In Praise of ‘Messy’
In the wake of the 2024 election, while everyone across the media landscape is crying ‘foul’…how can this be… who’s to blame…where do we go from here… who can we get America to listen to…
Consider this: messy.
Take down your Nate Silver dart boards, clean up the ceramic shards from your Morning Joe coffee mug that you tossed at the wall just missing the TV screen, reup your wapo.com online subscription.
Consider: ‘messy.’ As in disturbing, raw, unkempt, ‘hard on the eyes.’
Consider: President 47 exercises a cleanliness fetish. He believes in bleach.
Resist. Believe in ‘messy.’
One can find the historical context for ‘believe in messy’ in London, c. 1945, when Orwell, pre-Animal Farm, (1948), wrote an essay entitled “Freedom of the Park.” In a polite well-crafted think piece, Orwell, who was about to land a zinger, reflected on the removal of newspaper sellers from outside Hyde Park. Orwell’s take was journeyman journalism, blunt observation followed by a memorializing exercise, as in “what we just saw.”
Not your typical Operation Wall Street/Gaza Campus Protest tent village cleansing but remarkably comparable. Here are portions of his essay which appeared in the London Tribune, reproduced courtesy of the Orwell Foundation. (1)
