The Distraction Storm

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, May 23, 2021

 

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell observed.

 

What’s even more of a struggle is avoiding it. That’s why we have the distraction storm.

 

Thinking about the present is, for some of us, nearly unbearable. One way we deal with that is by inventing fantastical future scenarios — now catastrophic, now paradisiacal, from climate disaster to various political utopias. That is how you sell lottery tickets and home-title-protection policies — by making the future, its promise or its terror, an analgesic against the pain of the present.

 

Or else we look in the opposite direction, to the past, inventing for ourselves exaggerated histories — lost glory for the nationalists and sentimentalists, exculpatory personal and collective trauma for the social-justice set. This sometimes produces results that are morally ghastly but wildly entertaining: One cannot help but delight in something like The Me You Can’t See, in which Glenn Close, a movie star who grew up the daughter of moneyed Greenwich socialites and was educated at St. George’s School in Montreux, competes just ruthlessly in the victimization Olympics against the Duke of Sussex, that worthy gentleman who groans under the yoke of being only sixth in line to the British throne.

 

(That the referee in our national woe-is-me championship is Oprah Winfrey really is too perfect: One can only imagine what Winfrey, the daughter of an unmarried domestic servant born into a viciously segregated Mississippi and raised in rural poverty so absolute that she wore potato sacks for clothes as a child, makes of Prince Harry’s lugubrious sadsackery.)

 

What we do at the personal level, we also do at the political level. That is why we are so fixated on statues put up a century ago and on the average daily temperatures a century hence — anything to avoid looking soberly at our real troubles in the here and now.

 

Whites are a minority in New York City, but Mayor Bill de Blasio is much more at ease talking about the purportedly omnipresent specter of white supremacy than he is about, say, his city’s currently declining population. And as refugees from Mayor de Blasio’s incompetence scurry off like — well, one wants to write rats, but those are staying put in New York City and prospering mightily — let’s say, exit rodentially to wherever it is they are going, what are the powers that be in New York doing? They are not sitting still for it — no: The mayor and the city’s chief lawyer have just announced a lawsuit against Exxon, Shell, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute in order to “stop climate change in its tracks,” as the mayor put it.

 

Well.

 

Maybe people will one day flee New York because of climate change — right now, they are fleeing it because of crime, anarchy, filth, dysfunction, and the policies of Bill de Blasio, who, like so many of his ilk, manages to be heavy-handed even as he causes chaos. Mayor de Blasio would rather talk about the average temperature 80 years from now than, say, Manhattan vacancy rates today, and what those tell us about his governance.

 

On the opposite coast, we have the example of San Francisco, where retailers such as Walgreens are closing stores because the city now takes the municipal form of a failed state. (Yes, yes — Pakistan remains very comfortable for its ruling class, too.) The city of San Francisco is unable — or, in the case of its dopey D.A., simply unwilling — to perform the most basic function of a government: protecting property. San Francisco once had a great deal of shoplifting, and now it has day-to-day looting, to such an extent that some stores cannot afford to stay open. Clerks and shop-owners are generally too terrified to try to do anything in response, and those who do attempt to intervene are — because this is the great age of social justice — routinely denounced as racists. Store clerks are abused, threatened, and sometimes physically assaulted, but nobody cares very much, because San Francisco is a city run by insular wealthy people in the interests of other insular wealthy people, and the largely poor and disproportionately immigrant work force of pharmacies and convenience stores is, regarded from the peaks of Pacific Heights, disposable.

 

Some retailers operating in San Francisco, notably Safeway, connect this directly to Proposition 47, which reduced the penalties for such crimes, while San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin (son of terrorist/Columbia professor Kathy Boudin) simply refuses to prosecute shoplifting cases as a matter of policy. So it isn’t a mystery why this is happening, and there are pretty obvious ways to counteract it. But you probably aren’t going to run into Prince Harry or Glenn Close picking up their own prescriptions at Walgreens.

 

In response to the looting problem, the San Francisco board of supervisors is . . . meditating upon its program of action under the Paris Agreement on climate change. The people who care a great deal about climate change and who believe that municipal action in cities such as San Francisco is going to have a meaningful effect upon it are preposterous and delusional, but they have a lot more clout in those cities than do the nobodies working the overnight shifts at California convenience stores.

 

And so we are held hostage by their daydreams and their nightmares.

 

“We’re taking bold, aggressive action because our future depends on it,” Mayor London Breed says. Not to address crime — to address carbon-dioxide emissions. San Francisco, she promises, will “set a standard for the rest of the country.” Let us hope that it doesn’t, because the future of San Francisco does not depend on its sanctimonious implementation of a largely symbolic climate agenda; the future of San Francisco depends on Walgreens and Safeway and thousands of businesses like them, their employees, business partners, vendors, and suppliers, and the shoppers and the tax revenue they generate. And, unlike Mayor Breed, pharmacies provide life-saving goods and services.

 

San Francisco is not in need of a bold, imaginative plan. It is in need of government — basic government, government of the oldest and most fundamental kind, government of the sort understood by everybody from Machiavelli to Hobbes to the decidedly lesser figure of Rudy Giuliani, who was a pretty effective mayor before he became a lunatic courtier.

 

What is necessary to understand in the present is that our current cultural convulsion — the constant, distracting storm of outrage and panic and hatred and denunciation that plays out over social media and in real life every day — is being used as moral camouflage for failing institutions, from city governments to federal agencies and from the college campus to the commanding heights of media and technology. The burghers of the Bay Area won’t be around to comment on the weather in 100 years, and they’d much rather not talk about what’s happening down at the corner drugstore right now.

 

It is important for governments to look to the future and to understand history — planting trees under the shade of which we never will sit and all that. But governments at all levels also have a responsibility to the here and now, to the clear and present, to the local and the ordinary — a responsibility to see what is in front of their noses and, when necessary, try to do something useful in response to it.