An appreciable thickness of skin is required to wear the garb of an online correspondent, especially one still inhabiting America's shrinking isle of sensible progressivism. Write anything on a regular basis that challenges the regnant curiosities of modern conservatism -- itself a 40-year-old admixture of scripture-thumping hypocrites, vapid economic terrorists and taunting man-boy jingoists -- and you'll become a target for every brow-protruding reactionary who's learned to manipulate a keyboard without benefit of opposing thumbs.

Almost invariably it is they, the anthropoid ideologues out there, who self-obsess with writing online rebuttals to sociopolitical sanity. Of course, their rebuttals never hit the mark; in fact, these verbal snipers go out of their way to avoid any key argument made in defense or promotion of sanity. Their's is a tough job, and in that respect only, I feel for them. Tough indeed is the task of intelligently bad-mouthing progressives' reach for such common societal decencies as guaranteed health care, unprivileged education, genuine equal opportunity, a reasonable distribution of national wealth, a competitive marketplace, the subordination of political money to political ideas … you get the drift, even if they don't.

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In lieu of tackling decency head-on -- because, as I say, that's such an intellectually bruising experience -- our online proctors from the right opt for schoolyard silliness. This commentator, for one, has been called by right-wing overseers all manner of swine: a non-recovering communist, an atavistic leftist moron, a Stalinist and Trotskyite (try reconciling those two), a Saddam Hussein-lover, a Luddite (ok, perhaps a nolo contendere on that), a Leveler and, in general, a bonehead. With proper skin density, we are quite amused.

Yet, I did recently receive an email from a friend -- I'm down to the one in this age of alienation -- whose contents cut me to the quick and ravaged my virginity of emotional distance. What my thoughtful friend forwarded was a comment posted somewhere on History News Network by a gentleman reader of same: to wit, that Ann Coulter is to the right what Maureen Dowd, Michael Moore, Michael Lind -- and here was the spleen-wrenching bomb -- P.M. Carpenter are to the left. I was mortified.

I'd sooner adopt a true Stalinist outlook on life than accept any comparison to that fascist harpy of intellectual dishonesty and meagerness, Ann Coulter -- as I'm sure would Ms. Dowd and Messrs. Moore and Lind. The gentleman's barb hurt like the dickens, chiefly because said gentleman, unlike the usual vat of uneducated, shoot-from-the-hip right-wing loonies, appeared to be a man of intelligence and seemed to believe what he wrote. Ouch! Stop, you're killing me here.

This fellow of apparent learning concluded his online knifing with, "Let's not forget those on the left [in part, the above gang of evil, I guess] who routinely support and excuse vastly more brutal figures [than Joe McCarthy] from both past and present." He should have cut that line before pressing "Send," since its tiresome right-wing choral properties somewhat deflected his main thrust. But that's a digressive point.

So, I hear you asking, what in hell IS the point of all this? My hurt feelings? Hardly.

The point, which I suspect you've already suspected, is that the sad political situation in which we find ourselves today is even sadder than I thought. Here was a man clearly awash in mainstream modern conservatism -- and much, much more important, a man of education -- who had sunk to the level of quasi-defending a rabid female dog who herself is daily growing in stature as an "intellectual" voice of the right.

Until reading this learned gentleman's opinion I had yet to entirely appreciate the stark similarity between conservative American intellectuals of today and those of an Aryan bent ca. early 1930s. That any bona fide thinker on the right would wade anywhere close to uttering any respect for an imbecilic child of what we thought three-score ago was defeated genocidal madness was a blood-curdling realization to me. Naturally the thought of similarity had occurred before -- and with some frequency -- but this individual really drove it home.

We are in big, big trouble.

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© Copyright 2003 P. M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.