Donald Trump | The Perfect Response

She was stunned that the news that came to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel produced little more than a shrug from other vacationers.

Since it was formed, citizens of the United States have demonstrated that they have diverging ideas about the true animating force of their nation. Is it enough to have a shared interest in maximizing personal freedom? What does it mean when others are indifferent to a national tragedy?

Full citizenship and its protections were withheld from many over most of our history. But even with more enfranchised, it is apparent that a nation that spans a continent contains many differing values that can eclipse shared beliefs. Members of the European Union occupy another wide continental swath with some of the same challenges. Danes and Poles have cultural characteristics that are at least as wide as those separating native Texans from lifelong New Yorkers. Can citizens in so big an expanse still feel like that are part of the same tribe?

A picture of a culture that is more frayed quilt than a tightly-woven blanket came to mind in reading a revealing piece of literary detective work. It described the little-discussed dive into despair of the writer Joan Didion, a trenchant chronicler of American life. She was a leading American cultural critic who had the rare capacity to offer highly readable accounts of destructive forces swirling just beneath the surface calm of the American experience. Didion knew how to use a literary wide-angle lens to capture the national mood, noticing convulsions that others missed. Because she thought in terms of events laid out in oppositional narratives, she shed insight into alternate perceptions that others missed.

As Timothy Denevi notes in a recent piece in the New York Times, Didion and husband John were vacationing in Hawaii in 1968 and about to head into a sudden existential storm. In this unlikely place her natural California cool gave way to real symptoms of physical illness.

The Trigger

The specific event was June 4, the day Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded while leaving Los Angeles campaign appearance. She was stunned that the news penetrating the bubble of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel drew little more than a shrug from other vacationers. How could other Americans not recognize the loss of so temperate a voice while facing the morass of the Vietnam War?

Kennedy was very much a part of her stormy America she chronicled in collections of essays like The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and After Henry. Many saw him as an idealist that might pull the U.S. back from some of the national convulsions in the same year. Martin Luther King has been shot to death in April. Thousands of American servicemen were dying at a rate of 2800 a month in Vietnam. And the once outsized President Lyndon Johnson had slowly shrunk behind a vail of sullenness. He said he would leave after just one term. The “battle of Chicago” between protesters and the army at the Democratic National Convention was still to come a few months later.

It was during a performance in the hotel by singer Don Ho that Didion’s experienced a full realization of nation that had torn loose of its anchors. The singer had just stopped in mid-performance to pass on the breaking news of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, pausing to offer a spontaneous prayer he sung to mark the moment. But others in the room were apparently having none of it, shouting to the singer to “quit the hymns” and jeering his response to the shock. They still wanted the faux Hawaiian spectacle they had paid to see. The experience made her ill. In the aftermath she could not keep food down. But she still had the crystalline insight of a nation at war with itself.

No matter what your political feelings are, if you’re attached to the idea of the nation as a community—if you feel yourself to be part of that community—then obviously something has happened to that community. . . .  It seemed as if these people did not count themselves as part of the community.  They came from another America.”

A Warning of Things to Come

We are left to see an obvious pattern. This moment resonates because Didion’s sense of dislocation seems to have become a continuous sensation for many us. Like the shocking loss of a genuine American idealist, the daily conduct of many political figures today asks us to keep reliving the eminent dismemberment of the tribe. We must now experience the feeling that many within the culture occupy “another America:” less tied to the customs and norms that had defined the nation.

Didion died just weeks before the failed January 6 coup in the aftermath of the 2020 election. But in 1968 she already had the insight that the United States would not find its way back to the sturdy narratives Americans used to share. Even then it was clear that a kind of national self-sabotage was becoming the new normal.

The logic of willful ignorance outlined in this brief 2016 piece still seems valid today. It fits our age of like a comfortable bad habit.

In his sobering and seminal study, Democracy Without Citizens, Robert Entman dwells on the irony of living in an information-rich age among uninformed citizens. There is a rich paradox to a culture where most have a virtual library available on any digital device, and yet would struggle to pass a third-grade civics test. According to the Annenberg Policy Center completed a while ago only one in three Americans can name our three branches of government. And only the same lone third could identify the party that controls each of the two houses of Congress. Fully a fifth of their sample thought that close decisions in the Supreme Court were sent to Congress to be settled.

Add in the dismal results of map literacy tests of high school and college students (“Where is Africa?,” “Identify your city on this map”), and we have just a few markers of a failed information society.

As Entman noted, “computer and communication technology has enhanced the ability to obtain and transmit information rapidly and accurately,” but “the public’s knowledge of facts or reality have actually deteriorated.” The result is “more political fantasy and myth transmitted by the very same news media.” We seem to live comfortably without even elementary understandings of the complex world we live in. The simpler the explanations of complex events, the better.

This condition is sometimes identified as a feature of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a peculiarly distressing form of functional ignorance observed by two Cornell psychologists. Many of us seem not to be bothered by what we don’t know, overestimating our knowledge. Dunning and Kruger found that “incompetent” individuals (those falling into the lowest quarter of knowledge on a subject) often failed to recognize their own lack of skill, failed to recognize the extent to which they were misinformed, and did not to accurately gauge the skills of others. If you have an Aunt Betty who is certain that our former President is a victim of the “deep state” or Hilary Clinton, you have an idea of the willful ignorance this represents.

Circumferance of the unknown 300x282 2 — **_{Borders of the Unknown}**

Think of this pattern in an inverted sense: from the perspective of individuals who truly know what they are talking about. For even the well-informed, the more they know about a subject, the larger the circumference of the borderlands that delineate the unknown. That’s why those who have mastered a subject area are often the most humble about their expertise: their expanded understanding of a field gives them a sense of what they still don’t know.

The key factor here is our distraction by all forms of media—everything from texting to empty-headed social media rants—that leaves us with little available time to be contributing members of the community. When the norm is checking our phones over 200 times a day, we have perhaps reached a tipping point where we have no interest in noticing the vast expanses of our own informational black holes. A familiar fantasy may be enough.

With regard to the basics of membership in a society, the idea of citizenship should mean more. In the coming election cycle it’s worth remembering that perhaps half of eligible voters will not bother to vote. And even more will have no interest in learning about the candidates who want to represent them in Congress or their local legislatures. Worst still, this is all happening at a time when candidates have been captured by a reality-show logic that substitutes melodrama for more sober discussions of how they intend to govern. Put It altogether, and too many of us don’t notice that we are engrossed with a sideshow of fantasies rather than the main event.

The Perfect Response

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

Tag Archives: Donald Trump

“They Came from Another America”