Songs from my Auditory Cortex

Meryl Streep gave a nice speech, scolding the president elect for bad behavior. He tweeted back.

Of course he did.

No one is surprised DT tweeted back. Take that as a given. Sometimes the weather is bad, and sometimes at 3am the future president tweets at his critics. No one is surprised, and there is nothing new here. And yet….

People sure do like to talk about it.

I’d rather not.

Take a moment to look around.

Behind DT lies a week of putsches best soon forgotten - a laundry list of the unwise, the unpopular, of both at once. Ahead of DT - this week - a whirlwind of double-, triple-, quintuple-booked coups, rushed efforts desperate to slip past public notice. For reasons. And as always with DT, Russia.

Russia, the little scratch on the roof of his mouth that would heal if only the man could stop tonguing it, but he can’t.

What a gift, in such times, to tweet about Meryl Streep! To populate the networks and google news searches with a flurry of arguments and opinions and political fact-checks on comments about diversity in MMA wrestling from an Oscar speech.

Perhaps what we need is a code for the times:

Do not engage with the tweets; you are being managed.

News about DT’s tweets long since passed from real news into a sort of “celebrity dog bites man” story. It’s not surprising; not unusual; distinguishable only by the details of each case. In this week’s episode Meryl Streep opposes mocking the disabled, so that guy called her “overrated.” Goodness gracious, and tune in next week.

That’s not a description of actual news. That’s entertainment news. Maybe you read it to share outrage with your team; maybe you read it because you enjoy the misplaced outrage of the other team. What you don’t do is read it for political relevance. It has none. Less than none - it is click bait; filler that acts to replace political relevance.

This is important. Do not engage with the tweets; you are being managed.

The important part of these stories is not what happens, but why it keeps happening.

The man himself does it because he literally can’t help himself. Ahem.

But he is still doing this because his team hasn’t stopped him. And they haven’t done that because provocative culture-wars tweets distract the opposition, and because the outrage of "liberals” is meat and bread to his diehards.

Make it a daily affirmation.

Do not engage with the tweets.

Billy Joel - Miami 2017 (See the Lights Go Down on Broadway)

Too soon?