The attacks were severe, but by then I was immune to abuse and inured to embarrassment.
I had been at The Post for 16 years – nine as a columnist, the rest as an editor. After all that time, you get so used to embarrassment that you cease to be concerned with it.
And remorse? Forget about it. Despite that momentary twinge of regret I felt a few years earlier over what I had done to Sally Jessy Raphael, I was way past the point of feeling remorse for anything I had written.
On the contrary, receiving angry e-mails and letters had long been among the most cherished highlights of my days – and the crazier the better.
“ ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ is the best TV show in this world, you asshole!!” exclaimed a “Buffy” fan in May 2001 after I slammed the series as “overrated” and “over-hyped.”
“Stuff it up your pretentious ass,” wrote another “Buffy” zealot who questioned my right to write, declaring, “You are not entitled to an opinion on the subject.”
“ ‘Poor child’ my asshole,” an unnamed correspondent scrawled with a blue ballpoint pen in a letter complaining about a story I had written about Mariah Carey pulling out of an interview with Barbara Walters, who in my story had condescendingly referred to Carey as “poor child.”
“This is all a publicity stunt to revitalize a dead career,” the angry reader wrote. “Carey has zero talent and survives only by creating ‘stories’ for gullible idiots like you.” His letter from Connecticut was postmarked Sept. 11, 2001.
An e-mailer named “Wolfman558” didn’t like what I wrote about Bill Clinton in August 2002 when rumors swirled that the ex-president would soon be offered his own afternoon talk show.
I wrote that “wading into the swamp of daytime TV” would “further degrade the presidency – something [Clinton] did rather effectively while in office.” I called it “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Wolfman” informed me, “You wouldn’t make a pimple on Bill Clinton’s ass.” I was glad to hear it.
“Your mother was right and so were your grade-school teachers,” wailed an enraged reader on a picture postcard from an animal shelter that depicted a brown and white collie sitting placidly in a field of pink tulips.
The reader was reacting to a column I wrote in December 2004 about a PBS documentary that told the story of an infamous family of hawks that had made its nest on the façade of a Fifth Avenue apartment building. The building’s owners wished to boot the squatting birds, but the proposed eviction had drawn catcalls from hawk-lovers who made a pastime of setting up telescopes in Central Park across the street and watching the hawks for hours on end.
In my column, I took the side of the building’s owners and referred to the hawk partisans as “a bunch of nature-happy yahoos.” I reasoned that if the hawks could be induced to make a nest in Central Park like they were supposed to, then everybody would be happy.
But not this particular yahoo. Wrote she, imagining what some grade-school teacher must have written on one of my report cards long ago: “ ‘You’ll never amount to much [at the] rate you’re going . . .’ And you never did. And never will.” I was afraid she was right.
“Jeez, you are such a dick,” e-mailed a reader whose first name, ironically, was “Richard,” when I wrote a column in May 2005 complaining about a protest song performed on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” by the pop singer known as Bright Eyes.
The song, titled “When the President Talks to God,” conjures a scenario in which President Bush seems to receive God’s permission to raise oil prices and launch invasions of Muslim countries. I suggested in my column that a protest number of such vehemence felt out of place on the middle-of-the-road “Tonight Show.”
“Would you prefer that Leno only have lame ‘American Idol’ winners and patriotic country singers perform on his show?” ranted Richard, who indicated he rarely watches Leno and didn’t watch the show in question. “Will you be contacting the FCC to lodge a complaint?” The answer to both of Richard’s questions: No and no.
On topics large and small, the hits just kept on coming.
“You got no balls,” wrote one man. I do too, I wish I had replied.
“Everyone knows the Post is a rag!” declared another. Not everyone, I might have written back.
“You obviously need to grow up,” advised one e-mailer. You got me there, pal, I would have liked to have said.
“You’ve been in front of the boob tube too long,” concluded another. You’re telling me, I might have answered.
It wasn’t only me who came in for abuse from Post readers. It was the people I wrote about too.
Howard Stern and Bill Maher were “liberal swillbags.”
Roseanne Barr was a “talentless, repulsive fatso.”
Oprah Winfrey was an “obese crypto-dyke” (whatever that meant).
Wanda Sykes was a “foul mouth malcontent negress bitch!”
Martin Sheen “should be wrapped in crap.”
When Morton Downey Jr. died in March 2001, an anonymous letter-writer who evidently hated him drew a crude tombstone with a ballpoint pen on a sheet of white, lined composition paper and suggested an epitaph: “Morton Downey Jr the man who was too stupid to live!”
From society’s outer limits came mailings of mysterious and anonymous origin – strange collages; envelopes stuffed with unnerving racial invective; religious screeds; and my columns torn from the Post, the margins embroidered with angry scrawls and the photo of my face – the one that appeared on my columns along with my byline – defaced with a crude circle and arrow, a single word such as “stupid” or “jerk” rendered boldly nearby.
