White Page 14
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Halfway through the campaign, I’d noticed I was no longer reading only the Times, or watching only CNN and MSNBC; I was also checking out Fox and other conservative newsfeeds (including Breitbart) and realizing with harsh disbelief that we were living in two totally different worlds that I’d never bothered to notice before, inside two worlds that didn’t even come close to overlapping, and I felt naïve for failing to grasp the stark contrast until now. But why was one considered “right” and the other “wrong”?—where were these absolutes coming from? Were Trump’s supporters only deplorables and alt-right racists? Were Clinton’s really out-of-touch neoliberal elitists who didn’t care about anything except identity politics and the corporate status quo? Talking to anybody about the election in that darkening summer and fall of 2016, you’d have thought there was nothing centrist about how people chose to cast their vote, and that no coming together would be allowed; the idea of healing, of mending, seemed impossible. You were either virtue voting for one candidate or voting for the other and therefore evil. The women I knew who were for Trump were all about the economy and immigration, and they resented that gender supposedly forced them to line up behind a candidate they didn’t believe in. And in Los Angeles they learned the hard way that if they admitted this, massive wide-eyed disbelief followed by arguments would ensue, started by people they saw as overly sensitive and out-of-touch elitists; since any conversation would tank, they kept quiet. It was an insurmountable headache.
In February 2016, months before Trump won the primary, I had dinner with two youngish couples in their late thirties, one of whom I’d known for about a decade, and the other I met that night in a West Hollywood restaurant. I had never talked politics with the couple I had known for ten years because I wasn’t interested and assumed they weren’t either, though I knew they’d voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012. During the second round of cocktails things loosened up and someone mentioned uncritically something that Trump had said in a speech earlier that week and a surprising and dramatic hesitancy suddenly landed on the table. We all looked at one other, sipping our drinks, before one of the women, a small-business owner, confessed that she liked Trump, and was going to vote for him, with her husband agreeing, much to the relief of the other couple, who said they would as well. Even then, we were all certain Trump would be the Republican candidate, despite the legacy media assuring us that this was all but impossible, but I also knew at that dinner that I probably wouldn’t be voting for him, or for Clinton. I was shocked by these two couples’ announcement that they would be supporting Trump, but I wasn’t offended. Instead, I became curious and started asking everyone why they’d moved from Obama to Trump. The reasons were mostly economic, having to do with trade and immigration, with political correctness and identity politics coming in a close third and fourth. In other words: these were white people.
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That night I went home and tweeted about this surprising discovery: I actually knew people in Los Angeles who were backing Trump (and within a year I knew many more). By then it was eleven o’clock on a Saturday night and I thought the tweet was funny, and who’d be reading it anyway at this hour? It was just a lark, with the tweet saying only that I’d just gotten home from a dinner in West Hollywood and been shocked that the entire table was voting for Trump but weren’t eager to admit it. Then I watched Saturday Night Live and went to bed. In the morning I woke up groggily, vaguely aware that the millennial lying next to me was already awake and looking at his phone. Silence reigned in the dark bedroom until he asked in a low voice, “Why in the hell did you tweet that last night?” I thought about it for a moment and then remembered what I’d tweeted. “Why?” I asked. I fumbled for my glasses as he showed me his phone, and I saw that the tweet had been retweeted thousands and thousands of times (unheard of for anything I’d ever tweeted), not least by Donald J. Trump himself. In fact the tweet made international news overnight, and was now being covered on hundreds of blogs, and media requests in America as well as in Europe began pouring in, all of which I turned down. Because what would I be promoting? What would I be defending? People on the left refused to believe that this had really happened and preferred to believe I was trolling everybody, and they doubted if anyone in that part of Los Angeles would vote for Trump, along with disbelief that any women there would either. Yet in the end that tiny district in Beverly Hills did vote for Trump as did 45 percent of college-educated white females and 62 percent of those not college educated. This was around the time that I began to lay off Twitter.
The woman I’d known for a decade texted me later that Sunday and said she’d laughed when she saw the tweet, but she also warned me not to ever mention who was at that dinner. Her business was Hollywood-based, and who knew what could happen in this divisive climate; she’d noticed that people were far too hysterical, and to defend your beliefs just wasn’t worth the trouble. What an awful way to live, I thought. To ever behave like that would make me too stressed-out and exhausted, as a writer who had always considered himself liberal and a defender of free speech and a believer in people’s rights to express themselves however they chose to and in any way they wanted. I was now looking at a new kind of liberalism, one that willingly censored people and punished voices, obstructed opinions and blocked viewpoints. This illiberalism was becoming the alarming norm, in the media, in Hollywood, and for a moment nowhere more glaringly than on college campuses in 2017, but this seemed to become the breaking point for everyone. The irony was amplified when students—and, it seemed, the institution’s administration itself—rejected conservative speakers at Berkeley, once considered the bastion of free speech in America, and there was zero chance of spinning that story into an aspirational narrative for the Left or the Resistance or for anybody else anymore. All this was simply becoming embarrassing, and you could even sense the legacy media’s hesitancy to cover it.
