The other day, I wrote a post, what
The Daily Kos calls a "diary," on the most recent outrage by the Koch brothers--their effort to have their puppet politicians destroy our national parks so that the Kochs can take them over for their own oil, mining, and lumber industries. The post was titled, "The Koch Brothers' Latest Rape of America: Will Americans Ever Stand Up and Save Their Country?" Its cover page was a photo of a Yellowstone National Park sign with the word "CLOSED" written in red across it. The post included, at the end, three links to Woody Guthrie, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and Bruce Springsteen, each singing their version of Woody's (and our) beautiful anthem, "This Land Is Your Land." Just after I posted it, I discovered via another post that my efforts were in vain. The battle was over in Congress. Our national parks and historical monuments will be lost to the predatory corporations of the Kochs and others of their ilk.
Link to my post: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Link to the post on what Congress subsequently did: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Meanwhile, back on my post, the comments started flowing in. The very first one objected to my use of the word "rape," saying that I was trivializing it, and my expression "grow a pair" as being "misogynist." The person was polite, and I replied politely myself, agreeing with the point on "grow a pair" and changing it to "grow a spine," but disagreeing with the use of the word "rape" in the title. From there, the comments went downhill, and turned into a heated discussion on whether or not the word "rape" was allowable. The actual post, and its point, was lost in this tempest in a teapot. I had not expected any controversy to break out over this post.
I had experienced this before on other posts. When I protested Debbie Wasserman Schultz's rigging of the Democratic primaries by scheduling only 6 debates and scheduling them late and at times when people would not be watching: the first debate four days after the deadline for New Yorkers to register as Democrats, the second on a Saturday night when there are many millions fewer viewers, the third on the Saturday before Christmas when people are frantically shopping, the fourth during the NFL divisional playoff game, etc. Suddenly, I was a misogynist, a sexist, an antisemite (in this case, a Jewish antisemite), and a sexist Hillary Clinton basher, etc. Oddly, no one thought to call me a pedophile, racist, and homophobe. I assume that this was merely an oversight.
Along the way, I also learned that there are Daily Kos contributors called "trusted readers" who have the power to hit posts and comments they don't like with HRs (hide ratings). Get enough of these and you are suspended, for various lengths of time including forever, from posting on The Daily Kos. The way these people, who are allowed five HRs per day, used their immense power reminded me of something that I couldn't quite place. They hit me with HRs, others objected to my being hit with an HR, some threatened me with an HR, others who were demonstrating their benevolence and kindness admonished me but told me they were not going to HR me this time, and others HRed those who had HRed me. It finally occurred to me what these comment threads reminded me of--the behavior of children in elementary school. Here they were, getting offended in ingenious ways, wielding their HRs like some sort of magic wand, threatening, bullying, going back and forth at each other, calling everyone names. Yes, it was precisely like elementary school. Or high school. Or the faculty of a university English Department.
In addition, on other posts I discovered that many Daily Kos commentators do not grasp irony, satire, parody, or farce. In a satirical piece on how the corporate media was ignoring Bernie Sanders, I dated the post June 8, 2017, and had Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow returning from heaven to inform the American people that Bernie had been elected the previous November, parodic statements from the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and Fox News responding, and so forth. This drew many objections, including one that I needed to label the post as a satire! In another post, I had Debbie Wasserman Schultz canceling all of the debates and declaring Hillary Clinton the next president. Again, I was HRed, told that I had failed to label this a satire, I was compared to Fox News for lying, and several people thought the story was true and were badly shaken and very angry with me. Seriously? Have any of you ever read Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" or Mark Twain's "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut"? Did you think that George Orwell's Animal Farm was fact-based reportage?
To return to the "offensive diary" in question, I find it terribly sad that a post about how the Koch brothers and their bought and paid for politicians have set the stage for destroying our national parks and historical monuments like Gettysburg can turn, in the comments section, into a heated discussion of the use of the word "rape" for any purpose other than the rape of a human being. I'm not mad, just sad. This is altogether too typical of how it goes on The Daily Kos threads, with people perceiving non-existent microagressions and completely turning away from the substance of the post. Yes, by all means, let's ignore the destruction of the national parks system, the extermination of remaining wildlife habitats, and the turning of America into a huge toxic waste dump covered by sea-to-sea shopping malls, so that we can get into an argument about the use of a word in the title of the post. This is why our side never wins in the end. We stop our common battle against evil forces to get into silly, unsubstantial arguments over the proper use of a word in the title of a post.
