sad

 In my election cycle re-watch of The West Wing, the Toby vibes are strong. I have a theory that I can chart my own radicalization and/or the increasing neoliberal-ification of politics by how I feel watching The West Wing during election season. The show shifts surprisingly from timely to outdated to inspiring every time I watch it. Right now, there are some especially interesting scenes and conversations given the genocide happening in Palestine. Perhaps the gutless brilliance of the show is that it never actually says anything fully, allowing so many of its scenes and conversations to feely weirdly relevant no matter when you watch it. All of that is to say that I am not an apologist for the show's politics, I just like shows with ensemble casts and clever, unrealistic dialogue. Call me a millennial, I guess. 

This election cycle re-watch, however, the vibes are coming up Toby. Does this mean I am in my cynical era? The obvious irony, of course, is that the more that Toby stands in for the curmudgeonly realist-cynic, the more he becomes the most idealistic character on the show. Grumpy only because things could be so much better. Negative so as to hold everyone to a higher expectation. I had forgotten, however, about Toby's late season four journey of self-betterment in the attempt to get his pregnant ex-wife Andrea to remarry him. And especially that heartbreaking line from Andrea, spoken so reluctantly out of exasperation, “You’re just too sad for me, Toby. You’re just sad. You bring the sadness home with you and you’re...sad.” Of course, the show handles this storyline terribly. Toby's sadness becomes about his fears over being a father and then the babies are born and he magically realizes he has more capacity for love than he thought. But love and sadness are not mutually exclusive and reproducing isn't the solution to everything or anything really. 

I fear that I also am too sad. Sometimes, all I can see is sadness. My students are sad. My friendships are sad. It goes without saying that the news is sad. 

A very specific, cynical kind of sadness too. The sadness not of an acute tragedy and not so much of an indeterminate depression, but the sadness of things that just aren't as good as they used to be, that aren't as great as they could be. The old standby of the gap between expectations and reality and never-ending compromises. That might be one thing that The West Wing gets right: the constant fear of the moment when you will have compromised away your own ethics.

Is the goal not to be sad? I can stomach very little toxic positivity so I'm not looking for happiness, but surely there's enough range in the emotional spectrum that we can avoid sad. And yet, to stop being sad would mean to accept things exactly as they are, which seems very zen, except when the way things are is unacceptable. Is idealism just another word for capitalism at this point, an obsession with better, bigger, more? Is "staying in the moment" and "finding acceptance" just anesthesia for real change?