Tits and Politics, Side by Side
After writing about Stuttgart 21—specifically about the police using water cannons on pensioners and schoolchildren who’d turned up to protest a railway station—I got the kind of feedback that tells you something real about your readership. Some of it was appreciation. A fair amount was something closer to disgust: not at the police, but at me for covering it at all.
The messages arrived in a range of registers. The polite version was "stick to what you know." The less polite version involved comparisons to Bild—Germany’s tabloid id, a paper that has always been comfortable putting bare flesh next to breathless moral panic—as if the crime was mixing registers rather than doing it badly. The bluntest version: write about tits and Lindsay Lohan’s rehab. That’s what this is for.
I understood what they were saying. There’s a compact between a writer and a reader that gets established over time, and when you break from your usual territory it reads as betrayal. I’d spent years building something with a particular flavor—pop culture, design, bodies, irreverence—and suddenly I was writing about riot police and infrastructure politics. Of course that was jarring.
But Stuttgart 21 wasn’t abstract to me. Watching footage of a sixty-seven-year-old man being partially blinded by a water cannon at a peaceful protest over a train station—over whether citizens had any say in how their public space gets reshaped—felt relevant in a way that didn’t require justification. The events were happening. I was watching them. It seemed strange not to say something.
What the criticism was really asking was: who do you think you are? Which is, I think, the wrong question. The right question is: is what you wrote any good? If it wasn’t, say so. If the argument was thin, call that out. But the objection wasn’t to the quality—it was to the category. A culture site should stay in its lane. Politics has its own people.
It doesn’t, though. The lane markers are invented. I write about whatever catches me. Sometimes that’s a music video or a film or someone’s body. Sometimes it’s a state using force against its own people in a park in the middle of the afternoon. Both are real. Both happen in the same world. I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to keep the register comfortable.