I never could make those Magic Eye pictures work for me. Try as I might, no matter how faraway a gaze I cast upon the surface of the image, I could never make the hidden image snap into focus. I spend minutes staring dumbly into its static, waiting for meaning to emerge into a familiar shape.
It’s sort of the same thing with Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
“THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA IS THE OPPOSITION PARTY,’’ he tweeted Thursday morning, timed to match the release of some 380 newsrooms releasing editorial statements in explicit defense of the free press (or the #FreePress as we’ve now hashed it). “It is very bad for our Great Country....BUT WE ARE WINNING!’’
At first glance, the tweet is unremarkable in Trump-tweet terms. The all-caps; the mixed-caps; the infuriating four-dot ellipsis; the employment of “very bad’’ outside of scolding a terrier; the lingering sense that he’s actually saying this out loud to someone from a lavatory — they’re all present and accounted for.
It’s that last part — BUT WE ARE WINNING — that scrambles me up. The “WE’’ in question is amorphous, but not entirely vague — it’s presumably anyone opposed to the aforementioned “opposition party.’’ But that bit about “WINNING’’ I’m not quite processing. Remind me what is winning again?
The past few years have not been easy on everyday language, and I don’t have nearly enough print space to list all of the words that have recently adopted or absorbed altogether new (and often opposite) meanings, shades, associations, or functions.
But perhaps no word has been mangled by the knife so much as “#winning,’’ which, since 2011, when Charlie Sheen first deployed it in his debut tweet, has worn its hashmark like a surgery scar. That year, #winning came in second on Time magazine’s annual ranking of the Top 10 Buzzwords for the year (right between “occupy’’ and “planking’’).
The tweet tidily encapsulated the heightened confidence and runaway crazy of Sheen at the time, who had just lost his job on “Two and a Half Men,’’ launched his “Violent Torpedo of Truth’’ tour (which was really more like a bomb), and was busy introducing other new terms into the Internet lexicon, like “warlock brains’’ and “tiger blood.’’
#Winning, however, felt different, more profound. The way Time put it, “Charlie Sheen had solidified a definition for the term that goes something like this: winning (v.): ‘participating in an ostensibly drug-induced, highly public flameout, during which one loses an incredibly lucrative job and, subsequently, the respect of the American people.’ Or more, succinctly: winning (v.): losing.’’
The virality of #winning was pretty terrific (good sense) for Sheen and pretty terrific (bad sense) for the rest of us. For as tossed-off as #winning felt in the moment, and despite the wave of ridicule and irony that propelled it into prominence, within the term were the first cells of a malignant strain of subjectivity that would soon metastasize into the condition of “alternative facts.’’
While I wouldn’t say Sheen’s spin on his self-destruction as #winning was directly responsible for the word’s current hyperextension, it did portend a creeping trend on the Internet that finds losers gleefully rebranding as winners, distilling petty victories from the fantasized tears of “triggered libs’’ and owned snowflakes.
Without the benefit of an objective judge, or score, or tally (look at me not even bringing up the popular vote!), and stuck as we are in a post-debate realm of discourse, one that finds doubt routinely replaced by doubling down, what does #winning even mean?
When 13 percent of the population thinks the president should be able to shut down media outlets he doesn’t like, who wins what? When nearly half of Republicans polled believe the press is “the enemy of the people,’’ what will they get as a prize? When winning becomes more of an attitude than an achievement, won’t every match end in a draw?
“Defeat is a concept that only has meaning in the mind of the defeated,’’ I heard former ambassador Ryan Crocker say on the radio this morning. “If an adversary feels defeated, he is defeated. If he doesn’t, he isn’t.’’
He was talking about Al Qaeda in advance of the 17th anniversary of 9/11, the endless war on terrorism that has dragged on in various forms since, and the shape-shifting, name-changing, relentlessly regenerative nature of the threat of extremist groups in nations like Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.
But he could just as well be talking about us — the way we “win’’ against each other in our fury-fueled online battles, and the impossibility of defeat in a discursive environment where “#winning’’ is absolutely everything and means absolutely nothing.
Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.