For the sake of the uninformed, the word "rape" has numerous denotations in every dictionary, but they boil down to two: actual rape (what we mean by the word most of the time), and a large-scale devastation of something--a city, a region, an economy, nature, etc. In fact, the OED, that's the definitive Oxford English Dictionary, states of the word's origin: "Late Middle English (originally denoting violent seizure of property, later carrying off a woman by force): from Anglo-Norman French rap (noun), raper (verb), from Latin rapere 'seize'." Its earliest use had to do with the seizure of land and property. And although usually when we employ the word "rape" we mean human rape, the word has always been used in its other sense, for centuries up through our own time. That use, as I have said, in no way, shape, or form trivializes the rape of a person.
Numerous books in ecology, environmental studies, and ecocriticism use such terms as the rape of the land, the rape of the environment, and the rape of the wilderness. Often the word appears in the title of the book or article. Academic feminists have never had a problem with its use in this way. Simply put, a word in the English language can have more than one meaning--most of them do. So, should we change the title of Alexander Pope's classic poem from "The Rape of the Lock" to "The Cutting Off of a Lock of the Hair of Arabella Fermor: A Satirical Poem with Deeper Theological Implications?" And from now on, will the rape of Nanking will be stricken from all history books and termed "the violent attack on the city of Nanking?" Where does the censorship of free and accurate speech by this sort of insane and twisted political correctness end? No sentences allowed like: "The dangers of an impending nuclear holocaust."; "He's a slave to his passion for boating."; etc?
I use a word in a perfectly proper fashion, and a post on the destruction of national parks turns into this? Suddenly, I'm some sort of insensitive man who doesn't understand the horror of rape? Perhaps I am myself a rapist? I hate this sort of stupidity. People, words do not exist in a vacuum. Their meaning is always determined by their contexts. Always! If in one of my English courses I talk about the massive rape of women slaves that occurred in the antebellum South on plantations, the meaning of the word as I am using it is perfectly clear. If I talk about the continued rape of the environment by fossil fuels, pesticides, toxic dumping, fracking, and the destruction of national parks, the meaning of the word as I am using it is equally perfectly clear. And no, I am not a rapist or a man who is insensitive to rape and rape victims. I'm a man who has twice broken up rapes, at no small personal risk. I stopped the first would-be rapist with a chokehold and he ended up going to prison. The second one got loose, plunged a knife into my shoulder blade and got away. That wound has now turned into arthritis, and causes increasing pain when I raise my right arm over my shoulder. I don't regret either action because two women who would have been raped, one at knifepoint, were saved, and a rapist was taken off the streets. In the same situation, I'd do it again.
But view me in any way you wish, as this will be your final viewing. You'll do that anyway, with or without my permission. I'll continue to check out interesting Daily Kos posts from the list I receive daily in my e-mail, and I will post those I wish to on Facebook (where, amazingly, the 4000 people who read my page are actually saner, more civil, more thoughtful, and more respectful to me and to each other than what I see here on this site). But I've written my last diary for The Daily Kos. I get frustrated enough with the crazies on the right who are destroying everything good in this country. I don't need any more frustration from my own people. And I don't need to waste any more of my time here. I've published four scholarly books, over 500 pages of articles for scholarly journals, and am revising a fifth book on Mark Twain, race, and slavery. Time spent here is time much better spent over there doing something fulfilling and constructive.
And now have at it, folks. Call me a quitter, a loser, a person unworthy of writing anything for your beloved blog, and let some smug font of wisdom say, "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Also, if it's not too much to ask, please do call me a sexist, misogynist, racist, antisemitic, homophobic, nativist, pedophiliac rapist. Go big or go home. Knock yourselves out.
Good night and good luck.
12:05 PM PT: After reading some of the supportive comments here--I didn't have time to wade through all of them--I've decided that rather than leave the Daily Kos, I'll instead take a break from posting diaries for a while. The thing is that I love reading the diaries I find here. It's the comments that I cannot stand. Perhaps when I return, I'll wend my way over to the books section, where I'll feel much more at home. For those of you who were so kind to me, a huge thank you. I really appreciate it.