11// Headnods, no Handshakes
If critique happens in a (social) forest, and no one believes it, did it happen?
For the past three months, I have wanted to be able to do anything but write. I have thought about writing, what I would write, whether I should continue to write, looking at what other people are writing, buying the books that others have written, and digging into anything but, well, writing. Here
Feedback rarely lands. In fact, it is often a fallacy. It’s not that it doesn’t work; it’s that it is something you have to receive and do, over and over, which leads to what I’ve seen on the internet. In a climate with no discourse, everything and nothing is rendered meaningful. It’s also much harder to remember things.
It is a distinctive kind of fatigue, though. My media diet is limited and tactical, so I do not get lost in an endless sea of my own anxiety. I use Instagram mostly to watch hilarious Tiktok’s that get reposted, and Twitter is a mashup of inane threads and hilarious one-liners.
Tu Quoque (or whateva)
Whataboutery is my favorite word because it has been forced upon me, almost everywhere
Simply, it looks like this:
1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B asserts that A's actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim X.
3. Therefore, X is false.
To fully execute this, you do not need to present anything new. It’s actually better to rehash something that has grooves that people are familiar with. The more familiar, the bigger a rise you may be able to get from them, especially if it can easily agitate. The key is to say something just something different enough from what is being focused on to distract from the focus long enough. You need only focus on pointing out the perceived hypocrisy ( as loudly and vehemently as possible), so there is no doubt. There is no need to do the work to have an opinion if you have discredited the person who holds an opposing one.
You know, like election campaign ads. Or a debate.
But it’s very human. We love an investigative story until it hits a bit too close to home. We yearn for accountability until it may force us (it’s me, I’m us) to take. deep pause and consider what it means for how you’ve been acting.
The example above is a bit abstract. Let’s make it personal.
I did an interview with a local NPR affiliate after writing about growing up in New Hampshire. During the interview, a line of questioning popped up that reminded me that nuance is always easy to ignore and even more enticing to obscure. It went like this:
Interviewer: So, would you say they NH is more racist than it was when you grew up there?
Me: …excuse me?
Interviewer: You know..is it like…worse for you now that you are older?
Me: I didn’t even write about that, so no, I wouldn’t make that assertion because it’s not rooted in anything I spoke about. Plus, it isn’t like a skin crème that gets applied.
Interviewer: So….do you think it’s more or less…
Me: I’m good love, enjoy.
This is the fatigue, that I fear, afflicts so many of us. It is not enough to do the work, and do it well. That is at best, a precursor. No, you must stay vigilant to the small and consistent ways that inquiries are often disingenuous, layered in bad faithensure the boundaries against them are fortified, even if the intent behind them isn’t. I didn’t have time to worry about whether the interviewer had malice because in the moment, my focus turned to how can I change the paradigm of the conversation. It was exhausting, but I deemed it necessary.
While whataboutery is a part of our daily media diets and political dialogue (read: vitriol), it thrives in our social lives in a more insidious way. The amount of annoyance I felt to the question, and the fight to just keep it on track, is a reminder that anywhere, at any time, a conversation can transmute itself into something different and more weighty, sometimes before you can even recognize that it changed.
Kind of a big deal
Almost every conversation I’ve had since late January has increased in seriousness. After March, it was hard to go an hour or so without feeling like most things had a level of finality attached to them. But I realized that the difficulty was that I couldn’t place why I struggled so much to have them
I realized that it was not simply the heaviness. I’m no stranger to those. It was, and still is, a specific kind of density that is in and on even things that used to be trivial or easy to converse about.All became crucial. This is far from a novel realization because there is an entire book on this very subject, titled in fact, Crucial Conversations. It’s the kind of business book that people hide between their worn copy of 48 Laws of Power and Good to Great, but right next to whatever newest Brene Brown book they have next in their queue. They are leaders and readers, and you will know it, because their bookcase is color coordinated and doubles as an elite Zoom backdrop.
TL;DR, the thesis of the book is simple: conversations that are crucial have (1) something at stake, (2) they shape our lives in visible and invisible ways and (3) learning how to engage with them can dramatically impact every portion of your life, because well, everyone has things that are crucial to them or will be, including you.
Opposing Opinions? Tons of those. Strong emotions? By the boatload. High stakes? 2020 has been a big craps table and the dice are still rolling. This realization hasn’t been without its own existential shuttering. I’ve been having these for months (and probably years), and have not developed the capacity to always notice them. I just knew something was happening, it might not have been good, and I’d prepare myself accordingly. I’ve blown it. But in a time when everything feels serious, knowing how to manage yourself and your responses, however imperfectly, can keep you from feeling like you are living in a neverending episode of Lovecraft Country.
I don’t think there are easy answers right now. But that hasn’t stopped me from trying to input some ease into my life, wherever I find an opening. Right now, that opening is knowing where my feet are, and putting the left foot forward, and doing the same with the right. Then trying to repeat.
Critique without devolving into caricature. It’s possible, even if it feels fleeting.