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.