The book on Messiness that I wrote about yesterday covered other types of messiness. I wrote about them and then deleted them. After I posted I regretted taking those parts out, I save the biggest chunk I cut, knowing that I needed to say something about it, but it didn't fit in an article about household disorder and the creativity it can inspire.
It has to do with deliberately caused messiness. Messiness used as a tool for manipulation. We've seen this employed in the past few weeks, the three AM tweets. Those were diversionary messiness, messiness to cover, distract from the real issues. It's DT's "look at this outrageous thing I've said, don't read the article on the lawsuit I just settled, it's boring!" situation. This situation has happened before, whenever a prominent person or organization is under press scrutiny and attention needs to be drawn elsewhere to minimize the actual damage, it happens. The next time any of these topics are outrageously presented in the news: women's choice, school prayer, flag burning, gay marriage, illegal immigration...anything that gets people really riled up, then scour the news for something that should be front page news, but isn't, because everyone is in an uproar over the hot button issues. It's the movie Wag the Dog, only it's not a movie.
Messiness can be a political weapon. I expect to see much more of it in the next few years, but I hope I'm wrong.
In the meantime, I probably should clean out the stuff in the back of my fridge.
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