Is the reasonable person standard dead?
Comedians have to depend on a reasonable audience. Can our country?
Welcome to The Experiment, where we realize we’re in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now so before our final nail gets put in our cancel culture casket, we'd like to set the record straight that we think the Karate Kid reboot was far superior to the original. Jack Hughes has some serious thoughts about the Trump-Kennedy ticket, and I wonder whether it’s time to give up and embrace the stupidity.
As always, we recommend what to do (make these cookies), read (Matt Levine’s Money Stuff newsletter), watch (Coda on Apple TV+) , and listen to (Theon Cross’s Intra-I)
But first, have you ever heard of the reasonable person standard?
The “reasonable person standard” is a supposedly objective test given to juries to determine negligence. This is a fiction from English courts that supposes a hypothetical dude encountering uncommon circumstances, such as sexual harassment, banning books, and political satire. And though this fictitious person by definition does not exist, juries have for centuries been told to judge whether someone was negligent by first asking how a reasonable person would have handled the situation.
S and I just got back from a road trip to Houston to celebrate our 12th anniversary. We chose Houston — c’mon, now — not because of it’s many charms — seriously, it’s got plenty — or its vibrant — quit! — restaurant scene — cut it out! Houston’s nice! — but because — dammit, if you can’t say anything nice about Houston… — two of her favorite comedians, Hasan Minhaj and Trevor Noah were performing on successive nights.
It was Minhaj, performing to a masked, mostly Desi audience that got all the references S & I didn’t, who built his set on the reasonable person standard. In his case, however, he’s not worried about a court of law but the court of public opinion. He’s a comedian afraid of getting cancelled for crossing the line, whether by the Saudi royal family or by an audience apparently intolerant of the appearance of intolerance.
“Everything here tonight is built on trust,” he said. “That’s why I locked up your phones.” Minhaj said he’s assuming that the “audience can tell the different between sincerity and satire,” or that we were all reasonable people. This may have been true for his audience, but after last week I’m not sure the reasonable person standard still holds in America.
Let’s review the tape:
Over Halloween weekend, President Joe Biden’s meeting with the Pope ran so long that Amy Tarkanian — the daughter-in-law of the UNLV basketball coach and the former Nevada Republican chair — started a rumor that Biden had a “bathroom accident.” A reasonable person would assume this was satire; conservatives on Twitter did not. They started analyzing the color of Biden’s suit in before-and-after photographs like the Zapruder film to provide Biden did, in fact, crap his drawers, and “Poopy pants Biden” became a trending Google search. It’s now an article of faith among many that this happened, which required Snopes to debase itself with this not at all satirical article fit for a time capsule, “Did Biden Poop His Pants in Rome?”
On Monday, hundreds of QAnon supporters showed up to Dealey Plaza in Dallas because they expected JFK Jr. to reappear and announce he was running as Donald Trump’s running mate in 2024. When JFK Jr., who as of late has been dead, did not appear, organizers of the event decided that he would appear later that night at the Rolling Stones concert. And though this theory was considered so outlandish that even Q himself disavowed it, at no point did anyone get the impression that the people had come to Dallas on a lark. (No one goes to Dallas for a lark. It’s a notably larkless city. The official bird of Dallas is a Southwest Airlines 737.) Perhaps the only good thing that came from people taking this seriously was that Google searches for “JFK Jr.” eclipsed “poopy pants Biden.”
Election Day dawned and gave no rest to the reasonable person. An executive for Newsmax, which makes Fox News look like a bastion of thoughtful, evidence-based consideration, had to tweet a statement that was at turns mundane and dizzyingly bizarre: The COVID-19 vaccines work (good, good) and do not contain any sort of bioluminescent marker (what the what?).
Let’s give the reasonable person a chance to catch his breath while I explain. Apparently Emerald Robinson, Newsmax’s White House correspondent tweeted that the coronavirus vaccines contain a bioluminescent market called Luciferase so that 1) you can be tracked and 2) you will glow in the dark. (I wish!) Robinson based her assertion on (wait for it) a Facebook post that claimed this was all tied to patent number (it gets worse) 060606. The Devil, as always, is in the details. Pray tell, reasonable person, is it satire that a White House correspondent shares a conspiracy theory that the vaccines are a satanic plot or that Newsmax was forced to tell the truth for once?
Oh, by the way, Robinson has more than 440,000 followers on Twitter.
Tuesday was also Election Day. I won’t bother you with my analysis, though I do recommend Paul Waldman’s below. The hottest takes have already been taken. I’ll make only this observation: seven Jan. 6 insurgents won elected office last week. One was sworn into the North Carolina legislature; most of the Democrats staged a walkout, which I’m sure made them feel better.
Pundits had a hard time making sense of the Trump campaign in 2016. When the Republican primary field zigged, Trump would act like a dumb bully. When Hillary Clinton zagged, Trump would act like a dumb bully. How were the smartest political reporters in the country supposed to figure that out? Still, there was one, whose name sadly escapes me, who found a Trump decoder ring. The best way to predict his next move in 2016 was to ask what the dumbest possible move was. Invariably, he made that move, and it worked.
