Today I realized that I spend a lot of time avoiding political things that I know will make me upset. I can't listen to or look at the president, for instance, or most of the Cabinet, without feeling a combination of fury and despair, which means I can't (and don't) watch the news on TV or listen to NPR. I get most of my news from the web and from newspapers, where I can more or less control what information I receive.

Presumably this makes me little different from a regular viewer of Fox News, which is a depressing thought. And I wonder, is the sense that things are worse than ever "me," or is it "now"? I didn't used to feel this way, even during the Reagan/Bush years, but I was younger then (who wasn't?)... Are things now immeasurably worse than they've ever been, or am I just more sensitive or in touch with the news? Have the times changed, or have I?

I think figuring that out is one of the real problems of living in time; the answer is always "both," of course, but what the question gets wrong of course is the degree to which "the times" are and have been part of me before I came to know myself. I suppose at one point one gets enough of a sense of self to feel that one can resist the times, or that the times have passed one by; my guess in general however is that the "self" so defined (and so imagined as under control) is rarely as untouched by the times as I think it is.

There are a lot of people out there who know much more than I do about what kind of directly political work ought to be done to change the times we're in, and a lot of those folks have the stomach to look at Bush and to participate in a culture whose current mood seems to me to be, in general and on both the left and the right, antagonistic, violent, and angry (not always unjustifiably). I honestly don't have the heart for it, and have my doubts about whether it is possible to join in the fight without tuning one's self to that tenor.

But what I think I can do--what I think, also, that Printculture can do--is some work away from the fray, perhaps along these lines:

1. I think it's important to find a way to laugh that doesn't involve laughing bitterly or derisively. Somehow for instance today I find this man's face honestly delightful, even though what he's saying is crazy wrong. It looks like it's made out of some kind of delicious candy.
2. I think it's important to remember that there are other things out there than the political, even though it rarely feels like it and the personal is political, etc. etc. Nonetheless there are other things out there, even public things, worth reading or watching or doing. Saturday night in the NBA Slam Dunk contest, Josh Smith of the Atlanta Hawks had just an AMAZING dunk that involved jumping over (over, I tell you!) a sitting Kenyon Martin to finish with a one-handed, windmill slam. It's this kind of kinetic genius that punctuates professional basketball with a series of incandescent explosions; witnessing something like Smith's dunk, I remembered that a wild and imaginative physical ambition--what appears elsewhere in dance, in theater, in the circus--can in the right circumstances express the best possibilites of human culture.
3. I think a lot of people are in a good position to do some work on the self--on thinking about how it might protect itself without renouncing or withdrawing from certain forms of life; on how one might reconsider or remake one's relation to citizenship without renouncing it; on articulating an ethics of rage and despair that will help organize or clarify emotions that often seem (to me) to be overwhelming.