even books are now tv

I. Bestsellers, For Some Reason
Someone read all the best-selling books about Trump so you don't have to!

I paged through the top 10 on the bestseller shelf at my local Barnes & Noble. There was a memoir by a writer in her thirties about her long struggle to do something worth writing a memoir about; a plump sermon on national piety called, of course, The Soul of America; a book about opioids. And six books about Donald Trump. Evidently Trump has swallowed up the book-publishing industry the way he has swallowed up everything else. [...]

His evisceration is so casual as to be total, as seen in this tidbit about "Judge" Jeanine Pirro's book:

Her honor gets off to a rocky start and never quite recovers. “We know what the liberal media think of Trump voters,” she writes on page 2. “They’re deplorables, idiots, rednecks, and people who cling to God, guns, and religion. To those charges, I plead guilty—guilty and proud!”

Having pleaded guilty to being an idiot, she then proceeds to present her evidence—14 chapters’ worth, most of them seething with alliteration: “Lying and Leaking to Fix an Election,” “Lying Liberal RINOS,” and so on. When any of those titular words appears in the text, it is capitalized for emphasis. “LIAR Obama liked what he saw in LIAR Brennan.” “LIBERALS, you have a decision to make.” However questionable her legal skill, this judge knows from branding.

II. You Feel What You Think
If you don't already believe Trump is a con-man, I doubt the latest comprehensive reporting from the New York Times will change your mind. I'm a cynic about anyone changing their mind, to be honest. Minds don't even matter, I'm almost positive. We're all emotional hamburgers who mistake the meat of our decision-making for rationalism. Trump is bad. His presidency has been far less bad than I predicted. The details don't matter anymore, it almost seems, because people are exhausted and depressed and spiritually depleted. The answer isn't in watching more news, and yet the news matters so much right now. Say whatever you want about Trump - any of the terrible negatives are undoubtedly true - but he understands we're a reality-TV nation. Trump knows people trust their reactions as if they were opinions, which I think is partially due to our historically unprecedented hobby of fake-people watching. Our habits have gone ahead of our reason and been confirmed by the dopamine hits dished out by reality TV plots. We can pass judgment without stakes on so many different (fake) scenarios, our judgment has become essentially passive in terms of earnest reflection and self-doubt. I'm speaking in the aggregate and very crudely. I'm sure reality TV isn't the only genre to blame. That cable news is reality TV might undermine that caveat. Either way, everyone's mom and dad was right, it turns out: TV has taken us to hell in a hand basket. (Happy Thursday!!)

TL;DR: Intelligence is negligible; cable news is demonic. Anyway:

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

III. Noam Chomsky Is Quotably Distrustful
From The Responsibility of Intellectuals:

...the power of the government's propaganda apparatus is such that the citizen who does not undertake a research project on the subject can hardly hope to confront government pronouncements with fact.

To be fair, the "power" of the government's propaganda apparatus is partly that government employees have a platform at all. People lie to make themselves look better, and even if your daily grind is nationally important, it still feels like a daily grind, so you keep trying to make yourself look better as any office idiot might. I know I've never had a job that didn't include a shocking amount of pettiness and inter-turmoil originating from people's unacknowledged defense of their own self-worth. Imagine giving those people nuclear codes and policy mandates. They're the same people, only with less scruples and more money, probably.

IV. Final, Conclusive Truth from Annie Dillard

Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them.

This quote is from Dillard's wonderful For the Time Being, in which she poetically investigates the possibility of meaningfulness as it stacks up against the sheer bigness of the world, including all the billions of individuals that have gone before. The living are a minority, and the times are never so bad that history isn't worse. In my grandpa's lifetime a man named The Wolf conspired with freethinking political experts to murder six million Jews. Dillard, I think, is interested in something more philosophical; I probably am, too. Our times aren't unique, but that doesn't negate the mysterious, ecstatic singularity of all these souls who populate the times. They probably thus deserve our attention both in person and in aggregate.

V. Opinion
Stop trying to get me to care about baseball. It's a nice enough scene for a picnic, but then so is an empty field that I don't have to pay to enter. I will admit that baseball's slow pace is to its benefit, though. A national pastime from when people actually took three hours to watch as little happen as possible is, in a certain sense, a description of leisurely utopia. You know what? Never mind. God bless baseball. If only every part of our lives could be so devoid of activity.

Go Rockies.