Well, That Sucked
Happy December. This is the twenty-fourth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it’s just like all those other email newsletters, except slowly losing its will to live.
I’m starting the month, and ending the year, with thoughts from me — as well as thoughts from people who actually still nurture a flicker of hope. You’re welcome!
Here we go again
Last time around, I was ready to fight. Or, at least, from my relatively privileged perch, pointedly whine. Throughout the never-ending parade of injustice, corruption, and stupidity, I made the effort to stay informed, no matter how dispiriting the headlines became. I joined protests online and in person. I marched. I donated. I tried to look the thing in the eye and understand it. (And I drank.) This time around, I just want to bury my head in the sand. (And drink.)
And I’m sure I’m not alone. When the title of Ben Lindbergh’s article — “The Appeal, and Peril, of Postelection Apathy” — showed up in my RSS feed, I felt, as the kids say, seen. Or to put it another way, Ben’s bruised and battered spirit looks like I feel.
Just the title of that article provided a much-needed salve, a basic sympathetic response — recognition: I see what you see, I feel how you feel. It’s the rest of the world that went mad, not you. (There are now people on this planet who have voted for that orange-faced dipshit for president three times! Three times!!!) And the desire to escape/hide from that madness is stronger than ever. But, as Ben goes on to correctly point out, if we all choose to look away from the world for the next four years, what will be left of it by the time we look back?
I don’t know, and I still don’t know if I’m up for facing any of it. For the time being, I’ve set the news to “off” and social media to “as little as possible”. But instead of ending on a down note for the year, I’ll share what else I’ve read from the last month that still has some fight left in it. It’s not a lot. It’ll have to do for now.
Parasocial relationships with benefits
I don’t follow any political pundits or big media outlets too closely. And even if I did, I wouldn’t turn to them now for clarity or solace. Instead, I look to more personal and familiar voices — voices I’ve known and trusted for a long time. And that means strangers on the internet.
Ben Lindbergh, who wrote the piece above about resisting post-election apathy, is one of my favorite baseball (and Star Wars) writers/podcasters. According to the stats in my podcast app, I’ve spent over 133 hours listening to his Effectively Wild baseball podcast just this year. And that’s with me always falling behind on episodes, giving up on ever catching up, and skipping a significant number of them.
Going on its thirteenth year, Effectively Wild publishes three times a week, with episodes running over an hour long, equal parts sabermetrics-minded and goofily absurd. Almost all of the stats stuff goes right over my head. Some fans of the podcast use it to fall asleep to. For me, Ben and his cohosts are a pleasant background to my week.
I spend a lot of time with these strangers on the internet because they are my kind of fun. They are also absolutely a part of my liberal elite bubble — not because the show is political — but because of how they represent the future that libs want: smart, qualified people over-analyzing even the tiniest corners of our world with intelligence, humor, generosity, self-awareness, and joy. (Basically, qualities that half the country have stopped subscribing to.)
“How It Went”
Likewise, my very favorite post-election piece is from my favorite Apple writer/podcaster, John Gruber, whom I’ve been reading maybe longer than I’ve regularly read anyone — nearly every single word since he started his blog in 2002. Both Ben and Gruber are great writers, full stop. They are thoughtful and they express those thoughts with incisiveness, clarity, and a personal style that vibrates at a frequency that just happens to resonate with the particular bumps and fissures in the jellied mass residing in my skull cavity. (I might be able to explain why someday, but this windup has already gone on too long.)
If you want to understand Apple, both its strengths and its flaws, Gruber’s Daring Fireball is the only blog you need to read. It’s not all Apple stuff, tho. He’ll delve into broader tech topics, movies, baseball (his greatest fault as a human being is that he is an avowed Yankees fan) — basically, whatever interests him. And, unlike other bloggers and journalists, who are often admonished to “stick to” tech/sports/their beat, he’ll dive right into politics, too, wearing his allegiances on his sleeve. Oh, and he also invented the markup language Markdown, which is the formatting style I use to draft all these posts.
All that is just to say, his post-election article “How It Went” is not really about any of those things. But then, even if it is unlike anything he’s written before, it still fits rights in. It’s his site, his thoughts — coming from the same writer I’ve been reading and getting to know for over twenty years. So, it carries more weight than a hot take from a political pundit on a cable news channel. That means it might also hit differently for you if you haven’t been reading him all these years. But if you only click on only one thing in this newsletter, click on this.
Other Rabbit Holes
And now for a few more parting thoughts from the past. But in recognition of all those strangers on the internet whom I rely on (does anyone remember how polite we were with the “via” attribution on old-school Twitter? No such decorum there now), the rest of the links will be presented with both the name of the original author and the referrer. Like civilized internet people!
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), via kottke:
Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private fortune. We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.
June Jordan (1936–2002), via Laura Olin:
HEY
C’MON COME OUT
WHEREVER YOU ARE
WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING AT THIS TREE
AIN’ EVEN BEEN PLANTED YET
Thomas Mann (1875–1955), via counternotions:
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
And that’s it for this one. See you next year.
jf