Make America Boring Again
On growing weary of all the intensity
It was my birthday the other day. I don’t like to brag, but I have a new one every year. I don’t much believe in horoscope hocus pocus, though I am a proud Gemini. We are playful, restless, friendly, expressive, and intellectually curious. Or so they say. (I wasn’t intellectually curious enough to research it, so I just asked ChatGPT instead.) And I like our Zodiac sign — who wouldn’t mind being represented by a pair of comely twins? It’s kind of like being watched over by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson. Which beats the hell out of say, being a Cancer, whose sign is The Crab. Not that I have anything against crabs. As a Marylander, I eat steamed blue crabs with Old Bay on them every chance I get. But the thought of crabs being synonymous with cancer ruins the fun, and makes me want to stick with meatloaf, which of course, is made from Taurus.
But I digress. This isn’t a column about birthdays or eating crustaceans or The Big C. (We Geminis are head-fakers.) I brought it up merely to mention that on the occasion of my 35th birthday — which I’ve now turned for 19 years straight — someone asked what kind of excitement I was hoping this year brings. To which I responded, “The much less-of-it kind.”
Our political headlines bring new excitement every day, usually of the worst stripe: with all the insurrectionism, and criminal indictments, and looming threats of civil war, and general all-around Marjorie-Taylor-whack-jobiness of it all. It’s become so damn exciting for so long, that I’m getting bored by all the excitement. My adrenal glands are shot. My outrage-ometer is on the fritz from overuse. I’ve come to pine for our politics being boring again, due merely to dullness. Not because they’re so overstimulating, that we’ve come to be bored by way of desensitization.
Just for the sake of this piece, I went back a week into the Drudge Report archive. As I’ve said before: Matt Drudge writes my Apocalypse Bible on a daily basis. That is not meant pejoratively in the least. I say it in genuine gratitude for his very real service to our country. If you think you can’t stomach the news, imagine what his life looks like. He ingests all the worst of what the world has to offer every day, in order to bring you a representative sample. Which is more than enough for me.
Consider the Drudge political headlines, which perfectly capture the free-for-all chaos of just the last week: Biden ad attacks convicted criminal Trump…….The dread election: Share of “double haters” hits historic high: 1 out of 4!....CNN preps for hostile debate…Bitter tension escalating before debate……..Fake videos fill MAGA media…..Gaetz faces House Ethics Committee probe over sex, drug allegations……..Trump spiritual advisor admits he abused girl……The Don’s wartime consigliere now faces legal peril of his own…….Maxine Waters tells judge of “nightmares” after TX man threatened to cut her throat……NJ Dem kingmaker indicted on racketeering charges…….Putin online bot army spewing fake quotes from celebs in new propaganda campaign……Third of voters less proud to be American……Republicans now want to rename the oceans after Donald Trump……..Don challenges Joe to cognitive test but confuses name of doctor who tested him……..Chatbots still can’t say who won 2020 election!.....Ex-official reveals: Trump talked about executing people at White House meetings….Bannon: Opponents will be jailed……JD Vance, top VP contender, liked tweets suggesting Trump was rapist…..More American expats renouncing citizenship….Florida district bans book — about banned books……
And that wasn’t even a full week’s worth — more like five days. If you’re in the business of detailing our country’s political dysfunction, you could optimistically look at this time as an embarrassment of riches. And yet, it’s just come to feel more like an embarrassment, period.
When I was a reporter at a political magazine for two decades (Zoomer explainer: “magazines” were these mini booklets made of paper with large blocks of text printed within), I used to run the other way from straight-up political stories. I regularly looked for excuses to write on just about anything else – porn-star conventions, pot-grower schools, Christian professional wrestlers, you name it — for fear of boring myself stupid by having to delve into disputes over monetary policy or marginal tax rates or health-care initiatives. But like those porn stars I catalogued, in which everyone was having sex around me without it being sexy, politics now feel like bad actors going through the motions. Screwing each other because that’s what they’re supposed to do.
