What we have here is a failure to communicate.
Who are these nuts who sit in front of their computers — presumably in a highly agitated state — roll up their sleeves, spit on the palms of their hands, and compose hate mail to columnists whose views they disagree with?
Here’s one representative billet doux I got in my box last week from one such well-mannered reader who, after addressing me by my first name and rambling on about the “jealous, sick, backward and barbaric Arabs,” claims that “you were probably out there on Sept. 11 giving a little inner cheer for the acts of your co-religionists,” and that “you can come here and live in Washington, but you will never be a part of the West. You are the Other. Get out.”
You know you got a problem when you discover that these cuckoo birds have been reading up on Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of “l’autre,” or the Other, but have clearly been unable to make head or tail of it.
Seriously, folks, we do have a problem here: What propels a man (and we’re talking strictly the male gender here) to become a hater, to show such rabid intolerance of the views of others?
It is not enough to say that he is misled, uninformed, intellectually lazy, mentally dull, or just a fool gulled by racist views he has imbibed somewhere.
That doesn’t cut it in a society where from an early age the individual is socialized, by his educational system, family system and social system, to believe in the conventional wisdom, vindicated by the Founding Fathers, that in the public debate freedom of speech is sacrosanct.
That is the innate genius of democracy — it holds that a human community is imbued with a stratification of class, and thus a great many ideological currents, cultural sensibilities, moral ideals and political notions that the First Amendment guarantees us the right to articulate anywhere we darn well please, not only in newspapers but from rooftops, if need be.
However kooky or thoughtful, shallow or convincing these impulses may be, they remain protected by our constitutional right to express them openly and freely. It doesn’t matter how you interpret or phrase the law, you would be mutilating the very meaning of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights if you were for any reason to curtail the right of a person to speak his mind. To shut up or ship out, in this case.
All that is a given, indeed even a pedestrian notion to put across here. A child raised in the US, or any other Western country (as this columnist was, in Australia) would tell you that it is an insult to democracy not only for one person to deny another his right to speak his mind, but to refuse to be open to a counterargument from those who disagree with him.
Rather, the question I’m raising today is this: In the name of reason, who are these nuts, driven by their penchant for writing loony-tunes hate mail to columnists they don’t know from Adam and whom they belligerently advise to leave the country of which they had been citizens probably before these nuts were born?
Sure, we more or less know who they are — crazies, racists, right-wing extremists, fanatics, zealots, and the rest of it — but what’s their darn problem? Why do they get a cheap thrill out of hating, essentially out of defining other Americans, in this case Muslim Americans, as Them, some sinister, despicable Other?
Power, some shrinks have suggested. The haters derive a sense of exultation from being able to thrust a sense of Otherness on others. Different shrinks (trust these contentious folks in this dubious discipline to arrive at two diametrically opposed conclusions) have said, no, it is in fact vulnerability. Haters at heart are a bunch of sniveling, pathetic, helpless, insecure dorks who feel the need to project their own self-loathing on others. The contempt they have for those whom they have come to hate and demonize is contempt for the self.
Wanton psychologizing? Could be. But whichever way you look at the problem, make no mistake about it, these people are not just a disturbed lot in need of therapy, but they are dangerous as well. Left up to them, they would make our society safer by making it less free. By sacrificing some of our liberties, we will, say, find solutions to crime, terrorism, pornography, immigration and, as happened in the 1950s, the problem posed by those dirty, pinko commies in our midst.
Do I think haters, whether in government, the media, the church (of the kind controlled by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson) and society at large, contribute to violence in our everyday lives? I know they do.
These haters are no different from the terrorists who attacked the Twin Towers on Sept 11, who were motivated by an identical impulse, that is, a poisonous stew of racism, zealotry and paranoia. And never mind whether they were triggered by the need to exercise power or the need to sublimate vulnerabilities. Their hatred was the miasma of sick minds, of individuals pursuing that phantom enemy — the Other.
In reality, of course there was no enemy out there at the Twin Towers on Sept. 11. Just ordinary folks going about their business on a Tuesday morning.
It is a terribly insecure columnist who makes such an unholy fuss over nuts sending him hate mail. That is not my concern. On the contrary, my concern today is to put the notion across that, heck, let all those hate mail correspondents do their thing. Who wants to be part of a society where people are denied the freedom to write hate mail? Or desecrate their flag? Or burn their draft card? Or march in a demonstration to protest government policies? Or express their views anywhere they please, including hateful ones?
And who wants to be part of a society where, conversely, commentators do not take on the responsibility of speaking out against the haters, of identifying them for the intolerant buffoons that they are, lost souls who have nothing better to do with their lives than to invent and hate the Other — the Other being clearly a figment of their twisted imagination in the first place.
So to the regular hate mail nut, I say this: keep ‘em coming, it’s your right to hate and to verbalize that hatred, but who the devil said that you are free to be on a first-name basis with me? That’s one freedom I sure as heck will deny, fool.
Arab News Opinion 13 February 2003
