Saturday, February 9, 2008

And Now We Turn To Politics...

There is nothing like politics to get the assassins out in force.

Everytime there’s a blog post about politics the poison arrows fly. It’s like the last scene in the Chinese action movie “Hero” where the Assassin Nameless (played by Jet Li) is executed by a million flying arrows. The visuals are stunningly beautiful and breathtaking but Nameless’ fate is certain and inescapable – death. Have you rented that movie yet? If not, please log on to Netflix and put it next up on your queue. After you watch it, you’ll totally get my point.

On Gather, and elsewhere in the political blogosphere for that matter, metaphorical death is the inevitable ending, not just for the poster but for everyone who gets into the fracas.



Hate flows.

Read the article “Chelsea Pimp Remark” by P.S. Burton and you’ll see what I mean. It’s amazing to see the bile and blood spewing in the riot.

One wrote in screaming caps, “…WONDER HOW CHELSEY FEELS ABOUT HAVING AN ACCUSED RAPIST FOR A "dad???. AGAIN EVERYTHING HILL AND BILL GET THROWN IN THEIR FACE THEY DESERVE- NOT CHELSEY SHE IS A VICTIM OF POOR PARENTS.”

Another rants, rushing to post without checking for spelling or grammar, “The ultimate sleazer's of all time, bj billy and the enabler- to all his mental illness, Hillary are out-raqed (sic), the same pathetic liars and mud-slingers "the Clintons".

Of course, there’s always the peacemakers who try to inject reason and diplomacy into the melee but who get shouted down by shriller voices nevertheless. Just like in real life, I guess. Depending on which side you’re on, you’ll hear the decibel of your own voice. You know who you are.

Trust me, I don’t mean to sound like the righteous one. In fact, I’ve ambushed some posters in the blogosphere myself. There was an article published recently with unspeakable words of venom leveled against both Democratic Senators and I, acting like a sniper, rated it a "1" without leaving a comment, and invited a connection to do the same. Guerilla warfare, y’know. It’s a jungle out there.

I’m bad. Okay, I confess. I emailed Dan Abrams a couple of days ago. On the subject line, I typed:



Obama girl has a crush and Chris Matthews has a hard-on


In the body of the email, I wrote:



“Hey Dan,

You are the GM over there, right? Do you have any control over Matthews at all? I’ve finally decided to pack my bags and go over to CNN and – good God – Fox Noise because seeing Matthews’ hard-on for Obama is obscene. You better do something about him because the youth might be watching.

Oh, and I grew up thinking the word journalist and news had the prefix “objective” next to it. Guess not!

My two cents,
Maya
Bay Area”

Thank goodness Deux ex machina, the Invisible Hand of God of Cyberspace intervened. The message was returned to me undeliverable due to a bad email address. Whew. In retrospect, I really didn’t want my foul mouth to be broadcast over the internets. But then again, here I am pimping my own porn.

If there’s a lesson in all this, the lesson is that in a democracy we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal, and that we are endowed by our Creator with the inalienable right to act like jerks.

That’s all I’m saying.

1 comment:

Nadine said...

Maya, you are so right. Your piece reminded me of our Presidential election last year, when I found that reading comments to articles and blogs could be quite entertaining and depressing at the same time. I don't think I had ever seen so much hate, on all sides. And passion reached such levels that you couldn't get in a word of (relative) wisdom. It was as if someone, somewhere, had given the 'go' signal for some kind of bullfight, with the instruction to kill. Who are these people, I couldn't help wondering as I went through pages and pages of totally pointless insults: who are these people in real life? Do they act and speak like that?