the stakes
I was standing on the platform at Atlantic Avenue waiting for a Q train one Friday evening a few months ago when a young man approached me with a clipboard to ask me to sign his petition to get some independents on the ballot upstate. I said no and (as I remember it) otherwise didn’t engage. Later, I overheard the same guy talking to another woman who was protesting that his petition seemed fraudulent—why would he be asking in the city for signatures to support candidates upstate? That’s when he said, “We’re trying to get Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the ballot,” and I started laughing, loudly. “That laugh seems fake,” he said to me, and I turned away to get onto the train that had just pulled into the station. I didn’t care whether the train was a B or a Q—I just wanted to get away from that guy and my own deranged laughter.
On that particular evening, I did get away from that particular guy, but in another sense there is no escape. To live in the United States of America is to live with innumerable cranks, crackpots, and conspiracists. Somehow or other, we are supposed to make a democracy work with a demos that includes them—along with those who are well informed, ill informed, disengaged, striving for justice, striving for themselves, or striving to destroy the whole thing. You know, humanity. It’s hard to put up with my own family sometimes, and I love them dearly. As for putting up with all the rest of you—well, it is no wonder that from time to time I would get a little cracked myself and find myself laughing at a stranger on a subway platform.
Lately I’ve been more than a little cracked while much of the political press indulges in a mad orgy of speculation, prognostication, and demands regarding the candidacy of the U.S. president for another term in office. I had thought that the madness would subside after one weekend, especially after the Supreme Court released its decision that the former guy can do whatever he wants, he can be king. But no. Forget that on the debate stage the former guy claimed, of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, “This was his dream; I talked to him about it” while he also again implied that his re-election is the ransom for the release of wrongly imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Forget that his election would result in the implementation of a plan to crack down on marginalized people and the perceived enemies of the Right while establishing white Christian patriarchal rule. Forget that the GOP wants to extend Fourteenth Amendment rights to fertilized eggs. The president is old, and The New York Times in particular is on a crusade to make sure that no one forgets it.
Five years ago, when I first wrote about Don Quixote, I saw the novel as “a cautionary tale for our age, in which misinformation and conspiracy theories proliferate.” I compared Don Quixote to a conspiracist with a gun and wondered why, given the violence with which he acts out his fantasies, his particular form of quixotism is so valorized. Today I think we’re all to some degree like Don Quixote, including those of us who (think we) aren’t conspiracists. It can be hard to know what’s real because we perceive so much through media. Don Quixote sees windmills and a barber’s basin through the lens of chivalric romances; we see an election campaign through the lens of our doomscrolling. What’s worse, an election campaign isn’t a tangible thing, like an inn, and most of us can’t interact with a presidential candidate as Don Quixote can with an innkeeper. For most of us, the media creates nearly our entire experience of an election campaign. And, as journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones explains,
As media, we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans thinks is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it is not so. If Americans don’t recognize the crisis our democracy is facing, that’s not their fault, it is ours.
While pundits fantasize about “blitz primaries” and contested conventions—and these are in fact, to be perfectly clear, complete fantasies—I’m striving to do what I can do in the real world to defeat the current authoritarian threat, given the facts as I understand them. I’ll be writing 200 postcards to voters in Pennsylvania, and I’m planning a postcard-writing party to get at least another 200 written. I’m also screwing up my courage to canvass at least ten of my neighbors to make sure that they know about and vote for the Equal Rights Amendment to the New York Constitution this November. I didn’t even know about this possible amendment to the state Constitution before I went to an Indivisible meeting this week, during which I sat and talked with others at a taqueria while we wrote and addressed postcards to voters in a local swing district. It is good to get away from the media frenzy and simply do this work side-by-side with other people, to share knowledge and laughter with them—wry laughter, or bitter laughter, or laughter that’s just laughter, but never fake laughter.
I worry that I should do more, though I’m sure that when I do actually do more, I’ll still worry that it isn’t enough. What haven’t I thought of, that I could be doing? What are you doing?
