Here’s a little secret: the busier I am with Chair responsibilities, the more often I find myself with things to write about here. It’s not that I’m particularly interested in writing about my duties. It’s that, when I get my brain up and running, inertia takes over—when it’s working on other things, all of a sudden, it’s also generating ideas for my ‘Stack. When I was in college, and finals week would roll around, I would go to the library and check out a pile of books. I’d read a novel a day during that time, and my friends didn’t get it—how did I have so much time to read when we were all cramming? But it was the same principle: reading fiction kept the engine running, so I didn’t have to waste time getting up to speed when it came time to study. It also gave me something to do while my brain was processing all of the information that I needed for my finals.
This is why, if you want to write, it’s better to stay active than it is to wait until you’ve got long stretches of uninterrupted time in order to do so. In that sense, it’s not unlike exercise. The further away I get from writing, the harder it is to get back into it1.
When I stopped by FB to share my latest post, I happened across a quick piece from a friend who was making note of a particular interpretive move that happens a lot in online discussions of genre fiction (inc. books, TV, movies, et al.): some readers/viewers will judge a work by measuring the behavior of the characters against themselves (and finding the characters wanting). “The critic is generally using himself as the yardstick for optimal rational response, believing that what he would do in this situation would solve the problem (thus finishing the story quickly) and ought to be the universal logic that human beings would naturally prefer in such situations (even imaginary ones).”
He continued by laying out how unproductive this attitude can be for discussions of those novels/movies/shows, but my brain went in a different direction after I read this passage. I immediately flashed to a piece that came out in the NYT several days back, Patrick Healy’s “Joy is Not a Strategy.” I’m going to be a little unfair to Healy’s piece, because I don’t think it’s nearly as critical as I’d heard it was when I came across it. At the same time, though, I think it’s typical of a particular brand of punditry that’s been circulating for the past couple of weeks, where the Harris-Walz campaign gets negged for not talking to the press enough, for failing to offer sufficient policy talk, and/or for, as Healy puts it, trying to make “joy” happen (Healy even references Mean Girls directly).
I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. I’m inclined to say that Healy’s essay (and many similar attempts to shape the campaign in specific ways) are availing themselves of that same “aesthetic tendency” that happens online.
Calls from the news media for any campaign to conduct itself according to the media’s own “yardstick” ring a bit hollow. For the better part of the past decade, the media has spent its time like an army of frogs, ferrying one particular scorpion back and forth across the stream, hoping against hope (and all available evidence) that it’ll behave like an actual Presidential candidate.
And when I say all available evidence, I’m talking about a neverending avalanche of absolute bullshit that both “floods the zone” and washes away any attempt to check it, hold anyone accountable, or otherwise stem the tide. I’m thinking, for instance, about the massive Republican gaslighting on IVF, as though their senators hadn’t just voted down attempts to guarantee its availability, to say nothing of federal funding, which would be illegal in several states, post-Roe. We also saw TFG practically run through the Narcissist’s Prayer2 like a checklist in his account of what happened at Arlington Cemetery.
Over at The Present Age, Parker Molloy spent some time last week examining the ways that the news media covered these events. Rather than reading the specific entries, it might be more helpful to look at the essay that emerged from that activity, Molloy’s recent piece for the New Republic, “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity.” She describes as “sanewashing” the process by which the media try to isolate the (very and only) occasional bit of sense from TFG’s increasingly incoherent rambles, which has “the effect of making it seem like Trump’s words and actions seemed cogent and sensible.”
In other words, the media’s engaged in the assembly of what Naomi Klein describes as a mirror world, an ironic version of his incoherence that directly misrepresents it.
The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump’s words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality. When major news outlets consistently present a polished version of Trump’s statements, they create an alternate narrative that exists alongside the unfiltered truth available on social media and in unedited footage.
Margaret Sullivan also critiqued this brand of “false balance” this past week, noting in particular the NYT’s coverage of the Arlington debacle. “Nearly 10 years after Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, the media has not figured out how to cover him,” she writes. “And what’s more — what’s worse — they don’t seem to want to change. Editors and reporters, with a few exceptions, really don’t see the problem as they normalize Trump.”
When I started this post, I really hadn’t intended for it to become a critique of the way that the news media has handled Trump. But honestly, it’s all of a piece. To return to that original passage, a big part of what feels disingenuous about Healy’s “cringe” over the Harris-Walz campaign is not just that the media seem to be applying their own yardstick, but that they’ve been allowing Trump, for years, to hand them sticks of varying lengths, which they then insist on treating as though they were each 36 inches.
I’m no journalist, certainly, but to borrow from Shepherd Fairey’s Harris poster, I’m not sure how they move forward in a way that preserves some sort of integrity. Another piece that crossed my feed recently, Matt Bai’s WaPo editorial on the diminishing returns of the political interview, tries to offer some advice, but his prognosis is pretty glum. Political candidates speak to their bases through social media for the most part, while “traditional journalists have decided that the purpose of a candidate interview is to drum up some controversy and make a big show of how skeptical we are of everything.” Bai’s most damning critique of the current dynamic, to my mind, is that “the only interviews worth doing now are the performative kind.”
That distinction, between performance and reality, is one of the most deeply rooted implications of the irony that I’m trying to get at in my own work, and it precedes TFG, influencer culture, and social media, even as these are some of its current and most visible symptoms. I’ll be honest, if that’s the alternative, I’m not sure that joy isn’t in fact an entirely legitimate strategy.
I’m only speaking for myself here, but I’ve witnessed this same dynamic in a lot of other people, so I don’t think it’s just me.
Written by Dayna Craig, the Narcissist’s Prayer is a poem that dramatizes the series of strategies that narcissists use to minimize any sort of wrongdoing on their part: It didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, it's not a big deal. And if it is, it wasn’t my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.