Carol Bergman

 

 

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk…

 

-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (2005)

 

Because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is a very different category from what's important for sustaining a flourishing society.

― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (2025)

 

 

 

I read Postman in grad school and have recently returned to his books in between and alongside Chris Hayes' mindbender. Inspired by Postman and Hayes, kindred thinkers a generation apart, I've been keeping my eye on the firings, defunding, abnegations, and resistance in media organizations.

 

I am sure, for example, that the commentators on Morning Joe were thrilled when they heard that John Grisham had been booked to publicize "The Widow," his 51st book. There were questions that any experienced journalist might have asked during that interview, but everyone around the table was dumbstruck and fawning. I've always wondered if Grisham had any assistants poring over the news to generate story ideas, or a plot. Why didn't anyone ask that question? And what about his former active opposition to the death penalty? Is he still involved in that struggle given the retro climate in the country? And so on. Instead, Grisham was allowed time to recount his well-known daily writing routine without interruption, and ended with the complacent "and then I go out and play a round of golf."  Everyone dissolved into giggles.

 

Bad news for professional media watchers accelerated when Bari Weiss became Editor-in-Chief of CBS news and asked—or  insisted, or suggested—that 60-minutes reporter, Leslie Stahl, interview  "peace negotiator" Steve Witkoff and his sidekick, Jared Kushner, last week. Why did Leslie Stahl agree to Weiss's "request?"  What did Bari Weiss, or someone else, say to her behind closed doors? To watch Leslie Stahl stumble as she asked inane questions was painful, until she got to the word "genocide." For an instant, the bold Leslie Stahl surfaced.

 

The authors of Project 2025 would undoubtedly prefer the silencing of intelligent, informed interlocutors, and an unquestioning stupefied populace, to complete the demolition of American democracy. 

The way to secure liberty is to place it in the people's hands, that is, to give them the power at all times to defend it in the legislature and in the courts of justice.     -John Adams

 

A people fired ... with love of their country and of liberty, a zeal for the public good, and a noble emulation of glory, will not be disheartened or dispirited by a succession of unfortunate events. But like them, may we learn by defeat the power of becoming invincible.    - Abigail Adams

 

―  From The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

 

  

Early in the morning of the No Kings demonstrations, before sunrise, before breakfast, I called a dear friend in Bath, UK, to remind myself that as much as I resisted leaving England after a decade, an eventual return to America was inevitable for personal, political, professional and historical reason. In conversation with my dear friend, explaining and complaining about all that has transpired here, I wanted to test my commitment to the American Experiment. I complained more than I explained, and for an instant I felt disloyal, which is a strange sensation for me. I consider myself cosmopolitan and transnational most of the time, and I love London (and Bath) with a heart-stopping devotion.  So why this sensation of disloyalty?

 

I had turned down Austrian and EU citizenship—the  first phase of my self-imposed test—though  I had fantasized often about once again sitting in cafés in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and London and meeting a cohort of writer friends at the end of each working day. But this was before the implementation of Project 2025, the not so slow-moving fascist coup. Now that we are in the midst of a myriad of day-to-day challenges that have impacted every family in my orbit in some way, I cannot imagine jumping ship, or can I?  And how privileged I am to even contemplate such an eventuality.

 

I put on a yellow headband for No Kings Day. I thought of the British reverence for their still extant monarchy despite the recent disturbing news about Prince Andrew, and an experience I had in the House of Lords when I was called to testify to a committee about an article I'd written for The Times Educational Supplement. And one of the Lords said, "We thank Mrs. Bergman for her article and suggest she return to America posthaste."  If memory serves, and it usually doesn't, I think he also said, "where she belongs."

 

So, America is where I belong and where I set out on No Kings Day to donate a bag of clothes to a local church and dump my compost in the compost pile before attending a celebration sponsored by the Margaret Wade Lewis Center which will be housed in the Anne Oliver House on Broadhead Avenue in New Paltz. It seemed appropriate on this celebration of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech day to show up there to support Esi Lewis after her house had been violated with racist tropes; the perpetrator has still not been caught. She's the President of the Center; her mother, Margaret Wade Lewis, was one of the first Chairs of the Black Studies Department at SUNY New Paltz. The Ulster County Executive, Jen Metzger, was there, as was the Town Supervisor, Amanda Gotto. I chatted to Amanda about the outpouring of camaraderie, the massive turnouts at protests everywhere, and then snapped some photos. It was a mellow, sunny day and everyone was engaged, high-spirited, and optimistic. 

 

 

 

Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

 

-Martin Luther King Jr. Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech December 10, 1964

 

The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.

 

-President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10 2009

 

    

 

I've been listening to Martin Luther King Jr.'s  and Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speeches—available on the Nobel site. The speeches are biblical in their exalted intensity, though Obama's is sometimes grounded in descriptions of the particular challenges his administration was confronting. Although he sometimes sounded like a preacher, he was not a preacher; he was a politician. King was a schooled preacher, then and now an unsurpassed orator. Both men led their flock to activism and hope.

