ICE AGE

We have everything to fear except fear itself

Hi, dear e-mail friends.

No Grammy for Waxahatchee this time around. But Tigers Blood was nominated. And we witnessed Doechii’s splits and Benson Boone’s triple-double front-flip McTwist off of a piano. So not all is lost.

Team Waxahatchee at the 2025 Grammys.

Sammy and me at the 2012 Grammys.

Potato chips for the elite.

I watched Conclave on the way to LA, a highly optimistic film in which SPOILER a peace-loving wise realist wins over a self-obsessed zealot.

You could say the movie is untrue to life but I took it as a great reminder that assholes don’t always get the vote. I expected the warmongering fool to win because the warmongering fools of our time are winning (politically, not Grammy-wise, lol). But it hasn’t always been that way, and it doesn’t have to stay that way.

It’s been so tormenting, lately, to see even well-meaning, middle-of-the-road people fall in line with Trump’s agenda. Especially about immigration. In greater numbers than last time.

I was in a laundromat in LA in January where I heard a white man and a black woman commiserating in nasty terms about migrants in their city. They could just as easily have been saying reasonable things while talking about the same crises (of a broken asylum system, of global poverty, of housing in the US, etc). But because the ideological ground is ceded to Trump and conservatives, they were talking like them. There’s no one else loud enough to answer their questions, to respond to their fears.¹

I think this fear of fear is killing us. Progressives like me have drawn such a tight circle around the realm of respectable conversation, that we wish away myriad misunderstandings, false beliefs, and bitter attitudes that make people vulnerable to racist division and conquest. Ignoring them doesn’t magically resolve them. We have to look people in the eye, to stop pretending like their fears don’t exist, or that the mere presence of confusion and even animosity means that someone is certainly out of reach. (Community orgs do this hard work, but I’m talking about leaders at the top—and to some extent, our friend groups, too.)

The issues are so big, they make my head spin. I’ve written thousands more words about it than I can share, because it takes my slow brain too much time to make it make sense. The tense, dogmatic attitude we’ve allowed to develop affects not only national policy but also our relationships and our lives as artists, everything. We’ve got some weird ass McCarthyist thing going on, and I know that it has reasonable origins. There are always so many bad-faith actors in the room, shouting over everyone else, that it seemed to the Left like we had to shut it down, to clamp our minds shut, to simply “know” what’s right by osmosis (namely: tweets, now Instagram posts) and then hold that line no matter what opposition came our way. But that’s not how ideas work. And clearly, it didn’t actually close the door on bad actors. We just removed ourselves from the room, so mostly cruel people remained. Why would we think that ceding our voices would give us more power?

We were in the studio the other day, listening to “Comment (If All Men Are Truly Brothers)” by Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band and it just made me sob. Because it’s the message. Are we serious about including everyone? About healing ourselves and sticking together? Because it so rarely feels like it these days.

I’m looking around the corner to the time where we have our next charismatic-righteous leader, our Cardinal Benitez. There will still be unfounded fear, people who abuse facts to turn us against each other, and we will still be a deeply flawed society. But at least we’ll have someone at the top who can look your questions in the eye, talk about your fears, and point us in a humane direction.

In the meantime, watch out for a federal police that wants to become a Gestapo. They may “only” be arresting undocumented people right now (only half of whom have committed a crime), but they want to become lawless. My ancestors saw how that goes. We’re close to the edge. Let’s be ready if we fall over it.

P.S. Listen to Case Oats’ cover of Link Wray’s “Fallin’ Rain,” and all these other lovely songs, to support Sweet Relief’s California wildfire relief fund.

1. We don’t want to be led around by reactionaries’ talking points, for sure, but there comes a point where their conversation is the conversation. And we’ve clearly passed that point for immigration and any other number of controversies.