lived experience. For me, World War II is a Tom Hanks movie, except in Fiddler, Tevye’s family is run out of Russia because they’re Jews. And it wasn’t until the very end of the play that I realized that I had been sitting there expecting a happy ending to a play about Russian Jews. I guess after hearing “If I Were a Rich Man” I really thought Tevye would end up, if not rich, then maybe owning a couple more head of cattle.
The optimistic expectation of a happy ending is a factory setting for me if not always a lived experience. There was another surprise on that trip that I haven’t mentioned yet because the timing was a bit off. The evening after the show we took all the kids on a dinner cruise around Manhattan Island. This was at the tail end of my political career when I had left campaigns to enter public service, and the band director liked to ask me for political insights. I remember that night she asked me who would win the election, the subtext of which was understood. She wanted reassurance that her countrymen would finally elect a woman president and that they wouldn’t choose him.
The optimistic expectation of a happy ending is a factory setting for me.
I gave her the answer I gave to everyone. “Unless everything I’ve ever learned as a political consultant over the past two decades is wrong, Hillary’s going to win,” I said.
I never much cared for Socrate’s aphorism that the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing, but I am forced in recent years to accept that therein lies something worth learning. (Besides, in my head I can’t see the name “Socrates” without pronouncing it à la Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Where do I get off thinking I know anything?)
Election Night 2016 delivered the third surprise of that New York trip, and we’re still sorting out what that means. The scribes and heralds have only added to our confusion. No one expected Trump to win, so they oversold the story of emails and servers. Then, when the masses revolted, the press set about to learn just how revolting they were in endless visits to Pennsyltucky diners.
Now those diner patrons have turned into COVID zombies, and still the press seeks understanding, as if the Enlightenment still holds currency in a world in which “just 66 percent of millennials firmly believe that the Earth is round,” a slim majority of Republicans think Donald Trump actually got more votes than Joe Biden, and most unvaccinated Americans believe the vaccine is a greater threat than the coronavirus.
Biden was singing that tune, too, in the search for consensus on the common ground of empirical fact, but he couldn’t find dance partners, so now he’s done with trying to convince the zombies that the vaccine is good for them. Things have gotten so bad, though, that you can’t even sell brains to zombies, and the death toll to the Delta variant is a 9/11 every two days. We are overrun with madness, so Biden abandoned reason for iron rule: Get the damn jab.
Get the damn jab.
Still, the scribes persist. CNN’s Jake Tapper criticized Biden’s “scolding tone talking to the people who are unvaccinated, talking about how, you know, people’s patience is running out.” The only virus more infectious and virulent than the coronavirus is the belief that if only we reasoned with people that we could coax them out of ignorance and into the light of peace, love, and understanding. This is not, I am forced to conclude after more than a half century on this planet, my lived experience.
Brains are dumb, good at observing and lousy at predicting. In the middle lies understanding, and Walter Lippmann observed that western imaginations are ill-suited to that. Our brains trail behind events and need time to understand their meaning. Some, of course, are better-suited to identifying a blow-hardy fascist where we expect to see a party nominee, or a president, or a pivot. Some will raise the alarm when they see an array of threats installed in the judiciary. Only later will those who tut-tutted those who raised the alarm concede that they were right all along.
Our descent into state-sanctioned madness poses a unique problem for Americans because we expect things to make sense and work out in the end. In Imperium, Ryszard Kapuściński writes that what I’m experiencing now in my native country is what he observed in Westerners in the former Soviet Union.
Here is precisely the kind of situation in which many Westerners lose themselves, inclined as they are to treat all reality as it usually presents itself to them: limpid, legible, and logical. With such a philosophy, the man of the West thrown into the Soviet world has the rug pulled out from beneath his feet at every moment, until someone explains to him that the reality he knows is not the only one and--most certainly--not the most important one, and that a plurality of the most diverse realities exist here, interlaced into a monstrous knot that cannot be untied and whose essence is multilogicality: a bizarre confusion of the most contradictory logical systems, now and then erroneously called illogicality or alogicality by those who assume there exists only one system of logic.
Imperium, released in 1994, tells the story of Kapuściński, who experienced the Soviet invasion of his native Poland during World War II and his return as a journalist in post-Soviet Russia. The book ends on a hopeful note that assumes, not illogically or alogically for that matter, that Russia would trend however off-kilter toward a western-style democracy.
I worked as a journalist in Moscow in 1992-93, and even though I saw Boris Yeltsin resolve partisan gridlock by suspending the constitution and leveling parliament with tanks, I, too, thought Russia would avoid a return to autocracy. Turns out, the communism we should have been fighting all along was Ted Lasso’s rom-communism, the belief system that everything will work out in the end. To give you an idea about how deep-seeded that is in me, I read the excerpted selection above and recognized its truth while still observing in my mind the American reflex: Yeah, but once they see how good things can be, they’ll snap to.
We should have been fighting rom-communism.
