To be real

The return of the Reality-Based Community

Is perspective still useful? I’m talking about the general concept, not about its application to the visual arts —though maybe there’s a connection.

For centuries in the West, the use of perspective in drawing and painting was thought to be essential, until upheavals in philosophy and aesthetics made it optional. Maybe we’re seeing something like that now in terms of simple cognition: Maybe people and the times have become so weird that to regard them from any fixed viewpoint, moral or otherwise, no longer makes sense.

Don’t you ever have this same vertiginous feeling, looking at our politics, our popular art, our social relations? I try to “keep up,” as greybeards tend to say about the world as it spins into unfamiliarity, and some weirdness sort of makes sense to me. But then I look at something like this…

…and I think, where am I? Am I in a coma, is this a nightmare?

Well, just for sport let’s say perspective is useful (and I have a premonition that it is — I do think a little bit about what I'm going to say, sometimes), and try this on for size:

Some of you will remember this statement from just before the 2004 election, when a New York Times Magazine writer reported what a Bush White House staffer told him:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That's not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I know how that sounds now, but think about what it sounded like then (or, if you weren’t aware of it before, what it might have sounded like) and, say, four years later.

As Wikipedia mentions, in 2004 many liberals applied the term “reality-based community” to themselves — ironically, it might seem, though it may seem strange to say so, at least at first; the idea with ironic political self-appellations, after all, is usually to take something that’s supposed to be bad and proudly claim it, a la “deplorables” among the MAGA and, way back when, Know-Nothings. It’s meant as a perverse challenge — yeah, we’re stupid, we’re racist, so what?

Proclaiming a deference to objective reality, on the other hand, seemed awkward and insecure — like responding defiantly to someone who made fun of you because you could read and write, something you might do as a bullied child in an ignorant backwater but weird for a grown-up because, after all, aren’t people supposed to be able to read and write, isn’t that good?

October 2004 was an interesting time. We had some hope of getting Bush out in the election. We got beat instead, but not by so much; already the dizzying approval ratings for the absurd Iraq War had begun to fall and Bush was basically coasting. As the Iraq absurdity became more obvious, so did cracks in the hyperactive economy, and by the time the next election came up it had collapsed and Republicans, including the one who hired Mr. We Create Our Own Reality, were perceived correctly as its wreckers and losers.

By 2008, even if you didn’t subscribe to any grandiose ideas of a permanent Democratic majority, the notion of Republicans making their own reality seemed fanciful — or rather, like, sure, they could make it, but who’ll buy it? What are you gonna do, invade Iran and make that your reality-bender?

I hadn’t thought of that NYTM story since then, even during the first Trump term, until this week, when the intense unreality of the rapid changes — multiple assaults on the Constitution and due process, MAGA brownshirts kidnapping immigrants, comically unqualified TV personalities, many engaged in obvious criminality, appointed to high office, the President babbling like a demented nursing home resident — stirred the memory. Because when we look at reality, as reflected by news reports, it sure seems to be under someone’s control, and not that of anyone good.

(I wonder whether that Bush staffer is still in the business. I wonder if he’s in the White House now.)

Here's where perspective comes in. From here, October 2004 seems almost normal. It wasn’t an Era of Good Feeling, of course. There was a crisis in Gaza (the IDF’s “Days of Penitence”); Martha Stewart went to prison, several states had banned gay marriage, the Red Sox won the Series. And in Iraq: Car bombs, ambushes, beheadings, snipers — the inevitable but, to many, acceptable result of We’re An Empire Now. (The abuse at Abu Ghraib had been exposed in April.)

This was madness, but it was contained, localized, discrete, not like the blitzkrieg we suffer now. Looking back, it seems that was why they could get away with it. Iraq and Gaza were places savagery could be expected to happen. The marriage equality bans were distressing, but most of us knew that was a rearguard action — the energy was all on the other side. Slow progress, quagmires — these were things Americans could handle, if we were not directly affected and most of us weren’t.

In that regard, the claim to make one’s own reality, shocking as it was at the time, seems almost quaint. Of course you were making reality — ever hear of Ronald Reagan? The age of Big Business and Big Money is also the age of Big Bullshit.

Now, what Trump’s currently doing — is that reality-creation? The polls suggest not. In fact, it seems instead of accepting the small doses of alt-reality Bush offered us over 20 years ago, the public is spitting it up.

What seems to be happening might rather be called reality-imposition. The difference is Bush, still floating on the outrage over 9/11, waved flags and beat war-drums and successfully stirred the ancient related passions — actual nationalism, the pledge-of-allegiance, Remember-the-Maine kind. Some of his assholes did some muscle-flexing, but by and large Bush just rolled out a bandwagon bedecked with stars and stripes and the nation hopped aboard.

It may look like Trump is doing the same thing, albeit with racism and reaction rather than jingo and family values. But, were Trump creating rather than imposing a reality, he would be inviting rather than enforcing it. As it is, he has instead visited waves of violence and stupidity upon a nation that shows no sign of accepting it. He is attempting to beat it into us.

I understand and share the concern people have over this; because Trump has had unexpected success in elections, it’s not crazy to think he’ll also be successful in transforming America by brute force. Much of the institutional damage he’s doing will be very hard to repair. Plus he’s a Nazi.

But even the Nazis went down. And I think we have a bit of an advantage now. I think about the insane reactions the Trump factota have whenever things don’t go their way — most spectacularly when Zohran Mamdani won the New York primary and Fox News scare-headlines screamed that he wants to make New York City buses free like some kind of socialist. Maybe socialist can be the new deplorable. Maybe instead of being offended that someone accused us of being reality-based, we should take the initiative, and make our own reality.