And now comes the rest

We are living in an age of unhingedness, punctuated with only occasional pockets of sanity. Though few and far between, those oases are important. They are worth the effort to find.

My pocket of sanity

The photo above, taken about a week ago, captures one of the best moments of my recent life. As rough as the past few years have been, the great wheel in the sky finally saw fit to even out the score a bit in one fell swoop. The guitar I am holding (a Fender Telecaster) came into my possession straight from the stages of a recent Steely Dan tour. You read that right; I now own a guitar played by Jon Herington, the principal guitarist of Steely Dan since the 1990’s.

The story of how I came into possession of this wonderful instrument (it’s professionally set up and plays like a dream) starts with the pandemic of 2020, which coincidentally is when the world began to get weird for a lot of people besides just me. During the pandemic, concert tours got shut down along with everything else. Working musicians, typically lacking 401(k)s or significant savings, found themselves unemployed and flat-out of luck. A few of them hit upon giving lessons over the Internet. During this time, it was possible to confab with wonderful musicians all over the world via Zoom. I took a seminar with Larry Carlton that was one of the bright points of the entire pandemic shutdown.

But the coolest opportunity that I came across was a jazz chord melody workshop offered by Jon Herington. This occurred one Saturday a month and occupied most of an afternoon. There were about 20 of us from all over the world. Jon typically hosted with an invited guest who kicked things off by playing and then discussing things related to jazz chord melodies. We then went around the room with everyone playing a chord melody they’d crafted themselves just for the group.

You had to be prepared to play in front of some brilliant guitarists and to explain your harmonic and melodic choices. No pressure at all. The first time I played in front of this group engendered fear in me that rivaled anything I ever experienced in the mountains during my climbing career. You could not have pulled a pin out of my fanny with a tractor. It was among the longest three minutes of my life.

Once the pandemic was over and musicians went back to work, the Saturday workshops went away. But I still follow Jon and some of the other participants on social media. Every time Jon comes back from a tour, he advertises for sale some of the equipment that he used. About a month ago, a couple of guitars became available: a Gibson SG and the Fender Thinline Telecaster. I already have an SG, but I was all over the Tele about a nanosecond after the post for it went up. It arrived five days later. It’s got an Evertune bridge on it, so I waited until I had half a day to figure that out before setting it up for my tastes. I’m playing it next Saturday night at my regular twice-a-month gig, which is the only time I will probably leave my studio ever again.

I’ve written before on the topic of embracing whatever joy you can find in this often sad and dreary world. It’s important, I think, to find things that make you happy. To hell with what anyone else thinks about it too. If you can find something that genuinely makes you feel great and doesn’t involve substance abuse, vice, or hurting someone else, you should embrace it. Should you pass on such an opportunity, it might be a long dry spell before you encounter another. Life is short, then you’re dead a long time. Live while you can.

Now comes the rest. We are living in an age of unhingedness, punctuated with only occasional pockets of sanity and joy. All anyone has to do is look at social media to ascertain, for themselves, the abundance of hysteria flying around from all across the social and political spectrum in the form of dueling memes. From the left, we are on the threshold of doom. From the right, it’s the dawn of a magical new age with lots of magical thinking. For my part, I’m having little of it from either side. Right now the world feels to me a lot like living smack dab in the middle of a bullshit sandwich. I’ll take a little sanity and joy wherever I can find some.

I’ve written extensively and exhaustively on how I think that we got here. This is a theme that has, of course, been taken up broadly elsewhere, including in this interesting op-ed from yesterday’s Washington Post by Megan McArdle. This piece stands out as a rare bit of sanity from an otherwise reliably hysterical leftist media outlet. It was, perhaps somewhat opportunistically, published on the same day that Post owner Jeff Bezos issued new marching orders to the Post’s opinion section less than a year after publisher Will Lewis famously braced the entire newsroom over bias and mediocrity.