A letter-writer who identified herself only as “a 43-year-old woman” wrote to me four times – postmark: Brooklyn. With childish printing rendered in blue ballpoint, double-spaced on sheets of white, lined paper torn from a spiral notebook, she revealed an obsession with Howard Stern, of whom she apparently disapproved.
“This guy is the most smug, arrogant wiseass I ever heard or saw,” she wrote in her first letter to me, in July 1999. “He lives to snicker and torture and disgrace people – and he deserves to have his God damned teeth knocked out of his ugly mouth once and for all.”
In another letter, she “accused” Stern, whose prominent nose is not exactly inconspicuous, of undergoing a nose job and somehow keeping it a secret. “When is someone – ANYONE – gonna mention Howard Stern’s very obvious nose job?” she asked in a letter dated June 5, 2002.
“He had a BIG bump that started at the bridge of his nose – and went all the way down to under his nostrils – almost down to his top lip – and it’s not there anymore!!” she complained, exhibiting an astonishing (and unsettling) familiarity with the characteristics of Stern’s beak. “How smug and arrogant is he – dumb question – to think people don’t see the difference?”
Other letters – some having to do with columns or stories I wrote and others having nothing at all to do with them – exposed a wide spectrum of concerns and interests among my readership.
“My mode of communication, in today’s world, may be primitive,” wrote a reader from Bergenfield, N.J, in December 1998, in thick, blue ballpoint pen, single-spaced and printed in all caps on a sheet of white loose-leaf paper. “But I can’t be tracked on any computer.”
He was writing in reaction to a column decrying the loss of a beloved New York radio station, WQEW-AM, whose new owner, Disney, had announced it would soon drop the station’s traditional programming consisting of Big Band music and classic vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra – the last station in New York City to carry this music – in favor of a Disney-devised format designed for children.
His letter included this cryptic warning: “You can call me a nut [or] a conspiracy freak,” he wrote, “but I am telling you now that this is only the beginning.”
In the form of a six-page, typewritten newsletter postmarked “Hollywood,” another correspondent outlined his bold plan for “the largest media boycott in history.”
Among the boycott’s demands: “That Major League Soccer play all pre-season games with each team having a woman player on the field at all times.”
One of the boycott’s proposals: Shun the nation’s best-known TV newspeople, mentioning by name Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric. “The Largest Boycott in History suggests that Americans boo these persons when seen in public, including in restaurants.” Yes, even in restaurants.
And the boycott’s garbled goal: “To obtain universal, 1,000-satellite channels, free university [education], 24/7, for every human being on earth forever.”
Separately, the same correspondent envisioned the organization of a Chariot Racing League made up solely of celebrity chariot drivers.
Concerning another epic subject set in ancient times, an e-mailer reported her consternation over hearing something strange uttered by the voice of God in an April 2006 showing of “The Ten Commandments” on ABC.
“OK, we need some clarification here please,” she wrote in an e-mail, getting right down to business. “My family and I watched the [film] and we were recording it on the DVR. The part of the burning bush came up and every single person in the room heard the same thing: ‘Moses, Moses, I am Holy Crap’!
“We played this over and over many times, at one point with the volume all the way up, and it is very clear in what it says. Is this an editing error? We know in the Bible it says ‘holy ground’ and there is no way the two sound similar at all. I have asked others at my place of employment, who also caught the newly added line. Can you find out what really happened here?”
I could not find out. I have a vague memory of calling ABC to ask about this and the publicist who took my call nearly dying of laughter. I nearly died laughing too when I imagined this reader running to her Bible to see if God is really quoted using the phrase “holy crap” in the book of Exodus.
Other reactions to what people had seen on TV or read in columns were more disturbing. After I wrote in April 2006 about an upcoming show on A&E that featured the first-ever TV interview with the convicted killer at the center of the notorious crime that inspired “The Amityville Horror” movie, an e-mailer wrote to set the record straight.
The killer, Ronald DeFeo Jr., was 24 in October 1975 when he was convicted of fatally shooting all six members of his family – his parents, two younger brothers and two younger sisters – in their Amityville, Long Island, home nearly a year earlier. DeFeo, who is serving a life sentence, has long claimed he killed “only” three of the six. He repeated the claim in the TV show, which was called “First Person Killers: Ronald DeFeo.”
However, at least one reader thought my story was unfair to DeFeo, and she flew to his defense. “Your story on Ronald DeFeo is all lies,” she wrote. “Yeah, Ronnie may of [sic] killed his family but he only killed his mother, father and [sister] Dawn, not all of them.”
For some reason, I took this reader seriously enough to e-mail her a considered reply. “Thanks for writing to me,” I wrote. “Even if DeFeo’s claim that he ‘only’ killed three of the six victims is true, which seemed doubtful according to the experts in the documentary, I don’t think it excuses his crimes. Most people would probably agree that killing three people is a pretty heinous act.”
Her reply revealed that she was delusional, something I probably should have detected when I read her first e-mail. “You know what?” she asked in her second correspondence to me. “I am paying for a new trial for him and he will get out.”
DeFeo remains incarcerated.
