Dwain Northey

The President Who Wants to Be at the Rally

With only a few weeks left before the midterm elections, I find myself thinking about something that feels increasingly strange about the current occupant of the White House.

Presidents campaign for their party. That’s nothing new. They raise money, make endorsements, record advertisements, occasionally show up at a rally and tell everybody how important it is to vote for the candidates who will help them accomplish their agenda.

But Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand the word occasionally.

He has launched a full-blown midterm campaign blitz, planning rallies across the country to pump up Republican candidates and, apparently, remind everyone that the election is really about him. Reuters recently reported that his approval rating had fallen to 32 percent, while two-thirds of Republican candidates in competitive House and Senate races were trying to distance themselves from him. (Reuters⁠)

And yet here comes Donald.

Again.

And again.

And again.

It’s almost as if somebody told him there was an election and he interpreted that as, “Great! Another presidential campaign!”

There is an important distinction here. Barack Obama certainly did campaign for Democrats during the 2014 midterms, including holding rallies for candidates such as Maryland gubernatorial candidate Anthony Brown. But Obama initially stayed largely off the public campaign trail because Democrats knew his approval numbers could actually hurt some of the candidates he was trying to help. (CBS News⁠)

That seems like an important concept: sometimes the most helpful thing a president can do for his party is get out of the way.

Donald Trump appears to have missed that memo.

Instead, he’s behaving like the headliner of a traveling rock band that refuses to acknowledge that the audience isn’t quite as enthusiastic as it used to be.

And this is where I start wondering whether Donald actually enjoys being president—or whether he enjoys being Donald Trump, the guy who gets to stand on a stage while thousands of people cheer for him.

Because those are two very different jobs.

Being president means sitting through briefings nobody watches on television. Reading reports nobody chants about. Making decisions that don’t produce applause. Dealing with Congress, foreign governments, courts, agencies, disasters, budgets, wars, economic problems and all the other incredibly glamorous parts of being Commander in Chief.

Being at a Trump rally means walking onto a stage, looking at a crowd full of people who already like you, hearing them cheer, talking about yourself for an hour or two, insulting your political enemies and leaving convinced that everybody loves you.

I can see why one of those would be considerably more enjoyable.

The problem is that the country didn’t elect a professional rally performer.

It elected a president.

And now, with the midterms approaching, Trump seems determined to turn the entire Republican campaign into one enormous traveling Trump rally. He has even told voters to essentially pretend he’s on the ballot. (Reuters⁠)

Which, frankly, may be the most honest description of his political philosophy I’ve heard.

Pretend I’m running.

That’s apparently the plan.

Republican candidates are trying to win their individual races while some are quietly discovering that having Donald Trump’s name attached to them isn’t necessarily the electoral gift from heaven they were hoping for. Reuters found that many candidates in competitive races are deliberately creating some distance between themselves and the president. (Reuters⁠)

That’s understandable.

Imagine you’re running for Senate and your campaign team is sitting around the conference table asking, “What can we do to win over independent voters?”

And somebody says:

“How about we bring in the president with a 32 percent approval rating?”

At which point the campaign manager quietly walks into the parking lot and starts screaming into the nearest trash can.

Trump seems to believe that because the people who attend his rallies love him, everybody loves him.

But a rally isn’t a random sample of America.

If I throw a party and invite only people who already like me, I shouldn’t walk outside afterward and announce that the entire neighborhood has endorsed me.

That’s not polling.

That’s called having a guest list.

And perhaps that’s the fundamental problem with Donald Trump. He appears to have spent so much time surrounded by people whose job is to tell him how wonderful he is that reality has become something he encounters only when it refuses to cooperate.

The economy isn’t behaving the way he says it is.

His approval numbers aren’t behaving the way he says they are.

Republican candidates aren’t universally begging him to appear with them.

And voters aren’t necessarily treating every problem in America as though it can be solved by another Trump speech.

Yet the solution appears to be:

More rallies.

