Cacophony of contempt

“Oh, the noise. Oh, the noise. Noise, noise, noise.”

The Grinch peers down from his mountain at Whoville, recoiling from the sound of its citizens singing. The sound is joyful, but to him it is a vise tightening around his head. I understand how the Grinch felt, even if I cannot relate to the smallness of his heart.

Every morning, long before the sun rises, I open and read three newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. And the noise begins.

“Oh, the noise. Oh, the noise. Noise, noise, noise.” But this noise is not merely loud. It is morally deafening. I want to be clear – I don’t spend hours scrolling through social media, search for reasons to be angry. I read the newspapers like I have for my entire life, and I do that to understand what is happening in country and the world. Yet, everyday there another attack on history, another assault on science, another purge of dedicated and accomplished public servants, another declaration that cruelty is strength and that empathy or compassion as weakness. There is another Presidental pardon that makes “in your face” corruption look like mercy, another attack on women or minorities disguised as a defense of merit, another government official dismissing public safety as “woke,” another citizen injured or killed while exercising a right that once seemed fundamental to the meaning of America.

It is loud noise. Before I can really understand one event, another arrives. Before outrage can become thought—or thought can become action—the third, fourth, and fifth offenses are already clamoring to be heard. Although some claim that this is just returning America to some mythical greatness, it is not. The succession of daily stories is a cacophony of contempt.

The metaphor of noise is very real to me. In December 1989, President George H. W. Bush ordered Operation Just Cause, the American invasion of Panama. Among the administration’s stated purposes were protecting American citizens, restoring the democratically elected government, and apprehending the Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted in the United States on drug-trafficking and other charges. As American forces closed in, Noriega sought refuge in the Papal Nunciature—the diplomatic mission of the Holy See—in Panama City.

An armed assault on the Vatican mission was out of the question, so American troops surrounded the compound. They erected huge speakers and began blasting music. The original purpose was reportedly to create a “sound barrier” that would prevent journalists with directional microphones from overhearing sensitive negotiations. But psychological-operations personnel soon transformed the noise into a campaign of harassment. For several days, deafening rock music, news reports, revving engines, tanks, and helicopters filled the air around the compound. The playlist included songs chosen for their mocking titles, among them “Nowhere to Run,” “You’re No Good,” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy.”

Whatever the original justification, the logic of the noise was clear: deny the people inside silence, rest, concentration, and the ability to think. The science behind this tactic is straightforward. We can close our eyes, but we cannot close our ears. The auditory system continues to register and organize sound even when we try to ignore it. Irrelevant and changing sounds capture attention, interfere with working memory, and force the mind to devote cognitive resources to filtering them out. We may continue to function, but doing so requires greater and greater mental effort.

Eventually, attention becomes exhaustion. Judgment becomes more difficult. The ability to distinguish what matters from what is merely clamoring to be heard begins to fail.

Eventually, merely existing within the waves of sound becomes exhausting.

When I opened the newspapers on Friday, July 24, the first three stories I read seemed, at first, to concern entirely different subjects — although they were all related to the Trump Administration.

President Trump had signed an executive order directing the National Park Service to place warning signs along the walkways outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had labeled bicycle lanes “DEI bike lanes” that stole money from roads and bridges, while federal bicycle-safety information was disappearing from government websites. And a long article examined the Trump administration’s plans to reconstruct the way American science is funded.

At the center of that third story was Michael Kratsios, the president’s “science adviser.” I place the title in quotation marks around science advisor for a reason. Kratsios has a degree in politics and a career in technology policy, venture capital, and government administration. He has no scientific degree and no background conducting scientific research, and based on comments he has made, very little understanding of physics, chemistry or earth science. Yet he has been given extraordinary authority to diagnose the supposed failures of the American scientific enterprise and prescribe its future.

Kratsios argues that federal investment in science has produced “diminishing returns” and that the institutions responsible for American scientific leadership must be remade. His report proposes treating federal research agencies more like “capital allocators,” constructing investment portfolios with the intentionality of serious investors, making the funding agencies mission-driven organizations (where mission is defined by the White House), accelerating grant decisions, and tying metric for success closely to industry and technological production.

The report does not literally declare curiosity-driven research worthless although it is easy to infer that. In fact, it acknowledges that such research can produce value. But the reports language is the language of venture capital: portfolios, performers, returns, investment strategies, risk profiles, commercialization, and measurable outcomes. Basic science is increasingly asked to justify itself not by whether it expands human knowledge, but by whether it quickly produces something that can be built, sold, patented, or placed in service of a politically selected national mission.

Each of these stories revealed the same impulse: everything—and I mean everything—must be dragged into the culture war.

