Twaddler = Twitter

When at last the right one comes along, to set fire to this wilderness that is the asylum of all twaddle, all illusions, all clever tricks, he will, no doubt, already find there before him a company of twaddlers - a crowd.

***

Everything depends upon getting rid of the crowd, for all the crowd does with its hearty sympathy is to eradicate the real seriousness from the cause.

-Soren Kierkegaard, What Says the Fire Chief? (from Attack Upon Christendom)

Sometimes a stupid, inane thing clarifies something rather serious.  In the past week that stupid, inane thing was a mermaid, specifically a "Little Mermaid."  In the vast world of entertainment, where there is so much money to be made from the direly under-engaged and over-stimulated, the giant media corporations have determined that re-making old properties rather than taking risks on new things is a sure bank account booster.  That's why they're just doing old movies over again, that's why they can release a Marvel universe movie every three months and still make major cash, that's why Star Wars is still the biggest deal out there, even though most of us true believers have had to drastically adjust our expectations downward to avoid being angrily disappointed.

But this state of the entertainment industry is not my point, my point is that, in Disney's upcoming remake of the Little Mermaid, Ariel is going to be black.  My first reaction to that was... never mind, I didn't really have a first reaction to that, because I didn't know it was a thing, because my daughter has sort of outgrown Disney-princesses and because our family has thankfully graduated to movies where the characters use profanity (not saying that's great, it's just a step you take in life).  What I became aware of first was that there was a "backlash," maybe... sort of... well at least someone imagined that there was.  I mean there was a hashtag: #notmymermaid, so these days that means there must be something real right?

Question though, do you know anyone who is really, honestly upset by a re-rendering of a classic character as a different race? I bet if you do, it's more of a, "why did they have to do this at all?" sort of puzzlement.  That's sort of what I feel about the re-boot of Ghostbusters, it bothers me not at all that they made the 'busters female, I just wonder why they had to remake that movie at all.  The original had Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver and was already about as perfect as you could make such a ridiculous film.  Thus I think, as one who came on the scene of a "fire" already in progress, a lot of the people who were upset about a remake of The Little Mermaid, seemed to be in that boat.

But the Twitter-verse did not take it that way, oh, not at all.  This cause was immediately taken up by the most virulent twaddlers (thank you Soren, I am going to add that old word back into my vocabulary) on both the left and the right.  The racists on the right never seem to need much ammunition to add to their arsenal of cultural grievances.  This was clearly an attempt by the liberal elites in Hollywood to erase the white race from yet another beloved cultural institution: an animated movie about singing fish.  On the left the thought police were in full swing: "how dare you be angry about the attempt to simply increase the representation of brown people in media, you horrible racists you!"

Like Kierkegaard's hypothetical fire chief, I began to consider that perhaps the "crowd" really is the problem here.  Is our country "haunted" by racism? Yes, it is.  Do we have a long way to go before we reach true equality in thought as well as law? Yes, we do.  But I was really trying to figure out who was actually upset by a black mermaid, and as far as I can tell, it was all pretty much secondary outrage.  Someone, maybe what the old timers called a muckraker, tweets something critical of the idea and because Twitter is what Twitter does, the twaddle commences in earnest, and the flames get higher and higher.

I am trying not to be a cranky old man about these social media things, I understand that they do a lot of good, but they're also becoming increasingly toxic, and leaving all of us with a sour taste in our mouth.  The immediacy and reach of Twitter especially allows every little spark to become a full blown structure fire, and we don't have the ability to sort out what is really dangerous and what is just twaddle.  By the way, I'm going to post this on Twitter, but I'm not using the hashtag, because I don't want to get too close to the flame.