A bunch of people are posting a USAToday article that makes it seem McCaskill dissed on Ocasio-Cortez, and they’re expressing an appropriate amount of outrage about McCaskill doing that. The thing is, I’m not sure she did.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t know either politician at all. But I do know outrage bait, and both the USAToday and CNN articles reek of it. First, they smell like cropped quotes. For instance, the CNN article says,
“I don’t know her,” McCaskill said when asked if she’d consider Ocasio-Cortez a “crazy Democrat” like the ones she decried on the campaign trail. “I’m a little confused why she’s the thing. But it’s a good example of what I’m talking about, a bright shiny new object, came out of nowhere and surprised people when she beat a very experienced congressman.”
Had CNN presented the whole interview, there would have been
an exchange like, “Do you consider OC a crazy Democrat like the ones you
decried on the campaign trail?” And McCaskill would have answered, “I don’t
know her.”
In other words, no, she was not talking about Ocasio-Cortez.
The next part of her quote might have been praise, and might have been criticism. We can’t tell because CNN didn’t give us the context. But we do know this—that this is the photo CNN chose of Ocasio-Cortez.
Meanwhile, this is the photo they chose for Kamala Harris.
So, and that’s my second point, who knows what McCaskill actually said—CNN didn’t give us the interview, but an abridged version that skews against Ocasio-Cortez. Harris has nothing to do with this interview.
[Edited to add: why is Harris here? My crank theory is that CNN wants to play Harris against AOC. In other words: clickbaity CATFIGHT!]
The USAToday version is the classic CATFIGHT version that
always gets clicks—women fighting is such fun. It’s the depoliticized,
hyperpersonalized coverage of political events that has made me loathe USAToday
since it was started.
There might be reasons to criticize Ocasio-Cortez’s
policies; McCaskill might have made them. But neither CNN nor USAToday went in
that direction because policy argumentation doesn’t get clicks.
So, did McCaskill diss Ocasio-Cortez?
Maybe. Maybe not. That isn’t my point. My point is that we don’t know from either
the USAToday or the CNN article because neither of them is oriented toward
giving voters useful information about anyone involved. CNN is part of the
outrage machine, and USAToday is the founder of clickbait journalism. I think
lefties sometimes forget that CNN is more interested in getting committed
viewers than it is in furthering democratic deliberation, and USAToday is an
insult to parrots who might find it in their cages.
One of the paradoxes of con artists is that cons always depend on appealing to the mark’s desire for a quick and easy solution but the most profitable cons last a long time. How do you keep people engaged in the scam if you’re siphoning off their money?
There are several ways, but one of the most common is to ensure that they’re getting a quick outcome that they like. They’ll often wine and dine their marks, thereby coming across as too successful to need the mark’s money, and also increasing the mark’s confidence (and attachment). They might be supporting that high living through bad checks, but more often with credit cards and money from previous marks, or by getting the mark to pay for the high living without knowing. One serial confidence artist who specialized in picking up divorced middle-aged women on the Internet was particularly adept at stealing a rarely-used credit card from the women while they were showering. He then simply hid the bills when they arrived.
Because he seemed to have so much money, the women assumed he wouldn’t be scamming them, and would then hand over their life’s savings for him to invest.
They do this despite there being all sorts of good signs that the guy is a con artist–his life story seems a little odd, he doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends who’ve known him very long, there’s always some reason he can’t write checks (or own a home or sign a loan). There are three reasons that the con works, and that people ignore the counter-evidence.
First, cons flatter their marks, arguing that the marks deserve so much more than they’re getting, and persuade the marks to have confidence in them. They will tell the marks that those people (the ones who are pointing to the disconfirming data) look down on them, think they’re stupid, and think they know better. The con thereby gets the mark’s ego associated with his being a good person and not a con artist—admitting that he is a con means the mark will have to admit that those people were right.[1] The con artist will spin the evidence in ways that show he’s willing to admit to some minor flaws, ones that make the mark feel that she can really see through him. She knows him.[2]
Second, the con works because we don’t like ambiguity, and we tend to privilege direct experience and our own perception. The reasons to wonder about whether a man really is that wealthy are ambiguous, and it’s second order thinking (thinking about what isn’t there, about the absence of friends, family, connections, bank statements). That ambiguous data will seem less vivid, less salient, less compelling than the direct experience we have of his buying us expensive gifts. The family thing is vague and complicated; the jewelry is something we can touch.
Third, people who dislike complexity, who believe that most things have simple solutions, and that they are good at seeing those simple solutions are easy marks because those are precisely the beliefs to which cons appeal. Admitting that the guy is a con artist means admitting that the mark’s whole view of life—that the world has simple solutions, that people are what they seem to be, that you can trust your gut about whether someone is good or bad, that things you can touch (like jewelry) matter.
And it works because the marks don’t realize that they are the ones who’ve actually paid for that jewelry.
There are all the signs of his being a con artist—all the lawsuits, all the lies, the lack of transparency about his actual wealth, the reports that show a long history of dodgy (if not actively criminal) tax practices, the evidence that shows his wealth was inherited and not earned—but those are complicated to think about. Trump tells people that he cares about them; he (and his supportive media) tell their marks that all the substantive criticism is made by libruls who look down on them, who think they know better. The media admits to a few flaws, and spins them as minor.
And Trump gives his marks jewelry. If you have Trump supporters in your informational world, then you know that they respond to any criticism of Trump with, “I don’t care about collusion; I care about my lower taxes.” (Or “I care about the economy” or “I care that someone is finally doing something about illegal immigrants.”) They have been primed to frame concerns about Trump as complicated, ambiguous, and more or less personal opinion, but the benefit of Trump (to them) as clear, unambiguous, and tangible.
They can touch the jewelry.
And they don’t realize that he isn’t paying for it; he never paid for it, and he never will. They’re paying for it. They bought themselves that jewelry.
There are, loosely, three ways to try to get people to see the con. First, I think it’s useful not to come across as saying that people are stupid for falling for Trump’s cons (although it can be useful to point out that current defenses of Trump are that he’s too stupid to have violated the law). It can be helpful to say that you understand why he and his policies would seem so attractive, but point out that he’s greatly increased the deficit (that his kind of tax cuts always increase the deficit). It’s helpful to have on hand the data about how much “entitlement”programs cost. Point out that they will be paying for his tax cuts for a long, long time.
Another strategy is to refuse to engage and just keep piling on the evidence. People get persuaded that they’ve been taken in by a con artist incident by incident. It isn’t any particular one, but that there are so many, and they reject each one as it comes along. So, I think that sharing story after story about how corrupt Trump is, how bad his policies are,and what damage he is doing—even if (especially if) people complain about your doing so—is effective in the long run.
Third, when people object or defend Trump, ask them if they’re getting their information from sources that would tell them if Trump were a con artist. They’ll respond with, “Oh, so I should watch MSNBC” (or something along those lines) and the answer is: “Yes, you should watch that too.” Or, “No, you shouldn’t get your news from TV.” Or a variety of other answers, but the point is that you aren’t telling them to switch to “librul” sources as much as getting more varied information.
Con artists create a bond with their marks—their stock in trade is creating confidence. They lose power when their marks lose confidence, and that happens bit by bit. And sometimes it happens when people notice the jewelry is pretty shitty, actually.
[1]This is why it’s so common for marks to start covering for the con when the con gets exposed. They fear the “I told you so” more than the consequences of getting conned.
[2] In other words, con artists try to separate people from the sources of information that would undermine the confidence the mark has in the con.
If memory serves, Stephanie Odom came to UT as a literature student, and she was a gifted reader and teacher of literature. But, as often happens, her experience teaching first year writing caused her to change course to rhetoric. She loved it. She loved what happens to students as they become better writers—more confident, more intellectually curious, better at research.
And she really enjoyed reading scholarship in rhetoric, as it was a “conversation” she wanted to join, asking questions that intrigued her,and to which she wanted answers.
