Escape to Planet X
Faced with End Times, humanity seeks safe haven.
Obviously, it’s all very bad. Climate change, bioterrorism, Trump, Putin, Andrew Tate, Gal Gadot, microplastics, explosive-diarrhea parasites, espresso martinis, gender-reveal fiascos, Comics Unleashed, lip filler, Ebola, the Mets. So, for better or worse, a decent variety of awfulness.
My generation has WWIII panic embedded in our nerve roots, but, okay, fellow Boomers, a confession: existential fear is one thing we can’t simply dictate to younger Americans. There is so much more than nuclear war to projectile shit about.
I mean, depending on how you process the world. Depending on whether you opt in or out.
Me, as you’ve probably long since worked out by now, I’ve defaulted to total immersion. This is partly because I fancy myself a citizen of the world, and partly because scrutinizing ugly truth has been my professional responsibility since 1977. Send me to a s’mores campfire or a First Holy Communion and I’ll hunt for the seamy underbelly.
Of course, both as a producer of horrifying news content and as a consumer of it, everything’s so much easier now. Because it’s all a couple of clicks or an AI query away.
At my first journalism job, I worked on what was called a “typewriter.” It was a different time. Hair was very big. Leisure suits were worn unironically. The biggest consumer source for technology was Wham-O. On the supply side, to get background on a subject you needed to visit a government records facility or a “library.” On the demand side, the entire day’s news was delivered in 23 minutes on TV. The New York Times, outside of New York, was a nuisance to come by.
If you wanted to fret in depth, you needed to subscribe to a thing called a “magazine.” Unsurprisingly, the most popular ones were TV Guide, Life, Look, Soap Opera Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal, People, Sports Illustrated and Reader’s Digest (as in, “abbreviated to easily read, pablum to easily digest”).
Populist, in other words. Thanks to celebrity obsession, the pictures were easy on the eyes. Thanks to civilian indifference, apathy and deliberate detachment, the text was easy on the blood pressure.
Only an intellectually curious few subscribed to The Nation, The New Republic, Reason, Foreign Affairs, Ramparts, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Commentary and National Review. Contemporary politicians dismiss this educated, alert and often expert cohort as arrogant, out-of-touch, woke, unpatriotic elites. Back in the day, when politics weren’t as rancorous, they were simply laughed off as “eggheads.” Real Americans with traditional values were glued to the tube.
No surprise that the most popular show on television in 1977 was Laverne and Shirley. There was no episode devoted to gerrymandering, sea level changes or marginal tax rates. Escapism was a way of life. Reality was a hard sell.
Nowadays, immersed as we all are in the rancid and despicable, we can speak condescendingly and even pathetically of 1977 society. “Ah, that was a different time!” In 1977, for heaven’s sake, Kanye was just born and Elvis had just left the building. The world was not yet digital. No smart phones, obviously. There wasn’t even voicemail. Communication, entertainment and despair were all strictly analog. Americans consumed Hamburger Helper and Tony Orlando and Dawn. Jump ropes were still a thing. And media more or less required active choices. If you wished to be spared “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” — and you were willing to avoid Top 40 radio and elevators — you could manage. Likewise for the Tenerife 747s collision and The Exorcist: Part II.
No such luck for us. Nowadays the internet, and therefore all the world’s events — no longer summarized once a day at dinner but relayed in almost real time — are literally in the palm of our hand and therefore everywhere all at once. Ubiquity is the default. Everything is a meme. Avoidance would require the ability to defeat a digital infrastructure so vast as to be inescapable. Which, if you cherish an informed electorate, should be a kind of utopian.
Consider Bully Pulpit’s tireless service to mankind. Each week, in order to select a subject for our in-depth contextual analysis (see “hot take”) we heroically livelihood-scroll the news of the moment, typically focusing on fascism, racism, stupidity, cupidity, criminality, liminality and impending doom. In this Brave New World, that requires little more than foraging three or four news aggregators for a story or stories that illustrate a problem we face as a society — like the hypothetical s’mores scandal, only with more Republicans involved. We then frame the episode in historical terms and through a lens of what we used to call “facts.” Plus, a few jokes and some wordplay to soften the blow.
Technology provides. Our favorite for this exercise is an app called SmartNews, because it divides its feed into categories: Top, Politics, Health, Local, Sports, Buzz (gossip), U.S., World, Entertain, Lifestyle, Biz, Tech, Science. I generally stick to “Top,” because it algorithmically reflects what news is most significant and what users most consume — as well as my own history of clicks. If democracy matters, this should be a serial-killer app.
For most of its 14-year history, SmartNews’ “Top” category was top-heavy with news. This was at least a small comfort, showing as it did that human events, no matter how frightening or deplorable, still commanded human attention. Doom scrolling is a sign, if nothing else, that we haven’t as a species just given up. That we haven’t all run screaming from reality to find an escape in some dim-witted, ultra-filtered influencer, bro podcast or smorgasbord of meringue.
