“Katie bar the door,” Sen. John Tester told NPR this morning. It set the host back a half-minute. She didn’t understand what he meant. It terrified me. A flood of horrible memories just before Kenya’s civil war waved through me.
“Ruto n’mbungu!” my most senior driver, quiet James, retorted after I’d scolded all of them to just cool it, “nothing bad will happen” that December, 2007. The two expressions, one in English one in Swahili sound awfully similar to me. And I was wrong in 2007. Really wrong. Thank god James made me heed him.
The January 6th insurgency was a wake-up call. It effected us in a variety of different ways but in all cases powerfully. For those of us who use social media a lot it was a gut-punch.
America’s unchanged, 230-year old 1st Amendment is the source of much misery. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act are two of the more obvious cancers it fostered. There’s little can be done with Citizen’s United until the country gets its act together and actually amends the constitution to stipulate clearly that business entities can’t be treated as breathing individuals.
But Section 230 is another matter. No other democracy allows such unfettered control of social media by its owners as Section 230.
The repeated gargantuan fines levied against companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter are evidence enough of Europe’s dislike of these companies. But short of China’s threat to close them down entirely less they abide by censorship rules (which they did), only America has the ability to actually control them. They are American companies, American creations.
And they are out of control.
The notion that 1st Amendment free speech cannot be out of control was long ago proved wrong: yelling “fire” in a closed theater is against the law. Hate speech laws remain in their infancy in America, rarely enforced. But both these evils, propagating knowingly false emergencies and hate, have now been superseded by something worse: disreality.
At its most generous disreality is lying, because lying often spreads innocently enough by persons of legitimate concern. But it’s more often intentional, and always when it starts. But whether intentional or not disreality has become the manifest core of social media like Facebook.
We all knew this was true, but Zignal Labs’ careful study that showed following Trump’s removal from social media disreality on all the platforms decreased by 73%, is all the evidence we need. It’s critical that at this particular moment as we try to make a sharp turn in our troubled society that we do everything conceivable that we can to assist the effort.
If there had not been Facebook and Twitter there would not have been an insurgency. There would not have been a lot of horrible things, and I’ll leave it to poets and rap stars to string them out palpably. In sum there would be three-quarters fewer lies and a lot less people living in horrid, dangerous fantasies, if there weren’t Facebook and Twitter.
If you have any doubt about this, or harbor some suspicion that the “good might outweigh the bad,” listen to the most recent podcast of OnTheMedia. Facebook and Twitter were the yet-to-be-known instruments of 1984.
Until America has the guts to regulate social media those of us who have used it for so long so successfully have to abandon it, now. It’s the most powerful act we have. Not doing so affirms the increasingly immoral and dangerous paths that led America into this unforgivable nightmare.
Facebook and Twitter have been exceptionally useful to AfricaAnswerMan and EWT, and I know that many of my colleagues and competitors will disparage my intentions by referring to my imminent retirement and old age. Can’t do anything about that: they’re both true. But I certainly couldn’t pursue either proudly if I didn’t do this, first.
See you at africaanswerman.com and ewtravel.com.
[For the many important links in this post see the original blog at africaanswerman.com.]
I was 15 years old, wasting the last bits of summer wandering with my dog alone in the forests behind my house and the prairies behind the forests, returning late for cold dinners.
“I have a dream,” Martin Luther King said as I wandered, on August 28, 1963, at the opening of the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
If you want to know what America might some day look like pay attention to tomorrow’s election in Uganda.
A ruthless thug will win a sixth 5-year term as president. And I mean win. He won’t stuff ballot boxes or manipulate judges. He got away with that in the past. This time Ugandan citizens – two-thirds of whom weren’t born before he first came to power – will actually choose to vote for him. With free will they will abdicate their own.
Whether good friends or African newspapers I’m being asked, “How could this be America?” I can’t answer all individually. Below is one reply.
Dear Brian,
Yesterday was not surprising and I am concerned with your personal perception (and that of so many of my other friends) that this “is not the America I know.” It is precisely the America I know.
I was beaten in the streets of Madison WI as a college demonstrator, chased by police in Chicago, had my phones tapped and my identification ripped from me by U.S. government agents… and all that happened before I was jailed in Conakry, kidnapped in Kano and stared at the wheels of a Sherman tank that were taller than me in Goma. My affinity for Africa I’m sure comes in part from a maturing personality that grasped soul matches in the turbulence of Africa.
But why all this? is the question. I’ve spent my life wondering and there’s no simple answer, but there are broad understandings.
Your split from Brexit is a good start. I know that you supported it. It’s the opposite of “all for one, and one for all.” It’s when sports bifurcate between teams and super stars, when pay for the CEO grows exponentially beyond his floor worker, when walls to keep out different looking people turn into barricades dividing mothers and their babes into separate cages, when “tax refunds” double the wealth of a billionaire but leave a quarter of our children in poverty. It’s all about division rather than unity.
Divide and conquer. Divide off and prosper (Brexit). Divide so far that compromise is antithetical to the positions that remain.
It’s hyper-individualism, which might have been useful when the vacant prairie was dusted by drought a hundred years ago, but today it’s absurd. The world is in too much of a crisis for any part of it to pretend they can go it alone. It’s delusional – truly clinically psychopathic for any person today to think they can live without the help of strangers half way round the world.
Critical to this analysis is that any governing document that is two and half centuries old can’t possibly work except to inhibit solutions.
Most of us use phones and computers and dozens of other gizmos about which we don’t have a clue as to how they work. All we know is that every few years they grow obsolete and we’ve got to get a new one. Recently we’ve even begun to give up our visible gizmos to trust “the cloud.” If we do this automatically in our daily lives, what is stopping us from doing it with the governance of our society?
