The Weekly Screed (#910)

Tino triggers the 24-hour rule

By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — When I was running my weekly newspaper in Massachusetts, there was a distinctive good old boy on the town’s Board of Selectmen. His christened name was Frank, but everyone addressed him affectionately by his nickname. Let’s make it Tino.

My first encounters with Tino, as I covered the Board’s meetings, left me bewildered. Before then, I’d been in similar settings, reporting on the goings-on in various city council and school board meetings, but Tino presented a level of affable, aggressive incompetence that was new to me. I was alarmed. I wondered, openly, how a clown as preposterous as Tino could win enough votes to ascend to the community’s most powerful deliberative body. 

Tino was clearly incapable of deliberation, of any sort.

 

Strangely, though, I liked Tino. Everybody — with the likely exception of his wife, who had to live with him— liked Tino. They liked him the way you like a puppy who pees in your lap. He’s so cute you overlook the fact that he has just ruined a $200 pair of pants. Tino was a town mascot, coddled, forgiven and patronized ever since kindergarten, when (I picture this) his kindly teacher tried and tried and failed every day to teach little Tino how to tie his shoes, until he stood there looking down at his loose shoestrings, a tear trickling down his cheek, at which the teacher — every day, all year — knelt down, tied his shoes for him and kissed the top of his head until, finally, whispering to herself, “Thank God,” she passed him along to a first-grade teacher who had no idea what she was getting into.

 

As editor of the local rag, it was my duty to record the doings of the Board of Selectmen and issue editorial censure on their occasional shenanigans. Many a Wednesday night, past the witching hour, I would stagger into my office to compose my deadline report, seething with an inchoate outrage. Almost invariably, my ire derived from Tino, who had uttered some idiotic, inflammatory or simply selfish remark, or proposed a ridiculous policy diversion that wasted irretrievably an hour of my brief time on earth. Tino was the kind of local solon who would propose stop signs on both sides of his driveway so he could back out of his garage without looking behind him. He was giddily aware of his office’s power but oblivious to its inherent, grownup restraints. If the urge struck him, Tino might stop a meeting cold by suddenly demanding that the high school football coach be fired because he’d lost the big Thanksgiving Day game to Foxboro.

 

When these moments struck, Tino had to be gently wheedled, by everyone around him, into simmering down, sitting back down, cooling off, lighting a stogie and moving on. Calming down Tino — and then forgetting about it — had been a local pastime as long as most townspeople could remember. 

But I was new to this custom. Eventually, after a particularly time-consuming and capricious outrage by Tino, I snapped. On a blurry, wee-hour Thursday morning, I composed a brilliant, scathing editorial that condemned the Board’s dithering, posturing, inefficiency, naked cronyism and sheer dumbness.

Of course, the whole thing boiled down to a personal attack on Tino — who was the only innocent party because he didn’t know any better. I knew it was wrong. It hurt Tino’s feelings. It soured my relationship with the Selectmen for weeks. It accomplished nothing. I felt rotten about my newspaper all week long and enjoyed a wave of relief when the next issue came out and my anti-Tino screed sank to the status of fish-wrapping and birdcage-lining.

After that, I established a personal rule to which I’ve mostly adhered since — which is to never publish anything in the heat of emotion, especially when my anger’s source is someone who can be hurt, harmed or offended by my impetuous words. I decided to give myself 24 hours.

It was okay if I sat down and spilled my rancor onto the page (or into the hard drive). But I forbade myself the thrill of issuing this broadside ’til I had gone to bed, slept on it, gotten up, thought about it and — almost always — decided to spike it before anyone ever got a chance to read it.

While I was waiting out my 24 hours, I often found myself in the place of my defendant. I sensed the pain I might be inflicting, even on a hide as tough as Tino’s. By obeying this rule, I spared many (often deserving) miscreants from the full flood of my righteous wrath. More important, I spared myself the second thoughts, regrets, recriminations, justifications, revisions and, eventually, the apologies that tend to ensue from even the most literate of tantrums. Over time, for every blast I set off, I defused dozens. Although I never earned a reputation for cool self-restraint, I managed to disperse my Mad Hatter aura of hair-trigger lunacy.

One of my surprises in that job came years later, after a Selectmen’s meeting. One of Tino’s enablers, a Selectman with whom I had clashed (in print) a hundred times, stopped me on the way out the door. Speaking my name, he said, “I don’t like you.” He paused. “But you’re fair.”

I recalled my Tino days while pondering the hate speech, lies, phony news, propaganda and cyberbullying that have polluted Facebook’s vast, chaotic platform. In a sense, Facebook has evolved into a nation of Tinos, overreacting to the slightest provocation, believing nonsense and broadcasting it willy-nilly, shooting from the hip, insulting and demeaning anyone who dares disagree, and triggering a tsunami of back-and-forth vituperation and cruelty that has no foundation either in fact, reality or common courtesy.

 

I wonder what would happen if Facebook developed an insult algorithm, a few lines of software that could capture on the instant of its posting every mean, disparaging, cruel or slanderous ad hominem comment. And what if this magic algorithm could then quarantine that poisonous blurt for 24 hours, blocking it from everyone on the Internet except its author, who would see it pop up on his screen every ten minutes, all day, all night, over and over, burning it into his brain?

Would the cruel commentator think twice? Would he put himself in Tino’s shoes? Would he feel the heat of his anger cool as he slept on it, got up in the morning and read his ugly words once more over his coffee, in the sunlight of a new day?

I doubt that imposing a 24-hour rule would tame all of Facebook’s trolls or solve all its myriad problems. However, it might spare some of us a little pain, might reduce the hate level, and it might save Mark Zuckerberg some of the agita he so richly deserves.

After all, shmuck though he definitely was, Tino never really did anyone any harm… except his wife, who had to live with him.