The 24 Seven: Death, Then Birth
On the joy of contradictions and the blasé of outbursts
When I was growing up, my Dad would tell us that every Good Friday it’s sunny outside. And as long as I can remember, that’s been so. As I start writing this on Good Friday, 2025, it is sunny outside here in the suburbs of Washington.
To see Easter through a child’s eyes is to begin to understand some of the great contradictions of the world.
It’s “Good Friday”, but it marks the day of Jesus’s death. Why is it good? Shouldn’t the day of resurrection be called good? Why do bunnies leave eggs full of jelly beans? (I’ll add my own inquisition, Why are some of the purple jelly beans grape flavored, but the others taste like Christmas spice??)
I’ve been chewing on contradictions a lot lately.
Last weekend, I picked up a fresh copy of “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by Jared Loewen recently, spurred by its renewed status as a renegade tome.
I hadn’t read it in years and forgotten a lot of it, including Loewen’s central argument that American History textbooks avoid the pocks and warts of history so much as to make compelling stories 2-dimensional, flat, cardboard and as bland as a communion wafer.
Caricatures are boring, sanitized history about as interesting as a sanitized chicken dinner.
Years ago, when I started researching my biography of that blandest of politicians, Mike Pence, someone I’d been covering for six years already at that point, I already knew the flatness of his public image hid a rich vein of reporting and great stories.
(As one very astute source noted, “boring is his camouflage.”)
There was the time he had a phenomenal blow-up with his then radio producer in the ‘90s, the depths of his favorite Bible verse “Jeremiah 29:11”, the secret bathroom exit from the governor’s office for a clandestine departure in the 2015 “religious freedom” battle, his strong-arming of Donald Trump to get onto and then stay on the 2016 ticket and more.
And this was all more than a year before the sitting president of the United States painted a target on Pence’s back, the former vice president’s central role in federal and Congressional investigations into the insurrection and ultimately the run for president against his former boss.
Infinitely interesting, complex, contradictory and compelling, in ways you’d never guess from the flat speeches and unshakable white hair. (A fly could spend a lot of time up there figuring out how the gears are moving.)
I think about this often as I decide where to place my attention and my resources.
The demands for attention grow faster than any of us can, or should, comprehend, but there’s still only 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. (And I still need to cook, do the laundry, and fill plastic eggs with jelly beans.)
The news, journalism, reporting, mass media, used to be a limited good, requiring not much of our day — if any of it at all. The paper, the radio on in the background, the evening news.
That changed in a revolutionary way three decades ago with the popularization of PCs and dial-up modems and the clip has intensified continuously since then — flip-phones to cellphones (hard to call them smart, given the current widespread uses and societal effects); vetted news with deep reporting for the next morning’s paper giving way to quick hit blips with minimal depth, giving way to instant headlines of dubious accuracy (Tweets), giving way to “newsfluencers” and “YouTubers” worth millions of dollars; online searches with minimal distractions and relatively clean results evolving into constant marketing platforms.
And that’s before AI — masterful at instantly scanning and digesting endless information sources, but not yet fully accurate — began supplanting that “old” world of digital information.
Death comes before birth, as central a contradiction as I can think of.
Attention is the gold of this modern information world, the limited resource that everyone from Big Tech “oligarchs” to modest news startups (like your author) compete for. And the vast majority of it funneled through pocket supercomputers.
I spent the last decade navigating the vortex of meaningless, ephemeral, insta-scandals — powerful politicians performing to carve out their tiniest niche in the modern outrage industrial complex — to come back with useful, important, interesting stories.
(The world’s most “boring” politician turned out to be one of the world’s most important modern historical figures. Who’d’ve guessed that? Certainly not me when I started covering him 14 years ago.)
I’ve ruminated on this as I decide where to focus my attention.
I only have so many hours and so much bandwidth, a day wasted on did-they/didn’t-they is never coming back. (And, in spite of the news industry’s continuing challenges, we still have myriad incredibly talented, wise and dedicated journalists who work the heck out of these stories to bring clarity from intentional confusion.)
It’s one reason I’ve been so happy building “Sic Semper Tyrannis” with my very first intern reporter here at 24sight,
.When she turns in first drafts (“raw copy” as we’d say in the newsroom) I’m constantly surprised and thrilled by her findings in interviews with Virginia state delegate candidates, Virginia politics experts and more.
Local candidates running for office using Nextdoor?
Whodathunkit??
That feeling, the new, the interesting, the contradictory, is why I enjoy reporting so much.
Flat, anodyne stories are truly boring. Repetitive schticks get old, a photoshopped “outrageous” social media post about as interesting as a heavily-tested, on-script, campaign stump speech.
Discovery, the adventure, learning and wonderment (and some good music on the headphones), that’s what keeps me cranking away.
I hope you enjoy it, too, friends.
Whatever you celebrate this holiday season (even if it’s just the roads being a little clearer and the sun poking out more) I wish you a good one.
Now I’ll be returning to a different otherworldly mystery, discerning the flavor of the random purple Brach’s jellybean.
Cheers,
Tom
Love this!
Have you read Thaddeus Russell's Renegade History of the United States? Also Nick Offerman's Gumption? Might be a tonic for what you're going through.