X.1 — Reactors to the Guy
Politics and codependence, Camazotz and The Braindead Megaphone, detachment and selfhood. The start of a new series I'm calling "X."
First a quick programming note: You might (or might not) have noticed that I migrated platforms. Hopefully this doesn’t affect anything on your end; I just like Substack better than Revue.
I plan to start sending these newsletters more regularly, every Friday or so. That’s a big leap from once every four months to once-a-week, but I’m cautiously optimistic. Writing is easy, right?
My favorite essay on the modern media is "The Braindead Megaphone," by George Saunders (you can read it in its entirety on Google Preview here). Saunders invites us to imagine a party: people are milling around, making small talk and generally enjoying themselves, when a man with a megaphone starts to speak. As Megaphone Guy addresses the room, the atmosphere shifts:
Say he starts talking about how much he loves early mornings in spring. What happens? Well, people turn to listen. It would be hard not to. It’s only polite. And soon, in their small groups, the guests may find themselves talking about early spring mornings. Or, more correctly, about the validity of Megaphone Guy’s ideas about early spring mornings. Some are agreeing with him, some disagreeing—but because he’s so loud, their conversations will begin to react to what he’s saying.
Saunders wrote this back in 2007, but his metaphor for modern media applies now more than ever. The media is nothing if not loud, infiltrating our lives from all angles. Even if we’re not paying much attention, media has a way of informing our sense of self, framing our conversations, arranging events into narratives, and directing our attention. The media is a guy with a megaphone, blathering on incessantly, and it’s nearly impossible not to respond.
Saunders sums up the situation: “These responses are predicated not on his intelligence, his unique experience of the world, his powers of contemplation, or his ability with language, but on the volume and omnipresence of his narrating voice.”
As easy as it is to read this as a spot-on prophecy about Donald Trump’s presidency, I want to notice the broader systems at play. Trump weaponized the megaphone better than anyone, but I’m more interested in the megaphone itself—the media and its role in American society.
Mass media has changed drastically in recent decades. We could talk about the advent of the 24-hour news cycle in the nineties, powered by advertising and motivated by entertainment value. Whereas the news used to be confined to certain time slots—the morning paper, the evening news—now it was perennial. We could talk about the dawn of the Internet and then smartphones, mass media slipping into our pockets and hibernating on our nightstands. None of this comes as a surprise. Suffice to say that the megaphone has gotten louder.
Now, whether you’re a Democrat or Republic, you’re stuck with it. Whether you get your news from Breitbart or The New York Times or your great aunt’s saucy Facebook posts, the talking points are all the same. For all our diversity of sources, the messaging is remarkably consistent. If the megaphone starts a conversation, you’re bound to notice. You’re allowed to have your own opinion on, say, Critical Race Theory, but you’re not allowed to ignore it. The megaphone wins.
Saunders likens it to a ruler:
…this community constitutes a kind of de facto ruling class, because what it says we can’t avoid hearing, and what we hear changes the way we think… Like any ruling class, this one looks down on those it rules. The new twist is that this ruling class rules via our eyes and ears. It fills the air, and thus our heads, with its priorities and thoughts, and its new stunted diction.
Under Megaphone Guy’s rule, partygoers cease to value their own thoughts and unique presence. Their personhood is diminished. They begin to adopt positions as “reactors-to-the-guy.”
It’s got me thinking about codependency.
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A brief history: The term “codependency” was coined in the late 1970’s to describe spouses of people who were chemically dependent. Understood as a coping mechanism, codependency was a way of dealing with a loved one’s drug or alcohol abuse. Over time the term has broadened to encompass a wider range of relationships, in which one person lets their behavior be affected by another and responds with attempts to control.
Melody Beattie, a writer who popularized the concept in the 1980’s, hones in on one key feature of codependency:
The word react is important here… Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They under-react. But rarely do they act. They react to the problems, pains, lives, and behaviors of others. They react to their own problems, pains, and behaviors. Many codependent reactions are reactions to stress and uncertainty of living or growing up with alcoholism and other problems.
Reading this, I can’t help but think of our relationship with Megaphone Guy. Is it possible that we’ve become codependent with his omnipresent voice?
I think of my Instagram feed, the way I can find out about a current event merely by watching the flood of reactions to it. Often I’m beset by frantic memes before I’m even aware that something has happened. In a mixed huddle of friends, a reaction to today’s trending topic sets off a flurry of hot takes—until the takes get a little too hot and we grow quiet.
If the media starts a conversation, we continue it. We share and retweet. We amplify certain voices and shun others. We react.
When Beattie describes the culture of a codependent household, I hear similarities with our public discourse. She names a series of unspoken rules that prohibit, among other things, “open expression of feelings; direct, honest communication, realistic expectations, such as being human, vulnerable, or imperfect; selfishness; trust in other people and one’s self; playing and having fun…”
Because it takes so much energy to write this newsletter plainly, rather than hinting or hiding, I know what it’s like to struggle with “direct, honest communication.” Because I have spent so much time re-working short Instagram posts, I know what it’s like to get nervous with an “open expression of feelings.” And because basic conversations often feel like they have oddly high stakes, I know what it’s like to wish for the grace to be “human, vulnerable, or imperfect.” Can you imagine a public discourse that left room for “playing and having fun?”
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Now is a good time to note that I’m not a mental health professional. I may know how to drop cool therapist phrases like “What I hear you saying is…” but I can’t administer EMDR. I’m just a guy who weathered 2020 and is now weathering 2021—a year in which the dominant emotion, according to The New York Times, is languishing—armed with a stack of books on attachment and trauma and some enlightening chats with therapist friends.
So when I gently suggest that we might be codependent with mass media, I don’t mean it as a diagnosis. I’m hazarding a guess.
It’s hard not to see the similarities in Beattie’s many anecdotes about codependent wives of alcoholics. Rightly troubled by their husbands’ addictions, these women do everything they can to survive. They keep tabs. They coerce. They sound alarms and recruit others to the fight. In doing so, they became enslaved to their spouse’s addiction. Their mood rises and falls on his stormy seas.
It’s no accident that the modern media facilitates unhealthy attachment. We know that the news profits from our alarm, that our smartphones are made to be addictive, that it is not a bug but a feature, as if codependency were baked into the design. We are overstimulated, made aware of more threats than we could possibly take in. We wither under “compassion fatigue,” the natural result of an “attention economy” that is constantly drawing on our limited resources of seeing, hearing, feeling. It’s exhausting.
Remember the media under Trump’s presidency? Four years of hand-wringing. Shrill outcries. Countless articles, untold hours of work, daily headlines that largely amounted to, “Can you believe he just said that?” I don’t mean to pick on Liberals; I see the same thing on the Conservative side. That pervasive feeling of victimhood, all those warnings of impending doom.
And yes, of course, there truly is cause for alarm. No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we are right to notice abuses of power, injustice, and peril—just as the codependent is right to recognize the damage wreaked by a loved one’s addiction.
As good modern thinkers, we believe we can somehow think our way to salvation. If the Internet is full of disinformation, the solution is fact-checking. If our family members are “ignorant,” we need to educate them. If our opponents give us “fake news,” we need to become better informed. One would think that humans are primarily brains in need of right thoughts, instead of relational beings driven by a desire to attach and belong.
We each have our solution to the world’s ills, the things we put our hope in. I like the way my friend Blaine put it in a recent article for And Sons. “Think about the state of the world. In a rare honest moment, fill in the blank: if people would just _______, the world would be better.”
But what if our best efforts can’t save us? What if all our fact-checking, educating, and informing is making us more entrenched?
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Maybe you can’t relate. Maybe you’ve never stayed up late, slumped over your phone, clicking through articles, filing away data like ammunition for a coming battle. Maybe you’re a more well-adjusted human than I am.
I admit that I’m probably more prone to this kind of codependence than others. I can get obsessive about the wrongs I see in the world. I have a strong sense of justice, and I’m especially troubled by lies and abuses of power. I climb on my high horse and ride out like Paul Revere.
I am also rigged with sensitive antennae, attuned to messages in the air. The same equipment that makes me sensitive to God’s voice also catches darker frequencies. I don’t mean to sound woo-woo, but sometimes my airwaves flood with static, until I can barely hear the voices of my friends.
These things are hard to describe; a children’s story might help. I’ve been revisiting Madeleine L’Engle’s books (more on that in future newsletters), and I’m awed by how well she captures these dynamics. In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg must travel across dimensions to save her father from The Dark Thing, an evil force that is obliterating life throughout the universe.
