Communication Breakdown

As you probably heard, Mike Bacsik from The Ticket (Dallas sports radio station) was fired for putting things on Twitter that involved the phrase “dirty Mexicans” and “Stern’s cornhole” (the latter being an excellent name for a booth on the food pavilion at the State Fair this year). I don’t know Mike Bacsik and don’t think I’ve ever met the dude before. But I feel really, really bad for him. I’m not particularly interested in discussing the political correctness or incorrectness of what he put on Twitter. I watched this Great Twitter Mistake unfold before my eyes and I never thought for a second that it would lead to this.

Let me explain: I get a head’s up that Bacsik is drinking and Tweeting (horrible idea but we all have horrible ideas we indulge from time to time) and that he is very upset about the game and the way it’s being called. By the time I find his Twitter, he’s speculating about David Stern’s no-no areas. There’s some exchanges between some friends and I about how amusing/possibly not a good idea this all is. I said the words, “It’s funny to watch but someone NEEDS to take his phone away from him, hide it, pretend it’s missing and then return it to him when he is in a better state.” Then I saw the second to final Tweet about “dirty Mexicans in San Antonio.” And I knew it was a joke. Albeit, one in pretty poor form considering he is a public figure. But it was a joke.

I get why he had to be fired, though I may not agree. I find it reaching that every article I read about it mentions that he was the pitcher who gave up “the” homerun to Barry Bonds. It makes me wonder what, should I ever become semi-famous, will be my etched in history moment? I’m hoping it is that time that my friend Chrissy and I managed to pilfer an entire pizza off a man sobbing late at night in a NYC subway station or maybe the fact that I’m the only known person to have injured herself in a backyard (next to a keg) doing a Leon Lett impression. But Bacsik got to play professional sports so that means that we can all remind him of his failures in that sport when anything happens to him from now on. Serves him right for playing baseball!

But all this is very beside the point. My bigger issue is how hot exactly I think the fire Twitter dies in should burn. Hot enough to melt titanium is my current answer. I’ve written about it countless times and there’s no reason to beat you over the head with it again. I’ve tried Twitter as many times as Oprah has tried to lose weight and keep it off. There is no appeal. I don’t get how it works and I don’t get anything positive from it. In the past 72 hours, Twitter has allowed the following thoughts to go from air bubbles in cerebral blood flow to something that is permanently available for public viewing:

Michael Lohan, father of Lindsay, decided to give people a head’s up that his daughter is “living with HIV” and that she “had an affair with Tommy Mottola when she was 17.”

Jenna Jameson decided to try to work out her recent brush with abuse at the hands of her boyfriend by using Twitter to counter some of his claims and throw some slings and arrows his way. He, naturally, rebutted by accusing her publicly of being hooked on Hillbilly Heroin. As you do to the mother of your kids, you know.

I’m not saying that Twitter begat lousy humans but giving morally sorry people or drunk people or people who need instant feedback a forum wherein any old bullshit that can be abbreviated into 140 characters is permanently etched into the interwebs is a really horrible idea. Sure, that leaves Facebook statuses or drunk dialing/texting/emailing as an alternate route to ruining your career, talking shit about people or starting fights. But Twitter seems the most immediate and hardest to live down. I miss the old days when you had to pick up a phone and call someone in the heat of the moment to tell them that they are a polesmoker. And how contained that outburst could be in the privacy of a two-way call.

Unless Bacsik’s Twitter was hacked, he can’t blame the messages or the fallout on anyone but himself. But there’s the rub. I don’t think he is. The guy’s said sorry a lot. But apparently everyone who is out to crucify him has never cracked an offensive joke or sent a message that they wished they could get back within a few seconds or minutes of hitting that sexy “send” button. We all live in glass internet houses (like the movie BioDome, kind of) and I’ll be the first to stand up and say that reading back through old posts on this blog make me cringe sometimes. You’re a lucky motherfucker if everything you’ve ever written/posted/texted/emailed/said is something you stand by 100 percent. If so, I would like to meet you so I can call you names and Tweet about you. Until then, lay the fuck off this guy. He had what seems to me to be a pretty badass job and it’s gone now. That stings real bad. If for nothing other than your own karma, don’t jump on the pile. Unless you’re sure that you will never say or write anything that you might regret or about which you could have a change of heart. Ok, deal?

Signed,

A Filthy German