Writing Boots

Don’t tell me what I’m about to write is asinine, I already know.

I like to fall asleep with YouTube on. Sometimes, a Monday Night Football game from 1978. Or a baseball game from the same era.

But on more ambitious nights, I like to learn while I doze. You’ve heard of lifelong learning? This is night-long learning.

I’ll cue up a three-hour walking tour of the Civil War battlefield at Antietam. Or a William F. Buckley “Firing Line” debate with New York Mayor Ed Koch. Or a Noam Chomsky lecture on anything: Goddamn, can that man talk—if he wasn’t a linguist by training, they’d make him a linguist by volume!

But I think I’ve found the perfect nighttime listening: The Watergate hearings.

More specifically, John Dean’s testimony. The first part on YouTube is six hours of Dean reading a statement about how Watergate happened, how he got involved in the cover-up, how he tried to protect the president and when he gave up. I remember a pal reading Moby Dick and telling me with astonishment that he had to get through 700 pages before ever seeing a whale. Similarly, a viewer of this testimony must listen for hours—and will certainly fall asleep—before hearing Dean refer to a cancer, or any other ailment, on the presidency.

Meetings and memorandums, one after the other, beginning in 1971 and lasting deep into 1973. Subsequent parts are hours-long, too; this amounts to something like 20 hours of testimony!

You can listen for a year, falling asleep hearing about the hiring of Gordon Liddy, waking up listening to Nixon’s wish that Dean keep Ehrlichman and Haldeman out of the loop. And you doze endlessly to much, much more obscure questions and answers about Watergate players you never heard of. And that’s all before the Enemies List ever begins. You can’t say Byzantine without saying zzzzzzzzz!

Half-consciously, you’ll marvel at the seriousness and fairness and good humor of Dean’s congressional inquisitors, and the bipartisan groping for the truth. Subconsciously, you’ll wish Senator Baker or Senator Ervin would ask Dean how he feels about his culpability in all this (or that Dean would just blurt it out, as even his obvious physical and temperamental progenitor C3PO would, at some point).

And even though your spouse will surely leave you for a saner sleeper, you’ll still take comfort in knowing that some other bastard was once in much more trouble than you will ever be, more publicly than you’ll ever be—and handling it pretty fucking calmly.

And you’ll sleep.

If you witnessed a bad car accident, would your immediate impulse be to stand there on the sidewalk, pointing and shouting about which driver was at fault, and why? Or having done what you could do to help, would you quietly stand there in shock, hoping everyone would be all right—and, whatever their culpability, that both parties learned from the incident: He to pump the brakes in the snow, she to drive a little more defensively in wintertime.

And let the cops or the judge sort out who was to blame and whose insurance company ought to pony up.

Then why in the mother of fuck did you think it was important to share your “hot take” on the socio-emotional accident Sunday night at the Oscars? Or re-share Kareem Abdul-Jabaar’s hot take, titled, “Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing.”

I know what you’re going to say: You felt compelled to weigh in, because the incident addressed important issues of our time. Kareem justified it best: “With a single petulant blow, [Smith] advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community. That’s a lot to unpack.”

As an English professor of mine once said of Henry James, “He chews more than he bites off.”

Will Smith lost his ever-loving, standard-issue narcissistic Hollywood mind for a few seconds—and then, in the ego maw of the Academy Awards program, failed to find any equilibrium (much the way a car accident survivor, whether at fault or not, might be emotionally unstable for a few minutes or hours after the incident). He then later apologized.

Shocking to see—but not the Kennedy assassination or the Kent State shootings or the Rodney King beating or the O.J. Simpson verdict or the murder of George Floyd. About as much of a cultural watershed, I’d say, as Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction,” or Rosanne Barr’s gross performance of the National Anthem in 1990, or Pedro Martinez throwing Don Zimmer on the ground in 2003: Untoward incidents that inspired just the right amount of self-righteous high dudgeon to give the whole nation a brief dopamine whippet.

Why, having just survived a pandemic, with a war on in Europe, could you not emerge from a televised Sunday night snafu involving complete strangers (who you have generally passively admired for decades, by the way)—and get back to work on Monday without phonily fretting about how six seconds of one man’s (or two men’s) dumbfuck behavior would now beget a national rash of violence, a generational setback for feminism, or the Black community having to rewind to Bigger Thomas, and start over?

As a daily writer, I’m on thin ice, telling people to shut their pie holes. But being a daily writer does train one to try to keep the daily news in perspective, and, generally, to write about what one uniquely knows.

If what happened Sunday night was something you felt you had to speak out on, okay.

But otherwise?

It’s springtime, after all: Why not leave Will Smith and Chris Rock out of this and get eagerly back to your own work, and tend to your own life—both locations where you are generally dancing around real and chronic problems having precisely nothing to do with the hypocrisy of “The Academy”?

I think I just answered my own question.