A NEWSLETTER FROM DAVID CORN |
A NEWSLETTER FROM DAVID CORN |
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By David Corn April 18, 2023 |
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In recent days, it has certainly felt as if the wheels were coming off. Republicans have shifted into a hyperdrive of extremism, passing more restrictions on reproductive rights in an accelerating assault on women’s freedom. They have intensified their war on commonsense gun safety measures, even as tragic mass shootings keep occurring. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the wannabe autocrat, signed a bill allowing residents to carry concealed weapons without a permit—days after the massacre at the Covenant School in Nashville killed three children and three adults—and legislation that would impose a six-week abortion ban. In Tennessee, GOP state legislators abused their power and booted two Black representatives out of office. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott urged a pardon of a man convicted of killing a Black Lives Matter protester. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene defended the suspected Pentagon leaker because he is “white, male, Christian, and antiwar.” An activist Trump-appointed federal judge issued an anti-science ruling straight out of Gilead. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his right-wing activist wife, Ginni, were snared in not one but multiple financial scandals further undermining the legitimacy of the highest court. At the NRA’s annual convention, which was graced by the appearances of most top Republicans, children as young as 6 years old were groomed to be gun fetishists.
Meanwhile, Trump, of course, has been Trump—in addition to all his usual demagoguery, inanity, and fear-mongering, he reposted on his own social media site a post that apparently included a simulated video of the brutal execution of billionaire George Soros, the No. 1 political target of the paranoid right. More important than this foul deed from a foul man, no top Republican denounced his appalling act. The most popular Republican presidential contender was unabashedly boosting his preexisting support for political violence, and the GOP shrugged.
It seems that the far-right whirlwind of hate has quickened, with each news cycle dominated by more outrageous acts and attacks on decency and democracy. The stressors on our political system appear to be growing—almost beyond our capacity to process all of it. So, I’m going to write about...walking. At the start of this year, I had a surgery. It went well; I’m fine. But part of the recovery process entailed no exercise or major physical activity for six weeks. I have tried to stick to a daily regimen that includes 20 to 30 minutes on an elliptical machine. That was out. What can I do? I asked the doctor. Walk, he said. That’s what I did. On most days, I would take long walks that lasted one-and-a-half to two hours. What I expected to be an annoyance turned out to be a sublime experience.
I’ve never minded walking. I’ve always enjoyed a moderately strenuous outdoors hike. (Nature!) I walk my dog, Moxie, at least twice each day. Since steps became a thing, I’ve been conscious of getting my steps each day. (Okay, on some days.) But this was different. These long walks had no destinations. They had no purpose—other than the mere act of putting one foot in front of the other. I simply ambled, choosing paths and directions with no clear objective. I didn’t look at my phone—except to determine when it was time to head home.
Without a designated endpoint, I began to pay close attention to whatever I passed. I was not hurrying by; I was curious. There was nothing momentous to view—just hills, street corners, trees, houses, schools, strangers, and neighborhoods that I had never paid much notice. Now all of this registered. I focused on everything, everywhere, one impression at a time. One day, as I was striding alongside a busy road during an evening rush hour, I was struck by a thought: You can probably find a dash of beauty in almost everything.
Yes, I know that sounds hippy-dippy, not like a tough-minded reporter. But as an occasional practitioner of meditation, I realized the walks were putting me in a deeply contemplative frame of mind—I might even call it a meditative state. (I recently was a guest on the podcast of Robert Wright, the author of Why Buddhism Is True, and we discussed meditation for the portion of the show only available to subscribers.) I had previously heard that some people deeply into meditation engage in a practice they call walking mediation. Perhaps I had stumbled on to that. There was a calming and other-worldly element to these treks. (And, more than once, I did think of the Talking Heads’ song “And She Was,” which supposedly is about a woman having an out-of-body acid trip and soaring above her neighborhood.) The more miles I covered, the more hours I walked, the more I found that all the psychobabble buttons were actually being pushed: I felt destressed, centered, and connected.
