The Day Facebook Died

I had decided to let TV sail off without me when the switch to digital came in 2009; I did not buy a new set or converter. The last program I watched was the inauguration of President Obama.

I had believed that over the previous 25 years American television news had abandoned its priorities.

“We really don’t know very much about how this war is being waged,” ABC’s Forrest Sawyer casually told viewers in January 1991 at the start of the U.S. involvement of the Persian Gulf War. It was hardly a protest by Sawyer, but more of a disclaimer followed by weeks of dutiful digesting of Pentagon-supplied factoids and videos. Contrast this compliant tone with what happened eight years earlier when NBC’s Tom Pettit testified before Congress, condemning the Reagan Administration’s iron-fisted blockage of reporter access to the Granada invasion, the same policy that now in the Persian Gulf made PR people -- willing ones at that -- out of Sawyer and others in the one-time journalism profession.

At home, TV is uncritically passing on to us the lies that somebody got rich because McDonald’s coffee was too hot, and that racism is over.

The digital switch, a hassle for most Americans, was a gift to me – a way to get this nightly stress and these feelings of abandonment by the once watchdog profession of news out from in front of me.

Though I didn’t plan it this way, social media came calling in about a year. The same friends who had gotten me acclimated to e-mail in the mid-1990s explained why this thing called Facebook was all the rage.  Like so many other users, I started a profile for reasons of, “what-the-heck, why not?” then after a pause for an illness, I was by late 2010 an up-and-running Facebooker into more threads than my Grandma had kept in her sewing box.

Facebook could be a roller coaster ride. There were those nasty nighttime street fight threads over right wing zealots’ nonsensical claims. There were often nice, but sometimes disappointing reconnections with old childhood chums. There was the chance or two to tell a schoolmate of my crush on them decades ago, and to enjoy the long-deferred hearing of their flattered pleasant reactions.

What I loved most about Facebook, however, were not flashbacks to my past, but stumbling upon people with whom I seemed instantly in synch. It was as though I’d known them for decades.

And forming connections and group ties with them reduced my longtime stress problems, perhaps because their intelligence and moral honesty gave me refuge from a society where birtherism and other corporate money driven disinformation had derailed the national discourse.

And one of those collections of smart, eclectic, outlandish and never fooled people formed as an official Facebook group that was created as “secret,” rather than “private,” meaning that all comments and other interactions are visible only to other members. The group’s existence became known only upon the founder inviting someone to join.

And the founder was the coolest. So were the other most active members.

The group’s theme was of an “underground club” or “salon” of respectful yet daring conversation. Not an “anything goes” free for all; we knew that raunchy self-indulgence is a cover for the patriarchal orthodoxy. We abided by real  freedom.

We were from all over the continent, and some were beyond it. The vast majority would never meet, of course. But a few did – two even got romantically involved, traveling about a thousand miles to meet and surprise us with snuggle pics.

I was just out of a long period of social isolation, and whereas I may not have been skilled enough yet to socialize face-to-face with such confident, experienced people, this group was the best preparation. Such wonderful undeluded cynicism, everybody holding each other up.

At a 2011 book signing,

my comfort meant more

 than book sales. 

A picture of me taken in 2011 (which happens to be my Pluspora pic right now) summarizes my feelings in that period. That easy smile was a long time in coming. The pic shows me at a book signing. (My self-publishing of books was just marginally successful. But who needed professional success, when you were doing so vastly better as a person?)

I was learning not to be ruled by demons. Negativity and perpetual images of doom that had intruded on my perceptions for decades were being evicted from my awareness. I was grasping that although life included potential horrors, it could be good, and because of that potential for good, I was allowed to focus on the positive. Bad didn’t define everything, and there were attractions to people based on good and nurturing.

And god, I loved the club. As said, it facilitated my real-life social development, and one weekend afternoon in 2013 -- a Sunday as I recall – I had driven home from an overnight get-together out of town with some friends (real life ones). I went through the usual routine of settling back in -- coat off, leftovers in fridge, and of course, computer on.

What I immediately saw was the result of events I still cannot fully explain. First, I had an invitation to join a new  secret Facebook group, named funkily in honor of the founder’s favorite childhood TV cartoon. That’s fine, but the person who sent this invite was one of the top posting and most colorful members of that “underground club.” Why would she hastily have formed this group? And why were a few other active members of the club now in it?

I went back into the original group and found that these people had left it. Members still in were un-characteristically straightforward and terse, all talking back and forth in complex and somewhat vague terms about whether some member had gotten a raw deal, or had deserved what he received. Yep, a lot had transpired in my 36-hour absence. Some sort of massive blow up had wiped out the lively verve of the underground club.

It was as though I went to my favorite place, only to find it a smoldering pile of ruins.

Over the next hour or so of puzzled examining of the posts in my old club, and this new place, I steadily pieced together what had ripped everything -- and everyone – apart with such brutal swiftness.

