Violent Writing and Gangsta Writers

I am a great believer in freedom of speech. Free thinking is a noble occupation but it is in the possibility of freely articulating these thoughts that both the generosity and the innovativeness of the human spirit is displayed. However, I cannot abide rudeness. Whence comes the oft-asked question of how it is that I think people can say anything they want to say, but that I think there are some ways in which they should not be allowed to say it?

Perhaps it is a contradiction and a matter of personal perversity, but really I think not. It is simply that in conducting oneself, in writing as in speaking, with a modicum of self-aware dignity is an empowering thing, for both oneself and one’s audience. Spraying epithets and insults and ad hominem –and feminem—attacks is in the end an assault on the souls of both the objects and subjects of such diatribes. I am thinking of various debates I have been reading in our blog world, and of those who find it necessary especially when leaving comments to use a kind of violence in language that wounds my sensibilities as well as my mind. The pity is, really, that the more discourteous the writers are, the less the possibility that I will take them seriously or even that I will give their position more than the most cursory of glances. This, it seems to me, is somewhat counterproductive.

It is possible to be completely, devastatingly and eloquently in disagreement without recourse to coarseness or to rudeness. Indeed, as Keguro has just reminded me, politeness may be one of the deadliest interlocutory weapons ever invented. Yet, I still cannot understand what it is that drives people who are probably, in their non-blog lives, perfectly reasonable and responsible to become the writerly equivalent of drunken soccer thugs. On what has been an admittedly non-scientific perusal of these gangsta comments as I’ve been walking the virtual streets of my blog neighbourhood (sorry I didn’t leave comments this time round)what I have realised is the propensity for the rudest amongst us also to divest themselves of an identity and to become in the violence of their language, “anonymous.” Anonymous violence. Violently anonymous.

This is telling. I am persuaded it is not really fear of reprisal or even of discovery. After all, it is not much more revealing to call oneself, for example, “blitzwriter” than it is to call oneself “anonymous.” Thus, this latter impulse to anonymity suggests to me that the writers are in fact cloaking themselves from themselves no less than from us. They are, consciously or not, divesting their rude anonymous alter egos of the responsibility that being a citizen of the blog world imposes. They are in short, making of themselves a mob—in both gangster and crowd senses. Mobs, in either sense, allow themselves the detestable vices of non-thought, hidden identities, and most of all incomprehensible, unnecessary, unthinkable, and unforgivable violence. Mobs—both the gangster kind and the crowd kind—allow themselves furtive recourse to petty parochialisms, to ugly little hatreds, to bigotry, to witch-hunts, to meaningless contests for a power that only they covet, to brutality, but mostly, to irresponsibility. Then the crowd disperses, the gangsters flee, and they all melt back into the sheltering disguises of normality, reason and identity. Until the next time.

There is a place for great anger in discourse, and I have employed it. There is a necessity sometimes to rage and to denounce and I have done it. There is the occasion for sharp and unflinching disagreement and I have used it. I still think rudeness is the last resort of the lexicon-deprived. Incivility is the blunt weapon of those who have disenfranchised themselves from the society of reasoned discussion. Insults are the pitiful shadows of lyrical expression, and gangsta writing the frustrated and simultaneous love/envy of those who have command over, and pride in, the authoritative arrangement of their own words.