Eventually, the six weeks ended. I could return to my elliptical machine and did so. Work and life got busy, and it seemed impossible to find the 90 or so minutes I had dedicated to these walks. After all, 20 time-efficient minutes of interval training on the machine did the aerobic trick. On shorter walks, I attempted to recapture those sensations of the extended rambles—but only with a limited degree of success.
The other day I came to a deeper understanding of the neuroscience underlying what was happening during these long walks. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Shankar Vedantam’s Hidden Brain, which airs on many NPR stations. His guest for this episode was Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at University of California, Berkeley, who studies what he calls “pro-social emotions.” He is author of the new book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. The big idea explored during this episode was the link between emotional wellbeing and awe. One example Keltner pointed to in his own life was being in a mosh pit at an Iggy Pop show when Iggy leapt into the crowd. Keltner was of the fans who held the wild punk rocker aloft as Iggy crowd-surfed. His connection with Iggy—the ecstasy—made him feel stronger and more alive. (Longtime readers of Our Land might recall I had a very different experience with Iggy Pop in similar circumstances.)
Awe, Keltner explained, can provide an emotional or psychological reset that “connects the individual to collectives. And time and time again when people experience awe, they say things like ‘I felt small, and I felt like I was part of something larger than myself.’ And this is fundamental to our survival… Awe helps us see the systems around us and understand them.” It’s math: “The self takes up a lot of area in the brain and our consciousness. We're always thinking, especially in this modern world about my goals, my status, my aspirations, what I'm doing, it's my desires, my interests. And evolutionists have really talked about the problem of self-interest. How do we get people to orient to other people, to societies and collectives? And we started to have this idea that awe does that by creating the small self.” Keltner cited a study that found that brief experiences of awe activated the vagus nerve, which slows the heart rate, deepens breathing, and regulates digestion. Another one discovered that our inflammatory responses are somehow calmed by awe.
Keltner’s prescription for feeling better about oneself and the world was simple: doses of awe. But these days that may be tough, especially for young people. He told Vedantam that the students he teaches are “deprived [of awe] because of the new technologies, which frankly just get us too focused on the self. The more we're focused on the self, the narrow parts of the self, the less awe we feel.” He did offer a practical suggestion: Take an “awe walk”:
One of the easiest ways to find awe is to, in an unbounded way, go out and walk. We have been doing this as humans for a long time. In the spiritual contemplative traditions, getting out into nature and doing all walks is just part of those traditions...And you not only go out to do it vigorously and to help your heart, but you go with a childlike sense of wonder and you just stop and reflect on what is really interesting and the small things around you, the flowers and patterns of shadows. And also, look up past the horizon and look up to vast things. And do it in a way where you go places that you're curious about.
When I heard this, I was awe-struck. That’s exactly what I had done unintentionally (though with some intention). Keltner reported that in his studies of people who had engaged in awe walks, he found this exercise did succeed in generating awe for the participants. Second, in drawings they made after these walks, his subjects depicted themselves as smaller figures. (“The self [in the drawings] gets smaller over time and it starts to drift off to the side and they're including the rocks and sunsets of their awe walk.”) And, finally, their anxiety and stress levels dropped. I did not sketch drawings of my walks. But I can report that I was able to produce awe out of the ordinary and that I did feel a calm during and after the walks.
On the podcast, Keltner and Vedantam talked about the social value of awe—how this sensation can cause people to put aside self-interest and be more attuned to the community and to collective needs. Given our fractured society—which feels as if it is fracturing at warp speed these days—we certainly can use more awe. But I don’t know if we’re going to be able to persuade NRA leaders, the Tennessee legislature’s speaker of the House, or Trump to take awe walks. But I highly recommend it for anyone trying to cope with the political craziness of the moment.
