Alternative realities
Things Trump's inauguration made me think about—on journalism, resistance, and Gaza.
However you arrived here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about trying to make sense of a changing world and our place in it—by reading, walking, documenting.
I’ve been quiet around here, mainly because some life and work transitions have been taking up my time and mental space. I’ve also been thinking again about how I want to use this space going forward—it feels like I’m doing this every so often, and I think it’s because I have compartmentalised my thinking and writing spaces, including offline in various notebooks and note apps on my laptop, thinking it’ll bring some order and a clearer mental state, when I only end up trying to categorise things and filtering what should end up here or there, or what is best kept private or for gestating work, to a point that can be paralysing. But I know I’d like to keep this newsletter going in some shape or form, though as you would have realised, I’ve stopped publishing guest essays, so I can feel less guilty about the ebb and flow of this newsletter according to the ebb and flow of my own life and moods, alternatively seclusion- and community-seeking. Thank you to all of you who continue to follow along here. Really, I’m grateful.
It’s fair to say that though I consume a lot of American media and culture, I follow U.S. politics only to the extent that it’s unavoidable, i.e. Instagram draws my attention to them. One day, I woke up, started my usual doomscrolling, and there it was: Trump had won his second attempt at the presidency, and there was his re-inauguration, playing out on my small screen.
The first thing I saw were two candid stories from a Washington Post reporter, which still live on X. In one of them she captured a staffer asking George W. Bush, “Are you going to behave?” and Obama sneaking up cheekily from behind, quipping, “Nope.” In a following video, picking up on the same thread, she asked Obama as he was walking past, “Did you behave, sir?” And he said, impishly, “Just barely.”
This made me think: Is this how we have to cover the news now, to feed attention to formal news reports, if it even does? No judgement, I follow Emily Davies because I really like how she uses Instagram to pull back the curtain a little on how journalism is done; and these Obama interactions were what made me continue, that morning, to scroll on so I could see more of the inauguration. I found these seemingly candid moments quite delicious and funny, sent them on to friends. At the same time, I do also have some misgivings about this sort of instant personality-driven coverage appearing more and more in mainstream journalism, I guess because it feels a little like gossip.
And yet, maybe this moment demands it? As the hypocrisies of those in power have been more clearly revealed to us, particularly through the lens of Israel and Palestine, we are hungry for a glimpse of what they are really like, what they actually do and say, and yes, what they joke about, beyond the official veneer we’re presented with. But to what extent can finding and highlighting these more informal moments, especially the funny ones, make light of dire events, make them something to sigh but still giggle about? At the same time, isn’t our knee-jerk response to absurdity simply to laugh? To be sure, the comedians were among the first I looked to for their take on Trump’s inauguration.