Letter from (FaceBook) Jail

 

Dear Fellow FaceBookers,

There was a picture of big dill pickles stuffed with Snickers candy bars -- so yes that's a thing. I didn't post the photo. I merely commented, "Americans are terrible people." And that, dear friends, was that. Within minutes I received a notification that I had "violated community standards" and was banned from FaceBook for 24 hours, effective immediately. I read my way through the notification. I objected. There was no response, no appeal. Done. Well.

I've known lots of people serve time in FaceBook jail. I know a number of artists, many of whom have been put away multiple times, usually for male nudity. I also know a number of activists on various fronts; LGBTQ rights workers, defenders of sex-work, free speech advocates, all sorts, some of whom have been booted from the platform temporarily too. I know at least one photographer who has been fighting the good fight for a very long time, and one delightful provocateur who's been canned nearly as often as he's been out. Never happened to me before.

Shocked? Why I nearly fainted.

I am among those who have supported efforts to hold social media platforms accountable for policing their content for hate-speech, racism, and the like. They have none of them done a very good job of this. At least since the Idiot Insurrection of January 6th, 2021 and the storming of The Capital, a token effort would seem to have been made on most of the major sites to address the very worst of the knuckle-dragging Nazis, supremacists, and radical whack jobs by closing some of their accounts and blocking certain purveyors of hate.  Pretty small beans, as I understand it, other than kicking the Idiot in Chief off of Twitter and Facebook, at least temporarily. I still support this new found acting out of social responsibility on the part of the Billionaire's Boys Club and hope to see more, and more substantive change. 

If I buy a pair of slippers online and ten minutes later all my social media accounts offer me more slippers, how hard, one has to ask, can it be to track actual Nazis and klansmen? If I "like" someone's photo of a pound cake and then get flooded with ads from Goldbelly for Carla Hall's 5 Flavor Pound Cake...? (It was good, by the way so thank you, Ms. Hall. A little dense, very expensive, but delicious.) If these miraculous algorithms -- which in my head is always pronounced, "Al Gore Rhythms," -- can track my every consumer impulse and quite rightly offer articles from The Washington Post in preference to The Washington Times, ask me to donate to Stacey Abrams' Keep Up the Fight and John Fetterman's campaign for the Senate, and avoids invitations to Mar-a-Lago, then surely...? No?

And yet. 

On reflection, I shouldn't be surprised to learn that Mark Zuckerberg does not quite ken irony. In case any others might be confused, let me just say that I do not believe that Americans are terrible people. Or, to put a finer point, I don't think we are always. Our history is short by the standard of human civilization but fair is fair and we have done a remarkable job for such a young country when it comes to terrible things. I do think we have done and continue to do some considerable good in the world. At least we've proven ourselves capable of doing both, which is both disappointing and predictable in almost equal measure. This does not, to my way of thinking and according to my reading of the Constitution and our history make me either unpatriotic or in anyway nuts. Indeed, when one thinks of the levels of undisguised villainy and stupidity immediately accessible on the internet, I am downright upright. 

So, how then did I end up in the virtual clink? See: irony, Zuckerberg of course, but also please note, in the absence even of the obviously harmless context of that comment on that post, just what the sentence was that silenced me for a day.  Isn't it fascinating that this was what tripped the trigger? Who would have guessed? Evidently a Georgia Deputy Sherriff/racist spokesmodel can share giggles at xenophobic  misinformation and go on to speak not just for his department but his type when describing a murderous  goon as having had "a bad day," but me suggesting in good fun that "Americans are terrible people" is just that little bit too far for the mechanical censors. 

I am not outraged -- at this temporary suspension from FaceBook, at least.  Nor am I fishing for outrage on my behalf. When it happened I admit to being taken aback and very confused. Took a minute, honestly. When I finally tripped to the truth, I was very disappointed (how parental that sounds) but I felt no urge to mount a boycott or swear-off social media or write to my Congressperson. Perhaps I should be up in arms, but I confess to a certain amusement at the absurdity of my example, or rather this example being made of me. Programmers can be such clumsy fuckers, no? And who exactly was the management genius who had to sign off not only on this ruthlessly silly new software but also on the endless stream of potentially punishable variations of the shocking indictment of the American Character with which I tried to crash the internet? Makes one question our  technological hegemony, don't it? 

Stupidity is always shocking, however familiar. Never underestimate its infinite variety.

I would hope that there are any number of busy little tech dudes (and a still unfortunately smaller number of women) working to refine this, some of their first crude attempts at virtual civility. After all, it took them years to stop trying to pitch me a membership in Christian Mingle and skinny jeans. 

For all the recent hue and cry -- to say nothing of the bellow and screech -- over "cancel culture" and the supposedly unprecedented reach of the rising generation's "woke-ness," I will not offer my brief exile as an example because that would be both silly and wrong. In the time it has taken me to write this little bit, I could easily have gone online and found example after example, many of them still being trumpeted on the Right, of the so-called "canceled" whose behavior and opinion absolutely deserved to be censured, and an almost equal number of propertied victims of cancellation who are still, unsurprisingly employed, publishing, recently hired elsewhere and or still living comfortably if not on their royalties (who does that?) then certainly on their continued commissions from The Weekly Standard, The American Scholar, and or  their advance from Regnery Publishing.  I do not deny that there have been and continue to be sincere and honest people being unfairly targeted for ridiculous offenses against the new community standards at, for example our universities and colleges, among other places. Nor would I willingly be lectured about my biases by teenagers, even admitting I got 'em and that they would be right to call me on 'em. That must be hell. It is the job of the young to discomfort and disabuse their elders. Did it myself in the day. Doesn't mean I want to hear from them personally, you understand. Please, no. (SO typical of my generation.)

If I wanted to provoke some of my friends, I might mention my complete collection of the essays of Joseph Epstein. I could admit that Vivian Gornick's infamously homophobic essay from nearly my whole lifetime ago has not kept me from reading every word she writes. I wouldn't dream of defending the behavior of Charles Dickens with his much maligned wife, but neither will I stop reading and recommending his novels. I still read Jefferson's letters with John Adams every 4th of July. If I can't bring myself to read overt antisemites like Celine, I should quickly admit that it was "..." that defeated me before I even knew what a shit he was. I might even go so far as to suggest that mine may not be such an untenable position for others, even persons younger than myself. I would naturally not insist because, well -- to whom on earth would I be in any position to do that?! 

I offer this as at best a mildly cautionary tale. That's all. Hope it might amuse as well, though if it makes anyone angry I must say I would not be entirely disappointed by that response. Unless you're mad at me. Then I am sorry, And please don't feel you need to explain. I'm sure you're right.

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #118

A Caricature

Clerihew for a Chicago Stylist

JOSEPH EPSTEIN

Joseph Epstein
Falls somewhere between
His English betters
And the Groucho Marx Letters.

Daily Dose

From With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays, by Joseph Epstein

VANITY

"Much of the little I have been able to accomplish thus far in life I find is owed in good part to vanity -- with most of the remainder owed to guilt."

From A Bonfire of My Vanities

Daily Dose

From Fred Astaire, by Joseph Epstein

CHARM

"Charm is Noel Coward, entering a party wearing an ordinary suit, discovering every other man in the room dressed in white tie and tails, and blithely announcing, 'Please, I don't want anyone to apologize for overdressing.'"

From Charmed, I'm Sure

Shall We Dance?

As I've entered what I flatter myself in thinking will be but my middle years, I've found my patience with and or interest in most contemporary writers growing thin. With so many great books yet to be read, so many great authors as yet barely begun, I increasingly feel the sand running and look back now with some amazement at how cavalierly I used to adopt new writers after a single book, collecting and reading as if I had all the time in the world to, say, read my way through Balzac some later day. In the meanwhile I would read every new book, as they were published, by Reynolds Price or Richard Ford or A. N. Wilson. Why not? I would read backward from the point of adoption too, so that I might "catch up with" Colm Toibin or Richard Bausch or Kenzaburo Oe. Then the day came, around roughly my fortieth birthday I would guess, when my response to a new novel by Ann Tyler ceased to be "Look! A new Ann Tyler!" and instead became something like "Look. Yet another new Ann Tyler." Nothing to do, you understand, with the quality of Ann Tyler's work, as consistently, mildly entertaining as it ever was or is likely ever to be, nothing even to do with her prodigious output, though in her case I did have pause when she began to require more than one wide shelf to herself. I might still read each new book, but I became likelier to buy it, add it to the shelf and buy the next with the last still unread. Eventually a new rule was adopted: three "new" books unread, and the next could wait until it was remaindered. Thus, I fell behind but had the possibility still to one day "catch up" all over again, at a more affordable pace. The day came though when, for example, Richard Ford wrote a novel for which I simply did not much care. Reynolds Price started reading the Bible too closely. A. N. Wilson stopped reading the Bible, or going to Mass I suppose, and, while I liked him all the better for it, I let three, then four, then five books go by. Colm Toibin I've kept up with, but I could not go back to gather his Irish nonfiction after finding his book about Lady Gregory, the Irish National Heroine and bore. Oe, by the publication of Somersault, ceased for me to be bearable. Again, no fault of the author, but because I lost patience with my own incapacity to read anything else while reading him, and simply could not read Oe at such unbroken length without breaking up. (Coming up at last for air from that book made me understand something of what the bends must do to divers.)

