Yes, belief is weird -- powerful enough to deny the undeniable. It's like what separates us from the animals! Animals just know while we discount knowledge with reality-denying beliefs. Then again, so does the establishment media.
This is an interesting observation! Pre-internet there was a consensus reality you didn’t want to oppose too often, for fear you’d look like a sucker or a loon. Sure this reality had some bad points—the consensus kept teh gays on the outside, for example—but the social pressure of the consensus may in other ways have been load-bearing for civilization. Because here we are not quite 25 years into the internet, where you can find or create a consensus supporting ANY dang belief you like—and civilization is actually collapsing. Turns out people are not well-equipped to make up their own minds using evidence and conjecture! Only the antediluvian social pressure saved them from themselves, and us from them.
Had a client who was gaga over Frank Sinatra long after his mafia ties and domestic violence had been revealed. I could never relate. My heroes were chosen for their feet of clay (Sam Clemens, John Lennon and, for a while, David Byrne). I admired their accomplishments but realized that as individuals they were all assholes. That kept the fanboy in me at bay. Well that, and meeting other fans (always a disturbing experience).
I could be wrong about this, but I think you have to prime people to feel rage *first* before you introduce the conspiracy. Dorothy didn't have an interconnected media complex telling her to get the bastards who were maligning Liberace, because their plan was once they took down Liberace, they'd be coming for her next.
So people spend decades watching Fox News, then add in 10-15 years of rightwing websites, plus the emailed crank newsletters, plus especially the Facebook groups (and the worst thing many of us ever did was set up Facebook accounts for our parents/grandparents) that provide constant engagement and interaction. Constant fear mongering, constant outrage peddling. Once you’ve got people riled up, then you just point them toward the villain they should be mad at, the one(s) responsible for making them feel scared and angry.
And at this point so many of them are hard-wired with the rage impulse, and they only have to click on a website to get massive reinforcement that their rage is true and good. They really don’t need Fox or the websites or the newsletters anymore, they have become self-frothing, so something as asinine as a reporter removing a mask after a press conference becomes a huge affront and evidence of conspiracy.
I think more than a little of it has to do with the fact that most of the truthers know that their leader is an asshole and their movement is complete bullshit. Unable to cope with the actual truth, they come up with their own "real" truth, and the aggression is the same kind of aggression you see in cornered animals.
Having read a comparison of Liberace to the touring pianists of the 19th century, like Beethoven and Liszt, I went to see him on his last tour in his home state. He was the finest showman I’d seen since Frank Zappa. He carried the crowd along for two hours, swinging between romantic classical piano solos and unison Gershwin sing-a-longs. I finally understood what my grandmother saw in his weekly TV show we were forced to watch if we wanted to then see “Dragnet.” (We didn’t have a TV and had to watch hers.) No doubt it was too much of a whiplash for Dorothy to associate Liberace’s unique welcoming warmth and talent with a “perversion” she’d been taught to hate. But I don’t see a similarity between that refusal to accept an unacceptable truth about a man who brought so much happiness to so many, and the reprogrammable meatbags (Driftglass tm) who can be wound up and turned against anything the Republicans have chosen as the hate target of the day.
I would venture to guess that Dorothy's denial stemmed less from a conspiracy mindset and more from being unable to reconcile a truth about a celebrity she loved with a sexuality I assume she thought deviant. There are still people who deny Woody Allen did anything wrong. For myself, I love James Brown's music, but I understand that he physically abused women and that that's horrific; I don't know what it says about me that I still listen. I gave up on Michael Jackson. Can't hear his music anymore.
Anyway, a big reason Americans are vulnerable to the conspiracy theory media apparatus is because a majority---perhaps a large majority---of this country is functionally illiterate. Yes, they can read and write in a broad sense, but they have no interpretative skills, no reading comprehension, no ability to break down duplicities no matter how obvious. Stubbornness can be a part of it, yes, but it's also just an inability to comprehend.
Critical reasoning. It's not nearly as common in any high school pedagogy as it should be (and really needs to be for a real democracy). In fact, it's not even taught at fundamentalist institutions of "higher education".
The GOP has been successful in gutting education. People used to decry that we no longer teach civics; now we don't even remember that we used to teach civics. One day, we won't even remember that we used to teach.
