As regular readers of this Web log know, when my older sister Rose has a day off from work as a school teacher in Fairfax, Virginia, she often meets me for lunch at a good restaurant in downtown Washington. Today, however, she took a day off volunteering with the Kamala Harris for President campaign, which meant working on a virtual fund-raising phone bank from her house starting at nine and ending at two, and then going out door-knocking in Fairfax City after six, when everybody’s finally gotten home from work. So she picked Bellissimo on Main Street in old Town Fairfax for a 3:00 PM supper. It’s Northern Italian cuisine, so I ordered the cozz en umido and the involtini di vitello; Rose ordered the carpaccio di carne followed by linguine con capesante e gamberi, which at Bellissimo they call linguini frutti mare. Then we took a look at the wine list and agreed to split a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino 2013.
As the waiter walked away, Rose heaved a sigh and threw me a gloomy gaze. “What the [expletive] is wrong with the people in this country?”
“You should consider,” I advised, “whether you are asking the correct question.”
“By which,” she objected, with just a hint of obstinacy, “you mean what?”
“That, by definition,” I explained, “in a democracy, the people get exactly the government they deserve.”
“In that case,” Rose demanded of me, “how is it possible that forty-seven percent of the voters think America deserves a government run by that… that…”
“That [expletive] [expletive] [expletive], Donald Trump?” I interrupted.
“Well…” she gasped, “I was trying to think of some… polite… way to say it, but yes, Tom, that [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] ignorant, demented, cretin Donald Trump. What the hell is wrong with those people?”
“You want a list or a root cause analysis?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she responded with a sigh, “the latter, I guess.”
“Good choice,” I opined, “because it would take until we got to our post-prandial espressos if I had to recite the list of what’s wrong with them. The RCA, on the other hand, centers around twelve key factors. First, there’s the statistical distribution of intelligence. By definition, twenty-two percent of the population has IQs of seventy or less. Then, there’s the Forrest Gump Factor – an irrational, blind faith that ignorance is bliss and the key to success. That goes hand-in-hand with overt hostility to any kind of erudition beyond what it takes to earn a living and comprehend major league sports, which, combined with an unquestioning belief that the only indicator of merit is how much money a person has, as embodied in the venerable American expression, ‘If you’re so damn smart, why ain’t you rich?’ leads to a deep-rooted distrust of higher education and those who possess it. In turn, this serves as the basis of a subconscious terror that those pillars of the American gamma-minus mindset and worldview are in fact total fictions concealing deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. That fear manifests itself in a fulminating need for self-validation that is, in turn, expressed as racial and ethnic animus, as well as open hostility to any authority gained through expertise. Finally, there is the exacerbation of that pathology by distribution of wireless, network-enabled integrated circuit devices to such individuals and the loading of neuro-addictive stimulus-response software on those platforms, combined with selection algorithms that specifically target subjects based on their individual personality flaws, exploiting their innate survival instincts to manipulate their actions, together with the leveraging of those factors by both the domestic and foreign enemies of American democracy.”
To that, Rose did her signature face-palm with slow head shake, which she perfected at the age of twelve for reacting to something complicated I had just said. “Meaning, in less than a hundred words?”
“This is what happens,” I summarized, “when you give seventy-five million willfully ignorant imbeciles mobile telephones with computers connected to the Internet in them, load those phones up with social media, and then let fascist, communist and theocratic authoritarians use that technology platform to pump those pathetic suckers and losers full of absurd and asinine lies.”
“Okay,” she sighed, “maybe that explains the MAGA Republicans, but what about the media? What about their ridiculous double standard? I mean, what kind of ruckus would the talking heads on all the cable news channels raise if Kamala Harris decided to blow off a televised town hall and have everybody listen to cheesy music while she danced around for an hour? What would their reaction be if Tim Walz started talking about the size of some sports celebrity’s genitalia? How outraged would they be if either of them were verifiably found to be fond of Stalin and wishing American generals could be like the ones in his Red Army? You don’t have to be public relations expert to know the answer to those questions – the media would have a conniption fit of the first water! But Trump? He did all of that – the dancing around to “YMCA” instead of answering people’s questions, waxing enthusiastic over Arnold Palmer’s [expletive] and being caught by multiple credible witnesses praising Adolph Hitler, and nobody in the media bats an eye!
“Well,” I allowed, “MSNBC and The Atlantic do, in fact, take note of it when Trump behaves like that.”
“And who the hell watches MSNBC?” she demanded. “And who, besides you and people like you, reads The Atlantic?”
“Point taken,” I conceded. “Generally, the press never holds Trump responsible for anything he says or does, no matter how outrageous or reprehensible, while Harris and Walz are being held to the same puritanical, nitpicking, pecksniffian standards to which every presidential candidate has been held, at the very least, since Theodore Roosevelt ran against Alton B. Parker in 1904. And you’re right. If either of them did anything half as vile as what Trump does five times a day, the media would scream scandal from the rooftops non-stop, twenty-four seven, three-sixty-five.”
“So why is that?” Rose insisted as the waiter laid a plate of carpaccio before her and the sommelier poured her a glass of wine.
“Trump saying and doing outrageous things makes the kind of news that gets eyeballs on the tube, clicks on the World Wide Web and even today, in 2024, sells newspapers,” I replied. “Besides, people more or less expect Republicans to be amoral hypocrites. After all, they’ve been behaving like that since Ulysses S. Grant was in the White House. And actually, the Democrats, too, until FDR came along, and even then, the Dixiecrats kept with the tradition well into the 1970’s, until Nixon’s Southern Strategy poached them all for the Republicans.”
“Tom,” she confessed as the waiter and sommelier retreated, “I’m worried, you know… about what might happen if Trump wins the election.”
“You might,” I advised, “just as well be worried about what happens if he loses. Either way, it’s not going to be pretty, and his corrupt, stacked, bogus Supreme Court might try to crown him Dictator for Life even if he loses the popular vote and the Electoral College.”
“Great,” she shot back, taking a large quaff of wine. “I am so reassured. Now I know it doesn’t matter what I worry about.”
“Not at this point,” I agreed, washing down some mussels with a generous swig of wine myself.
Toying with another piece of carpaccio, Rose wondered aloud, “Do you suppose this is what it was like, in the Weimar Republic, right before Hitler became Chancellor?”
“Well,” I remarked while savoring another succulent bivalve, “we’ve certainly crossed the Godwin Event Horizon.”
“Tom,” Rose gently chided, as she always has when I make cryptic statements, “what the [expletive] are you talking about?”
“It all goes back,” I explained, “to Richard Dawkins, the theory of the meme as a unit of cultural DNA in a model of Darwinian cultural evolution, and the implications of that epistemological framework for the evolution of an Internet discussion thread.”
“Not to put too fine a point on my critique,” Rose japed, “but Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot?”
“Just as genes can work together to form co-adapted gene complexes,” I elaborated, “so groups of memes acting together form co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes. These include languages, traditions, scientific theories, financial institutions, traditions, and religions. Using that as context, Godwin’s Law was introduced in 1990 as an explanation for the behavior of participants in online discussion threads.”
“I hope,” she cautioned as she followed another bite of carpaccio with another generous sip of wine, “that you are not under the impression that your additional detail has clarified anything. But let’s get to the point, shall we? What, exactly, is this Godwin’s Law you’re talking about?”
“It states,” I declared, “that as a discourse progresses, as its discussion thread, so to speak, grows longer, the probability that Hitler is mentioned increases asymptotically toward unity at a rate proportional to the logarithm of the thread length.”
“And?” Rose threw me an expectant look.
“And once Hitler is introduced into a discussion,” I concluded, “it is said, in analogy to the Point of No Return in the gravitational warpage of the space-time continuum which occurs in a Schwarzschild singularity, to have passed the Godwin Event Horizon. And that’s where, after two hundred and thirty-five years and seven months, discussion of Constitutional politics in the United States of America has arrived.”
“You aren’t saying that the Constitution has gone down a black hole, are you?” Rose asked.
“No,” I clarified, “not the Constitution; not yet, anyway.”
“And not the United States of America?”
“No,” I answered, “not that yet, either.”
“So, you’re saying, then,” she pressed, “that discussion of American politics has passed some Point of No Return, like a spaceship slipping into a place near a black hole where it looks to us here on Earth like it will take an infinitely long time for the very next second its inhabitants experience to elapse?”
“Exactly,” I confirmed, “and it’s delightful to know you were listening during that Physics for Humanities Majors course you took in college. So, by analogy with that situation, having passed the Godwin Event Horizon, nothing that has preceded us in the discussion thread is accessible or possesses current meaning, and nothing lying ahead of us in the thread is relevant. All we can do now is argue about Hitler until the tidal forces of rhetorical gravitation sweep us into a place outside the known political universe, a place from which not even the smallest ray of the light of reason can escape.”
“If that’s the case,” she queried, “what can we do?”
“Exit the discussion thread, close the browser, and reboot;” I concluded as the waiter collected our appetizer plates, “which is to say, enjoy our entrées, finish this bottle of wine and decide on dessert.”
“And then what?” Rose implored in a tone of bewildered despair.
“Vote,” I said.