• I enjoyed this Contingent piece by Sara Mohr, “Penelope Garcia’s Criminal Minds.”
If you don’t know who Penelope Garcia is, she’s the preternatural hacker character on CBS’ long-running FBI show Criminal Minds, played with endearing charm by Kirsten Vangsness. Mohr — the digital scholarship librarian at Hamilton College — is clearly a fan of the show, but she’s writing about the fantastic impossibility of this character’s role on the show:
When viewers watch Garcia work, her wall of computer screens is filled with digital surrogates of everything from medical records to newspaper articles to high school yearbook pages, virtual entryways into scattered archives. To have digital resources like Garcia’s would make possible a myriad of histories that have remained largely untold. After all, the core of a historian’s research is about searching and finding, which many of us do digitally.
Historians have their favorite online resources, but where in the digital world is Garcia searching? According to the series, Garcia is accessing a series of digital archives that are equal parts fantasy and aspiration. Watching her work and seeing her archives are opportunities to think about what it would take to make this fantasy the historian’s reality.
Yep. Even the greatest “hacker” in the world can’t hack their way into digital archives that don’t exist anywhere online. But on Criminal Minds — and in almost every other TV show or movie — it seems like everything has been digitized.
I wrote about this here a while back — complete with a Penelope Garcia reference: “Screenwriters: No, back issues of The Smalltown Gazette from the 1930s are not archived online.”
I was writing there from the perspective of a recently laid-off newspaper copy-editor who’d spent the previous decade converting the print edition to its digital, online version. You can’t Google or hack into any of the stories I worked on back then. They’re not online anymore and the newspaper chain that laid off most of its copy editors and reporters isn’t planning on hiring anybody to spend years in its print archive scanning and digitizing its old records.
I share Mohr’s opinion, though, that it would be really cool if all of that stuff were available online — the “newspaper articles … high school yearbook pages [and] scattered archives.” That’d be a terrific resource for reporters, editors, historians, and librarians — as well as for FBI profilers. But it doesn’t exist.
• Here’s a click-bait article based on a poll that seems, itself, to have been conducted for the purpose of generating click-bait articles: “Americans worry most have forgotten the true meaning of Christmas.”
The Ipsos poll found that 75% of Americans surveyed agree that Americans have “forgotten the true meaning of Christmas.” Set aside the fuzzy particulars of this example and just consider the general conclusion: Most people think that most other people are wrong.
This is whole category or genre of opinion polling, often producing this same paradoxical result. I think of it sometimes as “The Poll Who Was Thursday” because it reminds me of that delirious Chesterton story in which the undercover policeman infiltrates the secret society of anarchists only to realize that every other member of the group is also an undercover policeman.
If most people think that most other people are wrong, then most people are wrong about most other people. Ipsos’ poll reveals very little about “the true meaning of Christmas,” or even about what most people think about it. What it reveals, rather, is what most people think about most other people, which is to say what most people think about themselves and how they imagine this sets them apart from most other people even when it mainly confirms their similarity.
Here again we encounter the fantasy of the Anti-Kitten-Burning Coalition, a group that imagines it has a Very Special identity due to its staunch opposition to kitten-burning but which actually consists, rather, of people who are extraordinary due to their refusal to recognize that everybody else shares this opinion.
That’s why the headline for this article is inaccurate. These Americans do not “worry” that their neighbors “have forgotten the true meaning of Christmas.” They savor that accusation. They delight in imagining that they are unique and special and exceptional because — unlike most other people — they celebrate Christmas and don’t burn kittens.
• I had never heard of the Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland nor of the “Battle of The Campbells” until Erik Loomis wrote about visiting Wergeland’s grave last week.
The so-called battle was a good old-fashioned theater riot. In 1837, Wergeland wrote a musical play called “The Campbells” that satirized the wealthy and privileged and, therefore, became quite popular among everybody except the wealthy and privileged. The empire struck back when, in January of 1838, “26 distinguished high-ranking gentlemen from the university, court and administration” bought tickets to a performance with the aim of disrupting the play and shutting it down. They shouted and heckled throughout the show, blowing toy trumpets and doing everything they could to make it unwatchable. As Loomis wrote, “While this did indeed disrupt the play, after it was over, the audience beat the shit out of them, threw tomatoes in their faces, dragged them around, and generally shamed them in society.”
So those ungentlemanly gentlemen started a riot they couldn’t finish. The shaming and shunning was, as usual, not enough to overcome the wealth and privilege of the wealthy and privileged — one of the 26 young cads who started the riot, Frederik Stang, went on to become Norway’s first prime minister. The only person who suffered any real long-term harm to his career and financial well-being was Wergeland, who was never quite forgiven by the Powers That Be whom he had assisted into turning themselves into punchlines.
This story illustrates one of the many, many things that are so ridiculous about the Aggrieved Substackers now making their fortunes by whining about some supposed “cancel culture.” These clowns all seem to think that heckling and tomato-tossing, shaming and shunning are brand new things arising just now due to some unique defect in 21st-century American culture. More specifically, they seem to imagine that such things began for the first time in human history at the very moment they first got ratioed by some uncredentialed wise-aleck on Twitter.
The truth is all of what they’re complaining about is older than social media, older than the internet, older than radio, older than the English language itself. It’s as old as human culture, since the theater riots that met performances of Sophocles or of the book of Job.
• I expected this old REM song to have gotten a bit more airplay earlier this month during the flailing 15-vote clown-show that took a full week to elect a new Speaker of the House of Representatives. That didn’t happen, so I’m posting it here:
My fellow Gen-Xers are invited to argue in comments below over whether Document is the last of the early REM albums or the first of the later REM albums.
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