DOI: Declaration of...Ignorance

As my readers know, I love the Declaration of Independence. It’s such an inspiring document, taking just a single page to enumerate the faults of the British sovereign, the colonists’ numerous—unsuccessful—attempts to seek redress and their reluctant decision to sever the parent-child connection with Mother England, and it concludes with the signers’ pledge of mutual support, backed up with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

And I love the annual rendition by NPR of the Declaration, sentence by sentence—sometimes by their correspondents, sometimes by random people on the National Mall. Because it is a people’s document.

Well, this year, NPR tweeted the Declaration, because it’s 2017, and SoMe is how you reach the people. But oh, my stars and garters, you would not believe the blowback they got from the, er, the crowd that decries the “mainstream media” as the enemy of the people.

No, seriously—the responses were kind of horrifying. Because apparently there’s a considerable segment of the population (either humanoid or bot) that does not recognize any passages from one of the seminal documents of our history. And there’s another segment—which may or may not overlap with the first one and may or may not also be part bot—that doesn’t care that it’s the DOI; if NPR is involved, it’s bad, #FakeNews and really, really infuriating.

Viz.:

Sanchez may be a bot—this appears to be his/her/its only tweet.

But Human Being took up the cause.

Dear Human Being is interesting: for having a profile claiming to be a fighter for humanity, you’d think s/he would have recognized one of the Big Ones when it comes to declaring unalienable human rights, but she just kept doubling down.

Since being outed as, uh, somewhat less than on top of things, she deleted those pig-ignorant tweets, but of course you cannot escape screen shots. This was only one of the many incredulous responses that probably drove her to run for cover:

Then there was this person:

After a few responses along this line, Cave Creek Deb deleted her account, which was probably a good move.

And then there was this fellow:

Who appears to have a hair trigger; he also responded to a tweet by Senator Mike Lee of Utah:

Old Jason doesn't seem to grasp words in the abstract, as in the entire nation being an experiment in self-government. According to his profile, Jason Talbot is from Arizona and has ambitions to holding office. In Arizona, he might indeed get elected.

Now as for this guy—he started out strong, inferring a call to violent overthrow of government from NPR’s series of tweets:

But after many responses pointing out the origin of these fightin’ words, he actually apologized:

However, his exculpatory statement—that, really, no one could be expected to recognize the source document—does not fill me with confidence for the future of this state.

All-in-all, this was a truly enlightening exercise. Scary AF, but enlightening. And I believe this tweeter has it right: