Beware False Endings

Donald Trump is himself a creature of television. His image was magnified by TV; his reputation was laundered by it. And he has brought the underlying logic of television—in particular, its assumption that every day is a new episode that might erase what came before—to his governance of the country. He has treated the White House’s coronavirus press conferences, when he holds them, as blank-slate opportunities to recast the day’s reality in his preferred terms. He treated his own infection with COVID-19 as a nearly sitcomic event: drama and resolution in one easy episode, the ending punctuated by a declaration from the president that he had been “healed.”

In May, Politico published a story outlining the Trump administration’s decision to reopen the American economy despite the ongoing presence of the coronavirus. The administration took that action against the advice of the White House’s own health advisers. “There’s this mindset that it’s like running a show and you’ve got to keep people tuned in, you’ve got to keep them interested and at some point you’ve got to move on and move on quickly,” a former Health and Human Services official told Politico. “Viewers will get tired of another season of coronavirus.”

Read: When the cliff-hanger takes its sweet time

This is impatience rendered as public policy; it assumes that the American attention span is as limited as the president’s. It has its insights: Americans are, indeed, exhausted. This show has gone on for far too long. But Americans have also been living through a cultural moment of delayed, or fractured, endings. Cliff-hangers keep hanging. Podcasts tell their tales over weeks and months, punctuating statements not with periods so much as ellipses; they bring the shapelessness of the internet—Facebook feeds and Twitter streams—to their storytelling. It’s no surprise that this is also the age of the reboot and the sequel, in which characters come back from the dead so regularly that every person in fiction—or, more cynically, every piece of intellectual property—has the potential to be Lazarus-ed. Saved by the Bell has been saved for a new generation. Supermarket Sweep is sweeping once more. Insider, earlier this month, offered a list of “TV reboots, remakes, and spin-offs that are in the works.” The list has 25 entries.  

That environment of constant churn—the ongoing sense of no ending—could prove beneficial should Election Night become Election Week, or even Election Month. Americans have already begun making their peace with uncertainty. For better or worse, we are slowly learning patience. “There Won’t Be a Clear End to the Pandemic,” my colleague Joe Pinsker wrote in September. (Instead, he noted, Americans should expect “a slow fade into a new normal.”) The pandemic, that framing acknowledges, isn’t a single story—any more than climate change or racial justice or economic inequality are single stories. This has been a year of partial acclimation to that fact. Endings are seductive. They suggest order, and resolution, and relief. But they don’t always suggest the world as it is. That realization might help Americans to prepare for the times ahead.

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.