Somebody hate me, please!

Every child dreams of what they want to be when they grow up. Little Johnny wants to be an astronaut. Sally wants to be president. Michael wants to be a fireman. Franklin wants to be in the circus. I wanted to be somebody who received truckloads of hate mail. Seriously, I didn’t care what I did. Perhaps I could be a senator. Maybe I could be an actor, or a director, or a producer.

Whatever the job title, I wanted to come into my living room every morning to the sight of bags and bags of scathing letters from those I had alienated, frustrated, agitated and intoxicated. I dreamed of big manila envelopes filled with dead rats and hastily drawn swastikas and those letters that are pieced together with words cut out of magazines.

I would save these little slices of bile forever. I was going to put them in an album. I would create collages of contempt. My own personal montage of malignancy. Any time I was feeling down and out I would take them out and thumb through the pages and I would get that fuzzy warm glow again. “I did this,” I would say to myself. “Just look at all of the discord I have caused in the world.”

So when I got the gig here at the Daily Vanguard, I thought that was it. I thought I had arrived. Finally my dreams would be realized. I could just smell the rotting rodent carcasses accumulating on my doorstep. Surely this was the place to stake my claim. A university is such a breeding ground of disgruntled and perpetually offended malcontents.

There is nothing like an education to fill people with the flammable qualities of quasi-political hostility, moral indignation and self-righteous bits of half-baked, poorly reasoned social commentary. The wind blows at PSU and 1700 people are offended.

Every time I go to the bathroom I am pelted with politically correct dribble about the connection of peeing while standing up to the perpetuation of a political patriarchy and the violence of a socially-constructed gender differentiation. This would be like shooting fish in a barrel. For God’s sake, I am male, white, smart, Jewish and overweight. I already have over 75 percent of the student body against me. I eat meat too. Come on, what more needs to be said?

I was cautious at first. I did not want to tip my hand, show my cards too soon. I needed to play this just right. If I was too obnoxious, I would just be edited to the point of obscurity and eventually just fired from the paper. No, I needed to ease into my role as the self-proclaimed “king of malaise.”

I stuck to my plan and I started with a series of relatively innocuous pieces focusing on the NAACP, and the controversy over the ethnic stereotyping in the HBO series “The Sopranos.” I figured I would get some nibbles from those pieces. But there was no response. Something was wrong. I checked with the paper to see if my e-mail address was working. It was up and running. Why weren’t you people hating me?

But alas, still nothing. I rationalized the silence. Perhaps you were all too busy with homework. Perhaps you were all too busy harassing the president. But then a guy wrote an article about cell phones and you all went wacko-o over a totally inane comment he made concerning the GNP of Africa. Come on people. Leave that poor slob alone. I am your nemesis. I am the hate breed. It is my destiny, not his.

Don’t make me do something desperate. I am counting on you PSU. I need you to hate me, or at least to act like you do. If you have any decency, a modicum of compassion, then put a flaming bag of poop on my doorstep and ring the bell. Send me a death threat, a picture of my wife and kids with their heads cut off.

Anything to let me know you are out there. Or perhaps you are more cunning than I first thought. Perhaps you are doing the one thing people like me truly cannot handle.

Perhaps you are ignoring me. Perhaps my narrow-minded hostility is falling on deaf ears. If that is the case, then I salute you. It seems that you have learned something at PSU after all.