Tag: Twitter

NO-PIVOT TRUMP AND THE CAMPAIGN THAT NEVER ENDS

Remember all that talk about Donald Trump pivoting? Once he secured the Republican nomination, he was supposed to pivot from the right to the center. After the election, we waited for him to pivot from candidate to president. When he gave his first speech to Congress without embarrassing himself, there was talk of his having pivoted into a genuine leader. Pundits greeted John Kelly’s appointment as White House chief of staff as the Donald’s major pivot toward becoming presidential. It never happened, none of it. Turns out that waiting for Trump’s pivot was as laborious and fruitless as Vladimir and Estragon Waiting for Godot. Like Godot, the pivot, never came.

Instead, for the first time in our history, we have in the Oval Office a one-dimensional, perpetual candidate, a blowhard with neither core beliefs nor the slightest interest in public policy, a president in name only whose singular vision is his own self-aggrandizement. And this is why our charlatan-in-chief can put children in cages, buy a porn star’s silence, lie 6.5 times a day, and still have a 42 percent approval rating.

All he does is campaign. There is no real governing going on here. Governance to Trump is the art of making stagecraft pass as statecraft. He has created a governing façade that casts himself as the omnipotent, winning superhero, righting imaginary wrongs and taking America back to a joyous, magical place and time that never existed.

We should have seen this coming when Trump filed his reelection documents on the day he was inaugurated, as opposed to waiting until the third year of his term, as all of his modern predecessors did. Or, when he obsessed over the size of his inauguration crowd. Or, when he ordered an investigation of voter fraud, insisting he had been robbed of votes, even though he won. Or when he kept right on holding campaign rallies and leading the faithful in chants about the wall and Crooked Hilary. These are not the actions of a man pivoting from campaign to governance. Alas, the Donald doesn’t pivot. He has only one gear and it’s all about creating adoration for himself.

At this very moment, Trump is preparing the pageantry for a prime-time Monday night announcement of a Supreme Court nominee who will supposedly sound the death knell for abortion rights. He’s been downright giddy about it for days, telling one audience this week, “other than war and peace,” packing the court with the right judges is the most important thing a president can do. Lest you think Trump’s judicial fixation reflects a deeply held reverential respect for the unborn, check out this 1999 clip of him boasting that “I am very pro-choice.” This nomination, like everything in Trump’s life, is purely transactional. He delivers a solid 5-4 conservative majority on the court, and sops up more love and approval from the right. As a bonus, attention is diverted from the thousands of migrant children he pulled away from their parents.

Reach deep into the soul of Donald Trump and you will find absolutely nothing. He is the first president with a totally empty ideological slate, unless winning or self-interest count as ideologies. He has changed party affiliation five times. His position on any issue turns on a dime, based on his instant calculation of what will make him look best in any given moment. Aside from this perpetual self-promotion, he makes no pretense of governing or leading. He doesn’t read briefing memos prepared by his staff. He doesn’t understand many of his own positions or policies. He signs executive orders without reading them or knowing what they do.

By not governing, Trump is able to focus exclusively on the only aspect of his job that appeals to him: campaigning. He pours all his energy into promoting himself and his brand, and demonizing those who decline to worship at his altar. Everyday his 40 million Twitter followers are bombarded with mini campaign messages. Yes, most are in prose that could pass for a middle school message board, but based on polling, they are having an impact.

Here’s a quick sample from the past few days:

• Democrats. . .weak on the Border and weak on Crime.
• We are doing a far better job than Bush and Obama.
• TAX CUTS are already providing historic gains for minorities, women, and small businesses.
• Democrats want anarchy, amnesty and chaos – Republicans want LAW, ORDER and JUSTICE!
• Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!
• The Russian Witch Hunt is Rigged!
• Crazy Maxine Waters, said by some to be one of the most corrupt people in politics.

This is what happens when a candidate for president is incapable of grasping the fact that he won, and must now actually lead. Like a character in an absurdist play, he just keeps on campaigning while his kingdom crumbles. Yet, it does explain why a guy who has accomplished so little, and destroyed so much, manages to hold a 42 percent approval rating. As former Trump University students can tell you, aggressive marketing, laced with a modicum of fraud, can sell a horrible product.

APES, CUNTS & TWITTER, OH MY!

What’s worse on the hierarchy of insults: calling a black person an ape or the president’s daughter a cunt? That insightful question is at the heart of our latest national conversation. Remember when our national conversations focused on substantive, compelling issues, like race, sexual harassment, gun control and income disparity? We are so through the looking glass right now, it’s hard to distinguish a Saturday Night Live sketch from the Nightly News. We have become our own parody.

