I'm gonna wash that man right out of my mind...
Many liberals woke up on the morning of November 9 in a state of extreme shock when they found out that the impossible happened...Donald J. Trump had been elected the 45th president of the United States. As we have seen in the many entertaining post-election videos, many reacted with shock, fury, or extreme sadness. However, one of the Trump haters acted in a very unique fashion, he blockaded not only all news about Donald Trump; but, in fact, all news of the outside world from his mind.
His name is Erik Hagerman and since he lives alone in the Ohio countryside, he has managed since Election Day 2016 to avoid all news of the outside world in order to not hear anything about the president he hates. New York Times reporter Sam Dolnick wrote about this man who is blockading the outside world in his adulatory March 10 article, The Man Who Knew Too Little:
Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics.
Donald Trump’s victory shook him. Badly. And so Mr. Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan.
He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016.
“It was draconian and complete,” he said. “It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.”
It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.
Hmmm... He sounds like a liberal nutcase but since he is a Trump hater to the extreme of avoiding all news, he rates a long sympathetic article in the New York Times.
Mr. Hagerman commits as hard as a method actor, and his self-imposed regimen — white-noise tapes at the coffee shop, awkward scolding of friends, a ban on social media — has reshaped much of his life.
...At some point last year, he decided his experiment needed a name. He considered The Embargo, but it sounded too temporary. The Boycott? It came off a little whiny.
Mr. Hagerman has created a fortress around himself. “Tiny little boats of information can be dangerous,” he said.
He decided that it would be called The Blockade.
At least it was a bit more original than calling it "The Resistance."
I recently spent two days visiting his farm on the condition that I not bring news from the outside world. As the sun set over his porch, turning the rolling hills pink then purple then blue, he held forth, jumping from English architecture to the local pigs’ eating habits to his mother’s favorite basketball team to the philosophy of Kant. He can go days without seeing another soul.
So, you can earn a two day visit from a New York Times reporter IF you are so unhinged over Trump that you go to the extreme of blocking all news of the outside world.
Of course, the big question is how does the Trump hating Hagerman find out if it is "safe" to listen to the news again if he is blockading it? A possible scenario could go like this:
Sam Dolnick shows up at the door of Erik Hagerman's remote Ohio home on the morning of November 4, 2020.
DOLNICK: Erik, I have good news and I have bad news for you.
HAGERMAN: What's the good news?
DOLNICK: I can tell you who won the presidential election yesterday.
(Extreme relief floods Hagerman's face.)
HAGERMAN: So, um, what's the bad news?
DOLNICK: I won't be able to tell you until January 20, 2025.