The Smithsonian order was a raised middle finger to the extraordinary work the museum has done to present America through an honest historical prism. It directs the government to warn visitors that exhibits inside the museum require correction and to steer them toward what the administration considers “accurate information” about American history. The order itself declares that the Smithsonian’s leadership “cannot be trusted to tell America’s story with honesty and gratitude.”

I have often written about “Pretend America,” the sanitized nation that exists only after slavery, dispossession, racism, misogyny, exploitation, and failure have been edited from the story. But this goes beyond pretending. The government of the United States wants to post warning signs outside the Smithsonian because professional historians and curators cannot be trusted to tell the American story.

History is no longer to be investigated, interpreted, debated, and revised as new evidence emerges. It is to be certified by presidential authority. Anything that complicates the preferred story of American innocence becomes not scholarship, but disloyalty.

The second story concerned Secretary Duffy’s campaign against what he called “DEI bike lanes.” Within days of his declaration, references to bicycle lanes, speed cameras, and other measures were removed from the Federal Highway Administration’s list of “Proven Safety Countermeasures”—strategies that agency experts haveidentified as reducing crashes and saving lives. Other bicycle-safety materials also disappeared from federal websites.

A bicycle lane has no race, gender, or political philosophy. It is a strip of pavement intended to separate a human being on a bicycle from a two-ton automobile. Whether it improves safety is an empirical question, not an ideological one. But “DEI” has become a political noise machine. Attach those three letters to almost anything, and evidence no longer matters. A safety measure can be erased without the government ever having to discuss safety.

The third story reached even more deeply into my own life. I have spent a career in science. I do know that the system is imperfect: peer review can be conservative, and NSF, DOE or NIH grant applications can become bureaucratic rituals.

But science cannot be managed like a portfolio of technology investments. Basic research does not know in advance what it will discover, how long discovery will take, or whether the eventual consequence will be a product, a new field of knowledge, or simply a better understanding of the universe. Curiosity is not waste. It is the beginning of nearly everything we later decide was inevitable.

Three stories: one about who may tell our history, one about whether evidence may guide public safety, and one about who may decide which questions science is permitted to ask. It felt like the Noriega tactic translated into politics. There were no enormous speakers and no rock music. Instead, there was provocation piled upon provocation, absurdity upon absurdity, contempt upon contempt.

The noise was not intended to persuade me. It merely had to continue until I wither away.

Once, my immediate response to stories like these was outrage. Outrage was energizing. It brought moral clarity. It made me want to write, argue, organize, and act. I could focus on an injustice, try to understand it, and decide how to respond.

I no longer feel that clean outrage. I feel exhausted. Before I can fully understand one assault, another arrives. Before indignation can become thought—or thought can become action—the third, fourth, and fifth offenses are already clamoring to be heard. The noise does not sharpen my moral judgment. It blunts it. I find myself losing the ability to decide which outrage deserves my attention because all of them demand it at once.

The familiar description of danger is “fight or flight.” Faced with the daily absurdity and cruelty coming from Washington, I would like to imagine myself choosing to fight.

But I feel myself slinking toward flight.

Not dramatic flight. I am not packing a suitcase or abandoning the country. It is a quieter retreat. I want to close the newspapers. I want to turn away from public life and narrow my world to the people I love, the mountains outside my window, and the work immediately before me. I want to stop listening. I want to hide and hope the storm will pass.

I think that desire is understandable. But it is also exactly wrong.

The storm will not pass because I hide from it. And perhaps that is one of the purposes of the cacophony. The administration does not need to persuade me that a bicycle lane possesses a race, that historians are enemies of America, or that the value of scientific discovery can be measured like the quarterly return on an investment portfolio. It does not need me to believe any of those things.

It needs only to exhaust me.

It needs me to decide that paying attention is too painful, that resistance is futile, and that private withdrawal is the only remaining form of sanity. It needs enough citizens who still believe in truth, integrity, dignity, service, compassion, and the common good to become so overwhelmed that they remove themselves from public life.

Noise can deafen. Noise can distract.

But its greatest political achievement may be to demobilize.

I do not yet know precisely how to resist that. I do know that permanent outrage is impossible. No nervous system can remain indefinitely at full alarm. We require rest, silence, family, friendship, nature, laughter, and ordinary life. Refuge is not cowardice. Recovery is not surrender.

But refuge must allow us to return.

There is a difference between stepping away long enough to recover our strength and retreating in the hope that someone else will defend the values we have abandoned. There is a difference between protecting the mind and closing the eyes.

That is the question now before me—and perhaps before all of us. How do we survive the noise without becoming deaf to what it conceals? How do we preserve the capacity to act without allowing outrage to consume us? How do we rest without surrendering?

How do we resist the temptation to flee?