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It wasn’t the holiday season I’d wished for. A week before Christmas, I went skiing with my wife, who’s a controlled, disciplined skier—everything I’m not. On our third run of the day, she hit ice, lost her balance, and fell. I’d never seen her fall. It didn’t look ominous. It was more tip-over than tumble. I assumed she’d be fine. She wasn’t. The stretcher took her to the base of the hill, then the ambulance rushed her to hospital. X-rays showed a fractured pelvis. She was in immense pain. But that wasn’t the end of it.
I rolled my wife out of the hospital, and as I helped her from the wheelchair to the Cherokee, I felt something in my back go ping. Like a Telecaster snapping the high E string. Now both of us were down at the same time. My Christmas plans to travel to visit old friends with my daughter now scuttled, in this, her last year of high school. It’s a trip that may not come around again. As I was lying on the sofa on a heating pad, feeling bluer than I’d care to admit, I grabbed my phone to have a look at the comments to a just-posted Lowdown column on this website. “I literally hate these pieces,” noted one reader in response to what I’d written. As I began to scroll the comments, another reader summed up his feelings to my writing even more succinctly than the first: he just posted the pile of shit emoji.
I’m not unfamiliar with aggrieved readers. When I edited a print magazine, I received an email from a man who wrote I was a “cocksucking piece of shit” because I’d made a quip about BMW’s R1200c cruiser looking “malformed.” It was a Friday evening when the email arrived, and I’d just finished sending an issue to the printer. I was alone in the office. I decided to phone him. He had an unusual surname and it didn’t take long to track down his number. I called. He answered. “It’s Neil Graham. From the magazine,” I said. He made a long, low groan. “Oh, yeah, man, ah, oh boy, yeah, shit, I don’t know, oh yeah,” he said. I didn’t ask for an apology, I didn’t get angry, I didn’t say anything beyond my initial greeting. I set the phone down, collected my belongings for the drive home, put on my jacket and hat, and returned to the phone. He was still stammering. I wished him a “fruitful” weekend, hung up, and left.
On this site, I’ve been called stupid, an idiot, a pathetic writer, a moron, and a jerk (not just any kind of jerk, but a man “proud” of being a jerk). One reader said he wouldn’t “air up my tires,” which is code, I believe, for letting me rot in the ditch if I ran off the road. And lest you believe I’m the oversensitive type, know that I led the Quinte St. Lawrence Junior C hockey league in penalty minutes one inglorious season. I can take a punch, and give one, too.
I understand the urge to vent. I’ve been known to yell at the radio at songs that offend me, and I believe there’s an extra toasty corner of hell for people who, oblivious to everyone else on the road, clog the passing lane. And I understand that rage at people you don’t know is often because you can’t rage at the people that enrage you. Like your ex-wife’s new love. Or your daughter’s tattooed boyfriend, who calls you “dude” and who listens to Motorhead at mind-bending volume in his slammed Impala.
Writers on this site—and writers everywhere—are accused of being agents of whatever the aggrieved reader fears: the deep state, the uterus, and anything electric other than a drill press. Readers seething with vitriol will not change. They’re stuck in a feedback loop fueled, I believe, by fear and self-loathing. The classic definition of a bully. I’m not writing this column with the belief that any of these words will cause them to pause and reflect. This column isn’t for them. It’s for you. The silent majority. The smart, sensible, thoughtful people that comprise most of the readers of this site and most of the people in the world.
The unfortunate legacy of the malcontents is that they have a chilling effect on anyone of reason. Which, of course, is their goal. And here’s why we shouldn’t let them bully us around. Yes, us. If I’m on a website and the comments section degrades into knee-jerk insults, I’m out of there. I know many of you feel the same. Friends and long-time readers have reached out to me and said they, too, split once the discussion begins its downward spiral.
Part of the problem, I believe, is that reading for pleasure is endangered. We either read to have our views reinforced or read to be enraged by whatever we find abhorrent. The goal of this column is to articulate an idea and support it by examples that reinforce the thesis. The Lowdown isn’t an edict administered by a dictator. It’s an opinion. That welcomes other opinions. As a writer, what I find heartening is when commenters show me what I’ve missed, or overlooked, or am ignorant of. I’m not trying to jam anything down your throat. I’m giving one view of a topic and am hopeful, should you feel differently, that you’ll give me your view.
My writing doesn’t appeal to everyone. I understand. And some pieces are more successful than others. I get that, too. But I’m often struck in the comments section at how often what I write is misinterpreted. In my piece about Peter Egan, for instance, I wrote that I’d sometimes wished he was a more controversial writer. Later in the piece I acknowledged that Egan “knew exactly what he was doing,” which is me signposting that Egan was right all along, and that I was wrong. Yes, wrong. I don’t think the point was so subtle it couldn’t be grasped, but I do think certain readers were just waiting to pounce without considering the context in which the words were written.
I’m a lot of things. But I’m not a fool. I’m fully aware that what I’ve written in this column is the equivalent of brushing a coat of tar on my body and handing you, the reader, a pillowcase full of feathers. But if this exercise encourages those of you with something interesting to say to comment, when you normally wouldn’t, then I’ll consider it a success. And if not, I’ve just re-upped with a half-dozen aerosol cans of brake cleaner, so that once I’ve picked the feathers off, it shouldn’t take more than six months of scrubbing to rid my skin of the last of the tar.
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