All of us? Or all except you?

Twitter speaks to the inner masochist in all of us

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022

I think this is his theory of why we're going to want to pay $8 a month to use Twitter. But maybe not. Maybe he deplores our love of pain and aims to lead us out of our lowly condition. Or is it meaningless chatter — alluringly enigmatic?

ADDED: I created the tag "masochism" for this post, then added it retrospectively to many posts in the archive. I found a few interesting things, and I'll excerpt them here, because it may shed some light on today's Muskism or spark some creative thinking:

November 25, 2008: Christopher Hitchens accused Obama of "foolhardiness and masochism" for selecting Hillary Clinton — "the unscrupulous female" — as Secretary of State.

January 19, 2011: My commenters were redesigning the Gadsden flag and Dr. Weevil — quipping "Here's my submission" — came up with this: 

          

November 1, 2013: I found what I called "a frisson of masochism" in something Ana Marie Cox attributed to Hillary Clinton.

May 28, 2015: I quoted Bernie Sanders, writing in 1972: "Many women seem to be walking a tightrope now. Their qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism." 

February 2, 2018: I quoted William Safire, writing in 1970: "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." 

October 30, 2018 — a study showed that Republicans and Democrats have different sexual fantasies: "The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism...."

I guess Exley is — what? — her dog?

People are upset I RT’d that image of Trump’s make-up-caked-over pustule but I think we can all agree such an image is hardly the most upsetting thing to come out of the administration. His skin, presumably, can be fixed. That said, I am sorry & will post extra Exley today.

— ana marie cox (@anamariecox) May 21, 2018

Here's the "pustule" thing she retweeted (with the comment "I knew he was rotten but I thought it was on the inside"):

someone showed me this last week and i haven't been able to stop thinking about it so now you all have to too pic.twitter.com/58xafwhzEI

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) May 21, 2018

Understanding "Pissgate."

1) I don’t understand “pissgate” as anything other than a golden showers ref either 2) Trump believing the DOJ is “filled with women” explains A LOT #fireandfury pic.twitter.com/Lrj3J6AkhY

— ana marie cox (@anamariecox) January 6, 2018

It seems clear to me, even from that little context, that the idea was that these people wanted the Russia/collusion scandal to become so big that by comparison Watergate look like practically nothing, that is, like piss (as in the vice-Presidency is "not worth a bucket of warm piss").

But since I have to explain that, we need to count it against the author Michael Wolff. He's trying to make Trump look confused for thinking there was a reference to the "golden showers" story, but even readers who are antagonistic to Trump are experiencing the very confusion that was supposed to make Trump look bad.

"A sad day indeed! This whole sexual harassment thing is devolving into McCarthyism I fear."

"Does sexual harassment exist? Of course it does - we've seen a number of perpetrators fall. In my 84 year old opinion I don't think Senator Franken is guilty of harassment, and I suspect the female senators who have asked for his resignation are guilty of grandstanding for political reasons. Sad day!"

That's (the first part of) the top-rated comment — with 1963 votes — on the NYT article "Al Franken Announces He Will Resign from Senate Amid Harassment Allegations." (The second part is a demand that the Senate go after Donald Trump.)

The comment jumped out at me because I'd just read a column by Ana Marie Cox at The Washington Post, "Al Franken isn’t being denied due process. None of these famous men are," which had a high-rated comment that sensed the arrival of McCarthyism:

What a sorry column. Yes, Franken is being denied an ethics probe and impeachment [sic] and conviction in the Senate. To tap dance around the established procedures to placate a Twitter Mob and a devious, grandstanding Senator whose doing a hell of a Joe McCarthy impression in a dress. And the spineless Senators that lined up behind her are a disgrace to the rules and procedures of the U.S. Senate.

I don't really think Franken can complain about due process: He's expelling himself. He just experienced political pressure to quit and he yielded. And I laughed when Franken said:

I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party.

He's leaving because he's deciding to leave. They're staying because they're deciding to stay. Same treatment. No irony. (And why is he "of all people" aware of irony? Because he's been a comedy writer?)

But I am interested in seeing how people in general may be shifting from enthusiasm about believing women and taking women seriously to feeling something is going wrong when the accused goes down so fast. Maybe Franken's case is where the public sentiment turns. Franken wouldn't admit to his misdeeds (so he couldn't apologize), and he described his predicament:

I was shocked. I was upset. But in responding to their claims, I also wanted to be respectful of that broader conversation because all women deserve to be heard and their experiences taken seriously. I think that was the right thing to do. I also think it gave some people the false impression that I was admitting to doing things that, in fact, I haven’t done. Some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others, I remember very differently.

