the guilt in joy
(I promised these would be infrequent. I’m hopeful this is infrequent enough for you!)
In the before-times, when we lived in New York, and at the recommendation of Ira Glass, we went to this Broadway show called What the Constitution Means to Me. (Lest you think I’m about to exhaust you with the details of a play that you won’t ever be able to see, it was recorded at some point, and was just released on Amazon Prime. You should watch it—ideally, before Tuesday.)
The play is not overly complex in its set-up; and yet, at the same time, it defies simple summary or categorization. Essentially, it’s a one-woman mostly autobiographical play (though there are two other featured roles) that takes as its point of departure writer/actress Heidi Schreck’s experience traveling around the country and competing in constitution-themed debates throughout her early teenage years, at which she won money that helped put her through college.
These competitions prioritized memorization of constitutional amendments and the ability to weave in personal narratives about how those amendments played a role in the debaters’ lives (often with an implicit requirement to emphasize the purported beauty of that document). The play does a partial re-enactment of these debates, during which present-day Heidi interjects with witty commentary on the absurdity and silliness of these debates, being a teenager, and other related observations. This part of the play is all very delightful.
But the real genius of the play—and, truly, it’s soul—reveals itself when Heidi shifts gradually, and then fully, into her current self and begins to explore the very same kind of prompt—how relatively esoteric elements of the constitution have impacted her life and the lives of so many others—with a richer and fuller perspective afforded to her by her lived experience, and without the naïveté and overly sanguine viewpoint of her younger self. (Though she doesn’t dwell much on it, the twisted irony of having to spout off patriotic slogans and ideals, largely based in historical narratives of questionable authenticity, in order to pay for a college education that would, in effect, undermine that very perspective is not lost on me.)
To be clear (though, at the risk of offering a minor spoiler), it is not as if her life is replete with stories of wild run-ins with the law or anything; it’s not that kind of play. Rather, what is so brilliant about her storytelling is that much of the impact of the constitution—or, more accurately, the law and society in general—for her life are at once subtle and profound. She reflects on the psychological effects that stem from the normalization and legal entrenchment of male privilege, male violence against women, and the relative disempowerment of women’s control over their own bodies. Much of this is just a reflection of societal norms and internalized misogyny; but a lot of it is shaped by the way the courts and the country’s founders have thought about (or, rather, not thought about) women’s roles in society.
The play was released a while after Trump was elected. When we saw the play on Broadway, Kavanaugh had recently been confirmed to the Supreme Court. This was never spoken of, but everyone in the audience felt it in her words. We watched this recorded version the other day, when Barrett was going through the confirmation process. I won’t belabor the importance of all of this. You get it.
I have plenty more I could say about this fantastic play. (If you decide to watch it—and I hope that you will—let’s talk about it sometime!) But there is another somewhat subtle feature of Schreck’s approach in the play that grips me—though I admit I didn’t notice it much when we first saw the play, but only upon revisiting it recently. It happens a few times throughout the play: she says something funny, or delightful, or otherwise of positive valence, only to very abruptly shift her tone back to the deadly serious. If you watch it carefully, you’ll probably notice it: she has a powerful way of forcing you back to reality, to face facts—as if to remind us that the delightful moments are only a brief reprieve from what we ought to be focusing on instead.
Beyond the context of this play, this is something I (and others I know) experience often. It is our duty, or so we believe, to stay in-tune with the political goings-on of the day. To opt out of a news cycle is an exercise of privilege. (In fact, whether or not it actually is is beside the point; the fact that we have led ourselves to believe it is enough.) To not feel some issue of concern deeply, we think, is to manifest that very same privilege, which in this context amounts to a sort of wholesale denial of care. And so we teach ourselves not to let that happen to us; our sincere passion for social justice makes intense demands on our emotional lives. We are prone to feeling guilty for enjoying ourselves, particularly when that comes at the cost of staying up-to-date on the news, bearing witness to it, and spreading the message to others in our networks.
This is what it feels like to have fun in 2020. Whatever you’re doing is genuinely enjoyable—a serious retreat from the anxiety of everyday life. But then the push alerts chime in to inform you that RBG has died (cf. my last letter), or that Texas is practicing blatant voter intimidation and suppression, or that Missouri has been spying on Planned Parenthood patients in a clear attempt to intimidate and unsettle women seeking abortions, or that the president has been spouting conspiracy theories about doctors trying to bilk the system with false COVID reports—all of which reminds you of the precarious nature of everything you care about. Or you’re out for a bike ride, enjoying your first warm Florida fall and taking in the sight of the charming Spanish moss, when you realize you haven’t checked your phone in a couple of hours, and something awful might have happened, or probably did happen. Whether or not it did happen is, in the end, somewhat beside the point.
There’s a lot we can do to rein in these anxieties, but many of the most natural thoughts—Turn your phone off! Stop reading the news so much! Don’t doomscroll! Don’t let it affect you so much!—are of little help to those who feel a strong sense of obligation to bear witness to the slate of ongoing crises. Maybe that’s the issue; maybe there’s nothing much of value to letting politics consume you in this way. Ah, but there again is the privilege of being able to opt out! How lucky you are for politics not to affect you so much! Don’t your feelings of solidarity preclude you from taking yourself out of it? Which side are you on, boys?
And on and on it goes. It’s a dilemma that, in my assessment, is pretty impossible to escape without abandoning or cheapening something of deep and serious value to our identities. But resignation is also a dead end, so we keep cycling through our options, ad infinitum. As Schreck makes clear throughout the play, this is all so very exhausting.
Recommendations:
Obviously, you should all watch What the Constitution Means to Me (Amazon Prime).
I love Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted, and his work on tenants’ rights has been extremely important. This recent piece of his was super interesting.
In keeping with the sort of “hopeful/dreadful” theme of this letter, I’d highly recommend this amazing song/video by Phoebe Bridgers. She’s a generational talent. This song goes a thousand different places. That’s a good thing.
I’m sure many of you saw this already, but the NYT piece about guessing Trump fridges from Biden fridges was fascinating. I want to hear everyone’s reasons for why they chose the way they did. In my own case—and I’m not proud of this—I tended to associate a more ‘Whole Foods aesthetic’ with Biden supporters, which proved no more accurate than random guessing. This is odd, too, because I know that Biden does well with a pretty broad range of people, and Trump does well with middle class folks, so there’s no obvious reason (that I can see) to think Whole Foods=Biden. (Hence, what makes this exercise so revealing!) But the craft beer owners did overall tend to support Biden, which definitely confirms my priors.
You’re tired of hearing this, I know, but I hope all the Americans reading this will vote on Tuesday—hopefully for the candidates and initiatives that will support and restore democracy. I guess there’s nothing inconsistent with using the tools of democracy to undermine its very application, but it would sure not be ideal.
-JVD