Microresistance: Part I of Possibly Many Parts

(5-minute read)

What still gets me is the cats and dogs thing. A elderly man, gripping the podium to hold himself up, lost the thread of what was going on and shouted a lie right in front of 90 million people. Of course the lie-shouting had happened before. Pretty regularly, actually.

But this lie was naked and crazed. It ran yipping up and down the stage smeared in its own shit, then tried to do a cartwheel, failed and fell off into the audience. You gasped and you laughed with the same staggered breath. “They’re eating the cats and dogs!” I thought, for a moment, I had hallucinated it.

But it was real, because other people saw it too. I spoke to a voter in Pennsylvania when I was knocking on doors down there. Everything you looked at in that town could have been a Bruce Springsteen lyric. Sidewalks with cracks six yards-long and houses covered in roof shingles, next to factories that could have been open or closed. The woman stepped out onto her small porch and said she was done with him. “I liked him, I thought he was a good president,” she said. “But ‘they’re eating the cats and dogs’? He’s lost his marbles.”

And then: He won.

He won bigger than he’d won before. He won legitimately and clearly. I didn’t think I put my faith in any expert. But when he won the popular vote, I realized that the pundits who’d said it wasn’t possible for him to win the popular vote had been holding all my faith in their now empty, sweaty palms.

I felt then, and still feel, that I’ll never know why he won. Not because I can’t find a reason, but because I see so many reasons, constantly floating in and out of view. It’s like trying to focus on a floater in your vitreous gel: It’s easy enough to see one and follow it for a moment, but then it’s gone and suddenly, from nowhere, on the other side your eye there are two more spidery little fuckers, spinning and splitting and disappearing and reappearing. It’s Twitter, it’s disinformation, it’s Russia, it’s the collapsing middle class, it’s cognitive fatigue, it’s gender roles in flux, it’s billionaires who snorted a kilo of Ayn Rand back in the ‘80s and never came down, which is kind of the collapsing middle class thing but also its own thing, it’s misogyny, it’s video games, it’s climate change, it’s right-wing Israelis, it’s this overwhelming sense of unbreakable, hopeless stuckness while everything around you seems to just tumble apart. It’s everything. Just everything.

And it’s me. And you. And everyone. Every click, every swipe, every stream makes the billionaires richer and crazier. Every joke makes the cynics more cynical. Every meme shortens our attention span, my attention span, by another thousandth of a second (but man, does it all add up.) It’s everything and it’s just…too much.

I would like to stop and get off this bus now, please. But this bus does not appear to be making stops anymore. In fact, it’s accelerating, and I don’t recognize the neighborhood but it looks sketchy.

I’ve been thinking lately though that maybe I’ve been focusing on the wrong things, at least partially. When I think of the cats and the dogs and authoritarianism and disinformation I get dizzy and have to lie down. But when I think that I’m pretty sure that Mark Zuckerberg is a cancer, the next thought that comes to mind is that I should probably delete my Facebook account. Not because I think that will necessarily do anything, but because I just don’t want to be a part of Mark Zuckerberg’s cancer, that’s all. That seems simple. I can’t put a sane person in the White House, but I can delete my Facebook.

I think I’m going to call this Microresistance™: Changing the itsy-bitsy little biatches of habits and routines that make me feel that nothing can ever change, walking away from the rules and assumptions that make me feel like I have been successfully hacked, and that the world today is the world that has to be.

And I’m going to write about it, and it’s challenges because…can I delete my Facebook? I really want to. But then what if I think of a really good joke, how are people going to send me little laughy faces? The mail? It’s harder than it seems.

I’m still going to do all the stuff I did before, the knocking on doors in Pennsylvania or wherever, writing postcards, calling Chuck Schumer at all hours of the night - the Macroresistance (also ™). But the problems seem deeper than I thought they were. So I think my reaction to those problems has to be deeper as well. In a perfect world I’d go full-Ghandi: I would log-off all my devices, stop buying everything and sit cross-legged in an empty room, dressed in homemade clothing, rejecting the entire system in its entirety for at least the next infinity number of years. But the reality is that I’ll probably want to see Moana 2 at some point.

I guess I’ll just have to give it a go, and do what I can: Try to disentangle my mind and my mindless habits from the mesh of gossamer bullshit that makes me so constantly feel that I am being dragged farther and farther from what reality should be.

I think this project will touch on many subjects, like how we communicate, what we owe to one another as citizens, and why it’s so hard for me to cancel my Spotify subscription even though I only listen to the same four songs over and over again.

What microresisting can accomplish I do not know. My hope is that by thinking about it a bit, and clarifying what (if anything) it means, I can make it easier to do. And if I do the little microresisting things in the right way, often enough, then maybe somehow I’ll see if or how that connects to change in the big world out there, where people are eating the cats and the dogs.

At least that’s the plan for now. So far as plans go, it reminds me of a favorite cartoon from Poorly Drawn Lines: