Twitter

Once more, I attempt to fall asleep. My eyes are heavy, I feel dizzy, weak. My body is wracked with aches and I am shivering uncontrollably. The blessed relief of healing slumber still eludes me. Is it morning or night? What day is it? I don’t know. Nearby I hear a muffled groan. Someone else is suffering. Another victim of this god-awful pandemic. How many more of us will it take? With some difficulty I manage to turn my head and can just make out large, blocky letters which from my perspective spell ‘AROD’, adorning the outer sides of my Dora the Explorer play tent. From the amount of light passing through the garish green fabric, I’m guessing it’s early morning. Moments before dawn. I survived another night. Another night of this sleepless nightmare.

There's a joke about a guy who gets anxious on airplanes. The passenger next to him, trying to be helpful, suggests ways he might relax. A drink? A Xanax? A movie, or a nice nap? The anxious man shakes his head, annoyed. He can't relax. He can't lose focus. He can only sit, gripping the arm rests, staring straight ahead in a state of white-knuckled, sphincter clenching terror. Why? Because his terror is the only thing keeping the plane in the air. This notion of anxious acting-out as our sole line of defense against chaos — call it the Control Freak’s Fallacy — isn’t new, but it is certainly having a moment in the run-up to the 2020 election.

In ancient Athens, the great lawmaker Solon passed a law banning ‘laceration of the flesh by mourners’, ‘the sacrifice of an ox at the grave’, and other ‘unmanly and effeminate extravagances of sorrow’.Cockburn has come to appreciate the wisdom of Solon. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday night caused an instant outpouring of...well, mourning isn’t exactly the right word. It was a hysterical outburst, an explosion of mass delirium: greater exhibitions of neurosis were taken as proof of greater commitment to the cause. So great was the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you would think that Ginsburg’s death has caused all Planned Parenthoods to close, and birth control pills to lose their contraceptive powers. https://twitter.

No one will deny that 2020 has been a rollercoaster, but one fun thing Cockburn discovered this year is that you can now live forever via your social media accounts. Facebook has long given family members the option to turn their deceased loved one’s page into a memorial, but something far more bizarre is happening on Twitter. Family members and staffers grab the keys to the account and fire off tweet after tweet under the late user’s name with little indication of who is the one resurrecting the dead. Charlie Daniels’s account, for example, lived on by posting quotes from the late country music singer and links to charity for veterans and police officers.

Dear Twitter,The other day I spotted an elderly man not wearing a mask in the pharmacy. He had a badge pinned to his shirt which proclaimed him to have COPD, absolving him of his responsibility to do the decent thing. At first glance everything looked legit, but to my keen eyes, the kerning on his medical exemption badge was all wrong. A friend of mine is doing a graphic design course and after discreetly WhatsApping them a close-up, they confirmed to me it was indeed a clever forgery. I immediately opened my Twitter app so that I could broadcast me shaming him to my 128,000 followers, but my plan was abruptly scuppered. I tapped the familiar icon and was confronted with a message telling me that my account, MY account had been suspended! SUSPENDED! Can you imagine that?