The Situation: On Slowness

The Situation on Thursday contemplated the John Bolton indictment. 

Thursday already feels like a long time ago.

Since then, James Comey has filed his motions to dismiss the indictment against him on grounds both of selective and vindictive prosecution and that the prosecutor who brought the case—Lindsey Halligan—was appointed unlawfully. 

For her part, Halligan has been on a texting spree directed at my colleague, Anna Bower.

And Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him $230 million to compensate him for the costs of the investigations against him during the last administration.

Oh, and he’s bulldozing parts of the White House—literally.

Each of these subjects deserves a column of its own, and none of them is going to get one today—at least not from me.

I will write about Comey’s motions as soon as the government responds to them in early November and the full parameters of the dispute come into clearer focus. I actually have little to add to Bower’s superb piece on Halligan’s texts—particularly as I served as her principal editor on the piece. I am sufficiently enraged by Trump’s demand for hundreds of millions of dollars in gratuities from a department now run by his personal lawyers to compensate him for warranted and merited investigative and prosecutorial activity that the better part of valor is to refrain from comment until my blood cools. 

As to tearing down the East Wing of the White House, I will just say this: If I were running for president—which I most emphatically am not—the promise to begin the demolition of Trump’s “ballroom” and the restoration of the East Wing on day one of my presidency would feature prominently in every speech I gave.

I have found that when The Situation speeds up, it is important for me to slow down. At the outset of The Situation, I offered readers the following advice: “you do not need to respond to every outrage [and] you do not need to respond in real time.” I have to remind myself of this often: that I cannot control the pace at which Halligan issues meritless indictments at Trump’s direction but that I do have the ability to comment on motions at a pace consistent with my own intellectual metabolism.

The world does not need my instant reaction to Trump’s desire to loot the federal till. It doesn’t need my howl of rage at the physical destruction of part of the White House. And if it does, it can have this quotation from King Lear: “Howl, Howl, Howl, Howl”

There is value to slowness in the face of speed. Slowness deprives The Situation of the ability to control my mind. The Situation wants me to have racing thoughts and to feel compelled to react instantly to the latest vileness. Forcing myself to wait, to play some chess, to study one of the languages I am learning, to read books not directly on the subject of The Situation, is an assertion of control over my own thoughts. It is an assertion of control not just of the content of those thoughts but their pace—which may be more important than their contents. It is an antidote to efforts to “flood the zone with shit.”

The Situation seeks to dominate me, and speed is part of its strategy of domination. Speed is disorienting. Speed is bewildering. I can make decisions and judgments quickly if I have to, but I can make better decisions and better judgments if I take the time to respect the questions I am asking. The Situation tries to take that away from me. Slowness is a means of defiance. 

Recently, I have been taunting The Situation by becoming interested in a question that sounds in hundreds of years of the history of ideas: How exactly did the idea of human enslavement go from near-universal acceptance to near-universal condemnation in a remarkably short period of time? Where did the idea that slavery is morally abhorrent actually come from, and how did it catch on? I was delighted the other day, browsing newly released books at my local bookstore, to find a new piece of scholarship on the almost reciprocal question. A man named John Samuel Harpham has written a new book entitled, “The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” which explores how English thought used Roman intellectual traditions and evolved an intellectual defense of slavery.

Slowness.

It can be knitting. It can be music—I am currently engaged in a project of listening to all of Brahms in a systematic fashion and writing about it. It can be sports. It can be anything that breaks the logic of The Situation’s attempt to dominate you with a rat-a-tat-tat of events to which you have to respond. It can be anything that allows you to say that you will engage the latest atrocity on your own schedule, not on the schedule of The Situation.

Slowness is, I want to emphasize, not putting one’s head in the sand. It’s not avoidance. I will address the vindictiveness of the prosecution of Comey and Letitia James, I promise, in a timely fashion. I spent the week working with Bower on her piece about Halligan’s texts; I have nothing useful to say on the subject right now that isn’t already in it. Slowness is not a means of denial. It is a means of seizing control of the terms of my confrontation with The Situation.

Some would call it self-care.

I think of it rather as self-definition. I choose to know what I’m talking about. I choose to think through issues before pronouncing on them. I choose to not be bullied into expressing opinions before I’m ready to. I choose to prioritize my own thought and titrate my engagement with The Situation so as to make that engagement most useful.

Slowness is, to put it bluntly, a tool for maximizing my own effectiveness. 

And yes, it means that I don’t comment on everything. It means that news cycles go by without my interventions. (The world manages to survive this, I find.) It means that, sometimes, The Situation gets a pass from me—even though I write a column about it two or three times a week.

The Situation continues tomorrow, by which time I may—or may not—have decided to engage with it.