Recently, I went what seemed to be about 17 rounds with a publicist seeking to place an appeal for an arts organization who objected to my calling the organization small and struggling, even though it is. I shouldn’t have gotten testy about this. One of the casualties of the pandemic has been my minimal patience. But as a journalist, I always object to publicists trying to control the story, and I was particularly rankled by her waving the dictionary at me via e-mail, as if I were some recalcitrant schoolgirl.
In the end, we achieved a kind of detente, but only because I decided the story was more important than my ego. It always is. Still, I was this close to telling her she used another word incorrectly. Why? Because I wanted to score a point. I wanted to win.
The desire to win is part of human nature and key to Americans. Say what you want about us, but we didn’t get to be the richest, most powerful nation in the world by taking a backseat. In the digital age and the new cult of narcissism, however, we have elevated winning to a kind of obsession in which the truth and our democracy no longer matter. The truth is that winning is part of losing and losing is part of winning. Nobody wins forever, because the effort to sustain the top is much harder than the effort to attain it.
As Martina Navratilova once shrewdly observed the only thing you can do when you’re the No. 1-ranked tennis player in the world is try to remain the No. 1-ranked player. The challenger, on the other hand, has that eye of the tiger in the hunt for the top spot, using setbacks in the jagged quest for the prize as fuel for improving. Or as another former No. 1 tennis player, John McEnroe, put it in pursuit of friendly rival and then world No. 1 Björn Borg, it’s not important to be the best but to beat the best. McEnroe understood that while the view from the mountaintop may be breathtaking, no one actually lives there. And the only way out is down.
Still, losing stings. (How often have I avoided reading about my favorite teams or players in big contests for fear of seeing the L-word attached to their results.) And yet, if there’s one thing Americans hate more than losing, it’s losing ungraciously. We now have that example in no less a personage than the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, who by all vote counts — Republican, Democratic — lost the election to now President-elect Joe Biden. Yes, we understand the political rationale for not conceding — or in Trump’s case, for sort of acknowledging his opponent’s victory but as another hoax — same thing. Trumpet’s got to keep the base fired up to win those two runoffs for the Georgia seats that would assure the Repubs their majority in the Senate. And ginning up the base presumably gins up the coffers to pay off campaign debts and keep the lawyers needed for the wait-for-them SDNY lawsuits on retainer.
But this isn’t just about politics. This is a psychological aberration that holds that all truth and reality are relative. They are not. There is such a thing as objective reality. Otherwise, the trains would never run on time.
Yet Trump and his enablers have insisted on an alternate universe that not only could endanger our national security but has in the form of inattention to the coronavirus. As we have the extraordinary sight of the president-elect pleading with the current president to ramp up efforts, Trump is doubling down on doing nothing but harm, threatening to withhold the vaccine from New York state, because Gov. Andrew Cuomo has promised to have it tested by his own people before unleashing it on the populace. (California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom said the same thing. So why New York? Methinks someone’s worried about criminal charges in his native state.)
If Trump wants to help his base and ensure the legacy that Ivanka is apparently so worried about, he should graciously acknowledge Biden’s win, allowing the transition to move forward; go all-in on virus testing and tracing; and support a mask/social distancing/hand washing mandate..
It’s never too late to do some good — in other words, to find the victory in defeat. Time for the president to pick up the consolation trophy, smile through the press conference and allow himself — and all of us — to move on.