As if further proof were needed

There’s a small gaggle of hyper-hostile critics out there who watch this blog with obsessive interest and who post extremely negative comments on it virtually daily.

I find them fascinating as a kind of laboratory specimen of odd human behavior.  I look in on them almost every day, for at least a minute or two.  (Some understandably ask me why I pay them any attention.  My personal fascination with the lengths to which they routinely go is at least half the reason.)

One of them is a fellow calling himself “Everybody Wang Chung” who, on several occasions, has made up stories about his encounters with me out of whole cloth and who delights in regularly pronouncing me a racist, a sexist, an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a glutton, and so forth.  In his latest venture, he’s found proof that I’m a racist in the fact that I mistakenly identified Richard Pryor, the other day, as having done a sketch on Saturday Night Live that I titled “White Like Me.”

This, he said, proves that all black people look alike to me.  Because I hold all black people in disdain.

Except that I wasn’t mistaken — except (perhaps) in actually entitling the sketch “White Like Me.”

Because it turns out that my memory from four decades ago was quite correct.  Richard Pryor did do such a sketch on Saturday Night Live.  It did revolve around a purported book called White Like Me.  It was exactly as I remembered it.

But retracting that gratifying accusation of racism against me would require more integrity than the folks in this weird little petri dish culture have yet been able to summon up.

Here’s the data:  By now, several people in the place where this fellow made his accusation almost certainly know that it’s untrue.  As I say, they watch this blog like vultures and cluck about it regularly like hens.  And at least one of them has actually commented on an entry that I made last night, subsequent to the post in which I provided confirmation that I had remembered the Richard Pryor sketch correctly.

But there’s been no correction, no retraction.  In  fact, the original accuser has permitted a chorus of others to add their comments to his thread, unchallenged.  I was, they say, flatly lying about having enjoyed Richard Pryor’s comedy on Saturday Night Live.  I was merely pretending to be “edgy” and “cool.”  Furthermore, the incident demonstrates my shameless willingness simply to make things up.  And, of course, they agree that it proves me a racist.

Even after many years, the personal malice and disingenuousness of some online critics (and the hostile gullibility of some others) still amazes me.

But, at the same time, such behavior fascinates me.  It says something — something, alas, quite unfortunate — about how some people will act when their identity is concealed and they’re at liberty to indulge their hatreds unconstrained.

Posted from San Antonio, Texas