Click Bait!

Oh, My God!  The Jolie-Pitt Divorce is getting Ugly!  Nobody saw this coming, but we’re all going to watch it go away, aren’t we?

Oh, My God!  Look at Tiger Woods with no shirt on!  I wonder what he’s advertising?  Have women forgotten that he’s a dickhead?  When you have that much money, does it matter?

Oh, Look!  That lake is mysteriously disappearing!  Wait a minute, haven’t we already seen that?  Like, about a dozen times?

Oh, Look!  The DEA has listed Charlotte’s Web as a Schedule 1 drug because a company wants to monopolize it!  Wait, No!  That’s wrong, the story was a lie!  Gee, what if Facebook looked it up on Snopes before they ran it, rather than leave the work to the readers?

Oh, Look!  Over on the side of my Facebook page!  3500 people are talking about Earl Thomas!  4,000 people are talking about Sarah Michelle Gellar, and two hundred and forty thousand of them are talking about Elton John talking about George Michael!  Don’t any of them have anything better to do?  How does Facebook know who we’re talking about?  Oh, Look, there’s More!

Ooh!  I must do this quiz, to find out how smart I am!  Oh, Look!  There’s a puzzle!  A Survey!  Why is it 2:00 in the afternoon and I’m still in my bathrobe?

I don’t have time for this shit.  Especially since it is becoming all too obvious that George Orwell got it all wrong.  The dystopian world he pictured in 1984 did not look beyond the TV screen and see the Smartphone waiting to give us even more Big Brother than we could have imagined.  Beyond that, they’ve found a way to make us like it!  Here, click on this, Like that, Share that with your friends!

This is no dreary world of shortages, unhappiness, and gray concrete.  This world is full of color, and sound, and action, right out of Shakespeare: “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!”

Meanwhile, the planet continues to spin on its slightly wobbly axis, the bombs continue to fall, and people continue to die under them, like always.  And, of course, we’re paying for everything.

We’re picking up the tab for those bombs, and the jets out of which they drop, and the training of the people that fly them and do the dropping.  We’re paying for all the click-bait on Facebook, too.  Every time we get sucked into an attractive headline, or a picture of an attractive person with much skin exposed, somewhere a cash register dings.  The cost of those ads is called “overhead”, and is rolled into the price of the goods.  Quite often, if something is advertised on Facebook at a discounted price, it turns out that is a rip-off, the actual identical product can be found on Amazon or elsewhere for half the so-called “discount”.  So, the corollary rule to the one that says the Lottery is a Tax on Those Who Are Bad at Math is this:  Facebook is where friends go to find a product that brings them joy, but they want to pay even more!

I like to use Facebook to keep up with the friends and extended family, see what the kids are up to, what milestones have been born or celebrated.  I also like to use it to share my own stories from time to time, at the risk of inviting comment or criticism.  What I don’t like is when a useful app like Facebook becomes an avenue to distract me from the truth, or tell me lies, or feed me bullshit, or cost me money.

What I realize is that it’s up to me to control what shows up on my page.  When one of my friends continually dumps bullshit or fake news on my timeline, they get unfollowed.  When ads pop up that annoy me, those companies get blocked.  And above all, I recognize Facebook for the ultimate time waster that it is, and never, ever click on the bait that appears, the pop-up ads, the sponsored posts.  Each one spawns a dozen.

The other thing is that, scattered among the click bait and fake news, there are posts from real people telling the truth about what is going on in the world.  And that is the other thing that Orwell did not see, that instant electronic communication can also enable massive change in the world, can keep us talking to each other and sharing our truths.  It gives one the hope that a revolution in the sense that we can decide as a people to stop dropping bombs on each other, and that the world does not consist of us and them, that the shared best interests of all humans include peace and freedom and a right to happiness can come about because we all share the truth as it happens, and we don’t have to kill each other to do it.  That’s where our friends come in.  We trust each other to speak the truth, and share it when we find it.

I think, at the end of the day, that is what it’s all about.  :-{)}

Two plus Two equals What?

So it looks like this is how it works:  A few days ago, President-elect Trump tweeted that the contract with Boeing to build the next two Air Force One planes was, “...too expensive, 4 billion dollars!  Cancel It!”  Boeing’s stock took a nose dive, and publicists and politicians all over the globe got in front of microphones and bleated endlessly, with some agitation, that it was not true!  Boeing has only been working on a lousy $150 million project to talk about it.  They don’t have the specs yet to even start asking how much, so somebody pulled that number out of their ass.

Despite that, given the level of response to that single tweet, and the wide-spread nature of the response from all directions, would it surprise you to see on the front page of one of the scandal sheets on display at the checkout stands of our local grocer (all but the “family friendly” ones, anyway) a headline that shouted, “Trump Cancels $4 Billion Air Force One Project!

My first thought was, “Are you kidding?  Do you not know that all of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Fox News, CNN, and all the rest of the chatterverse has been debunking that story within the hour?”  Then I realized; they don’t care.  Their audience doesn’t read anything they don’t already know, and don’t care to start now, thank you very much.