She visits Camazotz, a place where everyone is caught in a terrible loop, acting and speaking in time to The Dark Thing’s dictates. No one has agency. Everyone follows a script that is scrolling through their minds. When Meg finally works her way through a series of subterfuges and reaches the man who is pulling all the strings (achieving that tragic dream of anyone who blames the Illuminati for the world’s ills), something still seems off. Her younger brother, Charles, realizes the truth after he tries a physical attack:
“I’m not sure what you are, but you” — he pointed to the man in the chair — “aren’t what’s talking to us. I’m sorry if I hurt you. I didn’t think you were real. I thought perhaps you were a robot, because I didn’t feel anything coming directly from you. I’m not sure where it’s coming from, but it’s coming through you. It isn’t you.”
Let me be honest. When I talk about static in the airwaves, The Dark Thing that forces itself upon our thoughts, I am not thinking primarily of Fox News or Facebook. And when I talk about the Braindead Megaphone, that mouthpiece that “fills the air, and thus our heads, with its priorities and thoughts,” I’m not really thinking about mass media.
I am much more concerned with that power which is at work in the world to destroy the image of God in us—to X us entirely. The Apostle Paul probably had something similar in mind when he wrote that we don’t “battle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers…” (Ephesians 5).
Maybe that makes you squirm a little, or roll your eyes. But I’m confident you feel it too, in your own way, the persistent lie that your voice doesn’t matter, the picking apart of whatever meaning you find in life, the far-reaching presence of that slandering tongue, that smothering hand, The Dark Thing trying to obliterate you.
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How do we relate to a world that often feels unsafe, within cultural narratives that distort our sense of reality? If all our efforts to defeat Megaphone Guy only make us more entrenched, what hope do we have?
These are honest questions that I’m not sure I have the answers to. It’s been a hard couple years, during which I often find myself pitted against the voice that tries to X me. I keep trying and failing to have the last word (you might notice a similar theme in my other newsletters—I’m still learning).
What I find helpful about the codependent framework is that it proposes a first step. When Megaphone Guy’s voice seems inescapable, I need the same thing the codependent needs: detachment.
Detachment is the choice to opt out, a return to open-handed and generous relating to the world. It is permission to be human again, to know that we are small and have no saving power. It is the freedom to enjoy our lives and use our freedom how we will. It brings us back to the present moment, at home in our bodies and safe in community.
If Silicon Valley turns us into commodities, profiting from our frantic attention, detachment gives us back our personhood. If the news plays on our anxiety to get more views, detachment restores our peace. If The Dark Thing maneuvers us into its pinched narrative frame, detachment returns us to a broad space where we can hear the sound of our own voices again. We can let go. We can detach.
How does this make you feel? I find in myself a sense of excitement, as well as some nervousness. I’ve spent so much time solving all the world’s problems—and quite well, I might add—that I’m afraid to let go. Beattie offers some helpful (and embarrassingly self-helpy) questions for consideration: “What might happen if you detach? Will that probably happen anyway? How has staying ‘attached’—worrying, obsessing, trying to control—helped so far?” She invites us to imagine letting go:
Spend a few minutes visualizing yourself living your life, feeling and behaving that way—in spite of your unsolved problem. Visualize your hands placing in God’s hands the person or problem you are concerned about. Visualize His hands gently and lovingly holding that person or willingly accepting that problem. Now, visualize His hands holding you. All is well for the moment…
I’ve appreciated how Black Liturgies has modeled this detachment, reminding us that our rest is an expression of our freedom and that our bodies don’t belong to the world. Our rest is a weapon. Far from making us passive, detachment frees us to recognize an actual crisis when it happens, and to respond appropriately.
This rest is a relief, although it may not be the relief we wished for. We want a cleared battlefield hung with victory banners. We want a world that affirms our existence and is imbued with meaning. For now we get a paradox, the beautiful promise of Psalm 23, “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies.”
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Detachment is a good first step, but more is needed. We can’t only distance ourselves from this unhealthy connection; if we don’t find a better lover, we’ll come sulking back. Even the most resilient stoic needs to belong somewhere. The human heart was made to attach.
Who are we attaching to? And how secure is that attachment?
Questions for another time.
We’ll keep this conversation going for the next couple issues, talking more about media, selfhood, and attachment. In some ways this is my attempt to engage our unique cultural moment. It may also be my way of working through 1 Peter, which my church has been reading together this year.
I’m not sure if it’s possible to draw together all the threads I’m trying to connect. We’ll see. At the very least it should be interesting.