“Who are those guys?”

by David Benjamin

“We have had some just horrible, horrible confrontations in our public meetings in Anchorage, The top of the fold in the Anchorage paper is about an assembly meeting where individuals wore yellow Stars of David to protest the mask ordinance that the Anchorage Assembly was taking up, comparing a mask mandate to the Holocaust. It’s shocking.”
― Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Ak.)

PARIS — When you’ve posted a weekly essay on Facebook for seven or eight years, as I’ve done, you sometimes feel like Butch Cassidy after the train robbery, looking back at a posse of tireless and seemingly fanatic pursuers and asking Sundance, “Who are those guys?”

In response to the last outburst in this space, which one of my more coherent critics described as “angry, but tightly reasoned,” I received 199 “comments” from some fifty complete strangers on Facebook (including the inimitable Jimmy Jimjim), most of them not just virulently or passionately opposed to Covid-19 vaccination (the topic of my essay), but outright Hunter Thompson-gonzo on the issue. They took it personally.

I’m the person.

Having operated in the prose racket for as long as I have, this sort of backlash is water off a hippo’s tuchis. I usually pay no heed. My policy has long been that if I can’t say something nice — or funny — in response to these flames, I just let them quietly smolder. This week, however, on a whim, I peeked into my troll file. Facebook, after all, can’t help but intrigue an old newspaperman. It has evolved into the tweeter and woofer of the cri de coeur. It’s a playground for the aberrant that was never allowed to cut loose during the era of Letters to the Editor — because, well, the editor always sifted out the squirelliest of the wackos.

So, getting to work, I compiled my “correspondents” and tried sampling their Facebook biographies. There wasn’t much bio there. Some of these folks, like eschatologist James Wilson and politico-sexual fantasist John Clarke had names so common and logos so vague that they were unsearchable. I did learn that a defining aspect of this community is its abhorrence of community. At least seven of my detractors, including Paula Goodin, the prolific Ellie Stretch, Peter von Feldt and Suzy Stabile, list no “friends” on their home pages. Even the friended few tend to avoid spilling where they went to school, where they work, where they’ve lived and whom they know. This makes sense, of course, if you suspect sinister forces —out there — who will use your boss, your teachers, family, friends and co-workers to dig up “dirt” and expose your peccadilloes to the fake-news media.

Three of my trolls, Steve Sicular, Mitch Brunn (lives in Reno and has a horse), and Ellie Stretch (her Facebook logo is a scary-looking Jesus), seem to be active in the anti-vax “movement.” Ellie consecutively posted to me a barrage of prefab posters with dire slogans about the iniquity of public health efforts. Typical: “Jail the Biden administration! They are raping Americans with their death needle!”

Cleverer was Steve: “Stick to fiction and leave science to the professionals!” This was, alas, the wittiest (actually, the only wit) among my 199 “comments.”

Still, a few notable remarks surfaced, including Pam Griffis’ succinct “F u.” True to Pam’s style, there seems to be a consensus in the Facebook commentariat that the ideal riposte is an emoji depicting a cute little pyramid of feces. This image bothers me not because it’s gross but because, in all my associations with crap, I’ve never seen it form itself into an equilateral 3-D triangle. I mean, if your stylized shit don’t look like real shit, how can we believe anything you have to say?

A feisty gal named Becky Gyorko crisply articulated the solipsist position against inoculation while arguing ironically (on a platform attended by another billion people) against my invasion of her privacy. “Why do you worry about what I do or don’t do with my own body?” scolded Becky. “This body isn’t owned by celeberties, Biden, the fda or the CDC… it’s my body to choose… You, someone I don’t know jack shit about believe you are better than I am because I’m not taking the shot? Who the hell do you think you are?”

Meanwhile, Suzy Stabile broached a theme even more viral than the feculent emoji. The Holocaust, quoth Suzy, is coming to get us — in the unlikely, avuncular guise of Tony Fauci. “This is America,” cries Suzy, “not Hitler’s Germany!”

The enigmatic John Clarke advances Suzy’s parallel, adding, “Collectivists, we know you. The greater good, liebensraum, ein Volk, ein Reich.”

Rick Batt, the scientist among my trolls, neatly settled the medical debate with a string of dizzyingly brazen claims: “There is no such thing (the tests were developed using the common cold virus since there were no actual samples available… the tests can’t tell so-called covid from the flu or the common cold… It’s all a fakedemic… There were NO more deaths in 2020 total than there were in each of the previous years.”

Finally, I can’t leave out Johnny Key (who really should have a rock band — Johnny Key and the Deadbolts?) from Oregon, who’s tight with the Blackstone Intelligence Network. He stated his case both bluntly and intimately: “Piss off. I am sick of you condescending, self-righteous people spreading misinformation.”

As I peruse all this vituperation, I remind myself that I did not actually send my weekly screed to any of these people. They go looking for me. They plunge into my ramblings knowing they’ll be livid before they finish. They stoke their feelings into a blithering snit that can’t help but end in explosion.

This sort of self-abuse doesn’t seem natural.

Most of us (I used to think) apply ordinary prudence toward folks with whom we know we fiercely disagree. We steer clear, or we bring up the weather. We know the futility of engaging with minds that can’t be changed. This precaution that would seem, reasonably, to go double for people you’ve never met and never will — people like me and Johnny Key (and the B-Flat Majors?) — who are to each other mere phantoms on the internet. Why get involved with cyberhostility?

And yet, we do. Well, they do.

Pam and Ellie, Steve and Becky seek me out actively, to vent and fulminate. They’re like flagellant monks, turning my fleeting words and dumb similes into pain, using them to score their flesh, inflame their rage and exalt their zeal.

I doubt these folks are truly violent but they seem, in some remarks, ready to kill for the faith. Which is why, oddly enough, Facebook might be a godsend. There’s a demimonde, in normal life out there, of mad-as-hell malcontents, their sincerest feelings roundfiled for a century by editors and censors. Unheeded all their lives, they fume with frustration and seeth with anger while paying their taxes and praising Jesus.

Facebook is their break from mute captivity. It’s a spillway through which to pour their fury at strangers whose high-and-snotty opinions trigger their tantrums, strangers like me who — thanks to the internet’s intimacy — seem closer to them than, say, Joe Biden the FDA or CDC. Facebook disperses this pent-up fury harmlessly. Would Johnny Key (and the Safecrackers?) drive all the way from Oregon to beat hell out of me? Shucks, no. Not as long as we have Facebook between us!

Social media is a void sucking in everything that nears its orbit — love and family, birthdays and vacation photos, or obscenity, profanity, rage and lunacy — dispersing it mindlessly over million of miles of emptiness and cat videos, ’til it all eventually settles to an uncaring earth like dead skin cells and moth turds.

I do have one worry though. What if, someday, Johnny figures out that the only way to shut me up is to get in his car (with the band?) and come after me?