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Thursday, January 15, 2009
MY LOVE FOR YOU HAS TURNED TO HATE
Hank Williams
1949
Available on: Original Singles Collection
Mercury Nashville : 1992
[Buy It]
I'VE GOT REASONS TO HATE YOU
Lefty Frizzell
1951
Available on: Life's Like Poetry
Bear Family : 1992
[Buy It]
HATE STREET DIALOGUE
Rodriguez
Cold Fact
Light In the Attic : 1970
[Buy It]
I HATE U
Prince
The Gold Experience
Warner Bros. : 1995
[Buy It]
HATE IS THE NEW LOVE
Mekons
OOOH! (Out Of Our Heads)
Quarter Stick : 1992
[Buy It]
I HATE YOU
Monks
Black Monk Time
Polydor : 1966
[Buy It]
TURN IT INTO HATE
Graham Parker
Acid Bubblegum
Razor & Tie : 1996
[Buy It]
This week I published a short article in the magazine where I work. It was a humor piece about the Holocaust. Well, really, it was a humor piece about the Herman Rosenblat case, and the way that our culture encourages the artificial sweetening of memoirs about even the more horrific events so that those memoirs can better appeal to publishers, programmers, movie studios, television executives, and the public. It wasn't a major achievement, but it was a piece with a point. I should know. I sharpened it.
I thought it would make a little trouble, and it did. People don't like jokes about the Holocaust, even jokes that use it to make a broader case. In the wake of the piece, I have been getting a pretty steady stream of hate mail. The people who have decided to send me hate mail have derided not only the piece, but my entire body of work, not to mention my character and (in one case) my parents' character. That guy was the worst. I won't say his name. Let's say his name was Bill, which it wasn't. Bill wrote many negative things about me. Some I will repeat, some I will not. I will paraphrase and conflate, possibly also inventing: I'm trying the Herman Rosenblat thing. Among the things Bill said was the following: "You should be ashamed of yourself and your parents should be ashamed of you and if they aren't then they are just as self-hating as you." He went on: "race traitor," "talentless," "awful," and one misspelled profanity. (To be fair, it was probably mistyped: does anyone think it's spelled "fcuk"?)
I thought for a little while about Bill, who I won't identify, but whose remarks I will briefly dignify with a response. Dislike of the piece is fine, Bill. I prefer praise, Bill--who doesn't?--but I don't believe in a world where my preferences should always be satisfied. People are under no obligation to like my work, Bill. For me to believe otherwise would be idiotic, Bill. Sometimes, something I write will rub people the wrong way, Bill. Don't you think so, you freakin' moronic eunuch? See: it can happen. Other times, it's just that different readers occupy different territory. Let's say, Bill, that you love Claire Messud. I pick her only as a random example of an author I admire and like, but haven't yet found a way to love. Not her fault. Not mine. Could just as easily have been Etgar Keret or Barbara Pym. It is possible, even likely, Bill, that love for Messud/Keret/Pym is incompatible with love for me. Your heart and mind have staked out territory, and I am beyond the pale. That's fine. That's good. You can't love everyone, as they say, or your love is not love at all. You need hate so that love is real, as they say. They also say that a world without dislike is a world drowning in diet cream soda, and that it's better to have some bourbon and scotch too, so that people get intoxicated by what they consume rather than pleasantly, fleetingly carbonated. So in some ways, Bill, we're on the same page. I'm sympatico with your unsympatico. That's what I would have written back to Bill if I had written back.
I didn't, though. Why? Because I was mad. In the matter of Bill, I felt like stomping his head until I got wine. I put on heavy boots and looked up his address on the Internet. I even had a line I was going to say before I put the boot on his neck: "If you shift things into a hateful register, you might get rung up on that register." It wasn't exactly Dirty Harry -- it wasn't even Gran Torino -- but the boots were all laced up. A friend of mine asked me why I was so mad, when I professed not to care about criticism. I didn't know, and I said I didn't know. "I mean it," she said. "Why are you bothered so much by a reaction that's clearly ignorant? How thin is your skin?" Again, I said I didn't know. My friend was making me mad. It turned out the questions were rhetorical, which didn't make me any less mad. My friend is a writer, and she told me that she has an odd reaction to hateful readers. "Sure, they make themselves look bad, but they also make me look bad," she said. "So, mixed feelings, like watching an ex-boyfriend drive off a cliff in my Jaguar."