Sometimes I think about how many "third world countries" have people who can speak two or more languages, and in this country (America), people are graduating high school when they are barely fluent in their native tongue, let alone others'.
We'll be teaching for centuries to come. WHAT we'll be teaching is the question. If conservatives have their way, what we'll be teaching will be some bizarre mish-mash of myth, fable, New-Age woo, and the importance of ein Reich, ein volk.
When I went to school, lo 40 years ago in rural South Dakota, even our school taught civics and history. Not *well*, but it was something still seen as important. In 5th Grade we had to learn SD history; in high school there were entire years for History and Government. In grade school there was even time set aside each Friday for Penmanship (I still have flashbacks to the dotted lines paper and the Palmer Method). Now teachers have to spend most of their time preparing students to take standardized tests so the school doesn’t lose its funding.
Oh, and when the state instituted a language requirement, my tiny rural school offered French. It was the language the English teacher was qualified in, so we all took French. (We blew past everything I learned in half a semester in college, but what’cha gonna do?)
Yes, I love when people, good white folk mostly, tell me, "That's not a word," or that my command of English tells them it isn't my native language. Morons.
Lack of reading comprehension -- or even the simple tools that would help them identify a grift -- is a real issue, and I wish I knew why schools stopped teaching it. When my Mom was a kid they taught Social Studies. Can you imagine such a thing now?
Teaching things like reading comprehension (and the humanities in general) would mean smaller class sizes and hiring more teachers. To do it properly you can’t reduce it to a multiple choice test. Obviously we can’t do that! We need to run children through high-stakes testing like widgets on a conveyor belt and turn out STEM graduates to go be good worker drones.
The grifters started funding education when the states cut back and had some conditions --like the Koch Brothers and forcing reading or at least distributing of Ayn Rand
Gawd, that reminds me—I worked at an office building on John Galt Boulevard in Omaha. It made me so fking irritated to go past that sign every day, knowing that some moron developer thought that was Teh Awesomest name for a street.
Should’ve been. The office next to ours was occupied by scam artists who pretended to raise money for the Nebraska Firefighters Assn. I did a blood drive in that building once: 5 story office building yielded <20 donors 😡
I'll play my right-wing temperament rôle here and say:
Teaching reading comprehension well means failing some people. This will inevitably mirror, to at least some and in children very much, the preëxisting inequities in society, so they end up looking like discrimination.
Where I'm not just a right-winger is in insisting that if we 0.) just spent enough fucking money and 1.) had a culture that ACTUALLY VALUED EDUCATION we'd be able to work through these problems, but as it is the weakness of real education both rightward and leftward made the only course left to throw up our hands (upward).
Next: we should have retained a canon, added a lot more women and members of persecuted groups, and taught the hell out of it—and respected students with cogent arguments rebelling aginst it.
“She was a little defensive looking, like life had done her a bad turn and she was on the lookout in case life tried the same shit again.” You’ll want to keep that sentence at hand for your work-in-progress. A little gem, it is.
I know very little about LIberace (my parents were not fans) but my impression has always been that the rumpus was solely about "was he a prevert or wasn't he", i.e., it was about *him*, not any unpleasantness that he inflicted on others. (Maybe he was a jerk to people he cared about, but I never sensed that this was the reason for the controversy constructed around him, at least while he was alive.) The people who liked him and enjoyed his performances really liked him and didn't like to hear bad things about him. Mean things. (Back then lots of older ladies had, for example, gay male hair stylists that they adored. I reckon that many of them just pretended that their favorite guy would never do icky stuff, like have the actual sex with other guys - or beat up their wives. He was *safe*.)
So these people weren't on his side despite him doing harm to others, or despite his criminality, they defended him because people were being mean to him and because they really liked him.
And it occurs to me that I'm just riffing off what DrBDH said an hour ago about the cruelty of the windup-able "reprogrammable meatbags". The Liberace folks weren't fans because they enjoyed pissing off critics; they just loved his "unique welcoming warmth and talent". As Dr.BDH says, it's a whole different thing than some endless two-minute hate squirmish.
