VIEWPOINT
Heather Mallick
The Palin fallout
On controversy, democracy and e-mail
Last Updated: Monday, October 6, 2008 | 3:23 PM ET
Heather Mallick CBC News
A month ago, I wrote about Sarah Palin's unfitness to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee and attracted the wholly unwelcome attention of Fox News and its viewers.
I realize that in internet terms, four weeks makes that column the equivalent of a fashion update on Victorian hoop skirts and crinolines, and by writing about something so ancient, I am repelling that most yearned-for online demographic - young people.
But the essence of opinionating is that you work with the material you have. The last four weeks were, like much of life, often unpleasant but always instructive. And yes, there were funny moments. I have a streak of black humour in me so sturdy it's practically carbonized. This is the part of me that wants John McCain and Palin to win. "It's not the despair, I can stand the despair," John Cleese said in the movie Clockwise, as another rescue attempt loomed. "It's the hope."
Extremist right-wingers in the U.S. apparently read CBCNews.ca, and within days of my column's appearance, hundreds of e-mails from Americans began landing on my personal website. Then Fox News took up the cause and it got bigger and worse, not like a rolling stone, more like a dung beetle having a field day.
E-mail tale
I woke up and logged on - my abiding attachment to online news is unhealthy - and watched the e-mails land like rain, if rain were made of blood. I called my husband in to watch. My website was twitching, if not heaving. "It looks like it's alive."
This one was not the rudest or most violent of the e-mails I received, but it is emblematic:
"So you don't like Sarah Palin you ------? ---- you, you liberal ----- of ----. I'll bet your ------- rotting meat. You are one ugly ------. I'd love to punch you in your chops and knock every tooth out of your head. Come see me, bitch! I have something for you, something all ------ need … [etc]."
Here's my hypocrisy: I am a feminist journalist, one of the few left standing. We are rare, the snail darters of Canadian life, so to speak. I am a protected species, shielded largely by men. After persistent attacks from male oddities who were trying to find my address, my friends' addresses, who were trying to meet me and "raise awareness of face violence," as the satirist Stephen Colbert would put it, men stepped forward to help me. (Even women who hated me didn't seem to want me injured or deceased, and I thank them.)
After that, I grew tired of being misunderstood, pretty much stopped reading online, got into the informational equivalent of a fish tank and stayed there.
My e-mail provider added a filter blocking e-mails with certain words. The e-mails stopped instantly, which was brilliant, but to my cost, I failed to block the word "Jewish."
But after Fox got the firestorm restarted, we redirected the next few hundred threats to the e-mail belonging to my husband, who is British and unflappable. He initially read them, rather than mass-delete, so that kind people offering encouragement would not be ignored. Readers are hurt when you don't reply. Canadians are nice. Angry sometimes, but not violent.
But Fox viewers are a piece of work. I last appeared on Fox News in 2004 when I went on Bill O'Reilly's show to defend American war resisters sheltering in Canada. O'Reilly lost his mind, if he ever had one, and he was so mad about Vancouver's safe-injection site that he threatened to tell his fans to boycott Canada and destroy our economy, as they had that of France, he alleged, ludicrously. The conversation was so deranged that anti-Foxers sent me personalized "baguette" coffee mugs as souvenirs. "Beellions of dollairs," they read.
This time, I explained to Fox producers that I couldn't appear because Fox viewers are, like their hosts, too violently brutish to alienate. Fox shows aren't interviews so much as bear-baiting. I didn't watch the Fox shows on the subject of me or read the subsequent Canadian commentary in print or online.
The raw and the cooked
Two things about the whole debacle are of interest. One is the matter of protecting writers' safety when villagers approach with torches and pitchforks. One of my employers immediately provided me with a security guard. I had offered to cancel a speech I was giving at a Catholic university in Canada - I didn't want to embarrass them - but they refused, on the grounds of free speech, and they had also liked the column.
The other matter is the vexed state of cyberspace. Online has brought instant media democratization as well as the erasure of national borders. And websites have not devised a way to keep online forums civilized. "There's no point debating anything online," writes the columnist Charlie Brooker. "You might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky."
I used to write for print newspapers - an endangered species of their own - but this squabble made me think of Lévi-Strauss's theory of human culture, the raw versus the cooked: Cooking marks the transition from nature to culture. Online commentary is still mostly raw.
I have now discovered the joy of no e-mail; I cannot tell you how peaceful and happy life has become in the world of the cooked.
When I came out of my protected-species bubble and watched BBC World, I was aghast, as the U.S. bailout choked, governments worldwide began grabbing banks and the concept of Republican free-market rule was hung upside down like a certain Italian dictator at a gas station. This took place in one day.
I do not know what will happen to us; the economic fallout of an unregulated market and the end of oil will soon make our world unrecognizable, and that includes Canada, this good place. It won't matter who was right or who was wrong. We're all in this together. I wish us all good luck.
