The Man Who Knew Too Little (original) (raw)
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Erik Hagerman heads out for his morning ritual, a 30-minute drive into town for coffee and a scone at his favorite coffee shop in Athens, Ohio.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
The most ignorant man in America knows that Donald Trump is president — but that’s about it. Living a liberal fantasy is complicated.
Erik Hagerman heads out for his morning ritual, a 30-minute drive into town for coffee and a scone at his favorite coffee shop in Athens, Ohio.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
- March 10, 2018
GLOUSTER, Ohio — At first, the experiment didn’t have a name.
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.
James Comey. Russia. Robert Mueller. Las Vegas. The travel ban. “Alternative facts.” Pussy hats. Scaramucci. Parkland. Big nuclear buttons. Roy Moore.
He knows none of it. To Mr. Hagerman, life is a spoiler.
“I just look at the weather,” said Mr. Hagerman, 53, who lives alone on a pig farm in southeastern Ohio. “But it’s only so diverting.”
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