Social Media Blues

What's so sociable about social media?

When we were all sitting staring blankly at TVs, at least we had to fight over the remote every half hour.

Now we sit alone at our computers by ourselves, virtually connected to the entire human population, electronically exchanging snippets of information with people we saw five minutes ago and who are now sitting in the next room at their computer, and with people we haven’t seen in 30 years who are sitting at their computer in Berlin, and while it may constitute a virtual community, it doesn’t add up to being a real community at all.

The little bits of ourselves that we put out there seem to fall into two categories. The bursts of virtual road rage that erupt on political blogs seem to rise out of the protected isolation that people feel at the computer in their room, similar to the protected isolation of the automobile on the road. Because you don’t have to look your correspondent directly in eye, you feel empowered to drop the constrictions of manners and empathy and just let out your inner beast.

The second category of “interaction” is even creepier. This is the avalanche of people at social sites inviting you to join their network of friends, people you sometimes have to scratch your head for 15 minutes to be able to even recall what they looked like, but when you finally pull them out of the memory bank you say, “Sure, I remember you, I’ll be your friend,” because what the hell, there’s a recession on, and the more people I can squeeze into the sinking boat of my career, the more chances are that maybe someone can save me from drowning. [ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY DISCLAIMER: I have real friends, relatives, business partners, and friendly acquaintances on social sites who have at various times enriched my life, spiritually as well as monetarily. But every single one of them I met and stay in contact with offline.]

If you blog, as I do, there’s an entire science of virtual community-building called SEO, search engine optimization. There are even electronic versions of Dear Abby (or Miss Lonelyhearts) who hand out the guidance to online social interaction you need to con people into actually looking at the words that you dump down the rabbit hole of the blogosphere.

Mostly it boils down to being as nice to as many of your fellow bloggers as possible—reading their blogs, commenting positively, making new friends on the site, generating whole streams of insincere comments, linking back and forth, electronically scratching each others’ back as furiously as possible until Google or some other machine out there picks up these signs of electronic interaction and starts sending more people your way for even more back scratching.

Eventually you end up with oodles of readers—or at least positive commenters—who are just as penniless and starved for real connection as you are, but are incapable of responding like real human beings, because they are locked into responding positively no matter what kind of crap you post. And there’s a whole bunch of these electronic soulless beings responding falsely to your blog, so you feel great. You’re writing for a virtual audience and having virtual interactions with a virtual community of friends.

The problem, of course, is that you spend real hours in this virtual community, until you have to face your real life with its real problems and real people and real bills, none of which can be tended or paid with all the virtual currency in the world.

So that’s my rant. And what am I going to do with it? I’m going to put it right on my blog, and share it to Facebook.

Fond Memories of the Kennedy Murder

The other day at church we had a meeting of what we call our "small group ministry" before the regular service. This is a kind of touchy-feeling session the first and third Sundays of each month of about eight people from the congregation designed to encourage bonding and community with the bodies that are sitting in the next pew in church.

In principle I approve of bonding and community, but in practice I'm not sure that I'm really built for it. For example, we recently filled out a list of questions meant to help reveal our inner selves to our neighbors--what was your childhood ambition, your wildest dream, your proudest moment, your first job, favorite movie, inspiration, soundtrack of your life, etc.

Sometimes I feel safer keeping my inner self tucked away in my innards--Dylan said it; "If my thought dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine."

I was a bit quirky but safe enough on some of the questions; childhood ambition--"President of the United States," favorite movie--"Duck Soup," first job--"getting my act together." You can read the whole list a couple of blog entries ago, if you want.

But where I got into trouble was "fondest memory." What popped into other people's heads was the puppy they got for Christmas, playing baseball with their dad, their mother singing in the kitchen. What popped into mine was the Kennedy assassination.

I was asked by the group to explain. First of all, I told them, that event certainly cured me of my childhood ambition. And indeed, generally, what I like most in life, and about my baby-boomer childhood in particular, are those moments that pulled the rug out from under me, that upset the apple cart, that made me wake up and think.

