Sharpening my pen...


Long ago, not long after I was given by first by-line, I received my first “nasty response” to an article from a reader. As a junior journalist, I was devastated. I took it to one of the senior hacks who had taken me under his wing. “Oh, boy! You’ve arrived!” he said gleefully.

He first explained that you should appreciate any letter from a reader “because it means that someone is actually reading your stuff”. When I pointed out flaws and non-sequiturs in the reader's response, he told me to use them as “something to hang your riposte on”. He wasn’t nearly upset or concerned enough! “There’s nothing that plays more into your hand than a stupidly written letter. Be sure to quote the most stupid bits in your response.”

His advice proved sound. After several decades – and probably several hundred: “Dear Sir, I was thoroughly disgusted by your comments on….” letters (as well as several that carefully and eruditely pointed out my mistakes, to which my reply was invariably a contrite mea culpa), I now know exactly what he meant. It was that same mentor who taught me that the maxim “the pen is mightier than the sword” is often the refuge of scribbling cowards: The pen can only be (and then, infinitely) mightier than the sword if the penman is every bit as courageous and audacious as the swordsman.

Polemic, a tagline for this Blog has it’s etymology in the Greek word for “war”. But like “wordsmith” or even “warrior”, the applet “polemicist” is one bestowed on one (albeit often via vitriolic letters) by others. I’ve never been particularly concerned if my opinion did not agree with the main stream, because it so seldom does. And that's not because I adopt a contrary opinion on principle. Rather, that's what happens to you when you build up a life-long habit of accepting nothing, believing nobody and checking everything (see ABC). You're not a genius or particularly intelligent. You've just learned not to swallow the bullshit the general public does, but don’t expect the flock to thank you for it. The ancient knee-jerk human reflex to strike down the bearer of unwelcome news (as if so doing will make it go away) is alive and well and thriving in the psyche (or should I say amygdala?) of modern urban homo sapiens (see An unsettled soul).

In a recent newspaper article I read, several academics and journalists were asked for their “take” on “polemic”. The answers were food for thought. The consensus was that the polemicist must not be afraid to get his hands dirty and face-up to “apologists of the established order”: The counter-arguments the polemicist encounters are more often than not ad hominem (e.g. “Ah! You think you know everything”) which have little more value in serious adult debate than they do on the primary school playground where they were born and immature minds still give them some weight.

An older respondent was more optimistic about her yardstick for the success of a polemic: “If it exposes an issue from a surprising angle, and gets the reader to think. That’s when things get tricky.” Others adopted a more bellicose stance: “A polemic is only really successful if someone feels insulted,” and “the first sign of success is when the apologist bursts into tears and can’t sleep.”

One seventysomething “old hand” admitted he would never be a good polemicist because he has “too much sympathy for his reader,” a malady that I often find curbs my own poison pen. While I neither shy from nor lack skill in warfare, I’m just not of the bellicose persuasion, and fear that as I can identify with this final sentiment, I will (sometimes) hesitate to go for the jugular, in spite of any bravado here to the contrary.

So while the posts on this blog (as explained in the disclaimer) will never be aimed at specifically criticising or lampooning an individual (unless it’s a politician or other public figure in their public capacity), they might (and some are specifically designed to) stir-up the silt on the bed of your brain and get you to look at some things a different way, and to look at some things that you have never looked at before.

In our democratic and egalitarian world, I have to tolerate people knocking at my door to sell me magazines on Sundays, incompetent nitwits being issued with driving licences, shop assistants who don’t understand any word longer than two syllables, and a general public that is so alarmingly gullible that they swallow everything that is dished up to them – even if it only takes a teensy weensy tweak of the massive grey supercomputer that Mother Nature placed between their ears to realise that it is complete bullshit!

So while posts on this blog are not intended to piss you off (as it fundamentally respects the right of each to his own opinion), they very well might, and no attempt or allowance has been made to avoid that. The guys in the bad suits who knock on my door on Sundays don't either.

If they do, tough! They are intended to invite you to look at things differently, re-examine entrenched ideas (which are often no more than prejudices) and will refer to things in terms that might be unfamiliar, or even distasteful to you. Some people (the main target audience for this blog) find it mentally stimulating and refreshing to take their entrenched ideas out for a run in the park.

Some people might find that as hard to fathom as a couch potato would when considering a jogger (why do they always frown?), but believe me, in spite of a pervading culture of anti-intellectualism, there are still some people “out there” who take joy in saying, spelling and understanding things “right”, just for the sake of it. In using and sometimes playing with beautiful nuanced words and grammatical forms, savouring them in the mouth like fine chocolate.

They realise that the mark of an educated person is the ability to entertain a thought he does not necessarily agree with, and the mark of the civilised man, the ability to agree to disagree.

I know that some (many?) cultures actively discourage this kind of thinking and that as a result, a large proportion of humanity has simply never been supplied with the equipment necessary for liberal thought (or is put in prison if they indulge in it). So if anything in any post here makes you feel inadequate, stupid, bigoted, primitive or uneducated and that pisses you off, that’s your problem.

And I have always found that the boots that are thrown hardest are the ones that fit best.

And that’s why Messrs Gates & Jobs both (abouth the only thing those two ever agreed on) put that little red “X” in the top-right corner of your screen . . .
 
– AMB


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too…          Bro. Rudyard Kipling

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