He’s back. As usual with free posts, this one went out to premium subscribers a few hours early. For a free trial, click here:
Did I miss anything? Any FBI raids on former Presidents’ summer homes, or assassination attempts on controversial authors, perhaps?
Honestly, I’m kind of glad I was busy doing touristy stuff (sometimes in rural areas with spotty internet and cell phone service) while the news cycle kept churning. One of the worst things about social media is the pressure to have a hot take RIGHT NOW!!!!!!! before all the facts of a case are known.
I certainly have my strong suspicions about The Orange Guy’s criminality and possible light treason, and what motivated that guy to stab Salman Rushdie, but I don’t think the world lost anything by my being unable to opine about it as it was happening, especially considering how many commentators beclowned themselves by tweeting theories that were outdated as soon as they hit the “send” button.
Charles Cooke also got back from vacation around the same time, and he says unplugging for a few weeks was exactly what his soul needed:
As promised, I disappeared from the face of the earth for a couple of weeks. And boy was it glorious. I didn’t manage to lock my phone in a drawer, as in 2016 — a sign, perhaps of how much more I use it now than I did six years ago: today, my phone controls my lights, my garage door, my speakers, and it has my movie tickets, my Disney World reservations, my credit cards, etc. — but I did manage to stay off Twitter and to ignore my work emails and to resist the temptation to check the news websites every few hours. And, in so doing, I remembered something that I remember whenever I step away for a few days, but that I can forget the rest of the time, which is that while there is of course a lot of important information in the news, most of what happens inside the journalist-media ecosystem on a day-to-day basis is not only irrelevant, self-indulgent nonsense, it is also inscrutable to everyone who doesn’t follow it by the hour.
CNN publishes a new story every seven seconds. Politicians tweet every minute. Something marked “BREAKING!” will hit the ether on the hour, every hour. But the ones that actually matter during a random fortnight? They can be summed up in a matter of minutes. As for Twitter? Signing back on to Twitter after two weeks away can feel like coming out of a coma after half a century has elapsed. Everywhere, there are references you don’t understand (“it’s grub evening, folks”); fights whose provenance you simply can’t imagine (“he wouldn't apologize for discanoning me!”); new terms that don't seem to comport with the standard rules of English (“nooo wutcat”). And here’s the thing: none of it matters. It’s all insular fluff. If you want to understand the real world, one minute spent in the supermarket is worth two hours online.
[…]
Leaving the maelstrom for a while is also useful for setting life in a useful context. That useful context: that most of the people who work in journalism and in politics are lunatics — myself included. I spent a lovely two weeks with my family swimming, going out to eat, taking boat rides, visiting amusement parks and museums, playing golf, watching movies, hanging out at the beach, chatting about sports, and then I came back to The Internet and was told almost immediately that the United States was on the edge of a civil war. This is absolute nonsense, and if you meet anyone who tells you this in the wild, you should kindly ask them to log off and go spend some time in physical America, where people disagree profoundly on some pretty important questions but simply do not talk or think in the way that people do on social media or on cable news or on the opinion pages of our major newspapers.
It’s interesting, and kind of sad, how Twitter has left me permanently on guard for people saying controversial, insulting or downright offensive stuff in person. Obviously it’s going to come up now and again, but by and large, no one is going out of their way to find an argument when the screens are turned off.
As for the trip itself, the province has been promoting 2022 as “Come Home Year,” beseeching the Newfoundlander diaspora to return after a few years in COVID lockdown. (It’s a throwback to 1966, when then-Premier Joey Smallwood beckoned everyone home to gawk at the long-overdue paved highway connecting St. John’s to Port aux Basques.) I spent most of it in Terra Nova National Park with my parents, and exploring some of the surrounding communities.
I also got to visit my mother’s hometown of Badger’s Quay, and my late grandmother’s hometown of Greenspond, a bit further north. Look at this scenery and imagine how crazy my ancestors must have been to think they could actually make a living in a place like this. But they pulled it off.
After that, it was back to St. John’s, the largest city in Newfoundland and Labrador by a wide margin. Of course we made the obligatory trips to Cape Spear and a nighttime visit to Signal Hill, but it’s at the overlooked south side of the harbor where you can get some truly spectacular views of the city, especially the famous Battery neighborhood overlooking the narrows:
I’ve made a pretty good home for myself here in Halifax, itself a beautiful, historic city, where I have my kids and my wildly moderately modestly legal practice. But Newfoundland will always be home.
Constantly being on internet news sources is wildly stressful...more than one can ever imagine if one never shuts it off. After trying to follow everything for a year during Covid, my rule of thumb has become: if it's in the news right now and has any significance, it will still be in the news tonight and probably for the next week or so. In other words, I won't miss anything important by just reading the email notifications from major news sources every day or two. And, it's MUCH more relaxing.
People who have never gotten food anywhere but a grocery store don't realize how much one can do with a garden bed, a few chickens and your hands. Having a large family, I've gone to some lengths to cut food costs and especially improve quality (coming from a farm, no one is ever going to convince me that the meat sold in grocery stores is healthy. After a year on that, I was overweight and feeling depleted.) The trick is to source meat in bulk from small Maritime farms where meat is still raised fairly naturally (but which are increasingly being pushed out of existence by laws such as that a small farmer may now raise only 25 turkeys in a year! That's not enough to feed *my* family, nevermind for a small farmer to feed their family and still sell small-scale.) To call the basis of such laws "food safety" is rubbish - has anyone in the Maritimes ever actually gotten sick from some home-slaughtered product they bought at a farmer's market?? IMRO, it's about handing more power to the food system (those same grocery chains that, according to the news, are increasing prices more than they really need while Nova Scotians skip meals to pay rent).
Being able to look after yourself and raise a sparse, but sufficient supply of your own food is an invaluable skill which will likely become more so over time, while resources to do so become increasingly inaccessible as they lie in the hands of ever larger companies.