Convictions on the Internet

I was reading a Newsmax article on Bowe Bergdahl yesterday discussing whether he should serve jail time for desertion. I don’t have much of an opinion about whether he’s guilty or not, that’s for the military court to decide. But I made the mistake of reading some of the 400 plus comments attached to the article.  As I read the first 100, I never saw one that was remotely sympathetic. More than half felt he should be lined up in front of a firing squad. The remainder:  “Bowe should rot in jail.” Nobody seemed to care he spent nearly five years being tortured as a captive of the Taliban.

It would appear Bowe has been convicted and sentenced in the court of internet opinion. So has President Obama for exchanging Taliban prisoners for Bowe. When the comments weren’t advocating a quick summary execution for Bowe, they wanted the firing squad aimed at the President. I feel partially responsible for this. I’ve spent the last thirty years working in the industry that put the World Wide Web in everyone’s pocket. Back in the Eighties, if I wanted to listen to domestic conspiracy or transfer of blame theories I had to order Jack Daniels at a dive bar or be held captive by a distant relative at a family reunion.

You know the kind of conversations I’m talking about. You’ve gone to a funeral and great uncle Clyde asks you out to the house for dinner and your dad makes a dumb ass remark like: “Wow it’s been a long time since I had potatoes like this.  We always have instant.”  Course that’s because mom really whips them with butter and milk rather than just mashing them in a bowl and dropping them on the table like Aunt Bennett. That’s when the fighting starts.  Mom rebuts, “You think I make instant?” She stops there, because she’s polite, and everyone with active grey matter in the room has perked an eyebrow at the idiot making the “Instant Potato” remark. But the baboon eyebrow flash politeness seems to leave on the table the premise that unenhanced wire masher pounded potatoes are better than butter-cream whipped potatoes. At least as far as the other ape species are concerned. Also the premise that we have been eating instant throughout my parents’ marriage and don’t understand what is good is established.

The conversations continue. Pretty soon, Uncle Clyde is making comments about African Americans. (He isn’t using that term.) Unlike dad, he notices the eye movements of the college grad baboon troop. “Oh,” he says, “Let me tell you something, I’m prejudice!”

“No shit!” One of us answers, smiling.

Acknowledgement of Clyde’s prejudicial point of view seems to establish the college grad faction accepts it.  (We do, only as a given.)  We pass the unenhanced potatoes around and glop lots of butter on them. There is no gravy.  Clyde makes ovations in our direction. “What are you guys doing with those fancy engineering degrees your parents and my fucking taxes paid for?”

I politely bored the table with particulars of my cube based coding job, editing out that my starting salary was more than what most of the other non-college grad relatives make after 30 years.  But I make the mistake of mentioning I get drug tested and don’t like that. I feel it invades my freedom. The conversation takes an ugly shift. There is a fray of accusations. All my uncles and my dad think I am an ungrateful fucking liberal. I’m what’s wrong with kids these days. I’m lucky to have such a nice job. The Depression gets mentioned. Then Clyde pounds his fist on the table, “Look, people who smoke pot are dead. You try and sell drugs to my granddaughter, I’ll take my gun and fucking shoot you. Am I clear?”

Attempting to swallow dry lumps of potato, the logical mind I spent six years training in philosophy, rhetoric, and sound engineering principals tried to put together the path where blame for the issues before our society had  been transferred to me. I didn’t come up with an answer other than I probably should have publicly corrected my dad about his instant potato comment.

On the way home that night, my only college educated uncle could tell I was disturbed. “Look we all know Clyde’s an asshole. But he’d give you the shirt off his back. Even if you were black.”

“Before or after he would shoot me?” I answered.

I never saw Clyde again. I was able to fly away to California, and outside of a dinner table, Clyde didn’t have much of a venue for his points of view. Had the internet been around in 1986, I could imagine Clyde tapping away at his IPhone volunteering to be on Bowe Bergdahl’s firing squad.

There were 400 some angry Clyde’s loose with the Newsmax article.  Thirty years since Clyde’s lumpy mash, I couldn’t be polite anymore.  I typed in the following: “You guys all sound like fucking assholes. If this were your kid, held and tortured by the Taliban, you’d be thanking Obama. So shut the fuck up.”

I checked back a few hours later, nobody had made any additional comments. Somehow I think I have Clyde to thank for stopping the conversation.