What, then, constitutes a proper hopepunk resistance in this funhouse of distorted reflections of reality? Certainly, it’s not to impose an OCD sense of narrative structure on current events. That’s a fool’s errand, and who wants to do errands, anyway? Amid the endless trauma porn of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the only true legacy of that day is Homeland Security and a homeland made insecure by guns, militarized police, anti-government militias, and a populace unable to reach consensus on something as basic as the shape of the planet. A fella could break his brain trying to make sense of that nonsense.
Perhaps the hopepunk resistance is to worry about a horse in the hospital but to find the pony in the roomful of horse shit. My friend and long-time reader D.G. likes to remind me to look for the good; I prefer to look for the space between the trees where a pony could reasonably fit. Yes, I think, that would be a good place for something good to be. And I’ll make my own pony, my own television show, my own book, my own logic.
In that space, anything is possible.
In that space a troop of smelly teenagers can breath music to existence in the most storied concert hall in the country.
In that space, you don’t need everyone to stop being wrong to do what you think is right.
You own that space. It’s yours. And mine, too. We can share it. It’s as big as we need it to be.
In that space, we could make our own happy endings.
Jason Stanford is the 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 Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Buying this T-shirt
Reconsidering genetics
Making coconut chicken curry
Not trying to newsletter for a living
Avoiding the indignity of being observed
Savoring this takedown of Andrew Sullivan
Changing the playback speed of Facebook videos
What I’m reading
Paul Kane: “Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan, divided over Trump, see different futures for the Republican Party” - Paul Kane doing Paul Kane things.
This split-screen approach to Trumpism, between such good friends, is one of the most clear demonstrations of how much the ex-president changed GOP politics.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: “Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?” - I hate this headline as much as I was fascinated by the article.
“‘The Bell Curve’ came out when I was twelve years old, and somehow that’s still what people are talking about,” she said. “There’s a new white dude in every generation who gets famous talking about this.” Virtually every time Harden gives a presentation, someone asks about “Gattaca,” the 1997 movie about a dystopia structured by genetic caste. Harden responds that the life of a behavior geneticist resembles a different nineties classic: “Groundhog Day.”
Joshua Yaffa: “The Victims of Putin’s Crackdown on the Press” - I wrote my honors thesis in college on the emancipation of the Soviet Press. In more ways than one, it was a fruitless exercise in optimism.
Since April, ten outlets and twenty journalists have been targeted by the state. In April, Meduza, an online publication founded by journalists who had quit or been fired from other outlets, was named a foreign agent. It has since struggled with a loss of advertiser revenue and a general wariness among many of its sources. VTimes, a new startup made up of journalists from Vedomosti, a once-respected business paper, announced its closure three weeks after being added to the foreign-agent registry, in May. A week after Proekt was named an undesirable organization, in July, the Insider, which specializes in data-driven investigations, was added to the foreign-agent registry; two weeks after that, Open Media, an online resource, announced that it was shutting down after its Web site was blocked and its parent organization, funded by the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was named undesirable. “Life for Russian journalists has never been calm or all that great, but I’ve never seen things get this bad this fast,” Badanin told me. “We have reached the most dramatic point in the entire history of Russian media.”
Dan Zak and Ellen McCarthy: “The Summer Before 9/11” - This one got me.
The country woke up with Triple Sec and cranberry juice on its breath. Just out of reach: the scuffed brick of a Nokia phone, a bottle of pills to stoke the serotonin, 2½ pounds of more than you needed to know about President John Adams. The phone on the nightstand couldn’t read the news, so on went the television. Something about a woman in the Houston suburbs who drowned her five children in the bathtub. And that D.C. intern — another intern scandal — was still missing, and her parents were suspicious of a congressman with whom she allegedly had an affair. In Las Vegas that week, Whitney Houston accepted a BET lifetime achievement award at the ripe old age of 37.
What I’m watching
I watched The Morning Show on AppleTV; think Succession, except with better-looking people and about The Today Show. I’m moderately excited about season two with Hassan Minhaj.
I’ve started Underground Railroad, which is good but you can’t binge it.
So with all that quality programming, why am I recommending you watch a virtual sermon? Just watch:
What I’m listening to
The miracle of “My God Has A Telephone” is that Aaron Frazer is recording now and not in the 1970s.
Andy Shauf was inspired to write this song when he thought of how funny it would be to get in a big fight on a romantic vacation. Weird dude; good song.
Remi Wolf’s “Quiet On Set” is going to be playing over a lighthearted moment in a prestige cable show before too long. Mark my words.
When they go Low, we turn it up high.
Yebba, a Grammy-winning artists who grew up in among church folk in Arkansas, is onto something with “Boomerang.”
Remember that song “Soy Yo” in 2014? This is that band.
Dr. Dog checking in with a refresh of the 1994 global hit, “Here Comes the Hotstepper.”
"Lookit’ all these slave masters posin’ on your dollar.” Who’d a thunk that would be such a bop?
Let’s end with Saun & Starr, the former backup singers for Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, with “Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah.”
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