Until the clip is emptied

I’m trying not to hate myself for not doing this more often. We can all do better at doing something, though, right?

It might sound like a bad excuse, but it’s been hard to write about something worthwhile with so much happening every single day. We’re so used to rapid-fire updates and bad news that even the biggest stories are played out after about four days of resyndication. Trust me, I see it happen in real time doing my day job.

Recentism is slowly eating away at the process of evaluating what’s important. I could tell a friend that someone we know died on Monday, and by Thursday, that person’s death will have taken a seat in the back of my friend’s mind as they’re telling me about Tom Brady’s new coconut water, Good Nut.

To me, this is a large part of a gigantic, ongoing issue in civics. The United States of America is reaching a level of scandal laundering so high that each controversy evaporates almost immediately.

An apparent lie, a scandal, a questionable appointment, an attack on an institution, an abuse of power, a cover-up or contradiction, a disturbing public statement. The public reacts. Cable news debates it. Social media explodes. Then, three days later, another orange guy statement, another controversy, another crisis replaces it. Nothing is ever fully resolved. It simply becomes old; however, the illusion is that these situations have dissolved.

We have built a political culture in which the news cycle moves faster than consequences. By the time the public understands what happened, the country has already been asked to care about something else.

It’s been a morbid and endless content stream from “the administration.” We all know who I’m talking about. His political career has often functioned like reality television: conflict, spectacle, cliffhangers, villains, shocking reveals, new episodes tomorrow.

But the problem with living inside a reality show is that the plot never has time to develop consequences.

This guy pops up campaigning for the next election, for which he is still currently ineligible, about as many times as TikTok users slide to the next clip. Not even halfway through his second go-around, and we’ve already started to binge-watch his embarrassing antics at world leader gatherings, while he’s overreached to place active-duty servicemembers in a war where those we are defending, who possess the most advanced weapons capabilities on the planet, refuse to send boots on the ground to their enemies’ territories.

But what happens when the president’s actions are covered with the same cultural machinery we use to cover pop stars?

The saddest idea, which probably holds true as a fact, is that his antics have become content rather than political events. A controversial statement becomes a clip. A serious institutional threat becomes a meme. A scandal becomes a hashtag. A lie becomes a debate segment.

Then the next thing happens.

Maybe the media has slowly trained us to consume politics as entertainment—and he has been extraordinarily good at giving the entertainment industry more material than it can process.

Every single policy he’s signed may or may not last a lifetime, but every piece of news that’s come with the coverage of these policies now has a half-life.

A major story has maybe twenty-four hours of shock, forty-eight hours of outrage, seventy-two hours of commentary and ninety-six hours before the public is expected to care about something else. The problem is that politics doesn’t work on that timeline. Government decisions can affect people for years. But public attention is being forced to operate on a four-day schedule.

The Russia investigation consumed years of public attention, but before the country could fully settle what it had established, the Ukraine scandal became the next defining political crisis. The story did not necessarily disappear because it was resolved; it was replaced by something newer, louder and more immediately demanding of public attention.

His first impeachment trial concluded in February 2020, and within weeks, the coronavirus pandemic had completely transformed the country’s attention and priorities. A constitutional crisis was effectively overtaken by a public health emergency before the public had much time to consider what the impeachment had actually meant.

In 2020, the country moved from a pandemic to a national racial reckoning, then to a presidential election and the disputes that followed it, with each crisis competing for the public’s attention before the previous one had been fully processed. The crises were not solved so much as buried beneath the next event.

The attack on the Capitol was an extraordinary rupture in American political life, but even it was eventually absorbed into the familiar machinery of partisan debate, outrage, reaction and counter-reaction. One of the most consequential events in modern American history became, in part, another political story competing for attention with whatever came next.

MAGA Jesus’s second coming has produced such a steady stream of controversies that individual events can struggle to remain in the public consciousness long enough to receive sustained scrutiny. A new controversy does not necessarily resolve the old one; it simply competes with it until the public is asked to move on to something else.

The man was just found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, awarding E. Jean Carroll $5 million.

The federal jury in the civil case answered “no” to rape but “yes” to sexual abuse under battery claims, and “yes” to defamation. But what happened to the investigative journalists who went through school to keep the public informed and safe?

Well, if you haven’t been keeping up, he’s been using a tactic more familiar to his home state of New York than anywhere else in America in order to hush them: extortion. His Klan have also been staunch critics and silencers of television stations, streaming services and the one that means the most—universities.

Through all of the stunts, however, most may seem irrelevant because the problem is no longer simply that bad things happen—it’s that the culture has become structurally incapable of mentally retaining them long enough to demand accountability.

The media does not necessarily need to make people support him. It only needs to keep people watching.

MAGA coverage is like celebrity coverage, while celebrities and politicians are consumed through the same attention economy. There have been millions of stories about thousands of celebrities since the early days of yellow journalism in the 1890s. Great for ratings, revenue and recognition.

It becomes a dangerous game, though, when we start to invite in coverage of those who make decisions for humanity in the same way that we find entertainment in updates on famous people. Though this idea isn’t anything new, and we’re decades past a time when this wasn’t the case, I can’t imagine that it’s ever reached a spoiling point like today’s.

I’ve personally never been someone who gets starstruck. And if you know me well enough, then you know all about how I am when it comes to conformity, hive mind or traditionalism. They would be the three main suspects if I turned up facedown one day.

People all over the world fill spaces with like-minded others, which isn’t an issue in itself; but when every single person is constantly watching, talking about and interested in the 

same things, how could an individual make what hasn’t already been prioritized by the masses important to all?

I think that’s the reason we have specific publications receiving specific syndication, for the public to be made aware of dire information.

But the problem is that people aren’t always persuaded. Sometimes they are simply overwhelmed.

They stop talking. They stop arguing. They stop asking what happened last week.

As a journalist myself, I can’t put all of the blame on the media market, because it could be argued that greed, white nationalism and false nostalgia, or “rosy retrospection,” is what created this monster in the first place.

And it’s a very scary time to be a journalist with the amount of power that has been given to the rich and taken away from the people since “power to the people” was first granted. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re finally here.

A new red scare is underway, ushering in a new type of democracy—one that doesn’t exist.

It’s actually difficult to even think of a way for people to escape such molds of ignorance, especially with an unhealthy media diet, artificial intelligence and grifter culture at the center of it all.

I appreciate you for reading this piece. But I can only hope that you’ll better use your antenna and stay informed.

I’ve been in too many political debates and conversations in my lifetime with people of all ages who could care less about knowing what’s going on and more about sticking to their guns. Those situations usually pass once I press too hard and mine doesn’t stop shooting.

If you really care, there’s a long road ahead.

Let’s stay on topic.

“Either they don't know, don't show, or don't care…” — Doughboy

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