I have no tales of wildlife this week. No mice in the house, bears at the trashcans, roaming dogs around the shed. Except for a family of wild turkeys stepping out of our driveway and a beautiful buck bowing his majestic antlers while nibbling near our apple tree in the front yard, no creatures great or small really interacted with me this past week. Instead, a more human type of creature was on my mind. For work, I’d been tasked to run fact-checking backup during the Presidential debate this past week. The assignment was that when (if?) the candidates touched on the topics meaningful to the AARP audience—Medicare, health care, Social Security, caregiving—then I would quick-like-bunny make sure what they said carried some truth so that the writer could include that information in the piece. We all knew that Trump would be in negative-truth, 88.9% lies territory (I mean, during Harris’ baller-shake-hands-pre-debate move, he said his name was Trump, which we have been able to prove as true), yet still … just in case he and she had a meaningful back&forth on one of the AARP-style topics, there I was to check it. While Harris did in fact tuck in some facts on her policy ideas (read details in depth here and here), and true to form, he spewed angry spittle and said “I have concepts of a plan” around health care (even though, no, I’m sure he doesn’t except tear the current down), in the end, the decision was that AARP would not run a story about the debate. There was a tiny moment as we all tried to figure out how Taylor Swift’s endorsement might fit into the demographic (grandkids love her? I added that I would bet plenty of 50 and older peeps do as well, yet maybe not enough to do a story on the endorsement). Then everyone signed off our group chat and went to bed.

The elation I felt around Harris’ delivery, not to mention facial expressions (the sense that the split-screen delivered delight as compared to the tragedy of June’s Biden/Trump debate was visceral), sent me to bed hopeful. That word hope in all its permutations has been put through the spin cycle and tumbled around in the lexicon overmuch in the last many political cycles perhaps leaving it threadbare, but I still pull it tight as a comfort item, and I’ve clutched it Linus-style ever since Tuesday night’s debate.

As much as hope has been washed through the language, sanity is also coming up for a spin. A term that’s been bubbling over the last little while: sanewashing, wherein the press normalizes Trump’s words by not calling out the lunacy and disjointed nature of them, thereby exposing his complete lack of fitness for holding any office and his actual danger to our world. This isn’t even about fact checking, because there are no facts to check, but rather constructing meaning where there is none. This quote, “Watching a full presidential Trump press conference while visiting the US this week,” the Australian journalist Lenore Taylor observed in 2019, “I realised how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.” Please note that this was observed in 2019 so it’s not a new phenomenon. These two pieces, one by Stephen Robinson about the absolute embarrassment mainstream media outlets like the NYTimes, Washington Post and other front&center at the newsstand papers of record have made while pretzeling to make T sound coherent, thereby making him all the more dangerous, are instructive and clarion-call clear. (Thank you, W, for introducing me to these columns.) This recent one by Brian Beutler strikes the most hopeful, yet absolutely cautious note, that perhaps there are other outlets (read: independent essays on places like Substack) where calling out this sanewashing insanity is causing a ripple of a difference in the so-called mainstream press. The sense that perhaps people are actually starting to be sick of having journalists, writers, media sorts create out of whole cloth some sort of coherent narrative out of Trump’s unhinged comments may be surfacing. One example: The factual corrections the moderators made around the most absurd of Trump’s claims during Tuesday’s debate (Linsey Davis, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.” And David Muir pointing out that ABC had called the city manager of Springfield, Ohio, and found that, no, pets were not being eaten by Haitian immigrants and there were no credible reports of pets being harmed whatsoever. The. End.). Look, they were small moments and by no means held him accountable for the totality of his ranting lies, which would have meant the debate would have for sure gone on until well past midnight, although it would have been helpful if the moderators had stopped him from hogging the talk-space and truly cut his mic as he verbally bullied himself into overtime.

Being a journalist myself and someone who has been reading and watching mainstream media (specifically The New York Times) for four-plus decades, I realize the habit of it. I recognize my intellectual laziness when I open the app or the newsprint, read the words written there, and go on my way thinking, Yep, now I get it. It’s an alarm bell rung for me to investigate my own tendency to want to believe in the simplest way possible just because I always have. Just because in J school, they told me these news sources were of the highest standard. That Woodward and Bernstein had risked their careers to break a story that would bring down a president, and they did it in a national newspaper. This is the school of thought that weaned me, and it felt important, unimpeachable, noble, even. And all those things were true. They did do a thing that exposed a president. It was important work and important work does still happen in some areas of mainstream media. But, simply said, it’s not the only word or the last word. It’s just one word in a whole sea of others.

