There was a weary inevitability to the way news about last Thursday’s
shooting at the Capital Gazette offices broke on Twitter,
the initial splash sending ripples of claim and counterclaim through countless
sub-threads. As this presidency lumbers along, Twitter has come to
represent something ineffable about Trump’s America – an arena in which
vigilante justice reigns, where opinions are formed in a fraction of a second, and
where people say what they want, especially if it offends. It’s a world in
which profound implications are ignored in favour of appearances, and where the
search for anything resembling objective truth can feel woefully naïve.
Twitter, it seems obvious to say, is only ever as benevolent
as the people who use it. Were we a species united by a common bond – that shared land and resources and protected one
another from threats to our planet – Twitter might have helped us evolve into a race of cosmic beings. We’ll never know. Instead we’re driven largely by fear
and anger and a belief that we are somehow special, destined for greatness and threatened
by barbarians at the gate. And those are qualities that get reflected by
Twitter, a hall of mirrors in which messages are distorted and amplified billions
of times over, blurring the borders between fact and fiction, while the real
story unfolds somewhere off the timeline.
It’s not a new idea to suggest that the search for the great
American novel was a distraction, and that the country itself may be the
pre-eminent work of American fiction: a tale of conquest and capitalism, a history
written by victors in the loudest voices possible. How else is it possible to
account for the wider world’s tacit acceptance of a nation built on stolen land
brazenly legislating who can and can’t live there, despite lingering evidence
of a Native American culture obliterated by genocide? What else can explain its
politicians’ condemnation of human rights abuses abroad, while black Americans –
many of whose ancestors lived and died as slaves – are treated like criminals,
murdered by white law enforcers who are seldom held accountable? How else does
America get away with telling the world who is and isn’t responsible enough to
own nuclear weapons, despite being the only nation to have used them in
aggression, killing hundreds of thousands in the process?
Such things are possible because the fictional tale of America
is so compelling – a story of democracy and glamour, of wealth and raw power – and
because we in the UK have been complicit in writing as well as addictively consuming
it for generations. It was only a matter of time before it came under the sway
of a fictional president, one for whom reality and reality television are much
the same thing. Nor is it a coincidence that Trump has emerged in the age of social
media, or been able to use it so masterfully to spread his message. His belief
that the world revolves around him is true on Twitter, a platform that rewards
instant gratification and favours sensation over thought, and he knows exactly
which buttons to press to get a reaction. It’s easy to imagine him calmly
scrolling through the hundreds of thousands of replies to his tweets and
nodding with approval, seeing only numbers, a self-promoting PR robot oblivious
to the raw emotions colliding around him. He knows that the more outrageous his
claims, the more people on both sides of the political divide will retweet them.
And slowly, inevitably, his version of events gets heard: more people attended his inauguration than any in history; the collusion with Russia is fake news; those kids in cages were Obama’s fault.
The latter point was driven home by followers posting a doctored
version of a Time magazine cover in which Trump looms over a screaming child being
detained at the border; in the new version,
Obama is questioning why the girl is out of her cage, and Trump is saying ‘Let’s
go find your mommy, sweetheart’.
Nor are those of us immune who think we’re smart enough to
see through the fiction. We too thrill to the controversy: our wailing outrage is
the soil that Trump supporters find so fertile – proof of our madness, and
their president’s power – and they water the roots of their lies with our liberal
snowflake tears. We’re constantly distracted: no sooner have we exhausted
ourselves railing against one injustice than another is coming down the pipeline,
and the last becomes just another brick in the wall. We’ve begun to accept as
daily occurrences revelations that a few years ago could have unseated a
president: defence of Nazis
and alleged paedophiles, multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, references to ‘shithole countries’ and immigrants who are ‘rapists’
or ‘all have AIDS’. Our outrage meters barely register as blips things that would
once have seemed unthinkable.
Yet some things are still big enough to shatter the meter. The
Capital Gazette shooting is one such moment. Done honestly and effectively,
journalism is humanitarian work, especially in an age of disinformation. The idea
that Trump’s tirades against his ‘enemy of the people’ may have contributed to American journalists being killed in
their own country is a horrifying prospect, yet there is a grim inevitability about
it: in a world built on lies, the pursuit of truth is bound to be a dangerous
job.
At such moments, the postmodern fiction of America unravels,
and the emotional detachment of Twitter culture – the memes and emojis, the lols
and the trolls – is revealed to be an armour of irony insulating users against
the real-world consequences of their words. It is horrific, though hardly
surprising, to learn that Milo Yiannopoulos had only days before the shooting
claimed that he couldn’t wait for ‘vigilante squads to start gunning
journalists down on sight’. Even more telling is his subsequent decision to weigh in on social media, dismissing his comment as an innocent ‘troll’, and
attempting to turn the blame on journalists to whom he’d sent the message.
Where can one turn for solace at such times? Perhaps the
answers lie in fiction itself. Orwell is understandably making a lot of sense
right now; the pre-war existential dread of Kafka feels somehow fitting. And a
couple of days ago, the opening of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist seemed to be telling me something:
Like the brief doomed flare of exploding
suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror
passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten
and perhaps not connected to the horror at all. It was difficult to judge.
I think we’re in the shriek phase now.
