We Get Letters — Oh, Do We Get Letters

What is it about politics that turns even the brightest people into raving idiots? I confess it totally escapes me. I mean, I could understand it if, say, we were living under a Nazi or equivalent regime with no hope whatsoever of affecting the outcome of anything. But in this country? Today? Sorry. I can't begin to understand it.

My post skewering one such richly deserving idiot for his unforgivably egregious charge that the 58 million Americans who voted for Mr. Bush this past election were "hateful bigots" brought more hate mail in two days than I normally receive in two months, all of it written in crayon of course, as per usual; all of it vicious, mindless raves, also as per usual; and all of it missing entirely my central point. Here's an extract from the latest, typical of the lot.

You wrote something not too long ago about Sherlock Holmes that I agreed with — that the publisher of the new edition was wrong to commission an introduction from someone who didn't like Holmes [I in fact wrote no such thing]. You should take your own advice about music that you don't like. You are spectacularly ignorant about it, and your mean mouth is an embarrassment to read.

Similarly about politics. Your ridiculous ad hominem attack against Kyle Gann displays your ignorant naivete in fortissimo. [...] Your absurdly snotty hauteur ... always struck me as kind of funny. [...] But you really should shut the fuck up about politics. The Republicans ran a campaign based on bigotry. [...] Their war in Iraq has been the most disastrous folly and enormously destructive of American interests.

[...]

So take your own advice and quit embarrassing yourself by writing about things you don't begin to understand. Stick to what you know and love. Classical music before Stravinsky (or whatever your cut-off date is).

Oh dear. This fellow does seem to have missed the point (as did every one of the others, as I've above noted) — the central point — of my "ridiculous ad hominem attack"; curious, as the writer of the above eMail is clearly a fairly regular reader of this weblog, and as such could hardly have missed another of my political posts here (because such posts are an anomaly in my writings; a total of three out of 119 posts), and therefore must surely have known just what I think of Mr. Bush, his neocon administration, and their handling of the Iraq war.

And concerning the eMail writer's charge that the Republicans "ran a campaign based on bigotry" in this election, the writer of this eMail (and hundreds of thousands — but hardly millions — like him) may view the Republican stance on the issue of homosexual marriage as being grounded in bigotry, but that would be a judgment based on emotion or ideology rather than reasoned thought or good sense, and, more importantly, hardly just cause to imagine that the 58 million who voted for Mr. Bush agreed with the Republicans on this matter and were therefore "hateful bigots" as well, or that most of the 58 million, the large turnout of hardcore fundamentalist Christians notwithstanding, even gave the matter a serious or considered thought when they cast their ballots. Had I voted this election, I would have voted reluctantly for Mr. Bush for the reason given in this post, and I can assure you that the issue of homosexual marriage would have been the very last thing on my mind when I cast my ballot. And I've no doubt the same could be said of the great majority of the 58 million who voted for Mr. Bush on Tuesday. With all due respect to those directly affected, as a country we've today too many more pressing issues confronting us to be principally concerned with such a parochial matter, even given that the matter surely has implications beyond what its parochial nature would suggest.

Like most Americans, I'm hugely uncomfortable having in the White House a man who declares he gets his orders directly from God Himself, or has His imprimatur for his every major decision. Such a man is more a candidate for a rubber-lined room than he is for the Oval Office. But given the success of our more-than-two-centuries-tested Constitutional system of checks and balances, I'm not too concerned on that count. We'll survive the next four years, and come out strong as ever. Of that I'm certain. After all, if we could survive Nixon and Watergate, and surviving it, flourish, we can survive just about anything political without so much as getting our hair mussed.