I sit in the empty silence of my sister’s house in Sacramento as the sun streams into the dining room. She is recovering from a fall and I am here in support. Something is not happening this morning. My cat, Doc, who should be reminding me that I am remiss in my obligation to feed him. The energy of that relationship is missing here.
Instead, I sit in a meditative silence, a black hole of non-energy around me. Though I rarely write about the same thing two weeks running, my mind goes to the ongoing drama of classified documents in DC.
What a continuing saga it is proving to be. Trump hides and resists; Biden finds and returns; Pence does the same. America’s press corps has wrapped itself around this story for weeks, now. Even this blog had a bit part in the story.
For weeks, the press corps has been spinning about the former President’s resistance to a search for the documents. Then the madding crowd runs to the White House to savage the current President for delays in his reporting his own carelessness with documents. And rushes over the other cliff to report that the former Vice-President misbehaved, as well.
As I said last week, this is not really a story. The nation’s secrets are safe, in fact, over-safe – there are too many; they are way overclassified; too many people are cleared to see them. This story is about careless but not malicious behavior. There is no threat to the Republic.
It has been spun into an event. I should not be surprised. Despite Elon Musk’s effort to kill Twitter, it will not die. It has become reporter’s primary tool for creating and spreading non-events like “Document-gate.”
By now it is old news that non-events become events courtesy of social media. That the press corps and editors run in herds to the edge of mythical cliffs, pitch themselves over, and fall, tumbling together, into the cavern of nonsense.
Like silent ghosts we perch at the edge of this chaos and watch. Or are drawn in, making “nothing at all” the focus of our chatter with each other – will it end the Trump campaign in 2024? Will Joe Biden decide not to run because he is weakened by this nothing-burger event? Will Pence’s future die, too?
Oh, we just love this stuff. Like my cat, it fills the room with energy. What sad lives we live that we feed off of this energy. There is no road out of it on television or in social media.
So I turn all of that off. It doesn’t make the circus go away. It just goes away from my life. From the lives of most of the people around me here. Aftermath of storms and floods; that is the story here. Life, injury and death, that is the story around us; a health care system that emphasizes profit and avoids coverage; that is the story. A persistent homelessness crisis in every major town; now there is something one can sink one’s teeth into. Reservoirs that are still not full enough to recover from persistent drought. Mass shootings that appear, dissolve, and reappear somewhere else. Groundhog day reappearance of racism in daily life.
But, no, It appears the nation’s “leaders” and the press are not too interested in that. It is more fun, more profitable, and more flashy to slap wrists over inconsequential carelessness with paper stamped “Confidential,” “Secret,” or “Top Secret.”
The energy in our lives is disruptive as a result. And it is distracting, entertaining even, to see a flow of lawyers and investigators spreading out to retrieve paper and argue over it.
I think I am better off with the energy of my cat, even the absence of cat is noticeable and more real than the paper chase in DC.
Yes, Concierge Medicine is a REAL story worth our attention. I learned a few details on today's NPR interview with Dr. ?, an internist. Scary! Kaiser isn't perfect but considering the alternatives I'll stay there.
For what it’s worth: does it also have to do with place? Here in DC we are bound by various ties to the politics of the moment. The business of this city is national politics, however ugly or ritualistic it may be.
When I am away from DC, I pay more attention to nature, to the air, to friends and relatives. In DC I watch and listen too much to the “latest” developments, no matter how insubstantial.