Numlock Sunday: Megan Garber on Misdirection

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Megan Garber who wrote the new essay collection On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics from The Atlantic.

Megan is a writer at The Atlantic, and the magazine has compiled a number of her essays into the new book. It’s a great read, an exploration into the ways that American political actors have parlayed the techniques of entertainment to their own ends. Today, we talked about amusing ourselves to death, what happens to a country when politics becomes entertainment, and Dwight Schrute. 

Megan can be found at The Atlantic and the book, as well as several other new compilations of essays from the magazine, is available wherever books are sold. 

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Megan Garber, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

You have a new book, it's a collection of a lot of your essays at The Atlantic, it's called On Misdirection. What prompted you to figure out this beat and tease out that you were covering misdirection over the past couple years?

A lot of the things that have really interested me about politics and political discourse, let's say, over the past few years are the ways that we are trained to see each other and then also to not see each other. It seems like so many things, so many of the big political stories, particularly at the beginning of the presidency of Donald Trump, and then up till now, so much has come down to are we seeing what we should be seeing, or are we in fact looking away from what we should be seeing?

Ideas about vision is actually one of the main drivers of all of these essays, which are very different other than that. I'm a political junkie, I love to follow politics and all of that, but I kept feeling for myself just as a news consumer, "Is this really the most important thing right now?" All these shiny distractions, daily outrages that come and go, and I know I myself, as a news consumer, often feel very addled, almost, and just in a constant state of distraction.

So these essays really do try to figure out what happens to that form of distraction on a mass scale. If I'm not the only one feeling this, but if a lot of people are feeling this, what are the consequences of that?

I loved how also you kept it in some of the more conventional forms of media as well, too. I know that a lot of our conversation about distraction has been related to social media and algorithms and kind of blamed on Silicon Valley ghosts that are destroying our brains.

But a lot of what you talk about is just super day to day. It's the way people talk about other people, whether it's on television or radio or things like that. Do you want to expand on how it's not just necessarily what we're doing online?

The first essay, actually, is a look-back at the scholar Neil Postman, who's one of my favorite thinkers, critics, et cetera. He wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 that was looking at the impact of television, essentially, on American culture. And as you might guess from the title, making an argument that the entertainment has slipped the bonds of mere fun and mere escapism and distraction and has actually come into our lives and come to infiltrate lives in a lot of ways.

Looking at him in retrospect is the first essay in the collection. We chose that specifically because I think one of the other arguments underlining a lot that's in the book is that entertainment, as much as I love it, and I am an inveterate lover of entertainment of all kinds, but it can, I think, also become fairly pernicious when it becomes our standard of judging things in the political realm.

One example that's in another essay in there is the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The talking points, it seemed to me, among Trump's allies had nothing to do with the facts at hand. This was a legal proceeding, conducted by lawyers, by Meta lawyers, in fact, in Congress. Yet the arguments were nothing to do with the facts, but "this is boring." That was essentially what it came down to. "Ugh, snooze, ugh, no one's watching this." All that kind of stuff.

When again, this was an impeachment trial of a president, there were facts at play, and yet the talking points completely elided that. What struck me as well, though, was it was not just partisan talking points. One news organization had an entire op-ed about the impeachment trial, sort of complaining that it lacked pizazz. Pizazz was literally the word that was used.

I think there's this way that if we're not careful, the sort of logic of entertainment itself, this idea that everything has to be fun, that boring is its own kind of factual argument, that's what can happen. That was what Neil Postman was talking about.

That, I think, is what's happening right now, too, where just entertainment becomes the only thing that matters at the end of the day. That can become, I think, pretty quickly dangerous and bad for us as a culture.

That was a really remarkable argument in the book. Again, I'm a huge fan of pop culture. I like being entertained, but it just felt weird how so much of the language and the desire of pop culture was being adapted and weaved into politics.

You mentioned obviously Trump, and rallies, and the impeachment, but you had an example in there about Pete Buttigieg after the Iowa Caucus that I thought was really potent where it's just, the question isn't like, "Did we win?" It's like, "Aren't we having so much fun?"

Exactly right, and the Iowa Caucus is as famous and infamous for not having an immediate result. Very quickly, things went awry in a quite extreme manner there. Exactly what you said, Pete Buttigieg put out a talk saying, "We have shocked the nation," claiming victory even though no such victory had been claimed. Just like you said, this idea that shock is even part of the conversation, that shock is a value on its own, I think just speaks to the way that fun and high emotional stakes of everything are infiltrating, I think, our rhetoric and logic as a culture.

I think also just we talk a lot about overheated rhetoric. Just everything is heated, and everything is ratcheting up at all times, and I think one of the extensions of the ratcheting is that we as news consumers and as citizens just become accustomed to evermore levels of drama, of outrage, of everything. We're sort of losing the ability, I think, to have a moderate anything in our conversations. Everything is just bigger, dramatic jazz hands.

So, we may as well get to some of the heart of this. There's obviously a guy who comes up a couple times in your book who is very good at this, bit of a controversial figure, but you just keep on coming back to him, I think, for reasons that are clear.

What draws you to Dwight Schrute?

I will say, during the early days of the pandemic, I've always been a fan of the show The Office, and I went back to it as a comfort watch, a soothing watch in these really awful days. I was newly familiar with The Office.

For anyone who might not be familiar, The Office is a U.S. sitcom, but it focuses on a very small office in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There is a boss, Michael Scott, who is kind of an oaf in a lot of ways. And then one of the other characters in the show is, yes, Dwight Schrute, who I've always been fascinated by, because he's this amazing contradiction, this walking category error.

He is a beet farmer, but he has these authoritarian tendencies. I'm trying to think of how to describe Dwight. He's just a lot of things at once. I think one of the things that's so interesting about him is that he is this person who very much thinks that he knows better than everyone else what the rules are, that he can decide the rules for himself and then, importantly, inflict them on other people.

So, Dwight thinks he is basically the ultimate agent of law enforcement, literally and otherwise, in the office. In fact, again and again is a physical danger to his colleagues. Just that tension in Dwight felt very resonant to me, as you say, for other political figures and power players as well. I wanted to look at Dwight as almost a character and a trope who conveys so much about the people in political power, often, who make up their own rules and then enforce them and inflict them on everyone else.

This idea of, "We're doing it because I said so," and that's the only explanation you're going to get, and these lies that just, everyone just lies without any real sense of backlash or anything. And a lot of that, to me, seemed to be conveyed in Dwight.

There's an appeal to him. You can understand, in a democracy where appeal is a key component of accessing power, that despite the obvious flaws in his leadership capabilities for a large duration, you can see how a guy like that just might appeal to a large group of people. I guess we can now broaden it out a bit, how do you think that applies to American society as a whole?

A lot of the supporters of the fellow we've been talking about, poll after poll suggests that they feel a sense of encroachment. They feel like they used to be de facto at the top of American societ