(by @J_K_Smothers on Job’s Twitter, 6/5/2017 Sunday)
The Michael Tracey-Maxine Waters Incident, which should hereafter be known as the Twitter J’accuse Catastrophe, in the interest of ubiquitous internet hyperbole, has left upon me the indelible impression that the human race will never be able to curtail its unremitting tendency to believe its own bullshit. For those who are unaware of it, TYT reporter/commentator Michael Tracey interviewed Maxine Waters, politely asking one or two adversarial questions (which is a reporter’s job), and Rep. Waters (D-Ca) answered them with increasing ire, abruptly ending the interview by pushing or shoving or delicately caressing Tracey’s microphone, depending upon the political slant of your eyeballs, and Tracey posted the video of the interaction (also a reporter’s job) and characterized Waters’ action as a shove (although he stipulated in his initial Tweet that it wasn’t a violent shove). Twitterland’s response was typically and unironically vapid and aggressive: Tracey was a “snowflake” who needed his safe space and was “weaksauce,” whatever the fuck that means.
The background in a sociopolitical context is that recently a Montana politician, Greg Gianforte, a freshly elected Republican (sigh!) allegedly body-slammed reporter Ben Jacobs, breaking Jacobs’ eyeglasses, and allegedly struck at him several times as Gianforte bellowed on audio like a WWF maniac villain. Although these two incidents were cosmically different from each other, their similarities and dissimilarities are quite remarkable. Waters’ response was comparatively non-violent in a prosaic display of aggression and childishness; Gianforte’s response was completely insane.
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Both Waters and Gianforte were completely wrong; supporters of both were equally wrong; Twitter, almost as an afterthought of predictably awful mediation, was fuck-all wrong. Twitter-ers decided Waters was practically victimized by Tracey’s assertion that her action was a shove–as though it were everyone’s duty to defend Waters because Bill O’Reilly is a prick who made horrific racist comments about Waters’ hair while assholes on “Fox and Friends” laughed sycophantically with him (I admit I mock Donald Trump’s hair, which is wrong to do and I know it, but fuck Trump–feeling guilty about mocking Trump’s hair is about as useful as feeling guilty about despising Trump or Bill O’Reilly’s overt racism, and Trump mocks the physical features of any man or woman or transgendered person he deems worthy of being mocked for appearances, so again, fuck him). But Waters behaved childishly, as I’ve said, and her prior suffering of Fox News insults does not absolve her from from criticism for such a ridiculous response to a few simple adversarial interrogatives from a journalist. The minor dispute and almost satirical scuffle between Tracey and Waters was a sideshow to the anti-Michael Tracey Twitter dogpile that the incident birthed.
During the last presidential election cycle Rick Santorum yelled at CNN’s Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny, telling the reporter, “It’s bullshit!” with a rather accusatory glower, and the video of the exchange was replayed ad nauseam for some time afterward on the cable infotainment channel. Zeleny commented on the incident quite extensively, but there was no physical contact between Santorum and Zeleny. Waters made an obvious and completely unprovoked physically aggressive gesture and was zealously defended by Twitterland to the point where Tracey himself seemed to be transformed by mass fiat into a whining victimizer.
Partisanship blinds us to reality sometimes. Maybe even oftentimes.
I am not equating the initial minor incident to a violent assault, nor do I believe that Tracey intended it to be seen as an act of political violence or anything other than reportage that would get less acknowledgment–much less–than the Santorum-Zeleny exchange. But I am saying that you cannot have one set of standards for politicians whose views you think suck and another, looser standard for politicians who behave childishly or even potentially dangerously but whose ideas give them greater leeway in your mind for making any kind of transgressive physical contact–there is no excuse for unprovoked physical contact with a journalist or a human being (journalists have to be considered, at least for scientific purposes, to be humans). A reporter asking a question is not a provocation necessitating violence or unwanted physical contact of any kind–ever. If it is, let’s all just fuck-maim and kill each other until the world ends.
Or be adults.
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J’accuse, Twitterland!