Wolves
The Enlightenment was a hoax, we're wrong about Darwin, and all is lost
This week Robin Whetstone offers another chapter from her Moscow memoir, Red Ticket, in which her boyfriend gets arrested and she gets evicted. My friend Josh Berthume, who for years has been unsuccessful in warning us about the dangers of disinformation, shares with us a nightmare that he already sees playing out all around us in “7 Hours in November.” If you read anything this weekend, read that. It’s lovely and terrifying, an elegy for what some of us thought our country was and a plea to wake up before it’s too late. And to bring us back into a pleasant, if perplexed present, the highly caffeinated Rachel Megan Barker offers “Three Thoughts From Lockdown.” And I ask Mayor Adler whether he’d be willing to close down some things that annoy me in the latest segment of “You’re on Mute.”
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to. Seriously, y’all: Holland Taylor’s Tony-nominated Ann is streaming for free on PBS, and Todrick Hall dropped an EP with quarantine songs that will put you into a good mood, guaranteed or your money back.
But first, did I ever tell you about the wolves?
I have to admit, at first I didn’t take the wolves seriously. They looked dangerous, sure, but in China, and then in Europe. We had a party the day after they officially Cried Wolf; some people shook hands, others hugged. But then the Burgomaster cancelled the Annual Festival of New Things on account of the wolves were coming, so we figured, OK, sure, indoors with us. We knew it would be a tradeoff. Some inns and taverns wouldn’t survive, but we wouldn’t survive the wolves except by staying indoors until they went away.
Then the damndest thing happened. After a few months of the wolves not eating everyone on account of us hiding inside, some people decided that what was shutting down all the commerce wasn’t the wolves but us staying inside. We should go out, reasoning after a fashion that it must not be too dangerous. The wolves hadn’t eaten that many people after all. People started talking about infringements upon their liberty, and how you can’t really trust scientists, and about herd immunity, which is when we all went back outside and the first thing that happened is that white people started killing unarmed Black people again.
I was raised straddling the Enlightenment’s divide between reason and tradition. My momma taught me to respect my elders, and as I became an elder I learned why that was important even and especially when they did not deserve it. I was also raised to use words and facts to construct impenetrable arguments of reason, and that truth and right should carry the day against confusion and deceit. For a while, this seemed to work. My report cards were mostly Arthur Fonzarelli (all ayyyyyys); I went to a college with a really nice lawn where being right was similarly rewarded; I started a business built upon holding up pieces of public records in the habeas corpus gamesmanship of politics. There was a time, I promise you, catching politicians in lies was followed by an equal and opposite satisfaction.
This is a different time.
Recently the President sat for an interview on Fox News. Sean Hannity’s question was less softball than coach pitch tee ball. Here it comes. You ready? Eyes on the ball, you can do this: “What’s at stake in this election as you compare and contrast, and what are your top priority items for a second term?”
Did you do what I did? It’s a test prompt with a cue to compare and contrast and then list the things you want to do. OK, this is easy, first you… Wait. No, no one cares about right answers anymore. There are no more gold stars in the sky. The Fonz jumped the shark in 1977. He skied off, leaving us here with those darn sharks.
Here is the President’s answer, verbatim, which is Latin for kill me now:
Well, one of the things that will be really great -- the word experience is still good, I always say talent is more important than experience, I've always said that -- but the word experience is a very important word, a very important meaning. I never did this before, never slept over in Washington.
OK. We’re going to stop here if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that this is really happening and to catch our breath. Let’s dive back in, because, oh, well, you’ll see:
I was in Washington I think 17 times, all of a sudden I’m the president of the United States, you know the story, I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our First Lady and I say, “This is great.”
This would be funnier if it were not true, or it were happening to Canada, or just Texas as usually happens. People think journalists cherry pick quotes from Trump’s appearances to make him look bad when the opposite is true. By plucking complete sentences out of his who-slipped-Uncle-Donny-a-pill transcripts, journalists make him look much more coherent than he is. It went on:
I was from Manhattan, from New York.
You don’t say? Not Manhattan, Kansas? You sure?
Now I know everybody.
Yes, Donny, you’re very popular. Your dad was wrong about you. Everybody says it. You hear it more and more.
And I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes, like you know an idiot like Bolton, all he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.
Hannity tried to bail him out, but Trump refused to ever give even the bullet points of a second-term agenda. I’ve heard worse campaign platforms than “You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody,” but Trump said it, which means it must not be true. But that’s just me trying to be clever, using my brain as a shield against accepting that we have a political class unable to utter the incantation that will make the wolves go away: stay indoors, wash your hands, wear a mask. Instead we cycle from surreality to grotesque to horror; blather, spin, repeat.
The Enlightenment is a fraud, and we misunderstand Darwin. Survival goes not to the fittest, strongest, or most adaptable, but the luckiest. Do you have the longer, skinny beak that makes it easier to find the hidden seed in a drought? Congratulations, you get to live. Are you an anti-establishment game show host running when someone disengages the safety protocols on the Holodeck? Cool, Donny, you’re hired, even though you’ve been in Washington only 17 times, which is a weird thing for an adult to keep track of.
Too few people care about what is right and wrong, and nothing makes sense. It’s no wonder that Generation Z has lost faith in this world. Maybe they’ll teach their children and grandchildren that the danger isn’t as much the wolves as those who would tell us at the same time that the wolves are a hoax and will disappear on their own. The danger is those who fire the wolf scientists for not agreeing to juke the stats. It’s those who say the duty falls on our elders to feed themselves to the wolves as sacrifices to commerce, and those — us — who thought reason and fact would be enough to keep them out of these positions of power in the first place.
