Chatterbox Jazz and the Victim Complex, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Chatterbox Jazz and the Whie Victim Complex

Another angle on the entrance to the Chatterbox Jazz Club, which only a
complete doofus would mistake for apolitical. (source)

I can’t help considering the parallels, and the lack of parallels, between Elise Hensley, who videoed herself getting ejected from the Chatterbox Jazz Club, and George Floyd. To reiterate, Hensley almost certainly recorded her expulsion deliberately, hoping to cultivate the impression of herself as an oppressed minority. But so far, the explosion of outrage she expected hasn’t arisen. It bears some time to consider why.

Hensley’s video and Darnella Frazer’s recording of George Floyd’s death might seem superficially similar to chronically online denizens. Both filmed on cellphone cameras, these videos show what their respective target audiences consider an injustice. But the online outrage machine flourishes with such displays of false equivalency. Hensley’s staged confrontation, and George Floyd’s unplanned murder, only resemble one another to lazy media consumers.

To exactly such lazy consumers, the sequence appears thusly: somebody distributed video of an injustice in progress. Millions of Americans were outraged. Protesters filled the streets. Ta-dah! We see similar reasoning in the hundreds of January 6^th, 2021, rioters who live-streamed their push into the Capitol Building, speaking metaphors of Civil War and 1776: they thought simply seeing provocative media created public sentiment.

This bespeaks a specific attitude, not toward current events, but toward media. Lazy consumers see events not as events, but as content, and information distribution not as journalism, but as content creation. Functionally, Hensley doesn’t elevate herself to George Floyd’s level, she lowers George Floyd to her level. The spontaneous recording of an actual crime in progress, becomes neither better nor worse than her forced confrontation with a queer bartender.

Let me emphasize, this isn’t merely a conservative phenomenon. I’ve struggled to follow political TikTok because, Left and Right alike, it mostly consists of homebrew “journalists” either repeating somebody else’s breaking reports, or shouting angrily at like-minded believers from their car or bedroom. The read-write internet has expanded citizens’ speaking capacity to, hypothetically, infinity, depending on server space. But it’s created little new information.

But conservatives, especially White conservatives, receive one key point differently. They’ see stories of injustice multiply rapidly and gain mainstream attention, and they believe the media creates the martyrs. If martyrdom happens when cameras capture injustice, rather than when humans or institutions perform injustice, then anybody with media technology could recreate the martyrdom process. Anybody could, with a 5G connection, become a martyr.

Such lack of media literacy travels hand-in-hand with the inability to distinguish between forms of injustice. Hensley’s description of her ejection as “discrimination” suggests she thinks herself equal to Black Americans denied service at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in the 1950s. By extension, it suggests her MAGA hat equals organized resistance to injustice. She can’t see the difference, and hopes you can’t, either.

When all news is media manipulation, in other words, then all injustice, no matter how severe, no matter how authentic, becomes equal. Hensley can’t distinguish her own inconvenience from George Floyd’s death—or at least, she expects that others can’t distinguish. The meaninglessness of Hensley’s public stand, as nobody has rallied around her faux injustice, reveals that media manipulation isn’t the same as reality, and some people still can tell.

One recalls the occasional online furor surrounding some doofus who just discovered that “Born in the U.S.A.” isn’t a patriotic song, “Hallelujah” isn’t a Christmas song, and punk rock is political. These people aren’t stupid, despite the inevitable social media pile-on. Rather, these people consume all media, from music to movies to news, passively. Under those conditions, everything becomes equal, and everything becomes small.

Did Elise Hensley seriously believe herself a martyr, surviving a moment of bigoted injustice? Well, only God can judge the contents of her heart. But she evidently hoped other people would believe it, and throw their support behind her. Some evidently did, although the fervor has mostly sputtered. Without the jolt of authenticity, her media manipulation stunt gathered scarce momentum, and seems likely to disappear with the 24-hour news cycle.

The whole “fake news” phenomenon, which pundits say might’ve helped Trump into the presidency twice, relies upon the same action that Hensley attempted, mimicking real events under controlled conditions. But, like Hensley, it mostly failed to fuel real action. It might’ve helped calcify political views among people already inclined toward extreme partisan beliefs, but like Hensley, most “fake news” produced meaningless nine-day wonders.

