Pump This Washington Post Meltdown Story Straight Into My Veins

Not that that's healthy or anything

This is not a column about last week’s meltdown at the Washington Post. That has been discussed here, there, and everywhere. This is a column about how I reacted to the meltdown at the Washington Post. This is about what that tells me about how we relate to news and politics.

To say that I enjoyed the Post story is a massive understatement. There are salmon returning to their spawning ground who are less obsessed with their mission than I was with consuming every morsel of this delectable shit soufflé. In a time when Hollywood is arguably struggling to find stories that connect, real life gave us a narrative with vibrant characters and deep meaning that makes Hamlet seem like a six year-old prattling on about his rock collection.

Why was I so obsessed with this story? Why did I devote twice as much attention to it in the past week as I did to Ukraine or the January 6 hearing? I think there are two reasons, and neither of them are healthy.

The first reason is that this story confirmed several of my priors. If you read this blog regularly, you know that many of my columns relate to an over-arching narrative that goes a little something like this: