We Get Mail

Surely one of the great pleasures of running an esteemed (if little known) “weblog” is the batch of mail we receive from esteemed (if little known) correspondents. “Your writing brightens up my otherwise dark nights,” write sundry e-fans. Or words to that effect. This sort of missive, dear reader, is the stuff that keeps us going. It’s our veritable e-nectar.

We would be remiss if we did not mention, however, that every once in a brew moon (as our beer-loving Chinese friends say), we receive a slightly less flattering epistle. In fact, some of these e-mails can be downright intemperate. If we didn’t have such peculiarly high self-esteems, we might even find them a tad upsetting.

Case in point: One fine Saturday night we were on the receiving end of an e-missive sent by someone with the intriguing nom de web Fatugleeebich@aol.com. Although one might reasonably infer that a character with a “Fat-Ugly-Bitch” tag would be pleasant, she actually turned out to be less-than-hospitable.

The following amounts to the entire contents of her e-mail:

Fatugleeebich@aol.com
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 20:35:40 EDT
Subject: (no subject)
To: hatemongersquarterly@yahoo.com

you people are scum for kissing Israels butt

Peculiar, is it not? We don’t quite know what strikes us the most: The rancor or the lack of punctuation. Yeah: Probably the punctuation.

We don’t mean to be snooty, but we feel that this is a particularly pathetic exemplum of hate mail. And hate mail is already a pretty pathetic genre of writing on its own. Can’t our detractors up the ante a little? Isn’t anyone going to have the decency to send us a real childish, hate-filled rant? We think this “Fat-Ugly-Bitch” is really ‘phoning it in.

We mean, come on: We’re “scum” because we support Israel against its terrorist nemeses? How dull. Where’s the loony anti-Semitic carping? Where’s the miring in conspiracy theories? In short, where’s the passionate craziness?

If you are going to take the role of a mean-spirited crank, you ought to do a better job than this. The writer of this sad letter isn’t so much a fat, ugly bitch as she is a lazy, fat, ugly bitch. Perhaps she’ll have to take some lessons from Deb Frisch. Now there’s someone who can make an ass of herself with a little gusto.

Besides: Aren’t fat people supposed to be jolly?