“The Puritan’s idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.”
-Wendell Phillips
Criticism about someone’s performance is direct and honest. Moral indignation related to personal matters is backhanded and often hypocritical. Then there is a third type of criticism, one that’s rearing its ugly head right now: the attack against nothing.
Imagine this for a moment. A newspaper claims that vanilla ice cream is more popular than chocolate based on a recent study. You wonder why that is. Are enough people allergic to chocolate to have an effect? Where there a lot of different options for different types of chocolate ice cream that ended up splitting the pro-chocolate vote? Did the study ask people why they preferred certain flavors of ice cream over others? With these questions in mind you write a letter to the editor asking why more people seem to prefer vanilla to chocolate. The editor responds, “because more people voted for vanilla.”
There is always a danger with any medium that can self reference. The danger is that discussion turns into meta-discussion, where the issues don’t matter and people’s opinions of the people discussing the issue becomes the new issue. At that point the only healthy thing to do is ask, “What the hell are they even talking about anymore?” I have my issues with the job that Governor Paterson is doing, but he doesn’t deserve this kind of vapid slander. No one does.