Because surely the thing missing from the current situation is another giant crowd chanting his name.

At some point, you have to wonder whether the presidency has become secondary to the performance.

The Oval Office is the job.

The rally is the dopamine hit.

And Donald Trump seems increasingly interested in the dopamine.

There are only a few weeks left until Americans vote. Republican candidates are going to have to answer for the policies of this administration whether they want to or not. And Trump is going to continue traveling around the country telling everyone how fantastic everything is, how badly everybody needs to vote Republican and, presumably, how fantastic he is.

Because in Donald Trump’s America, the scoreboard apparently doesn’t matter if the crowd is still cheering.

And maybe that’s the strangest part of all.

A president should be looking at the country and asking, “How are we doing?”

Donald Trump seems to be looking at the crowd and asking, “How am I doing?”

Those are two very different questions.

And with the midterms approaching, America is about to provide an answer to both.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There’s something almost exhausting about the way human beings tell stories. We seem incapable of letting a story simply be good. Somewhere in the narrative, somebody has to be the villain, something has to go terribly wrong, and lurking behind whatever happiness we manage to achieve is the inevitable possibility that everything could fall apart.

Maybe that is human nature. Or maybe it is some psychological imprint so deeply embedded in us that we don’t even recognize it anymore.

We have apparently decided that a story isn’t really a story unless something goes wrong.

Shakespeare understood this centuries ago. The difference between comedy and tragedy isn’t necessarily that one contains happiness and the other contains sadness. A tragedy is often a comedy that doesn’t make it all the way back around. The characters fall, the circumstances deteriorate, and the story ends before the circle can be completed.

Apparently, we liked that idea so much that we made it the template for everything.

History certainly follows the formula.

We don’t simply talk about civilizations and what they accomplished. We talk about the wars, the betrayals, the tyrants, the genocides and the inevitable collapse. Even when something genuinely remarkable happens, we seem compelled to attach an asterisk to it explaining how somebody suffered along the way.

Religion does it too.

Salvation is difficult to define without damnation. Heaven needs a hell. Good requires evil. Redemption requires something from which we need to be redeemed. The light becomes more meaningful because we’ve established that darkness exists.

And I understand the philosophical argument. Contrast gives things meaning. If everything is good all the time, perhaps eventually “good” becomes meaningless because there is nothing against which to measure it.

But sometimes I wonder if we’ve taken that concept a little too far.

Look at artificial intelligence.

The conversation about AI almost immediately becomes: What if it destroys humanity? What if it becomes Skynet? What if it becomes Ultron? What if it decides we’re the problem?

And yes, those questions are worth asking.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve managed to make the potential catastrophe the headline and the potential benefit the footnote.

Instead of asking, “What extraordinary things might this technology allow human beings to accomplish?” we seem almost compelled to ask, “What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen?”

Then, rather than designing the technology so that those dangers are minimized, we spend an enormous amount of time imagining the apocalypse.

It’s as if we believe identifying the monster is more important than building a better house.

There is an important distinction between preparing for a negative outcome and becoming obsessed with one. We absolutely should anticipate unintended consequences. We should build safeguards. We should regulate dangerous technologies when necessary. We should learn from history.

But there is a difference between planning for the worst and assuming the worst is the story.

Maybe that distinction is what bothers me.

We seem to have developed a cultural reflex in which every possibility of progress immediately requires a warning label.

The medical breakthrough will save millions—but what if it is abused?

The new technology will make life easier—but what if it takes everyone’s jobs?

The political reform might make government more representative—but what if someone exploits it?

The scientific discovery could solve a problem—but what if it creates another one?

Eventually you start wondering whether we’re actually afraid of failure or simply uncomfortable with optimism.

Perhaps part of this comes from evolution. Humans who noticed the rustling in the bushes and thought, That’s probably nothing didn’t necessarily leave as many descendants as the ones who thought, Holy shit, that’s probably a tiger.

Our brains are apparently hardwired to notice threats.

The problem is that there aren’t many actual tigers hiding in the bushes anymore.

Instead, we have 24-hour news, social media, political outrage, dystopian movies, conspiracy theories and an internet capable of delivering every conceivable catastrophe directly into our pockets before breakfast.

The psychological mechanism that once kept us alive can now keep us perpetually anxious.

And perhaps that’s why we keep inventing villains.

A villain gives the story structure. A villain gives us someone to blame. A villain gives us something to fear and, more importantly, something to defeat.

But not every story needs a villain.

Sometimes the story is simply that something worked.

Sometimes a technology solves a problem without creating another civilization-ending problem.

Sometimes people cooperate because cooperation actually benefits everyone.

Sometimes a scientific discovery makes life better.

Sometimes a political decision improves something.

Sometimes somebody does something kind simply because being kind is a good thing to do.

There doesn’t always have to be a sinister motivation hiding underneath it.

There doesn’t always have to be a monster waiting in Act III.

I’m not suggesting we abandon skepticism or pretend darkness doesn’t exist. That’s just another form of foolishness. History has plenty of evidence that human beings are capable of doing horrible things.

But perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to looking for the darkness that we’ve forgotten to recognize the light when it is standing directly in front of us.

Maybe that’s the real psychological imprint: We trust danger more than we trust goodness.

We believe the other shoe is going to drop.

We expect the happy ending to have a catch.

We look at something new and immediately ask how it might destroy us rather than how it might help us.

And maybe that is why so many of our stories feel darker than they need to be.

We keep writing the villain into the script.

Perhaps every story doesn’t need one.

Perhaps sometimes the story can simply be about people figuring something out, making something better, helping one another and moving forward.

No demon.

No apocalypse.

No tyrant.

No secret conspiracy.

No inevitable tragedy waiting around the corner.

Just a good thing happening.

I realize that probably makes for terrible Shakespeare.

But honestly, after several thousand years of villains, betrayals, damnation, dystopias and people screaming that the end is near, I’m beginning to think humanity could use a few boringly optimistic stories.

Maybe not every comedy needs to flirt with tragedy.

Maybe not every light needs darkness standing behind it.

Maybe sometimes good can simply be good.

And maybe, just for once, we could let the damn story end there.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Imagine, for a moment, that you live in an alternate universe where FBI agents are being fired, resigning, or simply walking away because they keep discovering an inconvenient problem:

The evidence doesn’t agree with the president.

I know. Crazy, right?

Apparently, in this alternate universe, investigators still have this annoying habit of following evidence wherever it leads. They interview witnesses. They examine physical evidence. They review documents. They reconstruct timelines. They do all those things that law enforcement is supposedly supposed to do.

And then they have the audacity to come back and say, “Well, that’s not what happened.”

How terribly inconvenient.

We’ve seen experienced FBI personnel pushed out, including agents associated with investigations involving Donald Trump. FBI Director Kash Patel has defended the dismissals as an effort to remove people he believes participated in the “weaponization” of law enforcement. Meanwhile, former agents have challenged some of those dismissals in court, alleging they were punished simply for having worked on politically inconvenient investigations.

And then there is the David Hearn Reflecting Pool fiasco, which is almost too perfect to be real.

The administration wanted a vandal.

They had a suspect.

They had a narrative.

There was only one tiny problem:

The evidence didn’t cooperate.

Federal prosecutors ultimately dropped the case after evidence from the Interior Department indicated that the damage to the pool’s liner was more consistent with botched, rushed contractor work than vandalism by Hearn. And now a D.C. judge has permanently dismissed the case, criticizing the government’s rush to prosecute and noting the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the pressure to keep the case alive.

Which brings us to the alternate universe.

If Donald Trump could fire judges who dismiss cases he doesn’t like, perhaps he would. After all, imagine how much easier government would be if judges were required to reach the correct conclusion—the conclusion that had already been announced on television.

