On Online Comment Cruelty

 Was reading an article about the recent suicide of a celebrity, and the article was followed by many comments from readers, some of which were thoughtful, many of which were not.  A few of us shared some ideas on why some people seem drawn to make grotesque, hurtful, and cruel comments in an online environment.  Below was my contribution to the discussion, which I realized would probably be appropriate for this blog.  I'm still thinking through this phenomenon of online cruelty for no apparent purpose and how to respond to it.  Mostly, I just try to avoid reading comments sections in general.  When I do read comments, I try to keep the following ideas in mind (emphasis on *try*; I often fail).  If any of you have thoughts about the best way to engage/think about such things, I'd love to hear what you have to say as well.

Anyway, FWIW, here it is:

On the issue of the tone of many of the comments, it's true we don't put a collective value on empathy, intelligence, and just basic politeness (e.g., we downgrade politeness as a virtue these days because it is somehow antithetical to being "real").

That said, when I encounter these sorts of comments, I try to remind myself of a few things. One, people make these comments for reasons that are all about them, not about anyone or anything else. It's a chance to offload anxieties, frustrations, pain, etc. A second, related, point is that age-old observation that people treat others the way they treat themselves. No matter how smug and self-satisfied they might try to come across, people who are cruel and insensitive are people who treat themselves that way as well (often unconsciously).

None of this excuses the behavior, but it might explain what is otherwise utterly insipid, idiotic behavior. It speaks to an underlying degree of pain in a society in which we feel disconnected. And it also helps me move from a place where I feel a need to skewer these people or explain to them exactly how stupid they are being to simply acknowledging that these people have been damaged and hurt on a profound level themselves, and even more tragically, they don't know how to heal. Instead, they just try to offload the pain and frustration in an attempt to purge it from themselves. It never works. Let's hope they can learn that.

Of Kissing and Killing

FYI, I'm going to be posting weekly here on Fridays.  Putting myself on a schedule will prompt me to gather my thoughts and be a better blogger!  Also, if I don't have anything profound to say (which is most of the time), it will goad me into being a bit more glib and personal, which would again make me a better blogger.

So, anyway, I've been Gleeked by my wife.  Not only do I now watch Glee on a regular basis, but I've also gotten hooked on The Glee Project, which is a reality show in which a dozen or so young folks compete to win a recurring role on Glee next season.  Yes, I believe my Man Card has been voided by the central office.

What does this have to do with nonviolence, peace, etc.?  Well, I suppose one could spin hypotheses about the relationship between testosterone and violence, but I'm not going all gender-y today.

Instead, the episode last week got me thinking about our attitudes toward violence, sexuality, and their symbolic representations (in this case, acting). 

Here's what happened: one of the contestants, Cameron, is a lanky young dude with a good voice, shaky dance moves, and a conservative Christian mindest.  He's a sweet kid--easy to root for.

Anyway, during a recent video shoot (the contestants must record a song and perform in a video together each week as part of the contest), a fetching young female co-star/contestant kissed him in a bit of improvisational whimsy.  Given the nature of the song and the video, it was entirely in character and probably helped both of them "pop" on screen.

No big deal, right?  Wrong.  Cameron flipped out afterwards, calling his mom nearly in tears, saying that he felt he had "cheated" on his real-life girlfriend.  The kiss itself was chaste, and it wasn't Cameron who initiated it, but nevermind.  The poor guy was inconsolable.

Indeed, Cameron's uptightness about portraying physical attraction has become one of the subplots of the show.  So strongly does he feel about this that he [spoiler alert!] voluntarily withdrew from the competition.  According to Cameron, his unwillingness to "go there" on-screen is because of his Christian upbringing and morals.  Some things, he says, you simply don't do, even if it's acting.  After all "what you do is what people see."

Okay, but I find myself wondering is what would happen if Cameron was asked to play a scene in which he hit somebody.  Or called somebody a fa**ot.  Perhaps the writers for the show would create a scene in which Cameron's character was the victim of bullying, and he had a dream sequence in which he fantasized about gunning down his tormenters.  Or maybe he'd simply be asked to "slushy" somebody.

All of these actions of verbal or physical violence would be against any sense of Christian morals (or virtually any other set of morals, for that matter).  Would Cameron balk at doing any of these things?  Even if they were all things he would never, ever do in real life, would he call production to a halt if asked to portray them onscreen, in character?

Maybe, but I doubt it.  And that's what caught me when I first thought of it--how odd it is that somehow kissing someone would be a deal-breaker, but hitting them wouldn't be.

This isn't to denigrate Cameron's particular beliefs.  I think we as a society, not only conservative Christians, share a fairly bizarre attitude when it comes to violence and sexuality (even its tamest forms).  We're far more comfortable with the former than the latter.  A bare breast can't be shown on broadcast television and will get a movie an R rating, but you can punch, shoot, cut, dismember, blow up, and torture all you want, even during dinner-hour television.

I have to admit that if my wife were in a play, I'd be much more comfortable with her miming violence onstage than miming affection with someone else.  Why is that?  How would I feel if it was me that was doing the acting?  I'd like to say I'd find it much more emotionally and morally challenging to mime doing harm to someone else than being affectionate, but I can't say for sure that's the case.

But the upshot is that there's more going on with L'Affair de Cameron than values.  Presumably any number of actions Cameron would say go against his Christian beliefs would pose no problem for him if called on to portray them onscreen.  But would Cameron call his mom in tears, saying he felt like a "criminal" if asked to act out striking someone, or even killing them?  Again, I can't say for sure, but I doubt it.

Which leads me back to the question I have no other answer for, other than our rather twisted set of cultural norms: why is it more more morally repugnant to pretend kiss than to pretend kill?

Peace

Troping Arizona

I'm experimenting witha new presentation tool called Prezi.  Click here, and then hit the forward arrow whenever you want to change "slides."

This is the very first time I've messed with this, so it's pretty rough.  Now that I know a bit better about how to use it, I think I can make this style of presentation work a bit better. But it beats PowerPoint.

Peace

The Meaning of Saturday

We’re meaning-making animals. That’s what we do. We’re good at it. We’ve been practicing since the first human capable of reflective thought looked up at the sun and wondered why it was there. Must be a reason, right?


The massacre in Arizona, like any tragedy, goads us to look for a meaning behind it all. If one doesn’t present itself tout-de-suite, we start constructing them ourselves. We can’t help it. It’s what we do.

Our attempts to make meaning from the world can be sublime or grotesque. They can take the form of the Sistine Chapel or the ravings of Glenn Beck. Even the incoherent blatherings of the shooter himself show a damaged human mind struggling to impose some sort of meaning on life’s flux.

The hemming and hawing going on in the media today show the good, the bad, and the ugly of our penchant for meaning-making. We hear people on both sides try to fit the gelatinous goo that are the shooter’s published ruminations into a mold (hopefully one that matches that of an ideology we do not cotton to ourselves). “He read the Communist Manifesto! He’s a liberal!” “He read Ayn Rand! He’s a tea-bagger!”

Talk about a fool’s errand. It ain’t happening. There’s no “there” there.

Synecdoche Gaza

We’ve now learned that an American citizen was killed on the Turkish ship boarded by Israeli commandos.  Furkan Dogan was shot four times in the head and once in the chest at close range.

Everyone from the Pope to the Secretary General of the UN has criticized the forcible boarding of a humanitarian aid ship in international waters. But many, particularly in the United States (even those critical of Israel’s actions) wonder why the criticism is so one-sided. After all, although those on all but one of the ships used non-violent, passive resistance, the commandos did face physical resistance on the ship where the shootings happened.

There are a lot of reasons for this. First, all of the dead were members of the flotilla. While some commandos were wounded, none were killed. Then there’s the obvious David/Goliath issue, with the well-trained and well-armed Israeli commandos playing Goliath (ironically enough) to the David of a crew of unarmed men and women trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza. And then there was the fact that the boarding took place in international waters. While it would have been ideal for all members of the flotilla to practice nonviolence, it isn’t surprising that some would have tried to defend their ship when armed men dropped from the sky to take it over.

If any of these variables weren’t in place, I suspect the reaction would be a bit more nuanced and conflicted.

But there’s also a symbolic—even rhetorical—part of the answer as well. The vision of armed Israelis seizing control of a ship and shooting civilians serves as a synecdoche of the situation in Gaza.

Rhetoric of Violence Makes a Resurgence

So it’s come to this.



