Hillary Clinton Archives | Carol L. Douglas

November 9, 2016

How did that happen?

My beady little eye on the world.

Since I had no use for either major-party candidate, I went to bed early last night. As the wits were saying, the bad news was that one of them would be elected. However, my phone pinged at 11 PM. It was a friend who is an ardent Hillary supporter, talking about how she wanted to die. After chatting with her, I went on Facebook and saw innumerable shocked and angry posts. (I’m an artist from New York, so the majority of my friends are liberal.) The same people who’d been celebrating all day yesterday for electing the first woman president were posting things along the lines of, “I’m trying to understand. How did this happen?”

In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger developed a theory of cognitive dissonance, which basically says that holding contradictory beliefs is stressful and people will do anything to squirm out of it. The more deeply held the belief, the stronger the dissonance. Among the strategies we use to cope is confirmation bias. This is our tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. When we read and remember information selectively (and we all do), we are engaging in confirmation bias.

Today our best friends are machines that do that biasing for us. The average American spends 11 hours a day using electronic gadgets. All of these have some kind of confirmation bias built in (the channels you select, for example, affect the news and commercials you see) but the most insidious are your computer and your smart phone.

Yes, your computer is watching you, and yes, it is developing a profile for you based on the sites you visit, your search terms, your purchases and social media profile. That’s relatively innocuous when it comes to what salad dressing you buy, but in 2012, the major parties started using the same tools to target political ads. We started seeing advertising that reinforced, rather than challenged, our beliefs.

Our clickstreams also influence the results we get when we are searching. Google has complicated (and patented) algorithms that say that when we search for A, B, and C, the result will be offered in a particular order. That’s based on user history, and it has a tendency to lump us into herds.

Then there’s the fallacy that you choose your friends. Every time you open Facebook, it scans and collects all the posts made by all your friends and ranks them. The algorithm is complicated and hidden, but how frequently you interact with the poster is certainly part of it. So too is hiding similar posts.

Needless to say, you very rapidly weed out the people you don’t particularly like, the ones you find boring, or—in many cases—the ones who disagree with you. Most users only see the top few hundred posts, which they’ve selected through their own internal biases. The machine then takes over and reinforces these biases. The posts you favor influence the posts you see. This is why last night so many people posted things like, “But I don’t know a single person who supported him!”

This creates terribly bad assumptions about our group behavior and further polarizes us. It’s why so many of us were blindsided by the results. I’m not saying you should ditch your computer—heck, I want you to continue reading my blog—but I am saying that you need to test its version of reality.

October 17, 2016

The end of Reason

Figure sketch by Carol L. Douglas

I’ve been blessedly ignorant of the American election for weeks. I would occasionally hear TV news when stuck in a waiting room, but generally I had too little personal bandwidth to take it in. When Canadians would ask my opinion, they did so lightheartedly. No surprise there; it’s not their train wreck.

At this point, I plan to vote for neither candidate; I was born and raised in New York and have followed both of them for a long time. A plague on both their houses.

Please don’t send me any links explaining why I’m wrong. All that ‘information’ is a big part of the problem.

“That’s how men are,” is one argument that has been prematurely dismissed this week. Most of us are rightfully offended on behalf of our own fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. In fact, alpha males have behaved like this for a long time, and we live in a society of extreme moral grunge, so none of this should come as a particular surprise.

Every woman at some point holds a friend’s hand while she experiences the death of her marriage. It’s devastating. The most private things become public while, at the same time, the grief is overwhelming. Sadly, there’s a common thread running through many of these stories: the wife always knew he was a jerk; she just never believed she could do better. I’m always immensely saddened when a friend comes to that realization. Of course she deserved better. As a nation, so do we.

I wonder how Lyndon Baines Johnson would have fared in today’s world of electronic eavesdropping. He was famously crude and said to have been repeatedly unfaithful to Lady Bird. I doubt I would have liked him much, but he was an undeniably effective politician.

In the Sixties, we hid facts to make our politicians more palatable. Today, we create facts to make them less palatable. I receive hundreds of emails a day and an equal number of messages via other platforms. For five weeks, I had a respite, since I simply deleted everything from my phone without reading it. Coming back, I feel like I’ve taken a load of birdshot in the face.

There is no way I can sort out the truthiness in the barrage. Add TV (which I don’t watch) to that mix, and it’s safe to say that we’re all bathing in a stew of disinformation. It is impossible to sort hard news from opinion or, worse, absolute slander.

In 2016, none of us can agree on anything. Prove something and someone will immediately prove that the opposite is actually the truth. This is the end of rationalism, the death of the Age of Reason, brought to us by an overload of information. I’m not enjoying it particularly. Are you?

February 9, 2015

The Brian Williams Factbook

Brian Williams probably didn’t see dead bodies lying in the street during Hurricane Katrina, and it’s clear that he didn’t come under small arms enemy fire in a Chinook helicopter in 2003. Nor did Hillary Clinton land under sniper fire in the Balkins or Tom Harkin fly combat missions in Vietnam.

There’s the institutional blindness of Rotherham Borough in ignoringthe grooming, drugging and rape of at least 1400 mostly underage, predominantly white girls by local Pakistani Kashmiri Muslims.

Last week on Facebook I ‘learned’ that one in five children will develop cancer from eating GMO foods, and that “every day Christians kill a transgendered person.” And then there’s our President (a graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law) drawing crude and illogical parallels between the Crusades and ISIS.

These people aren’t really lying. They’re twisting and spinning information. They sacrifice inconvenient facts to their bigger truth. In this systematic destruction of small truths lies a Great Truth about our times: facts are subservient to narrative, and it’s no longer a big deal to lie.

The drawings on this post were done by J—, who grew up in a cult which perfected the use of media in manipulating the public. No less a personage than Oprah was taken in by them. Yes, the truth ultimately came out, but at great expense to many. While the public was still sorting out what was true (mainly through the efforts of the Texas court system), more people suffered.

One of the bitter fruits of gaslighting (as that truth-twisting is called) is that it’s hard for its victims to understand what is true and what is false. Imagine that every time you pick up a pencil your past kicks in to question you. When J— asks, “What should I draw? I don’t know what to draw,” it is not that he’s not creative; it’s his history trying to shut him up.

All this public and private lying makes me feel so old. Even though my parents were bohemian by the standards of their day (no church, no scouting) we did have the advantage of a stiff whipping if we were caught bending the truth. (Oddly enough, that didn’t impair our creativity.)

Today truthiness is preferable to truth in our culture. That’s why our mass media is a cesspool of simulated sex. It’s why the coy, sexualized nude done by a middle age man gets enthusiastic exhibit space, but paintings about misogyny are closed down. That’s how we can call 50 Shades of Grey a romantic movie, instead of a glorification of abuse. We can deal with shallow illusions, but we hate hard truths. They might require us to do something.

What are we—as artists—to do about it? In a culture suffused with lies, we must continue to tell the truth, and we should demand the truth from our students. To me, this points to realism as the most radical style of art for our age. Can you really tell the story of abuse, beauty, misogyny, love, war, or peace if the details are fuzzy?

Truth is frequently controversial. Controversy, paradoxically, is often not truthful. Truth is sometimes happy, but it’s never twee. Truth is often unpopular until long after the truth-teller has left. For this reason, it makes sense to leaven the bitter with the palatable, unless you like serving coffee for a living.

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