When the going gets tough, some crawl in bed and cry, and then share their feelings with a many people as possible. There are lots of words for such types, but none of them connote strength, much less heroism in the face of adversity. So, I had the check that the tweet below is not a hoax coming from some Macedonian content farm, but nope. It’s right there in the Twitter feed of CNN’s media critic and host of Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter:

I crawled in bed and cried for our pre-pandemic lives. Tears that had been waiting a month to escape.



I wanted to share because it feels freeing to do so. Now is not a time for faux-invincibility. Journos are living this, hating this, like everyone else. https://t.co/dIDujZZvQZ — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 18, 2020

In case he thinks it over and deletes the tweet in the cold harsh light of Sunday morning ridicule, here is a screen grab:

I can only assume that Stelter fully buys into the notion that sensitive males are role models for the rest of us, and that the people who get up every day and grow the crops, operate the factories, drive the trucks, and keep the stores open and delivery services functioning are afterthoughts, proles who do what they are told and need no special notice. It’s the inner torment of the sensitive male that is important in a time of crisis, worthy of sharing with the world.

Sundance of The Conservative Treehouse is scathing:

Modern journalists, no more essential to life than scripted narrative engineers dancing as puppets on strings in boxes, are inconsequential. The true American story is not built upon celebrity; but rather grit, callouses and dirty fingernails. Farmers, truck drivers, stock clerks and supermarket cashiers are essential; …dancing puppets, not so much. Facing this reality a generation of pathetically soft and feeble sorts; lemmings from the spine-harvesting indoctrination machines that turn bone into jelly-fish membrane; collapse as they recognize just how pathetic they are. Inconsequential gnats carrying a life-skill as useful as sand in the Sahara. Desperate and yearning for someone, anyone, to reaffirm their importance, the miserable and pitiful harbingers of irrelevance cry out in a desperate quest for meaning. Please forgive my frank and direct response, but apparently someone needs to call the baby ugly. Good grief man, cowboy-the-f*ck-up. You are not being tossed a pack of Lucky Strikes and told to storm the beaches of Normandy. You have to wash your hands, stop touching your face and sit on your ass while keeping distant from the check-out-girl. This ain’t hard. That said, Stelter’s “journalism” has evolved into back-slapping pundits reveling in process; and as a consequence it completely ignores the end point, misses the bottom line, doesn’t actually SEE the subject matter, never actually learns what might be discovered. Here’s a tip to Stelter: Cry more. The reality of your misery is worse than you can even imagine. Your enterprise is not only irrelevant, but your self-indulgent cries for affirmation are meaningless. Every fiber of your woeful existence is inadequate in an era when grit, fortitude, perseverance & strength are the greatest human commodity.

What’s amazing to me is not that Stelter is as soft and weak as his appearance suggests, but that he thinks it is useful to him to share his feebleness –and that he has lots of support on Twitter for doing so:

Welcome, @brianstelter. You are not alone. Sending love to you and Jamie, who by the way got me through years in NYC subway shutdowns. — Elizabeth C. McLaughlin 🩸🦷 (@ECMcLaughlin) April 18, 2020

I totally understand. I woke up this morning and thought about the fact that we have a president actively participating in the deaths of American citizens, and using his base to incite violence, yet there is nothing we can do. It can get so overwhelming at times. Hang in there. — Sheri Locascio aka Tea Angel (@SheriLoCascio) April 18, 2020

Stress has a way of making people reveal their true selves.