Remember when we cared that Kellyanne Conway wanted you to buy Ivanka’s shoes? It was 55 years ago. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Gaw, how long has it been? One hundred years? How long have we been alive for this administration and how many more times may we fling ourselves upon fainting couches, shocked — shocked — by the fact that, say, a White House official has been identified as a person of interest in the Russia probe?

(Refreshes Twitter screen.)

The person of interest is that guy? Shocked.



We are stricken with nostalgia for the things we used to be concerned about before there were new things to be concerned about.

We wasted our outrage. Wasted it all on frivolous things like Kellyanne Conway hawking Ivanka Trump’s brand — “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff!” — which people got upset about because they saw it an unprecedented conflict of interest.

“That seems like a much simpler time,” agrees Amanda Terkel. (It was three months ago.)

Terkel is the managing editor for politics at HuffPost. She quickly runs through the other bubbles of outrage that have occupied the nation since the inauguration, most of which, frankly, we had already forgotten.

“There were the reports of power struggles between Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus,” Terkel remembers.

There was something to do with Blackwater and Betsy deVos’s brother, we remind her. The Seychelles? That time we were going to deport green-card holders?

“I wrote a piece over last weekend talking about health care,” Terkel says. “Because I really thought we might be focusing on that again.”

Oh no no no. Silly, no.

There is no going back to normal, pet. This is normal now.

(Refreshes Twitter again.)

“Remember when we were all just boycotting Trump’s ties and Ivanka’s shoes?” tweets one person wistfully.

“Remember three days ago when the Kushner family was selling visas in China?” writes another. “Things were simpler then.”

“I remember the olden days, when the firing of Comey was the big scandal,” writes a third. “Now all this newfangled treason stuff.”

A meme circulates online: the elderly lady from the movie “Titanic,” in the scene where her mind drifts back to the ship sinking in her youth. “Remember when Trump fired Comey?” the caption reads. “It’s been 84 years.”

“Trump years are like dog years,” sighs Peter Sagal. Sagal hosts NPR’s news quiz show, “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me,” which airs on the weekends but has the misfortune to tape on Thursdays, which, in the current era, is at least six or seven news cycles behind.

“I have been afraid to get on airplanes because I wonder what’s going to have happened by the time I land. It’s like, with the latest news — ”

Wait, which latest news?

“Comey.”

Which news about Comey? Comey firing? Comey memo? Comey firing and memo leading to the appointment of a special counsel?

“The special counsel.”

Okay, continue.

“Anyway, we could fill the entire hour with just the latest news.”

Sagal says he feels that the American public has adjusted fairly quickly to this new state of outrage churn. We cannot remember a time Before. We are well equipped. We are prepared. We are lean scandal digesters, able to scarf down the next foible that’s flung in front of us.

“You’ve seen the movie ‘Castaway’?” Sagal says. “There’s that amazing transition in the middle of the movie. In the first half, Tom Hanks finds himself in the middle of the island — he doesn’t know how to survive; he’s totally unprepared. And then there’s a cut, and suddenly it’s four years later. He knows how to hunt, he knows how to fish, he knows how to make rope, and he’s talking to Wilson. And that is the American people right now. We know how to fish and we’re talking to a volleyball.”

The American people are alighting on their own coping mechanisms. The American people are using words like “self care” to justify the need to occasionally turn off CNN and just watch “Tiny House Hunters” marathons on HGTV.

“I’ve taken to Gwyneth Paltrow’s statement about divorce,” says Karen Kaub, a retired attorney who lives in the Watergate, a building whose name is freighted with its own storied news history. “I’m in a state of conscious uncoupling with the news.”

It happened gradually, as Kaub realized that trying to keep up with the relentless pace of things was adversely impacting her daily life.

“I can’t go on,” Kaub says. “I’m just an elderly retired person. It’s not healthy to get myself so caught up in it.”

Recently, she decided to cancel her subscription to the New York Times to protect herself from the endless churn of relentless scandal. “They begged me to stay, but I told them I had to do it for my mental health. Then they were so nice about it.”

But Kaub is a news junkie. She couldn’t stay away for long, so she came up with a solution, a temporary one, at least: She has been reading English-language news from China. On a recent day, the Chinese newspaper had stories about the new French president’s cabinet and about a Japanese bill that would authorize an emperor to abdicate.

“At least it turned me on to the fact that other things are still happening around the world,” she said. It was just really good to feel for a minute like the sky wasn’t falling.