 

I thought of both of them today after receiving texts and emails from friends in New Paltz about a disturbing incident that took place just steps away from my home. It has not, as yet, been officially designated a hate crime—motivation must be established—and the perpetrator is at large, but it feels and looks like one to me. It is reminiscent of the swastikas scrawled on Jewish businesses and homes in Germany as Hitler rose to power.

 

Here is an excerpt from Terence Ward's report in the October 10 issue of Hudson Valley One:

 

The New Paltz town council member was setting off to drop [Esi] Lewis' nine-year-old at school when the pair saw the graffiti scrawled in dark spray paint on their house, which included crude sexual imagery, a profane instruction regarding an intimate act, and that nine-year-old's name. They were both deeply disturbed, Lewis confirmed. "We are afraid to be home." 

 

An image of the "graffiti"—a  regrettable use of the word as it implies street art—appeared in the paper. I won't use it to illustrate this blog post, for obvious reasons. 

 

Just a word about Esi Lewis—a lawyer, the DEI officer for Ulster County, a member of the Town Board, a devoted parent, and the President of the evolving Margaret Wade Lewis Cultural Center in New Paltz, named after her mother, a founding faculty member of the Black Studies Department at SUNY New Paltz. None of my description fully describes Esi's energy and devotion to the town where she was born and raised; she made a conscious decision to return here. As a parent myself, I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to see the verbal attack on her home with her child in tow.

 

I have interviewed Esi, and crossed paths with her at various events over the years. I trust her deeply-felt concerns about racism in this ostensibly "liberal" town. When I first arrived here in 2018, there was little recognition of the history of enslavement, for example, or the legacy of Jim Crow after emancipation. Much has changed in the intervening years, and awareness is evolving, particularly on Historic Huguenot Street where signage of stone houses with their slave quarters has been updated. 

"People of color are afraid to be involved in public life…We are not honest as a community about racism — it's a real problem. This country was built and founded on racism. We are not immune," Esi told Terence Ward.

 

I reflect on this dissonant reality often, especially in the current fraught social media-driven climate. The breakdown of civil discourse, the cruelty we witness every day with round-ups and deportations, is inflammatory. Those who hate have been given permission to speak their hatred aloud, or to act on it. Peaceful existence and co-existence cannot be achieved, or re-established, in such an unsettling and unsafe climate.

 

To understand a working definition of hate speech, and the best protocols to counter its potentially violent effects, consult the UN's Fact Sheet:   https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/notohate_fact_sheets_en.pdf

 

 

I wasn't old enough to know how to pretend that everything was fine.

 
-Richard Powers, Playground

 

 

I was listening to the #SistersinLaw podcast on the way to the swimming pool. Joyce, Kim, Barbara and Jill have become my best friends of late. Imagined, of course. I turn to them for calm assessment and hope that the "rule of law," as commentators iterate and reiterate ad infinitum, has not been utterly sundered. But on this Saturday morning, the Saturday of which I speak, the sisters were chitchatting as they usually do before they launch into their chosen legal topics of the week, and I was paying close attention to the prompt: what do you do to relax?  The answers were variable, of course. Lots of word games, sports, and walks. Joyce has her chickens, Barbara is a football fan, Jill and Kim enjoy their dogs. The prompt got me to thinking: do I ever relax? Well, I was on the way to the pool to swim my meditative laps so I was confident in that moment, at least, that I do. But there are days when I am not attentive enough to self-care, especially if the news is so engaging, albeit painful, that I cannot quit reading articles about it, or listening to podcasts. PS: I begin my day with a BBC podcast as opposed to NPR these days. "Happy Talk News," has now permeated the American media sphere, corporate overseers are editing copy, firing and shifting personnel, succumbing to pressure, etc. Well, here I go again, and still.

 

Unlike many in my cohort of friends and family, I have a high tolerance for bad news. I've reported on war, atrocity, discrimination and cruelty often over the years. Indeed, I started writing about tough stuff when I was very young, and the protective callous has rarely been pierced. But I'm older now, feeling more vulnerable, and the cumulative witnessing has taken its toll. Not to mention that the news is more excruciating than it has ever been in my lifetime. Self-care, as modeled by my #SistersinLaw, is essential to continue important work, write freely, and remain steady. To this end, I have established new guidelines for myself and initiated new activities:

 

   *Fresh air and sunshine, or cloud watching, daily.

* Regular coffee/tea dates with kindred spirits.

*Reread Jane Austen to honor her 250th birthday.

*Visit art galleries with a sketchbook, no words allowed on the page.

* Indulge in restorative naps.  

*No news after 6 p.m.

* Study French yet again.

    *Study German yet again. 

 

I hope, dear reader, you enjoy my 8-point plan, which is fluid, and will change and amplify, as needed. It requires no diplomacy, abnegation, secrecy, or ultimatums. I thank the #SistersinLaw for leading the way to rest and recovery, by example. I dedicate this blog post to them.