The Weekly Screed (#936)

A burrow full of memes

By David Benjamin

“Liberals want to sit in a circle and share. Conservatives do not want to sit in a circle, and they do not want to share.”

— David Blankenhorn, founder, Better Angels

PARIS — Not even Noah Webster knew the word “meme” before social media gave voice and muscle to the white supremacist fever swamp — which calls itself, euphemistically, the “alt-right”.

(Parenthetical aside: How is it that racist propagandists, who pride themselves — and praise their messiah, Donald Trump — for “telling it like it is,” prefer to hide who they are and what they believe behind a euphemism? But I digress.)

A while ago, I got “memed,” if that’s the proper verb construction, by a guy named Kurt on Facebook.

(Parenthetical aside: I was going to reveal Kurt’s full name as it appears in his Facebook profile, but his personal data is so so sparse and poignant that I decided, out of pity, to spare the guy any wider exposure. Suffice to say that, absent his tenuous and prickly social-media existence, Kurt seems to have no life at all. But I digress.)

Kurt’s retaliatory meme referenced a photo I’d attached to my essay, in which I mentioned John Ford’s classic film, The Searchers. The photo was of the movie’s villain, a fearsome Indian chief named Scar (played by Henry Brandon). To most people, a movie “still” of a German actor in Indian makeup is hardly the stuff of controversy. But Kurt — as he readily revealed — is a Trump zealot. This puts him in a pretty constant state of pique.

Focusing on the war-painted and eagle-feathered Scar, his cruel visage edged in the dim glow of a Monument Valley twilight, Kurt dredged up one of Donald Trump’s dreariest slurs against both a political opponent and an entire American ethnic minority. Quoth Kurt: “Liz Warren's high school yearbook book (sic) photo”

Kurt, as though you had to guess, was citing Senator Elizabeth Warren’s unfortunate claim to a smidgeon of Native American heritage. After her blunder was dissected beyond all proportion by the media, Donald Trump latched onto it and turned into a “meme” (or perhaps a “trope”). Trump commenced, ad nauseam, to call Sen. Warren “Pocahontas.”

(Parenthetical aside: Loath as I am to flog the horse of Trump’s intellectual slovenliness, I feel I must point out that Sen. Warren’s razor-thin connection to native lineage involves the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, whereas Pocahontas was a Powhatan princess of the Tsenacommacah region in Virginia. Calling the senator “Pocahontas” exposes Trump’s abysmal ignorance of both tribal identity and geography. Kurt is at least equally careless in linking Sen. Warren’s alleged Cherokee roots to the Comanches of the American Southwest. But I digress.)

It was definitely odd to find Kurt launching barbs at this particular essay. Before, I’d often written directly — and sometimes critically — about Donald Trump, but heard not a peep from Kurt. Why this sudden outburst over an apolitical, non-Trump piece? 

An online dialog with Kurt clarified his prior silence. Noting his difficulties with punctuation, capitalization and grammar, I sensed that Kurt’s not a linear guy. Like Trump, he doesn’t read much. He’s one of many “alt-rightists” whose main cerebral stimulus is confined to pictures, gestures and the roar of the demagogue.

Nevertheless, perhaps foolishly, I strove to engage. In response to his jibe, I made facetious note of Kurt’s Facebook photo, which depicts not Kurt but his pet. I wrote, “Nice dog, Kurt. Tell the pooch that politics isn't really personal, or shouldn’t be. Not about hackneyed name-calling but about problem-solving, for other people, and dogs. The pooch will understand.”

I thought this reply lighthearted and subtly conciliatory, but Kurt was having none of my lame wit. He snapped right back with, “lighten up good ball” 

A moment later, frustrated by Facebook’s whimsical spellcheck function, he corrected the last two words to “goof ball,” meaning, of course, “goofball.”

Stubbornly, I did not succumb to name-calling. I retain a waning faith that Trumpkins can be reconciled, somehow, with the Rest of Us, if only we can work our way past stereotypes, cultism and cheap shots. So I answered Kurt by embracing his “lighten up” advice. I wrote, “I've been trying to get people to see the funny side since I started writing a LONG time ago.” I linked him, as proof of this proposition, to my website. Anyone who has read me knows that I tend to lace my prose with humor — a dubious marketing tool but a vice I can’t suppress. 

My olive branch had no effect. Kurt, who has likely attended his share of MAGA rallies and felt Trump’s flood of schoolyard putdowns flow over him like warm blood, said, “you invented lighten up wow you must really be old old old”

I realized with this riposte that Kurt was a creature entirely of the Internet, where attitude is the lingua francaand civility is the white feather of cowardice. To thrive on the Web is to adopt a persona detached from one’s actual dazed, confused and timorous self. On the Internet, no one knows you’re a weenie, You can project a certainty never attained in reality and a strength of conviction only possible in the fantasyland of cyberspace and in parallel universes like Trumpworld. So I surrendered to Kurt’s unremitting rancor and closed my side of the dialog with a veiled reference to Kafka: “Never mind. Back to your burrow…”

Kurt claimed the last word, delivering a coup de graceof pure adolescent snark: “no problem bend over and I'll start my car”

Later, I gained some perspective on my exchange with Kurt from a Times feature about an outfit called Better Angels. Its purpose is to gather people from both sides of our polarized body politic and guide them toward common ground. The article’s author, Nellie Bowles, sympathized with the Better Angels’ efforts. But the outcome was just a closer walk with Kurt, barefoot on broken glass, leading nowhere. 

Softhearted people like me want to find a way to bridge differences and work together. People like Kurt — and his hero — are at war. One of the “liberals” who took part in a Better Angels workshop, Martha Keller, came away with the feeling that she’d been snookered. By attending and listening generously to the paranoia and malice of her right-wing counterparts — whose preconceptions never wavered — she had helped to bring the wingnuts in from the cold. She had given aid and comfort to the denizens of the dark side without shining any light into their burrow. 

Watching them pack up and leave, Keller said, “I saw all the red people smiling. They felt validated and accepted. I think that was the object the whole time. And I thought, ‘Who are these people?’”

I share Martha’s puzzlement. Clearly, you can’t reach “these people” online. Like Kurt, they hide behind dog photos, reveal nothing and hurl insults in every martial encounter with their myriad enemies. Meeting them in person, as Martha Keller learned on her wasted weekend, achieves little more. 

Maybe, after all, we shouldn’t try so hard. According to conservative columnist Ross Douthat, researchers have discovered that social media’s effects are remarkably static. Very little of the sound and fury trumpeted online changes anyone’s mind. Web trolls are of a species with Kafka’s burrowing creature. They scurry in their scary darkness, squeaking incessantly but heard by no one, digging deep but always downward — terrified of letting anyone in and frightened of sticking their heads into the daylight.