The Man With The Megaphone
How George Saunders and Mohsin Hamid helped me understand the attack on the Capitol.
Dear All,
Welcome to my quarantine note. After flying back from Canada last Sunday, we’ve been in lockdown for the five days and hope to be sprung tomorrow through the UK’s relatively recent “trace and release” program. If I’m honest, I’d hoped 2021 would feel appreciably better than the madness and despair felt by so many in 2020. The promise of a vaccine and the early boosterism sparked optimism as we slid into January. However, while the UK has tried its hardest (and proved more successful than most European countries) in deploying and administering the vaccine, the country’s National Health Service (NHS) is nearly at breaking point as the number of infections continues to climb.
For now, however, with everyone at home and attempting to balance the unpredictability of jet-lagged work hours, this week has, at least, featured spates of sporadic reading — and re-reading — that sparked a few thoughts.
Then a guy walks in with a megaphone
This week’s second impeachment has, of course, dominated the news cycle. Most notably for having caused a slight fissure among Republicans — w/ 10 in red voting to impeach the “leader” of their own party. The latest charges aren’t worth repeating here, of course, as Trump’s violations of the public trust and domestic law; his previous obstructions of justice, and probable collusion with foreign agents for personal benefit, have already illustrated the nature of his presidency. Most evident in these last two months, Trump’s life-force — fervent narcissism — appears not only to have sustained his parroting of lies but — on January 6 — urged a mob of supporters towards sedition, delivering yet another rendition of the “stolen election” speech to his seething stalwarts before gesturing towards the Capitol. Scary, yes. But not altogether unforeseen given what we know of the man in the Oval Office.
Trump's parable has been written several times already: a man famous for being famous, bullies his way into an office with responsibilities he can’t possibly handle, choosing instead to maximise his own personal gain. Perhaps Donald J Trump is, in part, as much a slave to his rhetoric as he’s made his followers out to be. Perhaps, the world reflected in his eyes is pitched against him. Perhaps he is forever the underdog, fighting for the similarly aggrieved. Perhaps none of these details matters anyway. Perhaps the story that matters is why the committed core of supporters, exposed to their mad captain dangerously veering the ship of state, not only failed to see the damage he’d wrought but were willing to risk their own lives on January 6th to deliver an illegitimate electoral victory-by-violence.
The most trenchant insights into the state of American affairs comes not from a political pundit or scholar of politics. Nor, even, from experts on mass or political communications. Instead, it comes from the Booker Prize-winning author George Saunders in his essay “The Braindead Megaphone.”
The essay opens with the imaginative hook: picture a party where differently interested and informed individuals are scattered in small groups, chatting idly about the news or the weather, their lives or whatever people usually talk about. “Then a guy walks in with a megaphone.” On account of his sheer volume, this individual can not-so-subtly shift the nature of all the conversations in the room. He adopts a bombastic style and offers a bounty of banal but clawing phrases — and over time, the other people in the room incorporate these ideas into their speech and discussions. These banalities start to figure in the logic that guides their own thinking. The man with the megaphone is not the most intelligent person in the room; he may even struggle to string useful or meaningful thoughts together. But his power resounds nevertheless. The result, Saunders warns, is that — over time — the thoughts and considerations of all partygoers have been weakened or degraded by this man. In the end, the party is ruined.
Saunders wrote this in 2003, while trying to capture the zeitgeist of Americans coming to terms — or, as Saunders suggests, failing to understand the terms — of the invasion of Iraq. If we were already living in that party in 2003, the years since have only turned up that megaphone.
***
We live in the age of plenty: too much information, in particular. As the story usually goes, the more information we have, the better off (I.e. more “informed) we become. For instance, in the spirit of journalism, information is seen as an advantage in the fight against corruption or abuse of power. But this is only true when information leads to knowledge. I mean that the steady accumulation of information (i.e. the tabulation of data points) is not the same as the steady increase in knowledge. The notable media scholar Neil Postman identified the difference more than 30 years ago:
Information consists of statements about the world. There are an uncountable number of facts in the world. Facts are transformed into information only when we take note of them…or, in the case of newspapers, write about them. By this definition, facts cannot be wrong. They are what they are. Statements about facts can be wrong and often are. Thus, to say that we live in an unprecedented age of information is merely to say that we have available more statements about the world than we’ve ever had. This means, among other things, that we have more erroneous statements than we’ve ever had.
Postman’s insight was as important as his perpetual concern: what institutions are responsible for distinguishing true from false? Or, taking us back to the party, who intervenes to turn down the megaphone?
For Saunders, like Postman, this responsibility once fell to esteemed members of the news media. But both Postman and Saunders, in different times, worry that the motive behind this central institution had become fused with a dangerous logic of commerce — a business mentality where the producers of information were dependent and desperate for attention and sensation. Contrary to our story of more = better, this arrangement generated problems of plenty: too much content, too many takes, too many opinions. In short, too much noise without useful tools to identify the signal. Saunders knew that individuals would usually prefer to be entertained; they can be drawn into the kinds of “news” that amuses and fails to enlighten our public conversation. He also worried that, like the megaphone man at the party, these unfiltered information sources would lower the “intelligence-ceiling” of our national conversation.
