The Ever-Present Eyes of the Cell Phone

Several of the non-coronavirus stories that have somehow penetrated the news are a result of those ubiquitous cell phone cameras. They’ve captured the shooting on an unarmed black man in Georgia, a Minnesota policeman with his knee pressed against another unarmed black man who died during his arrest, along with a couple of widely disseminated nonviolent but seemingly racist encounters between white and black people.

One might conclude that there’s been a recent viral outbreak out of racism, but our guess is that these incidents aren’t any more common but are more likely to be videotaped and posted on the internet. All sorts of obnoxious behavior is winding up on the internet these days, often resulting in public shaming and even more severe consequences for the miscreants, ranging from losing jobs to being charged with crimes.

One might hope that this phenomenon will have some deterrent effect against people behaving obnoxiously, but so far we haven’t noticed that happening. Most of our interactions with other people, which have been somewhat limited the past few months, are quite pleasant, bolstering our hope that people of all ages and sexes and races and class are basically OK, but there still seems to be the usual number of them who just don’t get how awful they’d look on a viral video. By now most of them have cell phone cameras of their own, and will pull them out to make you look bad, but if you keep your calm and act reasonably they’ll still wind up looking awful.

We have a still camera and a video camera on our old-fashioned and relatively dumb “flip phone,” but being defiant Luddites we’re proud to say we have no idea how to use them, much less upload anything visual on the internet, and we mostly regard these newfangled machines as another annoyance of modernity. People use them to show their friends the fancy meal they’re eating and share “selfies,” that quintessential neologism of the moment, and to our admittedly Gutenberg-era conservative way of thinking it has a aggravating effect on an already self-obsessed culture. We’d also hate to have our worst moments be videotaped and go “viral” on the internet, although we do our best not to do anything virulent, and wonder about a brave new world where our every venture into the public space is watched by both public and private cameras.

Some good might come of it, we grudgingly admit. There are now a couple of cases of white men allegedly killing black men for no apparent reason that might have been swept under the racial rug if not for some seemingly damning cell phone footage. In the Minnesota case the videographers were bystanders who caught it from different angle, and in the Georgia case it was captured by a man now accused of being an accomplice.

When President John Kennedy was assassinated in broad daylight in the public square there happened to one guy in the crowd who caught it on a hand-held film camera, and the footage has been argued about ever since. We truly hope nothing like that ever happens again, but if it does we expect the investigations and commissions and historians will have thousands of videotapes from every possible angle. All these videos might well result in the guilty being punished and the innocent exonerated, and we hope that comes to pass.

We don’t hold out much hope that human nature will be much improved by it, though.

— Bud Norman

On Viral Videos, Black Crime, Panicky White Women, and Political Correctness

These days some of the most-watched products of our high-tech popular culture are those grainy cell phone videos that go “viral” on the internet. Lately they’ve been making reality show stars of such women as “#BBQ Betty,” “#GolfcartGail,” “#CondoCathy,” “#ApartmentPatty,” and “#CornerstoneCaroline,” and we’re intrigued by the trend.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with latest internet epidemics, all of them are about panicky white women who were caught on those damnably ubiquitous cell phone cameras dialing 911 to report behavior by black people who turned out to be doing nothing at all suspicious. “#BBQBetty” was alarmed by a couple of black men at a nearby open-to-the-public grill in their local park, but when the police arrived they found the men merely charcoal-grilling some meat. “#GolfcartGail” called the cops because she spotted a black man shouting at a child during a youth sporting event she passed happened to pass by on her daily golf cart ride, but it turned out it he was a father doing his fatherly duty by trying to tell his far-away son to accept the referees’ rulings. “#ApartmentPatty” and “#CondoCathy” both called the cops on a couple of black guys who were using their keys to enter their legal residences. “#CornerstoreCaroline” called the cops on a 9-year-old black boy for groping her buttocks in a corner store, and the next day she was greeted by a large group of cell phone-wielding black people who videotaped and gleefully downloaded on to the internet her embarrassed reaction to some security camera footage that clearly showed the schoolboy had merely brushed her behind with his textbook-laden backpack as he made his way through the crowded store.

