Are You Resigned to a World of Bad News? Or Do You Need Some ‘Cope’?

Magazine|Are You Resigned to a World of Bad News? Or Do You Need Some ‘Cope’?

Forget the awkward half-a-glass metaphor we use to describe optimism and pessimism. Imagine I’ve handed you a very full container of very bad news. We could judge your response using a newer, bleaker binary: Are you resigned to doom, or do you spin up some cope?

This wouldn’t be “cope” in its usual verb sense, as in “coming to terms with difficult circumstances.” (Nor, obviously, in its other senses, like a clergyman’s mantle or the way you cut crown molding.) We look on that kind of coping as a psychologically healthy thing to do, and the cope that’s thrived lately is nearly the opposite.

It’s the sort you invoke when, say, struggling partisans fixate on the one poll that suggests their candidate isn’t tanking — that’s cope. When those of us with W-2 income say the ultrawealthy are all miserable anyway, that’s cope. When some late-1950s Americans nitpicked the reporting on Sputnik because they couldn’t believe the Soviet Union launched a satellite first — that, according to the writer Jeet Heer, was “a pathetic display of cope.”

People love to complain about nouns being refashioned into verbs, but here we have a verb that absolutely shines as a noun. One YouTuber, taking a shot at a definition, came up with this: Cope is “a pattern of thought that intentionally reaches a conclusion that is distant from the objective truth, in order to make us feel better.” There are more familiar ways you could put this: denial, rationalizing, making excuses, clinging to false hope. But cope, as a noun, isn’t just the act of believing what makes you feel better. It describes the self-serving arguments you make as a result — which is a useful thing to have a word for, given that such arguments now constitute an alarming share of all text on the internet. Your insistence that your team only lost because of the referees? Cope. Your theories on how your dumb investment will recover its value? Cope. The fox saying the grapes were sour anyway: some of the earliest cope on record.

Even when “cope” does remain a verb, there’s a fresh spin. It’s used in the imperative now, and not kindly. Air any kind of complaint online, and there are those who’ll instruct you, with jeering schadenfreude, to “cope harder,” in a tone that sits somewhere between “deal with it,” “cry more” and “eat something they won’t print in The New York Times.” (Don Lemon publicly frets about Jimmy Kimmel’s removal from TV; a prominent right-wing account tells him to “cope and seethe,” another popular variant.) Sometimes “cope” doesn’t even take a part of speech, and exists purely as a four-letter heckle: cope, lol. This is not a response you benefit from parsing.

This usage has been around for some time, but it went truly mainstream in 2020, after a presidential election that I think we can fairly say — without partisan bias or judgment on the merits — had a lot of Americans struggling to psychically accommodate an outcome they found difficult to accept; for two solid months, we were knee-deep in fevered predictions that candidates would be arrested or entire states would hold do-over elections. These are the conditions in which cope-calling thrives. One of the moment’s most circulated memes depicted Pepe the Frog, the cartoon adopted as a right-wing mascot, wearing a respirator mask hooked up to a tank marked “copium.”