Writing About TV As The World Burns

Plus, some atoning for some mild guilt

White Lotus, (S.3)

I feel a mild guilt writing about small things while the world burns. As the Middle East bakes, Ukrainian fighters endure trench warfare, and American democracy plays a game of chicken with autocracy, I’m carefully documenting my media consumption, as I do in this post with reviews of The White Lotus (S.3), Andor, and Anora.

“What can I really do?” might sound like an abdication of one’s moral and civic duties. But, in the face of catastrophe — especially a faraway one — what can most of us really do besides gawk and commiserate? Calling my representative or writing another “Dump Trump” post feels about as significant as a silent fart in a gale-force wind. Maybe it’s okay to stay out some dramas. Leave the car wrecks to the pros — the thinking goes — while we, as the traffic, do our part by carefully driving around the pileup, catching a sordid glimpse of the carnage, and then promptly speeding away.

And that’s how I feel I’m approaching the central questions of our time, the most pressing of which, to me, are: Is America on a path to autocracy? Will judicial decisions be respected? Will there still be free and fair elections? Will political opponents find themselves shipped off to El Salvador?

It’s not that my head is in the sand; it’s that I lack the expertise to say anything that hasn’t been said. And I lack the time (as a parent in the midst of a midlife career pivot) to develop a perspective truly worthy of someone else’s attention.

One of my podcast guests, Tim Kreider, said he felt “impotent rage.” I feel impotent empathy. Or just impotence. Maybe I hope that — by writing the occasional progressive post, by radiating out the positive vibes of my liberalness, by emitting seductive political pheromones into the void — I’m doing my duty. But just as pheromonal discharge is a lazy and ineffective way of attracting a mate, so is publishing a Substack post.

Like everyone else, I’m just a bystander to the slow-motion car wreck of history. I inch past, merge into my preferred lane, re-raise the volume to my podcast, and forget it all by the next exit.

The news is so bewildering to me that I find myself not doubling down in my quest to comprehend, but checking out. Perhaps that’s not the worst approach, especially since most news turns out to be little more than tempests in teapots, like the ongoing tariff wars, which will soon feel like yesterday’s news.

Because I have no handle on the present, I try to think five steps ahead, focusing on a future that I can only hope is less hampered by political strife and backward constituencies. That’s why — in addition to my book and movie reviews — I take pleasure in diagnosing social disintegration, finding radical landownership solutions, and imagining the future of our national parks. Maybe I can’t offer a novel perspective for this century, but perhaps I can water a few seeds for the 26th. It’s a way to channel one’s unspent civic instincts.

As for the question — Is America on the road to autocracy? — I apply a couple of principles to such questions. One is that extraordinary things happen less often than we think. Another is, What is the long-term moral trajectory of a nation? To that I’d say that America is headed undeniably upward with regard to tolerance, material wellbeing, ecological compassion, and equality for all. This long-term principle helps us see beyond the present day. (2025, like most years, will either be forgotten or reduced to a mere footnote in history.)

Ultimately, I don’t believe there are enough Trumps to fortify a lasting fascist regime, and I suspect the MAGA movement will wither when Trump leaves the scene. Most voters support Trump not because they share his autocratic cravings, but because they’re annoyed by “libs,” because they lead unhappy lives and seek a mouthpiece to broadcast their rage, and because nearly everyone (except the well-off) correctly senses that something is deeply off about American life. They’re asking good questions. But Trump, to their confusion, is the wrong answer to almost all of them (borrowing from a Thomas Friedman phrase).

I also believe in the fundamental goodness of Americans — a belief informed by my thousands of interactions with strangers on my hitchhiking and hiking journeys — so I suspect that any moral lapses the electorate makes will be corrected, not entrenched.

I offer little of value here, perhaps except to give words to the impotent rage, impotent empathy, or merely impotence that a lot of us are feeling. But I also write to publicly atone for, or at least acknowledge, my mild guilt. (And it is mild because there truly isn’t much that one financially unstable father can do about Ukraine, the climate, or creeping autocracy.)

Before I talk about White Lotus and whether Anora deserved Best Picture, I want to briefly acknowledge the human wreckage on the periphery of our scrolling lives — the soldiers losing limbs, the families fleeing bombed-out cities, the displaced and dispossessed who don’t make it into our personal newsfeeds. They deserve more than passing pity in a post that only a few people will read. But, for now, that is what I have to give.

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