“The essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, bulls—t detector.”
What Papa Hemingway prescribed for would-be members of his profession is equally essential to anyone who aspires to be a good citizen. A good parent. A good romantic partner. A good anything.
And, as a nation, there is reason to fear that our BS detectors are faulty. If so, we are in deep trouble.
The recent indictments brought by special counsel Robert Mueller — the ones filed against the Russian troll farmers, not against the president’s former associates — reveal a long-running attempt by that nation’s government to sow discord, confusion and division among the American people by using our own social media giants to make us think that things in this country are as bad as the Current Occupant says they are.
The man in the Oval Office is there because enough people — mostly clustered in a few Rustbelt states who tipped the Electoral College in his favor — believed that they are threatened by large numbers of people who don’t look like them.
You know. Black welfare recipients in the big cities. Mexican drug dealers and sex criminals pouring across the border. Democrats who want to take your guns away. Atheists who won’t let you say Merry Christmas.
Clearly, there are a lot of good people in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who sense in their guts — where logical counter-arguments of any ideology have little meaning — that something just ain’t right. Even folks who aren’t homeless drug addicts can’t avoid the feeling that the comfortable life that many of them, or their parents, worked for, is not there any more.
An America where a single wage-earner, working 40-plus hour weeks, could buy a house, put their kids through college and expect a secure retirement at age 65 just isn’t realistic for so many of them.
Into that breach jumped the propagandists. Like the terrorists of 9/11, who turned our own civil aviation system against us, these deplorables used our own mediasphere — Fox News, Facebook, Twitter — as their weapon of choice. They used it to bolster the idea that a Manhattan millionaire who had a long record of stiffing contractors, assaulting women and swindling customers was their savior. Not so much because he was so good, necessarily, but because the alternatives were so bad.
Mueller is not claiming that he can count the votes — or the states — swung by those attacks. The indictment does not go there. The law that was allegedly broken was the one requiring foreign nationals buying ads and doing other things to influence our elections to register as foreign agents. Which these folks, we are told, did not.
Here is where an organization as devoted to First Amendment invincibility as the National Rifle Association is to Second Amendment supremacy might object. If there were such a incredibly stupid thing.
How dare Congress write, and the Justice Department enforce, a law that makes it difficult, even criminal, for any person to say absolutely anything they want about anyone they want in any medium they want? Who cares if they are not citizens, don’t live here, use fake names, even fake nationalities, to spread false information designed to convince us to cast our precious ballots in ways that suit them, not us? Free speech is free speech. Right?
The Platonic ideal of free speech would be a land where anyone could, indeed, say anything about anyone at any time. Because, even if those anyones were spreading lies and division, the rest of the citizenry would be attentive, intelligent and devoted enough to turn their Hemingway (can’t get much more American than that) bull detectors on the offenders’ effluent and immediately see it for what it is.
Those who kept at it would not be jailed, fined or deported. No, something much worse would happen to them. They’d be ignored.
It is the same argument to be made about the fear among some good people, not a few of them in the Utah Legislature, that seeing porn warps people’s minds and causes them to see as normal behaviors that are weird, repulsive or hurtful.
There is probably some of that going on, especially when younger people are involved. But if we are a nation that learns its sexual mores, as well as its political beliefs, from entertainment media, then we’ve got more to worry about than wedding night woes.
The fact that very few people, even children, truly believe that they can drive like that, shoot like that, fly like that, time-travel or mind-project like that, no matter how many movies they’ve seen, should cause us to worry a bit less.
Law or no law, there aren’t enough Robert Muellers in the world to protect us from this hazard unless we take on much more of the responsibility ourselves. And maybe we are getting there.
In the wake of the latest school shooting in Florida, there was a wave of social media bull claiming that it didn’t really happen. That the brave and incredibly articulate students who stood up to say Never Again aren’t real students. They are actors. Paid by the International Liberal Conspiracy.
Both the legacy media (that’s where I live) and the more active natives of the social mediaverse (people who are mostly 40 years younger than me) are almost as quickly calling BS on the trolls, pointing out that these tweets and YouTube postings are coming from Moscow, not Milwaukee. Many younger folk are not mindlessly sharing and retweeting junk because, unlike their grandparents, they are accustomed to being active participants in that universe, rather than passive absorbers.
Of course, this is where I cling to my belief, because I’m still clinging to my job, that old-line, professional, responsible news organizations are the best — even if not infallible — BS filters of them all.
You’re welcome.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tribune staff. George Pyle.
George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, welcomes all the devoted amateurs to the battlements defending truth. gpyle@sltrib.com
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