One member, a woman who lived in the southern U.S., had demanded that a male member be expelled for posting something so awful that – well, I still do not know what he actually posted, but I sure do know the topic: rape.

The founder of our underground club, a woman who lived in the northeastern part of the country, had declined to remove him. Like her southern counterpart, the founder was a strong feminist and unafraid to verbally blast patriarchy, racism or anything else hateful.

To know which of them was right required knowing exactly what was posted by the man on the Friday night when our club began what logically should have been another fun and rebellious weekend. His post had been removed, as had some of the immediate reactions.

To this day, I cannot imagine what could have been at the same time horrible enough to one of these indomitable progressives to clearly require expulsion, and yet to the other not warranting such action. At first, I was frustrated that I was so in the dark from having missed the incident itself. Then, after I scrolled back through the weekend's comments and saw one member’s response to whatever that problem post had been, I decided it was better that I had been away.

This member, a woman, had blasted the man in a chant-like string of emphatic verbal attacks, some surrounding the word “rape,” as though she were attacking the term itself, as well as him. It looked to me like a bid to exorcise horrors from her own consciousness. I recognized her comments as the sort of OCD/anxiety fueled rituals from which I had long suffered. I have never been sexually assaulted, but I was accosted as a 13-year-old, and years before that, I was ritualistically mentally abused by a teacher denigrating solely me in front of the rest of the class regularly for my entire 4th grade year.

I have been diagnosed as having both simple and complex PTSD, both in partial remission. That remission process started about four years prior to this “lost weekend” on Facebook. And it has continued since; things are steadily improving. But my innocence about the unmitigated good of social media to me, or the world died that afternoon.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA

The Amazing Contradiction -- What did and didn't upset Americans

One night in 2013, TV viewers of CBS’ Amazing Race saw a few minutes of the reality show’s contestants on a stop in Hanoi, Vietnam searching for clues that had been placed around a memorial to Vietnamese who died from U.S. bombing during the war four decades earlier.

The memorial was fashioned from wreckage of a downed American B-52 bomber, which was primarily what sparked an instant online protest, including the comment: "My father's friend was on that plane…. (I)t glorifies the death and killing of our men."

The VFW’s national commander wrote to CBS President Les Moonves charging that "the B-52 scene, as well as the young people singing a propaganda song, was totally unnecessary to the show's plot, which speaks volumes about naïve producers who think they're in charge when they are not."

Amazing Race contestants in Hanoi in 2013.

CBS, at the start of the next Amazing Race episode, apologized “to veterans, particularly those who served in Vietnam, as well as to their families and any viewers who were offended by the broadcast."

This single scene on CBS in 2013 brought forth from the grass roots of America what 168 half-hour shows on that network from 1965 to 1971 could not prompt.

Hogan’s Heroes, a CBS sitcom about American, British and French World War II Prisoners of War in the fictional German camp Stalag 13, was a huge hit during a period when TV comedies were silly escapism (talking horses, flying nuns).

At first, Hogan’s Heroes did draw criticism from reviewers and commentators for trivializing the suffering of prisoners of war and American World War II veterans overall. But from millions of people whose fathers really did endure the misery of fighting the Nazis – like, for instance me – came not a complaint. At least not enough to stop the show from being a ratings smash hit, and winning two Emmys during its six seasons.

In my childhood, I chuckled along with America at the hijinks of the good guy-ish American Colonel Hogan, the ineptitude of the unwittingly usurped Col. Klink, and the oafishness of the huggy rotund Sgt. Schultz, whose hilarious catch phrase was, “I know nothing, I see nothing.”

Beyond my knowledge back then was that Schultz’ constant repeating of this was his preparation for war crimes trials, and his fixation on their likelihood meant he was conceding the war, which he had no interest in waging in the first place.

John Banner, who played Schultz the harmless Nazi, was in real life almost killed by Nazis, who were anything but harmless, as European Jews such as him knew at the core of their souls.

Banner, an Austrian-born actor, by luck happened to be performing in Switzerland when the Anschluss, or forced annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany happened in 1938.

From Geneva, the place his theatrical troupe was staying, Banner applied for refugee status and was accepted by the United States.

Commenting on the contradiction between this personal history and his comedic portrayal of a Nazi soldier, Banner told the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1960s: “Some people ask me how we can be funny about a prison camp in the war. And I say to them, how was it possible to write about two little old ladies who killed twelve men and buried them in the basement and make it funny. Well, somebody did, and it was called Arsenic and Old Lace.”

That’s a somewhat fair comparison, because that 1941 Broadway hit was in fact inspired by a real-life couple in Connecticut who in 1917 were found to have fatally poisoned and buried male residents in their home for the elderly. And the story went from unspeakable atrocity to side-splitting comedy in a quarter century.