It seemed things couldn’t get more disturbing. Over the last few months, we’ve been treated to equations of Obama to Hitler, gun-totin’ teabaggers, and visions of an anti-healthcare reform mob taunting a man with Parkinson’s Disease.



But after Sunday’s vote, you couldn’t be faulted for thinking things might get back to being a bit more civil. After all, there was some evidence of it. Polls suggested that there was a growing consensus that, despite the enmity of the debate and the often egregious falsehoods flung into the public sphere, Americans were coming to feel that this bill was probably a good thing. Not perfect, but a step in the right direction.



But starting on the day of the vote itself, and then following, there’s been some ominous signs—things that remind me a lot of the craziest stuff being said and done during the Clinton presidency which culminated in Oklahoma City.



On the day of the vote, protestors yelled “nigger”at African American members of Congress. Another black congressman was spat on. An openly gay congressman was called “faggot.”



In the days that followed, vandals threw bricks at the offices of representatives who didn’t vote the way they wanted them to. Politicians received threats of physical violence. The brother of another congressman had a propane gas pipe broken by thugs who thought it was the congressman’s house.



As I type this, I’m hearing reports of congressional representatives having pictures of nooses faxed to their offices.



Sarah Palin now talks about “targeting” key Democratic congressional representatives in upcoming elections, complete with a U.S. map with crosshairs to mark the districts in question.



And one of the guys who has taken credit for advocating brick throwing at Democrats talks openly about guns being taken out and cleaned, as well as the necessity of preparing for combat. And oh yeah—he’ll be a featured guest at a gun rally held a high-power rifle shot from Washington D.C. to be held next month, April 19th—the day Timothy McVeigh chose to kill innocent men, women, and children at the federal building in Oklahoma City because it was the two-year anniversary of the conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas (an event seen by the radical Right as evidence of the malevolence of the federal government).

The Rhetorical Violence of Beck et al.

There's a short but illuminating article at Media Matters for America on the prevalence of violent imagery and metaphor by those appearing on Fox. You can find it here: http://mediamatters.org/research/201002040060

The problem with the comments cited in the article are not that they are passionate or political.  It's not even that some of them are downright hateful.  It's that they play with the imagery of violence.  "Figures of speech" are not mere ornaments or funny little doo-dads we add to our speech; they are ways we frame our understanding of the world.  Cognitive linguistics suggests that metaphors in fact structure the actual neural pathways in our brain. 

That is, words mean things.  Not in the sense that they have timeless, unchanging definitions.  They don't.  But they have consequences.  They have implications.  They do things to us when we speak and hear them.

Should such rhetoric be censored?  Of course not.  But they should be censured--condemned as unworthy of consideration by thoughtful people and out of bounds of civil talk. 

Violence and Sports Part Deux

We seem to have had a spate of violent sporting folks recently.  Given my previous post, I thought I might share this post I made on Salon in response to an article suggesting that Serena Williams was getting treated more harshly than John McEnroe and other des enfants terrible of the tennis world after her meltdown at the U.S. Open.  The video above accompanied the original article and is relevant.


I never had any sympathy for McEnroe or any of the other players who berated officials and whined. More penalties more quickly dished out for childish behavior would have been (and would be now)a good thing for the game.

Having said that, in none of the clips included in the article featuring McEnroe did he physically threaten anyone. He was petulant and disgraceful, but never overtly violent.

Yes, race and gender might play into it, but I think the more obvious distinction between Williams's outburst and the others mentioned is that she verbally threatened the lineswoman (whether it be saying she was going to "kill" her, or merely shove a ball down her throat).

Physical intimidation of officials is, in any sport, several orders of magnitude above simply complaining about them. Playing down this aspect of Williams tirade and pretending like it was of a piece with McEnroe talking about the chalk flying up is to misprepresent what happened and to tacitly diminish the significance of threatening someone with physical violence.




Peace

No Tears for Blount

So, I consider myself at least a moderate sports fan, but I was probably the last person on the planet to see the video of the punch thrown by LaGerrette Blount that decked Bryon Hout in the aftermath of the Boise State/Oregon game a week ago.




I had heard a lot about it—descriptions of various sorts. But I hadn’t seen the footage until after I heard an interview on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” with Dave Zinn, a sports writer for The Nation magazine. Zinn’s take on the incident bothered me, and I decided to seek out the video to see what happened for myself.


