I got to the bottom of this little YouTube debacle: remember this? You should, it was just posted less than 36 hours ago. "Tamtampamela" is a YouTube user who has been posting videos putting forward an outlandish, religiously fundamentalist viewpoint that sounds ridiculous.
Because she means for it to sound ridiculous.
Because she is a troll.
From a little research I did, it appears that she is a regular contributor to the forums on the Landover Baptist website, where she is known as a specific kind of troll called a "Poe" (don't ask me why), someone who satirizes an absurd position, usually of the fundamentalist variety, with such a straight face that you cannot at first blush tell the position is being satirized - hence showing the irony inherent in fervently holding to a belief that most people, even religious people, think is ridiculous.
What does this have to do with the stated intentions of this blog? Simply put, the majority of people who have seen her video have fallen for her troll. With the forty or so previous videos she has done over the past year plus (true troll dedication), it was just a handful and little harm was done. But in this video, by taking on such a sad event and giving voice to a position so controversial, harm is being done. A true asshole, knowing that this troll is "Pamela Foreman" who lives in Tampa, has been putting an address and phone number for a person with the same name in Tampa all over the internet. Only problem is, its not her, and this innocent woman and her family have been threatened and the sheriff's department is protecting her.
Simply put, "Tamtampamela" is able to carry off a only slightly wacked version of a viewpoint we are all familiar with and most of us aren't wise to the deception. I'm not saying this to criticize those who were taken in. I was myself, initially. But further investigation (which I don't have time but do have the curiosity for) revealed the true nature of what was going on.
The school of poetical explication founded by the authors of the book "Understanding Poetry," Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, says that the poem should stand on its own as a subject of interpretation, and that while knowing the historical background, author's biography, or what-have-you may shed interesting light, a good interpretation will stand or fall on how well it interprets the text itself, first and foremost. Although this school, called the "New Criticism," has come under fire in the decades since its appearance, it is still a very common-sense and sensible starting point for interpreting not only a poem, but any text.
With a video such as the one we have here, such an interpretive strategy is untenable. The level of irony is compounded by the postmodern moment that we're living in. I don't mean postmodern in a trendy, Parliament-cigarette smoking way. I mean it in the way that Jean-Francois Lyotard meant it when he speaks of the "self-adjustments the system undertakes in order to improve its performance." Postmodernity is marked by what Lyotard called a "legitimation crisis," and this applies not just to the legitimation of science but also of religion. The system's self-adjustments have lead to a ton of amazing products and technologies, but it has also lead to a self-adjustment in religious systems, of which a fundamentalist attitude has become more prominent, rising to meet the challenge of our pluralistic, postmodern, de-legitimized world.
Which makes videos like this very hard to interpret accurately.
I realize that by saying something like this video could be interpreted accurately, or that one interpretation could be more accurate than another, I am somewhat out of step with this moment in intellectual history. So be it. As long as a human can look at a disaster like the earthquake in Japan and feel sadness and empathy, can be moved to pray, send money and materials, and even go over and help in person, we live in a world where the legitimation crisis hasn't fully overtaken everything, where a semblance of right-and-wrong are still recognized, where perhaps even accuracy can be valued (if not truth itself).
But all this digitized content that floods our consciousnesses night and day makes it hard sometimes to recognize the humanity in others. And this girl, for the sake of a practical joke, has removed the humanity from her digital persona and given the world a fake shell of a human parroting other human shells.
As my friend JD said, "It's hard to be human in a post-human world."