Yet, for one, brief shining moment, it seemed that the hateful, racist, misogynistic depravity that has been gushing into our cultural veins since the 2016 presidential election had finally encountered a substantial abatement. A major corporation, ABC, acted against significant financial interests in an unambiguous repudiation of racism. The Disney-owned company summarily canceled the “Roseanne” show after its star, Roseanne Barr, tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, an African-American, looked like the offspring of “the Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, called Barr’s tweet “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” For at least 24 hours, hardly anyone disagreed with her. It was an amazing, almost redemptive, moment in our Trump-induced dystopia. A corporate conglomerate slaughtered its cash cow in order to take a principled stand against racism. There was no instant rebuttal from the right, no white nationalist defense of the centuries-old African-simian racist trope. You could almost make yourself believe that there was a national consensus that this kind of blatant, hateful bigotry was simply wrong and unacceptable. It was so pre-Trump.

Then comedian Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a cunt, and all hell broke loose. Bee, on her cable show, had shown a warm, loving picture of Ivanka and her young son, and contrasted that touching parental moment with the Trump Administration’s policy of separating children from their immigrant parents. Said the comic, “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child. But let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt!”

The Twittersphere was apoplectic with demands for equal justice for foulmouthed entertainers, an insistence that if Roseanne had to be sacrificed for her racist criticism of an Obama confidant, then surely Samantha should be fired for calling Trump’s daughter a cunt. Needless to say, the illusion that ABC’s principled stand in canceling “Roseanne” was a positive turning point in our culture wars, was now dead. What had briefly looked like a constructive consensus was now a full frontal battle between ape and cunt, a bizarre false equivalency between racial hatred and the use of a crude profanity.

The ensuing dialogue had nothing to do with civility or decency. It was all about politics, in the most decadent use of that term. Presidential Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced that “such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned,” leaving the door open, of course, to condone use of the c-word for Hillary Clinton, as many Trump t-shirts and campaign signs did during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself weighed into the battle, insisting that Bee be fired since that was the fate his buddy Roseanne suffered. That left us with yet one more unimaginable absurdity about the times in which we live: you can be elected president after admitting that you grab women by their pussies, but calling the first daughter a cunt is a dischargeable offense for a comedian.

Then the left fired back with numerous examples of Trump having used the c-word, along with the often told story of singer Ted Nugent calling Hillary Clinton a cunt and then being invited to dinner at the Trump Whitehouse. Moving right along with this scintillating intellectual exchange, the conservative surrebuttal hit its stride with counterclaims to Barr’s dismissal, including a Bill Maher episode featuring side-by-side pictures of Trump and an orangutan. As is so often the case with political discourse these days, the parties use whataboutism the same way a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination.

There is simply no moral equivalency between a brutally racist comment and the use of the c-word, particularly in this context since it was not used to demean women on the basis of their gender. Bee offered a sincere apology, as she should have. Her sin was not so much the offensiveness of the word, but the fact that its use predictably detracted from her overall valid message about the hypocrisy of Trump family values versus the treatment of immigrant families.

This is, obviously, a powerful word that packs a seismic etymological punch. Yet, it has not always been so offensive. In Middle English, the term was a standard reference for the female genitalia. The earliest reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the name of a 13th century London red light district street, Gropecuntlane. Chaucer used a variant for the word in two of his works. Shakespeare spun puns from the word in Hamlet and Twelfth Night. By the mid-1900s, the c-word had become quite notorious, generally considered one of the vilest of obscenities. It was used mostly by men to demean women, an angry, hateful, misogynistic slur, like “bitch” squared. That began to change in the 1990s. Many prominent women entertainers, prompted by playwright Eve Ensler and her The Vagina Monologues, began using the word, in effect reclaiming it from the misogynists. That new meaning was reflected in actress Sally Field’s reaction to this week’s brouhaha. Bee, she said, was “flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt (because) cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.” So sayeth the Flying Nun.

As the dust begins to settle from this latest culture wars skirmish, we seem to be in a pretty good place. Roseanne remains canceled, and an apologetic Samantha is still going strong. When it comes to evil, racism trumps obscenity. After all, cunt is just a vowel movement away from can’t. Now, there’s a bumper sticker for you!

