Everyone Talks, Nobody Listens

Dear Mika and Joe. WTF? Mika, for all of the eye rolling sanctimonious scorn and scolding you deliver with your shoulders smartly wrapped in your shawl du jour, and Joe, for all of your lame blowharding about the good ol’ days back when you served in congress for about a minute, turns out neither of you actually stand for anything. Except survival. Afraid of Trump blowback and retribution, you slithered your empty selves down to Mar-a Lago to kiss the ring in an effort to stave off what? The financial impact of Trump and his cronies turning off the MSNBC bandwidth? That’ll hurt the pocketbook no doubt, but what with your combined salaries of $16M annually, I’m thinking you’re gonna be OK. Smart move getting married! Two can live as cheaply as one! Though that’s a whole lot less than Rachel Maddow is pulling down. You do know that she’s the boss of you, right? That’s gotta burn.

It's been a rough month all around for the video jockeys at MSNBC. First getting that dang election 100% fucking wrong (whoops), and now the Comcast mothership is cutting you loose. Newsflash, that’s bad for the future of talent salaries like yourselves. Hopefully you’ve been smart with your money. I’ve known some film directors who spent lavishly and rushed to buy swanky houses in Malibu when they were making bank but had to sell when their careers ended. Hopefully that won’t happen to you, but you might now have to pay the salaries of your personal assistants out of your own pocket. Maybe the Mar-a-Lago visit worked. Maybe Trump won’t sick the vengeful wrath of his version of the FCC upon you. But he ain’t gonna help you either. Welcome to the middle class. It can be so lonely.

The rest of the talking heads at MSNBC aren’t much better. Except for Nicolle Wallace. I like her cause she’s authentic. She’s a lapsed Republican who hasn’t been afraid to say so, and no doubt she’ll return to the fold if ever the crazies burn themselves out and some sense of normalcy returns. But for now, she’s been keeping it real. As for the rest of them, the best I can say is that only Mika and Joe bended a knee to Trump so overtly. They did, however, participate in what I consider to be a fatal flaw of Democratic pundits. They are all so high on their own supply. Rachel Maddow, I don’t even know where to begin. She huffs and she puffs, but I don’t think she ever blows the house down. At least I’m not sure, because she takes so fucking long to make her point, that I usually changed the channel long before she got to the end of whatever she was blowficating about. Lawrence O’Donnell clearly chafes under Maddow’s place on the leaderboard, lightly sparring with Rachel to prove that he’s the smartest person in the room. For which he’s got significant competition from Chris Hayes. By God, is there any subject of which Chris Hayes is not an expert in? He must’ve gotten real good grades in school. Better than me anyway. I majored in getting high before exams.

But just like any self-respecting MSNBC host, I’ve meandered way too long before getting to the actual point. So let me get down to it. All that blustery pontificating and intellectual puffery are both a factor of, and emblematic of why Trump was reelected. Once seen as a beacon of progressive policies that were sure to guide the populace in the right direction, MSNBC got it entirely wrong. As a self-professed news junkie for decades, I had MSNBC on in the background for most of the day for years. I have not turned them on since the election, and don’t intend to. It's quiet in the house now, but I should be saving on my electric bill. It’s a hard habit to break. Sometimes I have to resist taking a peek. I was sick for two days, and instead of fuzzing out to some good ol’ news coverage, I left myself with only my thoughts. And my phone. And my laptop. But despite my foggy brain, this much is clear. We lost the election because the Democratic party, the candidates, and their MSNBC mouthpiece talked at the people, instead of listening to the people. It’s something the Democrats have done wrong for as long as I can remember. And even though we’ve won elections in the past, this loss is gonna hurt bigly.

Elections aren’t won by policy talk and appealing to the mind. They are won by appealing to people’s hearts, and how politicians and parties make people feel. The Republican party is expert at making people feel scared of a boogeyman that only they can protect us from. The Democrats failed at making people feel that Trump is that boogeyman. The resulting chaos is going to be painful as we watch the new party in power attempt to tear down institutions that have served us well. Flawed for sure, but well overall. It’s going to be tough to watch the Federal government be divested of its power by inept leaders and have that returned to a litany of racist states. Diminishing the reach of the Department of Education doesn’t feel like a sensible approach. But trumpeting the power of the states has its roots in a racist political culture that’s haunted us ever since our founding fathers put quill to parchment, deep into the night as the candles burned low. Go ahead and return education policy to the states. Oklahoma is still going rank 49^th.

My wife is from Poughkeepsie, NY, the butt of many snide remarks on Law and Order over the years. Many of them deserved. For many years we’d take the train up from NYC to visit her parents. It’s a scenic ride up the Hudson, especially in the fall. When we eventually got a car, we’d make the drive up the twisty Taconic. It was much easier with the kids to have a car. There was still a fair amount of farmland in the area, though we watched so much of that land sold off and turned into residential developments over the years. Adjacent to one small farm nearish her folk’s house was a farmhouse that one might never have paid much attention to. Except for the array of handmade billboards on the side of the house facing the road, expressing far right political views about taxes and freedom and free markets. All of the themes that morphed many years later into the Tea Party movement. But this was long before that populist movement coalesced into folks promoting their beliefs wearing colonial garb and tea bags dangling from three cornered hats. I saw a dude wearing such a hat (sans teabags) on my morning walk to the beach a few days ago. No one is hiding in the shadows these days. The billboards that this guy put out (I assume it was a guy) were angry. The tone and the wording were insulting and mean spirited. Some had a baldish character who reminded me of Mr. Magoo, screaming his far-right invectives. My wife and I used to laugh when we came around the bend, excited to see what new sign this lunatic had put up, because they changed often. Whoever was behind it was on a mission, and mad as a hornet’s nest. It was one of our favorite parts of the drive, mocking this homeowner, and it went on for years.

