I was still at work in my office when the texts started coming in. “Are you watching this?” they all asked. “Get on Twitter immediately!” some suggested.
The “this” that the messages referred to was the disastrous press conference held last Thursday night by President (as of this writing) Joe Biden, where he seemed confused and elderly. There was a firestorm of activity, I was told, on discussion panels in all of the usual places, like CNN and MSNBC, plus the cascade of memes, justifications, political attacks, and nastiness we expect on Twitter or X or whatever we’re supposed to call it. I was being told by friends and colleagues that this was not something to miss. I was advised to get home quickly and plug into the mess.
I was heading home anyway. When I got there, I immediately turned on the television. But instead of rotating through the talking channels, I went directly to the Criterion Channel — a great spot for old and obscure movies — and I spent the next two hours watching Ministry of Fear, a 1944 Fritz Lang spy thriller based on the novel by Graham Greene. It’s a terrific movie, and halfway through, I stopped it to order pizza. I wanted to enjoy Ray Milland’s performance with melted cheese and pepperoni.
When the movie ended, I still had some pizza left — I ordered a large, go ahead and judge me, I don’t care — so I decided to watch the first episode of the first season of Amazon Prime’s tough-guy series Reacher, which everyone tells me is a fun and mindless show. It turns out everyone is correct. Reacher is a fun and gratuitously violent escape and it has a pretty basic structure: a giant mountain of a man with an impossibly square jaw walks though each scene beating up the bad guys who aren’t bad enough to kill, and killing the ones who are. If you have a few slices of pizza left and some ice cream in the freezer, it’s the perfect way to finish them both off.
It was a pretty ideal evening, to be honest. And not once did I feel even a tiny itch of curiosity about what the current (as of this moment) president said, or how he said it, or what people were saying about any of it. In other words, I opted out of whatever was happening on TwitterX or cable news. I was aware that notable and important things were happening and that people who are paid to talk on television were earning their money. I had been alerted that there were lively discussion threads active on TwitterX. But I turned away from it all and had myself a lovely and stress-free night. And the next morning, when I woke up, I went on with my day and didn’t bother to catch up to the previous evening’s controversies. Let me tell you: it was blissful. My new plan for the 2024 political season is to Opt Out.
Rod Dreher, the conservative writer and thinker, writes in his excellent book, The Benedict Option, about the wisdom of retreating from the secular world and its creepy and corrupt popular culture. The book is a stirring and provocative call for the creation of smaller, cloistered pockets of countercultures — places where people of faith can self-exile, in community with other like-minded folk, until the world comes to its senses.
That’s a tall order, of course. The idea of making a full retreat from contemporary culture is, as my Southern Baptist friends say, “a lot to say grace over.” There’s plenty in Dreher’s book that I disagree with — my faith is a lot more permissive and 1970’s-groovy than his — but you don’t have to be a devout Orthodox Christian to understand the impulse to turn away from the chaos and nuttiness of the current scene and occupy yourself with something more spiritually nourishing. But if doing a Full Benedict is too much for you, too, it’s possible to execute a smaller version. Call it a Mini Benedict.
Let’s be honest: it’s going to be a long, sorry slog from here to Election Day, and if recent history is any indication, it won’t be over even then. And, look, we all have our coping strategies. Maybe it’s a contemplative life of prayer. Maybe it’s old movies, pizza, action adventure TV shows, and a pint of Honeycomb Vanilla ice cream. We are each called to opt out in our own way.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