By then, you couldn’t get around the idea that Hollywood and college campuses and the media were all deep seas of mixed signals and moral hypocrisy. Whatever the terrible reality of these businesses and corporations and organizations happened to be, that they would enforce rules about what artists and civilians should be able to say—which is what the friend who called me was worried about—was scary enough. But in the age of Trump there seemed to be no escape, no peace, for anybody. Rival views about anything had begun to feel like an attack on one’s personal identity—even for those of us caught in the crossfire, who were strenuously independent—and everyone seemed vulnerable to micro-aggressions while living in their half of a black-and-white world. All I could think about hearing the voluminous din—of hatred, anger, shock—on either side of the divide was that it was time for everyone to pull on their big boy pants, have a stiff drink at the bar and start having true conversations, because ultimately we shared only one country. But that notion, too, had begun to sound sentimental.
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In the winter of 2017, just a week after Trump’s inauguration, I was in London giving a talk at the Royal Institute of Great Britain when I was asked by the moderator what I thought of the “unending horror” that was now happening in the United States. I had to stop him and clarify that this apocalyptic narrative about the election and the new president was really only that, a narrative, and merely a reflection of a vast epidemic of alarmist and catastrophic drama that American media was encouraging. I reminded the moderator that despite what he or I thought about Trump, roughly half of the people who had actually voted were somewhat happy with the results of the 2016 election. After I said this you could’ve heard a pin drop in the sold-out hall. Other things I said that were met with a deafening silence included that I didn’t think Trump was going to be impeached; that the protests of the Resistance weren’t going to change anything; that I defended the troublemaker Milo Yiannopoulos’s right of free speech in an oversensitive corporate culture that was
trying to muzzle him, and I admitted that I missed Milo’s provocations on Twitter (he’d been kicked off) no matter how much I often disagreed with them, certainly more than I’d miss the tweets of a middle-aged comedienne who couldn’t handle a vicious yet typical Twitter trolling and had been instrumental in getting him banned. Again, you could have heard the pins dropping. Nobody in the audience at the Royal Institute of Great Britain in the winter of 2017 wanted to hear any of this. At the signing afterward many people came up and were very polite, in that formal British style, and none of them said anything about my remarks except for a white man about my age who said he agreed with me about the protests. But my statements were considered so controversial that they made headlines in the Irish Examiner and The Daily Mail the following day. Somehow these opinions—they were merely that, not prophecies or facts—were provocative enough to warrant these headlines. The overreaction was alarmist, but that was the mood: in a post-Brexit UK there was a chill as well, especially given the realization that nationalism was beginning its sweep across Europe, blooming everywhere.
That same week in London, I was in the back of a cab when the young American sitting across from me asked innocently what music I’d been listening to lately. As I thought about this it registered that my favorite pop music was being made by country artists: Jason Isbell, Miranda Lambert, Jamey Johnson, Brad Paisley, Kasey Musgrave, Ashley Monroe and Sturgill Simpson, among many others. One of my favorite songs of the past few years had been Luke Bryan’s cotton-candy “Roller Coaster,” the sort of nearly perfect pop production that wasn’t being made anymore by actual pop stars. Country was the only place where you could find the pop-rock sweet spot that I was currently searching for—old-school rock and pop sounds and structures. Jason Isbell transcends country with his great Southeastern and Something More Than Free albums, but this young man hadn’t heard of Jason Isbell. In fact he wasn’t listening to any of the artists I mentioned. I’d known him for a little more than a year, and he was also a “survivor” of the election who’d turn into a sputtering wreck if Trump came up briefly in passing or his image was glimpsed on a screen or monitor, and he was shocked, and asked, seriously, how could I possibly like that music? I had no idea what the young man meant and I said so. And then he told me, “How can you like country music when they’re all against us—don’t you understand that? They are against us, Bret. Our values.”
