Podcast Miscellany 7: “Welcome to our world, it’s been the apocalypse forever”

16 November 2016

So here we are.

I’ve mostly avoided writing about politics and news roundup shows in this newsletter. Though I listen to many obsessively, they seemed too tangential to my mission here, which is to document and recommend outstanding audio, stories that are worth revisiting no matter when you get around to hearing them. Typical gabfests and political podcasts seemed too transient, too of-the-moment.

A few days ago, Hua Hsu wrote in the New Yorker:

After 9/11, I remember talking to friends about ‘the new normal,’ the way that feelings of shock just got absorbed into the inconveniences of ordinary life. I never want to forget how this week has felt. Sooner rather than later, the drama that currently hangs over every second will melt into air, and some semblance of normal life will return. Most of us will move forward; some will feel left behind. … But the legacy of this moment — how we will be judged — remains to be written.

This task — of searing feelings into memory — is one, it seems to me, to which audio is uniquely suited. So this week, I leave you with the moments that I’ve heard and do not want to forget. Moments of mourning. Moments of rage. Moments of fear. Moments of hate. Moments of resolve. These moments capture some of the feelings I want to carry with me going forward, keeping them fresh in my mind. I hope you’ll carry some of them with you, too.

“One of the officers … was pretty convinced that this put his allegiance to the test as a police officer. In the age of Trump, where Trump, in his mind, stands for white people primarily, who was he supposed to be protecting? … What this election has been about has not really been about populism or about anti-Washington sentiment. Those things have always existed and they didn’t result in someone like Trump. The thing that makes Trump unique is that, unlike his predecessors, Romney or McCain, he indulged explicitly the latent white tribalism in this country, and people responded in kind. And so, like that officer, I think that does force a reckoning. Who is this country for? Who does it belong to? And last night, it seems that some decisive number of white Americans said that it belonged to them.” (Trumpcast: The Morning After)

“I hate being told not to be angry, because anger is an appropriate response to so much of the injustice that marginalized people face. If you’re not angry, then you’re not paying attention. Something is really missing if you’re not angry. And when people are saying ‘don’t get angry,’ what they’re really saying is ‘Don’t make me uncomfortable. Don’t make me have to confront my privilege. Don’t make me have to change the comfortable circumstances in my life in order to really create change.’ Actually, the thing that will make me angry the fastest, is to tell me not to get angry, or ‘stay calm.’ Fuck you. You stay calm.” (Politically Reactive: Roxane Gay on Anger After the Election)

“I’m really trying to understand the fear that people have of us. … I literally feel like that scene in John Carpenter’s They Live, where you put on the glasses and you see, and he’s like ‘Oh my God,’ you know, he sees the world for what it is. I can’t get that out of my mind. I loved that movie when I was a kid, because it was so damn scary that everything might just be hidden in plain sight. And when I was a kid that fear was so delicious, that thrill was so fun, and now that this is it, it’s really hard. … I’m at a point in my life where, you know, my girlfriend said to me this morning, like, ‘so if we want to have a family….’ And I just can’t, it’s so hard, I don’t know, it’s just really scary.” (Still Processing: The Reckoning)

“I think … one thing that … really tipped me fully over into rage was was just, like, hearing from so many white people today, like ‘Oh, I could have done more.” Like, the people who actually acknowledged it. And just being like, ‘yes, that’s true,’ but also I don’t know what you’re looking at your friends of color to say, because all we’re thinking is like, ‘welcome to our world, it’s been the apocalypse forever.’” (Call Your Girlfriend: Rage Phase)

“If you don’t know me by now, you will never know me. … But if you don’t know by now, maybe you’ll listen to a nice white person… In which case, step the fuck up and speak, because I personally am done trying to explain to you: ‘and these are the ways in which I’m human, please treat me as such.’” (Another Round: Burn)

“Muslims were really spoken of within a national security framework with both campaigns. … I love the Khans … Khizr uncle and Ghazala auntie … they’re wonderful. But it says something that our neighbors and our colleagues, for the majority of them, the only acceptable Muslim is a family whose son literally died for this country. What about the rest of us who are just normal people, who are just living our lives?” (See Something Say Something: Where Do We Go)

“I wish I could rewind time. If I had been less excited about it and hadn’t talked it up as much, then she wouldn’t be this disappointed. And I feel like I wanted her so badly to believe that she could do anything she wanted. And now there’s a part of her that does not believe that anymore. She’s been painting pictures and drawing things about being president and has said that she wants to be a female president, that she was going to be next. And today she said, if Hillary Clinton can’t win, I don’t think I can win either. And I don’t know what to tell her, because I want to say, no, you can be anything you want. But yesterday showed us that maybe that is just not the reality yet.” (This American Life: The Sun Comes Up)

“I think this really was a paradigmatic shift. The new paradigm that Donald Trump brought into the world was identity politics, and in particular white identity politics. And this question which he asked directly, ‘are we a nation or are we not?’ … All of these institutions are not acting on behalf of white people. They are acting on behalf of non white people. You can talk about this being fair, or what have you. But I will be brutally honest with you. Fairness has never been really a great value in my mind. I like greatness, and winning, and dominance, and beauty. Those are values, not really fairness.” (Reveal: A frank conversation with a white nationalist)

Brooke: “Shining a light gives people the information to pursue their goals. … What I would say is simply: you have a couple of choices. You can sit back and give way to panic … or we can simply keep our eyes open, day by day, and stay engaged. … Are you committed? Are you in, or are you out? This is about the American experiment and whether it fails … The country is evenly divided. That means half of the nation agrees with you. So get everybody off their asses.”

Bob: “I hope that it’s some sort of clarion call. But what I most hope … is that we are not all passengers on the ship of fools.”

Brooke: “What the fuck does that mean? … Why would you want to end on the line of ‘we’re all going to hell’?”

Bob: “Perhaps I misunderstood, but if you wanted to know what I’m thinking and feeling and what we should do, I have just told you. … Now you can think it’s ridiculous and hyperbolic … but at some point we have to reckon with what just happened last night.” (On The Media: Now What?)

“So I think we should institute the opposite of Godwin’s law, and basically start comparing everything to Nazi Germany and to other examples of the catastrophic rise of an autocrat, specifically for the purpose of perhaps creating the first historical precedent when a society actually effectively resists the rise of an autocrat.” (Trumpcast: Six Rules for Surviving an Autocracy)

“The Tea Party was making the argument that the constitution was on their side, and that Obama was essentially unconstitutional. And this of course was part of Trumpism itself, the birtherism, was the unconstitutionality of even the election of Barack Obama. And it was really effective for them to embrace that language. And it’s not so typical on the left for people to make the claim that their position is the constitutional one. And yet this is a moment exactly to be doing that, to use as the recourse for every argument the ideals of the constitution.” (The New Yorker: Politics and More: Donald Trump’s America)

“This is not an exceptional event. This is a horrific, horrific history, but it’s not an exceptional one. And I think the better that our country can grapple with that fact, the better we’ll begin to move forward. We have to. Almost a dozen black-owned and operated churches, sacred spaces, were burned or looted. We can’t help but recognize that, just one year ago, we had another attack on a sacred space in Charleston, South Carolina. And I think until we begin to recognize that these histories are part of a longer chain and a bigger context that has to do with questions of racism, of intolerance, and of hatred, then, while we’re not in Tulsa of 1921, we have to ask ourselves how far past Tulsa of 1921 we’ve moved.” (Sidedoor: Confronting the Past)

The pain many of us are feeling this week is all-too-normal for many. Let’s not allow it to seem normal any longer.

Yours,

Eli