The Worst Is Yet To Come

I feel awful. I wrote a satirical piece yesterday, a satirical piece of the sort that used to move me - that used to energize me. Normally, this is the kind of feeling you get when you write a potentially great piece that never gets off the ground or never overcomes its limitations. In other words, a failure when you can taste success. But instead I feel awful precisely because I succeeded.

I wrote that piece close to perfectly, and I don't usually feel that way about something I've written. As much as anyone can, I wrote (I think) a perfect deconstruction of everything wrong with Phil Mushnick's Adrian Peterson column. I took Mushnick's rambling, disjointed Gordian knot of a monologue that started with "r" and ended in "-acism" and I followed the logical strands and untied the knot until what was left was a strangling single thread of hateful, racist expression. It was almost too easy. I ate the click-bait and bent the hook with sharper teeth. I demolished every word of it. I took a pernicious element of our society and I exposed it. I did right by art and conscience. I did everything I was supposed to.

And I feel awful. I suddenly feel that - as in The Usual Suspects - I nabbed a petty phantom while a much more sinister evil just walked right out my door, unimpeded. Everything I thought I'd accomplished with that piece turned out to be meaningless, simplistic, and ultimately not worth the effort by reader or writer. Phil Mushnick is an awful writer that wrote an awful column. And no one that clicked my link thought otherwise beforehand, and no one that clicked my link thought otherwise afterward. It was a fun piece to write, but what it successfully critiqued was trivial. I wrote the easiest piece in the world and felt satisfied about doing it competently.

After all, what's really up is that there are these horrible incentives to write hateful drivel. And why is that? Well, you don't have far to look: Finding civility among commenters on a big-market, major news/sports website is almost impossible. I've come to expect explicit racism and laughably coded racism everywhere. I've come to expect "fire the author" comments by self-righteous commenters looking to make a name for themselves. I've come to expect ramblings by people that are willing to take 2 minutes to comment and not more than a second to read. I've come to expect condescending drivel ("You can't even understand the most basic..."), trolling by troglodytes, and an ugly confirmation about every terrible impulse I've ever read about. The worst is yet to come, if you give it long enough.

And when that's your audience? When the human race - in all its mind-numbing need for attention and tearing-down-of-others - is your audience? Then Phil Mushnick is your writer. "You get Hoynes," President Bartlet famously said to God. God could've answered, "You get Phil Mushnick." You get the New York Post. You get click-bait, think-pieces without thought, tabloids, mindless entertainment, substanceless counter-intuitive ideas, instant takes, simplistic analysis, and, overall, you get specious nonsense.

Phil Mushnick isn't the problem: No, literally every one and everything, myself included, are the problem. See, I'm not gonna speak for you, but I know I have this impulse to grind my teeth and delight in a hateful column or comment. I have an urge to leave that self-righteous paragraph. I have that rage of survival and existence within me. I have that urge to hate an easy answer instead of finding a hard answer. I have jealousy, envy, social signalling, prejudices, fear, and rage. If I read a hateful thing, I'll identify with who is attacking or who is being attacked, instead of finding universal compassion for both and using rationality to find my way through. If I read a mawkish thing, I'll instinctively mentally attack the author as naive. If I read a partisan thing, I will take sides.

I'm the problem. I allow Phil Mushnick to exist. No, not the easy "Well you clicked him so you're lining his pockets!" answer. No, I mean, the hateful anti-intellectualism, the rage I feel, the mindless envy of other writers (like I really want the Post's resident racist hack job, anyway), and the self-centeredness of my own perspective.... all of the essence of who I am feeds into this animal impulse of humanity that, writ large, leads to editors saying "This is what people want." Leads to politicians saying "This is what people want" of their most diabolical and vacuous plans. Leads to the miracle of aggregate demand saying, "Fuck it, this is as good as the market wants, and this is as good as the market is going to get." I get Hoynes, and I deserve him.

Instead, I need to find productive outlets for my worst impulses. Every hateful thought must become a beautiful creation. Every drop of rage must feed a torrential mercy that I must bring to the world through the things I will build. The outrage that Phil Mushnick peddled in his column is timeless. It's time to fight that hideous outrage with an indifferent and larger structure; built from the same bricks, but infinitely more accommodating.