“Your Honor, the president says the guy did it.”

“I’m sorry, but the evidence—”

“Wrong answer.”

And that’s where dystopia becomes more than a science-fiction word.

Because eventually you reach a point where the people responsible for finding facts are expected to find the right facts.

Not facts.

The facts that fit the story.

And if the evidence doesn’t support the story?

Well, maybe the investigator is the problem.

Maybe the prosecutor is the problem.

Maybe the judge is the problem.

Maybe the FBI agent is politically motivated.

Maybe the career employee is part of the deep state.

Maybe the scientist misunderstood the science.

Maybe the economist calculated the wrong numbers.

Maybe the election officials counted the wrong votes.

Maybe reality itself needs a performance review.

At some point, you have created an environment where the safest career move for a professional whose job is to tell the truth is to stop telling the truth—or stop working there.

And that is the truly frightening part.

I’m not suggesting every FBI employee who leaves is leaving because of political pressure. Andrew Bailey, for example, publicly said his recent departure was about returning to Missouri to raise his children, and he strongly defended Patel and the FBI’s direction.

But the larger question remains: What happens to an institution when people who are professionally obligated to follow evidence begin believing that following the evidence will get them fired?

Eventually, you don’t need to order people to manufacture evidence.

You simply create an environment where everyone understands which conclusion is acceptable.

That’s much more efficient.

You don’t have to say, “Change the evidence.”

You just say, “That evidence doesn’t support what we’re looking for.”

And eventually somebody gets the hint.

Welcome to the Upside Down.

It’s a place where facts are political.

Where evidence is apparently negotiable.

Where prosecutors can be pressured because they won’t prosecute the person the president wants prosecuted.

Where judges become enemies because they follow the law instead of the preferred narrative.

Where federal law enforcement can be purged because the people doing the investigating happened to investigate something politically inconvenient.

And where the ultimate sin isn’t being wrong.

It’s being wrong in the direction the president doesn’t like.

The truly dystopian part isn’t that someone might manufacture evidence.

It’s that we’re creating a system where honest professionals can look at the evidence, look at the political narrative, and realize the two aren’t supposed to match.

Then they have to decide whether they’re going to compromise their professional ethics—or find another job.

That’s not how a functioning democracy is supposed to work.

Facts aren’t supposed to take orders from the president.

Evidence doesn’t vote.

A crime scene doesn’t have a political party.

And a judge’s job isn’t to make the president feel better about a contractor’s mistake.

Reality doesn’t get a rewrite simply because the original version is embarrassing.

But apparently, in the Upside Down, that’s exactly what we’re being asked to believe.

And if you keep firing the people who tell you reality is different from the story you’re selling, eventually you’ll have an entire government full of people telling you exactly what you want to hear.

Which sounds wonderful.

Right up until the building is on fire.

And everyone in the room is afraid to tell you.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Every year, sometime around late August or early September, something strange happens in American retail.

An empty storefront suddenly becomes a Halloween store.

Not just any Halloween store, either. A Spirit Halloween store.

They appear almost overnight, usually in a vacant strip-mall space that has spent the previous several months looking like the retail equivalent of a condemned building. Then, suddenly, there are skeletons hanging from the ceiling, animatronic demons waiting to scare unsuspecting children, fake tombstones in the parking lot, costumes covering every available wall and enough inflatable Halloween decorations to make the neighborhood look like a portal to another dimension.

And then Halloween happens.

Twenty-four hours later, the whole thing starts disappearing.

By November 1, Spirit Halloween is essentially the retail equivalent of Cinderella at midnight. The costumes vanish. The skeletons go back into boxes. The animatronics are packed away. The fake cobwebs disappear. And the empty storefront goes right back to being empty.

Which has always made me wonder:

Why?

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has looked at this business model and thought, Wait a minute. You already have the building.

That’s the part that seems so strange to me.

