#tcot #p2 and the circular firing squad
When William Randolph Hearst was the current incarnation of the devil we today call Rupert Murdoch, his premier columnist was one Westbrook Pegler. Books have been written about Pegler damning him with faint praise, and there’s no lack of material to trash him. He started as a sports reporter and columnist, then moved to politics becoming the chief attacker of FDR. He was, for his day, O’Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh all rolled into one.
Time soured Pegler; he became a rabid anti-Semite and early proponent of the John Birch Society. But he was by all accounts a great writer. He was like Andrew Sullivan on steroids; somebody who could take a totally distasteful political theory and delight you with his description of it. His wit was lethal; he inspired the quote, “It feels good to have your throat slit by a professional.”
I wish I had him back for just a day, or even a small measure of his talent to describe what’s happened to the folks who sponsor the #tcot and #p2 Twitter hashtags. He was at his best when describing people in shouting matches with each other over meaningless fine points and irrelevant details. Even he might not be up to the task.
Hashtags are short tag descriptors that Twitter users include in their tweets so that downstream search engines and applications can perform automated categorizations. Both the left and the right have gotten into pissing contests in the last two weeks over what terms should be used, who may use them, and what they should mean.
Pegler would probably use a card game as metaphor. He liked those. Just when the players worked out what the winning hands were, and what all the chip colors meant, new players would arrive. They’d argue with the old players endlessly but then that argument would be eclipsed when even more players would show up with their own chairs, sit at the table and throw in a new deck of cards.
These twin catfights didn’t arise from conservatives being more anxious to monetize hashtags and website membership than liberals, or liberals unable to decide if good is enemy to the best or vice versa. Its because the players don’t own the card table, or the card room, or the game, nor do they make the rules. Twitter does that by allowing anybody to use #tcot and #p2 for anything they want, and unless that changes, we’re all arguing over the ownership of something we don’t own in the first place.
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