"How long will it take the calloused hearts of men before the scars of hatred and cruelty shall be removed?"

--Dashiel Hammet

We are living in a strange age.

An age in which people can wail and moan and cry disaster over the meagerest of crimes. An age in which maelstroms become touchstones for those looking to touch the general public for a share of their funds. An age in which charity is corporate profit.

But the strangest thing about this age, which has the advantage of being so far removed from the effects and reasonings of a major war, is not the outrage that foments-- not ferments, foments, a word that the rest of the world seems to have forgotten to use-- over actions that, in any other war, any real war, would simply fade into the background of general brutality and insanity. I like that outrage. It's silly at times, it's stupid at times, but it gives me a general feeling of optimism, like maybe we are approaching an age where even idiots* know that war is wrong and stupid.

No, the strangest thing is that there seem to have been put in place agents whose job it is to stir up whatever vestiges of the perverse and dirty-minded there are out there who still think that war, or better yet, war based on racism, is a good thing. My personal exposure to that is chronicled elsewhere, in connection to incidents which, now that they are years behind me, I do not desire to dredge up. But recently I got a glimpse of what they're up to.

It happened when I went to investigate a commentator to one of my wife's blog entries. Since I have sworn an oath of secrecy to the identity of the blog-- she wishes it to remain anonymous-- I will refrain from divulging the supposed name of the commentator, but for the purposes of this description I will give him the pseudonym "Willie Flogger."

Willie's comment was both obtuse and flirtatious, and it was probably due to the second nature of the comment that I looked the bastard up. The first blush investigation revealed two blog entries, one entreating bloggers to turn off their spam blockers so as to not limit their exposure to popularity, the second entreating them to subscribe to a spammer service that, he claimed, would guarantee that millions upon millions of netizens would visit their blogs.

It sounded like bullshit, so I decided to look one layer deeper in, see if this Willie Flogger person was actually a person.

The next post I ran across said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "40,000 dead in India and Pakistan? Good! It serves them right, the Muslim bastards, they sleep in tents anyways!"

I kid you not. The logic was that stunning.

I have concluded that Willie Flogger is a dog. That is to say: he is not an actual human being. He is one of a number of old Crays that were bought at a discount by the John Locke Society, programmed to spew hateful rhetoric out onto the net under the cover of concocted personas in the hopes of uncovering the callous, mean-spirited, bloodthirsty racist in all of us, somehow believing that these traits are what has been lost in the American spirit, and that if we are to return to times of greatness and glory, we must unleash our inner idgits and get down to some ol' fashioned lynching! Today in Iraq, tomorrow, Poughkeepsie!

And so, Willie Flogger-- if that is your real name-- we all know you're out there. And most of us don't care.

So there.

*cf. the Admin.