Balancing Acts: Restrained Ferocity While Changing the World

How pissed off should we investigative journalists sound when our discoveries make us angry and frustrated with violations of justice? I have just had run-ins with the gracious School Board member Andy Griffiths and an anonymous internet poster that have made me reconsider the tone of voice I take in my writing.

My career was made by dry technical research I got published in academic journals. I know how to write that way. By earning me tenure, it made me well-off. But almost nobody reads such work unless they are sifting it for their own publications. For my popular econ book, talk radio show, and the investigative and opinion pieces I have been writing locally since 2006, I have written in a style I hope people read.

Few read dry, dispassionate analyses of even hot topics. More read and listen to feelings around the facts. People are interested in conflicts, of ideas as well as people. For this writing, I dismiss the dry academic Professor and channel Nasty Little Ricky, the skinny 14-year-old nerd who got beat up until he learned to use his voice as a weapon. Verbally, I am a Shaquille O’Neal, and that is the voice I have brought to my commentaries.

Andy Griffiths gave me a dose of this in some emails he sent. I’ve published these elsewhere, and I’m not going to repeat them here, as an initial salvo of my New Civility (oh no, did everybody just stop reading??). He made reasonable points in response to some of my criticisms, but blended in ad hominem judgments that just irritated me.

But I saw I was doing the same to him. In particular, I used the phrase “Porter is his hero” to explain why Andy so often supported the Superintendent. Shame on me. First of all, the statement is factually wrong—it exaggerates to make a point, a bit maliciously. I have edited that slur out of writing I have already done elsewhere. I am going to try to do that with everybody. Call me on it if I err.

Andy and I kissed and made up over snacks and drinks at Louie’s Upper Deck, my favorite pow-wow hangout. He is a charmer in person, partly because he has had to learn how to get votes for the quarter century he’s won elections, and mostly because he is a nice, happy guy. In person, we would never have the nasty edge that comes out of a keyboard. Instead, I can appreciate his true passion (an overused word, but sometimes it’s true) for all things scholastic, and his immense fund of knowledge. He can appreciate my sincere attempts to add value to the maybe 10% of school business where I may actually know stuff the board does not understand.

But if signed columns and emails allow more intemperate language than we use face-to-face, the world of anonymous internet posting is in another sewer altogether. This is from a recent Huffington Post on “internet trolls”:

Americans are just as mean on the Internet as you thought they were. Twenty-eight percent of Americans admit to participating in “malicious online activity directed at somebody they didn’t know,”– including making fun of a stranger or deliberately making controversial or inflammatory statements meant to annoy strangers. Another 23 percent have “maliciously argued over an opinion with a stranger” online.

That adds up to over half their sample size of 1200 being “trolls,” though only half of the trolls knew the term. I in fact used the term “poster” in the first paragraph of this column, not wanting to be inflammatory until I could explain the term. I tried to have an interchange with one about my recent columns on the role of unemployed people in creating their situation by not voting. You can access his prior posts here.

Every paragraph drips with scornful invective against me, and supercilious elevation of his own vague wisdom. I tried to be civil and engage  his ideas, but he seems to have only one: corporate interests are all powerful. This unique and brilliant insight makes him the smartest man on earth! Their power justifies his not voting, or doing anything else for that matter to try to make things better.

Instead, trolls use their internet anonymity to puff themselves up by slamming down others. I feel the  joy of self-aggrandizement in his postings that makes me blush to think that more than a shade of that colors my own columns. A certain amount of self-confidence must inform any writing purporting to tell others something they don’t know, which is what I try to write. But if what jumps out of my own writing is “Hey, look how smart I am,” well, I’ve got to cut back on that as well as the “hero” jibes.

Not that I am copping in any way to being in the same league as my own personal troll. I emailed two writers (non-anonymous) in sympathy with the proposition that corporate power is out of hand. One had even advised me to engage with the posts. But after reading the recent exchanges, both advised me to not get into it. A part of me would like to resurrect the full Nasty Little Ricky, and give him a total Shaquille slam-down. Ooh. But that is a part of my soul I need to keep in its cage.

Finally, the George Neugents of the world. He is so used to his power as a commissioner-for-life that he, without wearing a mask, publicly calls me nuts as his only response to my 70 pages of factual accusations about his official actions. Ain’t no sense getting’ in the slops with that….um, person. (Gosh, this being civil is really hard!) You sic the ethics commission on him and sue him in civil court. The commission has got back to me and is in fact initiating an investigation. They’re asking for more information.

Thank you, senior investigator. There’s more where the first 70 pages came from. More depositions and closed-session transcripts . . . Definitely to be continued.

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