Hate Mail, Part Deux

Now here's somebody who knows what he's talking about.

As you may recall from a previous, not terribly funny update, I wrote about my frustrations with working at the Oregon Daily Emerald. Getting into the job, I apparently hadn’t understood that I’d have to be coming up with an opinion on a weekly basis, and after a term and a half of throwing out mostly half baked, soft pitch opinions, I was wondering how much longer I’d be able to keep up the façade of myself as a “serious” “journalist.” The time had come, I suppose, to decide between going big and going home, and for what is perhaps the first time in my life, I opted to go big. Some of you have mentioned that in the past few weeks, my Daily Emerald articles have started getting better. The combination of bourbon, rage, and not giving a shit has evidently paid off.

I may have mentioned before that I was afraid to toss out an actual, controversial opinion. Don’t take this to mean that I’m not an opinionated person; that I most certainly am. It’s just that up until this point I was under the impression that in addition to being an opinionated person, I was also an idiot whose ideas had best be kept out of print lest he incite an accidental race war or something.

I think this first became an issue for me when I was on the speech and debate team at my high school. Now, for those of you popular enough to not know the ins and outs of competitive public speaking, that gloriously dorky world is divided into two camps: Speeches, which tend to be individual orations judged on their quality, and Debate, in which two people (or two pairs of four) argue the pros and cons of an issue while wearing suits and generally refraining from hand gestures, crotch grabbing, or the phrase “jump up my butt.”

My various speech coaches always thought that I’d be great at debating with the same misguided fervor that people assume I would make a good leader or a great Jehovah’s Witness. On a few occasions, they paired me up in practice debates against other people from my team, and in almost every situation I’d end up getting verbally massacred by my opponents, who had the remarkable ability to disprove every word I said, including prepositions and most forms of punctuation. These repeated defeats quickly taught me that stating an opinion in the presence of dissenters was a great way to get mentally gang raped by people better informed than I. Thus, I opted not to do debate and instead settled on a Speech event called After Dinner Speaking, which centers on making stupid jokes for a few minutes before saying something mildly insightful. I was so good at this that I kept doing it after high school, twice a week, on the Internet – like a drunk man pissing non sequiturs and metaphors into a storm drain full of porn and lolcats.

Once again, this brings us to the question of why I became an opinion columnist in the first place, seeing as I already had a well-established fear of inciting the rage of a better-informed contemporary with a different opinion than my own. It’s especially bad given the fact that the name of the job was the thing I was so reluctant to do – Opinion Columnist. I mean, I wouldn’t feel any sympathy for somebody with a fear of alligators who became a professional alligator wrestler, or a guy with a fear of genitalia who became a gynecologist. I guess I was just sort of hoping that the Emerald’s readers would be so tired of opinions halfway through the week that they’d really appreciate a collection of non sequiturs and metaphors that ambled toward a point. Think of it as a kinder, gentler Opinion page, a vacation for the brain, if you will.

It was a few weeks ago when I finally realized that my opinions, which almost all fall into the “Don’t be an idiot, quit whining, meatloaf is delicious” vein, weren’t really all that scandalous to begin with – as far as I was concerned (in my opinion, you could say), they were common sense. My main fear, then, was broadcasting these opinions to the thousands of people who read (or do the Sudoku in) the paper, at which point I applied the “quit whining” portion of my personal philosophy and started writing down the stuff that made sense to me.

So far, it’s been going pretty well. I’ve received a couple of congratulatory emails from faculty who enjoyed my work, ensuring that I will forever be a teacher’s pet, but I’ve also received some pieces of hate mail. Fortunately, though, so far a fucking idiot has written every message. Take, for example, this response to my piece on helicopter parents:

Megan

It's kind of hilarious to hear someone whose mommy and daddy pay for everything try to preach about "independence" and the "real world." Practicing all those important life skills is easy enough when you have that big golden buffer between you and reality. Let's talk when you're juggling two part-time jobs, a full-time school load and are $15,000 in debt. If (heaven forbid!) my parents offered to drive up here and buy my books then I would have to accept that help because honestly I can't afford not to.

I'm sure you're a nice enough guy, Truman, but I think it would be in your best interest to find something to write about that doesn't make you sound like a first rate douchebag. Maybe a story about some third world country whose Poor Starving Children you helped or your struggle to choose the perfect double major combination or that backpacking trip through Europe when you lost cell phone reception for 20 minutes.

Hey, Megan – I couldn’t say this in an email, but I’ll say it here: You can jump up my butt.

I’ve changed my opinion on opinions, or at least the ones I’m writing for the paper. Whereas before I tried to examine things from every possible angle and see all the sides, I’ve realized now that that sort of behavior doesn’t meet deadlines. In order to put out good articles, like the ones you’ve been reading, I need to stand behind what I think and not look back. Therefore, I’ve been following this mantra every time I sit down to crank out another column:

Opinions are like assholes – everyone’s got one, and mine is the best.

Truman Capps actually is a nice enough guy.