Jokesters and Wokesters.

In the 1960s, when my dad was in his early twenties, he worked in the marketing department of a big insurance company. He and his co-workers would occasionally squander their employer’s time and stationery by producing jokey greeting cards that they passed around among the office staff.

One of those greeting cards consisted of a picture of Jackie Kennedy with John Jr. – possibly the one below:

William C. Allen / AP. Image source.

…to which my dad and his buddies had added the caption, “Look, John-John! Somebody just shot daddy!”

I don’t find this particular joke all that funny, but that’s an impeachment of my father’s jokewriting skills, not his sense of propriety.

As readers of this blog’s sidebar will notice, I am a former musician whose folk-rock band never rose even to the level of small-town fame. Before I took to acoustic guitars and major seventh chords, I started out in high school playing gross-out punk-rock comedy songs about incest, necrophilia, aborted fetuses, and so on.

At that time the internet was still an arrangement of pipes and vacuum tubes in Al Gore’s garage. My bandmates and I circulated our dumb songs on hand-labelled cassette tapes to a few friends, much as my dad had circulated his dumb greeting cards among his office pals thirty years before.

Are any of my tapes still out there? If I ever rose to media prominence, how long would it take before one of them reappeared to scuttle my career? Luckily I’m not important enough for enemies to go riffling through old shoeboxes to discredit me.

But in the age of social media, you don’t have to be important. When your shoebox is the entire world, anyone might decide to riffle through it.

***

Among the countless “cancellations” that have marked the current orgy of purification, you may not have heard of an incident a few weeks ago in Ottawa. A woman there, whose name I will abbreviate to SL, used to work as a waitress at a pizza place, until…well, as the Toronto Star reported it:

Woman loses job after video posted on social media mocking death of George Floyd

This Vice headline refers not to SL, but to her sister, also currently unemployed:

Canada Border Services Fires Employee After Racist Video Mocks George Floyd

I’ll call the sister JL. It was JL and her boyfriend who appeared in the video, subsequently shared to Snapchat by the pizza waitress, SL.

JL was (or, at some time in the unspecified past, had been) a “casual”, “non-frontline” employee at Canada Border Services. The agency was prompt to issue a statement saying that she “no longer works at the CBSA”.

So, at least one and possibly two of the three people involved in the video have lost their jobs as a direct result. It’s unclear how the boyfriend managed to get off unscathed. (Maybe he got a pass because, as SL told Vice, in an aside deemed unworthy of further exploration, he “isn’t white”.)

So what actually happens in this racist video? According to Vice,

The white people in [the Ottawa suburb of] Orleans allegedly tried to recreate Floyd’s final moments.

Yes, yes, “allegedly”. But what actually happens in the video? First paragraph of the Toronto Star story:

An employee at an Ottawa pizzeria has lost her job after a video was called out on social media for depicting what many users believed to be a re-enactment of George Floyd’s death.

Okay, they “believed” it to be a re-enactment. Is that what it was? In the screen capture which now seems to be the only extant evidence of this video, the boyfriend has JL pinned down with his knee on her back. Did this have anything to do with George Floyd?

In an apology posted to her now-deleted Instagram account, SL claimed:

In the video, they were play fighting as they always do and in retrospect I can see how the video could be taken out of context given the current situation and I now see how insensitive it is. It was wrong of me to be inconsiderate of the sensitive times at hand and by no means did I use this as a representation of what happened with George Floyd.

According to the woman who first rallied the forces of Social Justice against the pizza waitress,

On Sunday May 30th I was saddened to see a disturbing snapchat screenshot video of 3 non-black Canadians who mocked the death of George Floyd.

I immediately posted the screenshot on my instagram … and asked the public to share my post and message me if anyone had any information on what was said in the video. And to help me identify who these 3 non-black Canadians (from my city Ottawa) were. The post instantly went viral, and witnesses who seen the video and know them personally came forward and messaged me confirming “police brutality” was said in the video.

The Vice story mentions that another news source had claimed the video was itself captioned “police brutality”. SL denied that there had been a caption on her post.

Maybe SL was lying about the caption, but it seems plausible that the “police brutality” tag was added sometime during the screenshot’s spread from her presumably limited Snapchat following to the wider world.

