Sometimes the politics of unhinged triviality and outrage can come pretty close to causing nausea. It’s not an unusual response when you get caught up in what used to be a stable system that unexpectedly starts going wonky and off its rocker like politics in America today. A political culture, like anything with a life of its own, has its own chemistry. And when that gets out of balance, the results can be sickening.
A meaningful political chemistry, one that stimulates rational behavior, conveys a sense of “right” proportions — the important things dominate action and reflection, the trivial is not disproportionately emphasized and the nihilistic is shunned.
When a political culture becomes queasy and starts to drive people away, it’s usually because it has come to glorify the trivial and meaningless, allowing them to dominate the public space of news and discourse.
Take for instance the sensational media saturation of the menacing threats and PR circus surrounding Steve Bannon pleading not guilty to charges of contempt of Congress, or the bigoted rantings of Republican politicians indulging in hate speech directed at Muslim members of Congress, or the whining of elected climate change deniers and renewable energy debunkers made rich by payoffs from the fossil fuel industry, or for that matter the deluge of groveling coverage devoted to former President Trump’s slightest twitch or burp.
These bottom-feeding trivialities all seem at times to overshadow or assume equal footing with matters of national and global significance affecting the lives and well-being of everyone — such matters as the current surge in COVID-19 infections and deaths, President Biden’s signing the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law, House Democrats passing the $1.75 trillion Build Back America Act, Biden preserving Chaco Canyon National Historic Park from oil and gas fracking, the congressional investigation of the January 6 attack on Congress and attempted coup, and the horrendous number of gun deaths in New Mexico.
Maybe my sense of proportion has been clouded by breathing too long the fumes of the obnoxious. But it seems to me that former Trump advisor Steve Bannon is no better than an embarrassing splotch of sauce on the body politic, worthy of a grimace and nervous cough, not Al Capone headlines and raging TV coverage of his every sneer and bombastic threats. The media exposure given to his antics is the kind of disproportionate focus that makes contemporary political coverage as vertiginous as a tummy-wrenching hangover. The racist mumbling of members of Congress is as newsworthy as graffiti on what used to be the dignified bearing of the American political conscience. It should have been noted with disgust and immediately put on media extinction, not applauded as “telling it like it is.”
When President Biden signed an executive order banning fracking in a ten-mile radius around Chaco Canyon for the next twenty years, it would have been good to read about those who wanted an act of Congress to accomplish the same goals for an indefinite period of time, instead of an easily overturned executive order. What we got was lengthy quotes of fossil fuel lobbyist bemoaning regulation. But anything that protects Chaco Canyon’s numinous significance and beauty is a triumph of respectful governance that serves as a powerful symbol of an alliance of cultural pluralism with environmental sensibility in the age of climate change. I was waiting to see someone connect Biden’s Chaco initiative with his “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice,” an inspired document proportionately only slightly less significant than his infrastructure bill. But I waited in vain.
The coverage of the contents of Biden’s infrastructure bill took a disappointing and disproportionate second place to reflections on the dollar amount of the appropriation. Granted, over $1.2 trillion in capital outlay is an important fact, but details on how the money might be spent around the country, and deeper analyses of the condition of our nation’s roads and bridges, tainted water supply and decrepit rural broadband service would have focused the bill’s unprecedented historic significance in the public’s mind.
The coverage of the recent surge in COVID cases around the country seems to be relegated at times to the status of “old news” and placed in the middle pages of the mainstream media, even in our desperately unhealthy state. COVID, along with climate change, are clear candidates for the most pervasively influential conditions of our era. Yet both are more often than not swept into the dust bin of wild and irresponsible controversy, hairbrained negations and farcically nihilistic dismissals. The fact that it now seems as if well over three quarters of the new cases of COVID in New Mexico are in unvaccinated populations, and that more than 90% of the recent COVID deaths are, as well, seems to have trouble making it into the headlines where it might have a little more power of persuasion.
And we are perennially privy to the vastly overweighted arguments around gun “rights” with almost no proportionate discussion of the role of gun violence in the horrifying spike in homicides across our state and the nation. In Albuquerque, it’s estimated that 80 % of the 100 homicides this year were carried out with guns! To underplay or omit that fact to be little better than dupes of the personal armament industry.
It’s these kinds of disproportionate omissions and diminishments that make one feel as if the world is woozy and reeling from an imbalance in political chemistry that elevates the trivial far beyond the status of gossip, ordaining it as a pervasive reality while deemphasizing and minimalizing the critical and essential, relegating them to a realm of misperception. It’s as if saying up is down and right is left creates a meaningful kind of even-handedness in the public discourse. No wonder intellectual and political nausea leave so many of us enervated, drained and feeling estranged and powerless.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Spot on, as always. The trivialities consume us. We ignore the pressing issues at our peril.
I’m well past “up to here” with concern about “rights”, and I’m waiting for a similar emphasis on “responsibilities”.