My first big Twitter spat began shortly after 7 a.m. Friday morning when I came across a tweet posted by @bougeoisalien:
That tweet read: “If Americans can be so easily manipulated by a (Facebook) meme, the problem isn’t Russia. The problem is an electorate intentionally kept ignorant.”
The writer was implying that the media deliberately keeps people misinformed, an implication with which I take issue. So I retweeted @bourgeoisalien — posted a copy of the tweet to my timeline – but added this comment: “Swap ‘that deliberately remains’ for ‘intentionally kept,’ and I’ll reward you with a coveted ‘like.'”
Because of the way re-tweets work, @bourgeoisalien was alerted to my response. Almost immediately I was hit with ten consecutive tweets back at me – a short essay broken up into 140-character salvos:
“While both can be true, depending on the person, to deny that our education system and media is woefully inept at educating the / electorate is a vast oversight. When a person, in an economy that has the greatest wealth inequality since the 19th century is working / two jobs at 7 bucks an hour just to survive, and they may have 30 minutes to watch the news, neither FOX, CNN, or MSNBC will / do the job of actually educating citizens on the depth of the issues. Combine that with a sub-par education system that does not / teach civics, much less, and yes I’ll mention this again, critical thinking, and you have a recipe for disaster, a people able to be / easily manipulated. Yes, you I assume, and I were raised in homes that valued education, and perhaps we both had some advantages / but to sit here and say ALL people choose to be ignorant, is…well….ignorant. Yes, there are some that are willfully hateful / but to deny that there is a real problem with media, news, and education, to deny that the powers that be prefer and easily/ manipulated voter is naive, and I know you’re a smart guy, Eric, so I don’t know what to think about your comments. Very odd / Quite frankly, since the telecommunications act of 1996, our Media has taken a nose dive into corporate-driven propaganda. Give me a break.”
Twitter is a wonderful medium for quips, tips and sharp observations, but it’s lousy for expressing an even remotely complicated or subtle point. That’s why our simple, blunt president prefers it.
The above paragraph reads well when unpacked and reassembled, but not so much when chopped up and presented as a “thread.” This why I never respond at length to such offerings or try to present my own ideas that way.
I don’t fault people who prefer to pontificate and argue in threads, but I’ve never found it be conducive to an actual exchange of ideas. Not only do threads tend to get shouty, the conversation, such as it is, often invites hecklers.
@bourgeoisalien – the Twitter handle, I’ve since learned, of writer Elizabeth Hamilton Argyropoulos — usually has a lighter touch. Her offerings occasionally make the finals of my Tweet of the Week poll, and she has nearly 51,000 followers. A group of them jumped in to agree with her, tagging me so their rejoinders would show up in my “notifications,” which, for the information of those who don’t use Twitter, is similar to an in-box.
“Thank you,” she wrote to one of them who was cheering her on. “I’m sick of people in media not doing their job — educating voters on issues, and then have them say, “lol, Americans are dumb.”
This was an hour after my first response, I’d moved on to other reading, other topics, and I really should have let this go. But since this particular line of argument irritates me, I rose to her bait: “And I’m sick of people complaining we’re not putting the information out there,” I responded. “We are. Every damn day. Millions of words— facts, analyses.”
Were I given to presenting my ideas in strings of tweets – I would have elaborated:
Every American with a Facebook account has fingertip access to a vast variety of other media sources — left, right, middle; responsible, rabid, sober. Even if the biggest media outlets were conspiring to keep the public ignorant and “easily manipulated,” which they are not, it would be an impossible task without the cooperation of vast numbers of incurious people, people who watch only one news channel or stick to only one web site for information while spending most of their free time on sports and entertainment.
Sure, wealth and educational inequalities are big problems. People who have to work two jobs to stay afloat are stressed. But don’t tell me that their credulity when it comes to, say, fake stories on Facebook about the Pope endorsing Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton being in the final stages of brain cancer, is part of a vast media conspiracy to keep them uninformed. They evidently like their bubbles and their silos. Don’t patronize them and don’t insult journalists.
I did not write this. But @bourgeoisalien wouldn’t let the subject go, instead complaining to the world about my promise to reward her with “a coveted ‘like,'”
“That is the saddest (stuff) I’ve ever heard,” she wrote, totally missing the ironic overstatement in my reference to the mundane, nearly meaningless click of approval that twitter users frequently offer one another. “What are we here, in middle school?”
I had to fire back at that. “Wow, you are totally humorless, aren’t you? You didn’t see the irony at all, did you? So angry and sad, jeez.”
For the next 24 hours, my notification in-box was flooded with contemptuous asides from her and many of her supporters accusing me of sexism, ignorance, arrogance and general mopery.
“I couldn’t believe what I read yesterday morning from him,” @bourgeoisalien posted, still seething at 9:21 a.m. Saturday. “And he thinks he decides what’s funny? Bitch, please.”
“My friends on the left are often depressingly humorless,” I observed in what was to be my last contribution to this exchange, which her heaviest and most haughty supporters continued into Sunday. “And yes, I do get to decide what’s funny. God help us if it’s grim liberals.”
The left produces nearly all the best comedians, but along with them a veritable army of earnest scolds — touchy, hyper-literal handwringers with a suffocating sense of their own virtue. Not one on team @bourgeoisalien caught the wink in my declaration that I get to decide what’s funny.
Sheesh. As one essayist put it in July, 2016: “I’m exhausted by seeing satirists attacked by multitudes of asinine or threatening comments on their pieces by people who have no clue what a joke is in written form. I’m angry we live in a culture that largely can’t differentiate between satire, humor, or sarcasm with serious issues and those who actually mean us harm….
“It’s sad to see anyone living with so much misdirected hostility or self appointed authority over other’s intellect.”
That essayist was, of course, @bourgeoisalien herself in a piece headlined “Calm Down Douchebag, It’s Satire: A Few Words To The Humor-Impaired.”