I called that the First Rule of Trump: He will do the dumbest possible thing. It doesn’t just apply to him now. In his latest Money Stuff newsletter, Matt Levin described how attention even for dumb stuff creates more shareholder value than do logical plans to build a better business. If a CEO walked around in public with no pants on, he speculated, this would get more people talking about the business than would any plan to do something real. Just get people on Reddit talking about cryptocurrency. Speculate unrealistically about a grand alliance with Elon Musk, as shareholder activists recently did (successfully, I might add) with Macy’s.
“The basic issue is that right now everything is dumb. You can complain about that, or you can embrace it,” he writes.
Put another way, if the whole world looks like satire, but they’re being sincere, does the difference really matter? What good does it do you to insist that water freezes at zero degrees Celcius or that January 6 was a violent attempt to overthrow a lawful election or that getting Pfizered does not make me a tool of Satan if I could just turn fake news on Reddit into real money in the stock market.
“Lower the cost of capital,” writes Levin. “Embrace the stupidity.”
Fine, I guess. Insisting that up is up and down is down has never made me a lot of friends. Being right about others being wrong is isolating ahead of the fact and annoying afterwards. Why bother even trying to make sense of things if we’re just going to satirize ourselves by electing people to office who tried to overturn an election they insisted was unfair… Oh, bother it all. My head hurts. Maybe the reasonable person has an ibuprofen.
Maybe we’ve crossed a line. Early on Friday, before we saw Minhaj’s show, we took in the Calder-Picasso exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The pairing of the Spanish giant with the American sculptor was a cute, if thin idea. What made a bigger impression on me was Picasso’s series of bulls, which is most often described as a quest for simplicity. I saw something different. Picasso was a rebellious, anti-Franco, anti-fascist communist using the bull, symbol of Spain, as his muse. In the first four slates, the bull becomes progressively more realistic, more muscular, and more powerful.
Then in slate V, he sees the cracks. He sees how the component parts of a bull — or of anything really, any object, even a country — can be divided and separated. From there the bull’s decline is inevitable. Muscles disappear as the bull fades in successive incarnations until it’s left an empty shell of itself.
Would a reasonable person think this is sincere or satire?
The sincerest form of satire these days is to bemoan our divisions, but if on one side scientists are telling us the vaccine works against the airborne plague and on the other side they’re taking advice from Joe Rogan and saying the Devil is using vaccines to hasten the apocalypse, is the problem really division or that a third of the country has fallen into madness? It’s funny ha-ha to watch QAnon wave “Trump Kennedy” flags, but we minimize QAnon at our own peril.
“Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants,” said a pollster who found that 30 million Americans believe in its principals.
If one side believes JFK Jr. is dead and the other side believes the country is run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles, is the problem that we haven’t found a peaceful co-existence with QAnon or that we in fact are coexisting with them?
Trevor Noah, who hails from South Africa and has an outsider’s perspective on our predicament clearly thinks division is the problem. “That’s where everyone gets caught up,” he said at the Toyota Center on Saturday. “They want to make one idea of America.”
“Half of the fights Americans have is one half using the idea of America as a cudgel against the other half,” he said. The mostly unmasked audience applauded.
Noah, though hilarious, is wrong. There is only one side demanding the overthrow and complete submission of the other. I’m happy and in fact prefer to live in a pluralistic society where people can believe whatever they want as long as they respect the rule of law and the Golden Rule, which in this case means making sure you are inoculated against the plague and not spreading the virus or conspiracy theories.
I’m not ready to embrace the stupidity. As much as I’d like to make peace, I’m going to keep painting my bulls, even if it’s not looking like it’s going to turn out well. It’s tempting to laugh off poopy pants Biden, JFK Jr., and glow-in-the-dark vaccines as as joke, but that lets the people who mean all this sincerely off the hook. The division we have in this country is not left-versus-right but reality-versus-dangerously unhinged, and I think any reasonable person would see it that way.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Digging up old bones here in Houston
Making these peanut butter-miso cookies
Checking out Calder-Picasso here in Houston
Eating at this amazing Indian restaurant in Houston
Getting appetizers here before a show at the Toyota Center
What I’m reading
Matt Levine: “Macy’s Targeted by Meme Activists” - Read this. It’s sort of unbelievable.
Paul Waldman: “The real lesson Democrats should take from this election” - The kicker, folks.
What I’m watching
If I see a better movie this year than Coda, the marvelous story about a hearing daughter in an otherwise deaf family, it’s going to be a great year for movies. This one is up there with Minari. Writes NPR’s Linda Holmes, “There is a place for the crowd-pleaser, the tear-jerker, the movie that wants to manipulate your emotions and make you cry — particularly if it manages to bring something new to an old formula.”
What I’m listening to
If teenage Jason knew that when he turned 50 he’d really be into a modern jazz album by a tuba player, he’d had despaired his future. Nevertheless, here we are, with Theon Cross’ Intra-I.
Lily Konigsberg’s “That’s The Way I Like It” is some alt-goodness.
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