When the Fires of Anger Burn Out

I had intended to write today about the notorious Baraboo, Wisconsin, high school photo, which shows nearly the entire male class of 2019 flashing a straight-armed Nazi salute. I wanted to discuss how teenagers think asshole behavior is funny, and lack latitude of view to understand actions in historical context. I wanted to say we could demonize these children, possibly for the rest of their lives, or have a classic teachable moment and maybe improve society overall.

Then something happened I didn’t expect: America forgot the story.

Seriously. Two days ago, you couldn’t move on Blue Facebook or Blue Twitter without tripping over a half-dozen reposts of the photo, usually with captions of undiluted rage. How could anybody, especially in a post-Charlottesville environment, think such behavior was funny? Then it stopped. As I write this, another story hasn’t erupted sufficiently to really replace Baraboo as headline fodder, yet somehow, this story just petered out.

What happened? The story didn’t go anywhere. Baraboo police still promise a thorough investigation, which I applaud, since it clearly means all real violent crime in Wisconsin has been resolved. (C’mon, is this really the best use of police resources.) A Google news search reveals new details dribbling out about the story, mostly in regional outlets. But in the collective memory emblazoned on social media feeds, this story has already found a quiet corner to die.

Has our communal attention span become so brief that stories burn this quickly and vanish? Yes. This isn’t news to me. I’ve written before about how our capacity for outrage has become not only short-lived, but weirdly selective. We burn white-hot with indignation, spew largely crinkum-crankum bile in public places, and exhaust ourselves within, apparently, minutes. We lack capacity to keep stories burning low and constant long enough to actually do anything.

This causes further problems because it depletes our common capacity to keep real stories alive. While Baraboo sucked all the oxygen from the room, mainstream media apparently forgot, say, Jamal Khashoggi, whose murder, apparently ordered at the highest levels by one of America’s biggest trading partners, demonstrates just how dangerous the truth-telling industry remains in today’s world. Yet that developing story has become page-eight filler news.

(Yes, that’s a newspaper reference. I’m old.)

Yet perhaps that’s the problem. The American President has openly daydreamed about physically attacking journalists, called them “the enemy of the people,” and lavished praise on politicians who enact his violent fantasies. While the worst his administration has directly done is yank a journalist’s credentials over bullshit accusations, the implication nevertheless remains: we retain the option of capping your ass, Khashoggi-style, if you step out of line. We can make you wish you were dead.

This photo, by contrast, is safe. Everyone from MSNBC to Breitbart has covered this story, because they know moral outrage sells, but also because the story is low-risk. Disparaging American Nazis has been low-hanging fruit at least since The Blues Brothers used them as doofus villains in 1980. Media know they can gin outrage by thrusting stock villains under our noses, which accomplishes what they really want: to sell advertising space to the highest bidder.

And Baraboo itself serves a bicoastal narrative. A small town in a small state that few outsiders ever visit, Baraboo, Wisconsin, has under one-tenth the population of Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, and is primarily famous as the former headquarters of the defunct Ringling Brothers organization. National corporate media waving around the youth of a small city in an outlying province of “flyover country” reminds coastal city-dwellers of their unique privilege and its accompanying noblesse oblige.

I get frustrated when people tell me certain stories are mere smokescreens. Two years ago, it chapped my ass when pundits told me not to worry my pretty little head about the President-Elect’s theatre tweets. Yet that exact response is appropriate now, because the widespread popularity of the Baraboo story right now, when journalists are dying for telling the truth and an accused rapist sits on the Supreme Court, is the epitome of a smokescreen.

If social media means anything, we politically engaged citizens must start being more discerning in what stories merit our scrutiny. Truth isn’t criterion enough anymore. Humans’ ability to pay attention is finite, and if we expend it on low-stakes stories that burn out overnight, taking real journalism with them, the people who dominate our culture will eventually be able to get away with murder. Which, if current events are any guide, isn’t a mere metaphor.