Spirit Halloween goes through the trouble of finding retail space, negotiating leases, moving merchandise into the stores, hiring employees, installing displays, setting up registers, advertising and getting customers through the door.

And then, after approximately six weeks of business, they tear the whole thing down.

Why not keep going?

Not with Halloween merchandise, obviously. I’m not suggesting we celebrate Halloween until Easter.

I’m suggesting something far more logical.

Spirit Christmas.

On November 1, the skeletons come down and the Christmas trees go up.

The inflatable witches are replaced with inflatable Santas. The fake tombstones are replaced with inflatable snowmen. The animatronic zombies are replaced with reindeer, elves and whatever other electronic Christmas monstrosities the American consumer has decided belong on a front lawn.

Instead of costumes, you sell Christmas sweaters, Santa suits, stockings, ornaments, lights, wreaths, artificial Christmas trees, tree stands, outdoor decorations and approximately seventeen different varieties of enormous inflatable Christmas crap.

You know exactly what I’m talking about.

There are Christmas inflatables now that are so large that Santa looks like he’s preparing to land a Boeing 747 in someone’s front yard.

And Spirit already has the business infrastructure.

They have the stores.

They have the temporary retail model.

They have the employees.

They have the point-of-sale systems.

They have the supply chain.

They have customers who are already conditioned to visit these stores because the merchandise changes with the calendar.

So why pack everything up?

Turn Halloween Spirit into Christmas Spirit.

And honestly, Tim Burton already figured out the perfect transition for them.

In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington literally walks from Halloween Town into Christmas Town and decides that Halloween can become Christmas.

Tim Burton basically created the business plan decades ago.

Jack is the seasonal retail executive Spirit Halloween didn’t know it needed.

Halloween Town discovers Christmas, becomes fascinated by it and decides, Hey, we could do this.

Spirit Halloween should be standing there saying, “Exactly, Jack. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you.”

It’s almost too perfect.

You could even build the entire marketing concept around it.

Halloween merchandise gets boxed up. Christmas merchandise rolls in. Jack Skellington becomes the unofficial ambassador between the two seasons. The store doesn’t disappear—it transforms.

And there’s something almost poetically appropriate about that.

Halloween and Christmas are already two of America’s biggest decoration-driven holidays. Both have elaborate displays. Both have costumes. Both have lights. Both have inflatable lawn decorations. Both have people who transform their homes into something resembling a theme park.

Halloween has skeletons.

Christmas has reindeer.

Halloween has witches.

Christmas has elves.

Halloween has ghosts.

Christmas has… well, depending on the inflatable display, sometimes enormous snowmen.

The transition practically writes itself.

And then, when Christmas is over, perhaps you become Spirit Valentine’s Day.

Although I’m not entirely sure America needs a store dedicated entirely to enormous inflatable cupids and red-heart lawn decorations.

But knowing America, someone would buy them.

Then comes St. Patrick’s Day. Easter. Maybe Fourth of July.

Eventually you could have Spirit Holidays, a seasonal retail store that simply changes personalities throughout the year.

And that’s where The Nightmare Before Christmas becomes more than just a cute cultural reference. It almost provides the perfect fictional explanation for the entire business model.

Jack Skellington figured out that Halloween didn’t have to exist in isolation.

Spirit Halloween could figure out the same thing.

The genius of the temporary-store concept is that it doesn’t necessarily require the store itself to be temporary. The theme can be temporary.

That’s an important distinction.

You already have the real estate. You already have the retail infrastructure. You already have customers walking through the doors. Why not change the merchandise instead of changing the address?

Maybe there are logistical reasons Spirit doesn’t simply transform into a Christmas retailer. Maybe its supply chain, leases, inventory strategy or corporate structure are specifically optimized around Halloween. Maybe Christmas retail is already too competitive to make the economics work.

There are probably spreadsheets somewhere that explain all of this.

But from the perspective of the average consumer, it still feels like an opportunity sitting right there in the parking lot.

You have a building.

You have customers.

You have employees.

