Jack & Jill Politics

I wrote the following for Vanity Fair:

At this time every year, commentators across the United States engage in an exercise I’ll call Hypothetical King, in which we try to imagine what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say about the war in Afghanistan, the bank bailouts, or Mo’Nique winning best supporting actress for Precious at the Golden Globes. We extrapolate from his words and deeds and hope we’re right but can never be sure.

I’d like to engage in an exercise that’s almost the reverse of that. Instead of Hypothetical King existing in 2010, I’d like to imagine a world in which today’s tools exist in King’s day. I want to know what Dr. King would make of Twitter, the insistent social-media service that asks its users to describe “What’s happening?” in 140 characters or less.

Twitter is everything today: news source, stock ticker, pop-culture meme tracker, font of inane narcissistic chatter, time suck, marketing tool, and promised savior of journalism/capitalism/democracy/[insert dying institution here]. As someone who more or less lives on Twitter, I obviously want to believe that King would have used the service to its full extent.

You can check out the entire post, including sample tweets by King and those around him over at the VF website.