My second thought was, “Who exactly do we have in this country capable of designing, building and flying what will probably be the second most complicated flying machine this side of the Space Shuttle.  I mean, besides Boeing.  Nobody, right?  So you really are full of doo-doo to even suggest it, right?  So, who are you trying to fool?”  The answer is:  the same people who elected him.

I supported President Obama, and to this day believe he did as good as he possibly could given the level of attack that started the day after his first election from all sides.  He ran a clean ship, and got the trains running on time, at some level.  All the bullshit they threw at him was based on lies, the new currency of politics in America.  At the time, most profoundly expressed on the night of his inauguration, the spirit that flooded the airwaves felt like a sign that a change was gonna be here.  It gave me hope.  Still does.

But it occurs to me: Now, the shoe is on the other foot.  The pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme.  However, the process is the same, just for a different group.

Obama gathered the poor, the dispossessed, the young, college educated ones, some of the working class and built an organization on their efforts, Organizing for America.  Trump made those people the enemy and built his winning coalition on the backs of the scandal sheet readers, the Fox News quoters, the haters and the fringers on the opposite side from the radical left.

Obama got his money from the lawyers, and the rich liberals.  Trump got his from the capitalists, and the rich conservatives.  And here’s the thing:  Just like Obama in 2008, Trump in 2016 has given his followers hope!

You can see them everywhere, the Trump folks.  “I’m with Her” is a message that has disappeared from the bumpers of America, but Trump rides everyone’s ass these days.  They walk with a form of victory strut, the one we did when Obama won, he was our man, and we grinned from ear to ear.  Now it’s them, and we look away.

But in the back of our minds, we are thinking:  He promised a whole bunch of things to a whole bunch of people, and now he’s gotta come through for them, and he’s got four years to do it.  He’s gotta build a wall, then deport a bunch of nonwhite people.  Then he’s gotta start my mine back up, or my logging crew, or my auto plant job.  He’s gotta slap China around, even though they buy so many of our T-bills that if they quit buying them we’d see the full faith and credit of the United States of America go up in smoke faster than you can say leveraged buyout.  He’s gotta slap the Russians around, even though he personally owes them millions, we hear.

And all the time, we’re going to be riding his ass like a loan shark on payday.  All those liberals and progressives are still here (you saw the vote totals), and we’re not having any of this, thank you very much.

The difference is, we’re going to fight back with the truth.  We’re not going to pass on fake news, that’s their thing.  We’re going to ignore his wife, as long as she stops plagiarizing, and his kids, who will hopefully sit down and shut up for the next four years.  We’re going to talk policy, and facts; we’re going to insist on reasonability, and cooperation, and building community, and shining a light on things going on around us.  When they go low, we’re going to go high, just like Ms Obama said.

What else can we do?  :-{)}

Granddaughters

“Poppy, come play with me!  I’m bored!”, she said.

I’m the last resort, these days, if there’s nothing better on TV, and her cousin isn’t available to yammer endlessly over the facetime phone.  I accept my lowly status, knowing the near future will reveal to her my true nature as a dork.  I’ll take what I can get.  She’s ten now, and we all know what happens to them when they turn fourteen.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said.  “Let’s make a bet.  We’ll play UNO, and the first one to win two games wins the bet, and the loser has to be their servant, until mommy comes home.”  “Done”, I said.  “I’ll shuffle the first round.”

Of course, she had to summarize the deal in a written contract, with signatures in duplicate.  I explained that one signature was in cursive, one was printed, and she liked that, because it gave her a chance to show off her flowing signature.  This kid likes to nail down the details.  She’ll go far.

She won the first game in record time, before even half the draw pile was exhausted.  I complained bitterly about the obviously poor shuffle, until she pointed out that I had done it.

I came back and won the second game in grand fashion, having a run of blue cards left after she pulled a wild card and declared for blue. She complained that I must have cheated, somehow, as I went into my victory dance.

But it all fell apart on the third game.  I got stuck on blue and had to draw endless reds, greens and yellows before I could match the one on the pile.  She seemed to take particular pleasure in showering me with penalty cards that made me draw even more cards.  Her victory dance when she UNO’d out with a pile still in my hands circumnavigated the living room.

Now I was in thrall for the next several hours, and it did not look good for my dignity.  The first thing she did was write out a script for a scatological self-denunciation that she had me deliver as a rap tune, followed by singing a Christmas carol, all the while being recorded on her cell phone.  Heaven help me if it hits Youtube.

Then she handed me a puppet, a theme, a setting and a problem, and commanded me to invent a puppet show on the spot that fit.  Fortunately, my hand was too big for the puppet, so I wound up operating Harley Hog, the leather-jacket-clad yellow pig, as he engaged in a confrontation with said puppet, a fearsome dragon with big eyes.  We lost, of course.  In the nick of time, her mother showed up, and I was saved from further indignity and abuse.  I tell you, it’s hard being the adult around here, sometimes… :-{)}