You gotta laugh
so you don't cry, Part 578
Things have been a little crazy lately with the holidays and some travel for a wedding and wrapping things up at my job and networking for my next chapter.
My last day at work is Friday. I will say more about that later. But…lots of feelings. I know without a doubt I am doing the right thing. I’ve rarely been more sure of anything. But it’s just… a lot. Nineteen years of my life. Almost half my life.
I’m also turning 50 next week. I will have more to say about that, too. I’m not freaked out or unhappy to be 50. I am f***ing proud, in fact. But it’s just…more feelings.
In the midst of all of this, my family toured the West Wing last night, thanks to a friend who works on the National Security Council. I’ve been to the White House complex many times over the years, although it was only the second time I had seen the Oval Office.
Joe Biden’s Oval Office contained a million family photos, a signed ball from the US women’s rugby team, a bust of Rosa Parks, and a Christmas tree covered in ice cream cone ornaments. He’s not perfect, no one is. And the job is pretty much impossible. But Joe Biden is a decent man. A normal man, with faith and failures and empathy and arrogance and wisdom and biases and bull-headed beliefs in both directions.
And then there’s Trump. Honestly, there’s something deeply wrong with the man. Irrevocably. I could feel sorry for him if he weren’t so hell-bent on destruction.
As we walked through these rooms—at once so hallowed and oddly familiar, lofty and ordinary, weighty and homey—like our democracy itself—the horror and outrage of him hit me a new. He is the living, breathing nightmare of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the rest.
They planned for him. Carefully, meticulously. They drafted and redrafted and debated and tweaked and agonized over him.
Human nature has been the same forever. The worst of human nature has visited us many times in history. They absolutely knew Donald Trump.
And they knew us, The People.1
The People as a concept was and is a profound revolution in human history.
But the people are fallible and feeble and finicky and foolish.
They planned for us, too. The Constitution, and its exposition in The Federalist papers, represents an impressively realistic study of humankind.
But they overestimated our virtue by just enough. Certainly the virtue of too many of our political leaders. They overestimated that by miles and miles.
As the tour continued, I felt increasingly nauseous, panicked, helpless, frustrated. despairing. And I have felt it all day today.
That’s just the truth. And I don’t know what to do, and I have nothing really to say.
But as my friend
reminded us a couple of weeks ago, we can laugh. And not just to have fun. Humor is an effective weapon against authoritarianism:Humor can break through to people who don’t share our premises in a fashion that argument, and anger, often cannot.
Authoritarians hate being mocked. They want to make you angry. They want to make you scared. Laughing at them, and getting others to laugh at them, disrupts their control of the field of play. It seizes control.
Humor is brave. It shows fearlessness. Anger shows that they have gotten to you. Humor shows they have not. There is no quicker way to break down fear than laughter.
Humor is thus the ultimate expression of stoic self-control. To tell a joke on the gallows is the final fuck you to authority. (Groucho Marx used to tell a joke in which a condemned man is taken out on the gallows and asked if he has any last words. He responds, “Yeah, I don’t think this thing is safe!”)
Humor emboldens others. Emboldening others is important when people are scared….
Humor is memorable. Anger is easily forgotten. Everyone is angry all the time. Anger blends right in and gets lost. Humor stands out and sticks with people….
Humor is fun. And we all need to have fun—especially now.
And so in the midst of all the feelings, many of them despairing, I leave you with the video Ben and I made a week or so ago. Maybe some of you have seen it on other platforms. In case you haven’t, here it is.
Grace and peace, friends. Godspeed. Go well.
Yes, I know they only included white men of property in that. Which was still far more power relinquished than ever before in human history. Not my point today.
Happy birthday Holly! You are seven years smarter than I am…it took me until age 57 to jump off the “highly paid/interesting work but there is more to life than going to the office” cliff. You will soar!
I think what the Founders missed was that start was new and revolutionary to them would become not only commonplace to us, but assumed as the natural order of things. What required re-orientation and education in their generation, we've all but ignored in ours. Water won't keep boiling if you take the heat away, and I think that's what we've done. We've turned off (or at least down) the flame of civics education and small-scale, democratic self-government, and we've allowed ourselves to slide back into feudal, strongman thinking.