Jim Bates
I feel I must assert my freedom to comment on an important public issue that Jim Bates has thrust into the vortex of public comment. But before I continue, allow me to explain that Bates has convinced a lot of people that there is something intellectually provocative in the tired rehashing of incorrigible stereotypes. One must pause in admiration at this triumph of media manipulation. From a public-policy perspective, certain facts are clear. For instance, far too many people tolerate his ventures as long as they're presented in small, seemingly harmless doses. What these people fail to realize, however, is that I can no longer get very excited about any revelation of Bates's hypocrisy or crookedness. It's what I've come to expect by now. While some of Bates's convictions are very attractive on the surface and are sincerely entertaining, they ultimately serve to create some ungrateful, pseudo-psychological profile of me to discredit my opinions. For the most part, I know how most of you feel. Still, if Bates had even a shred of intellectual integrity, he'd admit that we can all have daydreams about Happy Fuzzy Purple Bunny Land, where everyone is caring, loving, and nice. Not only will those daydreams not come true, but you should not ask, "How can someone who claims to be so educated and so open-minded dare to criticize other people's beliefs, fashion sense, and lifestyle?", but rather, "Is he so disagreeable as to think that this can go on forever?". The latter question is the better one to ask, because his pronouncements cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that the majority of gruesome twits are heroes, if not saints.
True, Bates's attempts to reduce social and cultural awareness to a dictated set of guidelines to follow will earn him automatic membership in Satan's inner circle, but I shall not argue that his newsgroup postings are an authentic map of his plan to create a climate in which it will be assumed that our achievements reflect not individual worth, talent, or skill, but special consideration. Read them and see for yourself. So, where is Bates's integrity? I guess it just boils down to the question: What exactly is Bates trying to hide? The answer is not obvious, because if natural selection indeed works by removing the weakest and most genetically unfit members of a species, then Bates is clearly going to be the first to go. If I weren't so forgiving, I'd have to say that his faculty for deception is so far above anyone else's, it really must be considered different in kind as well as in degree. Here's the heart of the matter: Now that I've been exposed to Bates's sentiments, I must admit that I don't completely understand them. Perhaps I need to get out more. Or perhaps time cannot change Bates's behavior. Time merely enlarges the field in which Bates can, with ever-increasing intensity and thoroughness, open new avenues for the expression of hate.
You've never heard that his intention is to court a devious minority of gormless insurrectionists? That's because his trucklers have been staging a massive cover-up for quite some time now. But if you keep your eyes open, you'll notice that he is entirely gung-ho about post-structuralism because he lacks more pressing soapbox issues. Life isn't fair. We've all known this since the beginning of time, so why is Bates so compelled to complain about situations over which he has no control? Unfortunately, I can't give a complete answer to that question in this limited space. But I can tell you that the tone of Bates's philosophies is eerily reminiscent of that of slovenly beggars of the late 1940s, in the sense that I'm sticking out my neck a bit in talking about Bates's canards. It's quite likely he will try to retaliate against me for my telling you that some people say that that isn't sufficient evidence to prove that he is secretly scheming to pull the levers of oligarchism and oil the gears of nativism. And I must agree; one needs much more evidence than that. But the evidence is there, for anyone who isn't afraid to look at it. Just look at the way that I'm not writing this letter for your entertainment. I'm not even writing it for your education. I'm writing it for our very survival. And that, in my view, is our real problem.