Imagine you're 13 years old, you've watched 55 episodes of Leave It to Beaver in a row and in the first five minutes of the 56th episode, Wally walks into the living room, reaches under the sofa cushions, pulls out a shotgun, and blows Ward Cleaver's head off. Then your own father switches off the TV, turns to you and says, "Well, son, you saw what happened there. What do you make of that?"

At the time, few people gave a straight answer to that question. Mrs. Kennedy, refusing to change her bloody dress, was probably on the right track. "Let them to see what they've done," she said bitterly.

Generally though, what people made of the event (those who didn't break into applause at the news) was a bunch of bullshit. There were lame comparisons between Kennedy and Lincoln, the Warren Commission was convened to report that everything was OK, and we went on into Vietnam.

Certainly at 13 I was pretty much in tune with these reactions. But as the Sixties unfolded, and the bullshit kept hitting the fan and getting sprayed across the room like the President's brains, year after year, again and again, it became clearer and clearer that reality was a lot less like the programmed safety of the first 55 episodes of Leave It to Beaver and more like the totally unexpected, disturbing, and astonishing uncertainty of the 56th.

The home of the free and the land of the brave was a bit like what it was billed to be, but also a lot like a chaotic, violent banana republic. My childhood was pleasant, but my adulthood would be more complicated and difficult. Life was good, but suffering was inevitable.

Illusions are pleasant, but dull, dishonest, and dangerous. As a country we've spent the last four decades trying to put the lid on the Sixties. That's what the Reagan and Bush years were all about. Me, I remember the murder of John F. Kennedy, and I remember it fondly.

Afghan from Iowa

Hamid Kazai, following a finding by UN-backed investigators that nearly a million of the votes cast for him in the Afghan presidential election were fraudulent, has decided that he has not won a majority of the vote after all, and must stand for a run-off election November 7.

So what’s a million votes or so gone wrong? If the man wins in November, he’s the head of a legitimate government, right? And if there’s a legitimate government in Kabul, doesn’t that mean there’s something to fight for here, something a bit more substantial than shadows and dust to grab hold of and shape into an alternative to the Taliban?

Why are we even having this discussion? Having backed corrupt warlords in poverty-stricken Third World settings going back six decades to Chiang Kai-shek in China (remember Chiang Kai-shek? Syngman Rhee? Ngo Dinh Diem? Nguyen Van Thieu? Nguyen Kao Ky? Big Minh? Little Minh?), why should we think this approach is a winner?

Even if Karzai isn’t a hollow substitute for a truly national leader who’s been installed, certified, and propped up by piles of outside guns and money, that’s exactly what he looks like, particularly after he’s been caught stealing hundreds of thousands of votes and has his Western handlers force him to give the election back.

Essentially we’ve got this guy saying, “Oops, I guess that was a sleazy, brazen power grab. Now I’ll run again, this time not as Al Capone, but as George Washington.”

And this is the rock we’re going to build a strategy around? Maybe Afghanistan will never be a real country. Maybe General McChrystal is just looking for a guaranteed 30-year gig. Maybe al-Qaeda isn’t even in Afghanistan.

Definitely the Taliban are crazy, vicious, fundamentalist authoritarians, but they’re the local boys, and at this point, Pashtun or not, Karzai might as well be the candidate from Iowa.

Questionnaire

2006 American Express ad series My Life My Card: 13 standard questions to provoke reflection & expression

my name: John Yates

childhood ambition: President of the United States

fondest memory: Kennedy assassination—cured me of my childhood ambition, as well as a host of other fantasies

soundtrack: Beatles’ Second Album

retreat: safer than attack

wildest dream: Splish-Splash by Bobby Darin

biggest challenge: self-satisfaction

alarm clock: nothing you can do that can’t be done; the clock tells whether it gets done before the alarm sounds

perfect day: today

first job: getting my act together

indulgence: not getting my act together

last purchase: venti Earl Grey tea with two Splendas

favorite movie: Duck Soup

inspiration: Groucho Marx

my life: will end

The New Yippies

“The Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control. And truly patriotic Americans like you and our Republican Party are the only thing standing in their way.”

