Sunday, February 5, 2017

I'm Seriously Asking Here

Is this year different? Or is it just me?

It could just be my increasingly waning interest in football. Or the lack of cable in my house, allowing me to more easily curate the media I absorb. I'd be happy to find out that it's just my feeling and not a wider thing. But the buildup to this year's Super Bowl has been... dimmed. Less bombastic. And when football coverage loses bombast, my instinct is to ask if it's feeling okay. Yeah, media week was still there in all its grasping, repetitive glory. It's all still happening: the game, the ads, the halftime show. But it feels to me as though it's going through the motions. It's happening because it's what we do. Market forces wouldn't have it any other way. And, really, we all need it, too. Or, at least, we usually do. The Super Bowl is always, if nothing else, a fun distraction from the bleak midwinter. But it's not enough this year. Even if it were enough, distraction is not what we need right now.

Drew Magary has already written about the incongruousness of all this:
"Things are NOT going smoothly right now. Right now everything is deeply fucked, and to willfully ignore it is either impossible or irresponsible. The last thing I need is the NFL trotting out a showy display of allegiance both to the flag and its own, relentless tunnel vision. The whole thing feels tone deaf at best and passive-aggressive at worst... a tacit demand that you sit there and adore all this pageantry, or else."
I can't quite bring myself to say that it all feels wrong this year; a few hours of frivolous fun is crucial to self-care. But I know that it's not right, either. There will be pageantry, the kind that pretends everything is okay. That everything is normal. And that's great, necessary even, when it comes at a moment in which we all need to be told that everything will be okay. But in this moment, everything is not okay. None of this is normal. The most important thing we can do this year is remember that.

Watch the game. I will. But in the down moments, (during commercials, if the score gets out of hand, while Joe Buck is throwing up on America between plays) plan your calls to your representatives, make some donations, and keep on top of the news. Because something will happen. What better time to make something truly horrifying happen than in the middle of the biggest TV event of the year. Recall that the Muslim Ban was announced on a Friday night.

I've said before that I love sports because they're not important. And that remains true. In the face of so much importance, in a world that's dangerously low on trivialities, we find ourselves fighting a two front war: to preserve our stupid distractions, while also remembering where they rate. And if we stay strong, if we resist, one day we can go back to enjoying our distractions like we deserve to. We can have our frivolous things again. I promise.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

The President We Needed

Source: Getty Images North America

Just before taking office in 2009, President Obama attempted to reenergize the MLK Day of Service that had first been made official fifteen years before. This call came at an opportune time. A service holiday had always been a noble idea, fitting of Dr. King's legacy (hooray, another white dude expounding on King's legacy!). But by 2009, it was also a smart, practical way to get the country back to work in the middle of a biting recession. Get Americans to mend fences with one another as they pitched in to made their communities just a little bit nicer. Except a whole lot of us didn't do that. We continued to spend MLK Day the way we spend every Monday holiday: inside, bathing in the comforting glow of our screens. A day off means a day off, dammit.

That's a Royal We, by the way. I'm as much to blame as anyone. January is cold, man. And now that the Christmas lights are gone it's all grey, too, and you want me to go outside? And do stuff? Yeah, no thanks, Hussein. I did nothing this MLK Day except brace myself for... well, let's not get into that now, shall we? This is about positive reflection.

The point is, he looked at Americans and saw something better than what we were. Or maybe he saw what we could have been--and still could be. But we're not there yet. He expected Congress to act like adults who actually care about the people whose lives are affected by their work and they didn't. He expected his supporters to have his back in 2010 and they didn't. He expected his own party to unify and run an effective campaign to replace him and they didn't. That was the heart of Obama the Pollyanna: someone who counted on others to be the best people they could be. And kept doing that. Albert Einstein (who was not a mental health expert but was an accomplished guy in other disciplines so we keep quoting this) said something about the definition of insanity.

Looked at another way: Obama, Master of Cool, Calm, and Collected, was perhaps not ideally suited to lead a nation increasingly addicted to panic, outrage, and juvenile dramatics. He could try to talk us down from the ledge, and Lord knows he tried. But then one dipshit heckles him and then a lot of other people start yelling at the dipshit and then everybody's shouting and he's still standing up there, looking like he can distinctly hear the narrator from Arrested Development: "the nation continued to chant 'speech, speech, speech' for no one in particular."

So why would I have voted for him a third time? Because, in spite of all my liberal naval-gazing (do what you're good at, Mom always said), he was not the president we deserved, but the one we needed. And his was the example to aspire toward. Still is. That doesn't mean he always had the best solutions. You don't like his healthcare proposals? Find a different one and fight for it instead of torpedoing positive solutions and giving us a half-working sludge that'll be a nightmare to fix. Think he's too slow to get done the things that he promised to do? Call your congressman and tell them you want the work to get done, donate your time to organize marches and petition signings, show up to your bloody polling place. Life gets bad? Stand up, take a breath (or five; deep, slow, evenly-paced), brush it off, and get back to work.

None of this is new advice. You've heard it all before. They're the same positive-change platitudes that get proffered every time things look hard. They get repeated because we need the reminder now and again. They're creations of our better selves, yearning to break through from somewhere underneath, teased out of our evolved brains by our superegos. In other words, they don't come naturally. Our mammalian wiring, the stuff that still has us afraid of the dark and everything that's new and different: it's not far from the surface. It can take control very easily and will work to hinder every attempt we make at being better people. It's why we have the phrase "one step forward, two steps back." It's why we replaced a reasonable, stable, compassionate, classy, hyper-literate, upstanding citizen with his polar opposite. It would be hard to think up a more damning indictment of the man and his legacy, but here we are.

I try to imagine how things might've been if Obama had had a fraction of his successor's talent for self-promotion, but I'm not certain it would've made a difference. His biggest hindrance was the hand he was dealt (nation in crisis, hilariously hostile opposition, fickle base, on and on) and self-promotion only goes so far. It's not much good at building bridges when the people on the other shore are already convinced you're the anti-Christ. And it wouldn't have helped Clinton: self-promotion isn't transferrable. And, just as importantly, that wouldn't have been him. We loved the cool Obama. Making him into someone desperate to impress others would've killed the insouciant image we fell in love with.

Here's the part where I say we'll never see his like again, but it's not so dark as all that. Measured calm, dedication, work ethic, and being a really great guy is not so unusual a combination. And good things don't last, but they can be brought back. He wasn't the first president to have that combination. So it'll be a while before it comes 'round again, but it will. And I hope she invites him back to the White House for a fist-bump session. Before putting him on the Supreme Court.

Thanks, Obama.