I always tell my writing students to think before they write. It's a good lesson for bloggers too. Please, think before you write - and if you don't know how to think, have the decency to not write.
Usually, I don't feel the need to respond, in-depth, to comments posted about my articles. Sure, not everyone will like what I have to say - that's par for the course. I've been writing professionally for nearly 15 years, and I know enough to know that if you please absolutely everybody, it's usually because the writing's bland.
That said, some - thankfully a minority - of the comments on my article about the catastrophic fires in California were so breathtakingly stupid that I feel compelled to reply. For it seems to me that they speak to a larger issue.
First off, there's the "who cares - a bunch of wealthy Anglos have to suffer. Big deal."
That one is almost too easy. Anyone who can dismiss the extreme suffering of tens of thousands of people this tritely has clearly lost all sense of humanity. Not to mention the fact that he or she is utterly ignorant of California's extraordinarily diverse racial and economic makeup. For your information, many of the canyons that have gone up in flames are inhabited by desperately poor, often undocumented, Mexican migrants.
My guess is the writer thinks he or she is a social justice crusader sticking it to big, bad America. I'm guessing he or she wouldn't dream of dismissing the suffering of any other group apart from Americans in this manner. There's really not much to say here but "shame on you." You are, I believe, the sort of righteous fanatic, unwilling to recognize the humanity of those you deem your enemies, who, 61 years ago, would have refused to read John Hersey's just-published book Hiroshima, because, you would have asserted, "the Japs had it coming."
Then there's the trite comparison with Iraq and a reference to the "wretched buildings" that once were the World Trade Centre - and that, the commenter forgot to note, ended up as the molten tombs of thousands of entirely innocent men and women. There's the "burn, baby, burn" prayer. There's the snide comment about New Orleans, and how its floodwaters are probably being used to put out the fires. And there's the sorry excuse for humour, the one that refers to "an act of God set[ting] fire to the Death Star. Who will they shock and awe for this treacherous act of terrorism?"
So, let's break these down, too.
In many ways they seem to me to come out of the same vein as the moronic comments about rich Anglos. Imagine if a writer dismissed the thousands killed in the Bhopal disaster by talking about the "wretched" nature of the city; or if the cancer victims of Chernobyl were rendered insignificant by an author talking of the ugly, "wretched" industrial landscape of the Ukraine; or if famine victims in Ethiopia were erased from our consciousness by a writer referring to the "wretched" villages the starving came out of.
People who lived and loved, who had personalities and dreams were slaughtered on September 11 2001, but the writer's tone suggests they have and had no value.
It is the language of anti-Americanism, what the author Andrei Markovits terms a "pedigreed prejudice." It is a trite form of dehumanisation that has, somehow, acquired not only respectability but coolness among large numbers of Europeans. It is an anti-Americanism that has morphed from an entirely rational dislike of specific actions - such as the decision to occupy Iraq - and political leaders, to an inability to recognise anything good in anyone American. And that is the road to a deeply destructive group-think, one that fails to see, and to value, individuals as individuals, turning them instead into pawns in a larger game.
As for the comparison with New Orleans, on one level it's apt, on another it is completely inverted. Yes, the slothful, incompetent, response to the breaching of New Orleans' levees was disgraceful, and, yes, as hundreds died and hundreds of thousands lost their homes, it exposed for all to see deep racial and economic schisms in American life. By contrast, San Diego's disaster has, so far, been managed far better.
But does that justify a mocking response from armchair critics thousands of miles from the flames? Hardly. The fact that a major city managed to evacuate half a million people in the space of a day and in the face of walls of flame traveling at up to 30 miles per hour across hills and through canyons, and that it did so with only two fatalities reported, is extraordinary. The fact that thousands of firefighters from around the state have been deployed to fight fires that have consumed hundreds of square miles, and that the national guard and police successfully coordinated first the evacuations and then the provision of services to those seeking refuge in the Qualcomm stadium, should be celebrated. It should be held up as a success, in contrast to the stunning failures of government response systems in Louisiana - and, for that matter, in a fire-plagued Greece a few months back.
Yes, the suffering of Iraqis is vast - unarguably the pool of suffering there is far, far greater than that in southern California. Yes, the suffering of the residents of New Orleans was horrendous. Does any of this negate the pain and the terror those fleeing San Diego feel today? Surely not. Does it justify that pain and terror? Again, surely not. Not a single Iraqi life will be saved because of the thousands of homes lost in San Diego and the surrounding counties. The two events are entirely unconnected.
In fact, the only way to link Iraq and San Diego is to say something to the effect of "Americans are so corrupted by Iraq that any pain they suffer is to be welcomed." That, apparently, is what some of those who responded to my article believe. Thankfully most of you who posted comments avoided going down this treacherous path. Such a route is soul-destroying. It implies a worldview at the centre of which is profound hatred. A better world cannot possibly emerge from such an ideology.
