Humor

Me, a One-Hit Wonder

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The photo above shows it, the moment in which my life did not change. I may desire the sensation of a life-altering fame, but I know that one semi-viral tweet only serves to remind one that that sensation has not yet been felt in this life. Is it possible to desire something that one has not experienced? Is “desire” the correct word here?

Anyway, a tweet of mine tossed off last night with insouciance of a man who knows nothing about insouciance was liked 750 times (so far) and re-tweeted more than 130 times, and viewed/read/chuckled at (I hope) more than 200,000 times in under twenty-four hours. This is worth a post here if only because my average Twitter engagement is usually 200,000 times smaller than that.

Some of you may be acquainted with the feeling. Some of you may have watched one of your tweets fly out of the nest and somehow attract attention from hundreds of thousands of other Twitter-nests. This is my first time. In thirteen years on Twitter, ten with the current account, this is the first hit tweet. And nothing has changed for me: I am as annoyed or not annoyed by the world and most of its denizens as if 200,000 pairs of Twitter-eyes had not alighted on my one-liner.
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Pandemic Diary 28: Focus, People, Focus

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Whatever the opposite of a laser is, that is my unfocused brain in quarantine some days.

* * * *
Anecdotal evidence is evidence only of an anecdote, so I report this not with statistical accuracy but only as something noticed: there has been an uptick in the number of posts on my social media feeds of individuals who describe themselves as “TIs” or “targeted individuals.”

“Targeted individuals” labor under the belief that each one is the focus of intense electromagnetic energy pulses sent to torment them; now, these individuals indeed appear to be tormented, to judge from what they write and how they write it (ALL CAPS and no punctuation), so it is no surprise that they need something on which to blame their depression and suffering.

I am one of those readers who always takes a moment to report these accounts to the Twitter or Facebook offices as “someone in danger of self-harm.” As a more-than-casual consumer of content from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, I have my own sense of how often I encounter posts from self-proclaimed targeted individuals: about twice a year. There have been more than that number this month alone.

Is this an effect of quarantine? Our national and global economies are in a free-fall brought on by a mandatory lock down (in many communities) made necessary by a fast-moving virus that mostly kills the infirm and elderly but also kills the young, middle-aged, and healthy (in New York City, more than twenty-five percent of the dead were younger than sixty-four and the greatest number dead of COVID-19 with no underlying condition are those between forty-five and sixty-four; not young but still employable); which ended almost all in-person commercial activity; which led to businesses shut down and employees furloughed or laid off.
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Of Presidents and Emperors

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Former constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz posited on Fox News on November 25 that the “president’s not the king; the president’s far more powerful than the king. The president has the power that kings have never had.”

This is not an argument the former scholar offered for any previous occupant of the White House in Alan Dershowitz’s long life, so one wonders what renders this an argument worth pursuing on Fox News or anywhere that is not a mere public park with wooden crates available to stand on and bellow from. But he did so anyway.

The United States of America has three coequal branches of government to run its operations; our constitutional arguments usually concern which branch ought to run which operation. Our executive branch is one of those three, and we have not been ruled by a king or an emperor for a very long time. America’s last emperor died in 1880, after all, and we have not had a monarch since (or since 1776). (1880? Needle scratches on record as the music stops.)

When Emperor Norton I died in San Francisco in 1880 he left no offspring and no claimants to his (our) throne. We have been a republic ever since, although Alan Dershowitz seems to think that the current executive in the White House has the most legitimate claim to the American throne since Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, last occupied it.

Come to think of it, Mr. Dershowitz may be onto something when he asks us to compare the current occupant of the White House and Emperor Norton I.
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