Long walk home

As Donald Trump threatens to impose fascism on America, the news media distract us with a freakout over an apostrophe. We don't have to live like this.

Joe Biden’s apostrophe seems like as good a reason as any to explain the name of this newsletter.

“Finding Gravity” was inspired in part by the great Drive-By Truckers song “Gravity’s Gone,” in which Mike Cooley sings:

So I’ll meet you at the bottom if there really is one

They always told me when you hit it, you’ll know it

But I’ve been falling so long, it’s like gravity’s gone and I’m just floatin’

So much of what I’ve spent the last thirty years working on and thinking about — the Republican Party’s ever-increasing embrace of overt racism, sexism, authoritarianism and rejection of not only disagreement but of fact, science, and even basic math; the news media’s abdication of its essential role in democracy and the ever-heavier thumb it has placed on the scale for Republicans by privileging their lies and pursuing a false “balance”; our sprint towards climate catastrophe; a greedy and feckless tech elite blinded by their unquenchable thirst for money and power and arrogance unleashing on society the most ruthlessly efficient chaos machines ever imagined; structural biases in our constitution and our government that conspire to inflict upon America a tyranny of the minority; the gap between the promise of America and the reality; and more — can feel at times like one endless free-fall. One of my first thoughts on election night in 2016 was that so many of the things I’d been warning about and trying for decades to stop seemed like they had passed a point of no return. Like I’d been trying to stop rocks rolling down a hill, only to see them fall off the edge of a bottomless cliff I didn’t think was quite that close.

But the fall is only part of it. The disorienting nature of the fall — of so much of modern American politics and media and society — is the other. Falling so long, it’s like gravity’s gone and I’m just floatin’. That’s a very disorienting image: floating around in the absence of gravity, you’d eventually lose sense of which way is up and be left with no direction home, to borrow from another of America’s greatest songwriters. And that is in large part not an accident. It is the result of deliberate efforts by politicians and news companies to confuse and disorient us, to make us think things that simply aren’t true and think about things that simply don’t matter, in order to distract us from those that are and those that do. (To prioritize the insubstantial over the weighty, to stretch the gravity metaphor a bit more.)

This all has very little to do with Cooley’s “Gravity’s Gone.” But when I was thinking one night about what I’d use this newsletter to write about, I thought about the things in those last two paragraphs and the chorus to “Gravity’s Gone” suddenly came to mind, and I thought that what I’m trying to do here is help others — and myself — find a bit of gravity. To separate what’s true and real from the disorienting, the false, and the frivolous. To float a little less, and move with a bit more confidence in the right direction.¹

So, speaking of disorienting bullshit: Have you heard about Joe Biden’s apostrophe?

Last Sunday, Donald Trump held a Nazi-ish rally at Madison Square Garden, featuring speakers who called Puerto Rico “garbage,” talked about Black people eating watermelons, and made a whole bunch of other racist, sexist, and anti-semitic comments, as is the tradition at Trump rallies. Tuesday, Joe Biden reacted to the Trump surrogate’s insult of Puerto Rico:

“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

Biden’s straightforward rejection of the demonization of Latinos and embrace of the diversity and values that make America great was met with an immediate contrived freak-out by Republicans and reporters claiming that Biden had called all Trump supporters “garbage.” Those peddling the disingenuous claim insisted that Biden said “supporters,” not “supporter’s” — as if it’s possible to hear the difference between the two words, which are pronounced precisely the same way.

Chris Cillizza was an English major at Georgetown. Here, he insists he can hear the absence of an apostrophe.

Seriously, this happened:

Count the bylines: It took six journalists to produce a single CBS News report about a contested apostrophe.

Again, let me reiterate: The words “supporters” and “supporter’s” sound exactly alike. We all know this, right? You cannot hear the difference between the two words. So let’s go back to look at the word in context:

“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

The simplest, clearest reading of this is that Biden is saying that Tony Hinchcliffe’s description of Puerto Rico as “garbage” is, itself, garbage. We can tell this because the sentence in which the word “garbage” appears references Hinchcliffe’s description of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” And we can tell this because the immediate next sentence references “his demonization of Latinos” — again, obviously a reference to Hinchcliffe’s comments.

