When I look at people talking about Biden or Bloomberg being "the only one who can beat Trump" all I see is fear. Trump's election (and subsequent behavior) contravened nearly everything Americans are taught in civics class about how the process is supposed to work, and so many white Americans carry around cherished illusions about themselves and their country rooted in that kind of hypothetical civic nobility. Trump has to be an aberration that will eventually be fixed by the norms-respecters because the alternative – too awful to confront directly by these people – is that that Americans are not, in fact, as hostile to fascism as Tom Brokaw taught us to believe in the intros to Band of Brothers. I think a lot of liberals fear both having to let go of those illusions and also just fear being the Good Germans who cheered the Reich on as it slid into the abyss. Everybody wants to believe they're the good guys.
In the wake of my dad's death I started working to deprogram my mom (my father, who taught me to not trust what authorities tell me, ended up defecting to Camp Cut My Taxes Forever and we couldn't talk about politics at all anymore the last few years of his life or it would devolve into volcanic shouting matches, and he was ranting in my mom's ears all day long every day). I got her to start watching NPR News Hour, both because I think the crew on there are about as good as establishment media figures are going to get, and also because, as the name says, it's an hour. It's not perfect (I think mom's favorite part is Brooks and Shields, and no amount of patient engagement on my part is going to convince her that they're both selling snake oil in their own ways), but it's tough to get too many brainworms from only an hour of anything, especially when it comes from mostly well-intentioned DC liberals.
Maybe should have included 5) and the MSM lied like a rug. Maybe it’s a kind of “Cronkite Syndrome” . . . Walter Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, Woodward-Bernstein . . . There was a bit more variety and some newscasters were really trusted. But the TV and newspaper landscape looks nothing like it did back then and I still think my fellow boomers should remember and notice the difference. For example, news didn’t have any real segments about entertainers or entertainment unless someone died (Sharon Tate comes to mind). Also, when you flip through the various news broadcasts today you notice ALL of them talking about the same thing in the same way, Using the exact same phrases. I find that hugely creepy but none of my boomer pals notice how unusual this would have been even up to the nineties. It’s one of the things that I miss about Jon Stewart: I only agreed with him maybe half the time but one thing he and his staff were good at is putting together montages of all the different pundits on different stations spouting the same awful talking points. This started before social media really took off so you know this shit was being fed by the PTB
Well as a boomer myself I can’t understand why my contemporaries suddenly all forget what we’ve lived through just because of Trump ffs. Here’s the reality: our entire lives, every president has been worse than the last when it came to screwing our quality of life, the planet, and war war war. Many of us fought all of this over and over. Up until Obama my boomer friends and I all pretty much agreed that 1) our communities were being eviscerated by privatization and greed, 2) our government lies about the crap it does around the world, 3) we’re being impoverished by corporate ideology, and 4) every president was worse than the last. But I would say that some of the derangement actually started with Obama because I knew we’d been had as soon as Mr. HopeNChange started packing his cabinet and picking department heads from the same slimy group of peckerheads that have been involved in all this crap for years. That’s when my relationship with my contemporaries started sliding downhill....Trump was just the final precipitous cliff. Sigh. I don’t get why these last two presidents suddenly caused boomers to start believing MSM over their own lying eyes.
I read all of your articles, and am a subscriber -- Love you Luke. This entry has me a bit mystified though.
Disclosure: I like Bernie but would pick Warren if forced to choose. Will be ecstatic if he becomes the next president. (I'll be pulling a slimy, shitty, stinking republican ballot on Tuesday to vote *against* fuckface-in-chief)
I get the outrage about the sudden focus from MSNBC, etc on bashing Bernie, but throughout these above testimonials, there is this strange softness for Russia and a Trump-cultlike disbelief of Russia's well-documented desire to create chaos and disenfranchisement here. You describe it as the "Mueller and Russia shit". Those who believe the Mueller report were "tricked".
What does the Mueller Report have to do with Bernie? Why are those who read it and believe the details revealed within to be extremely ominous -- people like me -- a threat to Bernie’s candidacy?
There are reports around Russian efforts to boost Bernie. Do the Mueller Report’s findings suddenly hit too close to home? Are Bernie supporters ok with foreign help as a means to an end? (Just keep it a secret!) Like MAGAs are?
I don't doubt that some of the family members mentioned here are getting too much mainline centrist millionaire bullshit than is healthy, but the odd dismissiveness of the fact that Putin is not exactly looking out for what's best for America – and is having a successful hand in its current decline -- is unsettling. I see it as making enemies of imperfect friends. I WISH I had a brother that was so awful as to believe the DNC has a clue how to win. Mine has a TRUMP 2020 bumper sticker and believes being poor is a character flaw that is punishable by dying of the flu.
If the "Russia shit" hits too close to home, maybe a candidate's supporters shouldn't be so evengelically unwilling to self-examine.
To the good news: my mom is a hardcore Bernie supporter in SC now. I think a canvasser got her to agree to do calls? Shes also a lifelong Republican and moral majority type of Christian. She just has basic cable though, so no Fox news or MSNBC. I bet that helped.
