I recently read a comic essay in Newsweek magazine in which the writer lambasted Crocs shoes (those odd, brightly colored plastic things) and the people who wear them. He got actual death threats for his efforts. This last week there has been a great, albeit artificial, political flap due to one politician using a phrase describing the proposed policies of another politician that the other politician has used on more than one occasion (once even against the proposed policies of a female opponent) because they manufactured in their minds that the comment was about their female associate rather than about their proposed policies. Got that? I love America. The phrase by the way, for anyone who hasn’t been watching any television, involved farm animals and makeup and is meant to mean “you can’t pretty up something inherently ugly”.
Well. Seeing as how Americans can get up in arms so quickly about silly things as to send death threats (and, by the way, offers of marriage) for a humor piece about shoes and vociferously obscure reasoned debate over a manufactured misunderstanding, I figured the best way to become known in the general population is to piss someone off. And to do that, I must create a controversy.
I realize I must choose wisely, not just any controversy will do. It would seem that it must go to the heart of some widely held, deeply felt ideal. On closer inspection, however, admiration of plastic shoes may be felt deeply, but is not very widely held. There are many options. Questioning the patriotism of a true patriot wouldn’t work, a true patriot wouldn’t need outrage, so there wouldn’t be any controversy. Questioning the patriotism of a rascal would do the trick. Samuel Johnson famously said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” And outrage, it seems, is the scoundrel’s idiom.
That, however, is too easy, too often used, and wouldn’t get me noticed at all. I could come out against broccoli, but that one was already taken and I actually like the stuff. I could defend the vegetable content of school lunches because they contain catsup but that barely raised a stir when a well known politician tried it.
I think I have it:
People who blog are idiots.
If that doesn’t bring the juices of the on-line community (the most virulently vociferous community around) to a rolling boil, I would be greatly surprised.
People who blog assume that the very act of blogging makes them an expert, that having a blog makes their opinion more weighty than those without blogs. Without benefit of any journalism school or experience, they assume their investigative techniques are superior to those of “mainstream media” (a pejorative for reporters who actually get paid for their opinions, and whose opinions are actually read by more than just a handful of like minded blog writers.) People who blog spend countless hours pontificating to their keyboards and monitors, mindless of the fact that keyboards and monitors are not enlightened by their infinite wisdom. People who blog are probably all impotent and have problem sweat. People who blog wear Crocs. I dare you to find evidence to the contrary, evidence that I couldn’t repudiate with a swift stroke of my ergonomic human interface device.
I now await my deservedly brutal thrashing. (And any proposals of marriage you may be willing to send my way.) As the son of a broccoli hater once said, “Bring it on.”
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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend
Spy Magazine
, that wonderful satirical magazine that slowly started losing subscribers as it slowly devolved into a bitch fest, had a great feature called “Logrolling In Our Time” which presented two members of American intelligentsia giving favorable, often glowing critiques of each other on their respective pulpits. It was surprising how many pairs of mutual admirers they could find to keep the feature fed for as many issues as they did. This is a different kind of logrolling, more in line with 
Christopher Fry’s delightful verse play, 
Several years later, I wrote for, then joined the cast of, then became director of a long-running scripted cabaret show called 
