I can’t really encourage anyone to wade too deeply into this much-discussed Usenet thread, because it’s horrifying and just gets worse as it goes along. It isn’t horrifying in any particularly novel way, but it is kind of a greatest-hits collection of obnoxious message board behavior, mind-numbing circular arguments, and stripped-naked sexism trying to disguise itself as principled opposition to political correctness (a gambit that always makes me want to vomit).
It’s hard to read through much of it without the mind starting to wander, probably in an act of self-defense. (“Cells… dying… Must reach… happy place.”) For whatever reason, mine made it back to a gag from Annie Hall, where Woody Allen’s character pulls Marshall McLuhan from out of nowhere to get an ill-informed blowhard to shut his yap.
And that just made think how great it would be if, in the middle of these message board rant-offs, posters’ parents started showing up out of nowhere. And their high-school English teachers. And their former Scout leaders and the people who taught them in Sunday School and baby-sat for them when they were five.
“I don’t know where you got the idea that it was all right to talk to people like that, but you certainly didn’t learn it from your mother and me.”
“I knew from the moment I read your disturbing tenth-grade essay on ‘Pride and Prejudice’ that you’d end up like this, spewing venom in some seedy newsgroup. I even noted it in your permanent record, which I will happily forward to interested parties.”
“I didn’t work two jobs to put you through college (which you couldn’t even be bothered to finish) to see you talk this way about women.”
“I think you should know that I’m writing the Scout Council to see if your merit badges can be rescinded. Your little treatise on ‘House of M’ should be all the evidence I need.”
Okay, I can’t say I’d want members of my family or other authority figures from my past to read every word I’ve ever committed to the Internet. And I’m always unnerved when my instincts run to establishing some kind of “eject” button in an open forum (though I think Dame Edna has the right idea with her remote control chair in case guests are unexpectedly disappointing).
But I’m still smitten with this idea. “You settle down this minute, or I’m stopping this thread right now! And don’t you make that face at me! I can see you in the rear-view mirror!”
(Edited because I liked the new title better.)