Permission to Look Away

The challenge of Trump 2.0 will be knowing when to pay attention.

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“I am seeing so many posts on social media about boycotting the inauguration,” ran one Bluesky post. “Don't you dare. Don't you dare turn your eyes away from history, even the awful, scary parts. If you don't watch it with your own eyes, you rely on others to tell you what you saw. We must all bear witness to what's coming.”

I’m not gonna single this guy out, since this sounds like something a younger me would have written about something and we are all going to need to be extra gracious with each other over the next few years, but I did want to address this type of thinking about Trump 2.0. I think this person means well and earnestly believes there is something existentially edifying or at least valuable about “not turning away” from the inauguration. I also think it’s a pretty silly sentiment.

There are a lot of challenges facing us for Trump 2.0, and one of the big ones is going to be something that we did not do very well in round one: major on the majors. For the next four years, there is going to be a daily barrage of absolutely insane headlines the likes of which would probably microwave my brain on the spot if I were to gaze into the future and see even a tenth of them. A lot of these things are going to be pretty bad. But a lot of them are also going to be just stupid. Trump is and has always been a reality TV star and what makes a reality TV star good at their job is knowing how to make frivolous bullshit seem loaded with genuine dramatic importance. What is going to make us good at our jobs as informed citizens is knowing how to sift through the reality TV drama and the issues of actual importance. It’s my opinion that the inauguration is emphatically the former and if you want to look away then, by all means, have at it. I won’t be watching, I can promise you that.

I am, in general, sympathetic to the general gist of “don’t look away.” It’s the “eat your peas and carrots” of news consumption, and it has a lot of value. It remains incredibly sobering to look over recent history and see how stubbornly and successfully Americans did look away from atrocities in our own backyard, and the huge cost of that deliberate ignorance. To take just one famous example, the 900 Jewish refugees who fled Europe in the wake of Kristallnacht on the MS Saint Louis in 1939. Germany made it clear that it didn’t want them, so they left. What they didn’t anticipate was that nobody else wanted them either. Cuba, Canada and the U.S. all denied them entry, forcing them back to Germany where an estimated third died in Hitler’s camps. “We were not wanted,” M.S. Saint Louis passenger Susan Schleger would later tell the Miami Herald. “Abandoned by the world.”

So, yes, America’s legacy of looking away goes back to roughly her founding and has a storied history up to the present day, including but not limited to the genocide of Indigenous people, the slavery of African people, conspiracies against Jewish people, internment of Japanese people and ostracization of queer people.

That’s a pretty ugly list, and I didn’t include “the extrajudicial state execution of Black people” because the 2018-2020 period where those terrible videos seemed to be dropping by the week is when “don’t look away” started to reach its apex, but also became more ethically complicated. The social media age was in full swing. Basically everyone has a camera in their pocket. “Don’t look away” went from having an existential connotation (“pay attention to this!”) to a physical one (“watch this person die horribly.”) The idea of being an informed person with a functional moral compass started to get muddled with the idea of being a person who watched every police execution available to them. The nature of my job at the time meant that I did watch most of those videos, if not all of them. It does something to you, as I’m sure many of you know. There was a sense among some people that watching those videos was a penance — a cosmic self-flagellation for their complicity in systemic racism. Such people should ask themselves if all that abasement did one lick of good for those most vulnerable to police brutality.

That was where I first started to grok the difference between “not looking away” and “not ignoring important things happening in the world around you.” It is true that videos of police shooting unarmed Black men who posed no threat provided cold hard evidence of something Black people had been telling the rest of us for decades. There is simply no chance that the global protests that followed the murder of George Floyd would have happened if there wasn’t video proof of what Derek Chauvin did. However, it does not follow that it is necessary or even healthy to not turn away from any video of the police doing something terrible. You have an obligation to be reasonably informed about the world you live in. You do not have an obligation to consume every piece of media about that world.

This becomes much more important in the Trump age, where “consuming every piece of media” can be a real patch of quicksand. Trump’s an entertainer. There’s a perverse thrill in watching him cook. He knows you hate Pete Hegseth and he loves it. The man’s rank unfitness for the job is the whole point. The more we howl about what a dangerous outrage it is, the more he knows he’s putting on a hell of a show. It’s the only approval rating he needs. Eyeballs are eyeballs. Who cares if they’re watching in admiration or disgust? In his world, the point is that they’re watching.

From this perspective, “don’t look away” goes from being a moral imperative to a mental health liability to being really, really counterproductive. Donald Trump measures success is crowd size and every time you don’t look away from something he cares about, he chalks it up as a win. It is fully within your power to deny it to him. Just look away.

Now, in case it’s not clear, I’m not suggesting we look away from everything. Not even a little bit. On the contrary, I think there are a lot of things we should be paying quite a bit more attention to, and Trump’s inauguration simply doesn’t crack the top one hundred. It is not lost on me that many of the people who are now urging us not to look away have been studiously and brazenly looking away from the atrocities in Gaza for over a year now. That is something we should stop looking away from and I hope — no matter how stupidly — that Trump’s obsession with doing the things Biden couldn’t leads to some sort of ceasefire deal.¹ ²

I could go on and on about the things that I think we should stop looking away from but, suffice to say, I am resolving to do a better job at staying above the Trump vortex of news cycle after news cycle, all of which will chip away at what remains of our collective sanity, many of which will do material harm to people I care about and only a few of which will actually be within my power to meaningfully oppose. The few that I’ll be able to meaningfully oppose will be different than the few that you’ll be able to, so all of us are going to have to work together to stop or at least slow Trump’s designs for the labor force, queer kids and, most pressingly, immigrants. The things that I will have to care about will be different than the things you will have to care about, but all of us are going to have to be disciplined about what we care about, and resist the daily doomscroll into crippling therapy bills.

So look away. You’ve already heard Carrie Underwood sing. You know the one Village People song everybody else knows. Our elected officials have to be there and many journalists have a professional obligation to cover the event, but it will likely be very boring and dumb and if anything big does happen, you’ll hear about it sooner or later. What good will it do to put yourself through the agony of staying informed on this particular event? This is a good question to start asking yourself about news cycles generally.

The inauguration is going to happen whether or not you look away. But the rest of his plans are just that, right now: plans. They can be frustrated, disrupted and maybe even ruined by people like you and me. If we don’t look away.

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Applecore: Our Journey Through Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time RETURNS

Liz and I are listening to Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time. One album a day-ish, counting down to number one. We did this with Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 Albums of All Time, and it took more than a year. This should only take a hundred days or so. I’ll be posting a few thoughts here as I listen. We’ll be dropping standout tracks from the listen on this Spotify playlist here.

Here’s parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen.

40. Aretha Franklin: I’ve Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You

“What you want!” is how this record kicks off. You can hear it in your head right now, right? The opening blast of “Respect.” It’s so good. “What you want!” was how Aretha Franklin introduced herself on her Atlantic Records debut, the album that made her something more than a star, more even than a legend. The instant that “What you want” hit, there was no denying it. You were listening to greatness. Aretha kicks this album off dialed all the way up to 11 and she doesn’t drop an inch for the next fourteen songs.