Mutually Assured Distraction

Nothing like a Twitter war to make the afternoon breeze by.

A little while ago my phone started going crazy, letting me know that I was getting incoming tweets; a quick check revealed that they were from a bunch of people I've never even heard of -- most of whom were unleashing hell on me for daring to supposedly challenge Andrew Breitbart and Big Hollywood for their decision to elevate an inconsequential comment from Roger Ebert to the level of blasphemy. There was the obligatory name-calling; the accusations of being a pussy liberal; the run-on sentences; you know, that kind of thing.

Turns out Breitbart had retweeted my post to his followers -- and it obviously pissed them off.

So he and I went at it briefly -- nothing too brutal, just the usual juvenile nonsense that I've been complaining about here for the past several weeks when it comes to the direction political discourse has taken in this country. Admittedly, I contributed to the problem by hammering Big Hollywood in the Ebert post; I considered it a reaction -- a really angry one -- to the ridiculous comments left by some of the site's readers, but there's no doubt that at some point you have to ask yourself where the hell it ends, when one side will stop upping the ante on piss and vinegar.

The surprising thing, though, is that Breitbart saw fit to get into it with me at all. That's just fucking weird. Sure, he inexplicably wrote to me a couple of weeks ago -- which I responded to by writing a piece that was critical but relatively fair to him. (Yeah, I think Breitbart's "journalism" is beyond questionable; no, that doesn't mean I want to see him personally run over by a truck.) But what does he have to gain by staging a pissing match with me on Twitter? The first rule of PR in a public war of words is that the little guy always wins because the more prominent of the two combatants is forced to lower himself to even go at it. The only thing I can think of is that Breitbart is either a) a bully who can't handle even the tiniest bit of criticism and who feels the need to teach all comers a lesson, no matter who they are, or b) somebody who likes to argue bitterly just for the hell of it.

If he's the former, then he unfortunately fits a really shitty cliché about the mouthpieces on the right these days. If he's the latter, then he might prove my point that political debate in general has gone completely off the rails. I don't even pretend to know Breitbart personally, so I have no idea what he's really all about.

Look, I may have my opinions, but God knows I'll listen to anyone who dissents as long as he or she is interested in discussion and not derision. Do I pick on powerful people and institutions and not suffer fools lightly? Absolutely. When the topic is as potentially important as the path this country takes, am I a sucker for legitimate discourse? Once again -- absolutely. It was funny to watch Breitbart's readers gang up on me because it was such a knee-jerk reaction: guy says something negative about Big Hollywood; guy's obviously a smarmy liberal asshole. Of all the ostensible enemies Breitbart and his followers could've targeted, I'm one of the few who tends to take shots at just about everyone -- that means both sides -- and is willing to go against the grain regardless of which camp is embracing his opinion on a given day, which means, I hope, that I'm one of the least easy guys to politically pigeonhole.

In other words, I'm as likely to agree with you as disagree. But the only way to learn how anyone thinks is to talk rather than scream.

Besides, for fuck's sake, no matter how serious it gets -- in the end it's just politics.