Why do you come here?

[imomus]

Well, Saturday's entry -- in which I advanced the daring view that one Israeli life is equivalent to one Lebanese life -- really did seem to annoy a few Click Opera readers. "I'm arranging a Momus record burning in my yard tomorrow. Just listening to your voice makes me sick. I wish you ill you sick bastard," wrote one ex-satisfied customer with an IP address in Holland.

What puzzles me is why such right-wing people bought Momus records in the first place, or read this blog. Aren't there semantic filters, clues all over the place, political markers? Haven't my political cards always been on the table? Shouldn't right wingers have been rebuffed years ago? Shouldn't this "bigger-than-Jesus"-style record-burning have happened the moment people listened to my records? Shouldn't these people have played the stuff on headphones in Tower or Virgin, concluded "he's a radical", and just bought a Stephen Malkmus record instead?

Speaking of Malkmus, I could understand it if I'd expressed sentiments like those the pig libber shared with Index magazine last year:

"There are things about the West Coast that bug me. There is this really stupid leftism out here. It makes me mad. On September 11, I was at this health-food store on Hawthorne Boulevard called the Daily Grind. It's a ropy kind of place. These young, shiftless hippies hang out there. This one guy was like, "Those workers, man, they deserved it." At first, I wanted to collar him and put him up against a wall and get all Wolfowitzian on his ass. Then I turned into my dad, like, "This guy can hang out and play in his drum circle now, but in forty years he's just going to be a strain on our health-care system. He may be eating health food, but he doesn't know he's still part of the problem."

If I'd said that kind of thing, sure, I'd expect to have ultra-right wing commenters. But I haven't. I'm at a loss. Do these people come here just to "educate" me? Or do they think this white robe I'm wearing is KKK (in fact it's Moroccan), or that the big orange face in the poster behind me is Ayn Rand before she shaved her beard?

Come on, right wing people, enlighten me. What on earth are you doing here?

Comments

[bopscotch.livejournal.com]

"and dream about slicing up hippies a la Musashi."

That's pretty funny, since Musashi was a hippy himself.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

It was a joke about possible misguided fantasies of the far right. I've read The Book of the Five Rings which certainly isn't short on mysticism. I enjoyed it. Interestingly (and perhaps slightly apposite to the discussion), it is partly marketed to Western audiences as a manifesto on how to conduct business.