The Great Era of Overwhelming Conflation
"How do I know you aren't this enthusiastic about every meal you eat?" she asked.
"What difference does that make?"
"If this is the absolute best salad you've ever eaten, how do I know you don't say that about every salad?"
She didn't trust my enthusiasm. She was suspect of the praise and I understood that. If I was always white hot and passionate about salad, how did she know that her salad was somehow distinct or more special than other salads I'd eaten? What if I found another salad next week that I was equally jacked up about? Did she see that her salad had spinach and grapefruit and avocado? That it was completely perfect and unique? Would she prefer that I ate her salad the way a postal worker sorts mail?
"If I were seven years old, I suppose I can see that. The only assurance I can give you is that combined with my enthusiasm is a deep sense of devotion. I LOVE The Lincoln Restaurant. And I love the Honest Abe Burger (with bacon, mushrooms and Swiss cheese—you know, because Lincoln, right?). I've been eating that burger for twenty years. My enthusiasm for it never wears out.
“I want every salad to be the best salad I've ever eaten. Why would you order a salad with the expectation that it would be a mediocre meal? I engage every salad with the expectation that this salad will be thesalad, you see? And, if I love that salad, I will order that fucking thing every time I get a salad. Wait a minute. We aren't talking about salads, are we?"
I’ve always been a hyperbolic creature. It’s in my nature. The latest movie is my favorite movie. The last great book I read is the best book I've ever read. Mom's meatloaf? Shut up, already. It seems, though, that there is hyperbole in terms of the greatest things you enjoy and the poisonous exaggeration that comes with trying to bend others to your will.
The second type of hyperbole is the worst it's ever been.*
Or maybe it's exactly the same as it's ever been but with the massive information flood we face each day, it's just that we see and hear more of it than in decades prior. The result seems to be that with increased exposure to catastrophic claims of the dire nature of things, those most inflamed by their specific issues require of themselves to bloat and conflate even more just to be heard over the cacophony of voices.
It's no longer enough to make the data-supported claim that our reliance upon oil has increased the inevitable rise in the planet's temperature causing unprecedented climate change. To make some impact it has to be the impending doom of all life on the planet. It's not effective to claim that misgendering someone is rude and disrespectful; now it needs to be violence and transphobia. One cannot seem to make the case that a homeless man on the New York subway shouldn't be choked to death; it has to be a modern day lynching despite all the facts that dispute that claim.
Is the practice of certain states restricting gender affirming care to legal adults actually genocide? Of course not. That’s ridiculous. It’s shitty in some cases but hardly mass death. Are white people and more specifically white police killing black men in record numbers? Not even close. In fact, in 2020, there were 876 White-on-Black homicides and 1,877 Black-on-White homicides in America. Still a lot of homicides and certainly more than is acceptable but to pull focus from the numbers and conflate these deaths as a product of white supremacy is fundamentally dishonest.
The differential between the hyperbole of the past—back in the Boss Tweedy days—and today is that with the expanded reach that the internet provides it also gifts us access to the facts as well. We no longer have to take the word of zealots as the truth. We’re all pretty lazy and mostly believe what we wanted to believe anyway but that access can shield us from the bullshit. Pretty much every single utterance out of Trump’s gaping wound on CNN the other night was easily debunked through some simple online facet checking. He is the King of Harmful Hyperbole in the modern age and, while his methods tend to work on about a third of country, his lying is so pervasive it’s more a feature rather than a bug.
His brand is sprinkled with his ability to say things so obviously untrue that fact checking him is all but pointless. He doesn’t care if you catch him in a lie. That’s the point. Everyone lies now as if they think they can get some of that grifter dust on them.
Public-health officials lied about the necessity of school closures and the efficacy of masks (two opposite mask lies at different times during the pandemic). The bureaucratic and media elite lied about the likely origins of Covid 19. The press lied about the “peaceful” nature of BLM riots. Twitter lied about its policies. The entire medical and psychological establishment lies about the differences between male and female.
It’s not just the establishment that lies. In response to these “official” lies, anti-establishment types tell lies of their own. They lie about the safety of vaccines. They lie about Russian and Ukrainian deaths in Putin’s war. They lie about January 6 being an inside job.
Why would the folks on the Left—you know, the college kids—decide to ape Trump by conflating every claim to the point of lunacy? I suppose it's because it seems to work for him, why not? For me, I see very little difference between the GOP declaring that our children are in dire trouble of being groomed in schools and the Progressive rhetoric that nothing in terms of anti-black racism has changed in 400 years. Neither declaration is based in anything but a handful of leading anecdotes and very little substance. At the heart of why I find myself unwanted by either side of most of these issues is the rampant horseshit being flung. I have to eat my own version of a shit sandwich daily—we all do. I'm not going eat the additional Poop Reuben because you tell me if I don't munch down I won't be on the right side of history.
Chicken Little Syndrome (from the Urban Dictionary) Every time someone believes the hype behind an apocalyptic theory that will end the world, and the hysteria that ensues. It is an old cumulative tale about a chicken (or a hare in an early version) who believes the world is coming to an end. The phrase "The sky is falling" has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.
Most of these culture war totems are acorns dropping from the sky. We have far more important things to do than pay attention to those who decide to amplify the potential harms of pronoun use (on either side) or punctuality is a sign of white supremacy.
an example of, yes, catastrophic hyperbole