The real problem with my mother and her liberal friends in Ohio is their iPads. Not all of them watch MSNBC all the time, but all of them are connected via iPad to the Resistance Liberal media bubble 24/7. It’s gotten to the point where my brother and sister and I have discussed staging an intervention. We all live far away and don’t come back very often, but when we do we’ll be in the same room hanging out and she’ll be zoned into the little screen in her lap, ignoring us outright or asking a question and then not listening to our answer or sometimes just reading aloud directly from the article she has open. The news of the day is all she wants to talk about, and to where she directs every conversation, and she just doesn’t process that most people don’t enjoy talking about heavy political shit all the time.
I’m somewhat sympathetic, as she’s a brilliant woman who’s accomplished a ton in her life, and I think Hillary losing to this man in particular broke something in her brain (and those of her friends in her age group), how after a lifetime of dealing with bullshit from men like that no one could stop this last indignity (in large part by not being able to dissuade many of their husbands and conservative friends and family members from voting for him). Even so, the last time one of us asked her to put her iPad away she threw a fit befitting the world’s most spoiled thirteen-year-old. We were on a family vacation last year, and she kept offering to watch the grandkids in the basement or outside so the rest of us could get some peace, and every time we went to check on them the kids would be doing something insane or dangerous and she’d be sitting five feet away, reading her iPad, completely oblivious.
It’s taken a definite toll on my relationship with her. I have stopped asking for any sort of help with the kids if I can help it, and all the political talk limits our ability to have a conversation. The final straw there came last summer, when she tried to break things down for me, her immature, not-seeing-the-big-picture youngest son (I’m 37), by saying, “This goes back thirty years, to when LBJ was President, and the Great Society…”
I stopped her and said, “Mom, that was over fifty years ago.”
“Well whatever, whatever,” she said, and kept right on trucking. It felt so broadly representative of this whole shitshow, and how far gone so many boomers (even the smartest ones) are.
It's not all bad, I hope. My mother, for instance, was a fanatical MSNBC watcher who volunteer last week that she can't take their hatred of Bernie anymore. She finds it transparently cynical and openly manipulative. She sees him as the clear front runner and doesn't understand why these people she's respected for years are doing everything they can to destroy him. It warmed my heart, honestly. Maybe my Bernie fanaticism has rubbed off on her, but she can't be only boomer alienated by their utterly disingenuous, own-ass-saving bullshit.
Great post as always. I am so excited I found your book and then website.
When I look at people talking about Biden or Bloomberg being "the only one who can beat Trump" all I see is fear. Trump's election (and subsequent behavior) contravened nearly everything Americans are taught in civics class about how the process is supposed to work, and so many white Americans carry around cherished illusions about themselves and their country rooted in that kind of hypothetical civic nobility. Trump has to be an aberration that will eventually be fixed by the norms-respecters because the alternative – too awful to confront directly by these people – is that that Americans are not, in fact, as hostile to fascism as Tom Brokaw taught us to believe in the intros to Band of Brothers. I think a lot of liberals fear both having to let go of those illusions and also just fear being the Good Germans who cheered the Reich on as it slid into the abyss. Everybody wants to believe they're the good guys.
In the wake of my dad's death I started working to deprogram my mom (my father, who taught me to not trust what authorities tell me, ended up defecting to Camp Cut My Taxes Forever and we couldn't talk about politics at all anymore the last few years of his life or it would devolve into volcanic shouting matches, and he was ranting in my mom's ears all day long every day). I got her to start watching NPR News Hour, both because I think the crew on there are about as good as establishment media figures are going to get, and also because, as the name says, it's an hour. It's not perfect (I think mom's favorite part is Brooks and Shields, and no amount of patient engagement on my part is going to convince her that they're both selling snake oil in their own ways), but it's tough to get too many brainworms from only an hour of anything, especially when it comes from mostly well-intentioned DC liberals.
Maybe should have included 5) and the MSM lied like a rug. Maybe it’s a kind of “Cronkite Syndrome” . . . Walter Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, Woodward-Bernstein . . . There was a bit more variety and some newscasters were really trusted. But the TV and newspaper landscape looks nothing like it did back then and I still think my fellow boomers should remember and notice the difference. For example, news didn’t have any real segments about entertainers or entertainment unless someone died (Sharon Tate comes to mind). Also, when you flip through the various news broadcasts today you notice ALL of them talking about the same thing in the same way, Using the exact same phrases. I find that hugely creepy but none of my boomer pals notice how unusual this would have been even up to the nineties. It’s one of the things that I miss about Jon Stewart: I only agreed with him maybe half the time but one thing he and his staff were good at is putting together montages of all the different pundits on different stations spouting the same awful talking points. This started before social media really took off so you know this shit was being fed by the PTB
Well as a boomer myself I can’t understand why my contemporaries suddenly all forget what we’ve lived through just because of Trump ffs. Here’s the reality: our entire lives, every president has been worse than the last when it came to screwing our quality of life, the planet, and war war war. Many of us fought all of this over and over. Up until Obama my boomer friends and I all pretty much agreed that 1) our communities were being eviscerated by privatization and greed, 2) our government lies about the crap it does around the world, 3) we’re being impoverished by corporate ideology, and 4) every president was worse than the last. But I would say that some of the derangement actually started with Obama because I knew we’d been had as soon as Mr. HopeNChange started packing his cabinet and picking department heads from the same slimy group of peckerheads that have been involved in all this crap for years. That’s when my relationship with my contemporaries started sliding downhill....Trump was just the final precipitous cliff. Sigh. I don’t get why these last two presidents suddenly caused boomers to start believing MSM over their own lying eyes.
