further reading

My nephew has a book called How To Be A Man. The book is about how being a man is not about being masculine but about caring, being kind, wearing pink if you want, and doing all sorts of things that men for centuries have not been encouraged to do. It is not sort of about this, it is explicitly about this; the text says things like “you can cry” and the drawings show lumberjacks who are also ballerinas. There is no story, it’s a blatant manifesto, for some reason directed at toddlers, who are barely making any decrees at that age besides “I will not eat that” or “There is no nap.” It is not a very good book, in fact it is actually a terrible book. The writing is bad, the drawings are bad, it was written for adults, clearly, but as one I can’t say that it’s worth my time, and my nephew doesn’t like it either; when we have read it, he has drifted.

My nephew has another book called The Story of Ferdinand. It’s about a little bull whose greatest joy is the meadow near his home. When the other bulls are practicing bullfighting, he is sitting underneath a tree, smelling flowers. When we read the page about the young bulls fighting my nephew says “where’s Ferdinand?” and when we get to the page where he is, at the tree, he says “there’s Ferdinand.” It is drama, he is riveted. Ferdinand is stung by a bee and goes wild with the pain; men in bolo ties think he’s the best fighter they’ve ever seen and take him to the city to fight. My nephew squirms closer. Ferdinand does not fight. He doesn’t see the point, he doesn’t want to do it. They still try to make him, but he’s too big and strong to be forced to do anything. He is allowed to go home to his tree, where he remains to this day. The book finishes there. My nephew says “Again.”

Ferdinand is a classic story, beloved by many nearly a century now, and when I choose books for the children in my life I try to be unbiased, to not just drift towards the ones I loved as a child, but it is true that children’s literature has gotten increasingly simplistic in my lifetime. Manifestos without stories are far more prominent than they should be, and books that have even a trace of unclear conflict are rare; instead most stories are black and white in their narratives. Those stories, about one person being good and right and brave, and another person being less so, and eventually the good winning out, whether in actual defeat or, far more likely, bringing the bad over to their side with gentle care, are very boring. What’s more, they fail to do what children’s books should actually do - teach a child to read, and, moreover, to love reading. Opting instead to assume easy words and ideas are enough and skip straight to morals is not only cowardly but frankly never going to work. When a child is learning to read with you, you can feel it. Your voice is a pattern that they respond to, the waves of the story flow into them - now there is intrigue, now there is mystery, now there is surprise - and what they are learning to do is not only phonetically grasp what you’re saying but understand that the figures on the page can create full landscapes, characters, agonies, joy; in other words, life. To teach a child that words only exist to tell them what the right and wrong paths to go down is to rob them of entire places to go within themselves. Instead, what they come to learn is that stories are there to make them better people; a transaction above all.

Literacy rates in this country continue to worry, as public education continues to be defunded and mismanaged, and we know in this moment that this will only get worse. Statistics on children reading for fun suggests that the majority simply don’t do it. It’s unclear if adults do either. But I have worked in some capacity of the media for the last decade, and the connection between what adults are craving for themselves and what they’re giving to children seems obvious. As resources for both local newsrooms and publications of criticism, essays, and general writing have been hacked away, the actually moneyed media uses its booming sole voice to paint the starkest, most morally saccharine portraits of any story it bothers to get its hands on. In other words, what you are getting in this naked media landscape is not so much the truth or the lie of any given story but versions of both which line up with the anchor’s moral vision. This has always been true of rightwing media, but the failure of so-called leftwing media, in the capacity that it is funded, is that it has chosen to take the same route, an effort to silence by shouting louder instead of shutting down the right.

But we have known this about the rightwing media for decades, and it is their voices that have won now. Even so, the most baffled pundits on earth continue to declare that what we need is simply more of the same. A leftist Joe Rogan, a leftist podcast empire - both of which exist already in multiple forms, but in this case the desire is for the same sounding thing but telling you what is good and what is bad, from our perspective. Once we have the better, wholesome, morally correct media, we’ll win, eventually. 

On Tuesday night I watched the expected numbers roll into red areas. The expected blue numbers never came. I look back on my texts, I look at the revelation happening that the Democrat votes needed to stop the Republican votes were not going to come. If there is a media to blame for this, it is MSNBC. They have spent the last eight years not reporting the news but reporting their own warped concept of morality. They have had no trouble swaying right, cheering on vows from Harris to create “the most lethal force” out of the military, to make our borders even more deadly, to do nothing to stop climate change because Silicon Valley does not want that - all tenets of a right-wing order that not only the majority of voters detested but in fact what the majority of their main viewership had supposedly spent a lifetime fighting too. They refused to see Palestine, refused to see genocide, refused to see the countless polls showing exactly what this self-imposed ignorance was doing to their chances of defeating the greatest evil not that they could know but that they could bring themselves to look at. They will have, undoubtedly, another grand four years, a grand eternity as far as we know. In the view of the world they’ve carved out of the desecration of their children’s futures, they are more important now than ever before. 

The main beacon of MSNBC is Rachel Maddow. Though she’s now most regularly seen either smirking or weeping at whatever headlines she’s delivering on screen, she got her start in radio, with Air America. This was meant to be the antidote to talk radio, the Rush Limbaugh force that had so driven this country red. It premiered when I was in high school, after I spent a childhood listening to snippets of talk radio quite often, in order to know what they were saying. My mother wanted me to know the enemy, and since I was growing up surrounded by it in the Deep South, I think this was a good decision. 