But wait. This week, as always, I scrolled the “Top” stories on SmartNews. Here is what I found:
People Left Stunned As They Learn Dove Bars Aren’t Actually Soap
The Original ‘Munsters’ House Still Exists, but It Looks Very Different Today
Dublin homeowner finds neighbor’s black bamboo 3 meters into the yard and under the shed
A man’s bathroom emergency forced his partner out of the shower. Cue the online debate.
Charlize Theron Walks in Micro Shorts That Completely Hide Under Her Unbuttoned Jacket
Rebecca Falcone From Landman Has A Gorgeous Husband In Real Life
Now, I must admit, at a time when newsroom resources have dwindled to near the vanishing point, it’s impressive that newsgathering teams have managed to unearth these blockbusters. I guess if you invest enough shoe leather, you will eventually uncover the truth. So props to the intrepid reporters, otherwise the hotel-guest-seeking-room-change exposé might have never seen the light of day. As the Washington Post sloganizes, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
On the other hand, I think the greater issue regarding all of these scoops is (pardon my English) who gives a fuck? The barbarians are at the gate. What do Charlize Theron’s shorts matter to anyone?
It seems that rather than confront bonerattling reality of actual peril, even the consumers of “news” are gravitating to the calming distractions of the irrelevant. True enough, as I said, the algorithm that feeds me is highly sensitive to content similar to my own previous selections. But if you wish to understand what is happening here, you’ll just have to take me at my word that my SmartNews history is thin on bathroom emergencies, dating strategies, bamboo invasion and HVAC tech parking selfishness. This list is a function — like Laverne and Shirley — of overall popularity. In other words: Escapism 2.0. Or, what 41 years ago sociologist Neil Postman termed “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Technology provides, but human nature overrides.
As they so often do, the authors Will and Ariel Durant come to mind. In their towering 8-volume history The Story of Civilization, they compare society to a clearing of what once was a jungle of barbarism. But the endless, almost Sisyphean responsibility of humanity, is to preserve the clearing, forever paring back the encroaching jungle. The Pringles scoop is the “flight” choice in fight-or-flight. When danger approaches, run away. Run away!
What you might notice, though, is a strange zeitgeist phenomenon. Many of these headlines, though fundamentally trivial, nonetheless invite reader anger. Which is a weird-ass form of escape — from tragedy and threats to our survival, to vicarious rage at the trivial and irrelevant.
Mind you, this is all happening in a news app. Not TikTok. Not PornHub. Not Twitch. Even those explicitly interested in current events are defining “news” down. Sensing the existential danger swirling all around us, they are self-exiling to an imaginary safe harbor that fulfills the equally human need to disapprove of somebody else. Anger hurts, but it hurts so good. And thus they cannot run fast enough from the deadly truth. It’s an escape voyage to a beckoning, congenial, Planet X, far from the path of calamity.
I hope they find comfort, and can somehow stay out of harm’s way. But, come on.
Planet X is Earth.
I'll be honest here, Bob ... I really thought one of those HAD to be a misprint, and the Irish homeowner actually found a Black Mamba underneath his house. According to the infallible wisdom of Wikipedia, the untreated bite of a Black Mamba is 100% fatal -- and since these reptiles are native to Sub-Saharan Africa, a sweltering part of the world far in every way from the cold, damp, drafty climes of the Emerald Isle -- this would be a legitimate news story ... but alas, a click of the mouse revealed the awful truth: it really was black bamboo.
As Homer would say -- Simpson, that is -- "D'oh! Objection withdrawn."
Anger has indeed become our culture's drug of choice, especially among the red-hat MAGAt cult who are never so happy as when in the grip of a spittle-flecked rage. But I think there's something else causing so many to curl into a fetal ball while suckling on the digital teats of the Algorithmic Gods who rule our modern world. Despite all the stock market worship and whining about gas prices -- as if paying a bit more to motor around is the ultimate insult to strike humanity -- I think we're in a semiconscious state of denial, but deep down, we know The Truth: that the increasingly evident repercussions of global warming will exacerbate and dwarf every other problem we face, and that ultimately the human race is well and truly fucked.
This is an extremely inconvenient truth. I mean, who wants to seriously grapple with the notion that the human race has already taken Dr. Kevorkian's potion, and is now hoovering down Cheetos while watching daytime TV and awaiting the sweet release of death?
One of the first gaffers I worked for early in my Hollywood adventure was fond of saying: "If there's no solution, there's no problem," and we seem to have adopted that philosophy. It's abundantly clear we're not willing to do what it takes to slow, much less halt the warming of the only livable home we'll ever know, so instead we shrug our shoulders and pretend it'll all just go away.
Meanwhile, the fires rage, the rivers flood, and the crops fail, so I guess Neil Postman had it right.
Oh well ... we'll always have "Casablanca."