Lotus position
Why The White Lotus resonates, especially in today's America.
It was around 11am this morning that the temptation proved too great. I turned on the news, eager to hear analysis of the stock market crash, the dead-cat bounce on a fake rumor, and whatever else was ailing the planet in the wake of Donald Trump’s tariff insanity. Yet on CNN’s The Situation Room—surely the place to be discussing seismic events that are wiping trillions of dollars from the global economy—there was a chuckling Wolf Blitzer, wrapping a feel-good segment about a basketball game.1
Naturally.
It’s hard to escape the deeply despairing thought this is a country increasingly filled with unserious, uneducated, uninformed people—at all strata of society, across all income brackets—who take for granted the life they have the privilege of leading. There is an inherent assumption everything in America will continue as is, while ignoring the decades of struggle that got the country to this point.
“I do think one of the reasons that our commitment to democratic ideals has eroded is that we got pretty comfortable and complacent,” former President Barack Obama said on the weekend. “It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say you are a progressive or say you are for social justice or say you’re for free speech and not have to pay a price for it. Now we’re at one of those moments where, you know what? It’s not enough just to say you’re for something; you may actually have to do something and possibly sacrifice a little bit.”
On a positive note, it was amazing to see more than five million people take to the streets on the weekend to protest Trump. Gathering a coordinated resistance to his actions has taken time—and it’s hard not to cynically think most people shrugged at the illegal deportations and unlawful executive orders and it took a hit to the pocketbook to rouse a response. Still, we’ll take it. America requires a sense of community and collective action more than at any point in my lifetime.
Yet, of course, nothing that’s happened since January 20 is surprising. Trump may lie as easily as breathing, but he’s been shockingly consistent and truthful about what drives him at his core: he divides the world into “winners” and “losers,” and through a combination of stupidity and willful ignorance of the basics of economics, he believes tariffs are the cure-all for this power imbalance.
As Paul Krugman pointed out this morning, we can’t and shouldn’t expect most people to be deeply engaged in both understanding Trump and trade policy (although surely recognizing a conman as blindingly obvious as Trump isn’t something that requires deep concentration). Who should have known? The gaggle cynically supporting him in the naive belief “he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier.”
“Over the weekend Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, suddenly turned on his champion, declaring on X that: By placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital,” Krugman wrote. “But Ackman refused to take any responsibility for enabling the destruction: I don't think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.
“Indeed. Who could have foreseen that the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, who posts crazy stuff on Truth Social every day, would impose destructive tariffs? Who could have imagined that the many economists, myself included, who warned that a Trump victory would be very bad for the economy would turn out to have been right? Or if we were wrong, it was only because we underestimated the damage?”
Of course, I’m not immune to wanting to curl beneath a warm blanket and be distracted from the injustices and insanity of Trump’s second term. And surely the best distraction material in recent weeks was The White Lotus, the series that resulted from writer and director Mike White essentially being asked by HBO during the pandemic scramble for programing: “Whaddya got?”
What White had was an idea for a superficially frothy series that holds a harsh mirror to American society. Beneath the surface, the first two seasons of The White Lotus were deeply political, centered around how money makes people “coarse, stripped out their empathy, destroyed their human connections.” Season three? It followed the familiar formula of bloodshed, mayhem, and moral ambiguity that reflects both this moment in time. But the arc of its characters was much more muddled.
“Wealth is no longer their unspoken truth, their lodestar; it is more of a quest—how to get wealth, how to keep it, how to hide it, how to use it. It feels a lot more like early 21st-century wealth porn, in other words,” Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian. “I think White simply got bored of his powerful eat-the-rich message and moved on to new pastures, which is what creative people do—they’re mercurial. The rest of us, however, must be more workmanlike and remain on point; in the arc of human history, this is exactly the wrong time to get bored of having a problem with rich people.”
I’m not sure White was bored, and the less clear-cut distinction between right and wrong in this latest season certainly kept me thinking this morning, as great art does. We are, after all, at an inflection point in American history where the spoils are flowing to the victors. For the wealthy, the end seems to increasingly justify any means, morals and ethics be damned.
In White’s world (spoiler alert!), if spa maven Belinda can get hers by extorting a suspected murderer and promising to keep shtum, why wouldn’t she? If that suspected murderer can spend his victim’s millions on a house in the hills and a vanity yacht while his former escort girlfriend finds a new guy to have a threesome with, why not? If namby-pamby security guard Gaitok can get the girl and the job he covets simply by shooting a guy in the back, wouldn’t he be crazy not to? And if Russian thugs need to pull off the odd jewel heist to make a living and avoid deportation, that just seems logical. Right?2
In some respects, the bubbling fury over the actions of Trump, Elon Musk, and his DOGE dopes which resulted in the uprising this weekend undercut this moral squishiness: maybe, just maybe, there are still people who separate right from wrong; who recognize the inherent unfairness of late-stage capitalism. But it’s hard not to conclude that White’s latest season once again captured the nation’s mood. In Trump’s America, winners are winners by whatever means necessary. It’s the rest of us who are suckers.3
“We’re lucky. It’s true. No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have—even the old kings and queens,” the fantastic Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey) tells her daughter, Piper, in The White Lotus finale after Piper rejects the monastic life for its lack of air conditioning and decent food. “The least we can do is enjoy it. If we don’t, it’s offensive. It’s an offense to all the billions of people who can only dream that one day they can live like we do.”
I write this for fun, not money. But if you want to shout me to a (probably terrible no-doubt-inferior-to-anything-in-Australia) flat white or magic, it’d make my day!
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.
Monday night was the NCAA men’s basketball national championship game between Florida and Houston, the (April) culmination of so-called March Madness. I have to keep my voice down State-side when it comes to the insanity of college sports, where adults obsess over the outcome of games they have zero control over, played by kids who are not just amateurs but who have a fewer than 1-in-50 chance of going pro, fueled by schools spending billions of dollars at the same time they are cutting academic programs. It’s … madness, all right, just not of the same variety fans and online gambling markets celebrate.
I really recommend the episode recaps penned by Amanda Whiting for New York magazine. They were dashed off right after the episodes aired, but were both insightful and enjoyable.
Moments after I finished writing this post, David Brooks posted an article echoing these very thoughts.