You have retail equipment.

You have seasonal merchandise.

And you have another gigantic retail holiday waiting approximately twelve hours after Halloween ends.

Use the building.

Tim Burton already gave you the transition.

Jack Skellington already crossed the seasonal border.

All Spirit has to do is follow him.

I’m not asking Spirit Halloween to reinvent capitalism.

I’m simply suggesting that when the last child has returned from trick-or-treating and the last plastic skeleton has been packed away, maybe don’t turn off the lights and walk away from the building.

Replace the skeletons with Santas.

Replace the cobwebs with tinsel.

Replace the haunted-house music with Christmas music.

And replace Spirit Halloween with Spirit Christmas.

Then, sometime around January 2, tear it all down again.

Because if we’re going to have temporary retail stores appear out of nowhere every year, disappear just as quickly and occupy perfectly good commercial space for only a few weeks, we might as well get more than one holiday out of the deal.

After all, if capitalism has taught us anything, it’s this:

There’s no reason a store that sells inflatable skeletons for six weeks can’t sell inflatable Santas for six weeks.

And somewhere, Jack Skellington is probably standing in a boardroom, pointing at the Christmas sales projections and saying:

“What’s this?”

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is something that happens when you see something too often: it loses its impact.

Take highlighter yellow.

There was a time when you saw a guy wearing an orange construction vest and your brain immediately registered, Pay attention. There is something important happening here. Maybe there was road construction. Maybe somebody was operating heavy machinery. Maybe the guy was standing around holding a STOP sign while accomplishing absolutely nothing, but at least you knew where he was.

That was the whole point of high-visibility clothing.

It stood out.

Now?

Every warehouse worker, construction worker, road crew member, delivery driver, bicycle-riding senior citizen and apparently anyone who has wandered within 500 feet of a traffic cone is wearing fluorescent yellow or orange.

At this point, half the country looks like it is directing traffic.

The color that was once extraordinary has become background noise.

And that’s the funny thing about human perception: we adapt.

Something designed to grab our attention eventually becomes invisible simply because we see it all the damn time.

Which brings us to the extreme opposite.

Go to a nudist camp.

Suddenly, the person wearing clothes is the one who sticks out.

Think about that for a second.

You could have 200 naked people standing around, and nobody is particularly remarkable because, well, that’s apparently the dress code.

Then some poor bastard walks through the gate wearing khaki shorts and a polo shirt and suddenly everyone is thinking, Holy shit, look at that guy!

He’s wearing clothes!

The man who would be completely unremarkable at Walmart has become the most visually interesting person in the entire campground.

Why?

Because contrast creates attention.

And that brings me to gold.

Gold used to mean something.

The ancients didn’t value gold because some marketing executive told them it was luxurious. They valued it because it was rare, beautiful, durable, resistant to corrosion and—most importantly—difficult to find.

You couldn’t just order a pallet of gold trim because you decided the lobby needed a little more pizzazz.

Gold was special precisely because there wasn’t much of it.

Scarcity creates value.

Then along comes Donald Trump, a man apparently operating under the philosophy that if one gold object is impressive, then 10,000 gold-colored objects must be the pinnacle of sophistication.

Gold walls.

Gold trim.

Gold fixtures.

Gold furniture.

Gold lettering.

Gold accents.

Gold everything.

At some point you stop seeing gold.

You just see yellow with an enormous self-esteem problem.

That’s the strange thing about covering everything in fake gold: eventually the gold itself becomes less impressive.

When every surface is screaming, LOOK HOW EXPENSIVE I AM, the effect starts becoming less “royal palace” and more “casino that has somehow wandered into a HomeGoods clearance aisle.”

The ancients understood something we seem to have forgotten.

Rare things are valuable because they are rare.

Diamonds don’t become more impressive because you glue them to the toaster. Gold doesn’t become more precious because you put it on the bathroom faucet. And a color doesn’t remain attention-grabbing when absolutely everyone is wearing it.

