Twitterpretation
The George Zimmerman trial is going very poorly for George Zimmerman. All of the facts being presented by the prosecuting attorney are hitting home, the medical records are tearing his version of events to shreds, and his family is falling apart.
I know this because Twitter tells me so. Mostly from my Twitter-friends Indigo and Rima Regas, die-hard liberals who have been reporting the trial. The only news I’ve witnessed on Zimmerman’s trial that did not come through Twitter was The Daily Show’s rendition of Zimmerman’s lawyer’s ill-fated knock knock joke.
So of course my view is skewed. How could it not be? Doubtlessly, in some other parallel Twitterverse, there is a conservative dude getting updates on how the black people in Florida are ready to riot should this go poorly, that Zimmerman’s defense is shredding the prosecution, that Trayvon is now proven to be a bloodthirsty maniac.
That’s the joy of Twitter, really; seeing the flow in real-time. You get a sense of history unfolding as it goes; I remember staying up late into the night watching the Texas filibuster, having watched the live feed for all of two minutes before realizing the Twitterverse was giving me a far more entertaining and informative look at it – people citing Robert’s Rules of Order, giving witty quips, noting the historical precedents. It was like footnoted history, a brilliance of communication. Those who told me, “Oh, Twitter could never replace news!” overlooked the fact that CNN wasn’t covering this shit and my Twitter was a wealth of information.
But it’s also skewed. How is Zimmerman faring? I have no idea. I know it seems to be going poorly to people who want Zimmerman to go down in flames, which is based somewhat in reality as they keep linking to sites I deem trustworthy, but… is that reality, or wishful interpretation? No clue. Certainly a lot of the people who witnessed the filibuster seemed to think it a triumph, which it was in a sense, but it’s not like Rick Perry won’t try to sneak in again through the back door.
Twitter is a fantastic tool. But unlike the news networks, which are covertly biased, my Twitter-feed is overtly biased. I know somewhere there’s a truth, but Twitter as a newsfeed is more of a Roger Ebert review of a movie than the movie: I know it’s got leanings, and I have to account for them.
That makes it no less worthy, though.
Old Men, Dying, And The Things They Take
I was up early on a Saturday morning with my friend Thom Guthrie, and we were watching old men march.
The old men were dressed in military blue revolutionary garb, drums hanging from their waists. They marched around the gazebo in the tiny town square, a patch of grass grudgingly stuffed in the middle of three intersecting roads. We were too far away to hear what they were saying, but they were moving with great, exaggerated, heroic movements, the kind of motion that men in the 1950s envisioned George Washington striding across the landscape.
Nobody else was paying attention to them. The only crowd, if you could call it that, was a small boy – evidently a grandson – standing in his own outfit, watching befuddled. Whatever their ceremony was, it was inadvertently private.
“You know,” Guthrie said, turning to me after we’d watched them for a while, “I don’t want to do that, but I’m sad when it won’t be done.”
I nodded. And we watched the old men some more.
My grandmother was a big woman on clubs, she was – a Loyal Member of the Amaranth, a Moose Club member, and forever helping people hold yard sales. Every weekend, she’d go to some large, musty hall and dress up regalia and drink a hell of a lot. The members were colorful old guys, veterans who all had nicknames like “Tiny” and booming laughs and hoards of in-jokes.
(Fun fact: My grandmother was the first and only member to consistently call me “Ferrett” after I pointed out that everyone at the club knew her as “Boots.”)
The organizations were basically a gossip factory, being full of snakepit politics where oh God did you hear how Mary wanted to change the drafting rule, and of course henpecked George went along, he always does – but that was a feature, not a bug, as it allowed my Gramma to be on the phone for hours at a time with her friends, talking merrily. It filled her life with diversions. And the clubs themselves did a lot of good things, although to me it often seemed inadvertent – charity drives that raised thousands of dollars, Easter Egg hunts, big Christmas food drives. We were more charitable with Gramma in our life, merely because she dragged us into going to places we never would have thought to go otherwise, and was constantly passing down the pressure from her group to our family in order to donate cans, or pull-tabs, or what have you.
