A Carnival of Ignorance

Louis CK once described the strangeness of relying on online forums to research products.  He read a review of a Blu-ray player and wondered what particular expertise this total stranger brought to the task, imagining that the critic was about to “murder-suicide his entire family” but first stopped to comment on the unit’s “counterintuitive controls.”

This almost captures my view of the horror that is comments sections.  When I was a principal I once had to fire a new teacher only weeks into his first semester.  Minutes after a meeting in which I warned him about a pattern of abusive language toward students he returned to the classroom and told the kids that his mother hadn’t sent him to Harvard to be a zoo keeper for a bunch of animals like them.  The story actually made the NY Post, with me cast as the villain.  Most of the comments vilified me as a pencil-pushing bureaucrat empowering thuggish minority teens to threaten an idealistic, young, white Ivy graduate (while also mocking his unfortunate liberalism.)  The teacher in question was actually an African American man in his late forties who was still living with his mom, but that didn’t fit their imaginative rendering of the facts reported by the paper.

What interested me about this (and other similarly personal cases) was not the torrent of hatred I elicited from people who don’t even know me.  It was the highly-racialized narratives that people had about the Bronx, about the children I taught, and about their parents.  It mirrored what I saw in the responses to all kinds of news stories that had nothing to do with me.  People could not deal with what they read without first mentally re-writing it to fit their prejudices.  More than just seeing through the filter of a worldview, they actively rejected every fact that might challenge what they “know” to be true.

A little over a year ago I wrote in this space about reader responses to a New York Times op-ed on the US’s ugly history of lynching Mexican Americans.  One commenter complained that white people always have to “take it on the chin” and “grovel in the dirt.”  Several raised the time-worn defense that social norms were “different” in the past, as if somehow the Biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” had not yet been written in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  And one even wondered what the point of this piece of “historical victimhood” might be, apparently rejecting history – the need to understand our past – itself.

The level of venom in so many online discussions suggests to me that there is a special class of lonely, damaged folk who sit home on their computers heaving poisonous grenades into cyberspace… usually anonymously.  It is a carnival of ignorance.  I try as a rule not to read it because it undermines my faith in humanity.

Or that is what I thought until yesterday.  Because it suddenly occurred to me that they aren’t sitting at home anymore.  The whole crowd of misogynists and racists and xenophobes now have arenas to fill to cheer each other and to cheer their avatar, the phony real estate developer and reality TV star, Donald Trump.  I cannot pretend that they are isolated, because they have found a way to break out of cyberspace and into the real world.  They have found a way to call women “cunts” to their faces instead of in online forums.  They have found a way to sucker-punch Black men from within the comfort of a jeering crowd of similarly minded criminals instead of just threatening to do so under the cloak of a computer pseudonym.  And instead of complaining about the “liberal” media (“liberal” because it publishes facts they don’t want to know) they can physically assault reporters who come to cover their hate fests.

People of color have been observing for many weeks now that white folks have no right to be “shocked” by the Trump phenomenon.  Orange Hitler has simply given all these vicious folks a nucleus around which to coalesce.  My realization yesterday, though, was that these Trump rallies are an online comments section brought to life.  And I started to compose this post.

But our thoughts are rarely original.  And they are often better expressed by others.  Also yesterday a friend shared this tweet on Facebook:  "Donald Trump is like if a comments section ran for office."  Fifty-eight characters instead of 700 words.  Oh, well.  I am posting mine anyway.