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The Watch, Read, and Listen List
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“The Trials of King Rupert,” Vanity Fair. After watching the episode of HBO’s Succession two Sundays ago that contained the surprise twist that I will try not to spoil—though I’m betting most of you have heard the news—I had a tough time waiting a whole seven days until the next installment dropped. Fortunately, Gabriel Sherman’s propitiously timed report in Vanity Fair on the real-life succession games of Rupert Murdoch’s clan provided the necessary fix. Murdoch and his offspring make Logan and the Roy kids look like the Cunninghams from Happy Days.
Sherman has reported on Fox News for years and its mad-king creator Roger Ailes. He is well-positioned and well-sourced to convey the internecine warfare underway within the family for post-Rupert control of Murdoch’s empire. As he writes:
Although he is a nonagenarian intent on living forever, Murdoch has been consumed with the question of his succession. He long wanted one of his three children from his second wife, Anna—Elisabeth, 54, Lachlan, 51, and James, 50—to take over the company one day. Murdoch believed a Darwinian struggle would produce the most capable heir. “He pitted his kids against each other their entire lives. It’s sad,” a person close to the family said.
Sad only in the way that Kendall, Roman, and Siobhan Roy are sad. It is hard to feel truly sorry for hyperprivileged nepo-babies who see the world as their plaything—or ashtray. Oh wait, am I talking about the Roys or the Murdochs?
Over the years Murdoch’s youngest son, James, has tried to nudge the Fox corporate galaxy away from the black hole created by its right-wing demagogic cable news operation. Lachlan, however, has embraced the dark side of his father’s realm. Though Lachlan pined for perhaps the simpler life of a billionaire scion in Australia, where he could pursue his rock-climbing passion, he has long been regarded as holding the lead position in the race to succeed daddy. Elisabeth is said to be more liberal-minded but still close to papa. All three sit on the board that will decide who controls the company after Murdoch. As of now, pere Rupert has four votes, and Elisabeth, Lachlan, James, and Prudence, Murdoch’s daughter from his first marriage, each have one. “After Murdoch’s death,” Sherman writes, “his votes will be distributed equally among the four eldest children, the source said. ‘The question is, when Rupert dies, how are the kids aligned?’ said a former News Corp executive.”
Any casual watcher of Succession can easily imagine the discussions and the plotting among the siblings about who should inherit the throne. As the article puts it:
The central fault line remains the rift between James and Lachlan. According to sources, the brothers no longer speak. James is horrified by Fox News and tells people the network’s embrace of climate denialism, white nationalism, and stolen election conspiracies is a menace to American democracy. But to overthrow Lachlan and get control of Fox, James needs Elisabeth and Prudence to back him—and that is hardly assured.
Meanwhile, the Old Man is full of foibles. He has assorted and debilitating health issues, and not long ago he dumped via a text message his fourth wife, model-actor Jerry Hall. He took up with a 66-year-old former dental-hygienist-turned-radio-host with far-right politics and QAnonish views. For two weeks this year, they were engaged. Then Murdoch called off that merger, with sources suggesting he had underestimated her evangelical passions. How erratic or rattled is the 92-year-old titan? Especially now that his prized cable network has been scorched by the ongoing Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit and revealed as nothing but a scurrilous propaganda-for-profit operation. It’s hard to tell. But that’s another intriguing plot line.
Sherman’s article is full of delicious dish and chronicles a series of Succession-like intra-family battles over corporate matters. He reports that Lachlan told Rupert that James was leaking stories to the writers of Succession, and that the divorce settlement between Murdoch and Hall included the provision that she couldn’t pass story ideas to the Succession team. Is this a case of art mirroring life or vice versa? Perhaps a tad of both. In any event, as with the HBO series, there is much soap in this family’s opera that offers us voyeurs a boatload of guilty pleasure. But also as with the HBO series, the real-life Murdoch saga raises the point that it is unhealthy and dangerous for society to have a small group of people hold so much power. In the end, we shouldn’t be rooting for either family.
The Big Door Prize. I rarely like dream sequences. Not in movies, television shows, or books. They usually are cheap shortcuts or stunts. That said, I’m going to tell you about a dream I had recently. I was in what appeared to be an arcade. Next to me was a person who at times seemed to be one of my adult daughters. I was playing an odd video game in which I had to identify patterns on the screen. And it was impossible to do so. But, for some reason, my success—or lack thereof—was tied to my future, like this was an SAT test for college admission. As I continued to fail, I kept telling myself that no one in authority was present to record what was transpiring and that perhaps I would luckily escape the consequences of my inability to perform this task. I woke up feeling anxious.
It's important to know that this dream occurred after I had watched several episodes of Apple TV+’s new show The Big Door Prize. This kind-of-a-comedy is set in the small, picturesque, and exceedingly ordinary town of Deerfield—which seems very New England-y. One day, a machine that looks like a photo booth mysteriously appears in the general store. Anyone who enters it and plucks a few quarters into the slot—as well as plugs in their Social Security number and records their fingerprints on the screen—is given a blue card that foretells their “life’s potential.” The card might read “biker,” “father,” or “hero.” As residents of Deerfield try out the machine, the results start affecting their actions. The high school principal, who received the “biker” card, rushes out and purchases a motorcycle. She loves it, but then has a crash. But then, while recovering, falls in love and quickly marries the guy.
Dusty, a history teacher at the high school, is the local skeptic, who believes the townsfolks are going gaga over a novelty trick and foolishly allowing a machine to shape their decisions. When he reluctantly tries the machine, he pulls a card that states “teacher.” Does that mean he’s hit his potential and that’s it? Will he forever be stuck in humdrummery? His wife, Cass, scores a card that says “royalty.” The difference between the cards—are they verdicts?—highlights the preexisting friction within their going-stale marriage. Meanwhile, their teen daughter is coping with the recent death of her boyfriend.
There’s something going on here, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, but, after five episodes of The Big Door Prize, which is based on the novel of the same name by M.O. Walsh, I don’t know what it is. The show has a Severance-ish feel to it. What is this machine all about? What’s the backstory? This situation is sort of creepy, though Chris O’Dowd, the skilled Irish actor, does a wonderful job conveying the humor in Dusty’s overreactive outrage and his general cluelessness as a dad approaching middle age. Do I like this show? I can’t tell. But as with Dusty’s relationship to the machine, this series has gotten under my skin and seems to have even entered my subconscious.
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Read Recent Issues of Our Land |
April 15, 2023: Donald Trump’s inanity goes nuclear—literally; more on that disappearing Columbia Journalism Review town hall; a great endorsement of Our Land; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Sen. Tim Scott); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
April 11, 2023: The Trump-Russia town hall that disappeared; Matt Taibbi on the run; the Milk Carton Kids reappear; Adam Sandler’s slam-dunk in the Hustle; and more
April 8, 2023: Clarence and Ginni Thomas, enough already!; the Trump circus in NYC; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Special Arraignment Edition); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more. April 4, 2023: Why Fox can survive its mega-scandal; Bruce Springsteen’s rock ‘n’ roll revival; a new rock-chick-lit novel from Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles; and more.
April 1, 2023: Trump’s indictment is yet another stress-test for America; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
March 28, 2023: A Reagan bombshell reminds us of the GOP’s reliance on dirty tricks; elite bonding; Shrinking respects and breaks the sitcom formula; and more.
March 25, 2023: The real perversion in Trump’s porn-star-hush-money caper; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Possible Trump Indictment Edition); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more. March 21, 2023: The Iraq War: a personal remembrance of dissent; Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero’s stunning investigative memoir; and more.
March 18, 2023: Is anti-wokeness all the GOP has?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Mike Pence); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.
March 15, 2023: A debate (of sorts) over the Columbia Journalism Review’s huge Trump-Russia fail; Iris DeMent sings out about our current troubles; and more. |
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Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com. |
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