It appears that SL’s Instagram inquisitor didn’t see the video herself. Assuming that her “witnesses” were reliable, I’m guessing that the original video showed JL and her boyfriend tussling playfully on the floor. When JL wound up restrained in a position reminiscent of Floyd’s death, she (or maybe SL, holding the camera) jokingly yelled, “Police brutality!”

To be sure, that’s only my conjecture. It seems to be about as grounded as the conjecture that JL and her boyfriend had been intentionally “mocking” Floyd.

The difference is that my conjecture isn’t going to get anyone fired.

I learned about this incident from Howard Levitt’s column on workplace law. He concluded that Boston Pizza were well within their rights to can their suddenly radioactive employee. The video might or might not have been intended to belittle Floyd’s death, but:

That’s irrelevant as the video damaged her employer’s brand.

Levitt doesn’t give any thought to whether Boston Pizza, or CBSA, or the handful of news organizations that reported this incident, might be obliged to consider the effect of their statements on SL’s “brand”. Here’s what a search for her name currently turns up:

Google results for SL’s name, mid-June, 2020.

Maybe the media’s thirdhand interpretation of the meaning of the video is correct, in which case I suppose you could argue that SL and her sister reaped what they sowed – years of severely curtailed career opportunities as punishment for a tasteless joke.

Or maybe that interpretation is totally wrong. Howard Levitt and Vice and the Toronto Star don’t seem to give a crap either way.

***

I held off on publishing the above for about a week, waiting to see if a more sympathetic media outlet would take a crack at SL’s story. Not so far. [1] Meanwhile, the purification continues.

The latest report comes courtesy of the Washington Post, which shares the horror of a Halloween party held by one of its employees two years ago which was attended by a white woman in blackface.

This was in 2018, shortly after NBC talking head Megyn Kelly had been fired for saying she didn’t think blackface was that big a deal. The blacked-up partygoer wore a nametag saying “Hello, My Name is Megyn Kelly”.

Unlike the Ottawa “police brutality” video – which, if my interpretation of events is correct, wasn’t even really a joke, let alone one at George Floyd’s expense – the Megyn Kelly costume was clearly meant as a diss. To Megyn Kelly.

Now, if you accept, as everyone involved seems to, the premise that Kelly’s firing was deserved – that for a white person to darken his or her face is so inherently offensive that only a racist could defend it – then it follows that mockery of Megyn Kelly can be no excuse for blacking up.

An analogous faux pas would be to attend a party in a half-open bathrobe with your junk hanging out and call it a Harvey Weinstein costume. Funny or not, it would be, by the rules of D.C. polite society, indecent.

So it’s not surprising that a couple of non-white partygoers took offense, and loudly reproached “Megyn Kelly”, who soon afterward fled, “in tears”.

“Megyn Kelly” later called the host to apologize for having contributed to an awkward scene at his party.

And there things stood, until two years later one of the offended partygoers decided that the white lady hadn’t been humiliated enough over her tasteless costume. They got in touch with the Post, which determined that this two year old spat was front page news.

And now “Megyn Kelly”, like Megyn Kelly before her, is out of a job.

Robby Soave struggles to find an adequate level of witheringness with which to summarize this affair:

It’s astonishing that this article – a story about a long-ago Halloween party attended by the Post‘s own staff and principally involving three private persons – made it to print, and everyone involved in its publication should be deeply ashamed.

Well, sure. The actions of the woke viragos at the center of this story strike me as self-evidently insane. Any reporter unlucky enough to be cornered by such a kook ought to have pulled out a phone, said, “Sorry, gotta take this,” and scurried for the nearest exit. Any editor pitched such a story ought to have sternly advised the reporter to reconsider his or her career choice.

But what seems self-evident to me is far from evident to a sizable percentage of the population. And it’s those people, not I, who have the power to decide who gets their grudges splashed across the front page of the Washington Post, and who is unworthy of unemployment as a pizza waitress.