We mocked, but we didn’t listen because we thought that we knew better. And maybe we do, but what good is that if we can’t make the opposition feel good? I’ve seen the same thing in business. When a company goes on a long losing streak trying to secure new business because they keep turning up to every pitch with an elaborate deck telling a client what they need, instead of listening to what the client wants. A pitch isn’t won with a deck of ideas, or policies. A pitch is won when a client FEELS that this potential supplier understands them and will listen and be a partner. A pitch is won when a client FEELS comfortable spending the next few years with you. This billboard guy was angry, and it turned out that millions more were angry too. And we continued to mock without really listening. Because the policies they proposed struck us as non-sensical and racist and a whole host of other things that are antithetical to the liberal/progressive movement. These folks were angry, and their anger crossed over the Clinton and Bush years, increasing even more over the Obama years. And that anger was a boiling pot of oil just waiting to be ignited. All it needed was a grifter to float down a golden escalator to incite them to a fever pitch and explode. Finally! Someone who got them. Someone who would listen. Someone for them to worship as a hero. Someone who made them FEEL heard, and FEEL good about themselves, and FEEL as if finally, God was on their side. It didn’t matter if he was a pussy grabbing cheat who was only in it for his own capital gain and trying to salve his own inner self-loathing and fear of rejection. It didn’t matter if the embodiment of their beliefs is a small, bitter, pitiful human who fuels himself on other’s despair. It doesn’t matter if he’s petty and vindictive, vengeful, and a traitor. It doesn’t matter if he's a stupid (and he is), shallow, lecherous, rapist, racist, criminal, Hitler loving, military secret sharing fool of a man with small hands. None of that matters, because folks are buying an idea, not the man. And anyone who’s fought a war or two in the Middle East, or Afghanistan, or Northern Ireland or countless other places like that knows, you can’t kill an idea. These guys aren’t buying Oz, they’re buying their version of the Emerald City. Oz is behind the curtain, and they don’t really give a fuck about him. They’re happy to keep the curtain drawn.

This was all playing out in front of our eyes, but we didn’t listen, we mocked them. Hillary referred to them as a basket of deplorables. A crazy phrase remarkable for its deplorable syntax, but not without truth. Nevertheless, an unforced error to say the quiet part out loud. Obama derided those who clung to their guns and religion. Much more cogent and on point, but another self-inflicted wound which further deepened the divide between us all. Because we’re not listening to one another, were too busy tearing one another down. I don’t know that I would have had the courage to knock on that farmer’s door with some coffee and doughnuts, but that’s the kind of ice breaker we should be doing. I don’t think I would have changed a single thing about that dude’s belief structure, and he certainly wouldn’t have changed mine. Perhaps that’s beside the point. Maybe it’s less about changing people’s minds, as it is about making people feel that they can have a partner on the other side. About making people feel safe knowing that even when there are strong disagreements about policy, that their feelings will be factored into account. Some on both sides will always remain entrenched and uncompromising. But I believe there were enough reasonable people in the middle this time around, who would have come to their senses if only they’d been talked to, instead of at.

Now we’re all going to feel the pain collectively. And pray that the midterms give us an opposition with teeth.

Imagine if a Democrat spent a fair amount of time campaigning in red states, and a Republican did the same in blue states. That’s what I love about abolishing the Electoral College. It would spare us from having a handful of the same swing states determine the outcome. My vote in California doesn’t mean shit. And it would force everyone to speak to people they normally ignore.

Because as a country, we’re sick, and we need a Healer in Chief. The disease lives in all of us. Trump and that ghoul Stephen Miller are only symptoms of that disease. And if we only treat the symptoms, the disease rages on. Lord Sauron is the disease that rules Mordor with hate and evil and fear and the desire for absolute power. It’s easy to mistake Trump for Sauron, but Trump is really only the wizard Saruman; he’s Sauron’s puppet.

It's 5pm on a Thursday, and this is normally when I’d have a whisky or a glass of wine and be watching MSNBC drone on for a while. Taking comfort in their hourly confirmation that what I hold true and dear is righteous as well. But I can’t do that anymore. They’re not helping the cause, they’re hurting it. They only blow wind, but they don’t listen. Mix up your panels. Bring in the opposition. Hold your festive town hall events in Birmingham and Bismarck. Engage the other side. Same with the candidates. Go to some red territory and take your hits. You may not walk away with their vote, but you might walk away with their respect. Most of the time, people are going to vote down the party line. But maybe, just maybe, you’ll build enough cred over time, that when faced with an existential choice between good and evil, when the stakes are as high as they are now, folks will join together to drop that ring in the fires of Mount Doom and make both Sauron and Saruman disappear. We need to bring peace and order and civility back to the land. So that Joe and Mika can crawl out from their bunker to live out their lives in the luxury that they have so deservedly earned.