This is stupidity that must be addressed. I don't mean the "lol fail" of chain e-mails and memes or the oddities of language exposed by a hilarious Steven Wright one-liner, but the actual, categorical, creative stupidity of a staggeringly original and staggeringly indefensible variety, the pernicious and seemingly willful misunderstanding of a situation's gravity.
Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). The Caleb Hannan of the first tweet wrote a much-read Grantland piece, ostensibly about an innovative golf putter, but that veers off into Hannan's research into the putter's inventor. Hannan discovers discrepancies between the inventor's claimed background in academia and what Hannan is able to find in public records. Hannan's research even uncovers that the inventor is a transgender individual ("...born a boy," as Hannan puts it).
The putter's inventor, known as "Dr. V," resists Hannan's research into her past. Hannan digs deep into Dr. V's public records and family life, even telling one of Dr. V's investors that she is a transgender individual, outing V. And, finally, after several inquiries by Hannan and several attempts by Dr. V to quell the publication of Hannan's piece (even warning Hannan that he's "about to commit a hate crime"), Dr. V kills herself.
A closer reading of the piece (I was largely informed by this fine piece) finds a disturbing contrast to my initial reading of "intrepid, curious reporter hunts the truth, and a troubled individual, plagued by her own demons and lies, kills herself". On re-reading, Hannan appears to be the aggressor: A sociopathic, remorseless chaser of the story that almost deliberately (or thoughtlessly) puts Dr. V at risk. If you read closely, Hannan arguably never once expresses a personal emotion towards a person in the entire story. For someone aping Talese, Hannan sure lacks any kind of human insight or empathy towards anyone in the story at all, even himself. Believing in the magic of a putter and seeing some holes in a story hardly count as emotion or insight. A mass of descriptive sentences don't prove anything but a beat writer's background, perhaps, but in the context of the story, Hannan comes off unimaginably abstracted from the human condition on a re-read. He sees the lies, and thinks "The Story". He sees a suicide and thinks "The Story". Like an automaton crossed with an algorithm for Slate.
But and so anyway, Hannan discovers that Dr. V has made a suicide attempt before. And still Hannan presses on. Hannan discovers that she is an immensely unwilling participant in this journalistic endeavor the moment he starts digging. And still Hannan presses on. Hannan discovers that the few people apparently hurt by her lies about her academic background (the investors in Dr. V's company) are still incredibly enthusiastic about her invention. And still Hannan presses on.
Everything that Hannan discovers about Dr. V should give someone pause - a transgender individual that Hannan would be outing, a history of a suicide attempt, and either paranoia or justifiable fear at Hannan himself and his work. Everything that Hannan discovers is filled with all sorts of red flags, not just for suicide, but for retaliatory violence against her person, for mental illness, and for - in the long train of events - ruining Dr. V's life. And still Hannan presses on, because the story is apparently more important than any of that, is more important than the tangible and emotional harm that Hannan at least appears unable to comprehend on more than a superficial level.
All this to say that there is a very strong argument to be made that Caleb Hannan caused in whole or in part the suicide of Dr. V. Threatening to publicly out a transgender person is - depending on the situation - pulling the lever that cuts a troubled person's remaining thread to life. Dr. V's suicide attempt and her desperate resistance to Hannan gives at least a strong indication that Hannan controlled such a lever. And yet he pulled it anyway. And then, when it was strongly plausible that Hannan had indeed cut someone's final will to live, he had the audacity to worry first about his precious story being completed. After all, the climax is finished, we must have a resolution! Just like Ozymandias had those snowy episodes!
Anyway, as feminist and transgender groups caught wind of this whole sad story, some predictable (and understandable) outrage forced some re-evaluations from those of us (myself included) that missed the depths of Hannan's piece. and the arc of discussion has now generally pointed away from "ooh, longform" and more towards "wow that guy is a prick and that piece probably shouldn't have been published in a million years."
So enter Chris Jones, a sportswriter of some talent. Jones used his immense gift for language to come up with the above tweets, sarcastically learning that "You can cause the suicide of a subject by writing about their suicide after they've committed suicide."
What delightful smarm! What specious slime. This is Hume-level billiard-ball abstract deconstruction that all adds up to a pool table filled with bullshit in the basement of privilege. Causality and power for Jones work in such a masterfully stupid way if we take this tweet at face value. Lord!
Now that I've contextualized Jones's comments, you can please understand that I can't actually respond to something so stupid. What I can do is apply the stupidity to the world around me and see what results I get back. My results are bound to be limited, as the stupidity exceeds my capacity to articulate.
Examples of Chris Jones logic:
- Person A points a gun at Person B and demands B's money. A receives B's money. When pressed for comment, onlooker Chris Jones reported, "I don't know how you can say A made B do anything. He didn't even fire the gun!"
- According to classical physics on the level that a modern, decently-educated individual understands it, gravity is a universal force of attraction between all matter and obeys the inverse square law. A sportswriter is standing on the ground and reports that "I don't think gravity is really affecting me. How can it be, if I'm not falling down at this exact moment?"
- In "The Godfather", there are several violent mob hits, and, more generally, a culture of violence that are established in the film, specifically associated with the Corleone family and its rivals. Several people in the mafias shown are sent to die or are surprised when they are intercepted and killed. A sportswriter watches the film for the seventh time in his life and wonders why everyone in the film is so darn nervous all the time. The sportswriter sarcastically tweets about the characters' nervous affects, wondering if someone put expresso in their coffees.
I see the debate about privacy kicked off by Edward Snowden, and I personally have a huge fear of the chilling effect privacy restrictions have in stifling out our creativity and our remotely-unorthodox political action. I get it; if we start talking about journalists having social responsibility, the next step could be censorship, if we are not careful about how we frame the discourse on what that "responsibility" really constitutes.
But Jones is doing little more than irresponsible shilling right now with his idiotic 'logic', and in doing so is exacerbating two private tyrannies: The use of media as a mindless weapon against vulnerable individuals, and the dehumanization of the struggles of transgender individuals.
Speaking of which, special note: I'm not terribly familiar with the issues of transgender people, and so if the terminology or something about how I'm saying something offends you, please tell me and I'll fix it to the best of my understanding. Thank you.
