Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
I’m suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. I blame the news, which is always bad. Jihad rages all around the world, and the economy still feels sucky at home. Innocent people die on Westminster Bridge, while Obamacare, which deserves to die, seems like it will live on forever. Even our “united Republican government” feels as divided as always. And though I reluctantly voted for Trump, I’m already tired of his tweets, his embellishments, his loudness. How do I turn down the volume in order to get some rest?
Lonnie
Of course the news is bad. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be news. Which is the trade secret of our seedy, bottom-feeding racket: Good news is no news. However you take your news—real or fake—the bad news about bad news is that they’re going to keep making lots more of it.
But this news we incessantly complain about is partly our own doing. We’re like the circus Fat Lady, wondering why Hostess keeps making all those waist-busting Ho Hos. It’s because she, and enough people like her, can’t waddle past them in the grocery-store snack aisle without throwing a box or three in the cart. Similarly, we binge-eat bad news. We are hardwired to want to know how much worse off the world is than we even fear. (What Stephen King, in a horror context, calls “daring the nightmare.”) Don’t believe me? Try punching up a good-news website, and see how long you last. If you’re like me, after five minutes at a place like goodnewsnetwork.org, featuring headlines like “Man Creates Garden For Unwanted Bees” and “Women Break Stereotypes By Building Their Own Tiny Houses,” you’ll be jonesing to read about a mall shooting. The more fully we realize our appetite for ugliness, the faster we can set about beautifying our own realm, not unlike those gender-heroes fixing up their tiny houses.
When it comes to Trump fatigue, you’re not imagining his inescapability. In fact, it’s quantifiable. Recently, the New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo set out to do the impossible—to go an entire week without reading any Trump-related news. His verdict, after spending all his waking hours online trying to dodge Trump stories: “I could find almost no Trump-free part of the press . . . Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any human being ever.”
Perhaps as a result of social-media feedback loops and all-purpose outrage amplification, Manjoo reported that the firm mediaQuant, which measures all earned media, estimates that in January alone, Trump garnered $817 million worth of coverage—more than the next 1,000 famous people combined. Thus, it was unsurprising that Manjoo found Trump turning up in science stories, in finance stories, in sports stories. He found Trump creeping into our entertainments—from the Golden Globes to the Super Bowl halftime show. Even when Manjoo tried to purchase a Valentine’s Day gift for his wife, Amazon recommended that he buy her Trump-themed toilet paper. (He stuck with jewelry, presumably not from the Ivanka Trump collection.)
And yet, believe it or don’t, it’s not actually Donald Trump’s world. He is but one more actor in the Human Comedy, or Tragedy, if you prefer. (Even if he made his bones in reality television, Trump is one of our foremost tragicomic actors, able to make us laugh and cry in the space of a single tweet: “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special day September 11th.”)
But life is long—or long enough—and Trump, too, shall pass. All the immediacy you feel today will be directed, and even misdirected, at some new outrage of the day tomorrow. Just watch Rachel Maddow, who, every night, hates Trump with her whole heart so completely that it’s hard for her to even remember how much she once hated George W. Bush.
So go ahead and listen to your outrage stations on full blast, if it suits you. Keep those adrenal glands pumping, while shaking yourself up a cortisol cocktail. Climb aboard Sean Hannity’s float in the endless parade of human misery. Though no matter how much you fret, or internalize the news, or sanctimoniously unfriend editorializing Facebook compadres, life will march on—maybe right past you, as you’re obsessing over Chuck Schumer’s subtweet of Donald Trump’s live-tweeting of Fox and Friends.
But here’s an alternative approach: Exhibit some dog sense. The other day, my Great Pyrenees, Solomon, watched my wife open the back of her car to remove a bag. He saw his opening, made a dash, and lodged himself in the back seat, refusing to move. (Since Solomon resembles a mini-polar bear, he’s not going to move if he doesn’t want to.) As we went back inside, he sat there for 20 minutes, awaiting his ticket to adventure. I finally retrieved the dog ramp out of my other SUV—his cue to disembark—but when I opened the door, he sprinted from my wife’s vehicle and jumped into mine. Even a dog knows that sometimes, after a long frustrating day of cadging table food and licking himself, the only answer is a change of scenery. So I closed the door and drove him off to go for an unplanned walk in the woods.
