My wife and I have a wonderful marriage, with only one major difficulty: myself. And one of the ways I prove difficult is a constitutional inability to ignore any screen that happens to be shining in my direction. Younger men wonder at my ability to exist without a smartphone. I am often called upon—usually at airports—to explain why, exactly, I communicate like I live inside a 90’s action movie. And though I sermonize as best as I am able—“it frees me from distraction!”—I always have to make a caveat: that I am the most distractible of men. I am the idiot child gaping at the pretty lights. A dumbphone may be helpful to you; it is necessary for me.
Sitting down at a restaurant is no easy feat for La Familia Barnes. It is a little less like choosing a seat and a little more like laying siege to a city. I must have my back to the baseball game playing over there, but at a precise angle, lest that mirror behind the bar beam music videos into my innocent eyes from a TV across the room. I must keep my head straight. When my wife makes the (poignant) point that we really ought to educate these children we keep having, I Must Not Be Caught Slackjawed (Rule #17)—must not wonder at the televised couple who have finally cured their dog’s constipation and long for me to share their joy.
Once, we entered a Greek joint in the Ohio Valley to find all our plans outsmarted from the start. Every angle was covered by a screen. Every seat was arranged according to a kind of TV-to-man defensive plan, so that no one would go uncovered by LED eminence. We asked someone Greek if they could turn off just one of their six televisions as a concession to my weakness, and were told: “We are not allowed to turn off the televisions when there are customers in the building.” We ate our gyros in a strangely personalized hell.
God has made me this way to humiliate me. I can’t be all that great: I can be distracted from my vocation by a muted rerun of Gilmore Girls. But I hope I can help others with my weakness. I experience, as an obvious and unignorable stench what seems like an odorless evil to most. What little I have learned from being so pathetic is this: public screens and background music are a form of theft. They are a way of enclosing common spaces. They ordain a mood and mandate a climate, which would not be so bad, if making a climate was not a particular (and wonderful) power of each and every man.
We know what it means to speak of a lunch as “frosty.” We are not crazy to characterize a family as “warm” or a family reunion as “stifling.” We are not lunatics when we speak of needing to “break up the ice” that seems to crystallize around certain characters, nor are we nuts to praise a group of men for their “air” of jollity: we have a power over the air that surrounds us. We create, out of postures, glances, sighs, and words, a climate in which some activities flourish and others wither.
Of all modern phenomena, the most monstrous and ominous, the most manifestly rotting with disease, the most grimly prophetic of destruction, the most clearly and unmistakably inspired by evil spirits, the most instantly and awfully overshadowed by the wrath of heaven, the most near to madness and moral chaos, the most vivid with devilry and despair, is the practice of having to listen to loud music while eating a meal at a restaurant.
Thus the immortal Chesterton, complaining in the early 20th century of the invasion of American jazz music into his beloved London pubs. His despair is only partly cheeky—he really did hate the fact that his people were being deprived of their ability to control the air.
Chesterton’s lament is now universally applicable: men and women are everywhere deprived of their power to determine the atmosphere. Our man saw devilry in the jazz band at his pub: what would he say of the televisions at a Buffalo Wild Wings? Of the screens embedded in our gas pumps? Public screens are not really there to be seen any more than the pop music soundtracking your shopping is there to be heard. Both are there to produce an atmosphere. And whatever their atmospheric effect is or tries to be it always achieves this much: the certainty that you do not own the place.
To enter a bar blasting a playlist is to know, before anything else, that you do not own the bar. To sit down in a restaurant with a screen playing FOX News is to know that you do not have any authority to contribute to the atmosphere of the restaurant—and if you do, it will be over and under the sounds, between and around the sights.
Technologically crafted backgrounds belong to consumer cultures because they are efforts to forget the spotaneous “backgrounds” which belong to cultures of common ownership. Whistling while you work is an irrelevant pastime: the bluetooth speaker will do it for you. Singing is for drunks. In a 1927 essay entitled “The Loss of Local Cultures and Customs,” Chesterton recalls a young man who told him of his efforts to revive what he called “Community Singing” in England. Said Chesterton:
I can remember that my own grandfather thought it perfectly natural to have Community Singing. Only he did not call it Community Singing. He called it singing. He thought it as natural as eating and drinking and talking and laughing. All these five things went together; and he always expected people to sing in chorus round a table; very rightly scorning the petty and pedantic question of whether or no they were able to sing.
