Lots of people I know are in despair about the amazing conniptions and random thrashing about of Trump 2. It's the end of "the American experiment," they say; it's the apocalypse. The anti-Trumpers have been expressing confusion about whether to fight back as hard as possible (a la Cory Booker, maybe) or just give up and chill, as it’s bewildering and disastrous and all we have to do is let the man and his absurd minions destroy themselves (James Carville).
It’s a hard time to be a Democrat, a progressive, a liberal, a socialist, and so on. But I have some interesting yet morally problematic assertions for you: if you’re not currently being deported or having benefits cut, it’s a good time to be a journalist. It’s a good time to be a political theorist or a historian. It’s a good time to be an observer.
I'm writing on Sunday morning, and it’s a very dramatic moment in a variety of ways, or it would be a dramatic moment if “dramatic” wasn’t a relative term and if everything hadn’t been insanely dramatic for weeks. The relatively quiet, modest headlines at the (collapsing) Washington Post go like this: "States caught unprepared for Trump's threats to FEMA"; "As tariffs sink in, conservatives challenge whether they're legal"; "Trump starts a trade war, and Republicans are hostage to the outcome"; "Mass protests held across the U.S. in opposition to Trump and Musk"; "She marched against Trump in 2017. Now she says 'just let it all burn'"; "DOJ says Judge can't order return of Salvadoran man wrongly deported"; "Justice Dept. suspends lawyer who acknowledged deportation was mistake"; "A disaster reporter reflects on watching her city burn."
Those are interesting stories! Disturbing! Real suffering of people is involved in several of them, though some are hopeful. May you live in interesting times is, occasionally, held to be a Chinese curse or a Confucius saying. My own theory would attribute it (as a blessing, not a curse) to a press baron or muckraking reporter in the era of "yellow journalism." Yellow journalism, however, relied somewhat on making shit up (remember the Maine, if you don't believe me). But we're at the point where we don't need to make shit up, the point at which, as my observer-acquaintances also sometimes put it, "you can't make this shit up." Or: "If this was a novel no one would believe it!"
These are ways of saying that "shit" is getting very interesting, wild, unpredictable, absorbing. For if nothing surprising and bad ever happened in them, novels would be boring and redundant.
If you are a Salvadoran man wrongly deported, for example, you and your family might be sad to the point of despair or angry to the point of violence or both. But if you’re writing and thinking about what's going on right now, you have a lot to write and think about.
Say you’re an academic historian in your early-40s. You were a teenager on 9/11, maybe an undergrad as the "War on Terror" proceeded. You can only imagine what it might’ve been like to live as an aware and writing person when the Berlin Wall fell, when Nixon resigned, when soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camps, or during the Russian revolution. Over the last decade you might’ve had the impression that what you were thinking and writing and teaching about—history, in short—had (redundantly enough) become a thing of the past.
Or perhaps you were a reporter covering your first presidential contest, the 2012 campaign between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. At the time, people said the very future of the country was at stake. In retrospect, however, I can't think of any substantive matter they disagreed about. I can't point at any particular policy outcome that would’ve been different had Romney won. Journalists and also historians pretended otherwise, but nothing was really happening and nothing was really at stake. It was extremely uninteresting.
Finding times interesting or the reverse is a privileged position. It indicates that maybe your own life or well-being hasn't been compromised. It goes with certain professions, journalism and academia in particular. But if you’re not right now in the middle of a personal political disaster, a reporter or professor is not the worst sort of thing to be. Being a reporter or a historian in the middle of a world war, a revolution that changes the world (for better or worse), a profound economic transformation: it's an urgent task; it helps people understand and get through; and it helps the reporter or the professor find some distance and some epistemic leverage. Interesting times yield innovative theories and accounts, compelling personalities and unexpected events to try to understand.
It's hard not to be aware right now that we’re living in a history, and don't know what will happen next. The curse is a blessing and also a truth: these, our times, are really very interesting.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X and Bluesky: @CrispinSartwell