But since I knew it so well, right away what I noticed about Air America was that it sounded exactly like the thing it was meant to cure. Round tables, people just saying the same things over and over to people who agreed with them. There was never any serious reporting, and now it makes sense, because the people in charge of these mediums today so regularly steal other reporters’ hard work and meld it into their own narrative that one has no reason to tune in on any night if one has merely read the newspaper before primetime; clearly they don’t have the ability to report at all. I couldn’t understand this, because that wasn’t what I thought the news should be. 

In short, the experiment of creating the same thing but left failed instantly. Because it’s not the message here, it’s the medium. If you are someone who regularly puts on headphones and listens to hours of people talking to each other, left or right, I don’t really know what hope there is for you. It is a form that destroys nuance, craft, and message. It is drivel, and the difference between a podcast and a radio broadcast is painfully clear. Consider the Columbia radio station that brought us the news of the police violently raiding the student encampments this spring. What they were doing was reporting, from the ground, the world around them. The podcast instead locks itself into the world of its hideous little room and talks about nothing else. 

For my whole childhood, the best part of getting ready for school in the morning was listening to NPR. Almost every day a reporter went out somewhere into the world and spoke to people about the stories they were covering. It was brief, but I could hear markets and malls and farms and legislatures across the world from my kitchen. The distinct voices of the NPR, who my sisters and I could mimic by the time we were in middle school, were not anchors but guides. My mother used to call it “Some Things Considered,” and she was right - the commentary was always very centrist - but that was not what stuck with me. What stuck with me was that everywhere the reporters went, someone had a story to tell them, and everytime I listened, my world grew bigger. 

Decades later, a post-election round table on MSNBC, having spent the last year talking only to each other, wondered why Harris lost when she had everything going for her, including the endorsement of Queen Latifah - who never endorses anyone. 

They could not understand why she had lost because they could not understand that she was not good. Years of building up the clearest, easiest, most baffling unwavering narrative of right and wrong - we are right and they are wrong - has left them with a total inability to see clearly that a person who might be standing in the side that you know to be yours could still be lacking. That Democrats never did anything to actually concretely protect abortion rights during the entirety of their power after Dobbs, instead leaving it up to states and small funds, could not be true to these people because they had said, over and over, that Democrats were good. That Democrats were attacking from the right of Trump on immigration, vowing to make life even harder for people escaping hardships in hopes of entering a gigantic nation where the majority of people still welcome them, could not be true, because Democrats were good. That Democrats were responsible for Israel’s genocide of Palestine, would not stop giving them weapons to murder children and flatten hospitals, would not stop violently punishing all those who demanded who they stop, could not be true, because Democrats were good. 

“An ‘idealist’ was a man who lived for his idea - hence he could not be a businessman - and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody,” Hannah Arendt wrote. “The perfect ‘idealist,’ like everybody else, had of course his personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his ‘idea.’”

She was talking about Adolf Eichmann. I remember how much this shocked me, how long it took me to grasp it, how sometimes I still think I’m having trouble with it. Because for so long I assumed that I was an idealist, and maybe I even was. I have always prioritized my beliefs, what I have considered my ideals, have always tried to work towards making them reality. As I’ve gotten older, I have had to accept that I have to look at the failures of those beliefs, of the structures I have relied on to make them real. I have had to abandon the idealism that created my values in order to look at them under a harsh light. And this has been hard, because it’s hard to understand that your side is doing the wrong things when you’ve made your side the good one. It is even harder when the other side is even worse, concretely so. The idealist, we see, focuses solely on that truth: that the other side is worse. We know, in a thousand different ways, where that blindness leads.

Of all the things the progressive movement in this country needs, the very last is more media that flattens our world. The loss of Trump voters should make it as clear as the loss of Democrats the truth about listening solely to people telling you what is right and wrong: it is boring. It does not hold the attention like we think it does. It’s all background noise eventually. What people will always crave is a real story, not a morality lesson; even the lesson that tells them how strong and jacked and fucking sick they are isn’t interesting after a while. More people have left not only Trump but Musk, Thiel, Vance than stayed with them. The reason we still hear them is that they took away most of the platforms we had for anything else. What we do with the ones we have left should not be what they do with theirs. There is no way to align people into right and wrong when you only show them the most narrow path. They will, no matter what, find a way to see outside the picture you show them. They will always find the whole story. They will understand what it means to ignore it. 

When we first started reading Ferdinand my nephew was almost three; now he is three and a half. One of the most exciting parts of this to me is that he is more interested in longer books, with more text and less drawings. Visiting his grandparents’ house last month, we read Scuffy the Tugboat, a book from my parents’ childhoods that I didn’t really remember. Scuffy is a pompous little moron, and he travels through the world discovering danger, and then also discovering that he is unfit for that danger. When he gets home he is no less pompous and still fairly dense, but he is changed in the sense that he is now directing his few talents towards home. It is a long and involved story, and doesn’t exactly have the sort of lesson you’d want to teach your child, or really anyone. It is a great book. It is fun to read out loud, it is fun for my nephew to be read, he loves it, we read it almost every day. What I like most about it is how indignation comes across in Scuffy: he “sniffs his blue smokestack,” he cries “toot toot.” These are not things I or my nephew could ever do, but we recognize them, and what’s hiding underneath them - fear and uncertainty - is clear. This little tugboat is a character, not with any lesson to teach, but a story to tell. His story is not something to take and exchange for being good and kind and brave, nor is it an arrow pointing towards the right way to go. It’s something to share, without currency or trade. I sit with my nephew and I read to him, and together all we do is widen the world, make it fuller, make it grander. Again, and again, and again.