That’s the same elapsed time between the horrors of World War II and Americans tuning in to Col. Hogan outwitting Klink interspersed with laugh tracks and tooth paste commercials. It was as though being a POW in a German stalag was a rollicking week at summer camp.

It wasn't. "Rations were meagre. The men -- but not officers -- had to work, often at heavy labour," the website of the British Imperial War Museum said of German treatment of allied POWs. "(T)he days dragged and there was a constant battle against boredom. Prisoners tried to overcome this by staging entertainments and educating themselves. Contrary to the popular myth, most men were too weak from hunger and work to escape."

That site also said something that clashes with the one tasteful feature on Hogan's Heroes -- the progressive racial breakthrough role of actor Ivan Dixon. He played a black American POW named Kinchloe, who did secret radio surveillance for the allies, a role that launched Dixon on an acclaimed career as a director and actor. If the U.S. Army during the real World War II would not have treated an African-American fairly, the Nazis, or course, would have oppressed Kinchloe vastly worse.

The Museum's site said allied POWs from groups Nazi ideology considered "racially and politically inferior" were often starved and brutalized. 

In an American online remembrance of POWs, the National World War II Museum’s site said:

“In one of the coldest winters on record -- 23 December 1944 at Stalag Luft III in Sagan, temperatures hovered just below 0°F -- 80,000 Allied POWs were evacuated from camps on the eastern edge of German territory and forced, mainly on foot, to camps further away from the advancing Russians.”

I remember an adult leader in our Boy Scout troop, himself a World War II veteran (though not a POW), telling us circa 1970 about this brutal march of allied POWs in the snow. Yet he did not mention Hogan’s Heroes, apparently never regarding the then hit show’s lighthearted portrayal of the harsh life of POWs as a controversy.

Across America, there were no reports of angry letters to CBS about the nature of the show, no advertiser nervousness about supporting it, and very few if any complaints from Jewish or holocaust survivor organizations. Of course, POW camps, where prisoners got Red Cross packages and could write letters home, were not the same things as Hitler’s concentration camps, which were created to exterminate an entire people.

Yet, the reality of the holocaust was anything but removed from the set of this sitcom. Hogan’s Heroes cast member Robert Clary, a French-born Jew who played POW LeBeau, was a real-life survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp – a striking fact that serves both to dampen and inflame criticism of Hogan’s Heroes.

Adding to this elephant in the living room, actor Leon Askin, whose recurring role was no Schultz or Klink, but a real Nazi Gen. Burkhalter, was Jewish and a refugee from Vienna; and Werner Klemperer, who played Klink, was European-born to a Jewish father and gentile mother.

In the last 40 years, Clary has spoken about the holocaust on tours organized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, appeared as himself in a 1982 movie about survivors gathering in Israel, and worked with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation archiving recordings of survivors’ recollections.

“Inevitably, at his lectures someone would ask Clary how he could work on Hogan’s Heroes after what he went through during World War II,” entertainment writer Brenda Scott Royce said in her book, Hogan’s Heroes – Behind the Scenes at Stalag 13. “He is weary of repeating himself.”

Clary told Royce: “Really, with the students, it’s the first  question they ask."  Royce's book says that among Clary’s responses are: POW camps were not death camps, the character Louis LeBeau was not Jewish, and most overridingly: “I’m an actor.”

Clary does not try to frame Hogan’s Heroes as anti-fascist commentary, or poetic justice by a troupe of European Jewish performers.

“We did not deal, really, with Nazism…. As a comedy, you cannot do that,” he said in Royce’s book. “I played Louis LeBeau… and I enjoyed it.”

And so did we, for six years.

Yet flashforward to our era, and a few minutes in Hanoi is widely condemned as cold disregard for the sufferings of POWs four decades earlier.

What explains this drastic difference in the public’s perceptions? Are we wiser? Hypersensitive? Oversaturated with 24-hour opportunities to crusade instantly with the clicking of a key? We used to leave that letter of protest sitting overnight by the car keys, enabling us to reconsider our visceral reactions before mailing it in the morning.

Today, we are lumped into algorithms and echo chambers to make online marketing more precise, and we are inflamed with catchphrases of fury to make partisan fundraisers produce more cash. Paul Ryan lied repeatedly during his acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican convention and both parties watched and learned as Ipad and laptop money donations surged with each false incendiary statement about President Obama.

In 2018, spending for those crucial midterm elections, CNN reported, tallied $5.7 billion. Compare to 1966’s midterms, when war, racial equality, immigration policy, and a backlash against a president drove donors to give $24.5 million. (Adjusted for inflation and population size, that’s about 5 percent as much.)

The 24.5 million figure was considered alarmingly high back then, but in 1966 when we got all worked up about largely the same issues as today, we still had the time – or was it the callousness – to laugh it up over POWs.