Facing the Real World

When stuff is really wrong -- or maybe it's not? -- either way, it's gotta be talked about

Jul 05, 2025

*[Rubbish bags — or no, wait, are they just landscaping materials? — piled in an underpass on the High Line in New York City, May 2025. Photo by me.]*

1. Trying Only to “Do Art” in 2025 Is Impossible

For someone who believes, deeply, that creativity is important: current events are the enemy.

The creativity I’m talking about here — the “artistic” sort, whatever the medium1 —requires attention; it requires focus; it requires flow. A product of this kind of creativity consists of tens of thousands of little pieces (words, dots of paint, lumps of clay, whatever), applied individually… but the application of each separate piece is not what makes it “art.” What makes it art is “the whole thing.” And paying close attention to current events — that ever-changing fusillade of news and noise — makes it impossible to complete an entire coherent project. You don’t end up with a building; you end up with a pile of jackstraws.

And yet…

Unless you’re ready to go completely off-grid, you can’t ignore the bombardment. Your phone will continue to ping and/or ring. Your Inbox will continue to accumulate unread emails… You’ll want and need to learn and talk about stuff other than The Project du Jour, because that other noisy stuff does have importance of its own.

So, here goes.

2. Upcoming: A Discussion of Politics and So On

Sometime this week, I’ll be adding a new section here. If you’re already following or subscribing to this Substack, you will not automatically start getting the new posts: you’ll have to explicitly opt into them. (I don’t have a clever title yet; the torrent of current events has — ha! — made it impossible for me to think of one.)

How to opt into or out of a specific section of a Substack publication is described clearly here, in the Substack Help Center. (This is very useful information for any Substack publication, by the way.) Again, though, I haven’t added the new section here yet!

I’ve got nothing new to add to “the conversation,” really. I have no inside angle on anything in the news; I have no whistleblowers in my Rolodex, and I doubt that any of the news and opinion sources I follow are unknown to you. So, honestly: if you don’t want to read any more about it than you already do, I get it. The gods know, I won’t be tracking who doesn’t opt in.

Mostly, I’m setting this whole thing up because sometimes — in a culture going so desperately, crazily wrong — to say nothing at all about it feels desperately, crazily irresponsible. I want to count, I guess, and not to abstain.

3. What I Can Tell You in Advance

I’m not going to try to convince you to opt into this. But it’s only fair to let you know some things about it, up front.

I’m a lefty American — sufficiently so, that I’m ashamed of the lefty-American establishment’s failure to succeed, unambiguously, in the 21st century. That a far-right wing of public opinion even exists here is a mystery to me; that such a ridiculous political “philosophy” has gotten so much traction I blame entirely on the left’s failure to make its case emotionally as well as rationally.

Yet I also do not believe — I will never believe, and don’t, please, waste both our time trying to argue otherwise — that anything like a majority of the American electorate is “stupid.” Any aggregate of human beings contains a stupid minority, and the American public is no different.

But there’s genuinely, unforgivably dangerous stupid and there’s plain-old “Have you really thought this through?” stupid: if we can’t touch the hearts and minds of that second class of “stupids,” then we’ve got no business thinking of ourselves as lefty, and no chance to reverse the tide.

So that’s the perspective I’ll be writing from. Like I said, sign on or not; no commitment to agree required, and no offense taken either way.

4. Finally…

When I add a first post to open up the section, I’ll do a brief follow-up notice here. Otherwise, I won’t bombard you with updates. Thanks for reading, as always!