The World is in an Uproar

And it's tempting to look away

A FEW WEEKS AGO, I was on the verge of delivering to you, my occasional readers, some animal stories from late spring. Bert went to the vet, and there we observed a Dalmatian arrive with a snout full of porcupine needles. We’ve been watching a family of foxes in the back hayfield, with four kits jumping around as if thrilled with their new life on earth. I saw a bird nest attached to the top of my shop door and noticed a bird so perfectly still I assumed it was protecting an egg. A few days later, the bird hadn’t moved. I realized it had died in the nest.

Because I look out on an open landscape, with hayfields and old maples and crabapple trees, defined by a distant ridge, I can almost imagine the earth going along just as it always has. Walking around with Bert, I see bees doing busy-bee-stuff every day; I’ve been seeing monarch butterflies. The next-door farmer told me it bothered him that when he cut the hay in June he didn’t see the usual red-tailed hawks circling above his tractor, ready to swoop in for the scurrying rabbits and field mice. But in the last week, I’ve been hearing the hawks, up in the trees making their high-pitched screech. Maybe they’re new to the area and don’t know the haying schedule.

There’s a moment every morning, though, when I snap out of the nature reveries. I peer into a window on the wider world, as presented by the New York Times. It’s an increasingly glum ritual. It reminds me of the Ray Charles song, “The Danger Zone.”

Just read your paper
And you'll see
Just exactly what keeps worryin' me
Yeah, you'll see the world is in an uproar
The danger zone is everywhere

The song was written by Percy Mayfield, and recorded by Ray Charles in July of 1961. Mayfield must have been thinking about the nuclear threat when he wrote “the danger zone is everywhere,” but that line carries new power in an era of climate disaster. Or, in a society that is trapped in an endless cycle of gun violence. Just read your paper. The New York Times, July 22, 2022:

. . . a sense of impending breakdown has spread beyond the fringes, taking hold across a country that can at times feel dangerously unhinged. Pandemic, lockdowns, fire and flood, ubiquitous rage and shocking violence: A deadly rampage can suddenly break out in the big-city suburbs or in a remote little town, at work, at the grocery store, at school or even at home.

This story had a twist, though. It was a front-page profile of a wealthy businessman in Kentucky named C. Wesley Morgan. During the Obama presidency, Morgan began to fear the country was heading for some kind of civil war. He thought his wealth could protect him. He built a mansion on 200 acres of Kentucky land, complete with an underground bunker, stocked with provisions and weapons. Nevertheless, a deranged killer found his way in one night. One of Morgan’s daughters was shot and killed. The Times reporter, Campbell Robertson, portrays Morgan’s grief, and his awareness that his own “I’ve got mine” mentality may have made him and his family a target. He’s put the property up for sale. With his wife and remaining daughter, he moves from place to place, living out of a mobile home, having experienced great material success, followed by torment and persistent, deep confusion.

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I DON’T KNOW ABOUT the rest of you . . . but there are fewer news stories in the Times that hold my interest these days. I stare at the morning paper and no longer believe I need all the details about terrible things that have happened. I’ve been aware ever since the election of Trump of an impulse to look away. I can’t do it, of course; my job more or less requires me to pay attention. But it’s not hard to understand why so many people don’t want a diet of disaster every morning. Amanda Ripley considered the “news avoidance” phenomenon recently for the Washington Post. She began to feel like keeping up with the news was “marinating in despair.” She even consulted a therapist, who told her to quit the news habit. She writes:

Then one day a journalist friend confided that she was avoiding the news, too. Then I heard it from another journalist. And another. (Most were women, I noticed, though not all.) This news about disliking news was always whispered, a dirty little secret. It reminded me of the scene in “The Social Dilemma,” when all those tech executives admitted that they didn’t let their kids use the products they had created.

Apparently a study by the Reuters Institute found that the United States has “one of the highest news-avoidance rates in the world.” Part of the reason is it “leaves people feeling powerless.” My guess is that it also indicates that Americans detest what is happening to this country. It’s worth considering Ripley’s analysis of what the news business ought to be learning about driving readers toward despondency. This statement surprised me:

There aren’t many major news outlets systematically creating news for humans yet, but one that I admire (and now subscribe to) is the Christian Science Monitor. Each issue features reporting from around the globe, vivid photos, brutal realities — right alongside hope, agency and dignity. Stories include a brief explainer called “Why we wrote this,” treating readers like respected partners.

That’s probably good advice for newspapers, which are hardest hit by our urge to look away. Unfortunately, there is a huge industry that’s grown up to steal our attention, no matter what forms of excellent journalism survive. Just as it was always easier to come home from a job and plop down in front of the TV, now there are endless entertainments via TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc., requiring no mental effort, accessible on the ever-present device that most of us have on hand at all times.

We produced a new issue of The Baffler in July, and that’s what we were thinking about: the role of technology in promising us a better world, while it consistently makes so much of our lives worse. I wrote about an entrenched pattern of “change without change” in an introductory note. You could have it mailed to you, or you could grab your ansible and read it right here, right now.

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IF YOU ARE ONLINE, you probably saw the viral sensation that featured an inquisitive emu named Emmanuel, who lives on Knuckle Bump Farms with a charming farmer named Taylor, who calls herself Eco Sister on Twitter. I began this note by suggesting that it felt strange to be focusing on the quotidian observations about animals and nature when the world is in an uproar. The flip side is that animal life and the beauty of nature are what gives us a break—and people are clearly desperate for relief.

So I don’t rule out turning to less world-shaking topics in future newsletters—maybe even a chronicle of my return to the bowling alley and my so far successful efforts to stay away from pickleball, which has now achieved a moment of maximum hype. This was always just meant to be a letter to friends and family, with stray thoughts, and bowling news, and animal photos. Readers may well like the animal news more than the glum reflections. It was a moment with my friend Bert that led to the only tweet I’ve ever had that went quasi-viral. Undoubtedly it found a wider audience because it caught the eye of my old friend John Harwood, who has half a gazillion followers on Twitter and gave it the old RT. After a day or two everything went back to normal, and the next day’s news came in like the tides, but not in the reassuring and calming way of the normal tides. More like encroaching tides wearing away at the sandy cliffs.