It is also one that we’ve asked enough these past few years to be able to parrot back a familiar litany of answers. We tell ourselves that it is because white America is racist and male America is sexist and rural voters are fearful and we actually don’t know anything about Latino voters because that’s a socially constructed category into which we’ve stuffed a whole bunch of different people of Iberian and African and Indigenous descent and also because there is so much disinformation and there is Fox News and Facebook and the Boomers are weird. We tell ourselves that if this particular candidate had run a more effective campaign or had policies that better align with the policies we personally like that it would have been different. We correctly identify that the Electoral College is a big dumb racist albatross.
It doesn’t feel like shock, like 2016. It doesn’t really feel like rage. It feels like exhaustion soaked in national and personal grief, which is also a fitting description for the last eight months. “My head knew it would go like this,” the writer Seyward Darby tweeted this morning. “My heart—apparently—wanted something different. I am trying today to bridge the gap between those parts of myself.”
With nearly every tweet, Trump gave us a new 10-car pileup from which we couldn’t look away. But in the process of making us look at him, Trump forced many of us to actually look for the first time. By turning us into a nation of rubbernecks, he has pushed us to reckon with why things are crashing in the first place and to examine the faulty infrastructure of our democracy.
What changed? The continued spread of Wifi, but also the mass adoption of laptops — from work, or, in my case, for grad school — and then, of course, the smartphone. Gmail happened. Your email became a repository for bills, for endless advertisements, for eCards and alumni news. Very occasionally, there might be something interesting or novel, but most of actual, valuable interactions had been siphoned off elsewhere: to Facebook, at least at first, and then to text and Instagram.
But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
The great popularizer of psychedelics, Aldous Huxley, gave us a somewhat sobering description of what might be our future in “Brave New World”, and many in the West have been terrified of these substances for quite a while.
Ideology is like body odor: someone else's absolutely reeks if strong enough, but you can't even notice your own. If you remain convinced, in the year 2020 AD, that this or that national outlet remains the megaphone of disinterested chroniclers and selfless truth-seekers, then the BO in question is surely your own. But don’t expect everyone else to put up with the stink.
Stuttering is a neurological disorder that affects roughly 70 million people, about 3 million of whom live in the United States. It has a strong genetic component: Two-thirds of stutterers have a family member who actively stutters or used to. Biden’s uncle on his mother’s side—“Uncle Boo-Boo,” as he was called—stuttered his whole life.
Bringing my toddler to the Donald Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art when it opened last winter forced me to recognize the ways Judd’s objects resemble playground equipment: the diagonal ladder of red-painted wood with its single purple rod, or the red-enameled iron tube that slyly evoked (at least to my toddler-adjacent eyes) an empty kiddie pool. When we visited shortly after the show opened in February, my daughter wanted to climb on all the objects—or up them, or through them, or over them. The objects. I had trained myself not to call them sculptures, because Judd himself hadn’t thought of them that way. And neither did my toddler! She wanted to crawl through the silver aluminum boxes lined with blue Plexiglas, to bang her tiny fists against a green-lacquered galvanized-iron slab. The one thing she didn’t want to do was stay in her stroller.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.