So while none of us can read Joe Biden’s mind, the clearest, most logical reading of the words he said is that he was denouncing Tony Hinchcliffe’s attack on Puerto Rico. It is also worth keeping in mind that Joe Biden is not a candidate for the presidency, and that Donald Trump and his most prominent supporters routinely describe Americans in terms far uglier than “garbage,” so even if you insist that you can somehow hear the absence of an apostrophe in Biden’s comments, it’s just … not that big a deal. It’s an entirely fake scandal, a nontroversy. It relies on a convoluted reading of a straightforward statement that assumes the worst about the speaker, on centering in the closing days of the campaign a man who is not on the ballot, and pretending that Republican claims that they are outraged at the comments are made in good faith despite their own far uglier rhetoric.

Naturally, the New York Times put it on the front page:

Four reporters were bylined on that piece, and two more named as contributing reporting. And that was just one of at least a half-dozen pieces the New York Times ran about the nontroversy — at least three of which appeared in the print edition of the newspaper. (The New York Times, by the way, has never reported that Donald Trump threatens to fine and imprison people for criticizing the Supreme Court. When Trump’s former chief of staff said Trump had praised Hitler, the Times didn’t put that on the front page.)

One Times article suggested the paper understands Republican outrage over Biden’s comment is insincere:

Republicans seized on the seeming gaffe […]

Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, said: “This is disgusting. Kamala Harris and her boss Joe Biden are attacking half of the country.” Just one day earlier, Mr. Vance brushed off the Puerto Rico island-of-garbage comment, saying, “We have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America.”

The right way for news companies to respond to feigned outrage is to ignore it, not to privilege the lie. But that’s exactly what the Times and other journalists did: Privilege the lie that Biden had committed some important offense, and openly declare that what matters isn’t what Biden actually said and actually meant — all that matters is that it’s useful to Republicans:

For two days with just a week remaining in an election in which Joe Biden is not running, the nation’s leading news companies pretended this utterly irrelevant and innocuous Biden comment was the biggest political story in all the land. The Washington Post, reeling from the loss a quarter of a million subscriptions after owner Jeff Bezos spiked an endorsement of Kamala Harris, gave the “story” two columns above the fold on its front page:

All of this over an apostrophe, or its absence.

This is disorienting bullshit — intentionally disorienting bullshit. It is designed to obscure the differences between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a man who routinely calls people “vermin” and threatens “bloody” mass deportation of tens of millions of people, including American citizens, and uses violent imagery to describe women who dare oppose him and threatens to jail Americans for exercising their first Amendment rights to criticize their government and publicly expresses his admiration for foreign dictators and privately praises Adolf Hitler. It seeks to distract us from the very real stakes of this election; from a choice between freedom and autocracy. To distract us from a man who says women who have abortions should be punished and brags about his responsibility for abortion bans that are killing women. To distract us from Donald Trump’s economic plans, which would enrich a handful of his billionaire cronies while increasing inflation, according to leading economists.

That’s the free fall we’ve been in going back a lot farther than the dawn of the Trump era. We have a minority political faction that is structurally advantaged by a constitution written without input from women or people of color that seeks to dismantle democracy and impose its will on the rest of us, through force and violence if necessary; that openly displays its admiration for the likes of Viktor Orban, Kim Jong Un, and Adolf Hitler; that is funded and led by narcissistic billionaires driven by greed and hatred. And we have an information environment, from news companies like the New York Times to Elon Musk’s Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook that disorients and confuses, constraining our ability to resist and helping the Right stoke hatred and fear and recruit new followers.

All of that probably sounds quite pessimistic. That’s something I’m often accused of, and those who do so are not necessarily wrong.

But gravity still exists. And we do know the direction home.

Here everybody has a neighbor

Everybody has a friend

Everybody has a reason to begin again

My father said “Son, we’re lucky in this town

It’s a beautiful place to be born

It just wraps its arms around you

Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.

You know that flag flying over the courthouse

Means certain things are set in stone

Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

Its gonna be a long walk home

For as long as I can remember I’ve spent most of my time thinking about the length of that walk. Call that pessimism if you like. But I see the distance ahead of us and still think we can make it. The first step is clear.

Please, vote for Kamala Harris.

1. That all sounds very noble and self-aggrandizing but mostly what I actually do here is work through some anger about lousy journalism.