...And Enough Finally Is Indeed Enough

[Sherwood, Harrison]

>From: 	Vaska

>Vaska:
>Harrison very bravely, in my view, posted a message on the list saying that
>the very debate has already had a stifling effect on him.  That, I think, is
>a problem worth giving some thought to.  

(Actually, Vaska, that _too_ was a private message to you, and not meant
for the list. Tant pis. What I said was true. And better a bang than a
whimper, eh?) 
>
>Andrew:
>I am not particularly unhappy about this fact. I wish other male
>posters would do the same. This is a public space where people come
>and park their minds in the hope of enlightnment and enjoyment. If
>posters feel little or no responsibility when they fill that space
>then we get pollution. I have been giving this precise argument `some
>thought' for all the years I have been participating on the list.

_Man_ you shoulda seen it.

It was elegant, sleek, subtle, nuanced--and utterly remorseless. It
employed all the tricks: bathos, allusion, dramatic irony. It had an
epigraph from Ezra Pound. And above all, it _built_, man. It _built_
from the ground up, like Otis Redding, from a whisper to scream, from a
rock hitting the dirt to a nuclear Armageddon. It was the fuck-you to
end all fuck-yous, a World War III of a fuck-you, a chrome-and-aluminum
dragster of a fuck-you, a raging, stomping thunder lizard, the Fuck-You
that Ate Manhattan. 

And then I sat on it, didn't post it. I shrieked at the windshield all
the way home, probably looked like a Ralph Steadman drawing, my eyeballs
floating about three feet away from my head.

But I sat on it.

When I got home, I bought myself a rum-and-soda, decompressed, took a
tub.

And thought about it.

With the arrival of the (beautiful, cloudless) morning came emotional
stability; my top had corrected its spin and was now balancing
beautifully, a sure gyroscope again guiding my brain and my moral sense.
No longer needing to lash out in rage, I calmly deleted the thunder
lizard (if with perhaps a few pangs of regret; I'll file it away for
some other smug little turd who's convinced the place is going to the
demnition bow-wows, some other self-righteous, bug-eyed, finger-wagging
guardian of the public spaces, some other blinkered Comstock with his
inferiority complex sewn neatly on his over-starched sleeve demanding we
bend over for our daily Intellectual Purity Test).

I don't need this elitist, exclusionary, in-crowd,
country-club-for-intellectuals shit. It makes me crazy, and I'm calling
in sane. Unsubscribe request to follow under separate cover. Bye-bye.

It's a perfectly fine thing to exhort us to edit our posts for
relevance, for astute observation, for pith and vinegar. God speed to
yez. And defending your online culture by any means necessary is
perfectly OK too: Jesus, watch alt.folklore.urban sometime if you're
amused by the bread-and-circuses spectacle of the clueless getting
flayed and served up on a bed of lettuce. Me, I find that sort of
entertainment a trifle barbaric, but apparently--and not particularly to
their credit--large portions of the Intelligentsia think it's just a
real hoot to humiliate the rubes.

But when the Ugly Underneath shows through the frayed bits, when people
start using words like "pollution" to describe the thoughts and words of
others of whom they disapprove, and nobody listening, nobody within
earshot, nobody AT ALL calls them on it, then it's time to pack the
bags, check the visa stamps and tiptoe off for the Maginot Line. Fuck
it. Leave the kennel to Lassie. I mean, _I_ thought most of it was
on-topic and reasonably interesting, but who am I? Pollution.

(And I don't want to hear any prissy crap about private versus public
communication; Andrew expressed exactly this cramped and crappy
sentiment, using exactly these words, two days ago in public. Only at
that time he managed to withold his kind and generous opinions on
exactly _whom_ he considers "pollution." Even then it pissed me off, and
I was flabbergasted when everybody simply ignored it.)

Now I've had some wonderful conversations with people here, both online
and off- (just about all of them with people who didn't _appear_ to
think I was besmirching anything), and for these cordial and
thought-provoking and frequently hilarious interchanges, and for your
many kind words to me, I thank you. I look forward to continuing to
communicate with you off-list. You've got a nice little place here: just
be vigilant and don't let the self-appointed Silverbacks and the Alphas
with the big, bulging foreheads dominate the show and intimidate you
into silence--or silence is what you'll get. And Thomas Pynchon wouldn't
forgive you.

(Hah! I just read Mittelbrau's little screed. How 'bout this: There was
a young man from Nantucket/Whose head was stuck tight in a bucket/When
he came to a wall/That was two feet too tall/He simply sat down and
said, "Fuck it!")

Jules, can I crash on your floor in Cancun?

Harrison
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