Drumhead Drumroll
So it’s not just me that’s noticed a trend in reader feedback. Here’s what Roger Ebert has to say about the varieties of his fan mail:
There’s an interesting pattern going on. When I write a political column for the Chicago Sun-Times, when liberals disagree with me, they send in long, logical e-mails explaining all my errors. I hardly ever get well-reasoned articles from the right. People just tell me to shut up. That’s the message: “Shut up. Don’t write anymore about this. Who do you think you are?” … I just feel that essentially the country is in the grip of some very bad information. I think a lot of working class people don’t understand that their money is being stolen … Yet a lot of them seem to be voting conservative and thinking that the conservatives represent them. And they don’t … I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason. And the parrots of talk radio are just sending out the same stuff. When I look at my e-mails, I see the same Limbaugh rhetoric; apparently, people don’t have any ideas of their own. And there’s just this drumroll of anti-progressive thought.
Earlier here.
It’s a frightening trend–people who only want to silence dissentors scare me. And they’re being encouraged with all this “you’re with us or against us” verbiage.
view it this way: the little green footballers are simply hopelessly in love with you; they just lack the vocabulary to express it.
Stalkers, yes, maybe you’re on to something… Why are they so attracted to things that produce such feelings of nausea and disgust in them? Mayube it’s some version of displaced coprophilia?
also prehaps related to anal-retentiveness, a trait very common among conservatives. thus retentive coprophiliacs, conflicted between maintaining control and attaining the object of their desires, are obliged to seek satisfaction elsewhere?
Ah, the old Adorno “politics of shit” argument. I think you’re on to something.