Samizdata

Michael Tomasky blogs for the Guardian on American affairs. He is a fairly left wing Democrat, and is currently feeling down. He describes in this piece how a piece of internet humour cheered him up. He was sent a letter to the Red States (i.e. the ones voting Republican in the weird American convention for political colours) that reads:

Subject: Letter to the Red States:

Dear Red States.

If you manage to steal this election too, we’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren’t aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all of the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.

We get stem cell research and the best beaches. You get faith healing and swamps.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.

There is more if you click the link.

I am not so much interested in whether the contrasts drawn in the letter are true or fair. I did not even understand many of them. I am very interested in the way that this kind of humour can no longer be kept secret from those who are the butt of the joke. Despite being in the form of a letter to the Red States the original writer of this (from the reference to stealing “this election too” it dates from before Obama’s victory and probably from just before Bush’s second term) must have known that it would be harmful to the Democrat cause to have it actually read by too many Red Staters, particularly come election time. It would arouse even more hostility from a bloc of voters the Democrats would like to reach when accompanied, as it often was, by the Jesusland map.

A couple of decades back – when this sort of thing was photocopier humour rather than internet humour – such a letter would have been seen overwhelmingly by fellow Democrats and Blue State persons. Now it can be found by anyone. It can be found by anyone years after the event. It keeps on being found years after the event.

At first I thought of this in personal terms: one can imagine this letter to the Red States appearing on the website of some minor political guy in 2010 and causing him embarrassment in 2020 when the Republicans run it as an attack ad on TV, or whatever has replaced TV, just as his plane lands at Texas as part of the last-minute tour of swing states. But, imagining harder, he could probably laugh it off. Some of these red-staters might even laugh with him. By then, a cultural change will have occurred. It will have emerged that everybody has multiple skeletons in their cupboard; you can not spend years on the internet without accumulating them.

Bigger than the effect on any one person, though, is the dispersed effect of lots of Republicans being slightly irritated and slightly more prone to think that when Democratic party politicians come courting their votes they are laughing at them behind their hands. As indeed they are. (I could but heroically will not digress into the question of whether Republicans laugh at Democrats in the same way. You are not missing much; the term “hegemonic discourse” was in there somewhere.) However possibly that dispersed irritation also will be moderated by the coming everybody’s-got-skeletons cultural change: by then we will all know more about how everybody has multiple faces that they show in different groups. (Strange how “two faced” is an insult but “multi-faceted” is praise.) Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we will all be less able to ignore our knowledge of everybody’s rotating mild disloyalty to all the groups to which they belong except the one to which they are talking at any particular minute.

Oddly enough the name of Michael Tomasky has come up in another context concerning stuff on teh interwebs being seen by eyes it was not intended for. American right wing blogs are fizzing about “JournoList”, this being a private internet forum for American left wing journalists, academics and think tankers, where they would work out this week’s media consensus. Tomasky was a member. So was David Weigel, a journalist for the Washington Post, who had to resign from covering conservative affairs for that paper after expressing his opinion of several leading conservatives on JournoList by means of a term that I at first thought referred to their alleged propensity to engage in illicit commerce with rats but I now deduce means to behave towards someone in an underhand manner. You will have deduced that JournoList is no longer private and that some people think that its members were acting towards the American public in an underhand manner.

There will be several scandals like this. Then they will stop because everyone will have adapted. The words “private internet forum” will be regarded as oxymoronic. The politically imprudent humour will continue, though. Nothing can shut a human mouth once it has started on a joke, except possibly the prospect of saving it up for a larger audience on the internet.