Four Maxims For A Scary Moment Of Uncertainty
How to keep a level head.
This edition will be short.
In the immediate aftermath of significant but dark news events, the quality of media typically drops. Part of it is structural. That’s when demand for information is highest, but supply is lowest, allowing errors and speculation to fill the gap. But another part is that reporters and commentators allow themselves to get swept into the zeitgeist and start writing for history. Well, history, and immediate gratification. Their prose becomes purple and bloated, their analytical powers ebb. They say ridiculous things and make wild suppositions. It’s a pattern that plays out over and over, and I hate it.
When I worked assignments I’d always try to make myself invisible on Earthshaking News days—not to avoid the unsettling news per se, but the fevered professional climate.
If you don’t participate in that melodrama, you’re probably a bit like me right now, two days after a 20 year old gunman tried to kill Donald Trump: A bit too jumble-headed and in the dark to articulate anything novel or insightful. Only now are the political contours of the post-shooting environment beginning to come into focus.
Notwithstanding the seemingly non-political motive for this highly political violence (the shooter apparently a disturbed white conservative), Republicans are assigning collective blame to Trump’s perceived enemies—the nebulous “they” that Josh Marshall detected here.
Democrats, overcautious as always, have not aggressively rejected this smear, freeing up a large space in mainstream news (the space not devoted to treating Trump as a living martyr) for reporters to lazily attach blame to rhetoric on “both sides.” The White House has, thankfully, batted down one Reuters report that President Biden would temporarily dial down his already weakened campaign against Trump.
That doesn’t sum to much we can be certain of, though certainty is what most people want more than anything. What I can offer instead are the handful of ideas and mental habits that have helped me keep my head level. They all boil down to some version of insisting on truth, even under duress: