Whose Village Are You In?

"How does someone get here? How do they become a person who sees a person make a three sign and end up accusing the ADL of gaslighting? Well, it takes a village.” https://t.co/VIGUXTWXsV

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) May 17, 2021

I'm pretty sure this is only a thing on Twitter, but what a thing it is!

You love Jeopardy. You have invested time and sweat and emotional energy into Jeopardy. You are not even, like so many unwashed viewers, a passive lover of Jeopardy. You have been on Jeopardy. Jeopardy is not The Simpsons. It is not Wheel of Fortune. It is not some flyby thing you watch on TV to fill the time. Jeopardy is you. Or at least Jeopardy is part of you, but more importantly, you are part of Jeopardy. You and people like you—you know you aren’t unique in this fact—have made Jeopardy what it is and it doesn’t matter if you are a producer on the show or not. You are the thing that makes Jeopardy Jeopardy. 

I'm not going to hash and re-hash the "controversy."  It's not really worth noticing.  But this paragraph in that blogpost (or whatever category things on-line fit now) was interesting, because what is described there is what I define as "identity."

"You are the thing that makes Jeopardy Jeopardy."  I'm not sure you have to go that far to reach "excessive behavior" on Twitter.  The earlier Tweets I posted on this subject quickly developed a thread arguing the finer points and usages of the term "gaslighting."  As if that term needs defending and explicating and reifying. (For the record I think it's a stupid and overused term that's become a substitute for thought and analysis.  "Look, I know how to use 'gaslighting' in a sentence!  I'm clever, too!"  Which is also a matter of identity, come to think of it.).  More and more people were chiming in on the tweet to respond with their defense (more often) or even analysis of the term and its proper and improper usages.  Which, you know, completely missed the point.  But it sounded clever, like the way students think Oxford dons converse.

So I'm not sure you have to "love Jeopardy" to get caught up in the "it was a Nazi say of saying 'three!' " (Again, for the record, I'm not sure that's what the argument was (the author of the blogpost derives bases that conclusion on the movie "Inglorious Basterds."  Yeah, it's the internet, after all.).  I think the argument was based on the hidden "okay" symbol.  I'm waiting for the revelation that Eddie Murphy is a closet white supremacist because of his Buckwheat imitation in the...80's, was it?

Yeah, that one.)  I think people on the intertoobs get especially caught up just in contention and argument.  It becomes a source of identity.  I have can establish the definitive use of the term "gaslighting," or at least interject that the term is being misused in the argument already occurring, or if I can point out (cleverly, of course) how it should be used, and the argument at hand is not nearly nuanced enough on this important subject, well....otay!

Yeah; it's exhausting.  And it doesn't really have to have anything to do with a slavish devotion to a TeeVee game show.  But that something is a part of you, and you a part of it, to the extent you think you are the reason it is important and known (yes, that even applies to the proper/improper use or dismissal of a term like "gaslighting"), then it is part of your identity.  The mistake we make is imagining that thing around which we place our walls in order to protect it, must be of some seeming significance; like, say, a long-running game show.

It doesn't.  The thing, the kernel around which the sense of identity forms, is too often Hitchcock's McGuffin.

Hitchcock, so far as I can determine, invented the term.  He meant it was the otherwise unimportant objet which set the plot of a story into motion.  Once it had served that purpose, it was of no more use, and disappeared from the story.  This is not Chekhov's gun in Act 1, in other words.  Assuming you aren't familiar with my argument about this, I'll give you two quick examples.

"The Birds" begins in San Francisco; but the action of the movie takes place on the California coast.  Getting there from downtown Frisco involves a cage with two love birds which Our Heroine takes up Highway 1 (of course) in her two-seater "sports car" (as they were called then), with the top down (again, of course.  How else do women with helmet hair drive down the highway in the hot California summer?)  The birds in the cage actually prompt the first bird attack of the movie, on our valiant heroine.  But when she reaches her destination the bird cage is swept away and forgotten in the mystery of why a seagull struck our brave blonde and defenseless heroine.  (It's the 60's, go with it.)

"Psycho" does much the same thing.  Janet Leigh embezzles funds from her employer and flees town with the money in the car trunk.  She drives all night until she runs into a rainstorm (in the desert?) so fierce she needs a place to stop and then, looming out of the night like a beacon is the neon sign "Bates Motel."

Well, you know the rest.  The car, the money?  Conveniently drowned in a tar pit just behind the motel.  Who remembers "Psycho" for the money?

So it doesn't matter what the seed is you have wrapped your identity around.  It can be American history (probably a very white history, but still) or the "land of your father's pride" or of "purple mountains majesty."  It may be a political philosophy, a party, an icon (Reagan; FDR; Truman, etc.).  More likely it's something small and puny and really rather ordinary, if not downright ugly.  If you're arguing about it on the internet, more than likely it's not the Grand Idea that motivates you; it's the argument.  It's the desire to defeat all comers with your piercing insights and implacable wall of reasons.  This isn't new:  the old version of this was theologians arguing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.  The angels and the pin weren't important; winning the argument was.

It still is.  It shouldn't be; but that's another matter.  If it "takes a village" to create an identity, then the real question is:  which village are you are part of?  Most of the villages on-line condone, even support, petty and stupid arguments about words or small ideas.  What they don't encourage is taking care of each other, looking out for each other, being responsible to each other.  "Lord, when did we see you?"  Well, goes the parable in Matthew 25, you can't at all if you're not looking.  If your "village" is teaching you to spend all your time on-line and identify with the smallest of issues, maybe you need to move to a new village.  Or better yet, start a better village.