If I’m right in my interpretation, media consumers are growing weary of manufactured outrage. The next stage will probably be performative cynicism, which is hardly better, but will be at least less terrifying.

In Praise of Fanfiction

Margery Kempe, history's first
fanfiction writer

As an undergraduate, I once had a creative writing class with a guy who wrote science fiction. I have no complaints about genre writing; of the three manuscripts I workshopped that semester, two of mine were also science fiction. But this guy’s stories were based on video games. This was easy to tell with one story, where the entire plot turned on monsters jumping out from behind furniture and yelling “Boo.” He admitted the second manuscript was the backstory for his online role-playing game character.

Ordinarily, I’d pay such people no mind, besides warning then to recognize the difference between differing media while writing. First-person shooter games reward simple, repetitive action, while RPGs favor exploration and exposition over action and dialog. Pick your medium, and stick with it. But I spoke with our teacher later, who informed me that, because this one student had serious problems with what she called “fanfiction,” she forbid any genre writing in future semesters.

That’s where I have a problem. Because fundamentally, I understand what this guy wanted to do. He had joined what USC professor Henry Jenkins calls “participatory culture,” a niche that includes not only fan fiction, but fan conventions, cosplaying, RPGs based on popular franchises, and other reciprocal creation. Audiences have never been entirely satisfied simply, passively receiving their favorite stories from the dream factories that create them. They’ve always wanted to join the creation.

In my pre-internet youth, I usually had no idea such participatory culture existed. Sure, I played with action figures, and schoolyard games involved adding to the canon of TV shows. We kids loved recreating Voltron episodes, and sometimes came near blows over who played the Black Lion. Looking back, it’s funny how the kids wearing football jerseys and recreating Monday night’s scrimmage lines were considered school heroes, but students trading hand-drawn Star Wars comics were “losers.”

But dedicated fan culture went much further. Mimeographed fan magazines, including fiction based around popular franchises like Star Trek, were frequently hand-distributed at conventions and circulated among friends. Burgeoning digital technologies made distribution of fan-made works more practical, and formerly narrow fan networks began trading stories globally. Continuing stories like James Cawley’s Star Trek: New Voyages, or Nicholas Briggs’ Doctor Who spinoff Auton received international distribution.

It’s easy for cultural snobs and university professors to dismiss fan creations as “mere” juvenilia. Better writers would naturally create original works, duh. But this hasn’t always been so. Well-respected writers have long attached their creations to existing works. Some have called English Christian mystic Margery Kempe a writer of fanfiction for inserting herself into New Testament narratives. Surely the tradition is older, as many scholars consider certain New Testament epistles later imitations of Saint Paul.

Promo poster from James Cawley's
Star Trek: New Voyages

Only with the rise of affordable print technology and widespread literacy did originality become something desirable in literature. When only limited resources existed for distribution of written material, originality was regarded as theft from the common store. Why bother creating something new, when you could better spend your time hand-copying the important works of bygone masters? Until the Industrial Revolution, works like “innovation” and “newfangledness” were deployed as insults.

Fanfiction writers don’t merely derive from existing works. They attempt to join an ongoing discussion, adding to the experience. And certainly, James Cawley’s episodes will never have the arching influence the original Star Trek had, particularly as his distribution license with Paramount forbids him showing a profit. But for an intimate circle of fans, such new content deepens the experience, particularly because in creating, they more wholly immerse themselves in the act of sharing.

In graduate school, I read research indicating that teachers could broaden students’ subject understanding by having them write new material within the subject. In sciences, this could mean creative writing about a discipline: deepening students’ grasp of sociology, for instance, by having them write from the perspective of someone from another race, sex, and nationality. In literature, writing “continuations” brings students into the process. I didn’t understand A Raisin in the Sun until writing a scene where Beneatha packs her belongings.

I remember telling a Freshman Comp student that art becomes art, not because we appreciate it, but because we have a relationship with it. And when we have a relationship with something, we want to return our feelings. We want that give-and-take with friends, spouses, children. Art is no different. If we passively receive it, and create new work only at right angles, we have missed the opportunity for true reciprocation with what we love.