He was afraid that to defend himself, he'd only make his troubles worse. He'd be questioning the credibility of his accusers. But maybe he should have defended himself. Because at some point people are going to flip into have-you-no-decency mode. And poor Franken may regret that he went with what seemed to be the trend at the time and gave up without a fight. Fighting may catch on.

Now, I'm searching the news reports for other invocations of McCarthy, and here's Cathy Young in The Daily News yesterday: "Al Franken, the latest casualty of the 'Weinstein' effect, now a victim of sexual McCarthyism." By contrast, here's lawprof Stephen L. Carter in Bloomberg, 3 days ago:

Are we facing a new McCarthy era?

No. Perhaps there is occasionally too great a rush to judgment, but that’s a familiar problem in human history. McCarthyism involved a huge effort to punish people for their opinions, not their actions. That’s despicable at any time.... Disciplining an employee because he expresses views that some hate is McCarthyist; disciplining him for harassment or assault isn’t.

It would be McCarthyist for an employer to fire an employee for insisting on more due process for those who are named, or for coming to the defense of one who has been accused. But taking strong action when there is credible evidence that an individual has been abusive toward women is simply the turning of the wheel of justice.

That's one man's opinion, but it might be the view from 3 days ago, and the culture has shifted since then.

"I’m usually not afraid to make myself look bad."

"Somebody came up to me recently and said — I wrote it down exactly because I’d never heard anybody say it, and I wasn’t hurt when she said it, I just thought, Oh, that’s interesting — 'I think part of your charm is that you’re kind of a [expletive]. You’re not a complete [expletive], but you’re kind of one.' I think you would take that stuff out if you were that concerned with your image, but when you leave it in, then most people will think, Oh — he’s like me."

From the "condensed and edited" interview David Sedaris did with the NYT Magazine interviewer Ana Marie Cox.

Sedaris is promoting the book that I've already read (non-consecutively) at least twice: "Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)."

ADDED: Doing the tags for this post, I was assuming the deleted expletive was "asshole," but I see the article "a," so I'm going to assume it's "shit."

"I think about young people who will come to understand what a president is and does under Trump and it makes me dizzy and sick and sad."

Tweets Ana Marie Cox.

Now, let's try to figure out why Ana Marie Cox feels "dizzy and sick and sad" thinking about young people coming to understand "what a president is and does" in the context of a Trump presidency. She's not saying Trump makes her dizzy and sick and sad. She's imagining these other people, those who haven't had the opportunity to have their minds develop during the Obama presidency (or one of the other, earlier presidencies). The minds formed in the Trump era will be impoverished, warped, distorted in this vital area:  understanding what a President is and does.

A young mind that developed during the Obama era might form the basic understanding that when a person is elected President, he is viewed as having won and, because of that, he is given respect and admiration and support as he endeavors to meet the responsibilities of the office.

But if Trump is the first person you observe becoming President, your idea of what it means is quite different. After the long fight to get to the election, a new fight began. The seeming winner somehow didn't count as the winner, and he was given no respect, and, as he attempted to step into the responsibilities of the office, he was continually battered and treated like a horrible clownish imposter.

An older person might think: It's terrible that a man like Trump has come to take the great position of President. A very young person might think: A President is that thing that Trump is.

Another way to look at it is: What's the best frame of mind for citizens to have about their leaders? What's the optimum level of reverence or disdain? I suspect that we were too reverent toward Obama and now we — some of us — are too rebellious toward Trump. There are dangers in excessive reverence and excessive rebellion, and who knows exactly where on that continuum any given American will be during one presidency or another?

You enter the historical timeline when you happen to be born, and you begin to follow politics some time thereafter. I came to understand what a president is and does when a man became President not by election but a shocking assassination. He spoke weirdly of "the great society" and "escalated" a war that young men were forced into the military to fight. My generation grew up hating that man. And then we got Nixon. I could get dizzy and sick and sad thinking about what happened to the minds of young people back then.

But I think the reason that Ana Marie Cox can get so dizzy and sick and sad over what's happening to the minds of young people now is that there was a superficial, irrational good feeling about Obama. And gee, wasn't that nice for the young kids?

"You’re a Trump supporter, and you frequently refer to him as Daddy."/"I do because that’s what he is."

"I assume that’s not in a purely father-figure sense. Are you sexually attracted to Donald Trump?"/"Oh, yes. I call myself a Trump-sexual. I have a very antiwhite bedroom policy, but Trump is kind of like the exception to that rule."

