High Drama, Low Impact Indignation

Once in a while, a writer nails the zeitgeist.

My mom has this tiny dog, Buddy Ricardo. He’s two years old and is the sweetest, smartest little guy you’ll ever encounter. He really is adorable and fun but he requires almost constant attention. If mom, dad, and I are in the room talking and not giving him all the focus, he leaves room and finds something to destroy—a shoe, a hat, a bag, anything he knows he isn’t supposed to tear to shreds. He’ll come into the room so we can see that if he isn’t receiving his due, he will chew this forbidden item to pieces, unless he gets his way. The only thing my mom does to discourage this behavior is to ignore it, not chase him, demonstrate that his destruction of personal property will not get him what he wants. It’d be a solid strategy, I think, yet sometimes Buddy gets something in his jaws that mom really doesn’t want ravaged and wrecked. Something she cannot ignore. Then comes out the yelling and the broom (which she only brandishes but never actually uses on him).

You know when you’re aware of something happening in the world but you can’t quite get to the phrase that defines it? We have so many words and labels that don’t fully encapsulate ideas and movements—woke, privilege, colonization, misogyny, whiteness, accountability culture, virtue signal—all are accepted by the consensus as meaning something but few can agree exactly what they mean. They’re mushy words that blur the ideas behind them and, at some point, become useless.

When a writer or orator just gets one right, it’s a revelation.

Helen Lewis, in her contribution to the massive Atlantic If Trump Wins project, coins the phrase “high drama, low impact indignation” to define, well, here’s a quote:

Rather than focusing on how to oppose Trump’s policies, or how to expose the hollowness of his promises, the resistance simply wished Trump would disappear. Many on the left insisted that he wasn’t a legitimate president, and that he was only in the White House because of Russian interference. Social media made everything worse, as it always does; the resistance became the #Resistance. Instead of concentrating on the hard work of door-knocking and community activism, its members tweeted to the choir, drawing no distinction between Trump’s crackpot comments and his serious transgressions. They fantasized about a deus ex machina—impeachment, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the pee tape, outtakes from The Apprentice—leading to Trump’s removal from office, and became ever more frustrated as each successive news cycle failed to make the scales fall from his supporters’ eyes. The other side got wise to this trend, and coined a phrase to encapsulate it: “Orange Man Bad.”

Picture protesters screaming down their ideological opponents about gun rights, transgender rights, abortion rights. Highly dramatic. The drama fuels the clicks on social media—a transgender woman calmly explaining why her pronouns are an essential part of her journey to self realization isn’t nearly as interesting to view than a transgender man shrieking his pronouns at top volume, unhinged in the face of some conservative speaker in public. A environmental activist discussing the overwhelming science that indicates the coming apocalypse isn’t even close to as exciting as some kid throwing oil on a famous painting or gluing herself to a roadway.

Drama is the coin of the social media realm. No one would bother to watch a young black woman explain to a professor that allowing white students to potentially wear blackface as a Halloween costume is a really bad idea but the video of her going nuclear over this issue, barking at the professor, nearly foaming at the mouth? That’s viral, baby.

The protests turned riots in the summer of 2020 were incredibly dramatic. Images of young people throwing bricks and frozen water bottles at police, torching vehicles, and looting stores were watched by millions. Yet, reporters repeatedly denied the violence and continued calling it all non-violent. The CDC at the time declared that social distancing was essential but pivoted for these protests.

The difficulty with these high drama exhibitions is that they rarely last beyond that viral moment and thus, have relatively low impact on creating policy solutions. The protests for police reform have fizzled out and most police reform created in their wake have been stalled or reversed in favor of more anti-crime legislation. Big Oil has made more record profits in the past five years than in the previous twenty. It isn’t the screaming that has states across the union (including Kansas) codifying a right to abortion in their specific constitutions, it’s voting. It’s the work of door-to-door lobbying. It’s in persuasion rather than shame. The melodrama behind transgender rights expansion has resulted in more restrictions on this cohort than existed before the drama.

Like Buddy Ricardo, the process seems to be “I don’t like this, so I’ll do the most destructive, loud, obvious thing to get your attention so you’ll give me what I want” rather the behind the scenes sort of work that tends to move the needle in that direction. Like my mother’s tiny white dog, it becomes a spiral of the same activity over and over with no clear resolution beyond the short term attention.

Change requires patience and consistency. Lasting change needs daily energy rather than momentary performance. I’m reminded of the shift in marketing back in the day when those of us without wads of cash needed to promote our shows in Chicago. Before the ease of social media (1. build a graphic. 2. Upload to followers. 3. Hit send. 4. Job done!) we would go out with postcards and posters and face-to-face appeals to get the word out. In Scotland, for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, back in 1995, we would gather in the public square with signs and in costume, I’d play my trumpet on the street, and we’d hand out materials to individual people. It was work. The impact (as in, asses in seats) was slow, methodical, and individual. Years later, it was just easier to post a link.

Today it’s more efficient but less effective to post a video. No real skin in the game, no individual touch, lots of eyeballs who see it, share it, and immediately move on to the next highly dramatic video du jour. Drama is required for protest, indignation is likewise an essential ingredient, but the focus must be about higher impact over time to be meaningful.

Change comes one person at a time and requires less drama, measured indignation, and more impact per human.