Tuesday 3.30: What Mexican news means to me
Apologies for the lateness of this week’s installment. The World Series threw off my schedule. Congratulations to the fucking Los Angeles Dodgers.
About a week ago, I got a notification from the New York Times on my phone that caught my attention. I’ve turned off most superfluous notifications, like those attached to emails or new developments in Retro Bowl, but I’ve kept them on for the Times and Notify NYC, which lets me know about train derailments, mosquito spraying, dense fog, etc. Years of experience with an atomic pile of media in my hip pocket have taught me that too continuous a connection is unhealthy. Timid, friendly vibrations and beeps painstakingly designed to elicit an attentive user response create social and behavioral norms that in turn affect the expectations and aims of mass media—it all trends toward the insidious.
But I don’t need to get into all that. I’ve been bitching about it for years and there’s a whole new streaming documentary (o, the irony) about how all those pricks in Silicon Valley have always been aware that their little experiments in behavioral modification would give birth to a nation of slurry-brained, image-obsessed, narcissistic depressives, and now these heroes won’t let their kids have phones and we’re still supposed to think they’re paragons of insight and not just capitalist vultures who only sleep at night because they lack the inner resources to consider things like the extremely important and relevant difference between amorality and immorality. And, at the end of the day, if the narrative is just that social media screws up our psyches, it’s probably a win for massive tech companies whose real crime is systematically hamstringing the economy and establishing creepy, clandestine relationships in the intelligence industry that simply can’t be severed. Think about it: Can a government whose entire intelligence infrastructure relies on the data integration and analysis capabilities of one or two gargantuan tech companies really be expected to ensure that those same companies adhere to anti-trust laws? Who has the leverage here?
The point being, mainly, that your 12-y/o-VSCO-girl’s nascent depression is actually the least of your problems, and conveniently, it’s the one tech companies can very publicly assert they have a solution for.
Fuck innovation.
But beside all that, what struck me about this particular news notification wasn’t so much the subject matter, but that it grabbed my attention at all. The news (the arrest of a high-ranking Mexican defense official on some kind of corruption charges related to drug trafficking) probably wouldn’t have interested me much a year ago. I might have read the lead, but now I found myself totally immersed in this story.
That’s not to say that it isn’t a big story, but I don’t really know all that much about Mexican politics or the inner workings of the ongoing (and as I understand it, disastrous) war on drugs. I get a daily newsletter of international news, and to be honest, I usually struggle through it. So what was it about this particular notification that I found so captivating?
First and foremost, there didn’t seem to be any mention of the president or his (alleged) administration. It seems like the arrest was a pretty big blow to Mexico’s government, but the report really didn’t need to go into what Trump or whoever his wildly under-qualified war-mongering secretary of state is this week thought about it. It wasn’t just refreshing that Trump wasn’t involved, it made the story more compelling.
Also absent from the narrative was the pandemic. Again, it wasn’t really relevant to the report. On the surface, then, my interest made sense—Trump/pandemic fatigue can be debilitating, and substantive diversion (something with a little more value than Tiger King or any of the other half-assed documentaries that have made the rounds in the wake of its success) is a welcome respite. But there was also a deeper fatigue that the story seemed to address, a fatigue I have become to understand as one related to the insistence of attention as a virtue.
One of the most frustrating, tiring things about both the Pandemic and Trump is that among the teeming, livid masses, there is a constant discussion about whether we’re doing it right—whether we’re paying attention to the right things, signing the right petitions, keeping our eye on the proverbial ball, so to speak, despite the fact that whether or not we are, children will continue to be separated from their parents at the Mexican border, no relief bill will be passed in the senate, an alarmingly conservative (and, I’ll say it, not smart) judge will be appointed to a judicial position as powerful as it is antiquated, &c.
And while all this is happening, the public discourse often follows an almost accusatory pattern. In the absence of a reliable media narrative, our critiques are internal. Who among us has the best context, the best analysis, the best perspective? Who can hold the most virtuous position? Who can make the best point? So often it feels like what actually happens isn’t what matters, but how we feel about what happens, and the legitimacy of those feelings.
The necessity of this performance is exhausting, and makes us anxious, and as I became increasingly enthralled with the story about the Mexican drug-lord statesman, I realized it was because the story did not demand of me that perspective. When we talk about getting “back to normal,” I think this is a big part of what we’re talking about—normalcy as a clear discursive relationship between ourselves and external events. Perhaps it’s an impossible dream, but it would feel so nice to once again just listen, and for that to be enough.
Race Report
Abbot Virtual 5K. 22:17.
Yesterday was the first of three NYRR Cyber 5Ks I’m running between now and Christmas, with the goal of each one being faster than the previous. I considered this one a sort of benchmark run, and just kind of went out as hard as I could without puking. The course is Prospect Park Track Club’s Al Goldstein 5K loop, which starts at the bottom of the East Drive hill. That hill can be a bitch, so it’s good to get it out of the way early. I ran a personal best on the course, which was pretty neat, and managed to post negative mile splits at 7:24, 7:11, and 7:03—meaning I got faster as the race went on. This isn’t that remarkable on this course, as it starts uphill and then goes downhill before flattening out, but it’s still encouraging when you can end quicker than you started and still have something left in the tank for a little kick in the last 200m.
In my ongoing and imaginary race from Boston to Brooklyn, I’ve covered about 106 miles, and appear to be somewhere around Portland, Conn.