From a dialogue — in the NYT — between Ana Marie Cox and Milo Yiannopoulos.

"Well, I think one can be more male and keep the vagina."

"More appealing to me than making any kind of permanent decision would be if you could kind of lean this way and then lean that way and have gender be a kind of vacationing."

From "Eileen Myles Wants Men to Take a Hike" — a NYT interview conducted by Ana Marie Cox. Myles is a poet, and somehow the very first question brings one the subject of that personage that nobody can stop talking about:

Our national political conversation has recently seen some rather unpoetic lurches to the right. How do you make sense of that? 

Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. It’s like the un-Trump: The poet is the charismatic loser. You’re the fool in Shakespeare; you’re the loose cannon...

I wonder if Cox thinks lurches to the left are poetic? This made me look up the word "lurch." I was surprised to see 3 separate entries, the first of which was a game similar to backgammon and the state in various games in which one player is way ahead of the other, which is where you get "to leave in the lurch." The second was the opportunity to keep someone else from getting his fair share of food, which is the basis of the phrase "to lie at the lurch." The third one is what Cox meant, "A sudden leaning over to one side," originally nautical. We see that in Byron:

 "A mind diseased no remedy can physic." 
(Here the ship gave a lurch and he grew sea-sick.)

But I did like that idea of a gender vacation — "if you could kind of lean this way and then lean that way." Lean... or, presumably, lurch. 

"When I look at humankind’s great achievements, I also see the hand of God, and what astonishes me isn’t that He had to literally and specifically intervene—it’s that He didn’t."

"The miracle of the pyramids and Machu Picchu and the Mona Lisa isn’t God’s literal presence, but the capacity for genius He instilled in every human being whether or not they asked for it, whether or not they think He exists. There is an assumption of individualized divine intervention in Carson’s telling of his own life story, in the myths he’s created about himself. The fight with his mother, the knife hitting the belt-buckle: Carson has imposed a radical conversion story onto his trajectory, complete with miracles, because—I can only guess—the more mundane explanation (he was a smart kid who became a brilliant brain surgeon) is not satisfying to him. You can see the 'thug' tale as self-aggrandizing, but to me it is strangely self-denying—on some level, a kind of blasphemy. In making up a story filled with drama, he has failed to credit God for the original and true, if subtle, miracle within Carson: that a soft-spoken, nerdy young man born in inner Detroit did not have to become a thug at some point, that he was wise and respectful of his own potential without needing God to perform a parlor trick."

Writes Ana Marie Cox in "Ben Carson Thinks You’re the Crazy One/The real reason we should mock Ben Carson's pyramid theory? Because it reveals a very dim view of humankind." Read the whole thing. Apt analysis from a religious point of view.

"It feels to me like a lot of people talking and nobody listening. It’s just a little quippy for me."

Says Aaron Sorkin, about Twitter, after Ana Marie Cox prompts him to think about Twitter as a "shared experience" similar to the traditional function of television (that "national hearth").

"Does your Iowa accent return when you go back home?," the NYT asks Bill Bryson.

Who answers: "No. I wish it would. If I try to make an Iowa accent, I just end up sounding like Deputy Dawg."



The occasion for the interview is the release on a movie based on one of Bryson's many wonderful books, "A Walk in the Woods."

Bryson's is my go-to voice for audiobooks to fall asleep to. I have a decades-old habit of listening to audiobooks all night, and there's something about Bryson's voice — he's lived in Britain for 20 years after growing up in Des Moines — that works like none other. I've listened to "A Walk in the Woods" hundreds of times. And I will go out and see that movie as soon as I can, even though I haven't gone out to see one single movie in over a year.

The interviewer, Ana Marie Cox, asks him "What do you think of the fact that your home state has such an important role in our presidential politics?" He says:

I’m obviously biased here, but I’ve always thought that the Midwest is the most sane and sensible part of the country. And the closer you get to Iowa, the more it becomes that way. I really do sincerely feel that there’s a bedrock decency there. It’s the state’s finest quality.

For much more about Iowa from Bryson, read "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," his memoir about growing up in a particular place. And time — beginning, like me, in 1951.

"The people at Breitbart appear to have gone insane."

Tweets Ana Marie Cox, and I've got to agree.

See for yourself: here.

What Rush Limbaugh is almost surely planning to say to those who are outraged at his rape analogy.

Rush Limbaugh likes to throw out things that he knows liberal media types will propagate. He knows what gets them, and he's using them to go viral. It doesn't always work out right for him, and the Sandra Fluke incident ended up hurting him, but often it creates excitement around his show and keeps his reputation relatively fresh. People love him and hate him, and that's keeps the old radio show going.

