A Shallow End

There of course are manifold reasons not to engage in political debate or discussion on, like, facebook or whatever. The main and most obvious one is that the people with whom you'd be debating are on facebook, a self-selecting pool of Boomers and early-stage GenXers who lack the presence of mind, self-awareness or technological savvy to disregard facebook. It's a platform dedicated entirely to the resolutely decided. Any discussion is going to be way less like debate and more like trying to explain the concept of tone variation to a gong.

The good news is that there's really no need at all, ever, anywhere to "debate" anything anymore. Not that there ever really was, but I guess theoretically it was possible pre-internet to find yourself invited to a function that included people of various political walks of life who would be willing to participate in an exchange of ideas using their inside voices, in a place where other people could hear them. It sounds a lot more civilized than what we have now with shouting on twitter and whatnot, but I suspect, like everything, we're romanticizing a past state of affairs. The answer to the nostalgia trolls who trot out an idyllic version of America That Was is usually to ask how many Black people were invited. To anything. Anywhere. Ever. The response is probably going to be something like "Why do you have to make everything about race?" the re-response to which is "Because you haven't shown the capacity to do it under any circumstances over the course of 500-plus years."

And look, already I've backslid into postulating some kind of debate. Apparently I'm nostalgia-horny for a sort of Paris salon culture in America that almost certainly never was. I'm not on reddit so maybe there's some kind of healthy discourse there or in some other venue I don't know about or don't patronize. I'm not on Snapchat or TikTok either, but somehow I doubt there's a lot of subtle commentary on the collapse of organized labor in late-stage capitalism coded into videos of people falling over lawn furniture while attempting to replicate someone else's dance. But I have to be careful with my tone here. That kind of curmudgeonly dismissiveness is exactly how people my age end up shunted over to facebook in the first place.

Right now, the limits of outlets for discourse are feeling particularly restrictive. The developments in Afghanistan are genuinely shocking and upsetting. It actually would be cathartic and helpful to work through and process the events of the last week or so, on a region and subject I've had to be incredibly engaged in and second-hand witness to over the last 15 years or so.* I would actually like someone to be curious about the training program for the Afghan military, the partnerships and processes on the ground, the engagement and investment with regional and local polities, the limits of geography and history strangling all these efforts and the slow-avalanche tragic inevitability of the collapse... Roll any of that out on facebook though and the best you can hope for is a very thoughtful riposte in the vein of "Bidden is a trader and your so dum fukin libs jesus saves."

In the end, I'm OK with this state of affairs. I have you lovely people** to express at. Plus the best case scenario on facebook is that someone listens with genuine intellectual honesty and curiosity and then I've... impressed someone on facebook. No way that kind of payout is anywhere near worth the risk.

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*I'm not and never have been military, just to be absolutely clear.

**Single-digits, I know, but a fucking untold number of Russian bots, all of whom I imagine by now are sticking around after all those years because of the quality of the output.