In case you, like me, missed it, basically what happened is that Hout runs up to Blount after the game, slaps his shoulder pads, and says something (apparently unflattering) to Blount. The backstory is that Blount had been talking a lot of smack about how bad Oregon was going to whup up on Boise State. Not only did that not happen, but Blount had a horrible game personally. After Hout ran by and taunted Blount, Blount sucker punched Hout, who fell to the ground (but was not seriously injured). Blount was suspended for the rest of this, his senior season with Oregon.


Now, Zinn’s take: He claims the punishment was vastly disproportionate to the crime. While he repeatedly says he’s not excusing Blount’s actions, Zinn insists that Blount doesn’t deserve to be suspended for the entire season.


His reasons? First, he claims that there were “mitigating” circumstances, including the initial taunt itself, the replaying of the punch on the JumboTron at the stadium, and lastly the boorish behavior of some Boise State fans who threatened Player 1 after this repeated replaying of the incident on the JumboTron.


The latter two issues are easy to dispense with. They aren’t mitigating circumstances, by definition, since they happened as results of the punch after the fact. A mitigating circumstance is something that happens *in the commission of an act* that lessens the offender’s culpability. What happened after the fact, no matter how ugly, doesn’t lessen the severity of the act.


Now, as to the taunt, here’s where the video comes in. From the description, I had imagined Hout actively getting in the face of Blount, invading his personal space, and repeatedly taunting him. But that’s not what happened. As the video shows, Hout runs past Blount, slaps him on the shoulder pads, and shouts something, and then continues on. Nothing that could conceivably be considered threatening or as an attempt to goad Blount into violence.


Without a doubt, Hout is an incredible tool and shouldn’t have done it. But words are one thing, physical violence is another. The notion that Zinn floats that one shouldn’t be surprised that Blount reacted the way he did after being taunted in an atmosphere with “this kind of level of adrenaline and testosterone” is utter crap.


Look, people have gone to the electric chair for spontaneous outbursts of violence committed in stressful situations. Had Blount done the very same thing in a college-town bar (another location that often features a surfeit of testosterone), he’d be looking at jail time, not simply not getting to play a game. Heck, he didn’t even have his scholarship revoked.


But the centerpiece of Zinn’s argument about the punishment is not so much the “mitigating” circumstances, but the fact that :

“LaGarrette Blount has gone from being somebody who will most like - would have been most likely a second-round NFL draft pick with a contract of one or $2 million guaranteed, to being somebody who, according to ESPN draft expert Todd McShay - and people I've talked to as well, for that matter - is not going to be drafted, just for that one moment, that one punch.”

 He later says,

“I guess what I'm saying is not only that we have to look at the whole context of it, we also have to look at the extent to which this particular suspension is going to damage Blount's chances to make any kind of living from football.”

And that’s what’s most galling to me. Throughout the interview, Zinn suggests that it’s incredibly unfortunate that this punishment will damage Blount’s chances of becoming a multimillionaire in the NFL. As if he has a right to make such a living. As if the punishment would *not* have been over the top in Zinn’s mind if Blount had been a Division III player with no hope of earning millions after his senior season.


Despite his repeated attempts to assure us that he is “in no way excusing” Blount’s behavior, Zinn is doing exactly that, saying that it’s hypocritical for sports fans to expect players to play a game full on and then not commit assault and battery afterward.


Nonsense. If you are such a Neanderthal that you can’t play a competitive sport full out (yes, even a sport as inherently violent as football) and still act within the most basic bounds of social decency once the final whistle blows, you don’t belong in sports to begin with. Yes, Hout was a dick. Yes, the idiotic fans should be disciplined if they actually attempted to assault Blount afterward. Yes, the JumboTron dude should be given the boot.


But please, let’s get over excusing violence because of “testosterone” or the “adrenaline” of a contact sport. And let’s not cry over the justified punishment of a guy who, had he done what he did anywhere else, would find himself in the clink, not when he still has his scholarship, can practice with his team, and will likely have plenty of opportunities to be drafted and/or signed by the NFL next year anyway.

