A Twit Tweets

Maybe I shouldn’t say “twit,” but unlike “bimbo” the word is not gender-specific in its connotations, which do not include any sexual ones. The woman Mark Belling referred to was acting like a twit, at least in the moment she spoke about right to work legislation without knowing what it is but thinking she did. Yet she would have been a twit even if she were a man.

Anyway….

Another woman felt compelled to quit her employment with Governor Walker’s campaign – I guess that’s what it is by now – because her tweets proved offensive to Iowans of influence in the Governor’s party. Maybe she deserved a setback. She should rethink the uses of social media before seeking employment as an expert in that field again.

I’ve never tweeted anything, but I do know that tweets lack context. An isolated string of 140 characters, even if they form words and constitute a sentence, has little but itself to give it meaning. Moreover, one who tweets cannot legitimately expect anyone who happens to read a given tweet to be a follower. The same is true of hashtags.

Thus readers are free to give a tweet any context they desire, even compelled to do so. This is what happened to the quitter. She tried to make up for it by issuing a whole paragraph of early morning tweets, but the fact she had to issue them in six or eight installments only tends to prove my point.

In general, only a very profound, or a very trivial, sentence carries its own context with it – that is, sufficient context to make its meaning unmistakable. Users of Twitter should probably confine themselves to the trivial. Unfortunately, most political discourse, on the other hand, is neither profound nor trivial. This is what our Twitter quitter should reflect on.

Tweets are like sound bites that way. Only with sound bites the context, sometimes maliciously, gets edited out. Tweeters have only themselves to blame.

The Economics of Envy: A blind spot? Or the dog whistle of the bourgeoisie?

At Marquette University’s On the Issues forum last Monday, Mike Gousha, without throwing a hardball, asked Congressman Ryan to explain, and maybe defend, his comments on the “economics of envy.” And a very peculiar defense he made.

The first thing he said is clearly wrong: the “envious” classes do not drive and did not invent class conflict – and the latter certainly not lately. Class conflict is an historical feature of every civil society, from the time when class structures were primarily social, though modern times, when they became primarily economic. Only primitive societies have social roles without having stratified social classes. Naturally, people being what they are, conflict has run unabated during that whole time, though it is less noticeable in times of prosperity or national emergency. But it takes two to tangle: no one class started it.

Next, why ascribe bad emotions to the class thus singled out as driving the conflict? If you wanted to use a loaded e-word, you could call it the “economics of exploitation” instead. And if you wanted to better express the emotion the working poor feel, you would call it the “economics of oppression,” not envy.  

That’s because people who work for a living don’t necessarily envy, to use Mr. Ryan’s example, Craig Culver. They don’t want that kind of responsibility; they know their own limitations. For the most part, they just want to work for a fair wage and go home to their families at the end of the day. You don’t have to use an emotionally loaded word at all; you can use a morally loaded word and call it the economics of injustice. A living minimum wage, that enables workers to help pay for their children’s college education and save for their own retirement, is an issue of social justice, not bad emotions.

Finally, I’m not suggesting that equality of opportunity is not a good thing or that it does not, in large measure, exist in our society. What people like the working poor, and those who sympathize with them, are saying, is that by itself it’s not enough.

This is Mr. Ryan’s blind spot. Plainly he’s out of sympathy with a class of society he can bad-mouth so plausibly. It goes with the Republican territory. Likewise, to use one of columnist Eugene Kane’s expressions, the term “economics of envy” is a dog whistle audible only to the bourgeoisie. It causes them to think of people who really are shiftless, and lump those people with people who do want to work and will work for almost any wage they are forced to accept. That makes it easier to ignore injustices to the latter.