“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
— Abraham Lincoln, Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, Jan. 27, 1838
When psychiatrist Frasier Crane was too ill to do his radio call-in show, his brother Niles filled in.
From the beginning, the younger doctor laid down the law.
“While Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian,” Niles proclaimed, “So there’ll be no blaming mother today!”
Congress and the special prosecutor continue to delve into the allegations of how Russian-based hackers and propaganda shops put out all kinds of false information and incendiary images designed to disrupt our most recent presidential election. As they should. Especially if it turns out those efforts were not only designed to help the campaign of the eventual winner, but coordinated with it.
But if we are really going to get out of denial and deal with our national psychosis, we should agree. There will be no blaming Russia today.
We may properly look askance at Facebook creator and master Mark Zuckerburg, and at the monster that seems to have escaped his lab. Through, Zuckerburg seemed to be saying up until a few days ago, no fault of his. Or its.
Just about every day, we learn more about how operators and hackers connected to the Russian government turned our own social media giants into Trojan horses and used them to attack America from within.
By somehow worming their way into the social media algorithms and data bases, we are now told, bad actors were able to pinpoint the however many thousands of Facebook users who might be receptive to messages that exacerbate existing, if latent, fears of a black planet, of Islamic terrorism, of perverted cross-dressers in public restrooms and of a woman president.
And, by so doing, the tech trolls turned blue collar voters in rust belt battleground states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, folks who might at least lean Democratic in a normal year, into the voters who gave the Electoral College vote to the Republican candidate.
As experts have pointed out, it’s not the hundreds or even thousands of ads that Russian agents paid Facebook to deliver to susceptible targets. It’s more the thousands or even millions of likes, shares, retweets and other filters that so many Americans willfully provided to people who want to breach our security.
Each one of those further separates the reader, viewer or listener from the true source of the distortions and lies and makes normal, unsuspecting Americans into a sort of nationwide cartel of money-launderers.
Yes, what the Russians were apparently up to was no good. It seems more clear all the time that their purpose in all of this was not just to prank us, but to make us vulnerable to internal dissension mutual paranoia to a degree that we were never vulnerable to Soviet missiles and tanks.
But no body forced any of us to do any of this. In most cases, once the original ads were placed, no money changed hands as the bad seeds were broadcast across the land. Americans did it willingly, eagerly, for no reason other than to seem to be fonts of forbidden knowledge and inside information.
And to show up that uppity black president and his would-be woman successor.
But, unless some significantly worse worst-case-scenarios prove true, Russian interference wasn’t direct. It didn’t stuff ballot boxes or hack voting machines. It didn’t close polls early, or open them late, or cancel early voting programs or otherwise suppress the vote. We did that.
Facebook, Twitter, Google and the like should take more responsibility for what their engines promulgate and promote. They should not be regulated, as if they were a public utility. That would interfere with the First Amendment rights of both platform and user.
But they should stop pretending they are a mindless bulletin board or graffiti wall, with no power and no say over the information that flows through their server farms. They should see themselves, and be seen by others, as publishers, responsible for doing what is humanly, and cybernetically, possible to check, to label and to direct to a higher quality of information.
Ultimately, though, it is up to the whole of the American population to recognize that the immense power of these tools is in our hands, too. That was supposed to be what was good about them.
George Pyle, the Tribune’s editorial page editor, denies all responsibility for the disappearance of that last cookie. gpyle@sltrib.com