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.
