They were watching television, engrossed in a fantasy world in which people traveled between stars not in lifetimes but in hours, where energies sufficient to level cities were wielded by lone altruists, where men and women changed sex four and five times a night, where everything was possible and nothing was forbidden. It was a scream straight from the toad buried at the base of the brain, that ancient reptile that wants everything at once, delivered to its feet and set ablaze.
The things I’ve read about Brent Dill feel very reminiscent of people and situations I witnessed from a distance in my college days, but I don’t have the information needed to know whether this reflects any deep or actionable pattern.
In my college environment I think there was a problem where it became hard to talk about or even conceptualize red flags about people, because they would do the opposite of hiding them, instead “lampshading” them and folding them into a self-conscious persona — “oh I’m such a bad influence,” you know, that sort of thing. Sometimes the people aiming for such a persona were actually harmless, but even without that confusing the issue, it was easy to think “this is too obvious to constitute an insight worth voicing” — like, if “creepy” is part of someone’s self-conscious *aesthetic*, you feel like an idiot saying “you know, he’s kind of creepy!” And so there’s this vague sense that anything you notice must have been evaluated and judged actually-okay by others, on the logic of the economist joke about $20 bills on the ground. If it wasn’t okay, it’d be *obviously* not okay, which means someone else would have noticed, so therefore it *is* okay.
(In college the ubiquitous word “sketchy” played a role in this dynamic — it was a term with an overall negative valence but so diluted and vague as to not constitute a real criticism, and one would just hear endless things about the “sketchiness” level of various people or groups without this cashing out into a useful separation between serious red flags vs. “cultivates a sleazy aesthetic but actually morally fine” vs. “oh I just meant they do a lot of drugs” etc.)
As I said, I don’t really know how much of this was going on with Brent, and clearly there are other bad dynamics involved as well — he’s clearly a very manipulative person, for instance, and I get the sense that some key players were and are actively enabling him and approving of him, as opposed to passively failing to connect the dots.
Like George W. Bush, whose cowboy affect inspired the gushing epithet “rebel-in-chief,” Trump plays the part of the happy buccaneer, a role that invokes the right’s age-old hostility toward political arithmetic and moral geometry.
Grilling pancakes consists of a series of high-level actions, such as measuring flour, whisking eggs, transferring the mixture to the pan, turning the stove on, and so on.