I remember every Catholic-drilled sensibility in my head screaming at the top of it's perception when I first saw Freddy Mercury on TV singing "I want to break free", cross-dressed in an imitation leather mini-skirt, chintzy cotton singlet top replete with bra and stuffing, lipstick, bouffant wig and large pink plastic ear rings. This was long after I'd brushed Liberace as 'other', with his mincing around the stage in a giant fur, schmoozing the old ladies in the front row by showing off his jewelry.... "Want to see my ring?"
I just didn't want to know, no matter how talented they were.
"There are still people who deny Woody Allen did anything wrong."
(Hi, here's my least popular opinion this century: It's weird that SO MANY people assume the worst about Woody Allen! That seems unfair. The cops investigated thoroughly and concluded he didn't do it and that the kid showed classic signs of having been coached to lie by the other parent. Plus he made Annie Hall! Remember when Diane Keaton calls him over to kill a bug and then he runs out of the bathroom looking frightened? Come ON you guys.)
At least I can understand that. We sent men to the moon inside a ship with worse technology than a first generation iPhone.
I was listening to an episode of a favorite podcast where the hosts were interviewing a conspiracy theorist researcher, and they asked her if she believed in any conspiracy theories, and she answered yes - she believes the government is hiding alien technology at Area 51. It blew me away.
I think the podcast was Planet Money, but I honestly don't remember.
Area 51 seems one of the more benign, if not believable, conspiracy theories. You know why? Because I can imagine non-insane reasons why they'd try to cover it up.
It seems the craziest theories draw the most deranged people because it takes a whole lot of rage to carry them over the holes in the plot.
Well, jeez, it's my existential responsibility to link to this. It's by Gregory Fleeman, an old friend and one of the funniest people I know. He wrote, sings. Turns out both "Lee" and Elvis had dead twin brothers.
Aren't there two aspects to any cult/crackpot belief? One, the thing you insist is true. The other, the malevolence/greed/evil/etc. of everyone and everything else (the media; the liberals; society) who insist you're wrong. Dorothy might have said about Liberace, "I just know it's not true." Her modern-day counterpart might say, "I know it's not true, and that Big Gay is advancing its vile agenda by trying to convince us otherwise."
The latter phenom therefore attracts both true believers and true haters, two different constituencies drawn to the same cause. The former have a priori romantic/religious/etc. needs. The latter get out of bed mad (for real reasons) and look for some kind of congenial outlet.
Also, Dorothy's dot matrix newsletter was barely a step up from the single-spaced mimeographed nutbar screeds taped to Greenwich Village light posts. Today everything looks legitimately published, produced, etc., and has that kind of McLuhanesque legitimacy.
I agree with all of this, and your last point gets short shrift but it's important: the fact that the worst YouTube/Facebook conspiracy hustler can put on a tie and slap up a green-screen studio background and look exactly like any other sophisticated reporter on the real news makes it even easier to convince people bereft of critical thinking to live in the looniest of alternate realities.
All this is interesting and probably right. There is a difference between True Believers and True Believers who are also True Haters; I just wonder what changed in America to make so many more of the latter.
The point about the green-screen studio is fascinating and I wonder if anyone has ever written about digital democratization, which like a cultural Sam Colt made everyone equal production-wise but had the unforeseen effect of also making madmen look sane. Maybe I have! Have to go back and look.
Blame QuarkXpress, which turned faded purple mimeographed anti-semitic hate sheets from single-spaced gobbelldegook into nice, soothing text that looked eerily similar to a stock prospectus, because there were templates, and automatic kerning, and fonts that weren't Courier. Used to be you needed a print shop and a typesetter and a professional editor to get something into good enough shape that the print shop would even look at it. Desktop publishing and laser printers dropped the entry price to 10k, then 5k, then two, and then the web was upon us, and any knucklewit could swipe the html from a real site and make the most batshit ravings look like the Times.
I think people have a meanness that most civilized people suppress and control, but the obnoxious few find outlets - in the old days, it was something like lynching a black man or throwing rocks at homosexuals, but now it's berating reporters and carrying a rocket launcher into a Subway sandwich shop. Some of those folks were hurt in some way, whether some kind of abuse or maybe just the endless torment of life not turning out the way you want. Some of them are just assholes. Either way, the internet has allowed them to organize at a level we never could have appreciated even 20 years ago (when we also had the internet but social media wasn't really a thing).
Entirely unrelated, but I think it is unfair of you to take a shot at Hamilton. I have seen quite a few musicals over the past few years thanks to trying to attend more theater (or theatre) for the cultural experience, and my goodness, Hamilton is easily one of the top three musicals I've seen. The worst? Cats. I know it's trite to make fun of Cats thanks to the recent film, but it is truly a horrendous mess. I'm not here to make the case for or against T. S. Eliot, but the man's work deserved better. Between Cats and Starlight Express, I refuse to believe that Andrew Lloyd Webber wasn't more coked up than Rick James.
Totally agree. On the musical theater continuum, "Cats" (and all Andrew Lloyd Webber) occupies the bottom and "Hamilton" ranks up there with "Sweeney Todd." Maybe Roy was assaulted by "Oklahoma" as a child, leaving a permanent antipathy to America's only original theatrical artform.
Are you joking? Hamilton does not "rank up there" with Sweeney Todd. (This reminds me of the cold contempt with which Michael Chekhov regarded the actor who told him "Hamlet was just a guy like me.")
Funny how all it takes is saying something like, Shmucks who come to Vegas to see Wayne Newton, and the rest of the message goes out the window. The Desert Inn has heart!
Yes, belief is weird -- powerful enough to deny the undeniable. It's like what separates us from the animals! Animals just know while we discount knowledge with reality-denying beliefs. Then again, so does the establishment media.
(Nods) People used to keep their gullibility to themselves, or maybe a select few. Now they feel compelled to *share.*
This is an interesting observation! Pre-internet there was a consensus reality you didn’t want to oppose too often, for fear you’d look like a sucker or a loon. Sure this reality had some bad points—the consensus kept teh gays on the outside, for example—but the social pressure of the consensus may in other ways have been load-bearing for civilization. Because here we are not quite 25 years into the internet, where you can find or create a consensus supporting ANY dang belief you like—and civilization is actually collapsing. Turns out people are not well-equipped to make up their own minds using evidence and conjecture! Only the antediluvian social pressure saved them from themselves, and us from them.
ignorance is now a badge of honor. Where it proud, say it loud!
Had a client who was gaga over Frank Sinatra long after his mafia ties and domestic violence had been revealed. I could never relate. My heroes were chosen for their feet of clay (Sam Clemens, John Lennon and, for a while, David Byrne). I admired their accomplishments but realized that as individuals they were all assholes. That kept the fanboy in me at bay. Well that, and meeting other fans (always a disturbing experience).
I could be wrong about this, but I think you have to prime people to feel rage *first* before you introduce the conspiracy. Dorothy didn't have an interconnected media complex telling her to get the bastards who were maligning Liberace, because their plan was once they took down Liberace, they'd be coming for her next.
So people spend decades watching Fox News, then add in 10-15 years of rightwing websites, plus the emailed crank newsletters, plus especially the Facebook groups (and the worst thing many of us ever did was set up Facebook accounts for our parents/grandparents) that provide constant engagement and interaction. Constant fear mongering, constant outrage peddling. Once you’ve got people riled up, then you just point them toward the villain they should be mad at, the one(s) responsible for making them feel scared and angry.
And at this point so many of them are hard-wired with the rage impulse, and they only have to click on a website to get massive reinforcement that their rage is true and good. They really don’t need Fox or the websites or the newsletters anymore, they have become self-frothing, so something as asinine as a reporter removing a mask after a press conference becomes a huge affront and evidence of conspiracy.
You neglected the dittoheads in your compendium of RW infection vectors. Rush Limbaugh was where it all went big time
Well... yeah.
New and improved self-frothing conspiracy wackos? I like it.
I think more than a little of it has to do with the fact that most of the truthers know that their leader is an asshole and their movement is complete bullshit. Unable to cope with the actual truth, they come up with their own "real" truth, and the aggression is the same kind of aggression you see in cornered animals.
Having read a comparison of Liberace to the touring pianists of the 19th century, like Beethoven and Liszt, I went to see him on his last tour in his home state. He was the finest showman I’d seen since Frank Zappa. He carried the crowd along for two hours, swinging between romantic classical piano solos and unison Gershwin sing-a-longs. I finally understood what my grandmother saw in his weekly TV show we were forced to watch if we wanted to then see “Dragnet.” (We didn’t have a TV and had to watch hers.) No doubt it was too much of a whiplash for Dorothy to associate Liberace’s unique welcoming warmth and talent with a “perversion” she’d been taught to hate. But I don’t see a similarity between that refusal to accept an unacceptable truth about a man who brought so much happiness to so many, and the reprogrammable meatbags (Driftglass tm) who can be wound up and turned against anything the Republicans have chosen as the hate target of the day.
Love the discursion about our antediluvian media habits, BTW...
YOU SAW LIBERACE????
I saw him walking with Arthur Miller. And his hair was perfect.
I would venture to guess that Dorothy's denial stemmed less from a conspiracy mindset and more from being unable to reconcile a truth about a celebrity she loved with a sexuality I assume she thought deviant. There are still people who deny Woody Allen did anything wrong. For myself, I love James Brown's music, but I understand that he physically abused women and that that's horrific; I don't know what it says about me that I still listen. I gave up on Michael Jackson. Can't hear his music anymore.
Anyway, a big reason Americans are vulnerable to the conspiracy theory media apparatus is because a majority---perhaps a large majority---of this country is functionally illiterate. Yes, they can read and write in a broad sense, but they have no interpretative skills, no reading comprehension, no ability to break down duplicities no matter how obvious. Stubbornness can be a part of it, yes, but it's also just an inability to comprehend.
Critical reasoning. It's not nearly as common in any high school pedagogy as it should be (and really needs to be for a real democracy). In fact, it's not even taught at fundamentalist institutions of "higher education".
The GOP has been successful in gutting education. People used to decry that we no longer teach civics; now we don't even remember that we used to teach civics. One day, we won't even remember that we used to teach.
Sometimes I think about how many "third world countries" have people who can speak two or more languages, and in this country (America), people are graduating high school when they are barely fluent in their native tongue, let alone others'.
We'll be teaching for centuries to come. WHAT we'll be teaching is the question. If conservatives have their way, what we'll be teaching will be some bizarre mish-mash of myth, fable, New-Age woo, and the importance of ein Reich, ein volk.
Ja ja ja, der Heimat zu!
When I went to school, lo 40 years ago in rural South Dakota, even our school taught civics and history. Not *well*, but it was something still seen as important. In 5th Grade we had to learn SD history; in high school there were entire years for History and Government. In grade school there was even time set aside each Friday for Penmanship (I still have flashbacks to the dotted lines paper and the Palmer Method). Now teachers have to spend most of their time preparing students to take standardized tests so the school doesn’t lose its funding.
Oh, and when the state instituted a language requirement, my tiny rural school offered French. It was the language the English teacher was qualified in, so we all took French. (We blew past everything I learned in half a semester in college, but what’cha gonna do?)
Hey, for roughly two decades a few centuries ago, the area we call South Dakota was French territory. It all connects.
Except for a tiny notch in northeast SD that was Rupert’s Land, a British possession.
see you still remember some SD history. Also, I attended school in three different SD towns, and never had an SD History class
Yes, I love when people, good white folk mostly, tell me, "That's not a word," or that my command of English tells them it isn't my native language. Morons.
Lack of reading comprehension -- or even the simple tools that would help them identify a grift -- is a real issue, and I wish I knew why schools stopped teaching it. When my Mom was a kid they taught Social Studies. Can you imagine such a thing now?
Teaching things like reading comprehension (and the humanities in general) would mean smaller class sizes and hiring more teachers. To do it properly you can’t reduce it to a multiple choice test. Obviously we can’t do that! We need to run children through high-stakes testing like widgets on a conveyor belt and turn out STEM graduates to go be good worker drones.
When *I* was a kid, we learned Social Studies, and I'm still under 40.
In fact, you may have seen me mentioned in Forbes' Forty Million Under Forty profile. Not to brag, but I was #2,490,376.
The grifters started funding education when the states cut back and had some conditions --like the Koch Brothers and forcing reading or at least distributing of Ayn Rand
Gawd, that reminds me—I worked at an office building on John Galt Boulevard in Omaha. It made me so fking irritated to go past that sign every day, knowing that some moron developer thought that was Teh Awesomest name for a street.
was the sub-divivision called Galt's Gulch
Should’ve been. The office next to ours was occupied by scam artists who pretended to raise money for the Nebraska Firefighters Assn. I did a blood drive in that building once: 5 story office building yielded <20 donors 😡
That was Branden's pet name for Ayn's….
