Episode 20: “Crime. Boy… I don’t know.”

“Crime. Boy… I don’t know.”

Those were the words, in The West Wing’s episode “Posse Comitatus”, that hardened social democrat poster boy President Josiah Bartlet’s resolve to kick his Republican opponent’s ass. I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about them, partially because I am a dude that spends a lot of his time thinking about The West Wing in general, but also because it’s a pretty perfect metaphor for the internet.

I’m not being literal, of course. The reaction to crime – or at least specific crimes – on the internet is both apoplectic and comically shortsighted, just like most things that allow and encourage knee-jerk, anonymous replies will always be. I’ve more or less made my peace with that. No, what Governor Robert Ritchie was exemplifying was a certain apathy to widespread or institutional problems that’s incredibly common as soon as people are clear of direct responsibility. It’s an acknowledgment that yeah, there is stuff that sucks, but hey, whatever.

Most of the time, I’m someone advocating this kind of hand-washing; the rest of this column is an exercise in that theme, and I make no secret of it. If someone wants to be an asshole and a hypocrite because they don’t like a Spider-Man story, I’ll always encourage them to calm down and for everybody else to calm down, too. But sometimes, an actual, genuine victim gets created and it’s then that my inner Bartlet-idolizer gets rankled.

This rankling du jour started yesterday, when a friend tweeted a link to a video on YouTube* of a teenage girl getting all intense about Justin Bieber, calling it “the creepiest thing [he’d] seen all week.” I checked out a bit of it and hey, sure, this girl loves Bieber or something. I shot back, “Dag, man, that isn’t even the creepiest thing I’ve seen TODAY.” Again, that’s partially because I’d been sent a link to an article about a My Little Pony plush sex toy, but mostly because I just genuinely didn’t really care about the girl’s video. I wasn’t the audience and the subject matter didn’t mean anything to me. This is that kind of apathy I’ll advocate for.

But today, a full day later, another friend tweeted a link to “Overly Attached Girlfriend,”* his “new favourite meme.” There it was: a still from that teenage girl’s video with that ugly meme font (there’s a reason why when I did mine, I used Futura) and a bunch of insulting stuff a stereotypical “crazy” girlfriend would say, or so I’m told by pop culture.

Now that is the creepiest thing I’ve seen all week.

Again, it’s not the video and it’s not the actual still I find creepy. I saw a My Little Pony with a vagina yesterday, I know what real creepiness is. And to me, real creepiness is the response I got from my friend when I mentioned that I get uncomfortable when teenagers make a mistake and end up getting chewed and devoured by the cruelty machine that is the internet. “To be fair, the web will have forgotten about her in a short period of time,” they told me. And that’s true, I guess. But the problem is, that’s a real girl who goes to a real school with real kids who are real assholes.

I don’t blame my friend. I’m not upset with them. They saw a joke they thought was funny and they shared it. They saw a joke that is pretty tame by the internet’s standards and shared it. I made up the Reverse ALF sex act yesterday, so I’m not throwing stones. The issue I take is with the idea that an updated version of “Crime. Boy… I don’t know” is somehow the encouraged response because it allows us to keep an arm’s length.

Yeah, the internet will have replaced her in a week, and let’s all just appreciate the stark, existential horror of that for a second. Her face will be on that online meme database but we will all forget, which will make it easier to forget that she’s probably now going to have to sit through a whole lot of assholes’ emails and even more dumb, hurtful jokes for a few months.

I’m not going to make you sit through a lecture on bullying. Don’t do it. Be nice. There, let’s all grab a malt. My point is just that the sociopathic effect of the internet is that it allows easy laughs without ever intersecting with the subject’s lived experience, and it’s a positive feedback loop. If the internet is this way, then that’s just how it is. Click. Ha! Click. Ha! It’s fucking terrifying, is what it is.

The easy rebuttal to me is, “Well, she put it online, didn’t she? She wanted an audience, and this is kind of fair.” That’s not entirely wrong. She put it online, presumably for an audience, and now she’s got one. That said, I think it’s fair to say that the reaction she had in mind wasn’t a bunch of jokes at her expense in a Buzzfeed article with 70,000 hits and counting. And she’s a kid! If half the shit I made or wrote when I was that age became a meme, it would be mortifying. I made music videos, people. Amateur music videos. I am thankful at least once a week that YouTube wasn’t around when I was fourteen, because I was only subjected to the direct cruelty of kids I knew.

That’s it, really. People are assholes, and kids are no exception. This meme is just fuel. To me, knowing that this is probably going to make it back to her for a lot longer than I’ll have looked at those meme images means I can’t in my own conscience is too much. We’ll forget about it. It will almost definitely take longer for her to, and that’s a price I don’t want to have a hand in charging.

When this whole Before Watchmen thing started, some creators and commentators remarked that shrugging off this iteration of the rights issue as just the cost of business was repugnant. But just as, all things considered, Alan Moore is considerably better off than the other names that get bandied about in those discussions are – no, that isn’t meant to be my statement on Before Watchmen – he’s also better off than a little girl who’s the butt of the internet’s joke this week. I’m thinking about the two because I’ve only seen disapproving, moralizing opinions about one of them this week, and it’s not the one that’s snickering while a kid gets laughed at. Moore is an adult who signed a bad contract. This is a kid who adults are laughing at or shrugging off. Where’s the outrage about that? Because all I’m seeing is a bunch of, “Crime, boy…” and even more nothing, and that makes me even sadder and more upset than a comic book I’m not reading ever could.

* - No, I’m not linking to it. Hell, I won’t even tell you to look for it. I don’t feel like being complicit in a shitty media aggregator’s shitty content.