Alt Text
Can we see the truth as well as the blind?
Welcome to The Experiment, where we are still stunned that people said 2020 wasn’t a wave election. It was a wave interference election in which both Democrats and Republicans had wave elections. Normally, there’s only one wave.
This week we’re talking about not being able to call things what they are, and Jack Hughes says Gene Hackman needs to come out of retirement.
And as always, we offer suggestions on what to do (staying young), read (listening to Rush is birth control), watch (Hacks on HBO Max), and listen to (Sons of Kemet’s Black to the Future).
But first, have you ever heard about alt text?
Alt text, short for—get this—alternative text—is the opposite in function, intention, and morality from Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts.” Whereas those were meant to blur the truth and absolve liars, alt text is meant to aid in the search for truth, both in optimizing search engines and in helping the visually impaired see images. Apparently the blind have tools called “readers” that tell you what the picture is of, which is simple enough if it’s just a picture of a bag of nacho cheese Doritos. In this case, the alt text reads, “Doritos Tortilla Chips, Nacho Cheese, 1.75-Ounce Large Single Serve Bags (Pack of 64).” From this, we can easily tell what this is a picture of and that the person who wrote the alt text is German.
(It’s because all the words are capitalized, and in German they capitalize nouns. This joke actually would have been funnier in the original German.)
Alt text is trickier when the picture is the result of an editorial choice. “Putting into text what a picture is and what it’s for turns out to be a really difficult decision,” Seth Godwin said on a recent episode of his podcast, Akimbo.
Let take a recent example, such as Rep. Andrew Clyde, the Georgia Republican who recently said of the insurrectionists, “if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.” Imagine a picture of him in an article about insurrectionist deniers. The alt text of a picture of him can’t simply say that it’s a picture of Rep. Clyde. Unlike the sighted, the blind cannot see the truth in front of their faces. The alt text has to do that for them, so it has to say something like “This is a picture of Congressman Andrew Clyde denying that the insurrection was a violent attempt to stop a lawful election.” This alt text business comes in handy.
“I don’t think anybody is trying to question the legitimacy of the election.”
While Trumpian Republicans have alternative facts, the reality-based rest of us need to apply alt text more broadly, because simply calling things what they are is, for Republicans, hazardous to one’s career prospects. After giving a lot of speeches about cancel culture, Republicans went into a room and kicked Liz Cheney out of her leadership position for saying, among many other things, “We can't embrace the notion the election is stolen. It's a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy.”
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said she was being booted for causing “internal conflicts.”
“I don’t think anybody is trying to question the legitimacy of the election,” he said, ignoring the fact that about 60% of Republicans think the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Journalists, whose job it is to tell us what is happening, are struggling to tell us what is happening because it doesn’t fit into a house that has since been burned down. Among the first things to go in that old house was the Overton Window. During the nativist tea party rebellion, the Republican Party left an elephant-shaped hole in the wall and has kept right on going, yet journalists wander the original footprint of the old house, looking to “both sides” an unbalanced reality while begging, Brother, can you paradigm?
“There are still basic rules of decency in democracy,” Nafees Hamid said recently on CNN. “Like, ‘Don’t call your political opponents nazis. It’s an admission you’ve hit the limits of your logic, and it’s something we’ve seen too much of in recent years and decades. But what happens when your opponents actually call themselves nazis? Well, that’s when you know we’ve gone through the Looking-Glass.”
Well, actually…
It’s 2021, and journalism is still struggling with how to describe what they are seeing happen with their own eyes.
In 2012, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute—that is, a mainstream liberal and a mainstream conservative—came out with It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. The book documented the asymmetrical polarization of partisan politics in the United States, in which the Democratic Party futzed along from a center-left party to being a bit more to the left, and the Republican Party adopted a “no shirt, no shoes” approach and began humping orange traffic cones.
It’s 2021, and journalism is still struggling with how to describe what they are seeing happen with their own eyes.
For their trouble, Mann and Ornstein, who had long been considered the bi-partisan sages of the Beltway, were banned from Sunday morning TV talk shows. If it’s indecent to call the indecent indecent, you simply can’t put them in a place where people could see them. Wouldn’t be decent.
That was almost a decade ago, and still we have people equating the majority of the Republican Party, which won’t condemn the insurrection and thinks Trump won the election, with Bernie Sanders and AOC, who think we should pay workers more money and save the planet from getting all explody.
Now, the Republican Party has shifted somewhat in the same way a glass that your cat knocks off the table onto the floor has moved a bit. In 2020, the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden conducted the largest study of its kind and made an interesting observation: The GOP has not become more conservative, or at least much more so, on taxes, guns, abortion, what have you. Where it’s gone off the deep end is its stances on democracy, that is, voting rights, encouraging violence, immigration, anti-elitism, that sort of thing.
