You may have heard and even may still be hearing about last month’s presidential election in America, which took place on November 3 through present. The election is over, though unfortunately not in the minds of everyone in the population, which is an indictment in real-time and a catastrophe in slow-motion.
Part of what has made the last four years of American politics so insufferable is just how much space Trump occupies in our media and collective psyches. Every gaffe, every tweet gets its own news cycle, with speculative analysis and thinkpieces echoing across every major media outlet for days until the next bit of Pavlovian Trump news breaks.
Yet for the thousands of articles penned about Trump on a weekly basis, very few of them are very good, and even fewer are memorable. There are more reasons for this than I care to get into here — with Trump himself, the structure of modern media, our consumption habits — but in general, political writing isn’t easy. How do you say something that stands out when seemingly everything has already been said and re-said?
Essayist Tim Kreider explained it well: “for every event that occurred or issue raised in public, there would soon appear in print and/or online, within about thirty-six hours: 1.) the obvious response
2.) the contrarian backlash against the obvious response and
3.) the sage or snarky metacommentary on the first two.
If you can come up with a fourth thing to say, and say it half-coherently, you have a good chance of getting it published someplace.”
Finding a fourth thing is difficult, and I’m inclined to believe not always possible — especially on a deadline. There are some great political writers who can consistently do that — Jamelle Bouie, Elizabeth Bruenig, Osita Nwanevu, Adam Serwer and Matt Taibbi are some of my favorites — but most people need some time for their ideas to gestate before they’re able to stand apart from the initial deluge of low-hanging content.
Politics is complicated; even trying to define just what makes a piece of writing political can be fuzzy territory. Politics is our attempt to tame the human animal into civilized society. Politics determines how pain and power are allotted. It touches everything, so it’s only natural that politics pops up in every other type of writing.
I don’t blame anyone for tuning out; following politics is exhausting, and there are always more immediate concerns in our lives. I’m not here to tell you to read more political writing, but I will say that good political writing can transform how you see the world and interact with information. It can extract inspiration from anger and compel action from enlightenment. It can challenge your most sacred beliefs and make you feel less alone.
Said differently, good political writing does everything that we want art to do.
Further reading:
The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Cool Kid’s Philosopher by Nathan Robinson
The President of Blank Sucking Nullity by David Roth
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
He Was A Crook by Hunter S. Thompson
Favorite reads from November
Is There a Cure for Burnout? by Jeremy Gordon in The Nation (book review of Can’t Even by Anne Helen Petersen)
I want to stress how much I empathize, because I know a political awakening requires more than a list of facts. But as a reader, these types of generalizations are unsatisfying because they rely so heavily on trusting she [author Anne Helen Petersen] has had a representative experience. Who are her friends? What’s the work they wanted to do? You don’t have to look far to find a social world of millennials who didn’t require decades to realize the American dream was flawed, internalized that lesson as teenagers and young adults, and adjusted their worldview accordingly. There are plenty of comparably broad observations dredged from specific experience. Referring to Alexandra Robbins’s The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, a 2006 book about overworked teenagers trying to get into the college of their dreams, Petersen notes, “multiple people told me they read it as a sort of instruction manual.” If I polled the teens I knew in 2006, most of them would have taken it as a warning guide against being too much of a nerd.
How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism by Charles Duhigg in The New Yorker
Increasingly, the venture-capital industry has become fixated on creating “unicorns:” startups whose valuations exceed a billion dollars. Some of these companies become lasting successes, but many of them—such as Uber, the data-mining giant Palantir, and the scandal-plagued software firm Zenefits—never seemed to have a realistic plan for turning a profit. A 2018 paper co-written by Martin Kenney, a professor at the University of California, Davis, argued that, thanks to the prodigious bets made by today’s V.C.s, “money-losing firms can continue operating and undercutting incumbents for far longer than previously.” In the traditional capitalist model, the most efficient and capable company succeeds; in the new model, the company with the most funding wins. Such firms are often “destroying economic value”—that is, undermining sound rivals—and creating “disruption without social benefit.”
The Underground Movement Trying to Topple the North Korean Regime by Suki Kim in The New Yorker
“Raising awareness through college lectures, tours, concerts, and bake sales wasn’t enough,” Adrian told me. “Rescuing refugees through the underground work in China and Southeast Asia wasn’t enough. Advocacy, trying to convince governments to change their policies to do the right thing, wasn’t enough. So then what was left was direct action.”
November’s book
Thrown by Kerry Howley
Thrown is hard to pin down. It’s a nonfiction book with a fictional narrator that follows the careers of two MMA fighters at the opposite ends of the fight game: one is a young, talented up-and-comer in the Big Shows and the other is a shopworn could-have-been bumping around regional circuits. Both stories are real, but they are relayed by Kit, who is not real. Kit’s personality seems pretty loyal to that of the author’s, but Kit is watching the fighters for her PhD thesis on phenomenology.
This premise, however artificially injected it may be, allows Howley to draw connections and dwell on them in ways she probably couldn’t have if she were writing a straightforward nonfiction book. It also created moments of humor that didn’t always work for me, but would probably land better among a grad school readership.
The final result, though, is excellent. The two fighters’ stories are dramatic and captivating in different ways. You’ll judge them, pity them and envy them along the way, which is to say you’ll care about them. I even found myself caring about Kit, too, when her academic peers dismissed her project.
Thrown provides keen insight not just into the sport of mixed martial arts, but also how we respond to it. It unravels the primal allure of watching sophisticated violence for entertainment, and in doing so it reveals even more of its mysteries.
As was once thought that in the womb, the fetus cycled through every stage of evolution before settling on its modern form, men in the ring rehearse their inevitable atrophy two dozen times before they retire. Think of it: what is aging but a sealing in, a crude duct-taping of the box in which you are born; and what is fighting but a mere acceleration of the battle we’re all doomed to lose? One day a pageant a dozen yards away proves just so slightly out of range; the sound of your grandchild speaking across the room somehow fails to carry. The world must work harder to find you. And as you lose the world, your own body creakingly calls out louder and louder. Minor muscles, silent for sixty years, grow suddenly conversational. Will any of this seem new to the man whose profession leaves him so bloody that he spends the third round blind in one eye, so weak on his feet that he must work to stand? Another man stamps on his toes, pulls at the backside of his elbow, knocks at his knees. Will sore joints thirty years hence be some kind of revelation? Age comes to the fighter not as a shock but as a memory.
Reading now
Still reading Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, which I didn’t quite finish last month, and I’ll be starting The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang shortly. I will likely fall short of my goal of finishing 25 books this year, but I’ll go down reading!
November writing
For Civil Beat I wrote about Hawaii’s complicated relationship with tourism, why talking about the presidential election with middle schoolers was a more enlightening and human experience than talking about it with adults, and the causes and possible solutions to homelessness.
I took a little break from writing about fighting, but I’ll be back at Sherdog soon.
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