Djelloul Marbrook

I never knew what it was like to be young, and now that I’m old I don’t know what that’s like either, and perhaps this is the true human condition and everything else is a pretense at knowing.

Assumptions are always tricky, and I’m running out of them. I used to think it was an aspect of old age to show more forbearance and have less tolerance for nastiness, but my daily e-mail is prompting doubts.

Day after day I receive e-mails full of rage about President Obama’s presumed intent to disarm us, every one, in spite of the Second Amendment, or e-mails purporting to prove how he is turning our country over to Hamas or conspiring with enemies to bankrupt us or stealing money from hard workers to give it to bums. Where does all this rage come from? Are these the same people who won’t give an old lady an inch on Manhattan’s streets, the same over-privileged young mommies who use their kids’ strollers to mow down the infirm? Or are these the people who pushed you around in high school and made your life miserable?

Paranoia is not, of course, the exclusive province of the right, but I get these e-mails from people who either aspire to open my eyes to the evils of liberalism or to punish me for my views. Why? I don’t despise them for their views. I have no intention of trying to convert them. But obviously they perceive me as a danger. What is so disquieting about this is our sense that we have been targeted to be upset. Often the senders of this sort of mail know we don’t share their views. Their intent seems less to change our minds than to tweak us. Why? Every day as a matter of common courtesy most of us go out of our way not to upset people. It’s not smart, it’s not polite, it’s not good business. So what is going on here?

If you walk around New York City as much as I do you’ll undoubtedly encounter a breed of well dressed bullies who won’t give you an inch on the street, won’t even turn a shoulder to let you pass, and will act oblivious to everyone’s existence. They pretend to be engaged in conversation with each other or with someone on the other end of a cell phone, but they’re self-absorbed exhibitionists. I suspect many of them work on Wall Street, and now I wonder how many of them are cluttering up inboxes with a varied assortment of grievances.

I’m pleased that my views haven’t hardened with my arteries. The number of notions I hold with vehemence has dwindled to a few and I can be dislodged from them with sweet reason and compassion. So the vehemence of some of the e-mails I regularly receive baffles me. Surely no rational person expressing himself with such rage expects to persuade anybody of anything. That, perhaps, is the nature of rant and screed.

Preaching to the choir is one thing. But raging against the heathen strikes me as forlorn. Rage is ineffective, debilitating. As is so often the case with irrational anger, I don’t get the sense I’m the target. I think someone else is, perhaps someone long dead, someone who took old issues to the grave.

It’s not that I feel like Robert De Niro’s taxi driver snapping, You talkin’ t’me? I don’t feel like the kid who feels dissed because some hapless stranger has laid eyes on him in the street. But it seems to me that some of these enraged e-mailers do. They seem to feel dissed because voters vote the way they do, because not everybody agrees with them, because most of us don’t see the conspiracies they see.

Hey, I love a conspiracy, too. As a newspaperman I smelled more than my share of rats. But I don’t remember being angry about them, just obsessively curious.

I should tack a caveat to this meditation. I don’t get vehement e-mail in response to blog posts. Most of the responses I get to posts are thoughtful and respectful. I get the rabid stuff from the people I’ve encountered in life. They’re usually marked something like “and 28 more.” All things being equal, I’d rather get a prayer, even if I’m ordered to pass it on or die a horrible death. —DM