My Interactions with @REALBROTHER0003 and the Banality of Twitter

A few days ago I tossed off a rather unremarkable post called “Self-Hating Honkies and the War on Easter“. Not much to it, really. In the post, I linked Stacy McCain, who gave me a shout-out on Twitter, as befits a gentleman and scholar.

This must have coincided with an ongoing spar with one @REALBROTHER003, voice of what he calls the Real Brother Radio Show, about which, I must admit, I know little more than nothing. I say that because I was visited with this:

Now, the first part of this tweet is correct, if someone pedantically so. Ethnicity and religion aren’t identical. But is intolerance for a different religion really so different from intolerance for a different race? Are not both essentially based on fear and dehumanization of Teh Other? But whatever, score him the point. The second part is probably what drew me in. It’s almost hilarious in it’s rush-to-judgement, a too-perfect expression of “RAAAAACISM!” I had to read through the man’s tweets to make sure he wasn’t being ironic.

So I engaged:

This earned me a counter-thrust, complete with ALLCAPS capstone:

Ah. The cri-de-couer of the Reality-Based Community. How authoritative. I probably should have taken my cue and left things be at this point, but somehow, I plunged on, determined to see if I could get past the rhetorical armor:

I thought my hashtag would provoke a different line of attack, but he just doubled-down:

We now have an entirely Manichean worldview: the Land of Reality, and Bizzarro World, presumably filled with Racists. I have been judged and landed in the second place. Which is not really telling me anything new, so at this point, I got bored.

I suppose I had one last hope that my refusal to jump to his bait and moan “But I’m not a racist! Honest-to-gosh! And I don’t live in Bizzarro World either!” would at least give him pause. But @REALBROTHER003 has no truck with my contempt, and returned it full-force:

You have to give the man points for on-message consistency. And since I scored not one but two ALLCAPS explostions, I suppose I was getting under his skin that little bit. At this point that I summoned the interest to discover what TKCAL was all about: it seems to be an anagram for @REALBROTHER003’s name, Theron K. Cal. He’s also an independent filmmaker, with his own IMDB page.

Incidentally, the Urban Dictionary has three definitions for TKCAL, all of them referencing Theron, and none of them complementary (one of them is by “Real Brother’s Worst Nightmare,” which doesn’t sound terribly objective. This was the first link on the Yahoo search engine, as a matter of fact. So I’m guessing he puts that in all his tweets; reclaiming the name and all of that.

Anyway, I sent one more shot across the transom:

And that was that.

It’s not the worst conversation I’ve ever had on Twitter. I once got blocked by someone calling herself “Jezebel” (not @jezebel) because I wouldn’t let her give Bill Maher a pass during the Limbaugh-Fluke kerfuffle without calling her on it. Her tweets were hysterical in every sense of the word, and the block came when I told her that she had no idea how funny she was. @REALBROTHER003 was dignified by comparison.

But still, what a waste of time: a diary of two people not talking to each other. He shouts cliched insults, I sneer and condescend. He makes assumptions about me on nothing, I make assumptions based on little more. And that’s what we had: two assumptions with @-signs blabbing. What did we learn? Nothing, not even about each other.

And this is the media that delivered the last election? That sounds about right.

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