Jane recommended the Alex Jones documentary. “No, please!” I pleaded. I hate inviting hatefulness into our house. Images befoul no less than sewage. Our house is holy. Bad enough such monsters exist!
Jane overruled. We needed to see it, she said, to understand. She was right, of course. Ignoring vileness does not erase it.
Long before Cyclops or Grendel, monsters enthralled. Psychologists debate why. Are they escapist fantasies or infantile distortions of fearsome parents? New technology has spawned new monsters. Tumblr, I read, features sexyman monsters including Cecil Gershwin Palmer, Arataka Reigen, Nagito Komaeda, Waluigi, and Junkrat, each with its abnormalities, special powers, and fan base. I would add Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and Fox News to this crop of techno-enabled ghouls.
Computers permit monstrous fictions to whoosh into defenseless households at no cost, promoting fantastic nonsense more thrilling than onerous reality. The improbability of these concoctions is essential to their allure. They kidnap feeble intellects and whisk them to la-la lands from which they may never be rescued, because the la-la land’s pleasanter than dreary home. In la-land, losers become winners, servitude becomes service, foes conspire, failure’s never one’s fault, and victim turns victor if the story’s read right. Lightning-quick computers can make pop-up monsters potent overnight.
Alex Jones, a facile fabulist, informed his viewers shortly after the slaughter of twenty-six students and teachers in Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2014 by a deranged gunman, that the story was a hoax staged to stymie gun control legislation. Grieving parents were actors, the six-year-olds never died, unsuspecting Americans were being gulled by corporate conspirators, the truth must out! This preposterous upside-down distortion of tragic facts suited Jones’ audience – yet again, the deck was stacked against them! Ratings spiked – as did profits from Jones’ extra-special vitamin supplements, formerly labeled snake oil.
Seventy-five million Americans came to believe Jones’ hooey, making life a horror and torment for survivors, who’d already suffered plenty. It got so bad that the parents sued Alex Jones for his injurious lies. They won big-time – judgments amounting to a billion dollars toppled Jones and his enterprise into bankruptcy though, surprise, surprise, so far he’s avoided forking over a dime.
One watches The Truth vs. Alex Jones wide-eyed, slack-jawed. At least the Tumblr monsters don’t insist they exist! Jones revels in sewing distrust, spooking the dim-witted, scaring and scarring the bereaved. How could his followers be so dumb, we gasp. What’s gotten into them? How do we disperse this fulminous mob?
Our glorious First Amendment wasn’t designed for our wired moment. Thomas Jefferson foresaw a lot, but not the World Wide Web. The answer to Jones’ wizardry (and Bannon’s and Trump’s and Fox News’) must be to make malicious lying as punishable as reckless driving or poisoning drinking water or any other deliberate assault on the health and safety of an unsuspecting citizenry. Fantasies – fine, opinions – fine, inadvertent errors – fine, even polysyllabic missives – fine, but malicious lying, no. If you’re stopped for speeding, you get a ticket or, if your violation is rash enough, your license is revoked. So it should be with malicious lying. Make retribution prompt and painful enough to eliminate the temptation. If justice takes a decade and millions in legal fees, vile liars won’t quit and our peril will persist.
“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts,” said Senator Moynihan. Without honesty, self-government isn’t feasible, for how can we collaborate if we do not trust? Alex Jones is symptom of a dire disease which will supplant democracy with tyranny. Time to wake up.