The New Yorker:

What sort of reply can one offer to a person who has already decided that the world ends here?

By Lauren Michele Jackson

A postmortem is meant to make sense of tragic occurrences and yet, at bottom, it is designed to soothe. “What went wrong?” is a perfectly sane response to something gone wrong, and the postmortem helps relieve that question of its daunting open-endedness. Secure in its knowledge, forensic in its detail, it is an account of past events which comes complete with quiet warning for the future. Contrary to the title of the long-running TV program, people prefer solved mysteries—or at least a passable theory of the case. There’s a reason we too often recall that first line Joan Didion dispensed in “The White Album”: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” If the best thing is for the worst to not have happened, then the next best thing is to be told how and why it did in terms that are familiar, dulling shock with explication.

This genre of opining—in social posts, op-eds, newsletters, network appearances, essays, and podcast episodes, by professionals and amateurs and amateurish professionals alike—has flooded forth since Donald Trump won, and won decisively, yet another purported contest for our nation’s soul. Alongside the self-styled punditry, pop-culture enthusiasts have petitioned for anything that may pass as counterprogramming, namely in requests for the superlative “comfort watch.” A comfort watch, unburdened foil to the “guilty pleasure,” is not necessarily so-named for what it is but, rather, for what it provides; it is called upon to relieve the viewer of her frontal lobe and all activity therein when the going gets too unappealing to bear. As the election postmortems have turned toward expected idioms—comfort idioms, if you will, such as “identity politics,” “gender war,” “working class”—streaming services may well register an uptick in views of feel-good sitcoms such as “The Office,” “Parks & Recreation,” and “30 Rock.” Tapping into both of these complementary modes of coping at once, Steve Burns, the founding host of the children’s program “Blue’s Clues,” posted his own post-election digest to TikTok last Wednesday. The video shows Burns brandishing two coffee mugs—one for each of you, the gesture implies—before leaning against a paddock fence; ambient noise from the autumnal landscape supplies the only sound, other than an audible exhale from Burns, who is otherwise silent, staring into the distance, every now and again glancing into the lens, nodding with a slight purse of his lips. The video concludes just shy of a minute. “Didn’t even say anything. Just cried,” one comment reads. The verified account for Calm, an app delivering guided meditations, left a note on the video punctuated with a blue heart emoji. A user going by Emilee wrote, “I bet you didn’t think you’d still be raising us all these years later, Steve, but thank you for still being here.”

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