I Am Outraged By [have editor fill in blank]

In 2004, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham famously wrote a column describing his disgust with the appalling speeches he had just watched at the Republican National Convention. The column arrived in an issue of the magazine that hit mailboxes before that convention had taken place. In his apology, Lapham helpfully explained that Republicans suck, so he knew before the convention that the speeches would be bad. Journalism!

I thought of Lapham this week as pundits and politicians reacted to this year’s Republican National Convention. I was super super surprised that people on television criticized Donald Trump, because it happens so rarely. Brace yourself, but Chris Christie didn’t like the long orange speech. That last link is to a video that opens with Joy Behar, by the way. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Chris Wallace also didn’t…like…sorry, what was I talking about?

We’ve turned the presidential campaign season into a years-long spectacle, with the arresting-your-opponent season alone taking up a full two years, so it shouldn’t be surprising that everyone has so little to say, or that they spend so much time saying it.

I don’t watch political conventions, but I “watched” it through Twitter, like welding with a face shield, so I saw pieces here and there. Tucker Carlson spoke extemporaneously to tens of millions of people, thoughtfully and well, moderating his pace and tone to the reaction of the in-person crowd. That’s freakishly hard to do; the man has a very particular set of skills, skills he has acquired over a very long career, skills that make him a nightmare for people like Chris Wallace.

How well do mainstream journalists understand the world? This well:

Whaddya think, Alex, has he maybe recaptured some of that relevance?

I dreamt last night about Commissioner Lin’s letter to Queen Victoria. In the 1830s, British traders were making a fortune selling opium to the Chinese, leading to an addiction crisis, so the emperor assigned Lin to make the British stop. The commissioner wrote a sternly worded letter to Queen Victoria, that pissant, that pathetic little nobody, queen of some worthless little people in some far-flung foreign province. You’re messing with the EMPEROR OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM, he explained. You wanna dance with the BIG DOG? Lin ordered the weak little nobody of a so-called queen to knock it off with all the opium, already, or else face the terrifying wrath of the indescribably mighty Chinese empire. Then the British Navy showed up and shelled the Chinese coastline.

Commissioner Lin had an outdated map of reality, and he tried to navigate with it. Imagine having the temerity to resist the power of a man who had excelled in the national Confucian exams, this idiot Victoria person, this so-called monarch. Surely she’ll tremble to hear that she’s being addressed by the “viceroy of the two Kwang provinces,” amirite?

Not quite eighty years later, the Chinese writer Lu Xun wrote a short story about a man who realizes he’s surrounded by cannibals — people guided by their endless consumption of the stale ideas of long-dead ancients.

Nations arrive at a moment when people in positions of authority and cultural prominence say [thing that they say] entirely because it’s [thing that they say]. They’re reciting, with complete automaticity. Joan Didion was writing about the stale performativity of political convention coverage in the 1980s, and the show has just gotten staler. People say what they say about the speeches because that’s what they say about the speeches. Lewis Lapham was appalled by the speeches, he wrote several weeks before the speeches. So:

Republicans are vile, and their convention was entirely about demonizing brown people! Like this vicious white nationalist pig, probably a future resident of the Naval Observatory:

Or this immigrant-hating monster, with his rage at non-white people:

Or or or this XENOPHOBIC WHITE NATIONALIST:

See all the Republican whiteness? “Every speaker is demonizing me as non human because I’m brown.” Uh-huh. He’s Laphaming.

Our political language has gone insistently stale. Roughly 98% of all public discourse is people mindlessly reciting their priors, and it’s impossibly dull. Their descriptive and analytical language is a thing they button over their eyes. Now, compare:

“Last time I put up that chart I never really got to look at it.” He’s riffing on near-death. Try the veal, ladies and gentlemen, and don’t forget to tip your cocktail waitresses, you’ve been a terrific audience.

You can see why they find the man so confusing.