Cruel Optimism

Every day we're onto a new crisis brought about by mass shootings. We can't help but post about them, or enact our sense of grief and outrage, and drum up our political explanation for it. We lock horns with the other side, as they parrot back at us their own drummed up political explanation. It goes on like this for a while until we run out of memes, and we're about to concede some empathy with the other side and admit it's all more complicated and human than this, but before we can more shots ring out and we're onto the next one, spin the wheel and see who gets shot by whom to pick out the new narrative of victimhood, historical oppression, and false equivalence. It's not getting us anywhere, but it's taking up our entire horizon of concern and the circumstances and being shuffled too quickly for us to find our footing. The spectacle of violence and our visceral disgust with racism, black and white, trumps the time we would need to develop less self-righteous opinions. We can't help but check-in and react, terrified of being branded as apathetic or apolitical. But this isn't politics. It is the cruel optimism for a politics that we hope can advance, but it's not about interests and coalitions but ratings and spectacle. That's what I learnt from this book.

Cruel Optimism is also the company in California that will come spray paint your lawn green during water restrictions to keep your middle class yard looking good even when the well is drying up. It won't be Nero fiddling in our case, it will be someone in a visor watering their lawn with the last potable drops in the water table.