Linger there at your peril — and at democracy’s.

View in Browser | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book.

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/FrankBruni »

If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here.

Cristina Spanò

Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

Political analyses come and political analyses go. Not all that many of them stick. But a recent one by my colleagues Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy will. I knew that when The Times published it about two weeks ago, and almost daily since then it has popped into my mind as both a reference point and a metaphor for so many tensions among Democrats, so many forks in the road as the party evaluates its potential presidential nominees and ponders its best strategy and message.

“The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate” was both its headline and its thrust; I very much hope you’ll use this link to go back and read it. It elucidates a few dynamics that are too easily missed and that those of us rooting against a second term for Donald Trump overlook at our peril.

The chief dynamic is that the hyperventilating in the foreground of the news — in other words, the content that rules Twitter and is all too riveting to journalists who linger there — is a poor reflection of what actually animates most voters and fully penetrates their consciousness. It’s a poor gauge of public opinion.

As Cohn and Quealy put it, “Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its ‘woke’ left wing,” because that’s the wing tweeting so frequently and furiously. “But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.”

Twitter is the noise, not the signal. And it’s the noise at an especially intense, misleading and distracting decibel level.

Some of the people distracted by it, I fear, are Democratic candidates for president, who frequently respond to the winds and whims of Twitter, failing to consider the wider audience and longer game. Maybe that’s the right call if the goal is merely the nomination, because primaries most reliably attract engaged and enraged partisans, and thus are more Twitter-compatible than the general election. But the general election is where Trump ends or begins anew, a fate powerfully influenced by who has been chosen to end him.

Will he or she be a Twitter-triggered candidate or a candidate with a bit more distance from its heat? That’s a dichotomy expressible in other ways: stridency versus a softer touch; passion versus plotting; a call to arms versus a path to peace. In each case, Twitter favors the former.

Maybe I’m just feeling down on social media, which I’ve been down on for some time. Despite its power to unite — and the many positive ways in which it brings people in need together — it proves time and again to be an even more potent tool for division. I broached this in a column not long ago, but for a more current and probably better take, read my colleague Kara Swisher on the violence in Sri Lanka and the hand that social media played.

I also talked about the limits of Twitter in a column on the re-election of Gina Raimondo as governor of Rhode Island. To go by Twitter, she was staggering toward defeat. In Twitter’s judgment, she’s an incidental Democratic player with negligible power compared with a social-media superstar like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Wrong and wrong. But those are precisely the sorts of misimpressions that Twitter creates.

So as you come to whatever opinion you do on impeachment, and as you figure out which Democratic presidential candidates are the smartest bets, remember that an overwhelming majority of Americans spend little to no time reading or sending tweets. Ration your own exposure to Twitter or at least be skeptical of any apparent consensus there. It’s but one forum among many forums, with a fury that’s a trap.

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to friends. They can sign up here.

Public Education and the American Dream

A seventh grade social studies class at M.S. 51 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Dave Sanders for The New York Times

In last week’s newsletter I wrote about my father, and I mentioned that he’s the son of immigrants from Italy who spoke little English for years after they arrived here. I also mentioned that they didn’t point him toward college — they didn’t really understand what college was — and that he ended up there in part because he had the good fortune of economically heterogeneous elementary, middle and high schools, with students from more affluent backgrounds whose paths he could learn from and emulate.

Many of you were moved to respond to those bits of his biography. A Japanese-American reader wrote in to note that access to the “American dream” — a phrase I used for my father’s trajectory — has too often hinged on a person’s ethnicity or skin color. He said that his relatives’ experience of internment during World War II forever warped their futures here.

Other readers reflected on how their ancestors — from Western Europe, from Eastern Europe, from Asia — had so much in common with the immigrants disparaged by President Trump and went on to make important contributions to this country, including children and grandchildren who are integral to its greatness. My inbox was a poignant reminder that we are indeed a nation of immigrants. That’s one of our most treasured distinctions and indisputable advantages.

One reader — O.K., my uncle Jim, who spent his distinguished professional life as an educator — said that I should have stressed that my father’s schools were public ones. He’s right, and it’s a crucial point, because public schools have a potential for diversity that most private schools don’t. They certainly do if they’re well attended, and that hinges on their performance, their results, their quality, which is nowhere near what it should be. That we haven’t made more progress on this front and that it isn’t a top-tier political issue are shameful, because there’s no engine of advancement to rival a good education, and there can be no social justice and equal opportunity as long as many Americans can’t get such an education outside of exclusive enclaves with severely limited enrollments.

One newsletter reader, who works at an outstanding public university, wrote: “Being carried along by more affluent, better-informed peers and their parents was precisely what got me to college, too. We spend so much time in higher ed (and with public policy in general) trying to solve problems of information, but it’s all about problems of belief. If you see the people to your left and right accomplishing something, it’s easy to believe you can, too. If you’re isolated from that world, and no one around you is going to college or landing white-collar jobs or eating fresh fruit or whatever it is, then odds are good you won’t believe in your capacity to do it, either.”

