The Trump Diet
We voted. We marched. And it's making us sick. It's time to go on a Trump diet.
The pot of water is finally boiling. So now what do we pay attention to?
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Read: How down Americans arefor military intervention in Iran, how underserved Americans over 50 are in advertising, which candidate Democratic insiders are bullish on, the liberal environmental policies that a majority in every single state supports, the creepy things that Facebook and Amazon are doing now, the totally awful thing a drone caught the Chinese doing to a Muslim minority, what they left out of A League of Their Own, the case against Epicureanism, why Scotland is drinking less, how “information gerrymandering” effects elections, what happens when Trump tweets about the Fed, the AP’s new-new guidance on hyphens, how to best report on misinformation, and some cool-ass walruses.
Listen: So many great new songs out this week, or at least good ones, but we’re featuring a hopepunk-as-heck song from Fitz and The Tantrums. You gotta see this video.
But first: Politics creating a public health crisis in the United States. It’s time to go on a Trump diet.
We are not alone. There are a lot of us. And that’s the problem. Politics is driving way too many of us insane.
Well, not insane exactly, but it is making us sick. Some doctors are calling it “headline stress disorder” or “election stress disorder,” and that’s not just clickbait. The American Psychological Association “found that 57 percent of Americans identified politics as a very or somewhat significant source of stress,” and it’s creating real-world pathologies nearly on par with alcohol abuse (though I would argue the two are related):
Rough estimates based on Table 2 would be that approximately 94 million people believe they have been stressed by politics, 44 million believe they have lost sleep, 28.5 million that their physical health has been adversely affected, and 11 million that politics led them to consider suicide. …
Approximately 11% of the Add Health respondents reported that alcohol use had created problems with family, friends, or people at work, which is slightly less than the numbers for parallel political items (see Table 2). In other areas, 15.4% of the Add Health sample reported that alcohol use interfered with responsibilities at work or school. In our sample, 6% reported losing time from work or school because of politics and 8.5% said politics delayed them from completing an assignment, task, or job. Further, 9.1% of the Add-Health sample reported legal problems because of drinking, presumably mainly as a result of DUIs and similar offenses. In our sample 4.3% said politics had created legal problems for them.
Said one political scientist, “If these numbers are accurate, people are basically reporting that engaging in politics is creating something of a public health problem.”
Did I need to clarify that this is all post-2016? No, obviously. Since Trump got elected, there’s been a horse in the hospital, and we haven’t been able to turn away. The news has been like bad CGI, our brains torturing themselves to justify the wrong angles and fake representations, trying to pull reality back into 90 degree angles so things would make sense again. We know the way the world is supposed to look, and this ain’t it.
Until now. He did a thing outlandish and obvious enough to demand equal and opposite satisfaction. He withheld military aid to an ally so he could abuse his power to further his own political career and then tried to cover it up, corrupting the Attorney General in the process. How do we know? He told us, and now he’ll be impeached, probably, but frankly I just needed someone to call a cowboy or a wrangler of some sort to extricate the equine infidel.
This is the Newton’s Law reaction we’ve all been waiting for, right? We’ve been waiting for the picture to clear up so we could see the program, for the radio signal to come so we could name that tune. Finally, things make sense again.
So now what?
The system has righted itself, at least for a while. The grownups have acknowledged the presence of the horse in said hospital and have begun official removal proceedings. And right now I’m going to acknowledge something you might be thinking, but I also need you acknowledge something as well.
We don’t know what’s going to happen.
It’s going to take at least 30 days for it to start happening.
The House says it will take 30 days to hold hearings before voting on articles of impeachment. After that the world can go crazy, and in the next 30 days a lot of crazy stuff will come out in several news cycles a day.
Here’s the galaxy-brain idea for us: Proceedings will proceed whether we’re paying attention or not. What if for the next 30 days we took a break from the impeachment news? What if we muted Donald Trump in our lives and not just on Twitter? There’s tons of other important things happening, such as the demise of disruption as a recognized economic model, the upcoming baseball playoffs, and Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series, The Politician. Y’all, there is so much new music out. Or you could read a book. Like, actually sit down and read a page until you were done, turn that page and read the next one until your brain slows down enough to have a new thought. Experienced and professional cowboys with lariats have all the exits to the hospital covered. They’ve got this.
I wrote earlier that my first television memory was Richard Nixon resigning, and my mom was kind enough to tell me what actually happened. She wanted us to feel normal again, so she mopped and waxed our hardwood floors. This was a special treat for me and my brother because she’d put on a record, probably Paul Simon or Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and we’d slide across the floors in our socks to polish the floors. This is a bright, shiny memory of childhood for me, and I’m grateful to my mom for it. My dad was a journalist. I.F. Stone was a family friend. My brother and I didn’t play cops & robbers. We played Watergate, and my first imitation was Nixon. Our family mainlined Watergate, and my mom knew we needed to pay attention to something else if we were going to be happy.
