'You feel like you're going crazy...'
We all get to choose our own reality now. It's not as fun as it sounds.
I was listening to NPR while driving my daughters to school this morning. Right after a story about how one president (Jimmy Carter) added solar panels to the White House only to have the next president (Ronald Reagan) take them down, they aired a story that mentioned how, if you take the official tour of the U.S. Capitol these days, there is not one single mention of the riot that happened there on Jan. 6, 2021.
The suggestion was that this is kind of weird, seeing as how it was a pretty historic event that injured hundreds of people, was directly or indirectly responsible for several deaths, sent the nation’s lawmakers scurrying to a secret hideout, and led to prison time for a lot of the participants.
If that shit had happened in 1802 or whatever, you gotta figure it’d probably get a mention on the tour. But nah, apparently it doesn’t come up at all. According to one dude who’d just finished taking the tour, this was the right move.
“It was fine because I don’t think anything bad happened on January 6,” said this real actual person who knew he was speaking into an NPR microphone. “I thought it was a political hit job. It was all made up.”
We’ve gotten strangely immune to this. Here’s this guy talking about a thing we all saw happen. And if you missed it live there are plenty of videos on the internet. There’s even video of a dude beating an officer with a pole flying the American flag, which is the kind of thing that would be way too on-the-nose if it happened in a movie. And yet here’s this dude confidently asserting that it was all made up.
That’s obviously a ridiculous thing to think and/or say if for no other reason than how easily it is proven wrong. There is video of the shit. Lots of it. Much of it taken by the people who did it, many of whom are now in jail due to being convicted of the crimes they documented themselves doing. There’s also video of Donald Trump telling those people that he wanted them to go down to the Capitol to stop the certification of the vote.
And yet somehow the position of ‘it never happened/it was actually fine and maybe even good/it was all a deep state or antifa conspiracy’ (some people even manage to combine all three somehow) gets treated like it’s just another political viewpoint. It’s one of several available positions you can adopt in the discourse. For the people who got the shit beaten out of their very real physical bodies as they tried to protect some of the same lawmakers who now downplay or deny the whole thing, this is understandably pretty hard to accept.
All of this is, of course, insane. It also seems typical of a defining feature of our current moment. We do not agree on what is real.
Some people genuinely don’t believe what are easily verifiable facts. Others are pretending not to believe them, either for personal gain (you almost can’t win an election as a Republican in this country if you come right out and say it was a bad thing to storm that Capitol that day for the purposes of disrupting the peaceful transition of power) or because their sense of self demands it. In essence: ‘I am a Trump supporter, therefore I can’t believe this thing that I see with my own eyes.’
One of the worst parts about this phenomenon becoming such a central part of our culture is the disconnected, disjointed feeling that comes with it. I remember the big homie Dan Brooks talking about the time he spent with the late great Norm Macdonald for this excellent NY Times Magazine story. At some point, Macdonald was talking about how much he hated the experience of watching network TV sitcoms that used laugh tracks. You’d be sitting there, he said, watching the predictable set-up lead to a predictable punchline, and this would be met with the sound of raucous laughter, as if every one of these blandly safe jokes were absolutely killing.
“You feel like you’re going crazy,” Macdonald said. It’s that disconnect between what seems apparent to you and how others are (seemingly) responding.
(Norm, seen here totally Norm-ing.)
To tie this into fight sports, which is probably how you ended up reading this in the first place, I’ve often felt that one of the worst parts about being an MMA fan is how much bullshit they ask you to swallow. The next fight is always the biggest ever. The champ is always the best ever (unless he asks the promoter for more money, in which case he becomes an ungrateful scumbag who’s scared to fight and isn’t that good anyway). If it gets to the point where we need to replace that champ with another champ, it’s fine, the new champ is now the best ever. We will just erase any mention of the other guy.
This is sort of baked into a sport that has to constantly make and renew its sales pitch. As we all know, a big part of sales is bending the perception of reality to meet the needs of the moment. Taken to its logical endpoint, that means just straight up fucking lying.
The problem is that politics is also a constant sales job. Increasingly, so is news. In the Richard Nixon White House Tapes, the president can be heard wishing that he had his own newspaper that could run stories counter to stuff like the Pentagon Papers or other negative press he kept seeing in the New York Times and Washington Post. At the very least, he thought, it would muddy the waters enough that people wouldn’t be sure what to believe. He knew that he didn’t even need to actually convince people with his version. He just needed there to be enough uncertainty that he could skate by.
Now that part of Nixon’s dream has come true. There are a ton of wildly varying news sources to choose from. Some of them still call themselves news while others don’t want that responsibility, but they’re using the same mass media tools (podcasts, social media, all that) to disseminate their message to an audience that consumes it as if it’s all essentially the same. With these different sources come different versions of reality.
If you don’t like what they’re saying – even when it is demonstrably true – you can just pick another one. This is basically what Fox News learned when it lost viewers to more right-wing alternatives after it dared to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. It underwent a course correction that cost the network hundreds of millions of dollars for repeatedly lying about voting machines. Somehow that was still preferable to the risk of losing viewers by telling them a truth they didn’t want to hear.
That feels like a pretty dangerous and very stupid place to be as a culture. It also feels like something we’ve come to accept, that this is just how everything is now. And honestly that might be the craziest part.