I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasnât sure where to put it (âtry up your ass!â â someone, Iâm sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.
How do you shame someone who thinks Trumpsâ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trumpâs decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that theyâre racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?
You donât. Itâs silly to think otherwise.
Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) heâs forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work Iâve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Goâs show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.
I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.
But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my âfriendsâ even though Iâd never once met them or even heard their voices. These werenât even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.
We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.
There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said â It wasnât accomplishing anything to notice âHaha Trump looks like heâs bullshitting his way through an oral reportâ â such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailesâ wrinkly teat. Â Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though Iâm a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt werenât being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If youâre one of these guys, and you think Iâm talking about you, youâre probably right, but donât mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but thatâs not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one â it doesnât help a family stuck at the border because theyâre trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesnât help a poor teenager who canât get an abortion because the party of âsmall governmentâ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesnât help the coal miner whoâs staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a Presidentâs empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places Iâve ever lived, if you donât count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while Iâve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm peopleâs biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My momâs boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and thereâs even data to back it up.
âBut Mr. Bowie,â you might say, though I insist you call me John - âthose studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!â And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesnât fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.
âBut John,â you might say, and I am soothed that weâre one a first name basis - âCanât you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?â Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.
I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.
After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand â my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) â youâd have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, itâs almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything weâre actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news â one, weâre not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, weâre also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this â the ground. Is not. There.
There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesnât read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who donât need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three sâ in Ecclesiastes, folks).
So farewell Twitter. Iâll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I wonât miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country âvia chimney.â I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a âfucktard.â I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when Iâm right, and Iâm often right. Thereâs just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it â Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. Heâs also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think youâre straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). Youâre probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance youâre not, get to it. Youâll thank me, but you wonât be able to unless you actually have my email.
[1] And Jesus, thatâs worse â Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist â I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.
[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, âAmericaâs LGBT Economyâ Jan 20th, 2017
[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.
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