7.13.24

Brief and scattered thoughts

I try to stay out of the muck, but yesterday’s events shook me to the core. I’m trying to stay disciplined, but I’ve found it difficult.

My innocence cracked a little as I reached adulthood, but a large part of me still held on, maybe holds on (passing time tends to deaden the visceral certainty we feel in emotional moments, as it surely will in this case), to the naïve thinking that this is the sort of stuff we’d grown out of domestically, that it must have been so strange and specific to have lived during a time when it was routine for politicians and activists and singers to be gunned down in the street. It’s a testament to the uniquely privileged historical and geographical moment I’ve grown up in that I’m trained to fundamentally believe in the systems we’ve set up to protect ourselves exactly from moments like this. Fighting battles with ideas, votes, peaceful protests; these are core tenets of my worldview, the baseline of how I believe change is made.

Anyone living in Yemen, Ukraine, or Gaza right now, of course, has a very different view of things, as does anyone alive today who experienced really any of the first ninety percent of the twentieth century in the United States. Studying history taught me that longing to return to any decade is silly, but yesterday really took my FOMO for the sixties down a notch. Learning about it is one thing, living through even a modicum of it is quite another. 

In September, I made my thoughts on political violence clear. This is atrocious, deplorable, sad, unsettling, and, as we’re about to find out, strategically asinine. “The only thing more dangerous than a demagogue is a martyr,” I wrote last year. America now faces both.

I ditched Twitter five years ago and no day made me more grateful for that decision than yesterday. A group chat I’m in featured so much head-whipping, speculative disinformation last evening, all of it plucked off social media, that I muted the chat. These are my best friends. Maybe I’m missing out on the zeitgeist by being largely offline, but I at least get to pretend I live in a world where this doesn’t exist:

I’m in the middle of pitching an essay about young people’s alleged shift to romanticism over the last year or two and the political disinterest which has accompanied it. It seems wrong to me that we have to choose one or the other—full blown, 2020-style activism, or a total retreat into escapist literature. Surely there is a way to hold both in the same hand. In this essay I recommend, and still believe in, an integration of these models—empiricism and romanticism—to move towards a more holistic understanding of our political economy and world at large. There’s still lots to be said here, but yesterday’s events obviously change the tenor of things. In the face of whizzing bullets, it doesn’t really feel appropriate, at least right now, to identify a country-wide political malaise which might be aided by the same tools used to analyze Pedro Paramo. 

Yet I still feel this is a particularly strange moment in American history, somehow equally charged and slumbrous, defined by the peak of extremism on the one hand and total indifference, borderline futility, on the other. Perhaps it is unique, perhaps not. I only know that it feels precarious, tragic, and very, very strange. Otherwise, I have no idea what to make of it. I distrust anyone who tells me they do.