***

Let me return to my own background as a teenage punk rocker. I’ve previously told the story of our sole public performance, at a 1994 high school Battle of the Bands in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, of our song “Pee on Jesus”. It began:

Pee on Jesus, pee on me
How I love the taste of pee

As I wrote in that earlier essay, the song “had no coherent satiric agenda. It was pure juvenile provocation.”

And how did the school authorities respond to the provocation? The singer got a perfunctory dressing-down from the principal. Later that year he was elected senior class valedictorian.

My anecdote was meant to illustrate how, in contrast to Islamic societies – where you could whip up an angry mob with the rumour of an insult to Muhammad halfway around the world – in Canada you could be as vile as you liked about Jesus and the people sitting ten feet away could scarcely stir themselves to object.

How pleasant it was, I implied, to live in a civilization so highly evolved that it could afford to shrug off attacks on its most sacred idols.

It didn’t occur to me that my comparison was nonsense because by 1994 Jesus had already been demoted from the top rank of our civilization’s idols.

Of course there were other taboos we might have violated that would have gotten us hauled off the stage forthwith. In our naïve way, we calibrated our level of offensiveness very carefully. We were just obnoxious enough to cause a mild stir, but not enough to really piss anyone off…except a few religious weirdos, whose feelings didn’t count for much anyway.

A quarter century later, those religious weirdos are more irrelevant than ever. But these religious weirdos…

At a park in New York City, I witnessed something odd. A group of women silently formed a circle in the middle of a large lawn. Their all-black outfits contrasted with the surrounding summer pastels, and they ignored the adjacent sun bathers as they began to kneel and slowly chant. They repeated a three word matin.

The words of their chant were, of course, “black lives matter”.

It’s become commonplace lately to point out that wokeness has many of the characteristics of a religion. John McWhorter wrote up the most influential treatment of the idea back in 2017 – three years before those videos emerged of white people weepily repenting of their racial sins; three years before every media organization in North America simultaneously agreed that henceforth Black (but not white) would be spelled with a capital letter.

But the idea had been circulating in right-wing circles for far longer than that: in the early 2000s Paul Gottfried was characterizing progressivism as an “altered religious consciousness” which (as a book reviewer paraphrased it)

seeks for its elites a species of visible immanent grace that will mark them out from all others as delivered from the damning, fallen consciousness (of racism, sexism, and so forth) that predisposes men to evil.

The trouble with defining Antiracism or Wokeness or Social Justice as a religion is that it leaves non-believers like me conflicted about how to go about registering our dissent. It’s one thing to make rude jokes about a daffy and dangerous list of policy goals. It’s a totally different thing to blow raspberries at someone’s sincerely held religious beliefs.

In 1994 I wouldn’t have seen this as a conflict: I had no compunctions about hurting the feelings of whatever religious believers happened to be in our audience at the Battle of the Bands. Not coincidentally, I was aware that those believers had neither the will nor the means to retaliate against me.

I didn’t see myself as bullying those mild-mannered Christians. As I saw it, they were the bullies, the ones with all the cultural power, which they used to suppress ideas and books and music they didn’t like (all of which were somehow still readily available to me) and to force people to accept their belief system (which my friends and I could mock with no consequences whatsoever).

Nowadays I’m mildly embarrassed by our performance. Not by “Pee on Jesus”, which was harmless idiocy, but by the self-absorption that inspired us to inflict it on an auditorium full of unsuspecting strangers. But what the hell. We were only dopey kids.

In my supposedly mature middle age, I tend to look on religious believers sympathetically. Why should I care if they abstain from pleasures I regard as harmless? Why should I be offended by their attempts to warn me away from what they regard as acts of severe self-harm? However, I’m aware that my adult broadmindedness is as cost-free as my teenage pugnacity; believers lately have been too focussed on preserving their shrinking privileges to worry much about the private activities of the godless.

Wokeness is a different thing. The Woke in 2020 are becoming as powerful, and as intolerant of slights, as I imagined Christians in 1994 to be.

If my friends and I were snotty teenagers again, in the current year, would we have the stones to get up on stage and blow a raspberry at the holy martyrs of Black Lives Matter? Knowing that it would probably lead to outrage, expulsion, and enduring Google infamy?

Of course not. At most we’d indulge in private expressions of irreverence.

But that’s fine, right? As long as we kept our voices down, and chose our friends carefully, and took care to destroy all physical and electronic evidence of our conversations, we’d still have complete freedom to whisper our blasphemies in private. So what, really, am I complaining about?

M.

1. Double-checking my links before posting this, I discovered that the GoFundMe page for the young woman who first publicized SL’s “police brutality” video has been updated (or maybe I missed this comment when I first looked at it) to indicate that SL and JL’s family lawyers had:

sent me a document stating that if I do not make a public apology with their specific script they will sue me 200,000 each … I stand behind what I said and I will not be apologizing.

So perhaps a lawsuit will be launched and we’ll see more coverage of this controversy. I’ll try and remember to keep an eye out for it.

Update, October 31, 2021: The National Post reports that SL and JL – Shania and Justine Lavallee – have won a legal judgement against the young woman, Solit Isak, who orchestrated the social media campaign against them:

Judge finds Ontario women were defamed in social media firestorm over alleged George Floyd post

Uncowed by this judgement, and the $100,000 in damages (plus legal costs) for which she is now on the hook, Isak announced through her lawyer her intention to appeal: “I disagree that a white judge should be telling Ms. Isak or any other Black person what is and is not racism.”

I’m not unsympathetic to this argument. Solit Isak is a private individual. She is also very young, and…well, in a way, innocent. If she is prone to seeing manifestations of anti-black racism everywhere – for which it’s hard to blame her, given the media’s obsession with the subject – it shouldn’t be a judge’s role to correct her.

Ms. Isak’s bullying might have been contained to the phantom playground of Twitter and Instagram, where it would have been annoying enough to her victims, maybe even traumatic; it also would have faded away after a few weeks. It was the cowardice and credulity of supposed grown-ups – the Lavallees’ employers, the journalists who reported the story – that permitted the bullying to bleed over into the real world. The consequences ought to be on them.

Faulty ventriloquism.

I hadn’t heard from Y. in over a month, and when he finally texted I was at the computer with headphones on. The next morning I noticed his texts. The last one said, “Well, I’m off to bed. Hope you’re not dead in a ditch or strung out on drugs.”

I texted back that I was fine and I hoped he wasn’t dead or strung out on drugs. He replied that he was alive, but as for “drugs”, that was a question of definitions.

Y. has tried every mind-altering substance known to chemistry, but after some scary experiments with fentanyl last year he had, as far as I was aware, limited himself to a few daily puffs of marijuana. Therefore I found his comment mildly ominous, but I declined to follow it up via text. I invited him for breakfast the following day.

He said that I’d have to come pick him up at a campground on the outskirts of town.

After a kung fu showdown with his landlord, Y. explained, he’d been obliged to abandon his ground-floor suite on short notice. Knowing about his money troubles, his past run-ins with his landlord, and his habitual difficulty suffering those he deemed to be fools – and discounting the hyperbole about the kung fu – I found this development all too unsurprising.

Still, his jaunty tone made me wary. “Can’t tell if you’re joking,” I texted, “but I’ll come get you wherever you are.”

He replied with the name of the campground and said to meet him “at the usual spot”.

The usual spot? I assumed he was under the mistaken impression I’d visited him at the campground last spring, the last time he’d wound up living in a tent. In any case we could figure it out when I arrived. I said I’d be there at 10.

I slept badly, worrying that I would have to put Y. up in my spare room again, as I did for six weeks last year. The next morning I checked my lease agreement to see what it said about long-term visitors, then texted that I was on my way.

The campground was a half-hour drive across the river to Surrey, an area I barely know. When I found it I pulled up next to the office and texted that I was there.

Five minutes. Ten minutes. It was a warm day; I got out of the car, removed my jacket, strolled in circles. I pictured Y. sprawled on his foam mattress, too zonked to tie his shoes, and wondered whether I’d have to cruise around looking for his tent. I realized my phone was ringing.

“Hey,” he said. “Where are you?”

“I’m by the office. Where are you?”

“In the back alley.”

“What back alley?”

“Behind my house.”

It took me a moment to assimilate this. Then I exploded. “Oh, very funny, jackass. What a goddamned hilarious prank.”

“Did you read all my texts?”

“Yes, I read all your goddamned texts.”

“I thought you could tell I was joking.”

It didn’t take me long to recover my temper. First off, I was relieved that Y. was okay, and that he wouldn’t be pitching his sleeping bag in my spare room.

If anything, I realized, the joke was on him: his real life was so chaotic that his leg-pulling had seemed entirely plausible to me. As I drove back to the city to pick him up, I wondered how much further he could have taken the gag. Would I have met him at a hobo encampment beside the railyard? Probably. In a syringe-strewn alley in the Downtown Eastside? Yup.

Here’s the thing. Y. and I have known each other since sixth grade – that’s 30 years. We’re the same age, same race, same social class, grew up in the same neighbourhood, and became friends in the first place because we share a similar sense of humour.

Despite all that, I still can’t reliably tell, reading his text messages, when he’s cracking a joke.

***

Midway through Kevin Williamson’s story in the Wall Street Journal about the Twitter mob that harried him out of his very brief gig at The Atlantic, he discusses an earlier incident of social media misrepresentation:

In 2014, I got a call from a friend who was disturbed by my public support for Donald Sterling, the owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, who had gotten himself into trouble for some racist remarks. I had, at that time, never heard of Mr. Sterling, but there was a quote from me right there on Twitter: “‘Looks like the antiracist gestapo are already lacing up their jackboots for Donald Sterling,’ National Review’s Kevin Williamson commented.”

I mention that one mainly because I know the source of it: It was invented by Matt Bruenig, a left-wing blogger … That quote was not a distortion; it was not “taken out of context” or anything of the sort. It was a pure fabrication. (Mr. Bruenig says that the quote, produced in its entirety above, was intended as “satire.”)

You can sort of see how this would have felt like satire to Bruenig. As he saw it, any defense of Donald Sterling would be preposterous; to illustrate this, he put the defense in the mouth of the most preposterous person he could think of, right-wing commentator Kevin Williamson. His point was, This opinion is so far outside the bounds of good taste that only a Kevin Williamson could argue it. Here’s an analogous piece of satire:

“The people who write for National Review are so contemptible that the rules of fair play shouldn’t apply to them,” commented Matt Bruenig.

(Note: Matt Bruenig never said this.)

As for the comment that got Kevin Williamson fired – his four-year-old Twitter quip about having “hanging more in mind” as a penalty for women who had abortions – I’ve now read his own clarification, as well as those of several sympathetic social conservatives, and I still don’t really understand, if Williamson didn’t mean to be taken literally, what he did mean. He concedes that he was being “trollish and hostile” but still seems to think the remark made sense in the context where it occurred. It probably did, to those who already shared Williamson’s background, political orientation, and sense of humour; just as Bruenig’s satirical intentions must have been clear to those already on his wavelength; just as regular readers of Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams must have grokked what he was getting at when he wrote in 2011:

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.

I missed this controversy the first time around, but Adams brought it up again last week in a post devoted to swatting down media attempts to dismiss him as “far right” or “alt-right”. He elaborated:

What my devious critics cleverly leave out of the quote is the context of the blog post and the punchline of the joke. The context was about debates on important gender-related topics, and the punchline was “It’s just easier this way for everyone.”

He then devotes most of a paragraph to explaining this punchline which, even after reading the explanation multiple times, I still didn’t get.

However, unlike his critics who had only that isolated sentence to go on, I’d read enough of Adams’s writing that I thought I could draw a dotted line from his failed joke to the idea it vaguely gestured toward. Obviously Adams doesn’t think of women as naïfs whose precious utterances should, like those of children and the mentally handicapped, be exempted from the rigours of grown-up criticism; therefore his point must have been that it is society, not him, condescendingly demanding that women be protected that way.

A plausible interpretation…but a wrong one. Looking up the original post, Adams does appear to argue that women’s opinions should be exempted from criticism; or rather, that men’s rights activists (the intended targets of his barbs) should just back off and let women have their little perquisites.

