Bloggers Reflect A Sad Reality
Last updated Friday, August 15, 2008 6:04 PM CDT in Columns
By John Brummett
THE MORNING NEWS
Not all anonymous posters on blogs are creepy, cowardly, bitter, mean, vile, crude and consumed by ignorance, intolerance and hate. It's just that the very nature of this free-speech forum seems to lend itself to persons tending toward some or all of that.
A blog is an online site available by a mere click of the mouse to people with nothing better to do than sit around all day and read it and post anonymously, and publicly, in response to items on it.
These posters make up pen names. They write the most despicable and bogus things about named people. Then they hit the send button and, cloaked from liability for their words, commence re-picking their noses.
Yes, I'm a fan of several blogs. I used to operate one myself, but the blog sapped energy and vitality from the columns, which are the important things.
I didn't allow comments, anonymous or otherwise, because, well, I didn't want to. I respect the right of people to speak their minds. I also respect my right not to give a rip.
I've extolled many times the spectacularly vibrant blog maintained by a real newsman, Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times. I punch it up several times a day and get most of my local news from it. Max is kind enough to post my columns, even as posters anonymously implore him to spare them.
He allows comments and, boy, he gets what he asks for.
So when the item popped at the Times' blog early Wednesday afternoon that Bill Gwatney had been shot moments before at state Democratic headquarters, I wondered what in the wide world the anonymous brigade would have to say in response to such a stunning, horrifying, uncommonly distressing development.
Last I checked, 156 comments, the vast majority anonymous, had been posted on that item.
For a while, posters were merely commenting that they were stunned and didn't know what to say. That kind of begged a question: If you don't have anything to say, why bother writing publicly that you don't have anything to say?
It's a little like these online polls that some newspapers operate on their Web sites. They'll ask you to pick between three choices, something like: A. The Razorbacks will win more than half their games this season. B. The Razorbacks will win fewer than half their games this season. C. No opinion. I always vote no opinion, merely to run up the numbers for the category of people who don't know or care but feel obligated to take the time to vote in an online poll anyway - just, presumably, so their indifference can be counted.
Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, this blog discussion at the Times site on the Gwatney item ventured into blame, partisan polarization and hate.
Some people said it was Rush Limbaugh's and Sean Hannity's fault, assuming without benefit of a single fact that Gwatney had been shot by a person who hated Barack Obama specifically and Democrats in general. Persons of a conservative nature fired back that it was the liberals who are intolerant and that guns don't kill people, but people do.
Somebody posted that the chickens were coming to roost, the possibly ominous meaning of which escaped me.
Several people posted that they were praying. Other people posted that they wished these yahoos would keep their religion out of it.
The most interesting anonymous comment of all was from a poster who revealed the news - not yet reported in the mainstream media - that Gwatney had just died. This poster, calling himself or herself "Mantastic," wrote, "I'm a Republican, but this is just terrible."
What an odd thing to say. Were we to believe that Republicans might not necessarily find this senseless tragedy terrible? Wasn't what happened terrible without regard for the political philosophy of the victim or the sympathizer? Could somebody please take a stand for once without regard for partisan prejudice or proviso - firmly against cold-blooded murder in broad daylight, perhaps?
I'm wondering if humanity is in precipitous decline or if we've always hung by such a precarious thread.
About this columnist
John Brummett has been writing about Arkansas and national politics for three decades and as a regular columnist since 1986. Email Brummett at jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.
Click here to read his blog.
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