“IWhy are we talking to each other when we could just text?”/Image: Licensed Adobe stock, Francesco83.
How are we doing, my questioning, conservative readers?
Hold it right there, dear Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW) readers. Before you launch into a diatribe about how you’re grandmother needs a PET scan, your pet cat won’t stop sleeping on your face, and work is taking up too much of your life, and on and one, allow to make one thing clear. I don’t care. I simply need an opening to my weekly column, and pretending to care, much like President Donald Trump, our hero pretends to care about the white working class, is the introductory path I’ve chosen for these weekly write-ups on how to be your most Alt-right.
This week one of the millions and billions and trillions of emails I received from readers asking not the big, important questions, but small, petty ones instead was on reducing the quality of her interpersonal interlocution. As little as I care about what’s happening in your Alt-lives, your queries do make me happy. They tell me the complete, utter, and non-stop disaster that is the Alt-right lifestyle hasn’t tamped down your desire, need, and longing to live it. Next, I feel more validated in my conserva-pursuits, and on and on in a constant feedback loops of necrotizing fasciitis. Let’s look at the letter I received below and my response to it.
Dear Kaylee,
I’m a forty-something woman and a proud member of the conservative right-wing of the contemporary political spectrum in the good, ol’ U.S.A. I am concerned that our collective communication skills as a society are still too advanced to allow the wrongheaded, easily-seen-as-ill-advised policies and ideologies we espouse to be taken up by enough people in order to allow us to take back our culture from the Liberal Loonies. Can you advise me on how to debase them to so that conspiracy theories, antagonistic interactions that accomplish nothing, and assertions unsupported by evidence become the norm rather than an uphill battle we on the right are always fighting?
Concerned in Kankakee
Dear Kankakee,
Three Will Set Us Free
First of all, your hometown sounds like a sore you get your lips and then make more apparent by putting concealer on it. Second of all, I have some grand, great, and easily-grokked pointers for you on making sure your communications with other humans are as poor in quality as possible, thereby providing a welcoming milieu for the foolish quest of the right-wing in 2018. My advice is based on a book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle.
Turkle says that our mobile devices serve a trio of pathetically desperate purposes: they make us feel we “can always be heard,” that we “can put our attention wherever we want it to be,” and that we “will never have to be alone.” This little triumvirate of “truth” sounds all too familiar, I know, SYRW readers. We on the right love to scream our opinions at people and have others do the same at us (see what passes for conversation on Fox News) so her first observation is well-received by us. Rightists in 2018 like you and me think way too much of ourselves, self-fulfilled as we are with a false empowerment based wholly on human hubris and self-delusion, which makes her second point a terrific truth to us (but no one else). And finally we can’t deny her third point, despite our desire to kill the entire idea of community by being obsessed with the supposed sanctity of our homes and property above all else that we kid ourselves into believing personal firearm use allows us to preserve (it really doesn’t), our whole ideological project of late is a reaction to how lost and alone we feel in a rapidly evolving global culture.
In short: increase the amount of digi-communication you engage in, valuing it over face-to-face on any day, in every way.
Dude, Where’s My Phone?
“As I’ve noted, people with phones make themselves less vulnerable to each other and feel less connected to each other than those who talk without the presence of a phone on the landscape,” writes Turkle. Yeah, duh, lady. We don’t want to feel vulnerable or connected, it’s scary and requires an acknowledgment that we don’t already know and have all there is to know and have. Forget that a willingness to be vulnerable is the only way human connections deepen and become meaningful. We want to increase our isolation in our McMansion fortresses and dilapidated RVs! And we’re going to accomplish that by increasing our already copious digital device usage.
In short: always have your phone on hand, and if you can’t find it freak the eff out until you do.
Come Close–But Not Too Close
Digital device ubiquity provides us with a knowledge that assuages the modern Alt-angst about the devolving, disintegrating communities we belong to. “People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people–and sometimes with a lot of people–who are emotionally kept at bay.” Once again, yes, yes, and yes again. We, right-wingers, value the illusion of possible-communication over actual communication. That’s how we got to the wonderful place our little movement is today!
In short: make communication possible, but unlikely, in your life via your use of digital devices.
F–k Forgiveness
Turkle takes particular exception to the shift of the act of apology from face-to-face to digital. She says that in a live, if you will apology, both the apologizer and the “apologee,” practice and learn empathy. This doesn’t happen in what she calls, “‘I’m sorry, hit send'” culture. Perfect, I say, because we rightists have nothing–except maybe nothing–to be sorry for. Ever.
In short: N/A because we’re not sorry for anything nor will we ever be.
Those Liberals Are At It Again
Another Turkle observation that this writer intends to be a criticism of the current state of communication writ large is that digital-device-based communications fail to teach us “patience” or to “attend to tone and nuance.” Yes, exactly! We on the right like our communication short, misspelled and shouted in all caps on Twitter. Get with the Alt-program.
In short: we’re perfectly patient people, we just get frustrated when it takes too long to…d’oh!
High Five
The number five is a super-important one in human culture and history. It’s the number of fingers on one hand, and it’s the number of Jacksons in the band. And now it’s the number of tips I’ve given you on how to dumb-down your communication skills. We Alt-ers just love to curl our digits into a fist and punch members of marginalized groups, relegate African-Americans to positions of modern minstrelsy for our entertainment, and be bad at imparting or apprehending knowledge in verbal transmissions with others. Can I get a high five? No? Anyone?
Also: Apparel advice for when you’re not getting out the vote because of voter suppression.
In any case, between now and my next column on this day, at this time next week—ask questions, but promise me you will fail to grow and evolve—indeed, change in any way—when you get the Alt-answers.
We at Spread Your Right Wings generally don’t like people, the Internet, or interacting with people on the Internet. Seek out someone—in person—to talk to and laugh with about this article. Check back with us as we continue to mock the right wing. Follow us on Twitter at @worstaltlife join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @worstaltlife. If you simply must get in touch with us, DM us through our Facebook group. Also, please, please see the disclaimer in our About section.
