“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
—Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
The Situation yesterday found me contemplating the failure of our criminal justice system to prevent a democratic catastrophe—“a screaming,” if you will.
Pynchon’s “screaming” described a V2 rocket attack on London during World War II. But the word seems appropriate for the era we are entering, one full of relentless, unpleasant noise carrying damage and pain with it.
I want to pause a moment today over Pynchon’s second sentence: “It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
It has, indeed, happened before. Those of us who are horrified by the screaming at least have a template for it this time. We thus did not experience Tuesday evening the way we experienced a similar Tuesday evening eight years earlier—as a completely unexpected disaster for which we had no model.
The first time is always harder, because the trauma is so foreign. This time, by contrast, we knew to take seriously the endless polls showing the race a coin toss. We knew that there was a non-trivial chance that the screaming would happen again. We may have told ourselves that it wouldn’t, convinced ourselves of it even, but we also contemplated the possibility. It wasn’t unthinkable, because it had happened before. And we remembered the feeling the screaming engendered the first time around and recognized its shadow. We recognized the fear. We recognized the anger. We recognized the sense of betrayal on the part of a majority of voting citizens of our country. It was all somehow familiar. And people can get used to almost anything, it turns out.
Yet, at the same time, there is still nothing to compare to now. The first time, we may have told ourselves, was a fluke. This time seems so much more deliberate—so much more self-inflicted. And the screaming is different now, in any event: crazier, louder, scarier, more dangerous. And the last screaming, well, that’s in the past. The screaming this time is new and fresh, and it’s about what hasn’t happened yet but looms before us. Fear about the future is very different from the memory of fear.
Which brings me to the problem of managing the screaming.
I want to suggest six methodological principles for staying sane and rational during a period of a democratic stress born of the screaming. To clarify, these principles are not chiefly about mental health, though they may help with that too. (I’m not a clinician and am unqualified to recommend them for that purpose.) When I say “staying sane” here, I am referring to political sanity, which is related but different from mental health. These are strategies for not letting the screaming dominate you, corrupt your own thinking, and turn you into a robotic counter-screamer.
When there is nothing to compare the screaming to, we fall back on habits. These are habits of good democratic health in an era of dulling noise. They are the habits born of its having happened before:
First, you do not need to respond to every outrage. You do not need to follow the screaming on social media. You do not need to listen to his voice. You can read his words in writing if the specific words are important—and they often are. You can read policy pronouncements in official releases by federal agencies.
The captivation of your attention is an exertion of power over you. It requires your cooperation, and you can withhold that cooperation. The presidency is an executive office that does things, mostly through bureaucratic processes. Slow down, and force yourself to engage the screaming through those bureaucratic processes when it’s humanly possible to do so. This is hard. The screaming wants to talk to you—talk at you, really—directly.
Refusing to engage on that basis dramatically changes the conversation. Outrageous statements often disappear because they don’t translate into policy or action. Some get neutered in the translation. Still others retain their outrageousness but lose their emotional power.
Second, you do not need to respond in real time. The screaming aims to make you scream back in response. Don’t. Take the time to think about whether and how you want to respond, and in what idiom. It will often not be a screaming. It can be a donation. It can be something else. It can be two weeks later. It can be a year later.
Third, you often do not need to respond publicly. I learned this habit the hard way. I am a writer. My instinct is to respond to things by writing about them, by calling attention to them, by saying things to the public.
But during the first screaming, I often found that my most effective responses were quiet ones. People needed help finding jobs; I could help them. People needed someone to talk to; I could listen. People needed legal counsel I could help them find. People needed a beer or a hug. One person needed a companion at a conference where she wasn’t sure she would be welcome; I went with her.
Fourth, the screaming’s spoken words can often, but not always, be ignored. Sometimes, a presidential statement is policy and has to be treated as such. Oftentimes, however, it is just noise. Learning the skill of knowing when the screaming’s words require your attention and when they do not, when they merit your disgusted disengagement, is critical to not having your attention captured against your will. Do less in video and audio, more in text.
Fifth, policy must be evaluated rigorously and critiqued carefully. Policy involves the actual powers of the federal government. Don’t ever tune it out because the noise is distasteful. The noise of the screaming distracts us from what the actions the government executes. One way to think about this principle is that we must always remember that it is an executive branch we are monitoring, and what it does matters a great deal.
Sixth, non-policy governmental actions, particularly enforcement actions involving the government’s coercive powers, should always receive special scrutiny. This is government at its most dangerous and powerful, and it is where the rubber hits the road in authoritarian-leaning government exertions of power.
Nothing really prepares you for the screaming, but it has happened before. And we have learned from it. The habits of effective scrutiny of the screaming are in our bones.
The Situation continues next week.
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books. Published courtesy of Lawfare.
