[trigger warning–is this how it works?]
I knew to look away and I hurried past. The second time it came, I watched for a moment. The third time it showed on the feed, I watched it all. Now it’s in me, and it’s horrible. Truly, don’t read further if you bruise easy. Even in this moment now, I wince and draw hurried shutters down around it in my brain for protection. A father (here my stomach goes metallic, don’t say it, make it gone) is making his young son run on a treadmill. With cruelty. The view is skewed from above. It’s from the internet’s current favorite free source of short video, the security camera.
Mostly I’ve seen these cameras capture what I can never not laugh at: people falling over. Off their front steps, on the ice beyond, or drunk into a bush, this is the pratfall humor that slayed me as a child and fells me now still. I laughed to breaking at James Thurber’s The Night the Bed Fell On Father. I tried later reading it to our children, and drew stares as I gasped through the text. I was helpless again reading Garrison Keillor’s account of himself, a tall man, falling down porch steps in Happy to Be Here. Then the internet came, and The Drunkest Man in the World fell exquisitely down aisles under the grainy black and white eye of a convenience store camera for (I check) 23 million views. He exhausted me laughing for at least 6 of those, long ago. Why is this laughter fresh as a spring? I would not make someone else fall, nor laugh at one pushing another over. I can’t bear even a violence-free deception or prank, like the unwatchable Candid Camera set ups and their ilk. But a good old stumble, slip or stagger? All day long.
Now back to what I am avoiding. I won’t say the rest of this, except that the boy, an earnest little running-now-falling body of a boy, dies of it. Please do forgive my violence, in handing this knowledge forward to you. Maybe you’ve already seen it. For the vastness and variety of the internet, our family still seems to draw the same bingo balls by nightfall each day. “Did you see––?” one asks, and another knows already the headline or the clip. Maybe you live near our same algorithm.
But I won’t be mentioning this boy to the family, nor they to me. We don’t share anecdotal horror. We are careful with our offerings. You can’t know how a person is tending their existential health these days, so the common space stays pretty elevated. But alone, when the treadmill video now lodged in my mind runs more than a second, my deep want is to do a finishing violence to the man. To the father. If I had something to fight for that would end him, in a way he would feel and know, I would fight with crazy eyes and closed ears to win it.
The use of grievous anecdote to demobilize critical thought, and to drive feverish even violent action, is a known psychological tactic of war, of authoritarians (I include cult leaders here), and of political movements. “Waving the bloody shirt,” though a fictitious political incident during Reconstruction, became the term for igniting emotion not thought to persuade. What I am wondering now, is what happens when the bloody shirt is also heavily rewarded in attention, the new currency of our digital lives. Are we over-developing the muscle, or rather shaving down the trigger, for aggrieved and unthinking action, through this spinning constant of digital shock-and-response?
All things cannot be understood in the first, second or 100th jag of emotion. All things are not instantly divisible into Good or Bad, You’re With Me or Agin’ Me. But an intensity of feeling can surge us into a binary world of cognitive simplicity and reaction. Simple, blaring responses replace the tedium of analysis. “TF?!?” drowns thought, obviates listening, and pillories the judicious. The pace of thinking is slower than the pace of feeling. It feels wildly more efficient to live in the amygdala, where the speed and thrill of impassioned reaction can replace decision:
“The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped structure in your brain that processes emotions, memories and learning. It also links to other brain areas that affect survival, aggression, social communication and addiction.” -the internet, today
What I worry is that the presumption of a cognitive center, a place where minds can linger and meet, is like the presumption of institutions. We thought courts would, at root, be courts. Then SCOTUS showed its final crazypants hand with “political assassination, so that’s an official act?” We thought elections were elections, until fake electors f’g HID through the night, in a state Capitol, to cast their loony tunes fake votes, and blood followed.
So now, what if we are making the same erroneous assumption we made about institutions, but about the American head holding its basic s’t together? We see the noise and call it fringe. We hear the escalations and the crazy, and wait it out. Night will fall and common thought will order itself to an equilibrium, like the brain in REM tidies its shelves. We wait, holding the rails for a keel of majority sense to right us.
But what if enough people start breaking themselves on shards of spectacle, like me watching folks fall over outside their houses, or now horror-glimpsing that man begin his treadmill murder? I already held a false assumption of literacy, the ground our sense lives on: Snopes confirms as true the statement that more than 1/2 of Americans read below a 6th grade level. If long-form thought by the literate now goes into retreat, and emotional voltage off slot machine screens replaces the synthesis of story as entertainment, how long before we are all The Escalating Fringe? I picture piles of almond-shaped amygdalae in WWI trenches lobbing hot reactions at each other.
There is a social reason for literacy and thought: it’s where understanding happens and collective aims can be tackled. If we bludgeon and abandon our own reasoning capacity, under a hail of jacked up images and disconnected entertainments; if we practice no distance of reflection or length of thought, only now now now, in my face face face, what does happen? Whacky things!
The people you deal with don’t seem to have a baseline range of possible behaviors you can predict, of late. People on the street and in the news, yes, but I also just learned that the mayor and mayor pro tem of a small city where I have worked on infrastructure for the past twelve years, have 6 lawsuits against their city for a total of $8.5M. They themselves have run the place throughout the time in question. They have hired and fired city managers and staff with such heat and gusto that Glassdoor says to all, steer clear. They are both running for reelection, the former while actively pushing her fourth lawsuit. I don’t know if they broke their brains on security camera video shorts or not, but I do know they are whackier than when we started, and that there is more theater than infrastructure in the meetings these days.
Finally, my tiny town is Gaza-cracked in all directions. The fact I am googling Axis of Resistance, reading essays on how many definitions of zionism there are, reading Wikipedia’s finest on River to the Sea, and comparing Schumer’s March speech to Pelosi’s April letter, all while listening to Jewish friends in whispers state their ongoing alarm, is proof there is no pure play here. October 7th a horror, Hamas vile, Netanyahu and the settlements a longtime abomination, stop the bombing, release the hostages, what else? My town isn’t doing much that I can see for the people of Palestine or Israel except tear its own sleepy self right apart with white hot rumor and rubber stamp slogans.
I’m sure if I let the true imagery of the past 7 months bed in my brain, one scroll at a time, I too would bellow in pain and march these wee streets haranguing those who didn’t. I could take impassioned positions here, half-informed by my latest week of online grab learning. But we have elected a President (with his Secretary of State and his intelligence agencies and his alliances) to navigate the impossible on our behalf. He is a decent man, and possesses more information, experience, and spectrum judgement from those same 35 years, than I could catalog. I am with Speaker Emerita Pelosi in asking for Bibi’s resignation, a halt to arms, and support of Biden’s regional pursuit of a cease-fire, humanitarian aide, release of hostages and the ol’ two-state solution. I am with his efforts not to go to war with Iran, the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah, though they’ve attacked the U.S. presence 150 times since October 7th.
Where I land at last, though, is against the uniquely destabilizing threats of–
1.) Anti-semitism and how it especially seems to hurt people and liberal democracies every damn time;
2.) Passionate ignorance and personal attack in place of a presumption of best intent among neighbors; and
3.) Failing to reelect Joe Biden, noting what that would mean for liberty and peace at all.
Finally, I pledge to abstain for the balance of May from short form video amygdala jacking of any kind, and to read and think in long form until my brain puts itself back together again. Rest in peace you treadmill son, you October 7th children, and you, children of Gaza.
I'm still reeling from "half of Americans read below a 6th grade level".
But that certainly explains a lot now, doesn't it?
I'm grateful we have you on Substack, Megan. I miss you. Kathy C.