Why am I worried all of the time?
It’s not because I have a problem. Everything’s fine on my end.
The truth is, I’m on the receiving end of a problem pipeline. My processing power is being exploited to work through someone else’s issues, in an intensely non-productive way.
I’m not going to surprise anyone when I say that this someone is, at this moment, Trump, he of the capital T. There’s a guy who figured out, way back in the eighties, how to capitalize on the public’s attention. The trick he has is to actualize the idea that any publicity is good publicity. Whatever thinking we do about Trump is, for Trump, pro-Trump thinking.
But I’m also thinking of a conversation that I had with a friend of mine, in my back yard, a couple of years ago – which is to say, before Trump was a Thing. The through-put of it was that she felt like the news was mustering her to have opinions about things that she wouldn’t have known about otherwise; further, that these opinions were the ones she would have had anyhow, if she’d known about the relevant things; and, finally, that she kind of resented these opinions, because she felt like she was being induced to have them.
I knew exactly what she meant. We were being mustered to feel, e.g., that a hurricane in Honduras was really awful. Or a coup in Honduras. Both things that were, in fact, really awful. But, at the same time that you felt they were really awful, you couldn’t help but feel you were being mustered to feel that way, which produced an abreaction.
Since then, it’s only gotten worse. I feel like I’ve been press-ganged to worry about other people’s problems, and that these problems are a good deal less concrete than whatever was going on in Honduras a couple-few years ago. This is to say, my mind is being colonized. Thoughts about things that aren’t news have to make excuses for themselves. They’re subalterns.
I mean this unseriously, but not all that unseriously. The question of how these subaltern thoughts can get their passports back is, I think, also the question of how Trump can be made to lose.