But her love of literature, and her wide reading in it, meant that she was puzzled and sometimes irritated by what she saw as an unnecessary antagonism between literature and rhetoric. While it was long past the culture wars of the 80s and 90s that had led to the banning of literature from composition classes, literature was still banned. And, certainly, she saw the reasons for keeping first and second year writing courses from being intro to lit crit or literature appreciation classes—not that she saw such approaches to literature as bad, but simply as out of place–but she didn’t see why banning literary texts (still a common practice) was the necessary outcome of ways of teaching literature being not particularly useful to the goals of introductory writing classes.
Behind these arguments about literature, she thought, there was an argument about the purpose of humanistic studies. Initially, she imagined that she would write a dissertation that would focus on the term“humanism,” and its post-Matthew Arnold permutations. And she was well-trained and well-equipped for exactly that dissertation—one that would require close textual analysis, capacious reading, and precisely her kind of intellectual generosity. She could have written that dissertation about as easily as anyone writes a dissertation. She, however, did something that required more courage.
The problem for her, and this is typical of Stephanie, was that she wasn’t just interested in the theoretical disagreements or intellectual genealogy of the place of literature in writing classes: she wanted to do scholarship that would help teachers teach better. She wanted to know if bringing in literature did actually inhibit writing instruction. And that meant a whole set of other questions—how many people are bringing in literature? What are they doing with it? How do we assess the effectiveness of any teaching practice?
So, partway into her dissertation, she developed a set of questions that required that she learn entirely new methods—survey writing, qualitative analysis of data. She was brilliant, and so certainly smart enough to learn new material, new skills, and even new ways of conducting research. But it took more than intelligence to make that cognitive shift. It took a kind of bravery, and she did it. She was intellectually fierce.
She was also kind and funny, who inspired love, admiration, and respect everywhere she went. She was an Assistant Director in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, meaning that she helped prepare others to teach writing, who was always kind and helpful to fellow graduate students as they were trying to learn the thing at which she was so skilled.
She was active in a graduate writing group for years, a kind, clear, generous, and usefully critical reader of fellow graduate students’ work. Perhaps more important, at times when other members were slacking off—or even thinking about slacking off—she was cheerfully fierce at holding everyone accountable, partially through her breathtakingly practical approach to solving whatever problems people were presenting as obstacles.
She worked in what was then the Undergraduate Writing Center, and was a respected and talented writing consultant, with whom everyone loved to work. When the Writing Center shifted to the University Writing Center, and moved to a new space, there were two major new opportunities. One was the opportunity to work with graduate students, something that would require establishing a cultural practice of accountable writing groups. The other was to have rooms which would be quieter and less distracting than the hectic and often noisy common space—rooms crucial for being able to resolve the problems faced by students whose hearing, cognitive processes, writing project,or previous experiences meant being in the midst of a crowded and very public consulting space wasn’t practical.
Thus, when there was the possibility of naming one of those rooms, it was obvious that it should be named for Stephanie. Her commitment to writing—at both the graduate and undergraduate level—and her skill as a teacher and facilitator of writing meant that she was a model of what the UWC was trying to be. That the rooms were also a practical solution to a vexing problem of exclusion made it perfect.
When Stephanie was diagnosed with cancer, all those qualities—her brilliance, ferocity, pragmatism, and ability to inspire love—were tested. And still, she persisted.
And she got a really good job—Assistant Professor at UT-Tyler—where she branched into yet another area of research, working with a criminal justice professor on pragmatic ways of improving student writing. The smart and beautifully-written co-authored article ended up published in a journal on criminal justice education, another intellectually brave venture.
At UT-Tyler, she met a smart, kind, funny, and loving man, and it was wonderful to see her so happy. She also got an adorable dog, whom she loved even after the dog broke a sliding glass door multiple times (because squirrels).
Stephanie died yesterday. She was loved, admired, respected, and needed. I will miss her so very much. She was fierce.