So how do we push back against increasing economic segmenting and cloistering and integrate — or in many cases reintegrate — America? Especially in the classroom, which is where convictions and habits that govern whole lives are born?

Saying No to FOMO

Kit Harington in “Game of Thrones.” HBO

Before you ask: I do not have a strong opinion about the second episode of this last season of “Game of Thrones.” I didn’t have one about the first episode, either, or for that matter about any of the episodes in any of the seasons prior to this. I have never watched “Game of Thrones.”

And, writing that, I brace myself to be drummed out of the League of Sanctioned Cultural Observers.

I feel about “Game of Thrones” the way I do about skiing, which is another diversion that acquaintances of mine, shaking their heads and sighing in pity, tell me I’m a fool to miss out on: Having never relished or craved it, why embrace it only to wind up with another time-consuming (and in the case of skiing, expensive) pastime? Already I have novels, wine, word games (I’m a nut for The Times’s daily Spelling Bee if you haven’t tried it), “Homeland” and epic walks with my splendiferous pooch. I’m good.

Sure, you say, but don’t you feel estranged from the conversation? Aren’t you surrendering a ready point of connection with all those “Game of Thrones” — excuse me, GoT — fans around you? Isn’t the critical mass of GoT love an affirmation that’s worth heeding? Wouldn’t you, as a writer, be able to make some clever GoT allusions that are forever lost to you now?

All fine arguments. But here’s an alternate take: Isn’t the flush of independence from not following the crowd — from resisting Soul Cycle and then Peloton, from going to a restaurant that no one else chatters about instead of the ones whose patrons crow about the table they scored — as satisfying as any communion with the sensation of the moment? And don’t you need to edit the world somehow? As an old friend of mine used to say, “You can’t be invited to every party.”

I discussed drawbacks of Twitter and other social media earlier in this newsletter, and to those I’d add that they can become peer pressure on steroids, in regard to cultural experiences as well as political thought. They’re the wellspring of FOMO, a widely circulated shorthand for Fear of Missing Out.

But FOMO is a terrible reason to devote time to one activity versus another. FOMO-fed behavior is reflexive, conformist, lazy. I’m partial to JOMO, the Joy of Missing Out. And that’s because JOMO isn’t about contrarianism. It’s about contentment with a different route. I live a television existence impoverished of dragons (they have those in GoT, no?) and beheadings and wild sex. I’m sorry to miss the sex. But not, I guess, sorry enough.

On a Personal Note

“What’s that red plastic thing in the corner?” a friend asked the other day as she walked into my kitchen.

“Oh,” I answered, “that’s my sharps container.” I explained that I now go through four needles and two syringes a week as part of a ritual of injecting myself — in my belly, in a thigh — with either a treatment or a placebo. I don’t know which. That’s the nature of the drug trial I’m in.

She asked what was involved, and I explained that I have a batch of vials in the refrigerator; I take one out exactly an hour before the injection, to let it come to room temperature; I use a long needle to draw liquid from the vial into a syringe; I get any air bubbles out; I replace the long needle with a shorter and thinner one; I sterilize the injection site; then I quickly stab myself, plunging the liquid from the syringe into some combination of fat and muscle — in my case, probably more fat than muscle. The first and third times I did this, I felt a brief burning; the second and fourth times, nothing. The used needles and syringes go into the container my friend saw.

This will last for six months.

“I couldn’t,” my friend said. “I just couldn’t.”

She’s wrong. I know because I would have said the same thing a while back. But what my medical odyssey has taught me is that each of us can soldier through more than we imagine: When it’s what’s necessary and sensible, it’s just what you do. You tap a calm and a strength that you didn’t know you had. You fashion a perspective that had never occurred to you before. Simply put, you cope, and the process and satisfaction of that is a kind of compensation, even a gift. That’s no rationalization. It’s the truth.

My odyssey concerns lost vision in my right eye and the threat of the same in my left, as most of you know and as newcomers to the newsletter can catch up on here. There’s no cure for my condition, known as N.A.I.O.N., but there’s ongoing research; hence my participation in an earlier trial — I had a drug injected directly into my eye — and now this one. I’ll tell you more about the intriguing science of the current trial, which is relevant to a range of ailments including Alzheimer’s, in future newsletters.

These injections I give myself unnerved me at first. I’m not dexterous. I’m not patient. And I’m no fonder of needles than the next tender-fleshed creature.

But people with diabetes deal with a drill like this their whole lives. Women undergoing fertility treatments, children on human growth hormone: It’s a huge, varied club of us with tiny pricks across our bodies and sharps containers at home.

Pincushions of the human race, unite! Let us take pride in our forbearance. Let us celebrate our grace.

“For the Love of Sentences” will return next week; nominate bits of writing from The Times by emailing me here, and please include your name and city or town of residence so that I can properly acknowledge you. As for my dog Regan’s DNA test, I await the results, will announce them as soon as they come and have saved the guesses about her mix of breeds that many of you sent in. Thank you for those!

Have Feedback?

If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at bruni-newsletter@nytimes.com.