A Twitter Tour through the Superficial Zeitgeist

I have a Twitter account that really just serves as an advertisement for this site.

I don't know that a person should feel proud of that. Twitter is really stupid.  And one thing that having a Twitter account does is expose you to the really superficial Zeitgeist of the moment. . . every day.

When I checked in this morning a big Twitter story is that Jimmy Fallon was apologizing for a Saturday Night Live appearance he did in black face a decade or so ago.  I'm not going to look that up, but Fallon is an entertainer and Saturday Night Live has been bad for decades.  Black face should have gone out before it came in, but as this apparently has been around for a really long time, blowing up about it now seems a bit late.  Perhaps it might just be better to note that Saturday Night Live should be Exhibit A in the trial of the People v. Harvard Lampoon Not Being Funny.

Indeed, if that trial were to occur, one of the primary expert witnesses would have to be a sociologist on the topic of how, at any one time, alleged comedic geniuses are such only by societal acknowledgement, as many of them are truly never funny.  Charlie Chaplin is a good example.  Not funny.  Not even once.

Chaplin.  Not funny.

In the category of funny is Kathy Griffin, who is also blowing up Twitter today for a comment she said about injecting President Trump with air.

Griffin is occasionally funny.  I didn't hear the comment but it doesn't strike me as funny.  It also doesn't strike me as something that serious people need to waste much air time on.

President Trump for his part ought to stay off of Twitter, but was on complaining that Michelle Obama had gone golfing at the same time that he, Trump, is taking flak for golfing.

I don't golf and it strikes me as boring.  I realize that not everyone feels that way.  My mother was a superb golfer when young and taught me how to golf as a child.  It didn't take.

Rants about golfing, by whomever is making them, are really about something else.  Americans of both parties like to complain that the President is insensitive and lazy whenever he's seen not doing something that seems to be work. Democrats are complaining about Trump golfing as its an opportunity to complain about Trump.  Republicans complained about Obama golfing while he was President for the same reason.  

Driving by the golf course every morning I always look out upon it, but not because I like golf, but because I'm hoping the foxes will be back.

This year, it seems, Mr. and Mrs. Fox have chosen to have their brood elsewhere.  So, instead, I see that Americans are out golfing.

Well, at least that's being out, which seems to me to be okay.  The argument that we should shelter in our basements for the rest of eternity doesn't seem to me to be a sound one.  I get it, if you are in the former cow pasture that New Yorkers now call Central Park there's going to be a lot of people, as New York is crowded, and you ought to be careful and wear a mask. And that advice goes for other places as well, and I'm not saying otherwise.  

I'm just not too worked up about the golfing.

Or Griffin.

Billie Eilish is apparently worked up about body shaming which caused a lot of people to engage in virtue signaling by supporting her for being against body shaming.  

This is in some ways associated, I think, with a song (I think) in which the words "not my fault" appear" somewhere where she decries people who have judged her based on her clothing or appearance.  I'm not in that category as, perhaps to my discredit, I don't really care about Eilish at all, other than she's pretty clearly an object of fascination for being a certain sort of teenage/twentysomething idol in the same way that James Dean was, whom I also am pretty disinterested in.

What are you rebelling against? 

What have you got?

M'eh.

Eilish has been the subject of a lot of fascination because she wears bulky clothes.  In the video for her comments, song or whatever it is, she apparently strips down to a tank top in reaction to being the subject of a lot of fascination about what her wearing bulky clothing may mean.

The problem with that is that its almost guaranteed that a lot of her juvenile, and probably not so juvenile, fans will stop in to see the video not to bond with her statement, but because now they get to find out what she looks like under those threads.  It's sort of like protests here and there in which women go topless, but not nearly as extreme.  The message gets mixed.

That gets into the topic of decent clothing, of which there's an entire cul de sac on the web where people rage on that topic, some with really extreme views.  It's a tough topic to engage in, in regard to women, as standards applying to female dress change every few seconds, or so it seems.  Having said that, if you dress really oddly it tends to be the case that, no matter what you're saying, you're doing it to draw attention, in which case some of the attention will be unwelcome.  Eilish may deserve credit for slamming body shaming, but simply dressing in a less "look at how oddly I'm dressed" fashion right from the onset would probably have accomplished that more effectively.  Well, her video probably doesn't hurt. . . except to the extent juvenile males are checking into it the same way that they check into Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions.

All of which brings us back to this.  In this era of COVID 19 introspection, American culture, as reflected on Twitter, isn't looking too great.