DON'T READ THE COMMENTS Pt 1

I started reading the newspaper at the breakfast table with my parents when I was 8 or 9, probably in an unconscious bid to playact adulthood or seem “mature.” My starting point most mornings, and frequently my ending point, was the letters to the editor. They were short, to the point (a function of being short), and generally strange.

“Hey [Mom or Dad—depending who was at the table versus getting more coffee], this guy thinks the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution should issue a public apology to Saddam Hussein.”

“This guy thinks Zell Miller should be hanged for authorizing the bond issuance to extend State Route 400 to I-285.”

“This woman thinks they should teach Eminem lyrics in high school English.”

My mom’s usual reply was “Crazy crazy,” sort of mumbled half into her mug while she stared into the middle distance and waited for the caffeine to hit. My dad, an earlier riser, used my befuddlement as an opportunity to teach his son a lesson about the greater world.

“Son, [he never addressed me as Son, but it helps establish the tone in which he was speaking] this person is what we refer to as, ‘a crank.’”

He invited me to consider what I’d observed him, as a representative adult, do when he read an article in the paper he disagreed with or was otherwise put off by.

“You say, ‘Get this, Lu’ then read the crazy part of the article out loud and Mom says ‘Crazy crazy.’”

“Exactly.”

He asked if I’d ever seen him storm off from the kitchen to the computer room, turn on the computer, boot up DosShell, run WordPerfect, type a letter, print it out, pull off those spindle tabs from the line-jet printer paper, fold it into an envelope, return to the kitchen to find the address to write on the envelope, head back to the computer room to find a stamp then out down the driveway to the mailbox, and when I said, “No, you’ve got a job to go to,” he snapped his finger at me and said Bingo.

“And a family.”

Once I’d been cottoned to the fact that people who write letters to the editor were a distinct sort of folk, drawn from the wider pool of the idle and unpleasant, reading the letters took on a new form of enjoyment. Whereas before I’d been perturbed and titillated by what I took as earnest plans for the state—like requiring bicycle licenses or reinstating the draft—now I could sit back and enjoy the freak show. A typology began to emerge. There were essentially four basic kinds of letter writer, with the occasional hybrid or one-off respondent to an article they were personally involved with. They were:

-The crabby old man itching for violence.

-The pedantic tracker of pointless errata, often fixated on a specific beat or specific reporter.

-The Volvo-driving single mother, for whom the Coexist bumper sticker would eventually provide a softer and more true-to-self statement of purpose than its predecessor, the Darwin fish.

-The hyper-rationalist, self-taught policy wonk whose proposals were genuinely indistinguishable from satire. (One guy figured out the parks department could solve a payroll crisis by converting old cemeteries into playgrounds, with the added benefit that it would “lift the spirits of the grieving and acclimate children to the finality of death.”)

I grew to love this menagerie of lonely screwups. They formed a stable set of complementing human archetypes—like the cast of Herman’s Head—and I learned to identify them and their grouping, first by subject matter, then by diction, and eventually through syntax. I could picture them and their living spaces. I could tell you which ones wrote at the kitchen table and which ones had a dedicated “home office,” and which ones called their home office “the study.” Which ones were widowed versus divorced, which ones confirmed bachelors, and which ones simply had an unloved spouse who kept out of the way. One time I was halfway through a letter about homeless shelters and I said, “This guy’s gotta be from Milledgeville,” and he was.

One of the undersung benefits of an American public school education is early exposure to grown ups from a wide variety of intelligence levels and temperament. I had a lucky handful of good teachers in high school, but I probably learned more that I use in my daily life from all the awful ones along the way. My 2nd grade teacher Mrs Seadle, for instance, taught me not to argue with dolts. My 4th grade teacher Ms Mayworth about casual racism, and the Vietnam vet who taught our 6th grade Health class and whose name escapes me (Coach Something-or-Other) taught us all about the psychic limits of patience and probably also PTSD.

The letters to the editor held similar educational value. They familiarized me with the people in my neighborhood that “These are the people in your neighborhood”-type primers typically leave out. From the full blazing shut-ins with their terrifying lawns to the merely unhappy, those sane-seeming nondescripts where you can sometimes see the cracks in their passing complexion in the slow lane at the grocery store or driving past a picket line. An entire spectrum of cautionary examples, united in their pathological compulsion to say what they gotta say.