Now, with all the current instability, I yearn for the things that used to excite Nerd Washington (which is to say, all of Washington) before they all became either aspiring insurrectionists or domestic democracy-defenders. There was a time, not all that long ago, when staid think tanks like the Heritage Foundation would put out dry-as-dirt research titles like “Property and Competition in Telecom” and “The Medicare Drug Discount Card: First Phase of a Market Revolution?” Now, they issue “Project 2025,” a policy manual for aspiring autocrats ( think Mango Mussolini) to help lay waste to democratic institutions, while punishing your enemies and rewarding your idiot friends.
What I wouldn’t give to see policy geeks remember their place, and act like policy geeks again, instead of fancying themselves faux revolutionaries. To rediscover their normie-hood. This might be why, though I’m not a Democrat, I’ve also never managed to bring myself to hate Joe Biden. Even if it feels, sometimes, like he’d be better off working his bingo card in The Villages’ day room, when he’s not swimming naked or sniffing girls’ hair, he kind of feels normal. (I.E., he doesn’t spend each day trying to figure out how to burn down the country’s electoral and judicial systems, neither does he give torch to politeness, good manners, and every other civic nicety we’ve ever known.)
It makes you wonder sometimes, if the news ever settled down, whether we could similarly tamp down our own appetites for controversy, as our metabolic rates now burn much hotter and higher than they did in the past. Or have we become too addicted to instability, to always having a looming catastrophe on the horizon? Do our cortisol-pumping stations heighten our senses, and make us feel more alive?
The general population used to care about reality TV more than they did politics. Which plenty took as a sign of apathy, but which I took as an indicator of good civic health. In a healthy democracy, we can afford to take politics for granted, making it a secondary concern. We used to watch crazies acting out on TV as a cathartic ritual. And while reality TV has fallen off, ratings-wise, as a genre, plenty still enjoy watching crazies, as anyone who tunes in regularly to Sean Hannity can attest. Except that too many of us have become crazies, as well. What was once experienced vicariously is now, for so many, a full-immersion exercise. Years ago, when I was off on one of my journalistic nutjob safaris, profiling a Christian rap-metal band whose leader was susceptible to florid conspiracy theories, he surveyed a school assembly, where his band was playing, asking them how many believed the moon landing was faked in a television studio, as he did. I was shocked by how many teachers raised their hands.
That was back in 2006. But now, it wouldn’t shock me at all, since fringiness has become the new mainstream. As you well know, if you’ve ever watched a half-baked Joe Rogan (America’s leading podcaster) push one of his umpteen conspiracy theories. Or if you’re one of the 70 percent (of my once fellow) Republicans who believe the lie that the last election was stolen. Or if you’re one of the 34 percent of science-deniers who’ve come to the completely unfounded conclusion that there are more than two genders.
To which I ask a rude but direct question: if national normalcy bit us in the ass, trying to remind us of her presence, would we even remember what she looked like?
We’ve been going so insane for so long — with so many chaos merchants having a vested interest in us staying that way — that I have my doubts.
But they are not entirely to blame. The blame lies with us, as well — for our constant need for action, and overreaction. Maybe we’d do better settling for long stretches of collective boredom. I’ve always liked Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician, even if I hate math. Mainly, I’ve liked him for what he’s best known for — Pascal’s Wager — which has, at times, kept my belief solvent in moments of doubt. But in his Pensées, the same book in which his Wager was originally articulated, Pascal seemed to hint at the salutary effects of boredom as well :
Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
In other words: this is a bit what it looks like when people come to the end of themselves. That will smack of desperation to many. But to my ears, it sounds like music/a good start. It could even be the opening bars of the only song that might save us from our own self-destructive tendencies.
Bonus Track: When The Fray debuted their hit song, “How To Save A Life,” in 2006, I heard it a lot on the radio, but didn’t pay much attention. The lyrics were written by Isaac Slade, their lead singer, after he worked at a camp for troubled teenagers, and couldn’t figure out how to save one of his campers, who was suffering from all manner of setbacks and depression. But this cover of The Fray’s song, which I was turned onto by my son Dean, recently caught my ear. It’s from a red-dirt country-crooning 22-year-old named Wyatt Flores, who sounds like he’s been singing for a lot longer than he’s lived. It also has some good fiddle on it — always a plus. A lyrics taste:
As he goes left, and you stay right
Between the lines of fear and blame
You begin to wonder why you came
Where did I go wrong?
I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life