Democracy and its Insatiable Vermin

I have tried to ignore the letter-to-the-editor writer/comment poster as much as possible so far, but this particular species is pretty fascinating to me.





















And I am not talking about people who write stimulating letters that are worth publishing because they present new angles on stories or opinions. I am talking about a horde of gibbering maggots governed by an arbitrary set of compulsions: "If it's in print, I must take it seriously and I must tell everybody exactly how I feel about it and exactly who I am."

The letter-writer feels only the illusory coke-rush of civic engagement. He doesn't sense that he's one of a malignant, annoying species or that his voice just adds static to debates already overloaded with redundancy.

My interest in it began in high school, when a math teacher wrote a letter rebuking a column in which I called Jeb Bush on having a big fat face, a hilarious family and a lousy education policy. I'm not sure if this teacher meant to scold an inflammatory student or stand up for Jeb in a public forum, but under his signature he fussily noted that he was a member of some academic organizations and a former member of a few others. This on top of being a grown man who actually got ruffled by something he read in a high-school newspaper.

For example, this past month, a Holocaust-denying physics professor published a guest column in The Daily Northwestern (I worked there as an undergrad but graduated before the column was published). As far as I can tell the original column has disappeared from the Daily's Web site. Anyways, it prompted follow-up columns, stories, editorials and letters. But I'm going to skip the letters and note the deluge of online comments readers posted. We're talking hundreds of people, many of them not even college students, executing a vast and brain-pulverizing display of triteness. This column, it was clear, did not provoke innovative responses; it just allowed people to barf out their convictions (in this case: Holocaust deniers are anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers deserve academic freedom, the wicked Jews control everything including this student newspaper) with refreshed impunity.

So thanks to the Internet, especially blogs, a new subspecies of letter-writer has evolved. It attacks in greater numbers and has more incentive to do so because it's easier to get published on an online comments page than on a printed editorial page.

Online or not, the letter-writer thinks longer equals smarter. The comment I got on my recent essay in NUviews is just short of 400 words long. That's not especially verbose, but most of this guy's word count is a waste. He makes the common letter-writer mistake of bringing up a point the writer has already acknowledged and trying to use it to rebuke the writer. For example, he says:

I think that reasonble people that publish this kind of stuff are simply uneducated as to how offensive the material is to Islam.

In the essay, I argue that, given that the Muhammad cartoons are offensive to Muslims, they should still be published. And so on.

And the pedantry of this guy!

Agree they can say or show what they want without saying or showing the unreasonable material would, I think, be the reasonable course Aristotle would advise.

So on and so forth. What it really reveals is that it's not hard to participate in a discussion and sound a little educated. It's just that the letter-writer is so thrilled to be doing this at all that he never wonders how to do it effectively.