POTUS Is Pwned

This blog used to have a lot of political content—this or that piece of proposed or enacted legislation was, in Curmie’s opinion, a good idea, a bad one, or (more often) good in this way but bad in that one.  Then came the 2016 election, which featured the most corrupt pair of candidates ever assembled.  The eventual winner of the election, although receiving millions fewer votes, is one of a handful of people anywhere who would make Curmie vote for Hillary Clinton.  His administration belches forth little that falls outside the boundaries of outright evil, let alone which could be considered good policy.  Writing about that all the time is boring, so Curmie went into semi-retirement.  Once in a while, apparently giving some credibility to the “enough monkeys and enough typewriters” scenario, POTUS will do something right.  Still, Gentle Reader, you’ll save Curmie a lot of time and be right far more often than not if you just assume that Curmie thinks literally everything the current inhabitant of the country’s most expensive public housing does is some combination of stupid, insane, and venal unless you’re explicitly told otherwise.  (Ah, for the days when Curmie agreed with the candidates he’d voted against 30-40% of the time…)

The K-Pop group BTS.  (Or so Curmie is told.)

Anyway, there will be no policy posts about the Trump administration until further notice.  That extends to his boot-lickers—McConnell, Graham, Abbott, et al., as well.  That said, there are some stories about non-policy issues that are still in Curmie’s remit.  Now, if someone had told me a month ago that Curmie’s second post after a long absence would be about Tik-Tok Teens and K-Pop Stans, he might still be laughing.  Or, rather, would have found the idea ludicrous until that loose collection of mostly teenagers hijacked racist hashtags and disrupted police forces’ Big Brother surveillance tactics by flooding social media outlets and websites with clips of their favorite groups in performance, thereby either crashing the site or making it impossible to filter through all the clutter to find the “real” stuff posted by racists and narcs.

Over 12,000 rally attendees came disguised as empty seats.

Now, Curmie is laughing again, this time at the huge massive paltry Trump rally in Tulsa last night.  It need hardly be mentioned that the Narcissist-in-Chief and his minions crowed incessantly about the “million” requests for tickets for their little Covid-Fest.  We were even told they needed to book an outdoor space to handle the overflow.  Photos of the gathering crowd offered no surprises: the Trumpster Fire was overwhelmingly male and even more overwhelmingly white.  Ah, but when it came time for the actual rally, the venue was over two-thirds empty.  Why?  Well, there are claims of responsibility from the new guardians of truth, justice, and the American way: the Tik-Tok Teens and K-Pop Stans.  Apparently they ordered hundreds of thousands of free tickets without the slightest intention of showing up.  Yes, the President of the United States was punked, owned, rolled, you name it, by a bunch of teenagers.  Actual attendees were outnumbered by no-shows named Emma.  (Maybe not literally; go with me, here.)

Part of this, of course, is a little distasteful, even if hilarious.  “Everyone does it” and “they deserved it” may be (largely) true, but they ring a little hollow as slogans in the ethics department.  This campaign by (mostly) Gen Z doesn’t lie about the opposition (à la Donald Segretti’s infamous “ratfucking” campaign of the late ‘60s), but there’s still a level of subterfuge… the same kind as was employed by, say, the French Underground in World War II.  Curmie raises an eyebrow, but isn’t sure this even rises (or stoops?) to the level of “dirty tricks.”

But there’s something else at play here.  The Trump campaign is as incompetent as their boss.  Curmie has actually run box office operations, and knows there are manifold ways to guard against this ghosting technique, which has been around a long time.  You can charge a deposit for a ticket which is then refunded when the ticket is picked up in person.  The easy way to do this is to require a credit card for a reservation; the card is then charged a nominal fee if the ticket isn’t used.  You can double-check addresses: if you're holding a free event in Tulsa and you're getting a lot of ticket requests from Bangor, Boise, and Tallahassee, you might get a little suspicious.  You can guarantee a place in the outdoor gathering (which can presumably move to another space if necessary) and make each such ticket a standby ticket for the main event inside.  They’re numbered, and you call people in groups—there’s plenty of time for that, as POTUS probably won't arrive on time, anyway.  That brings in as many folks as are interested, and you aren’t faced with the embarrassment of national coverage of your big event showing a, shall we say, less than packed auditiorium.

Oh, one more thing: an experienced box office manager anticipates no-shows, especially if the event is either free or potentially controversial (let alone both!), and is prepared to accommodate as many actual patrons as possible.  If a sold-out show starts at 7:30, the house manager is counting empty seats by 7:25.  Customers high enough on the waiting list get to see the show if the seats aren’t claimed by starting time.  Hell, Curmie expects this level of competence from the volunteer student help at theatre productions at our university.  So, perhaps the person handling front of house for the President of the United States knows nothing about the job.  The alternative is even more damning: that only 6200 people showed up at all.  The estimates Curmie has seen suggest that perhaps 800,000 tickets were involved in the spoof operation.  That leaves about 194,000 other no-shows.  And that would be pretty damning.

 

Of course, the Trump campaign is claiming that approximately 50 gazillion people watched online.  (The bots must have been very busy indeed.)  Oh, and the reason for the low in-person turnout was blamed on the media scaring people with (totally true) stories that several Trump advance staffers tested positive for COVID-19, and the assertion (without evidence, of course) that “demonstrators blocked access to the metal detectors.”  OK, first off, if you’re enough of a sociopath that you schedule a political rally during a pandemic in a state that had just set its single-day record for most new cases, you deserve to be embarrassed.  Even the MAGA crowd will eventually run out of Stupid.  And, Gentle Reader, if you believe that Tulsa police would arrest and drag away a ticket-holding woman because someone didn’t like her shirt (1^st amendment be damned) but wouldn’t clear out demonstrators blocking the entrance to the event, then two things are true: you have an even lower opinion of the Tulsa police than Curmie does, and you might be interested in this really interesting e-mail from a Nigerian prince who’ll pay you a million dollars for a little help transferring money.

Today is, for purely personal reasons that needn’t be enumerated here, kind of a sad day for Curmie.  But there is some good news.  The youth of America seems to have a good deal of savvy.  Curmie doesn't know a single song by a single K-Pop group.  He’s not a fan.  But he’s kind of a fan of their fans.