This weekend lots of the sort of people who love to hate him are raging about the analogy he used in talking about the ending of the Senate filibuster:

Let’s say, let’s take 10 people, in a room in a group. And the room is made up of six men and four women, okay? The group has a rule, that the men cannot rape the women. The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six votes of the ten to change the rule.

Every now and then some lunatic in the group proposes to change the rule to allow women to be raped. But they never were able to get six votes for it. There were always the four women voting against it, they always found two guys, well the guy that kept proposing that women be raped kinda got tired of it. He was in the majority and he said, you know what, we’re going to change the rule. Now all we need is five."

And the women said, "You can't do that."

"Yes, we are. We're the majority, we're changing the rule." Then they vote. Can the women be raped? Well, all it would take then is half the room. You could change the rule to say three. You could change the rule say three people want it, it's gonna happen. There's no rule.

We've got Carolyn Bankoff in New York Magazine ("a vile, profoundly inappropriate rape analogy"), Amanda Marcotte ("The rape comparison is distasteful and casually misogynist"), and Politico collects the tweets:

Ana Marie Cox, a political columnist for the Guardian US, wrote that “Limbaugh using a rape analogy to explain the filibuster really takes mansplaining to a level I never imagined” — or as ChartGirl.com founder Hilary Sargent dubbed it, “rape-splaining.” Media Matters research fellow Oliver Willis tweeted that “rush limbaugh really games out how you could theoretically vote to rape women. hes just throwing it out there folks,” while fellow Media Matters colleague Todd Gregory called it “dumb, glib bullshit” that “is such a perfect encapsulation of rape culture, it should be put in a museum.” And The Huffington Post’s Elise Foley and Sabrina Siddiqui also weighed in, with Foley tweeting “Class act, that guy” in response to Siddiqui’s comment, “In today’s edition of offensive rape analogy.”

Come on. It's a trap. Don't you know your most basic famous aphorisms about democracy? "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." Usually attributed, probably incorrectly, to Benjamin Franklin, it vividly drives home the problem with simple majority rule.

I'm virtually 100% certain that on his Monday show, Rush Limbaugh will laugh at his critics for their ignorance of the famous aphorism. He can easily point out that he did not minimize the seriousness of rape. In the aphorism, the lamb is killed by the wolves. His analogy substitutes rape for killing, men for wolves, and women for the lamb. Really, it's men who are getting the negative stereotype, so misogyny is exactly the wrong word. A lamb is the very symbol of innocence. And it is killed by those terrible, selfish wolves. Knowing Rush, I predict he'll pivot to a discussion of abortion: Maybe women don't realize that killing an innocent is terrible. Maybe that's why they didn't understand the workings of his analogy.

I'm having trouble reading Ana Marie Cox's "Dear Senate women: grow up and don't pass Hillary Clinton 'secret notes.'"

I don't know. Maybe it's because she's writing in The Guardian now. This could be some British way of writing that just can't make it into my American mind. Anyway, Cox — going on about a letter 17 female Senators wrote to Hillary Clinton urging her to run for President — is working with the premise that "male representatives are boys and women are the grown-ups." That premise is not the part I'm having trouble with. I understand it. I understand it as: Feminism-as-sexism is funny; come on, give us a little room to get in some harmless girly slaps after all the millennia of suffering.

But let's move on. Cox writes:

No one in the media has seen the letter, so I guess it's possible that it contains some kind of burn-book-level intel: Jeff Session (Alabama Republican senator) is a grotsy little byotch, Lindsay Graham (South Carolina Republican senator) made out with a hot dog, Ted Cruz (Tea Party Texan) is almost too conservative to be anything but a robot. 

"Grotsy" isn't even in Urban Dictionary, but I understand it. It's like "grotty," which was understandable as a variation of grotesque when the British comedian George Harrison said it in "Hard Day's Night." Grotsy is as understandable as ugsly.

(Maybe the "s" absconded from "Sessions," which she has as "Session.") [ADDED: Commenters say it should be "grotsky," and the phrase "grotsky little byotch" is from "Mean Girls."]

I understand the rest of those insults and why it's funny to just make up insults about Republicans to pad out a column and why — when you're talking about Republicans — it's okay to apply the mustard of homophobia. That's all well within the rules of American political humor.

"Hard to mock Santorum’s visibly emotional opening about his nephew’s illness and death."

"So I won’t."

"Eastwooding" — the meme.