I'll play my right-wing temperament rôle here and say:
Teaching reading comprehension well means failing some people. This will inevitably mirror, to at least some and in children very much, the preëxisting inequities in society, so they end up looking like discrimination.
Where I'm not just a right-winger is in insisting that if we 0.) just spent enough fucking money and 1.) had a culture that ACTUALLY VALUED EDUCATION we'd be able to work through these problems, but as it is the weakness of real education both rightward and leftward made the only course left to throw up our hands (upward).
Next: we should have retained a canon, added a lot more women and members of persecuted groups, and taught the hell out of it—and respected students with cogent arguments rebelling aginst it.
s/added a lot more women and/added a lot more works by women and/
“She was a little defensive looking, like life had done her a bad turn and she was on the lookout in case life tried the same shit again.” You’ll want to keep that sentence at hand for your work-in-progress. A little gem, it is.
I know very little about LIberace (my parents were not fans) but my impression has always been that the rumpus was solely about "was he a prevert or wasn't he", i.e., it was about *him*, not any unpleasantness that he inflicted on others. (Maybe he was a jerk to people he cared about, but I never sensed that this was the reason for the controversy constructed around him, at least while he was alive.) The people who liked him and enjoyed his performances really liked him and didn't like to hear bad things about him. Mean things. (Back then lots of older ladies had, for example, gay male hair stylists that they adored. I reckon that many of them just pretended that their favorite guy would never do icky stuff, like have the actual sex with other guys - or beat up their wives. He was *safe*.)
So these people weren't on his side despite him doing harm to others, or despite his criminality, they defended him because people were being mean to him and because they really liked him.
And it occurs to me that I'm just riffing off what DrBDH said an hour ago about the cruelty of the windup-able "reprogrammable meatbags". The Liberace folks weren't fans because they enjoyed pissing off critics; they just loved his "unique welcoming warmth and talent". As Dr.BDH says, it's a whole different thing than some endless two-minute hate squirmish.
Roy, this is another great column that deserves to be made public.
I remember every Catholic-drilled sensibility in my head screaming at the top of it's perception when I first saw Freddy Mercury on TV singing "I want to break free", cross-dressed in an imitation leather mini-skirt, chintzy cotton singlet top replete with bra and stuffing, lipstick, bouffant wig and large pink plastic ear rings. This was long after I'd brushed Liberace as 'other', with his mincing around the stage in a giant fur, schmoozing the old ladies in the front row by showing off his jewelry.... "Want to see my ring?"
I just didn't want to know, no matter how talented they were.
"There are still people who deny Woody Allen did anything wrong."
Yeah. Sorry.
(Hi, here's my least popular opinion this century: It's weird that SO MANY people assume the worst about Woody Allen! That seems unfair. The cops investigated thoroughly and concluded he didn't do it and that the kid showed classic signs of having been coached to lie by the other parent. Plus he made Annie Hall! Remember when Diane Keaton calls him over to kill a bug and then he runs out of the bathroom looking frightened? Come ON you guys.)
I know a kind-hearted, generous guy who insists the moon landing was staged.
At least I can understand that. We sent men to the moon inside a ship with worse technology than a first generation iPhone.
I was listening to an episode of a favorite podcast where the hosts were interviewing a conspiracy theorist researcher, and they asked her if she believed in any conspiracy theories, and she answered yes - she believes the government is hiding alien technology at Area 51. It blew me away.
I think the podcast was Planet Money, but I honestly don't remember.
Area 51 seems one of the more benign, if not believable, conspiracy theories. You know why? Because I can imagine non-insane reasons why they'd try to cover it up.
It seems the craziest theories draw the most deranged people because it takes a whole lot of rage to carry them over the holes in the plot.
Well, jeez, it's my existential responsibility to link to this. It's by Gregory Fleeman, an old friend and one of the funniest people I know. He wrote, sings. Turns out both "Lee" and Elvis had dead twin brothers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8gYJLiIw7o
Now THAT'S a novelty song!
