As a kid, C-SPAN was my Nickelodeon. I knew of Donald Duck, Spongebob Squarepants, and Mickey Mouse, but I didn’t speak of them. They weren’t welcome in my parents’ animation-free household. Instead, I was fed a steady diet of NPR, BBC, The New Yorker and C-SPAN. It took me years to realize that this wasn’t the norm, that I was obscenely thin on American pop culture. I remember, one summer in Minnesota, a slightly older and unabashedly cool friend introduced me to the seamy underbelly of Japanese anime, and I binged in secret on Fruits Basket. Still, I had a hard time swallowing the idea that cartoon characters could add anything pleasant or palatable to my world. So, for better or worse, I stuck with C-SPAN for years.
I lived to watch the Prime Minister’s Questions. It was my Narnia, my Wonderland, my escape from modern Americana. This is how I ended up using phrases like “quite an appalling situation” to describe my seventh grade geography teacher, who couldn’t spell “Afghanistan” properly. Watching British politicians go on polysyllabic sprees made me so giddy. I told no one about David Cameron or Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, these great orators, who bounced about the British House of Commons with such zest and with so many zingers. I had no one to tell.
At 16, I went off to college, and I tried to be cool. I got into the habit of nodding along, when people mentioned Family Guy, The Flintstones, Rugrats, Powerpuff Girls, Beavis and Butt-Head. At age 20, I went to eastern Turkey and taught English to university students, who told me I reminded them of Velma Dinkley. Not knowing a thing about Scooby-Doo, I asked, blankly, “Velma who?” At the ripe age of 23, I went on a date and found myself mid-conversation with a fellow twentysomething, who went wordless when I admitted to not knowing what a dad joke was. I tried to make light of it by betting that The New Yorker didn’t have any articles or essays mentioning dad jokes. I won that bet, though clearly I lost the pop culture war.
It may not come as much of a surprise, then, that since the election I have listened to over 90 hours of C-SPAN’s live pool feed from the bottom of Trump Tower. For those of you wanting to follow in my footsteps, here’s November 18 (8:05 hours), November 21 (7:37 hours), November 22 hours), November 28 (8:00 hours), November 29 (8:36 hours), November 30 (8:35 hours), December 1 (2:55 hours), December 2 (10:15 hours), December 5 (6:00 hours), December 7 (8:35 hours), December 8 (6:44 hours), December 9 (8:15 hours).
I have a life. I mean, there’s no way I could watch all 90 hours, but I’m a committed listener. It’s like elevator music with a spike of National Public Radio. At first, I listened for answers, a hope that the Transition Team would reveal what MAGA meant. I listened, as I chopped carrots, as I emailed editors, as I drafted missives about what a post-election world meant for my main object of academic study: Guantánamo. I was tempted to believe that a Trump presidency would do the thing that I had dreamed of for years: It could make C-SPAN great again. This could be the silver lining, I tried to convince myself. The silver lining, I muttered, could be golden-plated, like the lobby of the Trump Tower.
