I’ve been thinking, this past week, about the distinctly chaotic, disorienting feel that the world has when Donald Trump is sitting on the throne in the United States.
In saying this, I’m not claiming he has some sort of monopoly on awfulness – to give just one example, clearly that is not the case given the enthusiastic participation of the entire liberal establishment in the West in the Israeli state’s genocidal conduct in Palestine. But in both his first term and now, there is, like I said, a distinct rhythm, a distinct feel to this time. There’s a chaos to it, a brazenness, a clearly deliberate effort to keep us all off balance, a proudly trumpeted ignorance, a touch – or more than a touch – of unreality.
I’ve been experiencing it this week at the level of being a writer and a media-maker. A few days ago, Trump temporarily backed down from his threat of imposing 25% tariffs on Canadian imports (after the Canadian government agreed to do things that it had mostly already committed to doing, to solve a problem that is almost entirely made up). As this was playing out, I was trying to write something about the concerning nationalism infusing the responses of so many people in Canada, including plenty of people with progressive and left politics. I wasn’t able to finish it quickly enough to get it out there in the immediate moment, but the basic point I was trying to make will no doubt continue to be relevant, so I’ll probably keep working on it. But what I’m focused on today is the way in which the Trumpian rhythm and feel of events sucked me in. It’s not just that the US administration’s actions provided me with a topic to write about, but at least to an extent, the whole flow of it organized my consciousness into that rhythm, and affectively oriented we towards participating in it. Which is not at all what I want, politically or in terms of my writing practices.
Now, that’s just one little example, and not a very important one to anyone who isn’t me. But I think it’s an instance of a bigger issue. I think it’s very easy, even for those of us who don’t live in the United States, to have the combination of the social media attention economy and the chaotic Trump circus of cruelty snag our attention and govern our engagement with the world. And I think we need to work not to do that.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any way to just avoid it. Part of its power is that it’s a result of Trump & Co. doing things that are causing, will cause, or might cause very real harm in the world. So of course it matters, it’s urgent, and we have to respond to it. But I also think we really need to work at not getting completely swept up in the chaos of it all. We need to find ways to not let the rhythms of Trump-time govern our attention and our efforts. Rather than allowing him to pull us from crisis to crisis, panic to panic, we each need to commit to our own ongoing, collective projects, whatever they might be, and focus our attention and energies on that. It’s a piece of advice that I’ve seen US-based abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba give lots of times – none of us can do everything, so pick your thing that you’re going to pay lots of attention to, work on it, and count on other people to do the same with other issues.
We can’t pretend that the distinctive and terrible flow of events that we’re facing right now doesn’t exist, and sometimes we do really need to respond to it. Sometimes we even need to panic. But we also need to stay connected to the reality that any effort to fundamentally shift things is going to be a result of us grounding our interventions in the world in rhythms and logics and structures of feeling that are different than what the Trumps of this world try to push us into.
(An administrative note: Over the last year or two, I’ve periodically experimented with TikTok. It’s a medium I enjoy creating for, but it’s quite time consuming, and with all of the uncertainty about its future and my pessimism about the general enshittification of social media, I stepped back from it. But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve turned my attention in that direction once again, for reasons that I’ll be able to talk more about later in the year. It still feels like experimentation and I may change my mind, but for now, I am once again making videos. And my expectation is that as long as I continue to do that, most of my Creating Through the Crisis posts will – like last week and this week – be re-purposed and slightly adapted video scripts.)