avoiding the trouble
some thoughts on the mood of things
Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, I went to a Thanksgiving dinner where the topic of discussion did not stray from what the hell is going to happen now? all night. The guests at this dinner were all politically active, ranging in affiliation from social-justice progressives to newly minted socialists, but the hosts were affluent liberals for whom politics had largely been something acted out through habits of speech and spending. This was made pitifully clear when one of them asked, in the middle of someone else’s sentence: “Is this what life is like now? We’re just going to talk about politics all the time?”
This was far from the first time this person had talked about politics, but it was without a doubt the first time he was doing it against his immediate will. Politics had ceased to be a cultural performance in which he could choose to participate. It and its consequences were real to him now: they were spoiling the dinner conversation.
That was eight years ago. If the social purchase of politics-as-cultural-performance was already breaking down at that point, then its pieces are now strewn about on the floor. Our cultural symbols are fragmented; they make less immediate sense. Montessori moms turn into antivaxxers turn into tradwives turn into pro-natalists turn into MAGA stans. Our individual lives are similarly fragmented: it is much more difficult to map them onto a coherent narrative. (This is partially why Trump’s simplistic anti-immigrant rhetoric has such legs. Here is the single culprit of—and the single solution to—all of your problems. One of the other reasons that message goes as far as it does is that the actual culprits—the profit motive and the power of corporations—are impossible to fathom. They have surpassed human control and understanding, not least because they have caused unknowable and unpredictable—and irreparable—damage to the planetary systems that make humanity possible to begin with.)
Most mornings while I work I listen to WQXR, which last week hosted a fundraising drive. The station’s pleas for pledges were marked by an overwhelming insistence on classical music as a respite. Support this sanctuary, we don’t play political ads, classical music is for people at every point of the political spectrum, this is the one thing anyone can get behind. To people who, on Tuesday morning of last week, pledged to give $120 either all at once or in $10 monthly installments over the course of a year, the station gifted a lawn sign emblazoned with the words “Classical Music Lovers Live Here.” The joke was, the hosts explained, that a neighbor would walk by ready to become incensed and instead get a good chuckle.
There was a willful kind of avoidance at work in this bit, which is understandable: the options on the presidential ballot represent, in broad strokes, overt enabling of a genocide with kumbaya overtones and overt enabling of a genocide with KKK overtones. It is not hard to imagine why someone would want to avert their eyes.
But the performance on WQXR extended beyond that: it was a coy little feint, an attempt to shed the association of liberal politics with classical music listening and public radio supporting. Perhaps it was a way of evading blame or culpability, a way of saying we represent here nothing but the very literal contents of our broadcast and none of the associations which it has accumulated. We, in other words, are innocent. We didn’t cause this mess, and we don’t know how to get out of it.
That seems to be, at present, the defining sentiment of the cultural mainstream. It’s in the pledge drive lawn sign and in its hosts’ talk of respite. It’s in the bacchanalia of Charli XCX and the pin-up cuteness of Sabrina Carpenter. It’s women online insisting that I’m just a little girl. It’s in the barrage of biopics of subjects—Dylan, Springsteen, Baldwin, Astaire—who represent a time when, we imagine, things were different; a time when our well-being felt less under threat. It is the wish that the trouble would simply go away. It’s a pathetic wish. Undeniably weak, a sign of our fallibility, our lack of power and imagination. It’s also incredibly human.