Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In
I did not miss the news cycle one single bit
I spent the past week in New Mexico at the same writers’ retreat that I attended (and wrote about) last year. It was if anything even more special than it was last time, and definitely more productive (as in both that I got more actual screenplay pages written and that I felt more like I was connecting with the process of writing them, which I hope will carry over). I reconnected with and deepened bonds with old friends from last year, made some already-precious new friends, hiked through some spectacular scenery and got caught in a storm on a mesa and accompanying flash flood that was far more dangerous than I realized. All in all, just the way I feel like I ought to be spending my time, and I hope it becomes an annual tradition.
There was only one way in which the experience of the retreat was slightly less perfect than it was the year before: their internet connectivity has improved. Not that it was great; there were plenty of places where there was no signal and no WiFi. But there were more places this year where WiFi was working than there had been, more places where there was signal, and therefore more ability to remain in contact with the outside world. I tried to stay disconnected, because I wanted to be—but it took a little more effort, and I noticed that fact.
Now I’m back, and . . . man, I did not miss being connected all the time, even on a personal level. Yes, I am very glad to be back with my wife, but that’s because I’m glad to be back with her, and the same goes for the rest of my New York family and community. Being in touch has its value, but it’s not the same as being with, and in some ways is even an opposed concept. When I was with the folks at the Ghost Ranch, I wanted to be with them, not in the state of semi-presence that is all too common to my existence in the normal course of life; being truly with them required not being in touch with the rest of my world.
And when I was alone, I wanted to be alone, whether because I was writing or because I was trying to be with my surroundings. I didn’t want to be pseudo-alone, but still only a text or an email or a social media push notification away from my entire universe. I spend a lot of time in my normal life pseudo-alone, connected with lots of people but not with anybody, and I think in many ways it’s the worst of both worlds, neither real company nor real solitude, and leaves me less capable of partaking of the rejuvenating power of either.
But what goes for the world of my actual relationships, of people I actually know, goes tenfold for the storms and swells of the on-line sea that passes for a news cycle these days. As I wrote before I left, I’ve had no chance to opine on “Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, or Senator Manchin’s about-face on the energy and climate bill, or the ongoing war in Ukraine, or the primaries in Arizona, Michigan or Missouri.” I still could, of course, but the cycle has moved on; now if I want to say anything about these topics, I’d better have something deeper and more consequential to say, because the window for first “takes” has already closed. Which is all to the good! I’d almost always rather write slowly than quickly. But it does raise the question of what purpose the cycle serves in the first place.
What social purpose, I mean, because it’s very clear what pecuniary purpose it serves. I know lots of ordinary people who behave as if they believe they are defending democracy by staying constantly on top of the latest news, but that’s almost entirely an illusion; in alarmingly many cases, they’re probably just participating in a massive multiplayer alternate reality game. But even for the folks involved in actually reporting the news, an enterprise which does indeed have some bearing on protecting democracy, I wonder how much purpose the frenzy serves. Does it really represent a Darwinian process of competition that ends with a more complete draft of true history even if along the way it produces a lot of mutations that aren’t conducive to survival? Or are we dealing less with natural selection by predators and a hostile environment than with something more like sexual selection for huge curled horns suitable only for butting heads with sexual competitors, an investment that drains energy that could be better deployed for the common good?
The latest of these frenzies revolves around the news that FBI raided Mar-a-Lago. Which, to be fair, is a huge story! But what does its significance? What does it portend? It’s obviously—obviously—too soon to know. Indeed, inasmuch as the raid is part of any kind of legal process, the integrity of the process depends on a common recognition that it is too soon to know what it portends, because what it portends is a consequence of a legal process that must—for it to be a legal process—be insulated from political influence, inasmuch as such a thing is possible when the target of the process is a former president and potential future presidential nominee.
I agree with Sean Trende that it’s weird so many people who fancy themselves part of the news cycle (reporters and Twitter addicts) think they have a clear “take” on these events already, as well as about the somberness that ought to greet the crossing of this kind of rubicon. But I think on another level the whole framing is wrong—because the precise reason we should be somber is that the statement, “presidents aren’t above the law,” is itself a political principle rather than a legal one.
That is to say: inasmuch as this is a legal process substituting for a political process, it’s bound to fail to achieve its political ends. The political process has already presented multiple opportunities to preserve itself; there were two impeachments, for crying out loud (my opinions of which are a matter of record—put most simply, I thought both were justified and neither was handled the way I would have handled it). Moreover, the Republican Party has an easy call to make if they want to preserve it further: they can simply not nominate Donald Trump for President again. (And it’s worth remembering that, less-momentously, the Democrats didn’t have to nominate someone in 2016 who was being investigated by the FBI. They may have considered that investigation absurd, but it was still a choice.) The fact that it is far from certain the GOP will opt for Ron DeSantis or some other standard-bearer untainted by Trump’s distinct inability to understand himself as a servant of the polity rather than its conqueror is the only really important political fact, and a legal process can’t substitute for whatever political process might change that fact. There’s no cheat code.
So what is there, actually, to talk about here? If there’s a legal story, it largely depends on facts we don’t have, starting with what kind of case is being built. Reporters should be ferreting out those facts—that’s the core of their job—but the question of their significance can’t really be engaged with until we know what the facts are. Meanwhile, everyone treating the legal story as primarily a political one is directly contributing to popular understanding of it as a political story, which is to say, contributing to its inevitable political failure. That can’t be what they are aiming for. So what are they aiming for?
That’s the main thing I find myself wondering about, for them and, by extension, for me. I spend a great deal of my time piling one word on top of another. The question hovering in the back of my mind, always, when I’m engaged in this task is “what am I building towards?” When I was in New Mexico, that question mostly attached to the nature of screenwriting as a step towards a thing rather than the thing itself; nobody reads screenplays, after all—they’re just plans for films that either will or won’t get made. But it’s a question here as well. What are these words for? What am I making with them? Where are they taking me, and you?
Perhaps that’s a silly question; perhaps the only real answer is “they’re a way to pass the time, for you and for your readers.” I don’t like thinking of my words as something to be consumed. I want to believe, rather, that language consumes us, assimilates us to it. That’s the only way, after all, for it to live on long after the specific form I organized it into, precariously balanced as it inevitably is on an evanescent present, is knocked down by the next gust of storm, the next crashing wave.
I stopped consuming “news” regularly in the mid 90s. I don‘t miss it. Indeed, not so consuming seems to positively aid realism about events.