1 Boring Old Man

I find myself talking about truth these days, and read about it a lot on other blogs. I also find myself fighting the impulse to be sarcastic. It’s so easy to do in this climate – be sarcastic. But I am so bothered by what Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, etc. do with it. It’s instant contempt – an emotion well known to me from my years among the mentally ill. Contempt is a desparate emotion. While it’s defined in the dictionary as …

con·tempt [kuh–tempt]

1. the feeling with which a person regards anything considered mean, vile, or worthless; disdain; scorn.
2. the state of being despised; dishonor; disgrace.

… the definition doesn’t quite capture the essence of it. If you feel contempt towards someone, you feel that that person has no value. It’s the feeling of the murderer.

So  when I looked at Firedoglake, there was a post by Jane Hamsher about a segment on Fox News from Sean Hannity about her. Jane can be a bit on the sarcastic side herself, but a rookie compared to the daily dose from the Right. She’s also a breast cancer patient, currently going through her third round of treatment after a recurrence of her tumor. Here’s the segment from Fox about her blog, and blogs in general:

Like I said, it’s hard not respond sarcastically. But I hope we can fight the impulse. Anyone who finds something like this Foxcast compelling is not going to be affected by any response that one might muster. Jane’s response was pretty classy. She quoted Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”