Choose your Own Adventure

I've written myself into a tangle. Help me out.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

There are fourteen—yes, fourteen—unsent newsletters sitting in my draft folder. They treat, seriatim:

• The global effects of Trump’s trade policy;

• The dizzying speed with which China is filling the void the US is leaving;

• Interpreting El Salvador’s crime statistics;

• The historical significance of the writ of habeas corpus;

• Mark Bloch and the curious case of Lisa Murkowski;

• The unending shame of our betrayal of our Afghan allies;

• Do political protests work? Under what circumstances?

• An analysis of the prospects for Trump’s impeachment;

• Will Trump preside over Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons?

• Middle East 201: More reports from the class, with a modern Turkey reading list;

• Project Russia, Sergei Cristo, and our betrayal of Ukraine;

• Russia’s activities in Africa and why they matter, with Philip Obaji Jr;

• Will the US leave the IMF and the World Bank, and what would happen if we did?

• Global Eyes

Make that fifteen—I counted again—because I’ve also been editing an essay, sent to me by a friend who grew up in the South, arguing that Southern revanchism is the key to understanding Trump. Oh, wait, sixteen, because there’s also this little doodle in my draft folder:

The Trump Administration accidentally texted me its economic plans. Senior White House officials included me in a group chat about economic policy I didn’t think it could be real. Then the Dow began to plummet. …

Why are they all unsent? Because I’ve shorted my circuits, I think. Each one needs a little more work—a few more paragraphs, some proofreading, some fact-checking, some polishing. Nothing huge. But I’ve just been unable to pull the trigger. Every evening, after working on one of these stories all day, I’ve thrown up my hands and said, “No, it’s not ready.” I’ve given up, vowing that I would do better the next day, then woken up to either be distracted by another breaking news story or repeat the previous day’s debacle.

I’m pretty sure—I’m certain, in fact—that this is a symptom of cognitive and emotional overload, which is exactly the state the Trump Administration wants its critics to be in, but knowing that is no proof against it.

It’s not serious. It’s not permanent. It’s happened to me before. I gather many are suffering from it, because when I’ve mentioned this to people who’ve kindly asked whether I’m alive, they’ve told me they feel the same way.

Of course we feel this way, really. Apart from the 48 percent of Americans—happy fools— who are persuaded things are going just swimmingly, the whole world grasps that we’re watching Donald Trump senselessly destroy and squander everything Americans have built over a quarter of a millennium. We all see that the foundations of the modern world are cracking; we’re all staring in horror at the yawning chasm of chaos, ignorance, poverty and violence that lies below, and it’s a bit more than most of us can fully take in, emotionally or intellectually.

So that’s why I haven’t been able to convince myself that my analysis of El Salvador’s crime statistics is adequate to the moment: It’s not. Nothing I write could be. We’re watching something like the fall of Rome, except the fall of Rome took a thousand years, and we’re determined to do it in a hundred days. If you, too, feel like a metal spoon in a microwave—short-circuited, sirens and warning lights flashing, so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the crisis and the horror of it that nothing you can think of doing seems adequate—that’s why. It’s because it’s really as bad as you think. Hope that helps!

That said, since it is that bad, I’ve got to do what little I can, because it’s all I’ve got. So do you. That’s why, once again, I need your help.

Part of this is just decision paralysis. I’d be better off if I didn’t have to make so many decisions about what to write about. Could you please prune the branches of my daily decision tree? Tell me which of the stories above you actually want to read, and which ones don’t sound interesting at all. List them in the order you’d most like to read them. The one with the most votes will be in your inbox tomorrow, and I’ll proceed—one story per day, until there’s nothing left in my draft folder—exactly as you instruct.

Let me know by midnight tonight, Paris time. (If none of those stories interest you, you can also suggest topics you’d rather read about.)

I’m pretty sure that if I don’t have to make so many damned decisions, or think about so many problems at once, I’ll be fine. Kind of the same principle as this:

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Meanwhile, we pause for a special event—our first advertisement.

The Dispatch wrote to me a while back to ask whether I might like to swap ads with them. I was thrilled—this meant, obviously, that the Cosmopolitan Globalist arrived. If you already subscribe to the Dispatch, perhaps you saw our handsome ad?