“The Republican party has not changed left-right placement but moved strongly in an illiberal direction. In this sense it is now more similar to autocratic ruling parties such as the Turkish AKP, and Fidesz in Hungary than to typical center-right governing parties in democracies such as the Conservatives in the UK or CDU in Germany,” they wrote.
So, nazis. But not nazis, say the journalists, unless the nazis call themselves nazis. To call the nazis nazis for exhibiting the behavior, opinions, and goals of nationalistic parties “is an admission you’ve hit the limits of your logic.”
My dude.
“The Republican party has … moved strongly in an illiberal direction [and] is now more similar to autocratic ruling parties such as the Turkish AKP, and Fidesz in Hungary than to typical center-right governing parties in democracies.”
Alice walked through the Looking-Glass—it’s a mirror, people—into a world in which nonsense is sensical, you walk away from something to get closer to it, and you run to stand still. There’s a logic to the illogic as the polarity of reason is reversed. We all know this, except for Hamid, who thinks there is something indecent about calling the indecent indecent unless and only if the indecent self-identify as indecent. (‘Twould be the only decent thing to do, don’t you think?) One would think that a journalist’s job would be to observe and report indecency, especially when it occurs in a since-razed mansion, but no. They walk around, admiring the nonexistent walls and norms, tut-tutting those who accuse former residents of destroying their half of the house.
Here in Texas—as foreboding an introductory adverbial clause as any in the business—the Texas legislature is considering a civics bill that would effectively ban the teaching of “a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue,” i.e., pretty much everything but the weather unless it gets especially cold or terribly hot. That bill is part of a national wave to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory, which is not taught in Texas, “so this author literally is legislating nothing,” said Rep. Jarvis Johnson. Well, not nothing. The bill also protects not only guns but ammunition as well from “discrimination.”
Lewis Carroll was an amateur, and we, dear reader, are lost. This already is and has long been Wonderland, where the last thing we are able to call something is what it is. To be able to see the truth of things as clearly as the blind? Well, that would be going through the Looking-Glass.
Gene Therapy
by Jack Hughes
“Gene Hackman is the best artist to craft a piece of commemorative art to capture all the tragedy and trauma that was 2020,” says Jack Hughes. Huzzah, say we.
How we’re getting through this
Establishing digital communication norms
Staying really, ridiculously young looking (probably forever)
What I’m reading
Dana Goldstein: “Schools Are Open, but Many Families Remain Hesitant to Return” - Want to see my nightmare?
Some families do not know that local public schools have reopened, because of language barriers or lack of effective communication from districts.
Elaina Plott: “The G.O.P. Won It All in Texas. Then It Turned on Itself.” - Sid Miller is thinking about primarying Greg Abbott??
The Republican Party — in Texas, in America — was “over” and “done,” he said. The Communists had taken control of the system, and they had already picked their winners. And so he had made up his mind, he said: He would never vote in a federal election again.
Mimi Swartz: “Could Matthew McConaughey Be All Right, All Right, All Right for Texas?” - See also: Betteridge's law of headlines
Yes, thinking that things couldn’t possibly get worse is never a great way to choose a candidate. But I don’t seem to be alone in thinking that a man who has played a lawyer in the movies might be better for Texas than the lawyers who play at being leaders in the Capitol.
Leslie Ylinen: “An FAQ About Your New Birth Control: The Music of Rush” - BAHAHAHAHA
No one has ever gotten pregnant while listening to the music of Rush. Clinical studies show that when combined with watching a male sexual partner play air bass along to the extended solo in “Freewill,” the contraceptive efficacy of Rush approaches 100%.
What I’m watching
Hacks, on HBO Max, is good until the last scene of the pilot, when it becomes great.
What I’m listening to
We do not talk enough as a country about how great Charles Bradley’s 2016 soul classic Changes is. No sir, we do not.
Little Dragon and Moses Sumney collaborated on “The Other Lover,” a slow jam.
Iceage is a Danish band fronted “by a lapsed Bible student,” writes Pitchfork, which raved about “Shelter Song.” I concur.
How had I never heard of Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection”?
This song, “to some i’m genius” by snow ellet, is some bouncy DIY emo pop.
Sons of Kermet put out a combustable, modern jazz record called Black to the Future. Check out the afrobeat-inflected “Hustle.”
I love—LUFF—Damien Jurado’s new single, “Tom.”
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Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself comes out June 8 from Penguin Random House. There is no better way to support this book than to pre-order a copy. You’re going to love reading what really happened at the Alamo, why the heroic myth was created, and the real story behind the headlines about how we’re all still fighting about it today.
