Our capacity to forget
Concussions, elections, and fuzzy memories
Yesterday, on a beautiful fall Sunday in New York, I met a friend and we walked through Central Park down to 57th street, where we ducked into a sports bar to watch some of the Commanders-Bears game. Both long-suffering teams have exciting rookie quarterbacks and some hope for the future, for the first time in years. It ended in an incredible Hail Mary completion to win the game for Washington: a tremendously fun finish.
The Will Smith movie Concussion came out in 2015. Smith played a doctor researching CTE and its relation to concussions in football.
Remember it?
I do, but it’s a little fuzzy.
In the 2010s, there were several high profile, heartbreaking cases of former NFL players suffering from CTE, some of them dying by suicide or committing violent crimes. Obviously the media covered these heavily. The NFL was forced to change some rules and pay some settlements. Concerned onlookers, myself included, swore off watching the NFL; a common refrain was “I could never let my kids play football.”
And then eventually, we mostly moved on. I’m back watching the NFL sometimes, although I feel terribly guilty when a player gets clearly shaken up and returns to the field. I hope the reforms to the game have helped, but there are obviously still lots of concussions and there will continue to be players who suffer from CTE.
But this article isn’t really about the NFL. A symptom of a concussion is forgetfulness, and that is what this article is about.
It is obvious to anyone who follows the tech industry that there’s been a massive shift in the acceptability of publicly supporting Trump’s campaign. The tipping point to me was when the All-In Podcast, an influential tech podcast where 4 wealthy, grown men call each other “besties” and debate stuff, hosted Jared Kushner.
Many tech people gushed over how thoughtful and articulate Kushner was in the interview; it felt like it began to give people permission to embrace Trump’s campaign.
Now it seems like at least in private, many of these tech elites have decided to support Trump’s candidacy:
Let’s assume you’re a wealthy VC or tech executive who has decided to support Trump. There are compelling economic reasons to do so. It will probably unfreeze big tech M&A if he changes leadership at the FTC. It will certainly pump crypto prices. Less regulation and lower taxes probably mean higher asset prices in general.
It may even help innovation in some real & important ways, although I’m less certain of that.
But it also means you either don’t care much about the many moral & democratic reasons not to support Trump or you’re forgetting about them, in the same way I have largely forgotten my anger towards the NFL.
I hope you fall into the latter camp, and if you do, I think it is important to remind yourself.
Remember the feeling on January 6th, as rioters stormed the Capitol and Trump pressured Mike Pence to stop the certification of the electoral college results?
Or the feeling of COVID being politicized to divide the country, instead of dealt with rationally?
Or the feeling of watching torch-bearing white nationalists march on Charlottesville, who were clearly emboldened by Trump’s election?
Trump is funny sometimes; he can even be oddly endearing when he is in a good mood. When there is not a crisis happening — when an unarmed Black man hasn’t just been shot by the police; when a high-profile sexual assault case hasn’t just come to light; when a Supreme Court judge hasn’t just been installed to a lifetime appointment— it can be easy to forget about the terrible consequences his presidency could have. It is important to remind yourself.
Since this touches on podcasts & politics, I should note that these views are mine and not my employer’s.
If you need more convincing, check out Woke Liberal Shill / former military general and Chief of Staff to Trump John Kelly saying that he would rule like a dictator.
Thanks to my friend Hal for giving me the idea of looking at concussion coverage in the media way back in 2020.
Tangentially related to concussions and mental ability: I think that if we had not been so distracted by Biden's obvious dementia we might have noticed more the decline in Trump's cognitive ability over the past eight years.
More than usually I am hoping for divided government, with the hope that each side can control the excesses of the other side. Sort of sad to be hoping not for good things, but just for less bad.--But perhaps that is how it has always been for us old, lamenting the ways of the young.
The January 6 event was bad enough, but don’t forget the 2 months of complete BS that our former president put the country through leading up to it. We had the 60 bogus lawsuits, we had the fake electors, we had the release of the “Kraken“.
On the plus side of forgetting, did you see the charming movie “Yesterday”? In that movie, a wannabe music star wakes up one morning and learns that the entire world has forgotten the songs of the Beatles. He uniquely remembers the songs, and once he begins performing them fame, glory and transformation follow.