Betsy DeVos is going to fund my protests outside your house for slighting Hamilton
Let her.
Aren't there two aspects to any cult/crackpot belief? One, the thing you insist is true. The other, the malevolence/greed/evil/etc. of everyone and everything else (the media; the liberals; society) who insist you're wrong. Dorothy might have said about Liberace, "I just know it's not true." Her modern-day counterpart might say, "I know it's not true, and that Big Gay is advancing its vile agenda by trying to convince us otherwise."
The latter phenom therefore attracts both true believers and true haters, two different constituencies drawn to the same cause. The former have a priori romantic/religious/etc. needs. The latter get out of bed mad (for real reasons) and look for some kind of congenial outlet.
Also, Dorothy's dot matrix newsletter was barely a step up from the single-spaced mimeographed nutbar screeds taped to Greenwich Village light posts. Today everything looks legitimately published, produced, etc., and has that kind of McLuhanesque legitimacy.
I agree with all of this, and your last point gets short shrift but it's important: the fact that the worst YouTube/Facebook conspiracy hustler can put on a tie and slap up a green-screen studio background and look exactly like any other sophisticated reporter on the real news makes it even easier to convince people bereft of critical thinking to live in the looniest of alternate realities.
All this is interesting and probably right. There is a difference between True Believers and True Believers who are also True Haters; I just wonder what changed in America to make so many more of the latter.
The point about the green-screen studio is fascinating and I wonder if anyone has ever written about digital democratization, which like a cultural Sam Colt made everyone equal production-wise but had the unforeseen effect of also making madmen look sane. Maybe I have! Have to go back and look.
Blame QuarkXpress, which turned faded purple mimeographed anti-semitic hate sheets from single-spaced gobbelldegook into nice, soothing text that looked eerily similar to a stock prospectus, because there were templates, and automatic kerning, and fonts that weren't Courier. Used to be you needed a print shop and a typesetter and a professional editor to get something into good enough shape that the print shop would even look at it. Desktop publishing and laser printers dropped the entry price to 10k, then 5k, then two, and then the web was upon us, and any knucklewit could swipe the html from a real site and make the most batshit ravings look like the Times.
I think people have a meanness that most civilized people suppress and control, but the obnoxious few find outlets - in the old days, it was something like lynching a black man or throwing rocks at homosexuals, but now it's berating reporters and carrying a rocket launcher into a Subway sandwich shop. Some of those folks were hurt in some way, whether some kind of abuse or maybe just the endless torment of life not turning out the way you want. Some of them are just assholes. Either way, the internet has allowed them to organize at a level we never could have appreciated even 20 years ago (when we also had the internet but social media wasn't really a thing).
Entirely unrelated, but I think it is unfair of you to take a shot at Hamilton. I have seen quite a few musicals over the past few years thanks to trying to attend more theater (or theatre) for the cultural experience, and my goodness, Hamilton is easily one of the top three musicals I've seen. The worst? Cats. I know it's trite to make fun of Cats thanks to the recent film, but it is truly a horrendous mess. I'm not here to make the case for or against T. S. Eliot, but the man's work deserved better. Between Cats and Starlight Express, I refuse to believe that Andrew Lloyd Webber wasn't more coked up than Rick James.
Totally agree. On the musical theater continuum, "Cats" (and all Andrew Lloyd Webber) occupies the bottom and "Hamilton" ranks up there with "Sweeney Todd." Maybe Roy was assaulted by "Oklahoma" as a child, leaving a permanent antipathy to America's only original theatrical artform.
Gilbert and Sullivan?
Are you joking? Hamilton does not "rank up there" with Sweeney Todd. (This reminds me of the cold contempt with which Michael Chekhov regarded the actor who told him "Hamlet was just a guy like me.")
Funny how all it takes is saying something like, Shmucks who come to Vegas to see Wayne Newton, and the rest of the message goes out the window. The Desert Inn has heart!
Hunter Thompson said of Hell's Angels (something like) sure they're infantile, but if you say so you'll find yourself crumpled up like Beetle Bailey.
I like Hamilton okay. I used to have the soundtrack! But if we still using the brow thing, it would be very middle.
That's true. Yet, for some Americans, Hamilton is probably the only black or Latinx music they own.