JJEROME HAS UNFRIENDED FACEBOOK
Jerry Harkins
There, Jerry! Don’t you feel a lot better now? Well, Doctor, ask me again in fourteen days when my unfriending becomes final and irreversible. That’s when Facebook says it will permanently erase me. Until then I will remain under constant surveillance and my every keystroke will be reported to The Party. But two weeks from now I will be not a has-been but a non-person, possibly a never-was like all those expunged from the Soviet history books. I expect they will denounce me to every man, woman and child I ever met, just as they sang my praises when I enrolled. How proud I was that day. “JJerome has become a member!” I never knew why the two J’s but it did not diminish my pride. Now I will no doubt be disfellowshipped by many, mourned by some and ridiculed by the rest. But the clozapine was not really helping (I think it’s better for schizophrenia than paranoia anyway) and it has several really nasty side effects.
What hath God wrought? (Either Numbers 23:23 is the culmination of a really weird story about Balaam beating his donkey or I dreamt it under the influence of the clozapine.) Facebook has become the universal consciousness [1] through the simple expedient of making all seven billion of us feel guilty if we don’t constantly tune into the trivia of our friends’ lives. Some of these “friends” are actually people you know, love and admire. (That’s how FB gets a hook into you.) Some are casual acquaintances you see once a year and exchange Xmas emails with. Then there are the folks whose names you have to dredge up from the deep recesses of memory. You know, people you met at a Free Paris Hilton cocktail party five years ago. Finally there are the thousands of people Facebook insists are just dying to friend you if only you would press the right button. After all, you have a friend in common and, if you remember the six degrees of separation thing, before long you will have seven billion friends. Every one of them will send you birthday greetings and you will know what they had for breakfast this morning and whether or not they faked an orgasm last night. Oh, joy!
But I digress. Actually God is not responsible for Facebook, Mark Zukerberg is. (I do not deny the possibility that Mr. Zukerberg is God.) He and a bunch of buds were sitting around in a circle in Lowell House one afternoon studying a Girls of the Ivy League feature in Playboy and having a grand old time. In the background, a DVD was playing on the TV. It was the 1984 release of 1984. (The one with the original Dominic Muldowney score rather than the Eurhythmics trash which replaced it a week after it was released in London [in 1984].) (I wrote that last sentence specifically to try out my new emoticon—a grin and a wink. Hope you liked it.) Anyway, Mark got this billion dollar idea and, by the end of the session, they had decided to call it CircleJerk.com. The name did not survive the first meeting with the venture capitalists who proposed inyourface.com and everybody thought that was pretty good but when the sweet-smelling haze dissipated, it got dumbed down to its present form.
Like most things that emerge from Ivy League bull sessions, Facebook is not an unmixed blessing. Think about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which emerged full grown from the mind of another Harvard man (Henry Strangeglove Kissinger) during an earlier Lowell House tea party. Dr. Kissinger was the coach of the mixed doubles tiddlywinks team at the time. Since Harvard lacked one of the genders in 1957, they recruited transvestites of whom there was no shortage.
As I say, Facebook has a number of drawbacks. To begin with, Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban it as a public health menace because of the number of people it bores to death. When Mike Bloomberg says you’re boring… Worse still, neo-conservatives see it as a threat to national security because it has exposed America as a nation of vacuous Yahoos. (A Yahoo is a character in a boring novel by Jonathan Swift. A Yahoo! on the other hand is a Yahoo trying to be non-boring by adding an exclamation point. Yahoo! emerged from what passes for a circle jerk at non-Ivy universities, in this case Stanford. The jerks were engineering students studying a beguiling circuit diagram. Enough said!) Don Rumsfeld came out of retirement to propose a surgical strike on Palo Alto which, with a little luck, might take out Sunnyvale and Cupertino at the same time. Of course with Don’s luck the missiles would miss the valley altogether and hit downtown Brattleboro, Vermont.
In addition to being boring, Facebook is ruining the market for talk therapy and the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation by encouraging people to vent their frustrations, complaints, indiscretions, alienations and other banalities to a global audience sure to respond only with a lol or meh. Given my skepticism about talk therapy, I contributed another new emoticon (I’m really good at this). :o stands for “How did that make you feel?” It hasn’t gone viral yet.
Bad enough I needed to reply to that post about your dog’s diarrhea but first I had to spend a half hour figuring out if you were serious. Maybe this was a test of your friends’ loyalty, sympathy or intelligence. Since I only vaguely remembered you from the cocktail party (while we were being introduced, I was probably ogling Paris’ sister, Nicky). I couldn’t be sure. I tell you, bubbula, Facebook was anxiety provoking. So I’m well rid of it even if, like the Ancient Mariner, I am doomed to wonder the world telling my tale:
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns;
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
Scholarly Endnote
1. Otherwise known as the “collective unconscious,” an idea invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in 1919. C.G. wrote a rich description of the fantastical material stored in his new mental construct but Facebook has now exposed this as utter nonsense if not culpable malpractice. The actual material of the collective unconscious is now seen to be nothing but the dregs of the most dreary, humdrum dross of daily life.
