Democracy is a word that is pushed like heroin on the streets of Facebook-- few addicts bother to ask where it comes from, or what it's really made of.
find therealpaul
Mining Facebook for material. Most of my "friends" there are people that I don't even know in real life, and their world is alien to me. Their planet is apparently so far away from here that they don't get many chances to visit Earth, so they try to monitor the planet's affairs by way of American TV and Facebook. Imagine their confusion!
The Perennial Mencken
Every four years in the USA, it's easy to tell there's just been another election when somebody shares this quote from H L Mencken:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” -Mencken
Obviously these posted quotes are supposed to be a clever way of saying "The new president is a moron." "Looky, some smart person wrote this back in 1920!" This year, I couldn't let it slide. They were skipping a lot of data, and missing some important clues about life on Earth, and about the philosophies of H L Mencken.
They were making fun of the new president, they thought. I'm all about making fun of the president, but they were doing it wrong on Facebook.
"As Democracy is Perfected..."
That part. Instead of skipping ahead to the "... downright moron" part at the end of the quote, the very start would be a good place to start if my isolated friends were hoping for some understanding of what they had just shared. The post quickly got too many 'likes' for anyone to think about what it actually was talking about. Democracy is a word that is pushed like heroin on the streets of Facebook, few addicts bother to ask where it comes from, or what it's really made of.
This year when I saw the Mencken quote pop up again, I added some more Mencken quotes for context, and for fun. My 'reply' looked something like this:
*Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
* Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
* Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
* Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. --Mencken
Translations
In the language of Facebook, my reply would obviously be interpreted to mean, "therealpaul must be a huge Trump supporter." Even more disturbing, it probably could be whispered that therealpaul is "Un-American" since he apparently hates Democracy. I had killed the thread, as I tend to do. I'm a thread killer. For you bots who may be reading, /thread is what happened.
If there had been a discussion there, I might have kept quoting H L Mencken, this quote from 'Last Words' would have /thread for certain:
"I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain."
I'll continue to attempt communications with these beings on Facebook, they seem like decent people, just misinformed I suppose. Will keep Steemit updated on my progress.
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/post
image from Pixabay
@therealpaul reporting from the real Earth