If there’s one sentence making me gnash my teeth and scream to the heavens right now, it’s…“You’ll never hear about this in the mainstream media, but…” Also its eye roll inducing cousin, “Nobody’s talking about this but…” and the makes-me-want-to-stomp-on-you “Crickets.”
It’s always followed by a story I’ve read or heard, over and over again, all day, all week, or all month. On main stream media.
This week in Crickets we have, on the left, the fact that the Austin bomber seemed to be targeting people of color. On the right, we’ve got the fact that this week’s school shooter was neutralized by the armed school officer. Both left-wing nuts and right-wing nuts were off on idiotic rants about how the MSM wasn’t covering these aspects. Which they were, of course. Constantly. Sort of like, you know, actual crickets. Crickets never shut up. They say the same thing over and over again until you go down the basement and stomp em.
It would be easy to think of Crickets as being to the newfangled opinion-shaping “alt” media what the word “literally” is to today’s common speech. Sprinkled liberally throughout, with no regard for its actual meaning, as a way to impart greater significance to something that is not, in fact, distinctive and maybe not even true. Silly, but mostly harmless, reflecting only on the user’s lack of knowledge. But Crickets is not harmless. It exists to undermine that which is real and helpful, reinforcing a negative dialogue that pits neighbor against neighbor and citizen against citizen by sowing suspicion. It’s dangerous and subversive and needs to be stomped on.
As our social media platforms sort out how to deal with this new world order, I hope one algorithm could target Crickets stories and banish them to the netherworld. But since the tools they are currently using seem convinced that what I really want is a ring with a golf-ball-sized aquamarine, a huge box of diapers, and a size 20 swimsuit, none of which would look good on me right now, I’m not feeling really good about that.
So we’re just going to have to do this by ourselves. Any time we read Crickets, we call bullshit. That’s the only way we can stomp on it.
The View from the Porch 