At Ground Zero of the Polarized Political Screamwars

I’m not sure this is the way any sane person would choose to drive traffic to their blog, but …

Out of curiosity, I checked on the Blogpulse list of hot blogs for the day. Got the expected roster of usual suspects – Kos, Malkin, Techcrunch, Gizmodo – and then this one which just kind of made me go huh?

Den of the Biting Beaver? What the hell? Is this an NSFW that’ll bring down the IT weasels on my head?  Hmmm. 

Come to find out that it’s a blog written by the poor – well, maybe make that "unfairly abused and scorned and derided" – woman who blipped up in the news a while back because she went for the morning after pill and got a faceful of attitude from some religio-wacko pharmacist.

Well, the story keeps taking darker and darker turns.  Now it’s turned out that she is, indeed, pregnant.  And hats off, folks.  She’s blogging about it.  Wow.  I’d say that take balls like churchbells, but obviously I need to come up with some kind of female-oriented metaphor to vividly denote "having exceptional courage."

Here’s some of the raw, revealing stuff:

I’ve asked myself countless times why I even mentioned this entire
thing on the blog. What was I thinking? Where the fuck was my head? I
chide myself and condemn myself for opening this seeming can of worms.
I self-blame, telling myself that I shouldn’t complain about the hatred
because, after all, I put it out there.

Apparently, this woman’s story has sparked an avalanche of hatred from the semi-literate Bible-banging wingnutosphere – she’s gotten charming stuff like this:

Anyway, after writing about the EC thing I saw another area of feminism
that I had not previously seen on anything more than a superficial
level. I saw hatred and misogyny that was every bit as vile and
horrible as the standard stuff I get all the time. People left
comments, many, many helpful and wonderful comments. People also got
angry with me and acted in ways that were abhorrent, cruel and
dehumanizing.

I was told that the people who wrote such
horrible woman-hating sentiments were simply ‘being jerks’. It was
suggested that there is a number of people out there who just get off
on being assholes. It was also suggested that some of these commenters
were even pro-choice but that they just enjoyed and thought it funny to
randomly attack people.

I called bullshit then and I stand by
that now. Quite frankly if there exists people in this world who truly
have no stance on a topic, or even who support that topic, who say
these sorts of things to other people just for giggles then this world
is a far sicker place than I ever imagined. It has been suggested that
some of the commenters were ‘just people who get off on this sort of
thing’, and it has been argued that these same people just ‘get off’ on
insulting, threatening and debasing all others ‘just for fun’. It has
even been alluded to that these same people may even be pro-choice but
just enjoy cruelty, debasement and degradation for the sheer enjoyment
of it.

If this is true, then what it boils down to is this:
These people get off on cruelty for the sake of cruelty. They need no
agenda; they just get off on kicking people who are down. People who
are in pain, or scared or people who just plain care about something.

I
cannot think of a more terrifying individual to be around. I cannot, in
my wildest dreams, imagine a person who agrees with abortion telling
another person that they are worthy of death just to be cruel.

Apologies for doing the old cut&paste on so much of this woman’s material.  But I felt that the more I (re-)print the more likely it is that you’ll actually click thru and read this woman’s blog.  Which is worth it, for no other reason than to get a sense of what it feels like to have the big klieg lights of attention focused on you and your problems these days.  Way, way back when, Ken Kesey, in a great essay on the death of John Lennon, wrote that the glare of public attention carries with it a crosshairs too … and that for all the people who love you or who pay attention to you, there are some sick fucking assholes that want to hurt you, debase you, abuse you just for the sheer kick of it, just to feed that black hole in the centers of their souls…

Here are some of the joyful and loving excerpts generated by the freaks whipped up into a hating frenzy by their enablers in the pulpits and on AM talk radio:

you dumb slut

you fucking retard

Ha ha, you’re a dirty whore

YOU DESERVED IT, YOU SLUTTY LITTLE WHORE

SHUT YOUR GODDAMN FUCKING MOUTH, CUNT

Your life is fucking worthless you goddamn slut

Please kill yourself now bitch

I hope you feel good about murdering your kid whore

Tough shit slut

You are a disgusting little shit of a woman

If I ever met you I’d fucking kill you like you murdered your baby, fucking whore

Die you fucking slut

Why don’t you just kill yourself now. People like you don’t deserve to live

Stupid
whore. You spread your legs and now you want to murder a baby. I hope
you get raped and murdered. Maybe then you’ll feel what that innocent
life felt

If you’ve ever spent any time dredging through the filth and insane fury that spews out in the Yahoo news message boards, this kind of thing will feel unfortunately very familiar.  Racial epithets, hate, threats, obscenity, insults – wow. 

So I guess the fact that Blogpulse has put her firmly in the top 10 blogs for the day shows that there are a lot of people – presumably on both sides of the political divide – linking to her site.  I hope that the level of discourse goes up a bit.