There is a psychological phenomenon hiding in all of this.

Overexposure dulls perception.

The first time you hear a song, it might stop you in your tracks. Play it 400 times and eventually you’re reaching for the radio button.

The first time you see a spectacular building, you might stare at it.

Live next door for 20 years and eventually you’re complaining about the parking.

The first time someone walks into a room wearing highlighter yellow, you notice.

When everyone is wearing it, you don’t even register it.

Walk into a nudist camp wearing nothing and you’re dressed appropriately.

Walk into it wearing a three-piece suit and suddenly you’re the spectacle.

Apparently, the easiest way to become interesting is simply to be different from whatever everybody else is doing.

And that’s exactly what excessive displays of wealth eventually destroy.

When everything is gold, gold stops communicating precious.

It communicates gold-colored.

And there is a difference.

Real wealth doesn’t necessarily need to announce itself every five seconds.

Real value doesn’t become more valuable because you paint it gold.

And genuine luxury doesn’t require every available surface to scream, DID YOU SEE HOW MUCH MONEY THIS COST?

Eventually, the screaming becomes the wallpaper.

There is an old saying that everything that glitters is not gold.

Perhaps we’ve reached the point where everything that is gold isn’t particularly impressive either.

Because if you have to cover absolutely everything in gold to convince people you’re wealthy, powerful or important, maybe the gold isn’t doing the convincing anymore.

Maybe it’s just decoration.

Just like the orange construction vest.

Just like highlighter yellow.

Just like the naked people at the nudist camp.

When everything is trying to stand out, nothing stands out.

And perhaps that’s the ultimate irony of excess:

When you make everything extraordinary, you accidentally make nothing extraordinary.

Sometimes the thing that gets noticed isn’t the brightest color in the room.

It’s the one person who decided not to wear it.

Dwain Northey

Misunderstanding: Or Maybe a Restraining Order?

There are songs we hear so many times that we stop actually listening to the lyrics. They become part of the soundtrack of our lives, and we absorb the emotion without necessarily examining the story being told.

Genesis’ “Misunderstanding” is one of those songs.

On the surface, it’s easy to understand the sentiment. The narrator is heartbroken. He’s waiting for someone who doesn’t show up. He calls, waits, searches, and eventually realizes that the relationship may be falling apart. It’s melancholy, catchy, and wrapped in that particular brand of late-1970s/early-1980s emotional misery that Genesis could deliver so well.

And if you’re the narrator, you’re obviously the victim.

But let’s try something different.

Let’s listen to the song from the perspective of the person he’s singing about.

Suddenly, this isn’t necessarily a sad story about a guy who has been abandoned.

It might be a story about a guy who desperately needs to be told to stop showing up.

Because that’s the funny thing about songs involving heartbreak: the person telling the story is usually the person who gets to decide who the villain is.

The narrator tells us about waiting. He tells us about trying to find her. He tells us about driving around looking for her. He tells us about the plans they apparently had. He tells us about her absence and his confusion.

What he doesn’t tell us is what she thinks is happening.

Maybe she really did misunderstand.

Or maybe she understood perfectly.

Maybe she didn’t want to see him.

That’s where the song gets considerably more uncomfortable.

Imagine reversing the roles. Imagine being the person on the other end of this story. You’ve apparently failed to show up for a meeting, and now this guy is driving around looking for you. He’s calling. He’s trying to figure out where you are. He’s emotionally distraught because you aren’t where he expects you to be.

At some point, you might reasonably think:

“Dude, this isn’t a misunderstanding. I’m avoiding you.”

And if he doesn’t get the hint, eventually the conversation changes from “Why doesn’t she love me anymore?” to “Why won’t this guy leave me alone?”

That’s a pretty significant distinction.

We tend to romanticize persistence in relationships. Movies do it constantly. Songs do it constantly. The guy refuses to give up because he’s convinced that the relationship is still there somewhere underneath the misunderstanding.