Apparently I misread the joke as badly as Adams’s most hostile critics. But why should this be surprising? I don’t know Adams. I’ve never even seen him on TV, or listened to his podcast. If I have only a fifty-fifty chance of decoding my friend Y.’s dicey attempts at humour, what are the odds of decoding a total stranger?

***

My father died in 2013. I can’t ask him what he thinks about President Donald Trump or the prosecution of Bill Cosby or the new Avengers movie.

But I have a dummy that I talk to all the time. The dummy looks exactly like my father, though its face gets a bit blurrier every day. It speaks in my father’s voice, though sometimes I suspect it sounds more like old audio recordings than it does like the original.

There are other ways the dummy falls short. Sometimes when I ask it a question it just sits there. Sometimes it comes back with gibberish. But even when it seems lucid and reasonable, I can’t help wondering if my real father wouldn’t have found its answers ridiculous.

When I’ve finished interrogating the dummy, I put it back in the cupboard with the others. It’s a crowded cupboard. My grandparents are in there, dusty because I take them out so rarely, their answers being too vague to be of much value. My friend Y. is in there too, a far cruder dummy than my father’s. If I want to know what Y. thinks about a topic, I just ask the real-life version. But occasionally, when real-life Y. says something whose meaning I can’t make out, I haul out his dummy for clarification.

On the upper shelf is a jumble of unfinished dummies representing people I know only through the media. Trump and Cosby are up there, and the cast of the Avengers, and Scott Adams, and Kevin Williamson. There’s even a Matt Bruenig dummy, shapeless and faceless.

When one of those people is reported as having done or said something outrageous, I take down the corresponding dummy, hoist it onto my knee, and ask it for an explanation.

And here’s the funny part. If the dummy can’t give a convincing account, I get mad at the real person.

***

In the blog post linked above, Adams complains that his feminist critics have damaged his reputation and reduced his income by about a third. If true, I’m sure that was annoying, but Adams is a multi-millionaire; he could afford the hit. If anything, the incident seems to have liberated him to speak his mind about other issues, which I consider a net gain for society: I find his opinions, even the kooky ones, pretty interesting.

But a one-third hit to my income would leave me literally living on the street. I’m sure I’ve said things on this blog, joking or otherwise, that would be as likely to offend strangers as anything Adams has written. Unlike him, I’m a nobody. But I’ve seen my fellow nobodies roughed up over unpopular opinions, misunderstood jokes, or nothing at all. The list of unsayable things is constantly growing. Likewise the population of potential offendees. Every one of my old posts is still online and searchable. Every new post is another tuna can left open in a forest prowled by hungry bears.

Why, then, do I keep exposing my opinions? Why does anyone, given that the likelihood of contributing anything novel or constructive to the conversation is outweighed by the likelihood of being misunderstood, stirring up fury, and upping the general level of pointless noise?

I wrote a couple weeks back about my self-published high school newspaper, and how it was inspired in part by a yen for martyrdom; an attempt to prove my valour by provoking a reaction from the school administration. Maybe it’s a similar instinct that keeps me blogging now, despite the world’s indifference. Maybe deep down I want to stir up a mob, to liven things up, to prove that I matter. A pretty contemptible motivation.

But then, it would be easy to post a stream of outrageous comments, if outrage was all I really wanted. If some part of me seeks to be misinterpreted and martyred, another part of me really longs to be understood, to help carve out a colony of mutual trust amid the howling wilderness.

The colony would be a place for grown-ups to thoughtfully, respectfully, good-humouredly bounce around controversial ideas, without fear of triggering a bear attack. We wouldn’t expect to agree about everything: that would defeat the purpose. We wouldn’t ask anyone to refrain from joking, or from vigorously defending their opinions, or from saying things that might annoy their fellow colonists.

Such a colony couldn’t function without trust. We would have to trust, when we encountered speech that seemed hostile or belittling, that the speaker didn’t really intend to harm us. Rather than reacting with name-calling or threats of violence, we would…hmm? Yes, you in the back?

So when Kevin Williamson threatens to hang women who’ve had abortions, doesn’t that constitute a threat of violence?

Uh…well, he didn’t exactly threaten anyone, did he? He argued that abortion should be punished under the law as if it were homicide.

