I’ve Got a Number on Me

On how everything is Sportscenter

First the requisite bit of self-promotion, which feels very weird to do in my first newsletter since the election while prospect park is literally on fire, but you know what, I have a kid to feed and bass pedals to purchase, so i am just going to suck it up and tell you about some goings on, or really just one thing that is going on, which is that I wrote a piece about Johnny Carson for the New Yorker that they (hilariously) published like six hours after Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election.

It is a piece that i am immensely proud of, on both a sentence and idea level, and so I would love it if you could take a gander at it. It uses the occasion of a new biography of Carson to explore him, his legacy, what cultural longevity exists today, and what the role of a biographer even is. You can read it here.

I wanted to also bring your attention to some old work that I did in response to the 2016 election: Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics. It’s a limited series, exploring how Shakespeare’s work stages political themes of his day that are still relevant to ours. Trump’s name is never mentioned in it, but I did make it in 2018, so you can see the ghostly tendrils of his malevolence shaping its conception and execution. The episodes explore Julius Caesar (political violence and broken institutions), Richard II (legitimacy), King Lear (the apocalyptic forces unleashed when the older generation refuses to cede power), Othello (Race and identity), Measure for Measure (gender and religious reaction), and Coriolanus (populism). It is another thing I’m quite proud of that I would love more people to experience. 

And now on with our show.

——

Here’s where I’m at, in the wake of this horrible week: Thinking about how I want to be in the world, and how I want the world to be in me. Change begins at home, and clearly the way I and many of my fellow lefties exist and encourage others to exist is not working. They say not to make any big decisions within a year of your spouse dying, so perhaps I should not be thinking drastically within a week of my hopes for this country being crushed, but I am a self-reflective person by nature, and I do not think there’s much harm in considering interior matters for a small time before emerging into the fray.

This is what I’ve realized in the last few days. It is that, without my seeing it happen, Sportscenter has taken over American life. I don’t really mean the show, although it remains a ratings behemoth and I have always loved its commercials. I mean instead the way it covers and thinks about the particular world of competitive sports has, in its popularity, taken over how we discuss and think about most things that I find important. 

Take movies. How much of the space for discussing film is taken up by the work itself versus box office returns and award potential?  Why should those of us who do not work in the industry or a trade magazine prioritize thinking about box office or awards? The answer is that it’s interesting and fun and addictive, in much the same way sports are. But it has almost nothing to do with the incredible art form that means so much to millions of people, the one where our culture dreams about itself and projects (literally) those dreams into the consciousness of others.

A similar thing has happened with politics. I can’t count how many conversations I had over the past year about the electoral consequences of Biden or Harris taking this or that position rather than whether or not a given position was right. I have friends who’s core beliefs and policy preferences I do not actually know despite having discussed politics with them on multiple occasions. What I know instead is their strategic thinking about how Democrats can win over the heartland or whatever. Similarly, commentators like New York’s Jonathan Chait have made an entire career, not out of arguing for things they believe, but rather out of arguing about what positions are or could be made to be popular. Chait often says he is arguing for Democrats to take positions he himself does not fully support, because they will help the party regain power. I am not sure I have any idea what he actually thinks is right or wrong, despite having read him— and yelled at him in my head—for years.  Meanwhile, because it is profitable, news outlets have gotten extremely good at making us care about polls, and treating them like the games played by the Mets en route to the postseason. The incentives for them are clear— It keeps us clicking. But what benefit we derive from it, and what way it actually serves the public interest remain unclear. It seems to me that what it does most of all is keep us focused on opinion instead of truth, or possible futures instead of the here and now.

To see the world clearly is a constant struggle. And treating politics like sports is incredibly entertaining. I mean, I grew up in Washington, D.C. To some extent politics is my sports. But doing this leads us to lose sight of basic questions. What do we actually want the world to look like? How do we make that world more possible? What do we think is right? 

These are simple questions, and politics is meant to be the arena in which our answers are enacted. But instead, politics has become the arena in which our answers get set aside in favor of a new set of questions about popularity, and phrasing, and message discipline, and whether or not Rasmussen can be trusted. I first noticed this in 2020 with the endless Presidential primary. Why, I wondered, wasn’t I asking who I thought would be the best President? Why was I instead tallying who had gotten what endorsement and who had the best snappy one-liner at a debate? The emergency presented by Donald Trump and the need to defeat him accelerated this move away from clear-headed consideration of reality that was the 2020 race, but the Sportscenterization of American life preceded Trump. Should we have elections again, it will continue, likely to our personal detriment.

In a way, what I’m advocating for here is viewing politics not through the lens of sports— whose up, whose down, who has the best strategic play, and so on— but more through the lens of theater. Who said what? Who did what? What does it mean? What is the subtext? And how does the explicit meaning and the way it is conveyed mesh? Or are they in meaningful tension? If you follow the action, what are people actually doing? And what is the meaning of what they are doing? 

Those of us who work in the arts and work in criticism do ourselves and the world a disservice by not using the tools we have been given to try to describe the world to each other more often, to explain both its meaning and how that meaning is created.  We have ceded that space to political writers, many of whom are great at it, but many of whom have every incentive to avoid discussing meaning altogether and to instead do sportscenter. In ceding that space, we have also begun to cede our traditional roles of describing cultural meaning making as well, with the unfortunate side effect that political writers moonlight as critics, but that is a jeremiad for a different day.

As for me: I do not work for the Democratic Party. I am not in the messaging business. I am not a political consultant. Nor am I a political columnist. All of those people have many reasons to think about polls, or slogans, or best to frame green energy production for working class voters. I do not. What I need to do is live here, now, where I am, in my community, figure out what I believe is right, and work to achieve it. As a writer, particularly one who works in cultural criticism and history, my job is to tell the truth, and to describe the world and what it makes as honestly as I can.  

So that’s what I am going to try to do. That is where I am.