IT’S TIME TO CONTROL THE RUNAWAY TRAIN OF SOCIAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

Like something out of a bad science fiction movie, social media technology has evolved into a grotesque, out-of-control monster that threatens our way of life. The beast’s ferocity has expanded so quickly and mindlessly that nobody is able to tame it, including the now-billionaire geeks who created it. Think that’s a harsh overstatement? Then look at these facts:

• Facebook admitted that it unknowingly accepted payment in Rubles from Russia for disguised pro-Trump propaganda spread to at least 10 million U.S. users during the 2016 presidential campaign.

• Twitter is equipped to place anonymous racist ads, ordered online, targeting 14.5 million users identified by Internet usage as responding to the n-word; 26.3 million to the term “wetback” and 18.6 million to Nazi.

• Google offers an online advertising tool in which ads are sold and placed with targeted users on the basis of such concerns as: “black people ruin neighborhoods”, “evil Jew” and “Jewish control of banks”.

To make matters worse, the offending content, placed on these sites by unidentified customers, have none of the visual properties of an online advertisement. They looked like ordinary posts, all part of a user’s daily newsfeed. In the case of the Russian Facebook buy, news-like items linking Hillary Clinton to Black Likes Matter or American Muslims were placed, for a price, on the pages of users who had clicked “like” on similar racist content.

Now, if these vile, misleading blurbs had been handled the way media outlets used to do business, a salesperson would have executed a formal contract for the buy and the advertisers’ name would appear in the copy. But that’s so 1990s. These social media sites rake in their billions over the transom of their medium. It’s all done online. In fact, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, until recently, brushed off reports of clandestine Russian interference on his site as a “pretty crazy idea.” Then he hired 3,000 “content monitors”, and suddenly hundreds of Russian “ads” and fake accounts were found. Same thing happened at Twitter.

Executives from the big three platforms – Facebook, Twitter and Google – steadfastly insist that there was never an intention to allow this kind of nefarious, deceptive activity on their sites. Think about that for a minute. Their defense is that the technology is at fault, that a bad algorithm did it. If they are right, then shame on all of us for allowing artificial intelligence to run roughshod over our democracy, for letting the technology control us, rather than the other way around. It’s time to take that control back.

Based on population, Facebook is larger than any country in the world. Except for Asia, it’s bigger than any continent. And it continues to grow at 17% a year. Zuckerberg, as an idealistic young Harvard student in 2004, created it in his dorm room. He said it would bring the world together through a “free flow of information”. He got the information flow part right, but there is nothing free about it. Facebook is now the largest online advertising company in the world, worth almost half a trillion dollars. As British writer John Lanchester put it, “Facebook was built to extract data from users to sell to advertisers.”

And that was precisely the transaction that Russia was looking for. It gave the Kremlin access to Facebook accounts of racist and anti-Muslim Americans, a ripe audience for pro-Trump messages paid for in Rubbles, but without a hint that they came from a foreign power. CNN reported Thursday that Russia’s Facebook campaign buy on Trump’s behalf was orchestrated so surgically that it hit disproportionately on a large number of targets in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that helped push Trump over the top in electoral votes.

So there is now a legislative campaign for transparency in digital political ads. Sadly, even that embarrassingly modest proposal is facing strong resistance. And it doesn’t begin to fix the much broader problem. Facebook, Google and Twitter are not just multi-billion-dollar conglomerates. Together, they control the communication infrastructure for most of the free world. Yet, the people who run these companies are not publically held to a single standard of accountability. Barbers and horse trainers are more closely regulated than these gigantic informational monoliths.

This is a long-overdue transformational moment. Technology has enhanced and lengthened our lives in so many ways. But that is no excuse for humanity to abdicate control, to let technology run itself, free from controls that reflect the values that only humans can construct. Yet that is precisely what has happened with these social media companies. No sick, ruthless executive knowingly took Russia’s money to let them tamper with our elections. It just happened because the technology allowed it to. Unrelated to the election, there are tens of millions of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, routinely sending off links to equally fake news sites. Neither company planned for that result; it was just technology doing its thing, unrestricted by human thought.

Folks with a rudimentary knowledge of code writing can create Twitter and Facebook bots, fake accounts, complete with pictures and bio. For all sorts of nefarious purposes, “bot farms” have been created to fire off thousands of phony messages every day. It is estimated, for example, that 43% of President Trump’s 38.6 million Twitter followers are fake accounts. In a recent high point of absurdity, Trump retweeted a follower’s post that blasted “fake news”. Turns out it had been created by a fake account.