There will always be wolves. We can get better at picking people to guard our cities for when the wolves come. But first, we’ve got to get these wolves to leave, and if any of you suggests we reason with them I swear…
Red Ticket: #Notalldejournayas
by Robin Whetstone
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. This week, Lyosha gets arrested, and Robin gets evicted.
“Hello,” she said, “I am the landlady. I am here about the scandal.”
“The scandal?” I said.
7 Hours in November
by Josh Berthume
My old friend Josh Berthume is a writer who spends a lot of time thinking about the nature of things like truth and reality. He founded Swash Labs and lives in Denton, Texas with his family. For the past several years, he’s been investigating disinformation and what it’s doing to our politics. This is his nightmare. The greatest danger to the future of the United States, he writes, is what could happen over seven hours in November.
If you think it can’t happen, know that it already has, in a thousand small ways. That big, final, unimaginable step isn’t all that big anymore.
Three Thoughts From Lockdown
by Rachel Megan Barker
Rachel Megan Barker, a highly caffeinated, itinerant feminist, and political organizer, checks in from quarantine with three thoughts she was able to corner and shove into a gunnysack.
A thing that no one tells you about huge events in history is that people were probably really annoyed that it screwed up their plans.
“You’re on mute” with Mayor Adler
This week on “You’re On Mute,” I ask Mayor Adler a bunch of stupid questions, such as why the rules keep changing, whether I’m allowed to use a taser to enforce a six-foot distance, whether this is the golden age for maladjusted introverts, exactly which horseman of the apocalypse he is, and how he’s holding up.
RIP
How we’re getting through this
Using the beer barometer
Getting subscription fatigue
Eating cold pizza for breakfast
Using haircuts as security indicator
Observing the first days of a new art world
Making a ton of sourdough bread, apparently
Getting on multiple meetings simultaneously on desktop
What I’m reading
The Atlantic: “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem”
Omar Gallaga: “Coronavirus Brings Into Focus The Austin Food Delivery Tension”
At the macro level, animosity between restaurants and apps could rise if the fragmented delivery market consolidates, tilting leverage toward apps. Uber recently considered an acquisition of Grubhub, but Grubhub instead combined with Just Eat Takeaway.com.
Seth Godin: “What’s at the front of the line?”
HBR: “13 Signs That Someone Is About to Quit, According to Research”
The Marshall Project: ““I Begged Them To Let Me Die”: How Federal Prisons Became Coronavirus Death Traps.”
Branko Milanović: “Non-exemplary lives”
Morning Consult: “How 2020 is Impacting Gen Z's Worldview”
Scott Pollard: “Tulsa Advance”
Watching the news out of Tulsa was like seeing my nightmares come to life. I would stay up the night before large crowd events and scare myself wondering if we underestimated the crowd size for the following day's event. Because the dirty little secret about campaign events is that they are not really about the people in attendance.
Psychology Today: “What’s the Matter With Libertarianism? Its models of human nature and society are terminally deficient.”
Texas Monthly: “How a Broadway Veteran Channeled Ann Richards”
“When I first started to speak Ann’s words in rehearsal, I remember feeling I was a little girl in her mother’s high heels–like, ‘Holy God, can I do this?’” she says. “You have to ask yourself, are you going to do [the show]? Yes? Then shut up about it.”
WaPo: “Trump is going back to holding rallies. He might be helping Biden.”
WaPo: “Who caused the violence at protests? It wasn’t antifa.”
What I’m watching
My friend K.B. co-wrote an article about the COVID problem in prisons, and Jon Oliver did a whole segment on it.
Hank Steuver’s criticism of season two of The Politician is dead on. I go further, indicting Ryan Murphy as a classic liberal dilettante who thinks the problem with politics is that politicians are too political. What we need, folks like Murphy posit, are leaders who ignore the mechanics of government and campaigns for the pure illumination of truth and justice. People like this prize the outsider and are mirror images of Barry Goldwater, and they scorn the dealmakers, ignoring the progress made when a deal gets done.
A much better, more practical, and effective portrayal of the benevolent ambition that animates the best of our politics comes from my friend Holland Taylor, who is having a moment. Of her touching, sad role in Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, NPR’s Glen Weldon wrote, “Holland Taylor remains Holland Freaking Taylor, and that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.” And this summer she plays God, or the “Great Leader,” in the new Bill & Ted movie coming out this summer.
But last weekend PBS aired her Tony-nominated Ann, the play she wrote and starred in about my old boss Ann Richards. You can stream it for free on PBS’s website or app. I was lucky enough to see Holland play the Governor when she brought the play back to Austin after her Broadway run, and she captures the physicality and spirit of Richards in a way that continues to shock me. Holland says that 90% of the play is made up, but not a word sounds false. As Texas comes back into play politically, it’s good to remember what used to be possible here.
What I’m listening to
Music speaking to the moment dropping all around us:
Beyoncé released “BLACK PARADE”
But Todrick Hall just dropped Quarantine Queen, an EP that’s a helluva lot of fun about something that’s not fun at all — quarantining. I didn’t know anything about Hall, a veteran of American Idol, Chicago and Kinky Boots on Broadway, a lot of viral videos on YouTube, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. But let me tell you, “Mask, Gloves, Soap, Scrubs” is the party anthem I needed to maintain military standards of cleanliness around here.
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