But persistence only looks romantic when the other person wants you to persist.

Otherwise, it’s just unwanted attention with a better soundtrack.

That’s the uncomfortable thing about looking at old love songs through a modern lens. We have become considerably more aware of the difference between romantic devotion and obsession.

And obsession has a funny way of rewriting reality.

The obsessed person doesn’t necessarily think they’re being obsessive. They think they’re being devoted.

They’re not stalking.

They’re trying to find you.

They’re not refusing to accept rejection.

They’re fighting for the relationship.

They’re not ignoring boundaries.

They’re trying to understand what went wrong.

And they’re not imagining a relationship that may no longer exist.

They’re holding on to what they know is still there.

Except, of course, the other person gets a vote.

That’s the part missing from the narrator’s perspective.

We don’t hear her explanation.

We don’t know why she didn’t show up.

We don’t know whether she had second thoughts, changed her mind, met someone else, became uncomfortable, or simply decided she didn’t want to continue the relationship.

All we know is that the narrator believes something has gone terribly wrong.

And that’s exactly how obsession can work. The person experiencing it fills in the blanks with their own interpretation because accepting the alternative—that the other person simply doesn’t want them anymore—is emotionally unbearable.

It’s easier to believe there has been a misunderstanding.

Because a misunderstanding can be fixed.

Rejection can’t.

And that’s where the title itself becomes almost unintentionally funny.

Misunderstanding.

Maybe.

Or maybe the narrator understands perfectly well what happened and simply doesn’t like the answer.

There is an important difference between “She didn’t understand what I meant” and “I don’t understand why she doesn’t want me.”

The first is a communication problem.

The second is a boundary problem.

And if the second person keeps pursuing the first person after being rejected, we’re no longer talking about a romantic tragedy. We’re getting into territory where someone might reasonably be researching restraining orders.

That’s not to say the narrator is necessarily some sinister psychopath hiding behind a sentimental melody. That’s obviously an exaggeration. The song was written as a pop song about loneliness and romantic disappointment, not as a psychological case study.

But that’s precisely why examining lyrics from another perspective is interesting.

We automatically empathize with the person singing.

They’re the one telling us what happened.

They’re sad.

They’re lonely.

They’re confused.

They’re the protagonist.

Therefore, they’re right.

But real life doesn’t work that way.

Sometimes the protagonist is simply the person with the microphone.

And sometimes the person with the microphone is leaving out some rather important information.

Maybe the woman in “Misunderstanding” isn’t cruel.

Maybe she isn’t confused.

Maybe she isn’t playing games.

Maybe she just wants some distance.

And maybe if she were given the opportunity to tell her side of the story, the entire song would sound very different.

It might go something like:

“I thought I made it pretty clear I didn’t want to see him anymore, but apparently that wasn’t clear enough because now he’s driving around looking for me.”

Suddenly Genesis has accidentally wandered from heartbreak into true crime.

And that is the beauty of examining old songs this way.

The lyrics don’t change.

Our perspective does.

What sounds like romantic persistence from one side can sound like obsession from the other. What sounds like heartbreaking confusion to the narrator can sound like someone refusing to accept another person’s autonomy.

Maybe it really was a misunderstanding.

Or maybe the narrator’s biggest misunderstanding was believing that someone else’s decision not to be with him required an explanation he was entitled to receive.

Because love isn’t ownership.

A relationship isn’t a contract that one person can continue enforcing after the other person has mentally checked out.

And rejection isn’t a puzzle that persistence is guaranteed to solve.

Sometimes the answer is simply no.

And sometimes the healthiest thing you can do when someone doesn’t show up is not drive around looking for them.

You go home.

You listen to the song.

You eat some ice cream.

You feel miserable for a while.

And eventually you move on.

Because if you don’t, the next chapter of the love story may not be a reunion.

It may be a judge explaining the difference between heartbreak and harassment.

And somehow, I don’t think that was the misunderstanding Genesis had in mind.