Flooding the Zone with S&*t: The End Stage

Five unfinished columns, one exhausted bear, and the political cost of never getting to the bottom of anything.

Morning. It’s a pretty cold start here, and everything has become rather grey - the fur daemon and I are sitting on the little sofa in my study, starting the day slowly and thinking out loud about what to write, as I have felt stuck for the past few weeks.

I will say here, I’ve never really suffered from writer’s block - it just hasn’t particularly happened to me in the past.

In politics, especially over the past decade, there really is always something to analyse, debunk or, if both of those fail, shout about loudly into the interwebs. And I don’t think what’s happened to me over the last few weeks has necessarily been writer’s block in the traditional sense.

On the contrary, I feel like there’s just been too much to write about.

With politics in the modern world, there is always something happening. Always another scandal.

It goes hand in hand with that Trump/Bannon approach of “flooding the zone with shit”. Over the past couple of years, everything seems to have been ratcheting up relentlessly, to the point where you struggle to distinguish the signal from the noise.

And over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself falling victim to it.

There have been so many shiny things catching my attention - there are so many stories, events and scandals that have come to light that I have simply been unable to sit down and properly pay attention.

One of the problems is that scandals, in particular, need time to brew. Time to establish what happened, who made the decision, and who is going to suffer for it. If we’ve moved on to the next outrage before we’ve even answered those questions, the people responsible have rather conveniently been let off the hook.

Case in point: Oxford Street. For those who are unaware - which, judging by social media, should be very few people - Oxford Street was pedestrianised this past Monday.

Personally, I think it’s an excellent thing to do. Looking at European cities where this has been tried, there is plenty to recommend it. Of course, it comes with trade-offs. But judging by the reaction on social media, you’d think we were witnessing an utter catastrophe.

There are valid questions about access for disabled people, and those deserve proper answers. But turning the whole thing into another referendum on whether Sadiq Khan is personally destroying civilisation makes getting to those answers a great deal harder.

That column is sitting half written.

Somewhere along the way, I found myself asking: am I helping explain the issue, or just adding to the noise surrounding it? And I put it aside, at least for the time being.

And that brings me back to the question of giving things time. We need to be able to look at the arrangements, listen to the people affected and ask what needs improving. Somewhere in all the shouting, there are practical questions about how people will actually use the street. Those should be answerable.

Then I started writing about the Budget, which felt like the most boring Budget we’ve had in many, many years - for which, if I’m being very honest, I was very grateful.

I don’t think enough was done to help the everyday person, but it was, for lack of a better word, largely sensible. I struggled to pull my thoughts together because there seemed to be so little drama to latch onto. Which probably says something about how accustomed we’ve become to the bloody drama that drives these subjects.

A Budget can be boring and still leave people struggling. It can look perfectly sensible from a Treasury desk and feel very different when you’re working out what you can afford at the supermarket. I suppose that’s where I need to keep my attention: what changes for people, and whether it’s enough. There doesn’t need to be a spectacular political car crash for that to deserve a column.

Then there have been the elections overseas. Lula’s win in Brazil over Bolsonaro was something worth celebrating. I was personally very worried he wouldn’t make it, but he did.

Bolsonaro promptly fucking off to the United States, where he was welcomed with open arms, also offered quite the contrast with how Trump and his administration treat immigrants without millions in the bank. But, again, I digress.

The Israeli elections, meanwhile, have brought another sense of stalemate, with Benjamin Netanyahu determined to hold onto power at all costs, Likud the largest party in the Knesset, and opposition parties unwilling to work with Arab parties. Another political knot to try to untangle.

But the biggest focus over the last couple of weeks has probably been the US midterms and Trump himself.

He has always struck me as a sleazy mob boss you’d struggle to turn into an anti-hero, even with the writers of The Sopranos on the job. And it’s very easy to spend an entire column on how appalling I find him. I could probably manage several.

But that’s where I need to be careful, because my disgust doesn’t explain very much on its own. If I spend the whole time reacting to whatever he’s said, I’ve left myself very little room to look at what his administration is doing, who benefits and who is being hurt.

The racism and misogyny deserve challenging, but the scrutiny needs to continue once the clip has stopped doing the rounds. Otherwise, we’ve had another enormous argument about Trump, and still haven’t followed through on the decisions being made by the people around him.

But here I am again, moving from one story to another.

I currently have five half-finished columns sitting in my little Substack drafts folder. As soon as I start writing about something, something else happens and I feel I need to jump on that. Then something else happens. And something else. And something else, again.

Which is where this particular ramble of mine asks the question - have we reached the point where reporting, writing or analysing anything feels almost impossible because everything is covered in fucking effluent?

You don’t have to persuade everyone that you’re right if you can exhaust enough of them into giving up on figuring out what’s true.

That worries me.

When everything becomes another scandal, another argument, another reason to despair, it gets harder to sustain the attention that holding anyone accountable actually requires.

I’m sitting here with a laptop, dictating my thoughts and trying to make sense of things for the people who read me. Usually, I can find a thread to follow. Lately, I’ve struggled.

There are journalists who remain absolutely brilliant at making sense of all this. I’m thinking of people like Carole Cadwalladr, Peter Geoghegan, Ian Dunt, Sam Bright and the many excellent political writers on Substack. But I’ve found myself almost frozen by one question: what the fuck should I actually focus on?

So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by politics lately, you are not alone.

If it feels like too much, like there are too many things happening to get a proper grip on any of them, I’m right there with you, and without going full conspiracy-theory bear, I do think some of that exhaustion is the intended effect of this constant churn.

That doesn’t mean every story has been planted by some political mastermind. Plenty of people are quite capable of creating a fucking mess without coordinating it - but, I do think there’s an advantage for those in power when everyone watching them is too worn out to follow through.

I still care about the answers. I suspect most of the people feeling like this do. But caring cannot mean being permanently available for every fresh horror that lands on a screen. I need enough room to think about what I’m reading, and occasionally that means closing the bloody laptop.

On that note, I’m going to step away from politics for today. There are things I’d like to do around the house, and I suspect the world will manage to produce several more scandals without my personal supervision.

Have a lovely Sunday, everyone.

Photo by Lauren Mancke on Unsplash