The idea that words have power is a very Biblical one, as well. In Genesis, God speaks the world into being, “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” (Gen 1:3) Jesus resurrects a young girl with the words, "Talitha cum," which means, "Little girl, get up!" (Mark 5:41) The beginning of the Gospel of John describes Jesus the Christ as the Word, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:1-3) Talk about power!
I believe that we need to remind ourselves that words have power every once in a while. Because when we forget that words have power, bad things happen. And unfortunately, we’re living in a society where it is all too easy to forget the power of our words. Which brings me back to The Onion and the tweet that shocked the nation.
That’s right, The Onion called the first 9-year-old nominee for Best Actress in the history of the academy awards a c**t. How does something like that happen? Well, first of all, you have to understand that The Onion is a satirical comedic news site. As film critic and commentator, Bob Chipman, put it in a recent article,
“They are a news parody outfit, but not of The Daily Show variety where the humor is mainly based on holding up actual examples of idiocy in the media for public mockery by Jon Stewart and his audience. Instead, The Onion takes the form of a ‘real’ news site and runs fake headlines (and entire fake news stories) that mock the worst excesses of the ‘real’ media by exaggeration.”Basically the intent was to point out how badly the Academy Awards treats women by saying the most misogynistic thing they could think of.
Side note: I suspect this may have been a response to Seth MacFarlane’s opening to the show, which included a song entitled, “We Saw Your Boobs.” MacFarlane’s humor throughout (ok, at least until I fell asleep on the couch—somewhere around the in memoriam segment) was confrontational at best. On the other hand, the aforementioned song taken in context seemed to be satirizing himself. All in all it wasn't his best stuff and I’d love to hear his reaction to the world’s reaction…
Ok, so, back to The Onion tweet. Being a satirical site, The Onion’s material gets mistaken for being serious all the time—but not by everybody. Even people who know that The Onion is satire and really gets how satire works cried foul. The truth of the matter is that when satire fails it becomes what it is trying to chastise. The truth is that what you communicated is what was received, not what you intended. So instead of calling attention to the harsh treatment of women in Hollywood in general—or by Seth MacFarlane specifically—The Onion really did simply call a 9-year-old girl a c**t.
So why did it fail? Chipman basically argues that the fact that the joke was a tweet probably led to it failing. He describes the frenetic pace of Twitter humor this way,
“Quick, go turn on the news, watch whatever is happening, immediately discern something insightfully funny about it, phrase it in a short, amusing way and disperse it to the web - you have 15 seconds. It's hard to do this well.
And so people cheat.
The ‘cheat’ in question is generally called ‘live-snarking’ in the parlance of the web. In lieu of joke construction or punchlines, one simply watches what's happening and says the meanest thing they can think of alongside some funny words and passes it off as a joke.”Twitter, in other words, moves so fast that there isn't enough time to think about what you’re saying, let alone construct something as difficult to get right as a good joke.
It is all too easy to forget the power of our words when we’re wildly shooting them out into the world through the internet. And once they’re out there, we can’t get them back. The Onion deleted the tweet in question within an hour, and I was still able to post an image of it gleaned from the Wired article that brought the whole brouhaha to my attention to begin with.
Speaking of the Wired article, entertainment editor Laura Hudson makes an excellent point,
“if this unfortunate incident offers us anything, it’s a teachable moment about the best way to respond when we screw up and say things that are sexist/racist/homophobic/insensitive without understanding their impact.
One common – and immensely dickish – response is that it’s ‘not a big deal,’ and that it’s the responsibility of person who has been mistreated or marginalized to remove themselves and stop complaining about it. Which is an attempt not only to silence them and sanction spaces as overtly hostile to them, but also essentially a reenactment of that scene from The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa start walking toward each other while punching and kicking the air wildly, saying ‘if you get hit, it’s your own fault!’
The Onion, wisely, decided to take another tack, by acknowledging, owning and apologizing for the tweet on their Facebook page and site… No one ever said that being a good person — or trying to understand the struggles and perspectives of people whose experiences are alien to us – would be easy. It’s a life-long process, and one where all of us are going to have moments where we accidentally step in it, either through ignorance or bad judgment. But when the inevitable happens and someone tells us that we've screwed up, we’d all do well to take a page from The Onion and respond not with self-righteous anger, or eye-rolling irritation that we have to deal with the inconvenience of other people’s experiences, but rather a willingness to learn…”So, if nothing else, take this home with you. Your words do have power. Try to use that power for good. And when you screw up, and you will, remember that the effect of your words has more meaning than your intentions—so apologize and learn from the experience.
Be good to each other,
Rev. Josh
022513
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