We’d all do better to follow the news less and walk in the woods more. Or to do something—anything—to quiet the media echo chamber in your head. Turn your idiot box off—they’ll still have plenty to talk about without you. Throw your phone in a drawer. Get your brain out of Wi-Fi range. Go fishing, or biking, or camping, or rowing. Buy a bottle of something strong, then invite someone you like over to kill it in front of an outdoor fire. You’d be surprised when you physically return to the natural world, how the entire world can start coming back to you, renewed.
In a moment of doubt once, I asked a former subject of mine, the human rights activist Thor Halvorssen, who has had ringside seats to the very worst humanity has to offer, if it didn’t seem like the world is dying. He waved me off, saying, “The world is alive and well. Thriving, in fact! Read more poetry. Start with Henley’s Invictus.” It was good advice, as it’s always wise to climb around in minds that are more expansive than your own.
Though if late-Victorian poetry isn’t your bag, reach for the Proverbs. (I like them enough that I named my dog after their author.) Or if you’re a godless heathen, reach for my back-up bible, Jim Harrison’s Off to the Side, one of the most heavily underlined books in my library, along with Robert DeMott’s book of interviews, Conversations With Jim Harrison.
Harrison left us a year ago last Sunday, keeling over in his writing chair. For those of us who’d do anything to avoid a deadline, it seemed like a good way to go. A one-eyed mystic and mad man (he lost the use of an eye—a “milky sparrow in its socket”—after a childhood argument with a girl who smashed a bottle in his face), Harrison saw a lot more than the rest of us, having what all great point guards possess: complete court vision.
Best known for his novella Legends of the Fall, he left behind countless short stories, novels, and poetry volumes. But it was his 2002 memoir, Off to the Side, where I have found the most gold nuggets per capita. For Harrison lived large, seeming to pack several lifetimes into his threescore-and-eighteen. He loved rivers and fish and dogs and bears and birds (“poems I haven’t caught yet”). He loved slow, lavish meals, reading Lorca, downing good wine—lots of it—and getting lost on long hikes, perpetually reflecting on all of these, and much more. All while resisting over-romanticizing: “A poet is technically supposed to be a ‘thief of fire,’ but as easily as anyone else he becomes a working stiff who drinks too much on Friday afternoons.”
What he left behind in his memoir is a rough roadmap of how to live. He railed against the dangers of people watching too much TV. The speed of the passing images, he said, “becomes the speed they aspire to and they tend to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else.” Better to self-medicate in the natural world, which “can draw away your poisons to the point that your curiosity takes over and ‘you,’ the accumulation of wounds and concomitant despair, no longer exist.” Even late in life, re-entering rivers or woods made him “both young again but also seventy-thousand years old.”
It’s not that Harrison didn’t care about the world at large. He cared plenty, taking aimless cross-country drives to meet new people and see strange places, as he advocated pretending “you’re a spy for the country of your own mind.” He was pro-consciousness: “Some degree of courage is in order if you wish to fully admit your life. You have to take a draught of ego poison to accept the full dimensions of your banality, your sheer corniness and ordinariness, the monstrous silliness of private ambitions and sexual fantasies, your loutish peacockery, your spates of sloth, all of which is to say that you were specifically not destined for the spiritual big time.” He just took care not to care too much, quoting Dostoyevsky, who wrote that to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased.
You’re better off, in Harrison’s telling, cultivating a sense of wonder, which is “curiosity magnified and exalted. Childhood, and perhaps adult prayers for some, allay fear, a word path to become less lost. Wonder gives direction to prayer.” For “it is too easy to be sure of yourself, too easy to know what you are doing moment by moment, too easy to walk the same path until it is a rut that finally becomes a trench and you can’t see over the edge.”
To this end, Harrison was a man who not only believed in talking to his dogs (“especially helpful”), in putting himself on dog time, much as I had to do with Solomon, waiting for his woods. As Harrison’s bird dogs aged and slowed down, he wrote: “I’ve been amazed at how much they’ve conserved their energy by moving directly from covert to covert without the aimless bursts of speed that typified their younger behavior. Hopefully your concentration on what you are doing is close to that of the dog and after a couple of hours, when you both are quite tired, you find that you have been so immersed in this creaturely behavior that you haven’t had a worrisome or contemporary thought since you got out of the car . . . If you hunt or fish for a couple of weeks in a row without reading newspapers or watching television news, a certain not altogether deserved grace can reenter your life.”
The Big Issues, which can often look terribly small when dwarfed by space and time, will be there when you get back. It’s nice of you to worry about them, to scare the hell out of yourself with them, but as Harrison wrote, “Newsworthy events and people, as always, have gotten along in the usual ways without your mental company.”
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
