I must admit that I cringed as I approached David Brooks’ latest piece in the Times. When the headline is “Donald Trump’s Magical Fantasy World,” you know the Great Karnak is about to emerge in full turban and engage in a good deal of flamboyant mind-reading. You also know what that reading is going to be.
I was surprised to find it a lot milder and less absurd and masturbatory than my expectation. Brooks, exceptionally for a Times writer nowadays, has moments of considerable sobriety, as in this PBS video with Mark Shields. He repeats his personal revulsion for Trump, but at least also admits that jobs, international relations, the impact of the tax cuts, and so on, have not been remotely as disastrous as he expected, and in fact have been surprisingly positive.
Brooks imagined, like so many, that the world would collapse in flames if Trump took office. Trump took office, and it didn’t happen. If anything we seem notably better off than we were during the rhetorically soothing but corrosively stagnant Obama years. Of course Brooks can’t quite bring himself to come out and say, We were wrong about Trump, but to his credit he isn’t twisting facts to shore up his distaste either.
There’s more than a little of that here. What are Trump’s “fantasies” exactly? “My instinct is that the Trump campaign never really colluded with the Russians,” says Brooks. (So is Trump fantasizing when he says so too?) But then he continues,”because there never was an actual Trump campaign — at least not in any organized sense of that word. It was a bunch of relatives and hangers-on having random meetings with some vague hope of personal and professional enrichment.”
Excuse me, but does this really describe a campaign which dispatched sixteen seasoned Republican opponents, vastly more experienced and better funded and connected? A campaign that took the election from a Hillary Clinton who outspent Trump by nearly a billion dollars, and did it with the near-universal, constant, strident support of the establishment media? A campaign undertaken while the sitting administration explicitly supporting his opponent spied on the opposing campaign, and leaked libelous manufactured DNC- and Clinton-campaign-funded Fusion GPS canards to a media frantic to spread them? “Fantasy”? It’s fantasy to use that term to describe a brilliantly effective and successful campaign that won against all odds.
But then those are terms of personal denigration, which are the only terms in which the fantasies of the anti-Trump faithful can be couched. “Every day he produces great geysers of fantasy — some of which rip the cultural fabric (Mexican rapists), some of which merely tug it (“Obama had my ‘wires tapped’”).” Mr. Brooks: some Mexicans who come across the border commit rape. Not all, true; certainly not the vast majority; but some do. It’s not a “great geyser of fantasy”: look at the DOJ statistics. Some commit other crimes too–here’s a listing year by year. It’s not fantasizing to state fact.
As for wiretapping, what does CNN say? As quoted in Wikipedia: “On September 18, 2017, CNN reported that the FBI wiretapped Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, from 2014 until an unspecified period in 2016 and again from mid-2016 until early 2017, pursuant to two separate FISA court orders. It has not been confirmed whether Trump’s conversations with Manafort were intercepted as part of this surveillance.” Of course it hasn’t been confirmed: when you’re wiretapping a campaign chairman at the height of a Presidential campaign, it’s unthinkable that the chairman would speak to the candidate!
The fantasies Brooks cites are not fantasies: they’re real. But Brooks brushes all that aside. Trump said it, so it must be a lie. If Trump says 1+1 makes 2, it’s time to rewrite the math books. What is arithmetic if not white supremacy?
The path to sanity, the Buddha reminds us, lies not in speculating about others’ fantasies, much less wallowing in one’s own, but in soberly facing one’s own–in realizing that if the world proves to be out of sync with one’s picture of it, one needs to adjust that picture till there’s a better fit. The anti-Trumpistas, however, just cannot emerge from their mythological inflation of a real estate developer into a grotesque embodiment of evil that dwarfs Milton’s Satan himself. Brooks writes, “even if you are motivated by the attraction of repulsion, you’ve given the man your brain. Sometimes my Trump-bashing friends and I seem like puppets on his string… have lost control of their own consciousness… “It is one of fascism’s goals to monopolize our attention”...
Given the man your brain? Lost control of your own consciousness? Cool off, dude.
“I miss people thinking about the world outside the gravity field of Trumpian unreality,” says Brooks. ”The more time we spend on the Trumpian soap opera, the less likely we are to know where we are or what we should do.”
Then why not just drop it, and pull the plug on the endless hatestream? After all, Trump too shall pass.
If one puts oneself among what passes nowadays for the left, however, one just can’t. The pressure to conform is too great. The pressure that forms you before you conform is too great. In the neo- mileaux, whether neoliberal or neoconservative, every media outlet one imbibes, every social gathering and community one inhabits, nearly every person one knows, either reinforces the consensus hatred or is too cowed to dissent.
Is there a remedy? The only viable one I can suggest is paradoxical: observe what is happening. In Poe’s Descent Into The Maelstrom, the shipwrecked sailor is dragged down into the whirlpool but rises back up by observing the motion and currents. Once he sees what is pulling him down he is able to rise back up, and out.
It’s too much to suggest to my liberal friends that they unplug from the friendships and stream of opinion surrounding them. It’s too all-encompassing. But it’s not too much to suggest that they look at it closely and dispassionately, poke at it skeptically and ironically now and again, like McLuhan, rather than drinking it all down in blind faith. Why not take an occasional walk on the wild side, and sample a dissenting perspective now and again? It can be refreshing, even entertaining. Take a break, and, like Brooks, you may experience a few all too rare, all too brief, moments of sobriety. You may backslide, but then maybe those moments will link up, and become a habit. Freedom from Obsessive Trump Disorder is a recovery to cherish.
There’s a Zen saying that applies equally to right and left: “The way out is through the door.” If you find that mainstream media drives you up the wall, either look at it analytically with your complete attention, or switch it off. Merely go with the flow, and you’ll only continue to drown.