"People who love the DNC are really weird. What are you even behind there?
Right! It's like being a fan of music but no actual bands or genres...just music in general."
I think it's more like saying "I'm a big fan of Universal Music Group - Vivendi!"
I read all of your articles, and am a subscriber -- Love you Luke. This entry has me a bit mystified though.
Disclosure: I like Bernie but would pick Warren if forced to choose. Will be ecstatic if he becomes the next president. (I'll be pulling a slimy, shitty, stinking republican ballot on Tuesday to vote *against* fuckface-in-chief)
I get the outrage about the sudden focus from MSNBC, etc on bashing Bernie, but throughout these above testimonials, there is this strange softness for Russia and a Trump-cultlike disbelief of Russia's well-documented desire to create chaos and disenfranchisement here. You describe it as the "Mueller and Russia shit". Those who believe the Mueller report were "tricked".
What does the Mueller Report have to do with Bernie? Why are those who read it and believe the details revealed within to be extremely ominous -- people like me -- a threat to Bernie’s candidacy?
There are reports around Russian efforts to boost Bernie. Do the Mueller Report’s findings suddenly hit too close to home? Are Bernie supporters ok with foreign help as a means to an end? (Just keep it a secret!) Like MAGAs are?
I don't doubt that some of the family members mentioned here are getting too much mainline centrist millionaire bullshit than is healthy, but the odd dismissiveness of the fact that Putin is not exactly looking out for what's best for America – and is having a successful hand in its current decline -- is unsettling. I see it as making enemies of imperfect friends. I WISH I had a brother that was so awful as to believe the DNC has a clue how to win. Mine has a TRUMP 2020 bumper sticker and believes being poor is a character flaw that is punishable by dying of the flu.
If the "Russia shit" hits too close to home, maybe a candidate's supporters shouldn't be so evengelically unwilling to self-examine.
To the good news: my mom is a hardcore Bernie supporter in SC now. I think a canvasser got her to agree to do calls? Shes also a lifelong Republican and moral majority type of Christian. She just has basic cable though, so no Fox news or MSNBC. I bet that helped.
The real problem with my mother and her liberal friends in Ohio is their iPads. Not all of them watch MSNBC all the time, but all of them are connected via iPad to the Resistance Liberal media bubble 24/7. It’s gotten to the point where my brother and sister and I have discussed staging an intervention. We all live far away and don’t come back very often, but when we do we’ll be in the same room hanging out and she’ll be zoned into the little screen in her lap, ignoring us outright or asking a question and then not listening to our answer or sometimes just reading aloud directly from the article she has open. The news of the day is all she wants to talk about, and to where she directs every conversation, and she just doesn’t process that most people don’t enjoy talking about heavy political shit all the time.
I’m somewhat sympathetic, as she’s a brilliant woman who’s accomplished a ton in her life, and I think Hillary losing to this man in particular broke something in her brain (and those of her friends in her age group), how after a lifetime of dealing with bullshit from men like that no one could stop this last indignity (in large part by not being able to dissuade many of their husbands and conservative friends and family members from voting for him). Even so, the last time one of us asked her to put her iPad away she threw a fit befitting the world’s most spoiled thirteen-year-old. We were on a family vacation last year, and she kept offering to watch the grandkids in the basement or outside so the rest of us could get some peace, and every time we went to check on them the kids would be doing something insane or dangerous and she’d be sitting five feet away, reading her iPad, completely oblivious.
It’s taken a definite toll on my relationship with her. I have stopped asking for any sort of help with the kids if I can help it, and all the political talk limits our ability to have a conversation. The final straw there came last summer, when she tried to break things down for me, her immature, not-seeing-the-big-picture youngest son (I’m 37), by saying, “This goes back thirty years, to when LBJ was President, and the Great Society…”
I stopped her and said, “Mom, that was over fifty years ago.”
“Well whatever, whatever,” she said, and kept right on trucking. It felt so broadly representative of this whole shitshow, and how far gone so many boomers (even the smartest ones) are.
It's not all bad, I hope. My mother, for instance, was a fanatical MSNBC watcher who volunteer last week that she can't take their hatred of Bernie anymore. She finds it transparently cynical and openly manipulative. She sees him as the clear front runner and doesn't understand why these people she's respected for years are doing everything they can to destroy him. It warmed my heart, honestly. Maybe my Bernie fanaticism has rubbed off on her, but she can't be only boomer alienated by their utterly disingenuous, own-ass-saving bullshit.
Great post as always. I am so excited I found your book and then website.