Perhaps the only amendment to Saunders’ story, though, is that our party today includes more than a single megaphone. And yes, while it is true we know more of the world today, it can also feel like we know less and less about it. The devil here is not in the details, but in the number of details — particularly when we don’t know how to organise those details, or why they matter, or if they matter, and to whom they ought to matter. In short, we live in a world of surplus material and no easy discernible or shared story. In these moments, we are particularly vulnerable to those willing to sell us one — and if they are loud enough, or compelling enough, we’re likely to listen. As Saunders writes:
Seasons pass. [Ideas or assertions made that] once would have evoked an eye-roll evokes a dull blink. New truisms, new baselines, arise. A new foundation, labeled Our Basic Belief System, is laid, and on this foundation appear startling new structures: a sudden quasi acceptance of, say, the water-boarding of prisoners ...
Or, maybe, the storming of the nation’s Capitol building…
As Jack Shafer wisely wrote this week, the goal is not to sympathize with the mob that tried to destroy the temple of democracy. For those who selected violence and broke the law, their punishment is deserved and should be served. For the members in attendance who parroted racist, sexist, and bigoted messages — spreading hate as if that was a suitable means for political change: There can be no sympathy. Striking, however, is that for many Americans present at the protest, in the world they’ve come to see as real, democracy died long before the 6th of January.
Perhaps, in their minds, the government has never, really, worked to serve their interests. Maybe, for reasons outside their control, the world has changed, and the forces of progress are now pitched against them. Time had stacked the deck. And then, four years ago, from the most powerful office in the most powerful country in the world, a man on his megaphone told them it wasn’t their fault. What was once theirs (money, prestige, standing, whatever, or what they were told they deserved) wasn’t just lost, but it was stolen. What would you do?
As Shafer notes, this isn’t about sympathising. It’s about asking ourselves if we can empathise. Can we turn down the megaphone closest to us — for just a moment?
Over the last year, I’ve found myself recounting a comment made by the author Mohsin Hamid when was interviewed at the London Review Book Shop in 2017. He was discussing his book, Exit West, which deals – among other things – with issues of identity and belonging in a slightly fantastical future world where ethereal doors are operated by a series of black-market human traffickers and can whisk people out of their country to start again somewhere new. During the night’s discussion, the topic of Brexit came up. Hamid, of British-Pakistani heritage, offered one of the most compelling explanations for why we struggle, perhaps uniquely today, with the question of identity and loss.
He argued we do not have the empathetic language to share in a conversation of mutual loss. Relating this directly to the story of an immigrant who “leaves everything” to start new in the United Kingdom, Hamid drew on the stark (but striking) similarities between the experience of the ageing British labourer who, awakening to the effects of globalization, finds themselves unemployed, left behind and bereft. Both of these individuals feel the gravity of loss, but – instead of recognizing that similar forces were responsible for bringing them together – resort to blaming the other for their misfortune. Failing to develop a language that can communicate their unique realities, leaves them to endorse a form of political brinksmanship. In the end, we fight because we can’t find the words to talk.
Building empathy will not erase hate. Nor should it be a means for excusing it. Empathy can, however, help us understand where the common political project has broken down. For artists, like Hamid, his work demands an audience suspend disbelief long enough to imagine a world that is given shape and velocity by words, images, emotions, and – importantly – the subtle details of other’s lives (and designs of mind). For Saunders and Hamid, the truly radical act is to make yourself willing to cross the gap between them and us. In that sense only, the rioters on the 6th of January in Washington were right about one thing: this is a revolutionary moment. For all of us. It just isn’t the revolution they were shouting about.
What I’ve been reading
Stephen Colbert on Trump Trauma, Leadership, and Loss - Vanity Fair (Excerpt from Colbert below)
What has occurred to me since Trump became president is that what the show is about is loss. And you feel it with such clarity, because you’re losing something you love, which is—however illusory or real, because I’m not going to judge either way—America’s moral authority in the world, that shining city on the hill.”
“Our own national image gets lost,” Colbert continues. “Our own sense of the purpose of America gets lost. And then there’s economic hegemony, then there’s a loss by white Americans thinking that they are the default culture of America. There’s all the loss that the people who’ve been denied their position or their rights in America have always dealt with, that then we have to deal with, which is also another sense of loss and innocence. There’s all this loss going on in America. And on a nightly basis, because there’s no audience, I can talk about loss, but what I’m really talking about is, ‘Look at what we love. It’s on fire.’
Evan Osnos on Mob Rule in the Capitol - The New Yorker
Osnos does an excellent job at capturing members of the “mob” at the Capitol on January 6. Importantly, he presents you with their speech and some context for what was happening around them in those moments and lets you (the reader) inside their minds for just a moment. Sometimes that’s enough.
Misc.
Worth revisiting: Leslie Jamison on The Photographs That Made Me Feel Less Alone - The Atlantic
Worth listening: Hanif Abdurraqib, A Fortune For Your Disaster on Between The Covers podcast. Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet and author and discusses his recent work in the context of race and creativity in the United States.
Author’s note
This newsletter is an evolving experiment. I’m curious to know what you like (if you like it) and what you want more of. Also, if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with others.