TALKING-POINT ZORROS

  A lot of strange beliefs are in circulation these days. That’s nothing new. In my lifetime, I’ve met a Calvinist who was convinced she was a member of an elite group touched by God, and thus a sort of pre-boarder for Heaven; I’ve read the job application of a pimply teen who described himself as a guitar “virtuoso”;  I’ve spoken to an American who was under the impression that Billy Joel had been awarded the Nobel Prize. I won’t even go into the litany of half-baked things my grandmother saw as facts.  

But I wasn’t aware until the other day that there were people walking the earth who believe that Barack Obama is to blame for the racism in America. This struck me as quite a leap. I recall Obama as a guy constantly under fire from African-Americans for not mentioning race more often. (I knew a soccer dad who had more to say about race during a brief post-game parking lot chat than Obama did during his entire eight years.)  The suggestion that the ex-President was a kind of rabble-rouser, exhorting fellow “blacks” to rise up against Whitey, seems difficult to credit. I can’t really see Obama exhorting anyone to do anything; he’s many things, perhaps, but not quite an exhorter. 

  I’m not as inclined as others are to tag people as racists. This is for various reasons, most of which I’ve been criticized for. But in this particular case, it’s sorely tempting to tar the Facebook asserter in question with the R word, the appellation guaranteed to raise the hackles of virtually every actual racist. (It’s helpful to recall that carnival barkers, the guys who stand outside a moldy tent and suggest you come in and gawk at a bunch of people with outré body and hair characteristics as if they are legitimate entertainment for a civilized adult, are themselves sensitive about the judgment of the throng. In what I consider the absolutely most indefensible example of political correctness in existence, they don’t care for the term “carnival barker,” preferring the euphemism “carnival talker.”) There might be another explanation for his bizarre Obama belief, I suppose, but I can’t imagine what it could be. Even a person subscribing to the odd notion that black people are “the real racists” would have to work overtime to make the case that Barack Obama was responsible for this phenomenon. 

  This moment on Facebook, where a man inserted himself into a typical groupthink thread with an outrageous and unsupported declaration, was a familiar one to anyone with Facebook experience, and evidently that’s most of us at this point. We’ve all come to see Facebook as the place that reinforces the prejudices through which we evaluate all news. I’m a leftist, by the way, but this philosophical positioning hasn’t led me to assume that gays, women, and skin-color minorities are all reasonable and honest people who must never be questioned. Neither has it convinced me that all cops are pigs (though I know some that are), or that conservatism is a kind of mental aberration. I find nearly all “articles” thrust under my nose to be insufferable, shot through as they are with logical leaps, name calling, and shitty writing. Even when I totally agree with the author, the tawdry desecration of the English language ruins it for me. (Sounds like the pearl-clutching of an entitled white guy, doesn’t it? Well, I cordially submit that “fuck that” is an appropriate response. I care about the American idiom, and everyone should, for the same reasons we should care about our arteries.) 

  As usual, I’ve wandered around at length before making my point. People who read my stuff presumably figure out this is the way I operate. I’m like a golfer searching in the weeds for his Titleist; and when I finally find it, I tend to drop it pret-ty near the hole. 

  Let me drop my point now. 

  I’ve talked about a conservative commenter here, but I also have a problem with liberals who travel around online, looking for clumps of citizens whose views invite attack. I regret to say this includes gay friends of mine who are often spoiling for a fight with homophobes. I’m not judging these guys, I tell myself. I am, in fact, a straight white male, so I don’t know how it feels to be mistreated right out in plain sight for your whole life. I must also say that I’ve done this online hectoring myself. In every case, I could come up with elaborate or simple excuses for why my version of “light trolling” is excusable, but why bother? It’s so much easier to just admit that I’m guilty too, and am trying to cut back. 

  But the particular type of trolling to which I refer is this: the well-meaning (I assume) individual who pops in, screams a poorly worded sentence or two, and then retreats into the shadows, never to return. 

  Why would anyone do this? I suppose it has a momentary satisfaction, like Skittles, but let’s investigate a moment. 

  If your sum total of things to say on a fraught topic is one or two sentences, and you are not able to have an adult discussion about it, I submit to you that you may not actually be thinking at all. Not a bit. 

  Now, I’ve been accused of wordiness. Excessive talking. Writing pieces that are too long. Babbling on and on, after others have wisely stopped doing anything more than smile and nod at the lunatic. 

  But I will say this. It’s not just because I love the sound of my own voice, or the look of my own font. It’s because I think our world is complicated. Tempting as it is to retreat to lazy shibboleths such as “politicians are all a bunch of conmen,” “the right wing are all rubes,” and the like, I don’t have time for such fortune-cookie analysis of the human condition. Let’s try to remember that while humans gave us Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump, they also gave us Hamlet and Clare de Lune. Humanity is, at worst, “guilty with an explanation,” I’d say, and my writing about humanity is generally either dealing with the guilt, or the explanation. I never get bored with either subject. 

  So, I offer that virtually no important topic should be dealt with at bumper sticker length. It’s amazing, for example, that the pearls people clutch are one of the earth’s most inarguable cases of observable perfection, and they exist only because of chafing. 

  Here’s a topic that doesn’t need much elaboration, though, which is why I had to plunk it down into the morass of verbiage you’ve just hacked through, or skipped. 

  If you see yourself as a kind of hero, poking the poke-deserving between cups of coffee, that is fatuous self-regard. I should clarify that trolls (the certifiable kind who are either paid to throw chum in the waters of what passes for our American discourse, or who operate on a volunteer basis, spending an unholy amount of time doing this to fill a psychological need of some sort) are not my target. 

  I refer to the “normal” citizen who has strong feelings about big issues. To this gentleman or lady, I say this. If you have become a kind of talking-point Zorro, gathering half-truths about the other side from the media you accept, passing them along to the rascals and rubes that dot the landscape of the hated opposite base, and then hopping back down the bunny trail to the comfort of your own groupthink companions, you are doing something that does no credit to your beliefs. A serious person can back up whatever he or she finds important enough to shout in a stranger’s face, with facts and information. Also, with ideas that are at least partially personal, and not just clipped like a coupon from the poison-pen seethings of the weasels who churn out reams of catchy propaganda in windowless rooms at the behest of the blowhard class. 

  Moreover, a VERY serious person can actually muster up the brainpower to accomplish a dispassionate evaluation of the other way of thinking. I don’t think every middle class Alabamian troubled by transgender plumbing participators is the equivalent of a Klansman. Nor do I think the many deluded safe-space liberals of today’s collegiate world are awful people, awful though I believe their guiding philosophy to be. I see both as human, equally human in fact, and if I find myself in a stalled elevator with a member of either group, I hope I can figure out how to point out the flaws in their position without making them feel ambushed by a bearded douche.