“Do you remember
when you were young
how the hero
was never hung
always, always
got away”.......John Lennon.
In Britain, they are burning faggots tonight in celebration of the attempt by Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators to blow up the parliament in 1605. Faggots are, by the way, logs or sticks that one throws upon the fire when one is burning a villain at the stake.
It is fitting, on this eve of the ritual bi-annual going to the polls that we in the United States historically celebrate. But this election is different. Oh, I know how shopworn is the old bromide. One hears it at the close of every election cycle, like the alarm that the washing machine has just finished its work. But this time it truly is serious.
For our Caesar Disgustus, to be properly understood, is a modern Guy Fawkes, blowing up the institutions of our society not with gunpowder but by the adroit application of overgrown mendacity. He has, in that stinking carcass, managed to embody everything that we as a nation wish so fervently to forget.
But he has had help. It has taken far more than the modern Republican Party to degenerate into the tea-bagging hell it has become to produce this political crisis. It has taken more than hate radio, or Faux News. It has taken the internet.
Metastasizing into the iPhone technology, the 'nets' have been anything but the liberating technology its apostles had promised. In September 2017, The Atlantic Magazine (1) published an article entitled “Has The Smartphone Destroyed A Generation?” which plumbs the depths of the rot coursing through our body politic. It isn't simply the flood of propaganda, disinformation, or outright lies flooding the 'Social Media' of Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and the like, it is the profound impact that the electronic mediums created in the last few decades ranging from cable, internet and now telephones that is eating at the soul of this country.
Jean Twenge, writing in The Atlantic, concluded that “the allure of independence, so powerful in previous generations, holds less sway over today's teens”, pointing out that the young are increasingly holed up in their rooms on their cell phones, not dating as frequently and then at a much later age; not getting drivers licenses, not venturing out into the physical world, but increasingly holed up with their heads deeply buried in their respective screens. So bad is it that the young report that they feel closer to their friends on the phone than they do with real face to face gatherings. And what this technology is doing to them, it is doing to all of us.
We have a generation not only over-supervised—reporting back to the 'folks' every 20 or 30 minutes as their 'helicopter' parents overprotect them—but a generation unsupervised where it matters most—on the internet.
And what this technology is doing to them, it is doing to all of us.
From nearly every perspective, the advantage of the information superhighway slips from our grasp. Frank Bruni recently wrote in The New York Times (2) that the internet “gives rogue grievances and dark prejudices the shimmer of ideals.”
“What a glittering dream of expanded knowledge and enhance connection it was at the start. What a nightmare of manipulated biases and metastasized hate it has turned into.” (3)
Bruni then goes on to catalog to sorry examples of the guy who last week mailed bombs to Democratic leaders, the guy who last weekend opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue murdering 11, and the guy who shot up a historic black church in Charleston South Carolina three years ago. “It was on the internet, with its privacy and anonymity, that Dylan Roof researched white supremacy and formulated his evil conviction that violence was necessary”. (4)
“Enclaves of the internet warped the worldviews of all these men, convincing them of the primacy and purity of their rage...
“It creates terrorists. But well shy of that, it sows enmity by jumbling together information and misinformation to a point where there's no discerning the real from the Russian.” (5)
It's in these dark places where the potent toxicity of Donald tRUMP grows and thrives. Like any parasite, he didn't create his environment, but he has found his host. Cyberspace is the new gunpowder placed beneath the people's house.
“Remember, Remember
the fifth of November”......John Lennon
Happy Guy Fawkes Day
“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”
Impeach and Imprison.
____________
(1). Twenge, Jean. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/
(2). Bruni, Frank. “The Internet Will Be The Death of Us” The New York Times. Wednesday, October 31, 2018. Page A27
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid
(5) Ibid
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