My friend R.H. is always challenging people on the Spar! app to take a phone diet, as in not looking at his phone for half an hour after getting up. I’m doing a meditation course where we’re practicing a method of recognizing that thoughts occur but don’t have to be engaged, as in, oh, I see there is a horse in the hospital still but they have him lassoed. And then I go back to what I was reading.
What if our thoughts were our own for a month and not an engagement metric for Twitter? What if, just for 30 days, we ignored Trump? It would have zero effect on what happens to him, but can anyone deny that we’d be happier?
If you can’t disengage in politics, what if you focused exclusively on creating what you want in the world? I’m not talking about sitting around and expressing your fears about what might happen. I’m talking about figuring out some real thing to do to plant a tree for future generations to enjoy. MOVE Texas is registering young people to vote. You can volunteer or donate. I can vouch for them. They don’t suck, but if you don’t like that pick something else because our ambitions for this world have to be bigger than simply corralling that horse.
And we can’t do it without you. So start building a better life. Read. Sleep. Drink water. Exercise. Walk a lot. Ride a bike. Put your phone down and listen to your partner. For the next 30 days, start creating a version of you strong and happy enough to help lead us out of this dark time and into a better one.
And lest anyone mistake me for advocating a turning away from politics, let’s acknowledge the sheer tonnage of fuckery we’re being asked to accept as normal these days. We’re being kept in the dark only to be handed a massive gas bill and told it’s our fault for keeping the lights on all the time. As NPR’s Stephen Thompson said, “Joy can be a political act.” For those of us who have been making ourselves sick with stress since the 2016 election, going on a Trump Diet for 30 days to go find our happy feels like an act of rebellion against the crown.
Let’s do that. We have to stop making ourselves sick and start figuring out a healthier way to engage with politics because at some point they’re going to get that horse and someone’s going to have to run the damn hospital.
What I’m reading
Americans are surprising down for military intervention in Iran.
A third of the U.S. population is over 50; that cohort is in only 15 percent of advertisements.
The reason insiders are bullish on Elizabeth Warren getting the Democratic nomination is that she has a lot of growth potential among Gen Z, Black voters, and women.
In every single state, a majority supports each of these positions: 100 percent renewable energy, putting a price on carbon, land conservation, upgrading buildings, investing in public transit, and removing lead from America’s water and infrastructure.
A German court ruled that hangovers are illnesses, which means you can’t sell snake oil cures for the bottle flu.
Facebook is creating a virtual world. Meanwhile, Amazon is making an Alexa that fits inside your ear.
A drone captured a video of hundreds of Muslims kneeling, blindfolded, and shackled, being transferred to re-education camps in China, the same country where the laptop I’m typing this on was made, as well as that drone in all probability.
“A League of Their Own” left out a big chunk of the story.
I agree with this gentle takedown of Epicureanism.
Recent Studies Indicate: Scotland introduced minimum alcohol pricing in 2018. The result? Less drinking. Also, “information gerrymandering,” or how we perceive the positions of others relative to our own, can have influence voting patters by as much as 10 percent. When Trump tweets about the Fed, the market prices in a future rate cut, so… money, money, business, business.
News Nerds: A long but good read: “What we are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. This has echoes of the populist challenge to liberal democracy, which pits direct expressions of the popular will against parliaments and judges, undermining the very possibility of compromise.” Also, the AP has changed, yet again, its hyphen guidelines, and I guess we can all just do whatever we want now, thanks for the help. Also, “corrections that included an explicit reminder of the provided misinformation were more effective than those that didn’t.”
Last Word: Hell yes, walruses.
What I’m listening to
Thanks to D.G. for sending along Soccer Mommy’s new song, “Lucy.”
Sweet Spirit, which I’m seeing this weekend, has a new EP out that includes
”Wait,” a torch song they’ve been performing for years. If Sweet Spirit ever comes to your town and you don’t go, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Likewise, Spoon has apparently been playing “Shake It Off” for years; they just released it as a single.
If you dig Greta Van Fleet’s ‘70s redux vibe, you’ll like “Always There.”
Mondo Cozmo has a new song out called “Black Cadillac,” and I sure like the way the lead singer’s voice sounds like Bono’s.
The New Pornographers have released their eighth album of infectious Canadian supergroup pop. “The Surprise Knock” ranks with their best work.
Courtesy of P.Z., the wife and I saw Tank And The Bangas at Meow Wolf. If Prince’s Revolution had become a jazz-hip hop fusion band and were backing a powerhouse female rapper, it’d sound like TATB. This is my favorite of their songs.
I was late to Fitz & The Tantrums in the late aughts. I’m a sucker for their upbeat retro sound. Their latest, “I Just Wanna Shine” off their latest album All the Feels gets at how hard it is to get up every day and go feel good. Watch this, reader, and feel better. This is tears-in-your-eyes good times.
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