The term "Eastwooding" — referring to talking to an empty chair — popped up on Twitter and got retweeted — by Ana Marie Cox — with the incitement "INTERNET you know what to do."

Do a Google image search for it — here — and tell me if this is working against Eastwood or against Obama. Even if it's half and half, it's not against Romney. As far as the election is concerned, the harm to Eastwood is irrelevant. And at some point, I think it's giving Eastwood currency. It may not be true that in showbiz any publicity is good publicity, but the kind of publicity that's not good needs to be a lot worse than rambling inappropriately. (It has to be even worse than this. Maybe even worse than this. Let's say: this.)

Anyway, Clint will be fine. He's so much tougher than internet meme-dweebs that it's not worth worrying about him. And I don't think Clint wants us to worry about him. He wants us to worry about the economy and the election.

And so the question is, does all this "Eastwooding" activity help or hurt Obama? I think it's intended to help, but the meme is that Obama is an empty chair, and that like saying he's "Zero" or an "empty suit," which people have been saying for a long time. 

IN THE COMMENTS: Rhhardin says: "There's an empty suit passage in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus that fits." Here:

"Ludicrous, hysterical, brilliant – the top Republican campaign adverts."

Ana Marie Cox assembles and critiques some fabulous material. I don't have time to watch them all just yet, but I did watch Rick Santorum's "Obamaville," and all I can say is I laughed, I cried...



Cox says, about that one: "Hey, people really liked The Ring! Also, the claims are so over-the-top that Obama partisans will be amused as conservatives take slash-fiction pleasure in the visualisation of their most fevered dreams.... The great thing about speculation is that it cannot be fact-checked."

Wow. Ads are getting so good, it's kind of evil. Hold onto your brains, people. It's going to be a crazy year.

"Obama wants to take our penises."

One of many out of context quotes — 2 of which are from me — in this montage of sexy highlights from the last 5 years of Bloggingheads:



ADDED: Here's the context of my reference to "masturbating boys":

"Wouldn't it be *awesome* if Obama were as radical as the Rights thinks he is?"

Tweets Ana Marie Cox about an article that I didn't click to when I originally read it yesterday. This morning, I happened upon an Andy McCarthy post over at NRO, decided to blog about it, and thought it would go perfectly with what Cox had written. I'd almost blogged Cox's remark, because I thought it was scarily left wing, and I wanted to blog McCarthy because I thought interestingly extreme. I thought it would be clever to put Cox and McCarthy together. Digging out the Cox tweet, I finally clicked her link. It went to the McCarthy post.

Here's what McCarthy said:

Today's Democrats are controlled by the radical Left, and it is more important to them to execute the permanent transformation of American society than it is to win the upcoming election cycles. They have already factored in losing in November — even losing big. For them, winning big now outweighs that. I think they're right.

I hear Republicans getting giddy over the fact that "reconciliation," if it comes to that, is a huge political loser. That's the wrong way to look at it. The Democratic leadership has already internalized the inevitablility [sic] of taking its political lumps. That makes reconciliation truly scary. Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with.... [I]f the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority....

I hope McCarthy's understanding of what's going on is wrong, and it shapes my view of Cox to know that's what she thinks is "awesome."

I figured out why reporters tweet so much.

Figured it out while reading another generous handful of tweets from Ana Marie Cox. In reverse chronological order:

Thank God Nico is so tall. He let me stand in front of him. Fuck you line cop. #whp
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

HuffPo's Nico Pitny just placed in 2nd row of SRO by WH staff. Now why could that be? (Nice "fuck you" to guy next to me playing line cop)
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

.@jaketapper says photogs "formally request" no rising in their way when O enters. And those of us standing might try to take their seats.
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

And my view if I turn around... @mikememoli says hi. #whp http://twitpic.com/872ib
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

RT @newmediajim @anamariecox prodded me into taking updated POTUS view. Crowd has grown! http://twitpic.com/8719t // #1stcome1stservefail
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

My view. http://twitpic.com/871bj
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

.@newmediajim standing in for POTUS. The resemblence is remarkable, no? http://twitpic.com/870pq
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

Actually I have just elbowed my way to the front. I am refusing to believe you can "save" a space on the wall. #whp
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

Sitting in an edge seat that I know will be taken has benefit of putting me in place to have a good place to stand... #whpresser #whp
about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

Hey that red blob in the middle is me standing up! RT @newmediajim: POTUSeye view of the White House briefing room http://twitpic.com/86xmg
about 6 hours ago from TweetDeck

They are so often stuck in waiting situations.

AND: Related question: Why do law professors blog so much? Ha ha.