But it wasn’t a comfortable environment for kids. They brought kids in on occasion – loved them, in fact – but the halls smelled like cigarette smoke, had couches filled with burnt ash and spilled scotch, and were dark as nightclubs without any of the attending glamour. There simply wasn’t much for kids to do, though they had a stockpile of old games from the 1950s to drag out reluctantly. It didn’t seem all that comfortable for my parents, either, as you had to dress up in tuxedoes and gowns – every stylist member of the Amaranth had their own gown, of course, but my parents looked uncomfortable and underdressed in their suits.
Yet it was a good business. It ran.
Now it’s dying.
My mother was pressured into the Loyal Order by Gramma, and stayed for twenty years, but she found it to be a tangle of drama. Which, of course, it was. I’d rather stay at home and not have regular meetings with strangers, avoid engaging with teetotalling idiots who think the boozy Loyal Order should be more structured.
Yet throughout the United States, there are tons of organizations like this that are dying. The Loyal Order. Those historical reenactors out on the lawn. Even the Boy Scouts seem to have problems attracting younger leaders, and I don’t write that off thanks to their anti-gay stance. It’s just graying of a generation, and neither the Baby Boomers nor my generation had much interest in going out to be part of a club. We’d rather just hang with our friends, a smaller and less organized group of people, self-selecting for comfort.
I don’t want these things to die. They did (and do!) good work, tying communities together. They provided a sense of obligation, of charity, of duty, that I lack in my life. Sure, I blog, and I write to my Congressmen occasionally, and I suppose a lot of the donations and retweets I give to friends in trouble recreate that online. But it’s not the same as getting out there and getting my hands dirty.
I also think there is a certain value of being pressed into a large group of people who you often have nothing in common with; an inconvenience, yes, but it reminds you that the world is not your friends, and mutates your outrage into a different set of beings. On the Internet, you see these full-throated cries of MY GOD WHY DO I STILL HAVE TO TEACH STRANGERS ABOUT MY RARE AND NOT-WELL-KNOWN SYNDROME, since everyone they talk to has this marginalized issue, and it seems almost a befuddled moan of rage that the world does somehow not match their self-selected environment. Whereas my Gramma and mother had a different, healthier anger – these people were inconveniences, obstacles, and morons, but they also had good qualities to be mined out. So how the hell did you minimize their damage and maximize the rarity of their strengths?
But I don’t want to do that. It sounded exhausting, as a kid, and sounds exhausting when my Mom relates the travails of her local condo group. But it’s useful. All of those Robert’s Rules of Orders and calls to action and subcommissions were hideously inefficient, like a job you never got paid for, but they got stuff done in that very human way where 80% of the effort is wasted. Yet there were poor and sick people whose lives were immeasurably bettered. There were cultures that honored things that should be honored, like the guys who died to free America from Britain’s rule.
Somebody should be honoring them, even if it’s not me.
I dunno how much you can fight selfishness. As I said, my mother was pressured into it by my Gramma, and one sensed my Gramma was pressured into it by her friends, indicating that a certain constant force is necessary to squash people into these kinds of groups. In the absence of that cultural combination of obligation and guilt, people just sort of drift away. Which is happening now. And it’s not being replaced by anything, so the world seems both a bit freer and a bit colder to me.
I have more free nights to play Diablo with my wife, to watch Master Chef with my friends, to work on my arcade cabinet. I have less drama in my life, interacting with all the people in my neighborhood. This is awesome. Yet I also know near to nobody in my town, have no idea what the real challenges facing Rocky River are, and don’t really help the local downtrodden at all aside from throwing a few bucks at local charities.
There’s a part of me that wants my buddies to go, come on, you gotta join, everyone’s doing it, we’re all pitching in for this scrap metal drive. To make me a functioning, productive member of this society I live in physically, here and now. And another, larger part that’s happy to dork away my nights for my own pleasure, wistfully watching the old men slowly die and take their organizations with them.
So it goes.
You Can Respect The Rules And Still Hate 'Em
One of the disturbing trends I noted in the comments to yesterday’s lament about kids not being able to appreciate a movie was this:
“The kids I know are very quiet! They’re well-behaved at the theater!”
I’m sure they are. You may note that there was nothing in yesterday’s essay about how children are terribly behaved. I’m of the opinion that, aside from the fact that kids are kids (which means they’re often squirmy or forgetful of their inside voices), most kids probably are well behaved at the movie theater. And if they aren’t well behaved, it’s the fault of the parents, not the children (because even if your child has developmental issues, when s/he starts to act disruptively, the least you can do is politely remove the child from the theater).
The problem I had was that there was no distinction made between “Acting well” and “Enjoying it.”
Look, I don’t go to black-tie dinners because there’s an oppressive layer of etiquette there. I can dress well enough, when the need strikes, and I can tone down my conversation for genteel limits, and I do know shortcuts to tell the difference between forks. (Work from the outside in, my friend.) But when I go, I find it stiff and uncomfortable; I’d rather throw a party at my house where everyone shows up in T-shirts and jeans and talks about pubic hair.
Likewise, children may be very well behaved at the movies. That doesn’t mean that they like it. They may want to see Despicable Me 2, but instead of seeing it as a treat, endure it as a cost of seeing it now. And I suspect many – not all – of them do. I suspect a lot of them are going to view movies as that sort of thing that older people do, much like (as was pointed out) the attendees of live theater are largely graying.
But I want to draw that notice: kids can be well behaved and not like it. Just because they’re not bothering you doesn’t mean they’re enraptured. I suspect many of them are quietly kicking their feet, irritated that they have to pee and can’t pause it, wanting to go for Mom’s iPad when the movie turns out to be boring but knowing better.
We’ll see what happens in the future, but I suspect we’ll have a lot of kids with home theater systems.
In Which I Watch Movies Slowly Disappear
For me, movies are the special place to go. I love walking into the theater, finding my seat, feeling that special darkness engulf me. I love the excitement of the trailers, getting jazzed for the film. I love the meditative effect the theater has upon me, the way I focus on a film when the lights go down that I cannot accomplish at home. I even love the audience, the laughs when there’s a good gag, the shrieks of terror. It’s a communal thing akin to worship; all of us wanted to see this film, and we all gathered here to find out how this thing is.
But I spoke to a friend of mine who has kids, and loves movies. And her kids hate going to the movies. She struggles to bring them.
To her kids, the movies are so patently inferior to watching it at home, they can’t believe that Mom wants to do this. You have to go when the movie theater tells you the movie starts. You can’t pause the film to go to the bathroom. You can’t eat what you like. You can’t lay on the floor in front of the TV and color. It’s a very inconvenient thing, going to the theater.
The sadness is, I agree with them. Movies are inconvenient.
It’s why I like them.
It’s why they’ll probably die.
Thing is, movies get a bad rap these days because they’re overpriced – which is true – and because the audiences are often texting, yammering idiots – which is also true. But I remember an interesting parallel that happened with the movie The Hurt Locker, which was about a bomb technician in Iraq. When Gini and I saw it, it was such a tense experience we burned calories. She gripped my arm hard enough to leave bruises, and my thighs clenched so much that I had charley horses at the end of the film, because ZOMG WHAT IF THAT BOMB GOES OFF. It was a brutal, beautiful example of how to invest a viewer in an experience that we raved about it to all of our friends.
Half of them loved it as much as we had. The other half were bored to tears, asking us what the hell we were thinking. And when we investigated this discrepancy in love, we discovered an interesting fact:
The bored contingency watched it almost exclusively on DVD.
That’s the thing about DVDs; it’s convenient, yes, but you don’t have to give it your full attention. If you miss something, you can rewind. If there’s a phone handy, you can text. If you don’t want to watch it, well, you’ve got the rest of the world around you. And that meant that The Hurt Locker, which worked so well when it swelled on the big screen to fill your whole world, was kind of lame when you could just sort of skim by it.
And I do that a lot, don’t get me wrong. I watch about 70% of my movies while working, which means they’re not getting my full attention. Which is fine; do I need to give a popcorn flick like Megamind intense scrutiny? No, I do not. But that’s not to say that my experience wouldn’t be improved by giving it everything I have. There are jokes I’m doubtlessly missing, little character reactions that are sailing right by me, nuances even in a kid’s flick that I’m just not absorbing. It’s lessened.
And while sure, I technically could drop everything to watch it on my screen at home, as I said: there’s something meditative about the theater for me. I was trained by my parents that this is a special place to be, fall silent, let the film take you where it wants to go. And so, out of instinct, I do. I feel no urge to text in a theater, no worry that I have interesting emails awaiting me. When the credits roll and it’s all over, I’m seizing for my cell phone – WHAT’D I MISS? – but for that time period, I am lost in a spell. A wonderful spell.
The current generation won’t have that. They live in an environment of constant distraction, of noises, of games to play and attentions to be split. And that’s not a bad thing! I live in that world, most of the time. My iPhone’s a constant distraction, and it’s wonderful, never being bored, always having something to read or play or listen to. But that never-ending cavalcade of Things To Do means that I’m not able to sink into everything a movie has to offer me.
I’m lucky. I got to have this perfect moment of silence for a while, absorbed in bliss. The next generation won’t, and I’m not sure they’ll know what they’re missing. And the idea of going out to a movie will slowly disappear as the mild inconvenience it is, and the attention paid to most media will dwindle, and it’ll be close but not the same.
I’m enough of a realist that I can’t fault this. I know it’s what my grandparents doubtlessly said about me watching the television, not appreciating the outdoors. And I live a pretty good life, even if I can’t just sit on my back porch and watch the tides come in and out, like they did.
Still, they had something that I don’t. And it was something peaceable that kept them going well, a form of appreciation I never had but sometimes feel the ache of. And so it goes.
I Just Can't Process My Own Death
Today, Gini and I watched UP. And when that heartbreaking first seven minutes were over, where we see a relationship bloom and literally die before our eyes, Gini was weepier than usual. I cleared off the couch next to me, and she came over and held me tight, weeping.
“I’m glad that wasn’t me,” she said.
And yeah. It’s been about six months since the triple-bypass, and I’m still not conversant with death. I know it’ll happen, of course; I didn’t used to. Oh, if you’d asked me, I would have said, “Sure, I know I’ll die!” And in some dimly teenaged fashion I did comprehend it intellectually.
But there I was, living with Gini, disinfecting a beer-brewing kit in the tub, and I suddenly thought: you don’t think they’re really going to develop immortality in your lifetime, do you? And sure enough, I didn’t. Which led to the thought that if they weren’t going to perfect it, at some point, death was on the menu for me, and I felt that mortality all the way to the root of my heart. These muscles would fail, these thoughts all gone, this unique spot disappeared.
I started blogging not soon after. I think it’s my way of leaving a record for somebody.
Yet there I was, facing death, and it didn’t bother me all that much. I was scared, sure, but the end would be soon for me. Either I’d be proven right about an afterlife, or I would never know, and I had a lot of things I wanted to do, but I’m pretty good at coping with non-negotiables. If that wasn’t an option, well, it’s not like I could argue. And so I went into surgery, not knowing if I’d wake up.
I dunno. My friend Lady said that my recovery from the surgery was brave. “Some people freeze,” she said. “They give in. You fought.” And I guess, but I don’t know how else to be. I was on the brink, and it doesn’t scare me.
Maybe because there’s another layer to go. Maybe there’s yet some other layer where you process death even more tangibly, and that’s what PTSD is. I don’t think we as humans can really process our own mortality this far away from it; Jay Lake can, but then again he’s in a situation where he has to, being terminal and all. And you can see it corroding him, even from a distance. Me? I’m skipping over the surface like a stone hurled over a lake, and I’m just fine with that.
I think daily of Gini’s loss, though. That’s how I process death; not the emptiness, but loss. Sometimes I have nightmares of losing her, the greatest love of a damned lucky life, and I wonder what I’d do if that happened.
I’m still blessed, in a way. If one of us had to have a brush with death, I got the easy end. She gets to envision that life much clearer.
My job is to make that not happen.