If canned singing seems like a rote necessity for every boxstore and gas station, it is because it is a primary experience of passive consumption: it gets a guy ready to receive the world and its mood from a centralized power that controls the controls. “Driver picks the music,” indeed. We are driven through innumerable, stupid worlds by invisible DJs. It is something of a triumph if, by loud storytelling and flamboyant gesture, by the sheer number of the boys we pack into the bar, by the intensity of topic or by a judiciously pulled plug, we manage to reestablish man’s customary ownership of the air around his face.
But it is useful for the rulers of the earth to play at ruling the air. For all the profits that our mighty corporate powers produce, they rarely produce a pleasant mood. I hope you—dear reader—have had the singular experience of a power failure which signified the failure of these powers. I hope you have been there when the Counting Crows song praising Mr. Jones was snipped short, and the supermarket it so gaseously filled stood revealed as not being very super and barely being a market. A Kroger, a Wal-Mart—even a Target!—is a scary place when plunged into sudden silence. The pipes start to show. The four walls become evident. The layout and design which promotes mindless, passive consumption becomes an object instead of a flow—a thing that can be thought about amidst the quiet squeak of other people’s carts:
Dear Lord, but I am not a happy shopper. This place destroyed the neighborhood grocery stores to which my mother once walked. I drove here after beating my children into carseats. I am without productive property, exchanging a husband’s wages and WIC for milk collated from 10,000 cows while cameras watch and robots repeat “place your ITEM in the BAG”—oh, the music’s back! Look, freeze-dried Skittles!
A power failure puts the atmosphere back in our hands, but it is an awkward handoff—we aren’t practiced in such power. But I noticed that, after some nervous laughter, everybody starts talking—and it is usually with scorn for the silent store. Usually, some poor person says something to the effect of, “What the f- is wrong with this place?” There are obligatory jokes about stealing groceries. All of it has the following and vaguely threatening air: “we’re in charge now.”
And while it's not true in any strict sense, I do think the heady feeling of power attendant upon a power failure comes from the sudden restoration of our common ownership over the air. For the invasion of common spaces with noise, common views with billboards, and common customs with screens—all this mood-manufacturing demoralizes the troops. Without the manful activity of mood-making, “going out” becomes synonymous with “giving in”—and sometimes with “giving up.” I simply don’t know what else to make of the iPad dinner. I cannot conceive of the pleasure of the four-phone lunch, in which friends give up on producing any cubic footage of atmosphere for themselves, and each receive an unshared vibe from a personal screen.
It is fitting that, after five hundred years of war on common spaces, we have produced a generation—bless them—who habitually wear AirPods. The bright young things have joined the dull old fogeys in wearing hearing aids. We have all internalized the war of the wealthy against spaces given over to common ownership—and we stand ready with phones and earphones to fight it. Should any place liberate man to converse at a normal volume with his neighbor and so produce, out of their society, an environment; should no Top 40 hit, no desperate deodorant ad, no meticulously crafted corporate climate conspire to relieve man of his atmospheric authority; should a family begin to discuss freely, and so begin to stumble along the way to thinking clearly; should, I say should an audiovisual way open up for two strangers to begin to discuss the truth together—that “this store sucks,” that “if each of us owned two chickens there wouldn’t be an egg industry at all,” or that “in certain circumstances, kidnapping a U.S. senator might be an alright thing to do”—should any of man’s wild and worrisome work of climate-creation begin to assert itself—fear not. He has been trained. He will find such silences frightening. He will quickly privatize whatever common air he breathes by selecting a soundtrack for it, inviting a millionaire popstar to make its mood.
This essay is an excerpt from a talk delivered to the Chesterton Society’s annual conference in New Orleans, 2025. Invite me to speak by sending New Polity a message here.