I had my polarities. As I marched with my boyfriend back in the eighties for America to get out of El Salvador, I wasn’t all that surprised that my NYT paper of record didn’t cover my view on the subject at all. My thinking: Those journalists were doing good mainstream work while I was heading a bit underground. I was climbing toward music journalism, which truth be, I wasn’t even sure was traditional J street material. I mean, sure, Lester Bangs was a muckraker in the truest sense, yet he did often create his own reality where no fact-checker dared to tread. Julie Burchill was fierce over at the NME, but also someone who pushed on the politically correct, emotional bruised bits to get a rise although I never doubted her belief in what she wrote. Perhaps, I thought, truth is fungible in the land of music, and while that isn’t altogether wrong, it’s also not altogether right. Living in the gray zone, I ducked the hard stuff because world events weren’t really being shaped by the bands I wrote about until of course, the world began to be shaped by the bands I wrote about. Yet still I observed, standing just off stage and not really taking a stand. Just watching. I continued to read the Times on the subway every day, creasing it in quarters in order that it wouldn’t open up into the person standing next to me’s face. That paper remained the place where I got my national and world information. For the city view, I had my pals at the Village Voice where their insight was more radical. Those friends never disabused me of my big-time-charlie newspaper habit although one did say she couldn’t really trust my opinions if I believed what I read in there. I just thought she was being spiky.

I certainly had experience with stopping up my ears and swallowing my ideology around people who believed in things that were destructive and abhorrent mainly because I wanted to be in their orbit. A certain pop star who said he admired Margaret Thatcher. He had dreamy eyes and had just bought me a drink. When he said it with his Brit accent I thought, he’s being cheeky, he can’t mean it, even though I’m sure he 100% did. I said nothing to push back. Drank the drink. Listened to him ramble on. The rock guy who felt Reagan had done wonders for the economy, because apparently being in a mid-successful band meant he understood and missed what Ronnie had wrought? I probably just smiled at him because he seemed like a good listener. Then there was the music man who laughed about Clinton and the cigar, how he’d do the same thing given the chance, then said he was really a feminist at heart and looked at me like he expected a cookie. At the time I thought journalism is hearing viewpoints without inserting opinions. Subjective. And yet, these moments were not me getting a story, this was me sitting in a bar or restaurant or club shooting the shit. This silence was about not rocking the boat. Wanting badly for them to like/love/stay with me and if I’d dug in and brought out my opinion as a woman, as a citizen, they would most certainly leave. It’s taken a long time for me to understand that not only is there space but there is necessity in saying what needs saying out loud. And holding it. And if the person is still there as those moments happen, then huzzah! Rinse and repeat.

I mentioned last week we are watching Babylon Berlin, and it’s set during the Weimar Republic period in Germany. In the show, the Nazi party is on the ascent. Naturally, a historical lens colors things but what the show does well is to agitate around how things like the crushing economic crisis post WWI and Germany’s national identity were shifting the molecules in a way that, like in The Handmaid’s Tale, things are akin to a frog in a pot beginning to boil. It feels hot, but it’s steady and the noticing is not acute. While I’m not making a direct comparison here with T, understanding how new normals were accepted as Hitler, who many saw as a lonely, weird, inconsequential character who could really rouse a crowd, stepped up his horrors, finding the flex boiling point, then unleashed the hell we know as history is chilling especially given the knowledge that it’s the people surrounding said person who enable it to happen. MiPeople, we’ve seen how this cult of personality mindset works; been to this reichstag before!!!

I’m lucky to have a community of people and a love in my life who inspire me to listen better and fight harder for the basics of our country, our world, the whole damn planet. To shake myself out of the place where I’ve been comfortable receiving/taking in news. It’s a phoenix rising every few years where I realize I’ve become complacent or haven’t questioned the where and why of what’s going on around me. Sure, I’ve been busy living a few lives, but haven’t we all? The importance in making sure our country does not get handed back to a man who is clearly slipping ever further into raging unhinged authoritarianism is no joke and despite the powerful media outlets who are practicing the disservice of pretending what comes out of his mouth is sane as they word-scramble around to construct his derangement, I know I need pay attention to where I get my information. And stay inspired by the community of each of you who will get this election over the line into a Harris/Walz win. Even after November 5, I know we’ll still have to fight to stop his takeover since he will not give up. Yet maybe if the outlets who’ve been complicit by MadLibbing his absurdities into stories would stop doing that, then maybe his flatulent balloon would lose air and deflate on itself. Or at least sputter out somewhere over a desert island.

Next week: puppies?