The bot who cried wolf!

(4/2023) My mother was a really good home cook. To this day, when I make her potato salad, people compliment it. Eating a meal with your community—family, friends, a church pot luck—includes conversation. The news of the day, the latest gossip about guess who, and did you hear the one about grandma’s adventures ages ago?

At our picnics we told and retold stories of our grandparents’ life in China. My grandfather was a doctor who helped found Peking Union Medical College. He and my grandmother spent their adult professional life there. Beijing and Shanghai were where they raised their children. They arrived in 1911 and left once the Communists made it impossible to stay. One particularly difficult time was the Japanese occupation during WWII. We heard a few stories of living in an occupied city, and of the death of their eldest child in one of the Civilian Camps operated by the Japanese. One story we did not hear was of the radio messages sent to them by their children back in America during WWII. I recently learned that there was one station, KGEI in San Fransisco, that broadcast via short wave, to Asia. One private station connecting people to each other with real messages in real time.

There are scores of historical references on radio broadcasts of propaganda during wartime. If they were broadcast on the Internet today we would call them bots. Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw, among others, were human tools, the analog bots of our history—propagandists of WWII. This was a time in history when the things, real or imagined, that one group despised in another group, were used to attack each other. We have lived through other such times, and we are living through one now.

The second half of the twentieth century brought social changes that we could see in the news reports, and discuss at length without being swamped by more news reports. We had time to think about the stories of the day. We still have time. Do we use it?

A lot of people are upset and unhappy, as shown by an increase in diseases of despair. The fear that life is getting worse and that they won’t do as well as their parents. Diseases of despair thrive on a perceived lack of options or answers. Is the noise of the Internet a self-medicating fix?

Instant access that the Internet has to our eyes and ears is the opiate of the manipulators. Clever human coders write programs to send messages on targeted paths to our devices. The breathless meme on Facebook or Twitter is repeated on a popular network news website. Is it "breaking" news on a real and present danger, or just a click-bait scenario? A constant barrage of statements or opinions about dangers that never happened, and will never happen, leave the listening public upset over nothing. Like the boy who cried Wolf! just to get attention from his village. He got their attention, they came to help, but found the boy was only playing a trick on them. The boy had his fun, only to learn that when there was a real wolf no one trusted him, and no one came to help.

Political leadership has become a contest between trust something and trust nothing. Ideally, politicians manage words to reach the most people, and accomplish governing for the maximum benefit. There are too many of us with individual needs for each of us to be happy with our government. But the line crossed by Fox news personalities and a select few Republican-elected members of Congress, when they say that the attack on our Nation’s Capital was a tourist visit, is like a bot playing a trick to get our attention. When the people, trying to sell us a story opposite of what we saw with our own eyes, need our help for real, will we believe them?

Words have become targets of other words. Woke, a slang term for understanding something from a different perspective than a white European-American, draws word-fire as though empathizing with another person, and trying to understand their point of view are bad things.

The ability to repeat messages online has stolen so many real conversations and real reading from us. For the return on our online investment of time we get bots declaring:

• Someone woke up! but not about anything I care about, so heck with them!
• Someone loves a person who is unapproved, tell them they are wrong!
• Some books hold ideas that some people do not like, throw them out!
• Life is a zero sum game. If someone else is raised up, you will be cast down! Verily you shalt be canceled!
• Don’t look up the real meaning of terms like zero sum game. Trust your bot!

And yet, summer is coming. Picnic and cookout season is upon us. Here is something you can trust. Potato salad, my mother’s potato salad.

Everyone makes it differently. Every version is delicious because you add till it feels right. Trust. Never made potato salad? I’ll bet someone you know has, and that they have definite ideas for these ingredients. Make it with a friend or for a friend. Cooking isn’t just about nutrition. It’s where communication, and thus community, starts. Talk to your friends and neighbors, and eat some potato salad. It pairs nicely with red or white wine, and lamb. Make it often, it deserves practice. Summer is coming.

My Mother’s Potato Salad - Ingredients:

• One 5 pound bag of potatoes
• 6-7 hard-boiled eggs
• a couple of decent size onions
• a few stalks of celery
• a bit of parsley
• a bunch of mayonnaise, till it feels right
• a bunch of pickle relish
• dijon mustard
• pepper