This can’t continue. These companies can’t be allowed to simply sit back and bank their billions while their algorithms wreak havoc on the things that really matter to us, like truth and our democratic process. Whether through legislation or regulatory control, these corporate executives have to be sent back to their laboratories. They need to be forced to retool their technological monstrosities so that they comport with our values, not destroy them.

AND NOW THE LATEST IN SPORTS: TWEETS THAT ROAR

Sports in general, and motorsport racing in particular, have never occupied much of my cranial real estate. Yet, I spent a good hunk of Memorial Day weekend thinking about both. It all started when Denver Post sports columnist Terry Frei fired off a thoughtless tweet saying he was “very uncomfortable” with a Japanese driver, Takuma Sato, winning the Indy 500.

As the Twittersphere erupted, complete with Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima references, Frei launched what has become the normal protocol for this kind of social media foot-in-mouth disorder: a series of inelegant apologies, one of which included a plug for his latest book. Then, as this formulaic minuet played out, front office honchos from the Denver Post went into full somber-and-righteous mode to declare the offending tweet “disrespectful and unacceptable”. “(It) doesn’t represent what we believe nor what we stand for,” so sayeth the corporate executives in a prepared statement. They also fired Frei, a move that is not always part of this post tweet-gone-bad ritual.

So, besides the fact that Sato can drive really fast, what do we know so far? Number 1: Frei’s tweet was an outrageous thought that should never have left his brain, outside the confidentiality of a therapist’s office. Number 2: the Denver Post’s reaction was the epitome of disingenuousness. The newspaper is owned by a hedge fund that “stands” for only one thing: sucking as much money as it can out of its properties. This company has financially benefited from Frei’s verbal edginess as a four-time winner of the Colorado sportswriter of the year award. If the Indy 500 tweet was linked to his role as a Post columnist, then his editors had every right, if not an obligation, to see it before it went out, just as they read and edited his columns prior to publication. In practice, however, most newspapers encourage or require their writers to tweet and use other social media platforms as a way of plugging the brand and drawing eyeballs to their content. The owners waive their right of advance approval to take full advantage of the spontaneity that is social media. To encourage controversial writing that attracts readers makes sense. Firing the guy when his controversy crosses a line that was never drawn for him does not.

But there is something bigger going on here, namely an epidemic of sportswriters stumbling into the Twitter penalty box. A former football writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer incurred the wrath of his employer when he tweeted that the owner of the Browns is a “pathetic figure”. An ESPN sportscaster was disciplined for a tweet that described his competitors at a Boston television station as “2 washed-up athletes and a 60-yr-old fat guy with no neck.” An Associated Press sportswriter who tweeted about horrible refereeing in an NBA game got into trouble with his employer after the referee filed a law suit. A Chicago Sun Times sports reporter had to delete his Twitter account after his lifetime collection of sexist tweets went viral. A New York Post sportswriter was fired for an inauguration day tweet that said simply: “9.11.2001. 1.20.2017”, apparently an assertion that the Trump presidency was as much a threat to this country as the Twin Towers and Pentagon bombings.

Before social media, sports reporters rarely encountered disciplinary action. As a union rep in this industry, the only sports discipline case I had was a hockey writer who, while at work, bet (and lost) $500 on whether the groundhog would see its shadow on February 2. (The poor chump swore he thought the no-gambling rule was limited to games he covered.) For the most part, sportswriters were in their own little world, far below management’s radar. The other huge difference between then and now is that many sports journalists of old distinguished themselves as top notch writers. Not limited to whatever unfinished and unvarnished thought might be floating in their heads, these literary giants were able to convert a mundane soccer match into compelling prose. I had never read a sports story before taking my first journalism class. I turned in a tepid, mechanical account of a student government meeting and my professor handed me a volume of selected sports articles. I told him I had no interest in sports. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “These are master story tellers. A good story is more than a recitation of facts.” For example:

• Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times) covering a 1960s Rose Bowl game involving an Iowa team: “There were thousands of people in calico and John Deer caps in their Winnebagos with their pacemakers and potato salad, looking for Bob Hope.”
• Shirley Povich (Washington Post) reporting on a New York Yankees pitcher tossing a perfect game in the 1956 World Series: “The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larson today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.”
• Red Smith (New York Times) describing an unlikely home run that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Yes, those were the days, my friends. It was a calmer time, before Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, a time when journalists faced only two tasks: getting it right and writing it well. In our brave, new, real time world, they are now expected to let loose with every embryotic half-baked thought that enters their heads. And pray that it doesn’t offend the suits who sign their paychecks. That leaves them with only one recourse, and I hope they take it: THINK – long and hard – before you tweet!