There’s still time for David Litt to revise his new book.
It’s Only Drowning: Learning to Surf and the Pursuit of Common Ground is scheduled for publication this June; Litt, a former speechwriter for former President Barack Obama, should make some necessary changes. As it stands now, It’s Only Drowning comes across as elitist, its ideas outdated amid the current moment that President Donald Trump calls the new “American golden age of common sense.”
It’s Only Drowning recounts how Litt, a liberal and the author of Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, becomes close to his brother-in-law Matt Kappler, a conservative. Kappler is a surfer, motorcycle rider, and electrician from New Jersey. He becomes an important figure when Litt starts experiencing depression triggered by, well, life: “By the fall of 2021, a perfect storm of growing certainties—that Covid was not an event but an era, that Trumpism was not a blip but a spreading stain, that a world on fire was not a challenge to be overcome but a permanent condition to be endured for the rest of our lives—began howling in my head. Psychologists call this ‘situational depression.’”
On a visit to New Jersey with his wife Jacqui, Litt notices that his brother-in-law Matt is not just coping with life but thriving. Litt is intrigued: “I couldn’t help wondering if what I’d dismissed as recklessness—the loose screw that compelled Matt to zoom down the Parkway on his Harley or handle live wires for a living or float on a fiberglass plank in a freezing wintry ocean—was in fact fearlessness, driving him forward when I was stuck.”
Litt decides to take up surfing. He begins to feel close to Kappler, who guides Litt through the powerful surf. This connection is supposed to represent the resolution of the two sides of the culture war. Americans can all get along if we all just paddle out together.
There’s only one problem. In It’s Only Drowning, Litt comes across as hectoring and self-righteous, whereas Kappler is laid back and filled with common sense. Furthermore, the things that Litt criticizes Kappler for believing look a lot different and plenty wise in light of what has happened since Trump got reelected. Litt would do well to go back and reevaluate his words before the June publication date of his book. In It’s Only Drowning, Litt comes across as patronizing to his brother-in-law, who has been proven right about a lot of things.
Here’s how Litt describes Kappler: “While Matt would never have described himself as libertarian—he wasn’t one to join movements, even those dedicated to standoffishness—he seemed receptive to any argument that involved taking matters into his own hands. Pandemics could be defeated with exercise and clean living. Financial security could be achieved by trading crypto. Looming societal breakdown could be rendered irrelevant by a gun.”
The COVID-19 shot was a breaking point: “The deepest fault line was, of course, vaccination. Had Matt been a friend rather than my wife’s younger brother, I probably would have cut off contact after learning he’d refused the Covid shot.”
When a family member in a social station goes on a tirade about evil Elon Musk, Kappler has a simple answer: “Free speech!”
Well, yes. One doesn’t have to be full MAGA or refuse a COVID vaccine — I got mine twice — to see that time has validated many of Kappler’s ideas. Yes, sunlight and fresh air can prevent illness. Guns do play a part in keeping order. There was an attempt to suppress free speech, as Elon Musk has revealed and as even Mark Zuckerberg now admits.
At one point in It’s Only Drowning, Kappler expresses admiration for the song “Try That in a Small Town.” Litt, a graduate of Yale and the Dalton School, is appalled: “Do you know the story behind it, though?” When Matt doesn’t reply, Litt goes on a lecture: “It’s a country song. All the verses are about mob justice, and the music video was shot outside a courthouse in Tennessee where there had been a lynching, so lots of people were offended, and then the guy who sings it said he was being canceled and the song went to the top of the charts. It was a whole thing.”
When the two men go surfing in Hawaii, Litt is put off by Kappler’s proletariat ways: “Would I have felt better if Matt had tried the local Hawaiian delicacies instead of the chicken tenders, abandoned his fundamentalist individualism for a spirit of solidarity, and given up Joe Rogan for NPR? Yes. Absolutely. Finding our piece of neutral ground was not perfect, or complete, or sufficient. But in a world on fire, few things are.”
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Instead of ever conceding that Kappler may be right about a lot of things, Litt pats himself on the back for being so tolerant: “Two years earlier, keeping someone like Matt at arm’s length had been a matter of principle. I felt a civic responsibility, if not to shun him, then at least to be unwelcoming until his worldview matched mine. It’s hard to list all I would have missed out on—all we would have missed out on—if I hadn’t betrayed my principles before it was too late.” Yet in It’s Only Drowning, Litt, like so many elitist leftists, never fully engages with the idea that many — not all — of his ideas may be deeply wrong.
He needs to paddle back out and try again.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.