“We are living in a moment of existential dread and alienation caused by the savagery of social media, the ugliness of our politics, the AI takeover, our melting planet, a winner-take-all economy...” Those are the words of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. He doesn't lack for certitude. Most of us can't develop a read of the street we live on, but Milbank looks in the mirror and sees an ability to describe a nation.
About the alleged “savagery of social media,” all one can ask is why it’s so popular if it’s so awful? The question answers itself. What Milbank describes isn’t real. So much of what makes social media so appealing is the power of “like.” Call social media what it is: a way for people to be connected with existing friends, reconnected with old ones, and joyfully connected to all manner of new ones through a medium that largely celebrates living.
Regarding “the ugliness of our politics,” has Milbank forgotten the dinner hosted by Post owner Katherine Graham at which Washington eminence Clark Clifford described Ronald Reagan as “an amiable dunce”? What about the right’s endless obsession with Bill Clinton's private life? History books indicate that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson despised each other until they didn’t.
Thinking about Milbank’s profession and what occupies his mind most days, how odd for him to imagine that the “ugliness of politics” is descriptive of a nation’s dread in the way it is his own. Sorry, but Americans arguably aren’t as fascinated by what Milbank reads and writes as Milbank is. Which leads to another point.
Milbank is once again a writer. And not just any writer: he gets to opine on what he’s passionate about. Milbank isn’t required to spend his days in factories, or on farms (more on that in a bit), or any kind of activity necessary to perpetuate life, instead he gets to entertain, educate, and as evidenced by most of his Sunday columns, he gets to skewer a president (Donald Trump) whom he disdains more than any other he’s ever had the pleasure of covering.
And pleasure it is. It’s worth thinking about as Milbank laments the alleged “AI takeover.” What a snooty remark. Think about it. Technology doesn’t put us out of work, rather it frees us to do the work most associated with our unique skills and intelligence. Just as the tractor and fertilizer unearthed herculean skills formerly suffocated by a daily avoidance of starvation, imagine what AI will do for the workers of today who are doing what they must do, not what they want to do. Translated, tens of millions more Americans will soon view their work as Milbank has long viewed his.
“Our melting planet”? Oh dear. Isn't Milbank sweating in the figurative sense because he isn't in the literal? Only someone who has always been familiar with the comforts of air conditioning could be so worried about technological advances that mitigate the horrors of hot weather, and that used to leave a body count in the city where Milbank has made his name.
As for a “winner-take-all-economy,” when school starts in and around Rappahannock in the fall, it would do Milbank good to watch drop-off from a distance, and all the fathers doing the dropping off. Get it?
Eager to seemingly escape the brutal world that he claims we all inhabit, Milbank writes of his plans to write a book “about life on the farm.” Yes, Milbank has exchanged the fruits of his specialty not for something he has to do, but that he can do. For as long as the U.S. has existed, Americans were desperate to escape the farm. Now dabblers like Milbank can learn about life on it. What a luxury!
It suggests that while life today isn’t defined by “existential dread" as Milbank attests, this most certain of individuals might well be spoiled..
