Make Yourself At Home | Defector

"This was not a good time, and I was very much Not Having A Good Time in it; in retrospect, the decision to cope with the dread I felt at anticipating several brutal years of national self-harm by watching a bunch of movies in which Gene Hackman scowled and wore weird hats and drank what was very clearly some absolutely dogshit coffee out of paper cups was something close to the healthiest possible scenario."

"American history tells us that the problems that make all that trouble do not ever get resolved, let alone solved; we don't really do that, here. This country loves its problems too much, or has just mistaken them for virtues so willfully and for so long that it can't imagine living without them; in the absence of a more representative politics, or maybe as a sort of satire of it, politics collapses into various ways to perform being upset."

"But if nothing ever really goes away, it is also true that bad times can be survived and outlasted, sometimes through heroic acts of resistance and refusal but mostly in the ways that people generally survive and outlast things, which is by being stubborn and keeping at it; there is nothing to do, really, but go about our respective and collective business as best we can."

A return to 1970s movies served as a coping strategy during a recent period of dread, offering perspective through recurring cinematic moods and gestures. Watching bleak films provided attunement to that decade's frequencies and manias and suggested that national moments of humiliation, failure, and loss pass in ways similar to personal ones. American history reveals that underlying problems rarely get resolved; they persist and are sometimes mistaken for virtues. In the absence of more representative politics, politics becomes performance and self-expression of upset. Bad times can be outlasted more by stubborn persistence and everyday continuance than only by heroic resistance. To lavish attention on problems until they crowd out humane things is a luxury.

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