Twitter as an avenue for education

The brilliance of Trump at making the mainstream media and Mandarin Class talk about things they don't want to talk about and defend positions they don't actually want to defend is astonishing. And he creates the conditions where you learn things you didn't know.

I live in Atlanta, home of Martin Luther King and numerous other famous Civil Rights leaders such John Lewis (my Congressman), Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, etc. I think I am reasonably familiar with the pantheon of civil rights leaders.

Over the years I have occasionally read news accounts referring to Elijah Cummings, House Representative for parts of Baltimore City and Baltimore County in Maryland. In those accounts they always refer to him as a Civil Rights leader. Hmm. I don't recall him in the pantheon.

But there are a lot of things I don't know, life is about focusing on what is most important, and until now I have never looked him up on Wikipedia. Since he now is at the center of a ridiculous, yet also consequential, tweet storm, I click on over to Wikipedia to find out his role in the 1960s civil rights movement.

He wasn't involved. He was born in 1951, too recently to have been involved at the height of Civil Rights. He graduated college in 1973 and got his JD in 1976. He is not a civil rights leader. He is a politician.

And a grifter. I had read of the case against his wife, but forgotten it. Ecchh.

A week ago he was off my radar screen. But between Trump's tweeting and Democrats circling the wagons to defend the indefensible, I now know that Cummings is a Mandarin Class grifter, playing for his sinecures and status and not serving his constituents.

And I didn't even want to know.