poison pen: responding to my hate mail pt 2

So thus far my hate mail (meaning all the mail generated by my site) has been by people who take offense at my dismissive tone regarding their dearly loved movies. This had been the state of my hate mail until tonight, when I received my first response to the article I wrote about the forthcoming Sylvia Likens movie. I had half-expected some kind of negative response, mainly because of the (in retrospect) over-stated hyperbole of identifying NASCAR broadcasts as more realistic venue than independent film festivals to reach out to potential child abusers. Obviously, this is a gross overstatement, and were I not committed to not altering the content of my writing once it’s published, that passage would be quietly exorcised.
As it turns out, the first negative feed-back the piece has produced has nothing to do with my comfort in pandering to southern stereotypes. Instead, it reads:

What gave you the right to plaster my fathers name {Coy Hubbard} over the internet? I guess people like you don't really care who's lives you are destroying, after all Sylvia Likens was 40+ years ago. I wasn't even born yet and you've destroyed mine.

Thank You,
Sincerely,
Dealing with it

Obviously, I would be a rube to not at least entertain the idea that this is someone pulling my leg for reasons too bizarre and obscure to imagine. At first I couldn’t fathom why my site was chosen; when either Hubbard’s or Likens’ names are entered into a search engine, hundreds of pages are found(this was an important case in the 60’s). While mine is not among the first hundred found for either name, I checked my site meter, which tracks this visitor as finding my site by typing “photos of coy hubbard and the murder of sylvia likens” into Yahoo (I tried it- mine is the first site that appears).

Because of the anonymity offered by the internet, I can never be sure who wrote this. But out of the remote chance that the actual real son or daughter of Coy Hubbard is the author, I feel compelled to write back.

Dear Sir or Madam,

It’s been a couple of hours since I discovered the comment you left at my site, and I’ve spent that time in careful consideration of how best to respond. There is a great deal of rage expressed in this short message, rage that seems wholly misdirected by being aimed at me. While brevity is hardly my strong point, I will try to apply it as I answer point by point.

First; the issue of my “right” in plastering your father’s name over the internet. I don’t know how extensive your internet searching has been, but I can hardly take the credit for introducing this story to the digital age. When typed (with quotes) Google kicks back 398 entries, and even allowing for the probability that there have been others who share that name, it would appear that this case isn’t going away. As such, I could easily hide behind the obvious and simple point that this is public record and a well covered case to boot, and I could even go so far as to offer a rhetorical question about Sylvia Likens’ “rights”, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll simply make this point; setting aside your personal relationship for a moment, do you want to live in a society where the protection of the guilty is so absolute that their name’s can never be mentioned in connection with the crimes they commit? Don’t get me wrong, I am no Dirty Harry style vigilante hell-bent on blood atonement; this is not one of those websites that list the current addresses and name changes of convicted criminals. Not only do I accept the possibilities of reform and redemption, but I truly hope your father achieved them, finding meaning and peace in his adult life. But while I have no interest in hounding people about their past bad choices, I also believe it is morally bankrupt to ignore that past because it makes people uncomfortable.

The suggestion that I “don’t really care whose lives” I destroy is absurd and offensive. Whose life have I destroyed, exactly? I am empathetic enough to concede the possibility that (hypothetically) there are others who are also responsible for your father’s presence in that house. Since most of the writing about the case is focused on the Baniszewski family, I can only speculate on what combination of emotional problems and miserable home lives brought the neighborhood kids into that nightmare, but the fact remains, they were there.

I certainly take exception to the statement that I’ve ruined your life; like you, I wasn’t even born when all this happened, and I think it’s incredible that my one passing mention of your father’s name is the cause of any personal catastrophe. If, through some unfortunate series of coincidences, my website is the first time you’re reading about this case…it’s just my bad luck, I guess. But the fact remains, among the couple of hundred websites that discuss this case, there’s a consensus of horror and disgust.

I highly recommend you come to peace with this situation soon, since, as I wrote in the original article, two Sylvia Likens movies are slated for release in the next few months (the criticism of being the actual topic of the piece). The filmmakers are using the real names, and while I don’t think either of these movies will be blockbusters, even modest success will mean a level of exposure well beyond the size of Millet’s book being assigned reading in gender studies courses…or my dink-ass website.

In conclusion, I don’t pretend that this response will in any way calm your anger or bring you to an acceptance of the specific context many people (myself included) view your father in. Rather, I expect that if you ever end up reading this, I’ll find an even angrier, more hostile message than the first one. I’m not looking forward to it, but I’m hard-pressed to think of anything I could write that would make this “better”, short of offering an apology for listing the participants in a hideous and inhuman crime- something in good conscious I cannot do. I take no pride from- nor find no pleasure in- the thought that stumbling into my site caused you any suffering this evening; I can only imagine the daily hell of living under the cloud of association with a crime committed before I was born. But as sad as that thought may make me, it does not change the fact that what I wrote was true, and that to falsely apologize or alter the text of a published piece would betray what it means to me to be a writer, and what it means to be a man.


Sincerely,
Jason M. Cutler

poison pen: responding to my hate mail pt 1

Only four months have passed since I stated my on-line journals; and considering a month and a half of that was spent without a working computer, it is no great surprise that the feed-back has been limited. It’s also no surprise to me that what little feed-back I have received has been mostly negative. The sole motivation in creating this site was and is to disrupt the current tone of passive spectatorship that defines the public’s perception of popular and high culture. While it would be serious self-delusion to think that one sporadically updated site could generate even a small amount of damage to the Colossus that the hype-machine has become, all the same I refuse to budge from my commitment to the belief that we can and should have a richer cultural legacy then the pablum we’re currently being spoon fed.

I’m fully aware that there are those who take the questioning of conventional wisdom far too personal; were I for instance to suggest that “Mystic River” was a morally bankrupt exercise further ruined by the least nuanced, ham-fisted acting I’ve ever suffered through, there are those who would not just disagree with my opinion, but react in an explosion of violent self-defense. It’s strange, but I’ve never known it to be lovers of the off-beat or obscure who react so poorly to differing tastes. I have, for instance, admitted to devotees of death metal that I personally find their beloved music a bit on the silly side, and they always accepted this, either suggesting something along the line of “dude, you gotta rock!” or perhaps even cherry-picking a particular title they think closest to my non-satanic palate. No, the people who react with the most bizarre defensiveness, the people who act like I just called their child homely are the people whose opinion is the most comfortably buttressed by the mass culture. It’s not fans of Cannibal Corpse and Solstice of Suffering that scare me, it’s fans of Billy Joel and Bon Jovi that’ll stomp you into the gutter if you voice dissent.

The heart of the Hype-Machine’s sell is the promise of consensus- if we convince ourselves to all like the same things we can experience the communal identity inorganic to a nation so large and diverse. Setting aside how utterly unappealing (and dangerous) the idea of actually achieving communal identity is, the fact of the matter is, we’re never going to return to the time when we can define ourselves in such a simplistic manner. The definition of multiformity as a singularity is inherently flawed and based on a system of exclusion- consider the safety and innocence one thinks of when considering the American 1950’s; is this an honest understanding of that time, or simply the limited perception of middle-class white children mistaken for official history? How we currently view the complex, tumultuous time says nothing about what actually happened, and everything about who frames our national conscious.

Anyway, the point of writing this was to address the angry comments I’m receiving. As I said earlier, I do not happen to believe that any argument I post here, no matter how tightly I construct it, could ever begin to loosen the entertainment industry’s steely grip on popular taste. What’s more, even if I magically had the power, I have no interest in reconstructing the world to match my likes and dislikes. What doesn’t seem to be understood by people who take exception to, for instance, my disinterest in a movie like “We Are Marshall” is that I have no desire to -or delusions of being able to- stop such films from being produced or enjoyed. What I do want to put at stop to is the expectation of enjoyment…the common assumption (resulting from clever marketing) that you can’t but love such heart-warming fare. This same culture of common assumption resulted in me leaving someone sitting there in mute horror and disbelief after I said I personally find it the height of tackiness to have a television that reaches more than sixty inches width. Have we sunk so low into passive consumerism that not wanting to see sitcoms blown up on a surface larger than a dining table is consider sedition?

So we return again to why I’ve started this site. The age of canons is past, and no adult with the least bit of consumer savvy can look at something like the American Film Institute’s 100 best movies list without seeing the obvious manipulation of studios and retail distributors. With the rise of digital technology and the internet, there is the possibility for a great reshuffling, a total break-down of distinction between mainstream and marginal, ‘classic’ and obscure. I’m loath to be optimistic, but I do think these absurd classifications are falling apart and that people have at their finger-tips a variety of choice unimaginable fifteen years ago. Which is not to say the Hype-Machine still doesn’t exert a considerable amount of influence on what we can see and hear; it’s just that the cracks are growing, and the amount of work involved in finding alternatives to their over promoted, middle-brow mediocrities is less and less.

I accept that I will continue to receive angry e-mails… in fact, I’m hoping for it. Even if I fail to persuade the authors to develop an appreciation independent of Extra! and Entertainment Tonight infomercials, I have at least succeed in forcing them to consider and defend their positions, an essential first step in the process of liberation of dogmatic thinking. So in the end, it’s not even so much that I want to stop people from liking stupid crap (although that would be nice), it’s that I want them to like stupid crap because they think it’s good, not because it’s what you’re supposed to do.

a new home...

As much as I've tried, I've been unable to fix the mess that's the old page. Rather than waste more time trying to correct the HTML, I've decided to just go ahead and start a new page.