So if I argue that men who endanger women’s reproductive freedoms oughta be put up against a wall and shot, is that a threat of violence?

Fair question. I suppose I’d say there’s a difference between rhetoric and…hey, hey! Settle down, everybody! Let’s keep things civil around here! Yes, the gentleman in the third row…?

It seems to me that rather than a vague commitment to “trust” we need a speech code that spells out explicitly–

Oh yeah, jackass, and who gets to write the speech code?

Surely, as reasonable people, we could democratically decide–

Translation, you’re confident that your side has the numbers to–

Don’t puts words in my mouth, you goddamn–

Well don’t wag your finger in my face if you want to–

That was a threat! You all heard it!

THROW THEM TO THE BEARS!

M.

Milan Kundera and the ostriches.

I think Twitter is stupid, and I’m pretty sure Milan Kundera agrees with me.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Tamina, a Czech emigré living in the West, is haunted by a memory of some ostriches she saw on a visit to a zoo:

There were six of them. When they saw Tamina and Hugo, they ran right up to them. All bunched together near the wire fence, they stretched out their long necks, stared, and opened and closed their broad, flat beaks. They opened and closed them feverishly, at an incredible speed, as if taking part in a debate and trying to outtalk one another, but the beaks were hopelessly mute and did not make the slightest sound.

Tamina, who is trying to convince her young boyfriend to return to Prague and retrieve some personal papers of hers, dreams about the ostriches, sees them as a portent, wonders whether they are trying to warn her about something. But Kundera has some disillusioning news for us:

Tamina will never know what they came to tell her. But I do. They did not come to warn or scold or threaten her. They are not at all concerned with her. They came, each one of them, to tell her about themselves. About how they ate, how they slept, how they ran up to the fence, and what they saw on the other side. … There they are, standing face to face with Tamina, telling her their stories, all at the same time, belligerently, pressingly, aggressively, because there is nothing more important than what they want to tell her.

Kundera, writing in 1980, peers into the future and sees ostriches everywhere. He describes the condition he calls graphomania, which he defines as the desire “to have a public of unknown readers” for one’s writing. One of the triggers for mass graphomania, he theorises, is “an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual”. He continues:

If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing … has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

As Kundera sees it, people aren’t that interested in one another’s lives to begin with:

You know what it’s like when two people start a conversation. First one of them does all the talking, the other one breaks in with “That’s just like me, I…” and goes on talking about himself until his partner finds a chance to say “That’s just like me, I…” … All man’s life among men is nothing more than a battle for the ears of others.

This reminds me of my company’s fruitless attempts to use Twitter as a marketing tool. As I’ve described before, I work for a software company, and not long ago my employers decided it was time for us to climb on the Twitter bandwagon. They assigned me the task of “tweeting” our “followers” once or twice a day. But what was I supposed to tweet about?

I wound up spending fifteen or twenty minutes every morning browsing the web for stories on reputation management that might be interesting to our followers. When I found a story, I’d log on to our account and tweet the link and a brief description of the story, then log off again. Total time spent on Twitter each day: thirty seconds.

Now, my company’s Twitter account has three or four hundred followers, and we in turn are following three or four hundred people. Sometimes I’d take a few seconds to skim the recent tweets from the people we’re following. They were deadly boring. Most of them were doing the same thing I was doing – generating noise, not attempting to take part in any kind of conversation. How can you have a conversation with three or four hundred people anyway?

After a couple weeks of this routine, I quietly let it fall off, fractionally reducing the volume of pointless verbiage out there. But I shouldn’t be too smug. Twitter might not be for me, but I produce an equal amount of pointless verbiage in blog form.

As someone who generates an awful lot of words while having very little to say, I am troubled by Kundera’s prophecy for the consequences of mass graphomania:

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

M.

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A few weeks ago on the Spokesmonster blog I explained why Twitter isn’t for me.

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Update, July 26, 2020: Redirected dead link to archived version, added book cover image, and linked to Bibliography page.

On being offensive.

To the long, long list of Newfangled Things Whose Popularity I Don’t Understand must be added another: Twitter. I signed up a couple days ago because my company, to promote its new online reputation management service, recently created a Twitter account, and it may soon be my responsibility to “tweet” our “followers”.