Jesus, who wrote this stuff? It’s from a fundraising letter attributed to Michael S. Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and sent out with his signature immediately following the announcement that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but I’ve heard Steele interviewed and am certain he’s incapable of producing language this maniacally grandiose and paranoid.

Pronouncements like this come out of the mouths of melodramatic strongmen haranguing the crowd from a balcony in a banana republic; Steele in the interview I heard sounded more like a petty bureaucrat.

I haven’t heard material like this since I my kids and I used to watch Pinky and the Brain, the latter a cartoon mouse with an enormous cranium and a dream of taking over the world. The style is not quite Joe McCarthy; the tail-gunner from Wisconsin had a more working-class, thuggish feel to his rants. Nixon was as paranoid in his style, but more personal; he wasn’t as obsessed with the international plot for global control as he was with the international plot to get Dick Nixon.

No, I think whoever wrote this was channeling Terry Southern, the genius who co-wrote Dr. Strangelove. This is Colonel Jack D. Ripper, barricaded in his office, clutching his machine gun, chomping on his cigar and laying out with utter conviction the Communist conspiracy to drain our precious bodily fluids. What the hell is “global redistribution and control” anyway? What do the international leftists want to redistribute and control? Our wealth? Our minds? Our guns? Our semen?

All of the above, or none of the above, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling, the fear, the anger. We want people to give money to stop the fear. This material is florid, desperate, and interesting, I suppose, because it’s so emotional.

So was Jonestown. I don’t know about you, but this new, cultish Republican Party makes me nervous. These intense lunatics are certainly more fun to watch than Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles, but I really was more comfortable with the Republicans when they resembled the board of directors of a bank more than they did the Yippies.

Pre-Postmortem

Just when did the Obama administration end? Was it was when he lost Saturday Night Live? When Chicago lost the Olympics? When people forgot his dog’s name? When John Boehner emerged from the President’s meeting with Republican senators on Afghanistan this week and said nice things about him?

It’s hard to be president, particularly of a country with the attention span of a may fly. Having elected this guy to clean up an enormous mess, we promptly forgot the enormous mess, until, apparently, we noticed it again several days ago—Look! There’s a recession! Hey! There’s two wars going on! Yikes! Crazy people hate health care reform! Wow! Republicans don’t like Democrats!

Who’s in charge here, anyway?

Barack Obama.

Is this the same Barack Obama who discovered insulin, designed the Chrysler Building, fathered three United States Senators, swam the English Channel? This guy looked pretty good last November, and here we are, 11 months later, and still in deep doo-doo.

As meaningful health care reform looks more doable day by day, the stock market rises, the recession bottoms out, it’s hard to look past Jon Stewart and SNL. Yes, Afghanistan could be a nightmare and the banks are still underregulated and global warming is probably a long-term disaster and no one will do anything about energy conservation in the near future. The ointment is teeming with flies.

But that’s how we came to pick this boy wonder in the first place. Things were so fouled up that, hey, how could he do any worse than the people we’d already tried?

Not exactly a high benchmark for success, but good enough for America, I think. Maybe Obama is struggling, but I say don’t shoot him yet.

Anger Management for the Socialist Slayers

How angry are you? Are you mad as hell? Are you mad as hell and you're not going to take it anymore? Are you locked, loaded, and determined to stop socialism dead in its tracks?

Right-wing populist rage is in the news. Shout-downs of supporters of health care reform have been heard from local town halls to the halls of Congress, together with the more restrained commentaries of conservative pundits and congressmen expressing weak disapproval of the public outbursts, but insisting that the anger is real, justified, and politically potent.

