TORTURE BY TWEET
Jerry Harkins
––Coffin v. United States, 156 U.S. 432 (1895).
Let me begin with a confession: I like Andrew Cuomo. A bit rough around the edges, maybe, but he gets good things done. Among other things, he has done a better job of managing the covid pandemic than anybody else I can think of. He is the least ideological politician we have and, while he does fib occasionally, he is the most truthful and most transparent disciple of Niccolo Machiavelli currently working. Which is to say he’s a realist, a pragmatist and an empiricist. Unlike his father, he will never be elevated to the sainthood. Rather, he is the all-American boy, collecting and restoring muscle cars and riding Harley-Davidson hogs. What’s not to like?
For some reason, however, not everyone agrees with my assessment. Throughout his career, he has inspired an undercurrent of dislike, distrust and outright hostility. I think it’s his style. He is aggressive, dismissive and demanding. He does not suffer fools lightly. Recently, he has encountered a tsunami of criticism from all sides of the political spectrum. The talking heads and pundits are jumping all over him. A bipartisan group of legislators are crying (in one case, literally) for his scalp. Among other things, he is being accused of sexual misbehavior in a classic case of she-said-he-said. Several women have accused him of making them “uncomfortable.” One says he kissed her on the lips, another that he touched her arm. One claimed he asked her for a date, or at least she felt that was what he was doing. If true, these offenses were offensive but perhaps not in the same class as Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein.
Let there be no doubt that women in our society are often the victims of disgusting male behavior. Misogyny is and always has been prevalent and prominent in human society. Charles Darwin to the contrary notwithstanding, there does not seem to be any selective advantage our species can derive from it. Yet it is not a mystery. Men derive much of their self-regard from their imagined sexual prowess but women are in a position to judge the reality of that prowess. In other words, there is a significant source of anxiety built into the male-female relationship. There is also a power differential that serves to alleviate that anxiety and, of course, that works in favor of the male. Much of what Cuomo’s accusers are complaining about seems to derive from the macho perception of him, an image he cultivates. But sexual abuse at the level they describe does not account for all the current antipathy.
Take, for example, the case of the Honorable Ron Kim, the representative of the 40th Assembly District in the state legislature. Mr. Kim was one of the first Democrats to call for Cuomo’s resignation on the grounds that he ordered hospitals to discharge certain elderly covid patients back to the nursing homes they had been living in. He basically admitted it, explaining that there was a critical shortage of hospital beds needed for sicker patients. It’s complicated and it was a difficult decision but Honorable Kim takes it as evidence of mass murder. Kim seems to be making a name for himself as Jack the giant killer.
If this sudden outpouring of accusation were football, you would call it “piling on” and it would draw a penalty of fifteen yards and an automatic first down. Without making any judgment about the validity of the claims, the sudden emergence of so many different criticisms is bound to raise the antennas of conspiracy theorists. That, of course, is highly unlikely. We are witnessing not anything organized and choreographed. No one is blatantly lying. Rather, it seems to be a natural process that has evolved in the age of social media, a process in which molehills are converted into mountains at warp speed. The claims have to escalate if they are to keep the story alive in the real media. One thing is certain: there will be more accusations about more matters as the story unfolds and they will get progressively more graphic. On March 25, 2021, the New York Times ran a front page story based on anonymous sources saying that Cuomo had illegally arranged covid tests for members of his family at the outset of the pandemic. This was not news because the Governor had announced it himself at a news conference a few days after the tests were done. At the time, he was desperately trying to arrange testing for everyone and he figured his 89-year old mother would make a good selling point. A week later, again on the front page, it accused him of “…pitching a book proposal that would center on his image as a hero of the pandemic” and asking his secretary for help in said pitching. Heinous!
Just possibly, Andrew Cuomo is toast. After four years of Trumpism, it may be difficult to recall that the left can be just as doggedly stupid as the right. It seems neither side ever learns anything from reality. The Democrats seem to have forgotten their fiasco in driving Al Franken out of the U.S. Senate. And virtually all the pols actually liked Al who also stood accused, a la Cuomo, of making women uncomfortable. First, it was one woman talking about an unwanted kiss she had received eleven years before. Soon it was seven women with similar complaints and eventually nine came forward. Franken was forced to resign a breathtaking twenty-one days after the first allegation. Senator Schumer engineered the ouster apparently telling Franken there was no time for due process. Franken later said, “The idea that anybody who accuses someone of something is always right—that's not the case. That isn't reality.” Apparently, Al has forgotten Napoleon’s instruction to the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Asked how to tell friends from enemies, he says it’s easy: “Four legs good, two legs bad.”
Schumer’s idea that due process was untimely is truly extraordinary in an America that constantly brags about being a nation of laws. In the modern era, we have become a nation whose politics are more like a bull fight than a deliberative process. El Toro has no chance of surviving the afternoon. Before the sun goes down, he is going to be tortured to death. That’s what the customers are paying for, cheering for. Ole! Even if he sometimes slays his torturer, even if the spectators applaud his courage, his own death is fore-ordained. The fiercer he acts, the more they will applaud both his courage and his death. It is all an act. As Ernest Hemingway wrote, “All supposed exterior signs of danger that a bull gives, such as pawing the ground, threatening with his horns, or bellowing are forms of bluffing.” Now this is a metaphor and, like all metaphors, it limps. But not before we note that the matador, while hardly a hero, is almost always a decent, God-fearing family man, an Everyman acting in a monster-slaying scripted role that leaves no room for improvisation. Bull fighting and sex abuse scandals are both forms of the medieval morality play.
If you doubt this, you can go back and read the coverage of past sex abuse scandals. All but the most monstrous look alike. The same headlines, the same vocabulary, the same development of the story line, the same presumption of guilt, the same innocence of the victims. Only the names have changed. Then compare the sex abuse coverage to the mass murder coverage which has its own set piece architecture. You are bound to hear all the usual claptrap about thoughts-and-prayers, guns-don’t-kill-people and the need for common sense gun control. Whether its sex abuse or mass murder, what the reader gets is tragedy reduced to melodrama. The tragedy is, first, the anguish of the victims but it is also the rush to judgment and the formulaic attention paid to an important issue in our society. If Napoleon were advising today’s thought leaders, he might borrow from the Red Queen. “Off with his head! Sentence first, trial later.”
The cause of all this is the phenomenon of social media. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and their competitors provide an extreme version of freedom of expression. Not only do they let you shout pretty much whatever comes into your head, they magnify your impact by reaching a vast audience instantaneously. With billions of users, there are sure to be millions of believers. Never before has communication spread so rapidly and so immediately after it has been sparked. Never before has the content of communication been spread without a moment’s pause for consideration of its believability. In the new information environment, an untested assertion will be accepted as truth first by the credulous among us and soon by many others. The life cycle of any assertion is predictable. Once loose on the internet, it is certain to be picked up by the conventional media which gives it gravitas and credibility.
You remember Virginia O’Hanlon’s father who told her, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” On September 21, 1897, that newspaper replied to her inquiry by writing, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” The most famous editorial in journalistic history was a lie told to an 8-year old child. At least, it was a harmless –– perhaps a charming –– lie. Less charming are the political lies we have come to know in the social media. These give life to the guidelines for the of Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth: Make your lie big enough and repeat it often enough. All lies, of course, corrupt the truth and degrade the idea of self-government. By normalizing a culture of untruth, they stain even the most righteous of causes.
There is a class of problems that have no technical solution. Women must be heard with respect and the value of free expression must be protected. At the same time, we must not lose the assumption of innocence. There may come a time when such balances are easier to strike but, at the moment, it seems that something precious will have to give ground.