The day came when I sold off all my Ann Tyler, read and unread, without regret, when I might read a Margaret Drabble or not without assuming I had missed something vital, when a short story in the New Yorker was enough Richard Bausch to last me for months or more. I felt bad about all of this, until I bought my first set of Scott, until I'd taken up Balzac at last, until I owned almost all of Fielding. As I said, I might still read Ann Tyler, and did when she wrote a pleasant novel called Digging to America a few years back, but my sense of obligation was gone. I doubt her feelings would be much hurt if she knew I'd determined instead to read through Mrs. Gaskell. (Though perhaps she might, in which case, on the off chance, my apologies, Ann.)

There are few enough living writers I feel obliged to follow now, but Joseph Epstein is one. He is about my favorite living essayist. He is a delightfully fussy writer, yet hilariously, intentionally and sometimes clumsily common, an enthusiast and a complainer, a snob and a democrat (little "d,") a frequently insightful and occasionally bruising critic, a bully and a pal, a man of examined and embraced contradictions. I have never met him, but he has been to me, over the years, a wonderful, avuncular presence. If I was as happy as a relative looking for a loan when he achieved bestseller-status with Snobbery and Friendship, I confess, I prefer him at a less oratorical, more conversational length, in his casual or critical essays, in preference to his more thematically grand recent books. When In a Cardboard Belt! Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage came out two years ago, it was as if he'd decided to sit back down and talk after a tour of the Chautaquas. The greatest charm for me of so consistently delightful, voluble an essayist is that he never exhausts his subjects. At book length, be it about Divorce or either of the two mentioned above, I rather wanted him to digress even further than he did and felt, uniquely in my reading of him, the none too gentle tug now and again, of his awkwardly important theme. But rumbling again with his old snappy, pugnacious ease from gastronomy to Beerbohm to a devastating slap at the late, very late, Mortimer Adler, I was as tickled by what he had to say again as I was the first time I read him.

His latest book is, again, an extended essay, but this time Epstein's subject is charm, as embodied in a single and singularly American artist, a sometimes small but supremely elegant man, a great if unlikely movie star, Fred Astaire. Epstein's is a critical appreciation and his curiosity extends beyond the screen to the man, about whom he can be unsurprisingly, unflatteringly blunt; detailing the weird attractiveness of Astaire's big face, sneering at his toupees and his tight fist, rather coldly dissecting the artistic disappointment of his partners after Ginger, to whom Epstein means to be kind, but isn't really. It is all wonderfully punchy and slangy and awestruck. Epstein can't help but be a little irked at finding a man no bigger or better than himself, yet possessed of exactly the kind of elegance and ease he both envies and distrusts as slightly sissy. (I've often thought, reading his essays over the years, how much happier Epstein might have been had he been taller, or at least a little less defensively small.) The pleasure in this portrait is in the author's incapacity to keep from forgetfully grinning at his pure, if obviously slightly embarrassed delight in watching a man dancing beautifully -- with and without the reassuring presence of various pretty ladies.

As it turns out, Epstein's book is part of a series, Icons of America, from Yale University Press. Today I had a copy of another book, newly out, from the same, Molly Haskell's Frankly , My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited. I was pleased to see it, certainly more than I was to see that the rest of the series seems to range from hamburgers to architecture. Sigh. (How I hate series distinguished by no better, less haphazard a rubric than this flabby word "icons." It smells of "American Studies" and suchlike interdisciplinary academic boondoggles.)

Still, I must be grateful to Yale for what it's given me in giving Epstein an excuse, and a fee, for writing such a grudgingly gay little book. At under two hundred pages, it flew by as light and fast as his subject's Swing Time. Joseph Epstein's Fred Astaire is a love letter from a resolutely, determinedly butch, dead-end-kid aesthete to his elegantly sexless, even slightly fey movie-star-crush, and the occasion of a happy hour for a fan of both. It also reminded me how right I was to love and keep ol' Joe Epstein around. He's a good sort, really, is Joe.