Good News Everyone!

6/16/2020

David A. Windham

Good News Everyone!

The title here is what Professor Farnsworth says before every suicide mission on Futurama, one of my favorite television shows₁. I’m using it sarcastically for those that are uninitiated. On the very rare occasion that Farnsworth has good news, he opens with “Bad news, everyone!”. Without further ado, I’m just going to briefly summarize a bit of what I’ve been thinking regarding some of our currently trending topics. Be forewarned in that, as much as I like to say or present otherwise, my opinions lean a bit towards a boring dystopia. The symbolism of a for profit billionaire owned company₂ launching astronauts into space above the heads of thousands of people protesting oppression amid a global pandemic and economic turmoil should not be lost on anyone.

My last post made light of the quarantine simply due to the fact that I’ve always thought that if you can’t be positive about something, at least figure out a way to make light of it. I’m a big proponent of that strategy and the power of humor to deliver the unspoken. I think we’re all aware by now that comedians very much walk that high wire. My better half and I are still very much quarantining ourselves from the rest of the world. You should see our Animal Crossing island now₃. I’m always telling folks first world problems, but rioting, looting, political unrest, and a viral pandemic are not. These are third world problems and let’s be real with ourselves in that they are very much right on our doorsteps.

I gotta confess that I happen to be in the minority in my neck of the woods regarding Covid-19. The top of the fold front page article from our local newspaper several weeks back was titled “Overreaction? Some say COVID-19 has been weaponized for political reasons“₄. The headlines recently show that South Carolina is leading the country in transmission rates and percent positive tests. Ah come on y’all, over 100,000 folks have died from it in the United States. The information war around it is a politicized mess. I’m not an epidemiologist, but I’m intelligent enough to understand the rates of transmission and the risks. My attitude has been from the start that you’ve got to consider what is worth the risk. I consider myself fortunate because I work from home and I’ve been able to adjust my leisure activities to suit. I think we all know who’s taking the risk and it’s mostly those that cannot afford to do otherwise. As for the other folks who would rather continue on in some sense of normalcy and expose others, I’ve just been writing that behavior off as ignorance and arrogance. I think that although some level heads are begging folks to take note, my guess is that the rates here in South Carolina will continue to rise and for the time being, I’ll be spending my time trying to isolate.

In the last couple weeks, the National Guard was deployed in over 20 states and protests have occurred in over 120 cities. The part that really had an effect on me was the watching videos of protesting and riots areas that I am very familiar with. It’s all just some video until you know folks that have been impacted. I think it’s pretty clear now the amount of discontent and I think it’s about much more than just racial injustice. I believe that there are a powder keg of other factors involved. Here’s an obscure fact related exactly to Minneapolis in that area has the largest discrepancies of home ownership rates for minorities with a gap of 51.3%_5,6. The socio-economic factors combined with the pandemic are underlying issues of discontent. I read this morning that as the unemployment benefits and social safety nets run out, it’ll likely charge up a new round of unrest. There are things that we can try to do to fix it. The first step I had to take was trying to explain to a board of mostly sixty-plus white males how spreading rumors originating from disinformation campaigns were espousing racists views to our neighborhood association. It wasn’t met with much reception, but several days later, I did get an email from one member who had obviously put a bit of thought into what I was trying to say. I got choked up a bit reading the email just thinking that I mighta help create a bit more unity and understanding. I’ve been doing my little part by creating Wikipedia pages of more recent racial injustices that have happened around our state. It has a much more lasting effect than #hash-tagging some tweets or any other social media nonsense. I add the pages to their respected cities and towns as a historical reminders of the antiquated mindset that happened just a generation or two ago.

I’m very much a moderate sorta fella and I have empathy for the various opinions in this discussion. For instance, on the more conservative side, I’d think we have a better long term outcome by adding historical context to the monuments instead of removing them. I kinda like the way HBO handled Gone With the Wind with an introduction for historical context. I think we’re in a really dangerous era now because of our modern communication mediums and information silos they create. As much is being said otherwise, I wish I could assure folks that while yes, there are certainly agendas hidden in about every editorial room in the US, many honest to goodness journalist are being as objective and sincere as possible in their reporting. I remember one summer as a teenager, I went to a weeklong ‘journalism camp’ where this tough ole’ broad gave a lecture on objective reporting. I’m sure that every journalism student at every major university has heard something similar. I’ve since sat in on several editorial boardroom meetings at major newspapers. Traditionally they’ve been represented by a highly educated spectrum of opinions, but the so called democratization of internet publishing has given a megaphone to relatively obscure voices. I recently did a little forensic research into a couple online rumors and found two tweets insinuating that riots and a heavy response from law enforcement were coming to our community. Both accounts had virtually no way to fingerprint a the person(s) behind them and I found evidence that both accounts were disinformation campaigns. Although I expected them to be removed when the news announced that 170,000 Twitter accounts that had been removed₇, I checked again this morning, and only one of them was removed. I’m not naming or linking to these tweets so as to not draw any unwelcome attention to my website. I will however point you to some research that was done showing how these campaigns are effective in a piece done by NBC on the spread of racist rumors₈. These sort of disinformation campaigns are literally tearing apart the fabric of America.

I think the most dangerous aspect of everything going on is the idea of American exceptionalism₉. I have Gravity’s Rainbow₁₀ by Thomas Pynchon sitting on my nightstand right now and it continuously reminds me of a quote about the meaning of hit song from Devo. “Whip It” is a tongue-in-cheek pep talk satirizing hollow American optimism. “I had been reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and he had these limericks and poems in there that really made me laugh, where he was making fun of all the American, can-do clichés—Horatio Alger—‘there’s nobody else like you,’ ‘you’re number one,’ ‘you can do it.’ And I was just trying my hand at it.”₁₁ Don’t get me wrong on this, I do believe that America is exceptional in a number of ways, most importantly our founding democratic ideals. However, I think that the dangerous part is assuming that we will always continue to be exceptional. I think that sort of arrogance is dangerous in any sport, profession, or personality.

The slogan of Make America Great Again has been rubbing me the wrong way since I first wrote about it. In November of 2016, I was correct when I wrote that “My guess is that the markets will take a joy ride on ideals of deregulation, but social and global issues will be agitated by him.”₁₂ A Pew Research study conducted in January of this year concluded “Younger Americans more likely than older adults to say there are other countries that are better than the U.S.” Slightly more than a third (36%) of adults ages 18 to 29 say there are other countries that are better than the U.S.₁₃ These policies of some of the countries who might rank higher in certain indexes aren’t some sort of foreign quasi new world order sort of ideas. These are just practical solutions to modern problems. Let’s look into them and give it a shot. It reminds me a clip that’s been circulating the internet taken from the series The Newsroom originally aired in 2012₁₄.

That video is pretty potent. I think that the editorial Please Stop Telling Me America is Great₁₅ was influenced by the monologue and is also worth a watch. Personally, I think it’s fundamental to admit where you are in order to get better at anything. Calculate your strengths and weaknesses realistically. I think we’re in that stage now. I’ve been tinkering with the idea of a third moderate political party in the U.S. based on the fact that I think teachers and nurses are the real backbone of our country. Perhaps their new political slogan could be something more akin to Make America Better. Let’s just admit it to ourselves and then get on with it.