One of the things I've noticed over the last few years is how badly we fight with one another. I don't mean that in the sense of how often we fight or how heated the arguments are, I mean we're just
lousy at it. No one, not the participants or the observers, seems interested in debating so much as shouting. When CNN first started it's 24-hour news network, I thought, naively, that it could have time both for hard news and serious discussion of the issues. I was wrong. Oh, I'm not going to say there wasn't a fair share of yelling or spewing inflammatory comments at each other thirty or forty years ago, it's just that as technology has made access to information easier, it's merely amplified our tendencies to act like a bunch of high-schoolers. And we do.
I'm not talking about the blogosphere alone, though with so many monkeys hacking away at so many typewriters, the signal-to-noise ratio tends to be pretty bad. What the blogosphere
has managed to accomplish, however, is to show how much the well-paid, college-educated "professionals" behave like high-schoolers themselves: look at what happened with "ombudsman"
Deborah Howell at the Washington Post as a perfect example. We're treading on their turf and showing them up for the hacks they are, and they just don't like it.
But I digress.
Instead of the more in-depth coverage of events a 24-hour news network would allow, we get the same talking points repeated
ad nauseum. If you can't make your point in ten words or less, you're just screwed. And of course you must make it personal, it's not enough to win the debate you have to humiliate your opponent and do the equivalent of an end-zone celebration dance afterwards. It's not just the news: look at these phony courtroom shows featuring things "Texas Justice" (what the hell is that supposed to mean, by the way? Do viewers expect to see retarded people get tried and executed on the spot? Or branded, maybe?), or on Dr. Laura's radio show where people call up to get humiliated, or even on sports shows. When Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd did their famous "point-counterpoint" schtick on SNL's "Weekend Update" thirty years ago, it was a parody. Now, comments along the lines of
Jane, you ignorant slut are the norm.
Things are so bad we've even invented a new word for it:
snarkiness. Snarkiness is a combination of sarcasm, obnoxiousness, and smug superiority. David Spade mastered this in the late nineties (buh-
bye!), Jon Stewart uses it very effectively, though in this observe's opinion, Jon is not only funnier in how he uses it, he can also get very serious about an issue when it's necessary. And Stewart almost singlehandedly took out CNN's
Crossfire when he refused to go along with the program's snarky format (
I'm not going to be your monkey).
The right's entire political/propaganda machine is built on snarkiness, and one reason they're so good at dominating the discussion (apart from the fact that they pay people a lot of money) is that the points they make can be made simply and quickly, and that they appeal to the baser instincts we all have. "Abortion is murder!" "Support the troops." "Whiney liberal loser!" "USA! USA! USA!" All are just variations on "Four legs good, two legs bad!" and make any serious debate impossible, because as soon as we try to explain the bullshit for what it is, the audience is heading out for popcorn. It really is a no-win situation for us under these conditions, so we need to change the conditions.
The problem with snarkiness, as the right will eventually discover, is that you have to keep topping yourself, and eventually you're going to go too far. They're trying to walk a fine line, keeping the discourse as nasty as possible without people getting violent, and there are some out there on the right just
itching for the chance to get medieval on some of us. Certainly the corporatist wing of the GOP doesn't want things to get too bad, after all, it's bad for business, but sooner or later that dam is going to burst and things are going to get really ugly. The Germans couldn't stop the progression in the thirties, let's hope it doesn't go as far as all that. Or maybe it
has to get that bad so we know that it can indeed happen here.
For myself, I will try in the future to avoid snarkiness, partly because I think it's wrong, but also because, well, I'm no good at it. The truth is, snarkiness works better for
some people; that is, people who either don't have feelings themselves or who never had their feelings hurt and therefore have little empathy for those that do (hint hint), than it does for me. That doesn't mean I won't be a tough advocate for my views, but I'll try not to make it (and take it) so personal.
As someone said in a movie, these are serious times that require serious answers. Snarkiness doesn't accomplish anything, it just makes things worse. Let's at least
try to act like adults.
Cup O' Joe - Blog Of The Working Man's Thinking Man!
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