This was especially helpful to me, because I 100% have the disease. If I read a mistake in a story or article, or more usually if I read or hear something I think I know better than, my brain will pull the emergency brake and divert full power to my response. I will not merely start thinking it, my thoughts will start writing it. If I don’t nip the bud quickly enough, I will actually start picturing reading it—it having already been written, mailed off, and accepted for publication—and from there receiving the adulation of others who’ve read it. This can go on, to the exclusion of other productive mental work, for hours. It’s sick. Two years before his death from AIDS, the artist David Wojnarowicz described the innate, volcanic urge he’d felt since puberty, to “place his naked body on the naked body of another boy,” as “a sensation equivalent to the separation of the earth from its axis.” This feels like that.

One morning, after coaxing a few too many “crazy crazy”s out of her, my mom, I’m guessing pretty fucking sick of having her coffee disturbed by what the dregs of Atlanta’s literate had seen fit to write, made the obvious suggestion.

“Why don’t you write your own letter in?”

The thought made me queasy, like being invited to openly consider taking part in a murder. The idea that I’d degrade myself over a keyboard for half an hour (and the unthinkable certainty that it would take four to five times longer) to join the ranks of these unsolicited boobs, tapping out little analogies and rhetorical questions with my smug little fingers. Opening the paper straight to the editorial page the next however-many days, scanning for my name. And of course the worst possibility of all, that I wouldn’t make the cut. That I would fail in aspiring to human vermin.

“Never,” I declared, before God and my pop tart.

To date I’ve kept this pledge. I had a close call a few months back when a writer for Harper’s called Pink Floyd’s The Wall the “wildly-successful stoner opera Another Brick in the Wall,” but I managed to hold my peace long enough for the next issue to come out. Contributing to the trough of worthless writing, however, is considerably easier to avoid than consuming it. Even having solved the puzzle, I still sat down every morning and made the first act of my day subjecting my brain to the opinions of mental invalids.

Scab-peelers, zit-pickers, and cold-sore-tonguers all know the irresistible siren song of their foul urges, and as a member of all three fraternities, I can begrudge no man or woman for compulsively damaging their body for the simple satisfaction of so doing. Still, no good’s come of it. Kingsley Amis once wrote “If you can’t annoy someone, there’s little point in writing,” and if that’s the functional baseline of the craft then the letters to the editor were at least getting the job done.

[Of the thousands and thousands of sentences I’ve read boxed in next to the proper editorials only one has ever stuck with me, and then only because it provided a fitting punchline to one of the great local political scandals of my youth.

The backstory is such: Georgia’d had some guy redesign its state flag in 2001, mostly as a way to deal with the Confederate battle flag they’d stuck on there after Brown v Board of Education in the 50s. This was as tendentious as you’d imagine—many people loved that anti-desegregation flag, said it evoked “heritage” (typically without a specifier like “Southern” or “Our”—just “Heritage,” heritage as an end to itself). The new one was a blue flag with the state seal in the middle and an orange ribbon beneath it with five more little flags in a row and the words “Georgia’s History.” Two of them were just the Stars and Stripes for some reason, then the three previous state flags of Georgia, out of order, and of course including the one with the Confederate battle flag on it.

No one was happy. The North American Vexillogical Association said that it violated every principle of basic flag design and some Sons of the Confederacy guy who I think it turned out had Klan ties back in the 80s called it “the Denny’s placemat of flags,” which you’ve gotta admit is a good quip, source notwithstanding. Ah hell, look at the thing.

I’d forgotten about the fonts. Psychotic.

So anyways, the state flag board or whatever rushed together another replacement to quell the furor. What they ended up with is was what they should’ve gone with in the first place, just the seal and some stripes, suitably arranged and without any overt nods to the Confederacy. Boring but serviceable—the kind of design that registers as a state flag on first glance.

Fuck it, might as well post it too.

Problem solved then, right? Everybody happy now? Ahhhh—everybody but one. The bad flag’s creator, an extremely old architect or something, did not appreciate all the derision being heaped on his design. This flag was going to be his legacy, his parting gift to the State of Georgia and its people to close out a lifetime of design-oriented service. Now here it was being damn-near universally reviled. He took to the letters to kick back at the pricks, managing to compress into 100 words all the unwarranted hurt and sour self-pity he’d been subject to for his effort. An effort that, by the way, was made not for money or professional acclaim, but in profoundest expression of his unflagging state pride, and on deadline.

Oh, not only that, he’d done exactly what he’d been asked to! He’d threaded the needle, figured out a way to make both sides satisfied—nay, bring both sides together. And for that we mock him?? His epistle closed with a sentence that evokes all the bitter, unshaven grandeur of Richard Nixon’s greatest quotations:

“They may say my flag is the dog’s breakfast, but I think it’s the cat’s meow.”]

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Part 2—The Vent… coming at some point…