I have some thoughts

...and some dog pictures.

Well, hello there.

We have a bit of catching up to do, but I have to warn you: this newsletter is going to be irregular, inconsistent, contrarian, often non-political, and usually accompanied by dog pictures. Actually, always accompanied by dog pictures.

So don’t expect a daily (or even weekly) outpouring of insight… and it’s not going to be a replacement for Morning Shots. But it’s going to be free, so there’s that.

Happy Wednesday.

Eli and Auggie are ready for their close-ups:

Flashback: Here’s Baby Eli four years ago:

Here he is Monday:

And here’s Auggie, explaining that I should be throwing him the green ball.

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The judges are pushing back. Hard.

ICYMI, I’m sitting in for Tom Nichols over at the Atlantic Daily newsletter for a few weeks, and my first offering was yesterday.

The TL;DR: The federal judges are pissed. And that may have consequences.

I also addressed the question of who is more of curmudgeon:

Tom Nichols gave fair warning. In last Thursday’s newsletter, he suggested that at least one of the folks who would be sitting in for him this month “will help supply your regular servings of curmudgeonly grousing.” That, I suspect, is me, although compared with Tom, I am a sweet summer child of optimism.

We agree, however, that keeping up with Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is both “enervating and exhausting.” By bombarding the public with threats, falsehoods, and vulgarity, Tom warns, “Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil.”

Tom urges us to keep our heads, but the evidence suggests that tens of millions of our fellow Americans have already lost theirs. Which is why the courts may turn out to be our last line of defense.

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If you scroll down far enough, you’ll also find a “P.S.” that catches you up on some of what I’ve been doing lately:

Lately I’ve been attempting to step away from the daily hamster wheel of crazy. This means that even though I follow the news, I’m experimenting with the radical concept of actually reading nonpolitical books during the day.

Old habits are hard to break, and I admit that I have a mental block about reading novels or watching movies during what used to be work hours. My solution has been to listen to an eclectic—perhaps even eccentric—collection of books on tape while I’m walking my two dogs, Eli and Auggie. Sometimes I’ll listen to different genres on the same stroll: Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That, Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Hurricane’s Eye, and the always sanity-enhancing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. And if I want to get into a particularly snarky mood, there’s always H. L. Mencken, who goes especially well with wrangling two immense German shepherds.

Who knows? One day soon I may even take in a movie matinee, as long as Dune 2 is still playing on the big screen. I’ll keep you updated.

— Charlie

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Revisiting Neil Postman

I have to admit that I hadn’t read anything by Neil Postman for quite a while, but I think it’s time for a revival. I opened my Atlantic piece with this quote:

Four decades ago, Neil Postman prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” he wrote, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

Postman was prophetic, but he couldn’t have had any idea how bad things would get in the age of Donald Trump and Twitter. Faced with Trump’s behavior, America’s norms of decency and truth proved to be far more fragile than many of us imagined.

Even though he could not have imagined the tsunami of nonsense, vitriol and mind melting that have accompanied the Age of Trump and Twitter, I don’t think Postman would be surprised to find that tens of millions of Americans are entertained rather than outraged by the predations of an absurdist clown like the GOP’s prospective nominee.

In other words: Our national idiocracy was a pre-existing condition, just waiting for the coming of a cynical demagogue like Trump. Our guardrails and norms proved to be far more fragile than we imagined, because they had been hollowed out and dumbed down.

Here is where Postman’s insights are so valuable: We worry about fascism and Orwellian authoritarianism, but Postman argued that the real threat was more insidious.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, he suggested, was a more accurate prophecy of our time than George Orwell’s 1984. He wrote:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

You really should read the whole thing.

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Speaking of blotting out the sun.

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Until, next week. Maybe.