The Rise and Fall of Keaton Jones

Scott Hardie | December 13, 2017
Is Keaton Jones, the latest viral sensation, not another perfect Milkshake Duck?

Why do we Americans make our ordinary people into heroes, and then make our heroes into villains? The Internet has accelerated the process dramatically, but it's been around for a long time. It's part of the American cultural DNA, these simultaneous drives to elevate the little people and to take cultural giants down a peg. Is it because social mobility is among our foundational values, and we thrill to see any change in status?

Why can't we accept that real people are multitudinous and will inevitably possess both positive and negative qualities? Why must we reduce every person and event and narrative to a binary good or bad? Why do we reduce complex issues like bullying into singular representative symbols and then debate the symbols as if they mattered, losing the forest for the trees?

Stories like the lionizing and villifying of this poor kid make me wonder how much is fundamentally broken in our culture.

Samir Mehta | December 13, 2017
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Erik Bates | December 13, 2017
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Scott Hardie | December 13, 2017
The term "milkshake duck" is just a metaphor for how positive, feel-good memes online can quickly turn sour. There's no deeper meaning there.

Poor Ken Bone is another example. The guy did absolutely nothing notable, just asked a question at a presidential debate, and his "normalcy" somehow catapulted him into instant acclaim. And within 48 hours, the same public started tearing him apart based on morally imperfect stuff in his Reddit history, forgetting that regular people do morally imperfect stuff online every day. He deserved none of it.

The potato salad Kickstarter guy is a similar case: He was first lauded for having a clever bit of fun that could net him a small windfall, then criticized for not doing "good" with the money (as if charity is the only acceptable outcome), and the criticism only abated somewhat after he capitulated and agreed to donate the windfall. Too bad. He did nothing wrong and deserved the cash.

Perhaps the problem is that we Americans bring morality to situations where there isn't any. Kneeling during the national anthem harms exactly no one, and yet the athletes who do it are treated like scum. Wearing a traditional outfit from a foreign culture also harms no one, but people who do it are scorned online for cultural appropriation. We could list dozens of examples if we started. Just today, i was reading about how Norway's prison system is much more effective than America's, but such gentle treatment of prisoners would be unthinkable here, because we think prisoners are bad and deserve to be punished, effectiveness be damned. We let our morals confuse us so much.

Can we just leave Keaton Jones alone? Can we just let this one kid just be a normal kid and just let his family have their Confederate flags and live in peace? Can we stop fighting over whether they fit into our cultural ideas of "good" and "bad" and just leave them alone? Why are we like this?

Samir Mehta | December 13, 2017
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Scott Hardie | December 13, 2017
Amen to that.