Why is it okay for Bill to hate me but not okay for me to hate him? What's the difference between a response that demonstrates measured disdain for me and my writing and one that lashes out? And why is ad hominem hatred any less virtuous than a more global misanthropy? It's the last of these questions that should come first. What's ironic about the whole experience is that the humor piece in question, the one that Bill thought was trivializing the Holocaust, was written from a place of deep and abiding hatred. All the people who expressed outrage that I was burlesquing the Holocaust were, whether they know it or not, simply re-expressing the outrage I felt when I first heard about the Herman Rosenblat affair. You should have seen my face. I mean it. You should have, because then you could have explained my expression to me: it was a look of sadness and distaste and frustration and despair, not only at the poor old man who felt compelled to fictionalize the horrors of his youth, but at the swarm of houseflies that came so quickly to the carrion. My sense of the whole incident just burned at me. I felt more than just hot under the choler. I was, well, Holocaustic. In the end, the outrage got filtered through at least three layers of trickery and irony, through masks, through fictional devices, because it needed to be at a temperature where I could safely handle it. (Incidentally, this is why I'm not as mad at Rosenblat as I am at the people who ringed around him opportunistically: maybe his introduction of fictional elements was somehow psychologically necessary. Who am I to say?) So that's the thing, Bill. I don't mind hate. I depend upon it, as do many people I depend upon--Stanley Elkin, Axl Rose, Ice Cube. But I like it to be deployed correctly, Bill, by which I mean non-idiotically.
Eventually, I took off my heavy boots. I never got the wine from Bill's head. I wrote a sentence about punching him in the face. An ear flew off. Call it cowardice or call it satire. In his honor, I'd like to offer a few songs about hate that use the term (and the weapon) correctly: a pair of bitter country tearjerkers, a hippie relic, the Mekons' "Lone Pilgrim" update, Prince's "Thin Line Between Love and Hate" update, a classic from the eternally mad Monks, and an undervalued anthem from Graham Parker. The Parker is my favorite of the bunch, I think. It's a song about how war and celebrity culture and the deadening of the human spirit has only one proper response, and that's to load up a whole quiver with arrows and then, quivering with rage, let them fly:Send your little boys and girls to go and play in a giant sandbox
Put your movie stars on the cover of People for going in for a detox
Let your happy-face news readers share a little joke
At the end of the night's transmission
Let's see the world through the eyes of some clown
Gonna make all of your decisions
Well if you can sleep at night go ahead that's great
It's all been manufactured like the junk that's on your plate
Come on
Turn it into hate
Turn it into hate Parker doesn't attack anyone individually. Rather, he attacks everyone, implicates whoever contributes to the blindness and complacency that lets the world go on cracked and crooked: that allows a memoirist to be lionized and then turned into a sacrificial lamb, that allows a justice department to be used as a blunt political instrument, that allows an economy to be rubbled by short-sightedness. Though the song was released in 1996, it feels even more contemporary, in the sense that it feels like a hurried, heated pushback delivered in response to a proximate threat. New technologies have harmed music in many ways, but jeremiads aren't one of the victims; digital delivery permits hatred and rage to range more freely, with often bracing results. In fact, Parker himself has recently taken to YouTube with a series of topical songs performed under the pseudonym Tex Skerball, and other rock stars like Neil Young are beginning to see how the death of record stores and radio and the rise of alternate distribution channels can help rather than hurt their cause. Elsewhere on the album, on "Sharpening Axes," Parker delivers a lyric that is nearly a manifesto:I don't appeal to the masses, and they don't appeal to me. Dyspeptic but fair-minded, angry but controlled, misanthropic because of his love for humanity, kicking against the pricks without ever breaking down: that's the kind of hate I understand and, consequently, the kind of hate I love.Labels: ben, country, rock
posted by Ben
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