Controlling the message

“The internet is fucked up,” my son said. We were discussing “Seinfeld” and the smooth career of Seinfeld himself and we slipped into discussion of the rest of the cast and their lives since and then naturally of Michael Richards. “If he had only been heard by just the audience that night without somebody videoing it, he might have just been able to apologize and that would have ended it, instead of it going everywhere, with Seinfeld having to go on Letterman to defend him.” We decided it’s the modern way of doing celebrity business: control the message while appearing transparent. It began with Watergate. In his own clumsy, half-distrusting way, Nixon created the internet. He tried to control the message about the burglars but didn’t destroy the tapes. Be a snoop but watch out for snoops. Nixon did the former but self-destroyed because he carelessly overlooked the latter. That’s the internet message to my twenty-first century children: trust almost no one, they’re all listening, and some want to impeach you, expose you, hurt you and as long as you try to be free, there will be those interested in watching you be ruined, and take an occasional pot-shot of their own on Twitter. We tell my children, control the message, the complicated, nuanced balanced truth simply doesn’t matter. It’s a bloodless world with a short attention span, and it’s listening to me, and you, right now. Forty years ago we were so happy, we Nixon haters, with Watergate, with watching him pathetic and beaten. We didn’t realize it was a double-edged sword, exposing evil only to ferment ignorance and hatred all these years later.