America’s constitution is like my first laptop, a 1980’s Zenith box. It’s neither equipped nor was it intended to last more than a few years. The American constitution is an incredibly beautiful document, a foundational document that liberated the subject from its sovereign. But it’s too old, now, and it’s remaining functional capability is to stop change. Good minds have tried to work with it by piling on tomes of interpretation but therein is lost any governing core. We need a governing core, and not one no more valuable than Homo erectus.
This is the morning after a single battle. Perhaps, now, we’ll begin to remember the others: Baltimore, Orlando, Portland, etc., etc. The skies are momentarily clear of smoke and screams. The few people killed and busloads of injured last night are thousands less than those killed and tens of thousands less than those hospitalized yesterday by Covid. This is no anomaly. It was called for, predicted, wholly anticipated. This is nothing unique. Terrifying insurgencies happen all over America, all the time.
The crazy instigators including our President’s advisors and the weak, shameful politicians who enabled his wanton destruction have begun to divide themselves into enervated losers and delusional religious fanatics. But left standing is the megalomaniac himself and half the society he has brainwashed. Every instant until he leaves has a potential for some yet unimagined historical explosion. The story continues.
Particularly for my African friends, suddenly bombarded with their media exhalations of joy with the Georgia race, puncturing with nuclear force the silences that I had attributed to a sagacious long-view of history. Regain the patience you are so notable for. This tiny moment in history does not an epoch make. Trump is alive and well.
Recognize a stark and striking difference between America and all the rest of the “free world.” Our democracy is not. Our aged system is designed to inhibit change, because the change that gave us our revolution from Britain was so fragile that once secured it had to be stopped for fear of reversing itself.
Original undoctored sketch by the AP’s Elizabeth Cook
A prematurely old man limped onto on his bench in a cold, damp courtroom this weekend listening to an equally enervated prosecutor behind him whose grotesque mole finally shown as his pandemic mask slid too far down his cheek.
The social and cultural debauchery of the last four years in America has revealed all its moles. The UK judge rejected the old prosecutors’ appeal to extradite Julian Assange to the United States, because America’s prison system is “oppressive.”
It had been a dismal reign for the Mwene, Nkanga a Mvika, ruler of the Great Kingdom of The Kongo. He lived day-in and day-out with the shame his father had brought on his people by making peace with the Portuguese. His father had even been forced to accept a European name, Pedro.
The unimaginable wealth flaunted by his subjects who now wore European clothing and enjoyed great new herds of cattle because of Portuguese guns had forgotten that the slaves they always enjoyed were no longer treated well when slammed into the bosom of the Portuguese naus at the burgeoning port of Moçâmedes. Their great families of elephant were many fewer than before. Yes, they were rich, but few knew as The Mwene did of the debauchery behind this mischief.
The helmsmen sighted disturbing clouds in the southwest, but Capt. de Noronha was in no mood to delay. To avoid but the risk of a few monster waves given his overladen ship was ill-advised. There were pirates waiting for the hesitant. Everyone knew rounding The Cape was no cake walk.
In his wildest dreams de Noronha would never have imagined a cargo as vast as was now in his charge: Several hundred massive ingots to be traded for Mollucan cloves and nutmeg worth twice as much and ten thousand times their weight in copper! Forty-four thousand gold coins and sovereigns for the moguls’ chocolate from Gao and silk from China! And twenty cannon to protect it all, much less the victuals for the men on board!
Most of the group was asleep. It was a full moon and a still, warm night and everything we did was watched by our minders who were watched by the militia.
I was leading a group of journalists and experts, the first Americans allowed back into Ethiopia since the Dirge broke with the West and allied with the Soviet Union. It was hard, tense work reminding the dilettantes that we could all be killed if they didn’t behave.
“The clearest loser from the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was America.” – London Times. “American Democracy on a Shaky ground.” – Kenyan TV. “This dark, horrifying, unwatchable fever dream will surely be the first line of America’s obituary.” – London’s Guardian
Or as China’s news agency put it, “Americans watched a drama of hurting each other.”
Kathleen and I inserted ourselves when we were 24 years old into the most autocratic, terrifying society that I believe has ever existed: Idi Amin’s Uganda.
We traveled the country in 18 days. There was hardly a night without gunfire. Dead bodies might be found anywhere. We had to hide our vehicle in jungle before stopping it in order to eat our sandwiches or dying children with inflated bellies would surround us.
My daughter watched a plane fly into a twin tower on 9/11 from her apartment roof in New York. I heard the bombing of the Kenyan embassy and ten minutes later from the garden of my nearby hotel pieces of eyeglasses, jangling key chains and fabric fell out of the sky at my feet. Both of us later saw horrible pain and destruction.
“August seventh” was as big to Kenya as nine-eleven was to America. The relative number of people killed and maimed, the heroism of rescuers, the damage to politics, economy and society – it was all comparable. Even the perpetrators’ beliefs, religion and motivations for suicide were the same. What was different?
I hope that BLM is a manifestation of increasing liberties but the rage of Portland and Kenosha reminds me almost exactly of what I had to manage from my employees in East Africa.
Why do some think racism is diminishing in America?
Shifting alliances is an African political art, something we all need to study in the era America is racing through right now.
More than 1500 people were brutally killed in the several-month Kenyan civil war of 2008, thousands more tortured or maimed and nearly 200,000 displaced. Yet less than four years later the widows and widowers, orphaned children and homeless thousands elected as their leader the man who tried to kill them and their families.
Shifting alliances is an African political art, something we all need to study in the era America is racing through right now.