“We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

None of this seems to have affected the attitudes of many Post staffers in the least bit. It turns out that given a choice, bias and “resistance” are more important than holding a job to a lot of people who call themselves journalists, as many resignations have been submitted at the Post over these missives. This is absurdly comical to everyone outside of their bubble. The Post, along with most of the rest of the legacy media, spent years misleading readers about COVID, Biden, Trump, disinformation, and a host of other issues. Their credibility is shot. That’s why no one reads their stuff. And help is just not on the way for most of these people. When, as a journalist, your response to having your bias exposed for what it plainly is involves resigning instead of self-examination and soul-searching, it’s all over except for the slow walk and the sad singing.

Even when some critical self-evaluation does occur, it’s most often in the form of self-indulgent navel gazing. On May 20, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson are coming out with a book about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline while in office and it’s coverup. Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. In a rational media world, this would have already been the story of the year, if not the decade. Instead, the media largely swept it under the rug. Now Trapper and Thomson intend to tell us all why.

There can be only three reasons for this gigantic faceplant among the media, none of them good. Either the media is 1) suffused with incompetence and/or is blind to what is plainly evident before their very eyes (there’s more than just anecdotal evidence for this), 2) the media knew what was going on but thought that denying Trump a second term was more important than doing their jobs, or 3) media really are innocent dupes as the government, the same government that believed that Sam Brinton was the answer to our nation’s nuclear waste issues, managed to demonstrate enough unlikely competence to successfully engineer a massive conspiracy to cover all of this up.

My guess is a lot of one, a lot of two, and almost none of three.

I looked up every piece that Thompson wrote for Axios or Politico this morning about all of this, and I’ll grant him some grace. At least he was open to considering the possibility that something was rotten in Denmark. But having CNN’s Tapper weigh in on this is like asking O.J. to investigate Nicole Brown Simpson’s death. In normal times this would be considered absurd. But these are not normal times.

Last week, Vice President J.D. Vance gave a speech in Munich that vituperated European politicians and bureaucrats over delegitimizing a Romanian election, censorship, and their subsequent adoption of the tactics (and actual bodies) of American disinformation Rōnin who’ve been expatriated by the Trump administration. This speech by Vance was reported by the usual suspects as an ode to Nazism—something that is manifestly untrue and evident by any reading of the speech. I think that CBS’s Margaret Brennan, in particular, really needs to read a history book.

It goes on and on. Right now there are very few oases of sanity in legacy media or among political cognoscenti. If you're seeking moderately balanced news on a daily basis, I sure hope you find what you're looking for more successfully than I have. There’s none on the airwaves, and about as close as you can get nationally in print is either the Wall Street Journal or the National Review. The fact that these two publications are, at least in a relative sense, oases of sanity says about all that you need to know about the current lay of the land.

In 2025 so far, the most popular feature here on Howlin’ has been Selective outrage. That was then; this is now. In that piece, I wrote about the hysteria from the left about Trump and his policies—much of which I find, frankly, laughable. None of this hysteria has abated; in fact, it’s gotten much worse. Trump derangement syndrome is a real phenomenon. I have encountered nary a single claim from the usual suspects among Trump doomsayers that was completely true and, for the most part, even mostly true. It’s that bad.

Both extremes of our political spectrum have long endeavored to gaslight America. I think that the left has been more successful at this than the right simply because even when the left loses elections, they maintain power via the control they’ve exerted over the bureaucracy, the courts (until recently), and academia for many decades. But make no mistake, this is a tool that both sides use as often as they can. The goal of gaslighting isn’t to get you to believe anything; it’s to get you to not believe anything. In that, I believe, they’ve been quite successful—to the detriment of us all.

For all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth about Trump, much of which is TDS hysteria, he has absolutely done some things that are alarming, probably illegal, and certainly without precedent (though not completely—there are some interesting parallels between Andrew Jackson and Trump). The problem now is that the “resistance, in this case the left, academia, the federal bureaucracy, and most of the media, have long exhausted their credibility. So when it comes to calling out Trump when he’s got it coming on things like Ukraine, running roughshod over federal workers, exceeding his authority, and a host of other issues of concern, no one’s paying attention anymore.

With all of the hysterical claims flying around, bullshit fatigue has set in. These days, everyone except those who trade in BS for the thrill it sends down their leg are just looking around as hard as they can for an oasis of sanity. Happy hunting.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com