This was an educated white person, very successful in the high-end art world, and I stared at him without knowing how to respond. I had never gravitated toward any kind of music because of the politics it does or doesn’t espouse: it’s a question of whether I like the tunes or not, that’s it. I explained this to the young man in that cab on a cold, wet London morning in the winter of 2017, but he didn’t seem convinced. My liking country music confirmed something about me for him and suggested I was a traitor. I just smiled tightly as we arrived at our destination, and I remember wondering what the idealistic young American would think if I told him Jamey Johnson’s The Guitar Song was a much better record than Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and in that moment I suspected he would have been offended.
t w e e t i n g
For many of us who grew up in California, the American writer Joan Didion was a heroine even though, or because, she was a Goldwater Republican, she was in love with John Wayne, she thought Jim Morrison was sexy because he was a bad boy, she hated hippie culture, she hated the Beats, she hated ’70s feminism, she idolized strong men in her fiction, she dismissed J. D. Salinger and Woody Allen when both were at the height of their popularity, she was the snob and the anti-snob. In short, she was fearlessly opinionated. In 1988 she wrote famously, obliquely, about where she stood politically at the end of the ’80s: “It occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.” Many people disagreed with her stance on social issues, and she was fiercely criticized for an anti-feminism piece she wrote in 1972 called “The Women’s Movement.” (“That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forced women to buy the package.”) But her style, her aesthetic, sold everything she wrote, and this belief in style, and the precision of her writing, seemingly erased ideology: she was a realist, a pragmatist, attuned to logic and facts, but a stylist first—as with all great writers, the style was where you located the meaning in her work. She had rejected the notion that as a woman she wasn’t strong enough to deal with what she saw as the abrasiveness of daily life in a male-dominated society. And she also found something ominous at work in the feminist movement, beyond its objection to being discriminated against. “Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay children forever.”
This particular wish—the desire to remain a child forever—strikes me as a defining aspect in American life right now: a collective sentiment that imposes itself over the neutrality of facts and context. This narrative is about how we wish the world worked out in contrast to the disappointment that everyday life offers us, and it helps us to shield ourselves from not only the chaos of reality but also from our own personal failures. The sentimental narrative is a take on what Didion meant when she wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” in her famous essay “The White Album,” from 1979. “The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be ‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
The key phrase here is “especially if we are writers” because it seems that everyone has fallen under the thrall of this idea that we’re all writers and dramatists now, that each of us has a special voice and something very important to say, usually about a feeling we have, and all this gets expressed in the black maw of social media billions of times a day. Usually this feeling is outrage, because outrage gets attention, outrage gets clicks, outrage can make your voice heard above the deafening din of voices squalling over one another in this nightmarish new culture—and the outrage is often tied to a lunacy demanding human perfection, spotless citizens, clean and likable comrades, and requiring thousands of apologies daily. Advocating while creating your own drama and your brand is where the game is now. And if you don’t follow the new corporate rules accordingly you are banished, exiled, erased from history.
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David Foster Wallace and I never met, but over the ’90s and into the 2000s we often exchanged pleasantries through foreign journalists who were crisscrossing the country to interview youngish American writers. “Who are you interviewing next?” “David Foster Wallace.” “Tell David I say hi.” Or “Oh, by the way, David Foster Wallace says hello.” Wallace had been a fan of Less Than Zero, and yet I’d been amused by David’s interpretation of American Psycho as “Neiman-Marcus nihilism” and never remotely felt we were having any kind of literary feud. We were still saying our distant hellos to e
ach other after he made the American Psycho comments. But this was the full extent of our relationship, which is perhaps how it should have been since I couldn’t get through his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, despite trying to a few times, and found his journalism bloated and minor-key condescending, and thought his Kenyon commencement speech from 2005 was a very special example of bullshit. I sensed the canonization following his suicide in 2008 to be based on a particular and very American sort of sentimental narrative, yet a film about Wallace released in 2015, The End of the Tour, was surprisingly easy to take even though it’s reverential to a fault. Smoothly directed by James Ponsoldt and elegantly written by the playwright Donald Margulies, the movie is often as static as filmed plays can be—with long stretches of dialogue that essentially constitute a debate about authenticity—and you can either get stoned on all of the goodwill at hand or roll your eyes in disbelief that this was actually taken as seriously and presented as laboriously as it seems to have been by everybody involved. The End of the Tour stars Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone journalist who tags along at the end of Wallace’s U.S. book tour for Infinite Jest, and for those of us who were also touring and immersed in publishing in the 1990s, the movie provides a comically accurate account of a Gen-X era that is long gone: Walter Kirn’s book reviews in New York magazine ignite entire party conversations, Rolling Stone commissions a profile of an avant-garde academic novelist, people in cars sing along to Alanis Morissette anthems and smoking’s allowed everywhere. The digital age had not yet fully arrived.