Then they explained their terms: Given how many more readers they have, they said, they thought it would be fair if I ran their ad three times in exchange for them running it once.

“Sure!” I said, ever the tough negotiator.

(I’m not eager to drive a hard bargain, though, because I really do like the Dispatch, and would recommend them even if they weren’t recommending me.)

Here’s their ad:

And here’s the copy they suggested:

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Make up your own mind. Read reporting from The Dispatch that tells you the facts, not what to think.

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So that’s their pitch—but here’s mine, which I’m throwing in as a bonus, because I mean it:

1. They just acquired SCOTUSblog, which is really good. If you don’t read it, you should.

2. I read the Dispatch all the time and rarely find myself in violent disagreement with them. For example, here’s what Jonah Goldberg had to say about Kilmar Abrego. He’s exactly right about this, and he’s right to point out that everyone is being appallingly stupid about this:

   Much of the political argument over Abrego Garcia is what legal scholars might call “stupid.” The Trump administration and its supporters are going full tilt to paint Abrego Garcia as a vile and dangerous terrorist. Many Democrats, outraged by Trump’s methods, prefer benign descriptions like “Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an innocent man and the father of three,” as Sen. Bernie Sanders put it.

   This framing—“Abrego Garcia innocent and good” vs. “Abrego Garcia guilty and bad”—is what is so stupid. None of the relevant legal and constitutional issues have anything to do with whether he is good (or a father). By insisting that Abrego Garcia is an innocent man, Democrats are implying that if he were not innocent, what the Trump administration has done to him would be unobjectionable.

   The relevant questions are whether the administration has the power to bypass due process—a right conferred even to illegal immigrants—and whether it has to try to remedy the mistake it made in sending Abrego Garcia to a foreign prison. …

   The idea that the government can simply assert that people on American soil, possibly including American citizens or legal residents, are criminals or terrorists runs completely counter to our legal system. … The Constitution is designed to limit abusive government power. That is the only relevant issue here.

   I agree. That this isn’t obvious to Americans shows that it was a catastrophe to abandon mandatory civics classes.

3. Kevin Williamson writes for the Dispatch and I think he only writes for the Dispatch. (Rescinding the job offer he made to Kevin was Jeffrey Goldberg’s biggest mistake in an otherwise illustrious tenure at The Atlantic.) I’d subscribe to pretty much any magazine for which Kevin Williamson writes. This column—Understanding the Trump Show—is great, for example. And he’s probably right, too.

4. This article by Katherine Dee about the way short videos are rewiring and rotting our brains is important.

5. So is this article by Jamie Kirchick about the moral and strategic idiocy of shutting down RFE/RL:

   … If the Trump administration fails to comprehend the harm it’s doing by closing down the radios, America’s adversaries do. “This is an awesome decision by Trump!” Margarita Simonyan, editor of the Kremlin-funded RT network, exclaimed after the administration’s initial announcement that it was closing the radios. “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.” (Given my personal history with this particular lie factory and its sycophantic leader, the expression of schadenfreude was especially grating.) An anonymous Kremlin official quoted by the Moscow Times was less subtle, describing Trump’s actions as “a dog’s death for a dog.” During the Cold War, conservatives rightly blasted the nuclear freeze movement as dangerously naive for demanding unilateral American disarmament in its confrontation with the Soviet Union. Today, many of them echo our adversaries and applaud a pointless act of self-inflicted harm.

So that’s my pitch for The Dispatch. You’ll like it. I’d encourage you to come back and subscribe to the Cosmopolitan Globalist, too, but I don’t feel as if I deserve it, given that I haven’t finished any of the 17 above mentioned newsletters. (When you’ve received them all, though, please subscribe.)

So tell me which one you want to read first. You’ll get at least one a day for the next 17 days. If there’s some other major news event that makes you think I should push all of this to the side and write about that, instead, let me know—otherwise, I’ll just ignore it and finish what I’ve started.

All of this stuff I’ve been writing is really very good. I’ve just been torn in too many directions to focus. If you act as my assignment editor for a few weeks, though, I’m sure I’ll get my groove back. Your wish is my command.