There’s also “#PermitPatty,” who reported an 8-year-old black girl selling bottled water, and “#NewportNancy,” who reported a black woman smoking a cigarette in a parking garage, and no doubt many other panicky white women whose similarly embarrassing 911 calls have somehow gone unreported even in this age of ubiquitous cell phone cameras. Most of the black folks we know are cool, and they assure us that most the white folks they know are cool, and almost all of our daily interactions with all sorts of people are mostly pleasant enough, but people being people we’re sure there are lot of panicky white people of both sexes out there who deserve some fleeting public shaming

As old-fashioned conservatives who were politically incorrect long before it was faddish, we’ll once again acknowledge that far too many 911 calls regarding black suspects prove all too well-founded, and that people being people pretty much every category of people has some serious explaining to do. Still, we urge our fellow white folk to be cool, and to hold out hope that most of the rest of the country continues to do the same.

— Bud Norman

The Climate for Satire

Pity the poor satirists, who are finding it ever harder to come up with a burlesque broad enough to exaggerate the latest news reports.

Readers of a certain age and certain subtle sense of humor will fondly recall the straight-faced surrealism of the great Bob and Ray, who used to pepper their satiric radio show with fanciful advertisements for such fictional companies as the Monongahela Metal Foundry, “casting steel ingots with the housewife in mind,” Einbinder Flypaper, “the brand you’ve gradually grown to trust over three generations,” and The Croftweiler Industrial Cartel, “makers of all sorts of stuff, made out of everything.” Our favorite was a spot for Cool Canadian Air, “packed fresh every day in the Hudson Bay and shipped to your door,” but apparently even that delightful absurdity has recently been overtaken by reality. According to a report in the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail, one of the hottest selling items in China right now is a bottle of Canada’s Vitality Air, billed as “100 percent Rocky Mountain air.” Apparently the air pollution in Beijing has become so bad that consumers there are willing to shell out 400 yuan, which is about 46 bucks or 42 pounds according to The Daily Mail, just to suck in the promised 150 or so breaths of pure “Lake Louise air” found in each soda-sized container.

Even such Gaia-hating and pro-industrialists sorts as ourselves have to admit that’s a sorry state of affairs, although we will gloat a bit that capitalism can hardly be blamed for it, and that so far only the most Bob and Ray sort of absurdist entrepreneurship seems to be offering any solution, so we can only hope that the big global warming alarmism confab in Paris will set things right. They’ve reportedly come up with something, although the Obama administration is calling it an “agreement” rather than a “treaty,” which would require the approval of two-thirds of the Senate, where it would probably fare even worse than that 95-0 rejection of the Kyoto “Accord” that happened back when Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and Paul Wellstone and most of the current liberal Democrats were in office, and so far as we can tell China has only agreed to start to clamping down on air pollution when the price of Cool Canadian Air becomes prohibitive, and India still seems intent on the same sort of coal-fired electrification of its rural villages that the Franklin Roosevelt administration once embarked on, so we’re not hopeful. Neither are we worried that both nature and human nature won’t revert to historic norms soon, which will admittedly lead to some inevitable cataclysm or another, although we hope it will occur sometime after our own expiration date, but we have to admit we can’t come up with a better joke than this unintentional comedy of climate change hysteria.

There’s nothing in this “agreement” or “plan” or “framework” or “accord” or anything else you might want to call it other than a “treaty” that forces China stop polluting its air before 150 or so breaths of Cool Canadian Air is worth 400 yuan, there’s nothing that will persuade India to leave its rural villages in the off-line dark, and since you dare not call it a “treaty” there’s nothing that will oblige a more sensible President of the United States to screw up the American economy to atone for communist China’s sins. Secretary of State John Kerry has said that “public shaming” will be the enforcement mechanism, but he’s not at all ashamed to have five lavish and energy-consuming houses and a motorcade of limousines and a private jet and a fancy yacht that doesn’t run all the time on wind power, and we don’t expect that China and India and all those other countries aspiring to American levels of extravagance will be any more shamed.

Then there’s the rest of the news, where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the front-runners for the next presidency and all sorts of similarly unsavory characters are waiting in the wings in the rest of the world and some sort of religious terrorism that cannot be named keeps popping up everywhere. It’s all far beyond our limited powers of satire, but we thank you nonetheless for dropping by The Central Standard Times, “a view from the middle of America.”

— Bud Norman