It’s a fair guess that everyone today who writes for public consumption — every journalist, essayist, diarist, novelist, poet, cartoonist, even every ad copywriter — has at one time or another had the experience of igniting a reader’s rage for the most mystifying reasons. In our hypersensitive, hyperpolitical times, it seem that any bit of writing, however mild in tone or bland in description, has the power to infuriate someone. It is now commonplace for that person then to tell the writer just how stupid, wrong, arrogant, foolish, hateful or pointless he or she is.
Sometimes it’s almost funny, the way some readers goad themselves into a frenzy. The angriest often seem to be those who bring their own fixations to the topic, supply a sinister ulterior narrative out of their own heads, and then upbraid the writer for things he didn’t say. This phenomenon is by no means confined to the Internet age. Generations of post-modern textual analysts have earned tenure by taking crystalline historical and literary prose and subjecting it to fashionable kaleidoscopic interpretations.
Still, it’s striking how exercised people can get. A few days ago, in this space, I wrote a column about how sometimes you only notice how much things have changed when some little remnant of the past pops up.
Among other things, I remarked on the sight of a mailman who had a cigarette dangling from his lips in the manner of an old-fashioned movie star, which you don’t see much anymore. I also wrote of seeing three young men striding up Connecticut Avenue, one of them playing the guitar, and how happy and alive they looked compared to the ear-bud-wearing, plugged-in,
preoccupied, cell-phoning zombie hordes around them. A decade ago they would not have been unusual, but now they stood out.
An irate commentator, reacting to the piece, provided the tidiest example I’ve yet seen of self-created, self-fulfilling indignation.
“Let me guess: that mailman and those three guys walking down the street were all white. Am I right?” he wrote. “What would the author’s response have been if they were people of color? Less friendly, I bet.”
He went on: “I’m so tired of white people yearning for the past, as though the past was so much better than now. Yes, things were so much simpler in the ’50s, with segregation still legal and state-sanctioned discrimination the norm. You could walk down the street and feel safe to talk to any of the [white] people on the sidewalk.”
This casual imputation of racism would be insulting if it weren’t so blinkered and, frankly, racist. The swashbuckling mailman, as it happens, was black. Two of the young men were white and the third was brown. But skin color was beside the point; the main thing is that they all looked rather handsome, confident and unbowed. You’d think that’s something everyone could appreciate.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