Watching all this, you can't help being reminded of earlier "days of rage" in the late 1960s, another watershed period in our political history. Then the anger came from the left instead of right, from radical opponents of the Vietnam War.

In October 1969, protesters organized by the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) fought the police in the streets of Chicago. This was more serious and violent stuff than what we've seen this summer and fall from the right. But the depth of feeling is similar and the gun-toting patriots who have shown up at anti-Obama rallies have not been subtle about what use they would like to make of their right to bear arms. The Oklahoma City bombing in the '90s, as well as the violent attempts to suppress the civil right movement earlier, demonstrated that anger from the right can bear fruit just as crazy and deadly as anger from the left.

The apologists for the current ugliness cite the million of "murdered babies" lost to abortion and more the tenuous threats posed by Obama's "government power grab." The point they end up making is remarkably similar to that made 40 years ago by apologists for radical, anti-war violence: "We agree with their goals but not their tactics."

I don't know if that's a valid moral stance in either case, but I do know that politically it is very difficult to draw a line between goals and tactics. What matters politically in these arguments between left and right is the people in the middle, the 40 percent or so of the electorate who define themselves as independents, and who decide elections.

Confronted by extreme tactics by either the left or the right, the people in the middle tend to forget the goals that seem so moral to those who feel driven to do anything to achieve them. If you act crazy, the people in the middle think you are crazy, you and your goals both, and they want nothing to do with you.

That's why Martin Luther King's nonviolence ultimately trumped George Wallace's ugly defiance in civil rights. That's why the "revolution" of the '60s radicals resulted in 40 years of dominance by the right.

Obama is right about one thing, this really is a watershed moment in American politics. What happens in the next couple of years could tell us who will be running things for the next couple of decades.

Whatever happens to health care reform, and however genuinely outraged the right may be, it needs to take some courses in anger management. The conservatives might take as an exemplar their Great Hero, and how he came to power.

After all, the defining moment of the 1980 presidential debate and of that whole election, when Carter said Reagan was going to wreck Social Security and Medicare, was not an image of Reagan turning purple and shouting, "You lie!"

It was Reagan's simple, politically masterful grin and shrug, and the genial, "There you go again."

I'm Not in Kansas Anymore

I returned to Tennessee Tuesday after a long weekend visiting my dad at his nursing home. My dad’s complex and the surrounding town are thoroughly spiffy and spotless, as is the entire state of Kansas. The people who prefer Germany to Italy (“Who cares about old churches crammed with art? Germany is so clean you can eat food off the sidewalk!”) generally love Kansas. In Kansas, the pavement-dining potential is astronomical.

In Tennessee, it ain’t. When I walk dogs in my neighborhood I make a point of picking up trash along the way to the park and back. After four and a half days out of state, I could tell no one had taken up the slack in my absence.

We had empty Dasani, soda, liquor, and drug bottles. We had dirty shirts, dirty linen, dirty diapers. Most of this stuff was within 20 feet of the nearest trashcan. When I walk the dogs, I find it simple to swoop by, scoop up the trash, and drop it in the next can along the way. Was there no one walking down this street while I was gone who could have done the same?

I admit that I do feel superior about public service I perform for this neighborhood, and why shouldn’t I? My god, the trashcans are sitting there in public view. What am I supposed to do next, follow these people into their bathrooms and wipe their asses for them when they’re done?

“Can you help me here, buddy, I can’t seem to find my butt.”

“It’s in the middle of your body, towards the back, right there.”

“Whuh?”

“Right there, in the back.”

“I can’t find it.”

“OK, go to your belly button.”

“Whuh?”

“In the middle, in the front.”

“This thing?”

“Right, that’s it. Now go around to the back.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah. Now go down to where your legs split apart.”

“Right there?”

“That’s it! That’s where you wipe.”

“What do I wipe with?”

So if Kansas is America’s Germany, does that make Tennessee its Italy? Well, we haven’t got the art, but with entertainment like this, who needs it?