It’s not a responsibility I look forward to assuming. But anyhow. On Twitter the other day I noticed a tweet from a friend of a co-worker concerning the Spokesmonster cartoons. I can’t find it now, but it said something like, “That’s the funniest, most offensive ad campaign ever!”

What does it mean, this word “offensive”? What does this person mean when he writes that the cartoons are both funny and offensive? Is he actually offended by them? I doubt it, or he probably wouldn’t find them funny. I assume he means that some other unenlightened clown out there probably finds them offensive.

But where are these unenlightened clowns and exactly how are they offended? This is a question I’ve asked before, and I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer. When the first Spokesmonster cartoon, for a brief moment, in an obscure corner of the internet, stirred up a tiny flurry of controversy, it was alleged that the cartoon was offensive. But except for one commenter who declared that he or she, as a proud hillbilly, took objection to the reference to inbred “hill folk”, no-one actually said they were offended. They were outraged on behalf of somebody else.

Then there was the almost-controversy, narrowly averted, that I didn’t quite provoke with a recent blog post. In regard to the third Spokesmonster cartoon, a friend had written to tell me that he found the tone off-putting:

The word “Skankmaster” comes up, which might raise some eyebrows with investors. Annie Anklebiter slithers and hisses at the camera in a threatening way. The Reichschancellor is funny except his voice sounds like a dangerous pedophile. And then Shelby, our main character, snaps at the girl’s finger and bites yours, and you say the F-word.

The next day, alongside a sketch of the Reichschancellor, I posted to the Spokesmonster blog:

I got my co-worker Dave to record the Reichschancellor’s voice. But apparently Dave’s too nice a guy, because his delivery lacked the necessary tone of quiet menace. So I re-recorded the voice myself. A friend said the Reichschancellor “sounds like a dangerous pedophile”. I choose to take that as a compliment.

In my innocence, I thought my meaning would be obvious. I only meant that I took my friend’s comment as a compliment on my voice acting: I was trying to sound creepy, and apparently I had been successful. It has since been pointed out to me that hasty readers might misinterpret “I take that as a compliment” to mean A) that the Reichschancellor was meant to be a pedophile, and that I was flattered that my friend had picked up the reference, or even B) that I was endorsing pedophilia.

I got an email from my boss telling me to take down the pedophilia reference tout de suite; I complied; and that was that. I have no problem with my employers determining what is and isn’t appropriate on a company website. Still, in an email thread with some friends of mine, I argued about the definition of offensive. Some of my friends thought my comment was a mistake because it could be misinterpreted. Others thought that the mere mention of pedophilia violated a taboo, and even if it had been more clearly written, my comment would still have been unacceptable on a promotional blog. One friend suggested that, even if he wasn’t meant to be a pedophile, the character of the Reichschancellor was a bit touchy, because when people think “Reichschancellor” they think “Hitler”, and you shouldn’t crack jokes about Hitler.

Someone else mentioned the message that pops up in StepRep when a search comes back empty: “No results yet! But don’t worry, our worker monkeys are slaving to get you relevant results.” The topic of slavery is a little sensitive, my friend said. Aargh, I replied.

What was missing from all this discussion of offensive subjects was a single person who actually claimed to be offended. Everyone was worried about what someone else might think. Everyone was trying to read the minds of people whose existence they couldn’t be certain of.

An analogy. A record executive gets a tape from a hot new band. (My analogy is set in the distant past, like the 1980s.) He clunks the tape into his stereo and gives it a listen. He hates it. He buzzes his secretary. “This band is fucking terrible,” he says. “Make up a contract. They’re going to be huge.”

If he’s good at his job, the record executive doesn’t need to actually like the acts he signs; he just needs to have an ear for what the chumps will buy. But wouldn’t you put more faith in a record executive who shares his audience’s tastes – someone who actually likes the records he sells?

Like musical taste, offense is a highly personal thing. It’s perfectly good business to worry about what other people are going to think. But I wish people would be more explicit when they say this is offensive.

Do they mean, I am offended?

Or do they mean, The chumps aren’t going to buy this?

M.