R.I.P. "Prince of Darkness" (Well . .. Sort Of)

Robert Novak (a.k.a. "The Prince of Darkness") died this week. He’s best known as one of a cadre of conservative talking heads, but he was a talking head before it was cool to be a talking head (with the exception of David Byrne). Before opinionated punditry ruled the airwaves and cable channels, there were only a few outlets where you saw this sort of ideological bloodsport in its raw form. CNN’s Crossfire was one such place, and Novak was a longtime participant, often facing off against Michael Kinsley.

When I first started to become truly engaged in politics, such shows were a major turn on. People yelling at each other! What could be cooler or more fun?

While I agreed with Novak on almost nothing, I always at least though of him as intellectually honest. He actually believed what he said and didn’t lie about his reasons for believing it. For that, at least, I found him so much better than, say, the likes of Ann Coulter, who I often think of as little more than a pigeon in a Skinner Box. As the bird could be trained to peck at a lever to get a reward of a pellet of food, I think folks like Coulter have found an audience for their brand of vitriol and reap the rewards from it, but don’t actually believe what they say in any deep sense. They certainly don’t think through it in any depth. I can’t stand Coulter not so much because I disagree with most of the political positions to which she pays lip service, but because I think she is an utter and complete cynic who doesn’t truly care much about political issues, but is more than willing to churn out bombastic nonsense and sell it to people as actual cogent thought. Caveat emptor, indeed!

Novak, however, was a true believer, and for that, I could respect him even if I disagreed with him. Or at least I could for a while.

Then 2000 happened.

When I heard Novak died, the first thought that came to mind was not his assist on outing a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, the incident he was most known for in recent years, but something he said on one of those talking head shows he helped pioneer.

During the recount of 2000, I was watching one of those Capital Gang/Crossfire/McLaughlin Group shows. They were doing a story on the “Brooks Brothers Revolt,” the allegedly spontaneous outpouring of outrage by conservatives at how the recount was being handled.

Of course, it turned out that most of the protestors yelling and screaming outside courthouse offices were paid Republican operatives, many of whom found jobs in the Bush administration and/or conservative think tanks and lobbying groups.

Anyway, one of the panelists was bemoaning the fact that these demonstrations had, at least in one case, devolved into violence. A hapless county official who was taking a sample ballot to members of the media to use as a visual aid in reporting the story was set upon by a mob of pro-Bush supporters who accused him of trying to smuggle ballots out of the office where the recount was happening. They roughed him up pretty well.

So, one commentator on the show (I think Mark Shields or Al Hunt) was saying how appalling it was that in the United States of America, you’d see violent mobs attacking election officials who were just doing their job.

You’d think that this would be a statement that anyone could get behind. And almost anyone could, except Bob Novak.

“IS HE OR IS HE NOT A GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRAT?!” Novak yelled. “IS HE OR IS HE NOT A GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRAT?!”

The implication was that, regardless of his innocence of any wrongdoing, this guy deserved a beatdown simply by virtue of being a public employee.

That was the moment Novak went from being someone I respected despite disagreeing with to being someone I found loathsome.

Now, I don’t know if Novak truly thought that a government employee, simply by virtue of his job, deserved to be set upon by thugs, or if that was just rhetorical red meat he was throwing to far-right conservatives who relish seeing government as the enemy, and he got carried away.

Either way, it was despicable.

I often had the fantasy of being on that panel when Novak said that and responding, “So, you think government’s a bad thing so anyone who’s a part of it deserves to get beat up? Fine, I think radical conservatism is causing incredible damage to our country. It’s a bad thing. You’re part of it. So, how about I beat you to a bloody pulp right hear and now? That okay by you?”

Of course, I wouldn’t have actually said that, even if for some reason they had decided to invite some anonymous editor of educational materials from Iowa City to weigh in on the 2000 election on national television. First, I’m not that quick with a quip. Second, joking about physically harming someone because you disagree with them on politics, even in jest and even to make a point about how disgusting it is to do so, is simply wrong.

But that’s okay, since Novak himself destroyed his own ethos with that comment. He revealed himself not as a political thinker and commentator, but as a bully, someone happy to use his position to put people in danger to score cheap rhetorical points. His involvement in the Plame affair was therefore hardly shocking.

Having lost both parents to cancer, I don’t wish that dread disease on anyone, and I would rather he hadn’t died. And I would still put Novak a notch or two above empty-headed poseurs like Coulter who play-act at punditry.

But I’d be lying if I said I thought the public sphere was rhetorically impoverished by Novak’s passing.

Peace.