Volume 4, Issue 41: Jeff Suppan

"In an unconventional move, the Cardinals pitcher is making a political pitch before his big Game 4 start."

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Wednesday evening, the President of the United States gave a speech about democracy. For most of my life, the notion of “defending” democracy would have seemed absurd; democracy was (or at least felt like) air, or the ground, or the sun—something immutable, undebatable, simply one of those things that existed wherever you happened to be. I know it was not like this, particularly for people not so fortunate to walk around so feckless and oblivious as people like me have been able to, but it did feel this way. There would be politicians in office that I liked, and politicians in office that I didn’t, but I did believe there was a base level of competence, an overarching understanding that at the end of the day, we were all in same car and whoever was driving would make sure that it didn’t go careening off the road and over a cliff. It felt like, no matter what, we’d make it.

It doesn’t feel like that anymore. And while there has been considerable debate as to whether or not it was politically effective, on the even of the midterms, for the President to make a big speech defending democracy, rather than focusing solely on the “pocketbook” issues voters ostensibly care about (issues that aren’t generally disconnected from whether or not we have a democracy, for what it’s worth!), I’m glad that he did it. I’m sorry, but I do think this is more important than the price of gas.

“As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America — for governor, Congress, attorney general, secretary of state — who won’t commit, they will not commit to accepting the results of the elections that they’re running in,” President Biden said. “This is the path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it’s un-American.”

But the thing about the speech—in which the President of the United States lays down, with as much urgency as he can muster (and genuine alarm), the vitality and importance of the American democracy—is that it sort of feels like a bummer to even bring it up. I am sure your eyes have started to glaze over. I am sure a lot of you would rather hear about baseball or mustaches or rock shows or whatever else you might expect to read about in these (totally free!) weekly musings. I’m sure a lot of you have already stopped reading.

And I totally get this. I really do. The very notion of politics, over the last seven years, has become so disconnected from the way human beings actually, in real life, interact with each other, so dominated by those scream the loudest, so rewarding of those that are most operating in bad faith, that it hasn’t been just healthy to tune out a little bit, it has been downright sane. It is particularly frustrating, too, to have seen the unprecedented engagement we saw during the last election cycle, and to see so much of that work thrown away, squandered or just ignored. There was a stretch there where it felt like the good guys could beat the bad guys. But right now it feels like there are more bad guys than ever before. Even those rare things we universally agree on are eroding and fading. Nine months ago, we All Stand With Ukraine. Today, 48 percent of one of the two major parties thinks the United States should back off. More recently (and even more disturbingly), a mentally ill person broke into the home of an 82-year-old man and hit him in the head with a hammer, and the response of the leaders of that party was either to claim it’s a wild conspiracy or to openly mock the elderly man who got hit in the head with a hammer. And that party is probably going to take back the House and maybe the Senate this Tuesday without rebuking any of those leaders—those leaders, in fact, will be rewarded. (My New York colleague Jonathan Chait explains the terrifying risk-reward calculus that brought us to this point.) The bad guys may be winning. And that’s discouraging.

And it’s just a bummer to talk about. I also do not, if I’m being honest, particularly enjoy writing about politics, not anymore. I once did, when I covered the 2016 election for Bloomberg Politics, an assignment I took to with legitimate patriotic enthusiasm. I believed (and still do, somewhat) that people who run for office, who put themselves out there, who are willing to deal with all the intrusiveness and vitriol that comes when you put yourself in the public square, should be celebrated: Even if I disagreed with them, I did respect the fortitude and willingness to try to change the world one small bit at a time, even if it came at the cost of career possibilities, family obligations and a good share of your dignity. One of my favorite pieces for Bloomberg involved watching Rick Santorum spend a whole afternoon interrupting countless Iowans’ lunch. People would just snarl at him mid-bite, yet he kept coming back. I respected him for that.

But of all the elections to sign up to cover, it’s fair to say that that was the worst one, the most demoralizing—demoralizing long before the way that it ended. By the end, my political reporting curiosity had been more than sated; after spending multiple weeks covering each party’s conventions, I had never just wanted to shut my brain off and watch a baseball game more in my life.

But more to the point: I do not consider myself a political writer. I write about politics occasionally, and in this newsletter, as well as in other venues, I’ve not been afraid to make my own political leanings known. In fact, today’s newsletter itself is part of a tradition here: I’ve written about the pending election every two years, right before Election Day. Here’s 2016, and here’s 2018, and here’s 2020. (And you are reading 2022. Uh, I’ve been doing this newsletter for a while.) But I also do not believe that if someone disagrees with me on something, they are inherently an asshole—or even that I am inherently right. Part of the point of this newsletter, in as much as it has one, is to try to find the universal in the specific: To discover the ways that, as human beings, we are alike—how we often share the same thoughts and experiences even though we are from different places, are different people, believe different things.

I am not interested in being a polarizing, divisive writer, sometimes to a fault. I am much more curious and invested in the things that we all have in common rather than the things that we don’t, which, all told, I find kind of boring. You have not had the exact same life experience that I have had, which means by definition we see the world in a different way. That’s a good thing. That’s how the conversation is supposed to start. How are we similar? What universal truths are out there? What can we learn from each other? The desire to look for human beings who confirm all the things we think we already know, rather than to find people who challenge us, who test our own beliefs so that those beliefs may be stronger and more honestly and intellectually held, is antithetical to how I see the world. I want to know what my friends in Brooklyn think just like I want to know how my friends in Mattoon think. I don’t need people to agree with me; I just need people to have thoroughly and truthfully thought through what they believe and why they believe it, so that we can have an actual conversation about it, along with everything else—the world, and life, and death, and love, and fear, and baseball, and sushi, and bad drivers, and Cate Blanchett movies, and all of it. That’s the fun of it. For me, that’s the best part.

But that is not the same thing as pretending that the differences don’t exist, or that it’s somehow impolite, or even off-putting, to talk about them. I got an email this week from someone who did not like an extended, joking riff I made on the Grierson & Leitch podcast about the Fox News talking points that claim cities with “Democratic mayors” were cauldrons of despair, murder boxes you try to escape as fast as you can so you might find the safety of a surrounding rural environ. (I also took an opportunity to make what I thought was good-natured fun of Jacksonville.) The person wrote:

After listening to your last Grierson and Leitch podcast I have decided your content is no longer for me.  I have been a long time listener to this podcast and the Seeing Red podcast.  I enjoy them both except for the political content. … I think your political talk marginalizes a segment of your audience and takes away from a very good podcast.  I thank you for the mostly enjoyable content I have been listening to for years with Tim and Bernie and the books you have written that I have read but from now on I will move on.  There are a lot of choices out there. 

I was appreciative of the politeness of this email—most aren’t so cordial; did you know that there are people who consider How Lucky some sort of socialist tract? There are! A lot of them!—and I thanked him for his note, letting him know I was honored he’d ever listened to any of my shows in the first place and that we’re gonna keep making them in case he ever decides to come back around. But the notion that you can somehow separate these things—that you can talk about sports, or movies, or food, or literally anything on the planet—without understanding their connection to the outside world (that’s to say: Politics) strikes me as absurd. And more to the point: I do believe that democracy is in peril in this country; that the Republican Party as it is currently constituted has become deranged and destructive; that many once-honorable people have painted themselves into previously unimaginable moral corners out of aggrievement, fear and a thirst for power; that abortion is health care; that government has an obligation to both protect and lift up its most vulnerable citizens; that bigotry in all its forms should be called out loudly and immediately and that a healthy society finds ways to limit the ways those bigots attempt to spread their poison; that even if you agree with his overarching point, which I don’t but can at least understand the problem those who do are trying to solve, Ron DeSantis is an asshole; that Donald Trump is one of the worst human beings currently walking on this planet; that my World War II veteran grandfather would agree that we should punch Nazis in their fuckin’ face. Saying so is not divisive, or it is at least not meant to be. It’s just that not saying so, in the midst of everything I see happening, strikes me as a moral failure. Someday my kids are going to look back at this tumultuous time in world history, and they’re going to wonder: Where did my father stand on this? They need to know that their dad didn’t stay silent, even if it didn’t ultimately make a lick of difference. I need to them to know, when they are old enough to understand, where I stood.

You might not agree with me on this: That’s OK! I will be out at the Georgia-Tennessee tailgate here in Athens today, and I will be drinking and cheering with people who voted for different state candidates for governor and the Senate than I did. (Though if you live in Georgia like me, I do hope you will vote for Stacey Abrams, Raphael Warnock, Bee Nguyen, among others.) We will still have a great time together. This is one of the great thing about sports, and friendships, and life: That old early-pandemic chestnut is in fact true—We’re all in this together, even if we sometimes try to pretend that we’re not. I will always look for the good in people, for the moments where we can find our common humanity, and I hope that people will do the same for me.

But that is not the same thing as saying that none of this matters, that the current state of our world and our nation is not in a very scary place. Because I believe it is. As the quote goes, the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I’m gonna keep fighting for it, however I can, even if it doesn’t make a different, even if I look stupid, even if I lose. I hope you will too. It is, after all, ours to share.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. You Need to Get Off Twitter, Now, Medium. Like the therapist told Carmela Soprano, now you can’t say no one ever told you.

2. The End of Kyrie Is Nigh, New York. What can you even say about this at this point?

3. Successfully Hiding Your Children From Donald Trump Jr., Medium. A parental success story.

4. Your World Series Game 6 Preview, MLB.com. Not outdated!

5. Your World Series Game 5 Preview, MLB.com. Less outdated!

6. Your World Series Game 4 Preview, MLB.com. More outdated!

7. Your World Series Game 3 Preview, MLB.com. Extremely outdated!

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Triangle of Sadness,” “Till” and “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we reviewed the Georgia- Florida game and previewed the huge Georgia-Tennessee game today.

Seeing Red, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Elon’s Twitter-Tilt,” Dave Karpf, The Future, Then and Now. This seems the best piece to me about what has happened in Elon Musk’s disastrous first week running Twitter.

Also, here is the story I wrote for New York about this weird new company called Twitter way back on February 6, 2009.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

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Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Dangerous,” The Mysterines. The Mysterines are fantastic and you are not listening to them enough.

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Go Illini, kids. (And Go Dawgs.) Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will