Tag Archives: Trump administration

How Far Can We Bend?

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It isn’t like there would be a ‘hard landing’ after escaping from the requirement to perpetuate the fantasies of the President.

Looking at the faces of members of the President’s cabinet as he takes off on another rhetorical tour through the weeds always makes me wonder what the absolute limits are for those who enable him. Think of all the pictures of the cabinet or business leaders lined up for a photo behind the President at the Resolute Desk or in the cabinet room. Most of the time those present seem to exhibit no obvious signs of embarrassment. Interestingly, except for J.D. Vance, few have also found reasons to be elsewhere.

Perhaps it is just me, but I see some signs of pain in the eyes of the Secretary of State whenever the President finds new ways to distance the United States from even more of its former friends and allies. Perhaps I’m wrong; maybe he is all in. But the photo above of Marco Rubio sitting on a couch in the Oval Office does not suggest a man relishing the role he has been asked to play. As with the others, there is an impression of non-engagement. I can’t imagine that Madeleine Albright, James Baker or John Kerry would have been so willing to keep their posts in order to serve an isolationist with contempt for America’s traditional friends. And being the Secretary of State during a period when fewer governments are welcoming must feel like something has gone wrong, especially when international cooperation is a virtual requirement for the position. It isn’t like there would be a ‘hard landing’ if he escaped to a position where he did not have to perpetuate the fantasies of the President.

To be sure, all of those who remain within the Presidential circle are ambitious weather vanes.  And ambition can make us live with a lot of dross to keep a dream alive. That was my excuse for sticking it out for a sociopathic department chair who once promised to doom any chance I might have for a promotion. Luckily for me and what turned into a 47-year career, this person soon retired and expired. If this was a period when I wanted to move on, the idea also faded with my wife’s desire to stay in her local job. Personal circumstances often complicate the question of how far we will bend against from our values and goals.

We could easily extend this analysis to the scores of business and tech billionaires who are only too pleased to be photographed with the President. It’s a puzzle, since these folks could easily be elsewhere. Is their fiduciary duty to their shareholders really that vulnerable? Do they not sense the dissonance between their own productive work and the dithering in the Oval Office supports? Is there really that much of a transactional benefit to “playing nice” with an otherwise shallow leader?  Doesn’t owning an important newspaper and the world’s biggest mega-store free Jeff Bezos from the need to show up for another enabling event?

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The issue of self-induced obedience is not an obscure question. My guess is that half of the people I talk to about their work mention their immediate boss as a good reason to seek another position. Perhaps like the members of Trump’s cabinet, they stay because they sense that they are positioning themselves for a better final act in a newly reconfigured hierarchy. And then there are the mundane but sometimes overwhelming challenges of reorienting one’s personal or family life.

None of this should ignore the possibility that folks smiling behind this self-satisfied president actually share his vision. Never underestimate how a person’s cognitive elasticity can be stretched to blend to embrace even the most implausible fiction.

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What “News” has Become

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                                  New York Times

We seem to be bleeding out the positive energy that was sometimes the national style. 

For many Americans this can seem like a season of despair. the constant din of alarming news on various platforms is wearing us out. Our politics now is fraught with controversy over the undoing of years of progress. Normal routes of trade and international cooperation have been undermined.  And, as ever, gun violence continues at about 47,000 deaths a year: much higher than most other peer nations. All of this has been made worse by a president who has mostly abandoned the usual roll of ‘binding up the nation’s wounds’ with appeals to transcendent values. Instead, his ersatz rhetoric of hate punishes individuals and institutions unaccustomed to having to defend their usually laudable objectives. Add in the fact that that legacy television news is folding under the crush of MAGA and FCC threats. ABC, CBS and NBC have yielded enough to have imprints of the President’s shoelaces on their foreheads.  How can a person escape this doom loop?

Most communities are safe, but the assurance of it is gone.  No wonder people are looking to A.I. for prepackaged nostalgia for times that weren’t necessarily better, but seemed more civil.

Researchers like Harvard’s Stephen Pinker note that a look at a lot of hard data reveals our world is now safer and less violent than in previous years (The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2010). The difference is the expansion of the personal boundaries of the known made possible by news sites and social media that have penetrated and been absorbed by the culture. Clearly, Americans think they are less secure. Their perceptions of violence and disruption penetrate our mediated spaces: from school shootings to the collapse of the social or physical infrastructures of whole communities.

Through all of this it is worth remembering what “news” has become. It is now a 24/7 preoccupation for many of us. And we shift seamlessly from video news, social media, and various online sites devoted to updates and opinion. There is a transformation of attention to reporting from a one-shot glance at a newspaper or evening newscast into incessant doom scrolling throughout the day. All-news channels like CNN mostly attract an older audience and continuous viewership. This has been confirmed by research that includes the corollary that these viewers feel less safe even in their own communities.

What exacerbates the problem is the decline in the kinds of activities that generally made people feel better about themselves and others, such as attending live events, attending church services, or participating in clubs and service organizations.

If we remember that traditional news has usually included the worst things that happened on a given day, the pool of available encounters within a population of nearly 400 million is always substantial. Hence, we get Robert Putnam’s representative image of a person bowling alone to feed our sense of personal isolation. Our discomfort is also fed by the steady drone of crime as entertainment, such as the elaborately produced and popular Netflix documentaries about lethal family members.

Solutions

So if news is now ubiquitous and a heavy tax on the soul, what are the solutions? How do we become less sour and more productively engaged? Of course, expressing opposition to the authoritarian impulses of this administration is a must. But it may also make sense to follow neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin’s advice to seek the restorative power of music. Among other things, music can reinstate our faith in the ability of different people to come together in support of one single vision. The parts of any composition are complementary rather than competitive. It is also gateway to those parts of the brain that tap into positive feelings rather than harsher binaries of languages that ask us to pick sides. One can chose any musical form open to the non-discursive world of moods and feelings that are usually resolved in harmonic resolution. As  Nietzsche noted, “Life without music would be a mistake.”

Baroque music usually lifts my spirit. It always reminds me what smart people working together can achieve. The lucky souls who have the talent to effectively enable this inventive world could be playing Bach. But they could also choose a modern classic like that selected by the Danish Girls Choir.

Some people find respite in putting digital media aside in favor of hiking, fishing, reading, or a simple game of cribbage. Modern media observers note that A.I. images of nostalgic scenes from the 90s or earlier on Instagram can do the trick. But anyone temped to find redemption through a richer experience of life can do better than find it on a cramped three-by-five device. Our politicians may be failing us. But there are still so many around us or nearby who are still on their game. Why commit to mediated experience through the filter of someone else’s political or ideological agenda?