"I'll Decide What You Mean"

The other day, someone in one of my Facebook groups asked "what's your most hated song." I offered up Hotel California, because it inflicted an endless-loop earworm on me when I was sitting alone in a canyon for three days with nothing but the wind and my journal to try and displace it, but that's a tale for another day. One group member mentioned Macarthur Park, a song that twice became a hit. Richard Harris' version reached #2 on the charts in 1968, and Donna Summer's 1978 version was #1 for three weeks.

The song includes these insipid lyrics:

Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no………..

Mild curiosity and good timing led me to googling the meaning behind the lyrics, and it turns out that this (and everything else in the song) was an actual occurrence, as in it just happened. The songwriter's inspiration was a relationship and breakup, so I conclude that the lyrics are just atmospheric. Nevertheless, there were pages of speculation as to deeper meanings or hidden metaphors.

That stanza has been earworming on and off me for the past day. Gee, thanks, group member. One suggested remedy is to actually listen to the song through the end, but I instead opted to use it as blog fodder.

Why, you might wonder? Because, at roughly the same time (or at least during periods of cake-in-the-rain earworm), this bit intersected with my sensorium.

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

It's an interesting read, with answers varying across the spectrum of possibility. What interests me most, in today's context, is not the idea of people finding symbolism in art, but rather when people presume the creator of that art intended the symbolism they gleaned.

Some of the respondents said they do, some said they don't, and some noted that symbolism in their tales was a serendipitous consequence of their process. Some worked with it when it emerged, others only discovered it after the fact.

This doesn't mean that the symbolism the authors wrote or found matches what a particular reader extracts. That's fine. More than fine, actually - the beauty of the human experience is that we each walk different paths.

Where things can go wrong is when someone decides for everyone else (author included) that "X" is there. I'm reminded of the Kurt Vonnegut bit from Rodney Dangerfield's Back To School (yet again, I find myself ready to scold those who haven't seen it...).

It's in our nature to seek patterns and to presume agency. Literally - it's an evolutionary survival trait. That twitching blade of grass on the savannah is probably just the wind, but it might be a lion. Those who guess "lion" lose nothing if wrong, while those who say "just the wind" will get eaten one time in a thousand or whatever. Over millennia, the pattern-seeking and agency-assuming get reinforced. And, so, today, we have people who connect dots that have no connection, with 0.001% "maybes" translated into certitude. Couple that with no penalty for being wrong - hold that thought - and the inclination to think one's self as smarter than the masses, and you get birthers, truthers, flat-earthers, vaccine-autism theorists, and other non-evidence conspiracists. I covered those recently. You also get Hamas defenders and history revisionists. I covered those more recently.

Related to both are the pattern-seekers that find racism and other bigotries under every rock and behind every tree. They, like Sally Kellerman's Professor Diane Turner, decide what is what and where, even if the originator disagrees.

That's how they can defend calling a nine year old Native American boy a racist and appropriator for wearing a costume and face paint to a football game.

That's how a Twitter mob can sleep with itself after calling a Chipotle employee a racist for asking a habitual dine-and-dasher to prepay for his order.

That's how a janitor at Smith College, tasked to be alert for trespass, got branded a racist for questioning a student's presence in an otherwise-unoccupied and shut-down dormitory.

That's how a hispanic utility worker who got prompted to make the "OK" sign got accused of (and fired for) being a white supremacist.

Remember that I told you to "hold that thought?" Once again, we see how social media's decoupling of instant feedback from statement is the equivalent of sand in a gearbox. People are generally afraid to look stupid in front of their peers (another evolutionary survival trait), and that reticence has served as a social lubricant for millennia. Now, however, you can post something utterly inane on Facebook or X-Twitter or other social media sites and be insulated from skeptical eyebrow raises, looks of disgust, and other physical cues that you're out of line. A combination of other factors might curate the spectrum of who sees your inanity to those who are more apt to agree with it. And, another bit of social lubricant - the desire not to be confrontational - might dissuade those who'd give you those cues in person from bothering to comment on your statement. I know I don't waste my time telling the chemtrail people they're being idiots.

The feedback loop being thus distorted, we unfortunately witness the evolution of the crackpot to bully. Whereas someone who tells you that wearing a white T-shirt is racist should normally be met with "don't be a [redacted] [redacted]," the way things work now, with everyone exchanging ideas via the Internet rather than in person, someone might eventually think to monetize the notion, and the "cooler than thou" crowd might lionize the monetizer, and we end up with the next Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo or Nikole Hannah-Jones or Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky.

The Internet has depersonalized us. As a result, it has become easier to discount dissent and diminish the dissenters themselves to non-person status. This suits identitarians just fine - you are, to them, nothing more than your skin color or gender or orientation or other demographic. It flies in the face of libertarianism and classical liberalism, which esteem the individual and treat all as equals. This makes fighting for individual liberty that much harder. Yet fight we must, because the alternative is disastrous.

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For the record, I made up the white T-shirt bit. Maybe I’m prescient, though…