Correspondence could creep up on you that way. In August 2000, I received a letter from a reader who complained about the Post’s coverage of the final episode of the first season of “Survivor” on CBS. This was the sensational inaugural season of “Survivor” that captivated the nation that summer and ushered in the new era of reality television.
The season’s winner was a gay corporate trainer from Providence, R.I., named Richard Hatch who had unnerved his fellow contestants in the show’s desert island setting by strolling among them completely nude for the better part of the season. So when he was declared the winner on the evening of Aug. 23, 2000, the Post ran a naked photo of him the next morning on the front page (his privates were covered by a briefcase he held in his right hand).
The complaining letter started out innocently enough. “I am writing to you concerning the naked photograph of Richard Hatch,” said the letter, printed neatly in black ink on lined, spiral-notebook paper, from a woman who said her name was Cleo.
“My understanding of [the Post’s story],” Cleo continued, “is that you are suggesting that Mr. Richard Hatch is a survivor winning one million dollars because he went to work although he was unclothed.” OK, still sounding normal, but maybe drifting almost imperceptibly off-course . . .
And then this sentence: “My understanding also is that you are claiming that this man won this contest in my place.” Oh boy, here we go.
And with that, her letter took off in all sorts of unforeseen directions. She went on to claim that her father was Woody Allen and that he was murdered. “Let me tell you a thing or two, Mr. Buckman!” the letter ranted. “My father along with his twenty-seven year old wife and her mother – actress Mia Farrow – were murdered with guns on March 5th, 1999, in Woody’s apartment overlooking Central Park. He worked not one but several jobs to amass the fortune he bequeathed to me upon his passing. I accuse you of being an Asian subversive who wants my money for Asia!”
For the record, that’s not true.
Scrawls, scribbles, jottings and ravings:
A woman from Ithaca, N.Y., tears a column out of the Post that I wrote about radio and TV psychologist Laura Schlessinger, circles my photo appearing on the column and writes the word “jerk” with an arrow pointing at me.
The column, written in May 2000, was a critique of Dr. Laura’s comportment on a series of TV talk shows on which she appeared over the course of a single week to promote her newest book, “Parenthood by Proxy: Don’t Have Them If You Won’t Raise Them.” She was also preparing to launch her own TV talk show in the fall.
“If you’d tuned in for any of the eight TV appearances Dr. Laura Schlessinger made to promote her latest book,” I wrote, “you would have gotten a good idea of how she’ll look and sound as the host of a daily TV talk show. With a voice so shrill that ‘shrill’ isn’t an accurate enough word to describe it, Dr. Laura’s face and neck appear to grow taut with the effort of speaking. She’s also given to nervous laughter, and answers questions in long, complicated sentences that frequently make little sense.”
The lady who labeled me a “jerk” disagreed. “She does make sense!” she scrawled across the bottom half of the same clipping. “More than you!”
An anonymous letter postmarked “Southern Connecticut” rebukes me for suggesting in a column that some Warner Brothers cartoons produced in the 1930s and 1940s might today be considered racist for the way they depicted some minorities such as African-Americans and Native Americans. The column, published in May 2001, was a reaction to a decision by the Cartoon Network to withdraw 12 cartoons from its annual “June Bugs” marathon of 176 Bugs Bunny cartoons because the 12 ’toons contained outrageous stereotypes that might have been acceptable in the era in which they were made, but were likely to offend some modern-day viewers.
“Since I’m not African-American or Indian, I simply cannot know how it feels to watch old movies and cartoons and see all the buck-toothed braves and the black characters in chauffeurs’ or porters’ uniforms shuffling their feet and bugging their eyes out,” I wrote. “To many people, the old cartoons and movies are reminders of how their group was once regarded.”
The letter-writer from Connecticut reacted angrily to this column about a bunch of kiddie cartoons. “I guess we should burn all movies and books from before 1990 just to keep the NAACP happy!” this reader complained. To him, the column was “further proof that political correctness emanates from the rectum!”
In an e-mail, a gay man calls me a “homophobic bigot” after I give a favorable review to the gay-themed show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which he feels traffics in gay stereotypes.
“Well, aren’t we a bitchy queen!” I e-mail back.
A man from Millburn, N.J., draws an over-wrought analogy to World War II in reacting to a story about a protest mounted by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) against CBS for condoning the eating of rats on “Survivor.” “If a PETA member had participated in the Death March of Bataan and subsequent captivity, he or she would eat dogs, cats, rats, grass, anything!” the letter-writer exclaimed.
Another correspondent tears a column out of the paper – a column about the unfortunate suicide of a participant in the boxing reality series “The Contender” – and scribbles “stupid” next to my photo with an arrow pointing inevitably at my noggin.
Yet another defacer of my smiling column photo scrawls across it, “You’re not funny, so stop smiling.” The defacer didn’t approve of a column I wrote praising “The West Wing.”
From Baltimore (according to the postmark) came a disconcerting series of viciously racist and homophobic mailings that started to show up some time in 2003. They would arrive like clockwork a few days after I wrote columns touching on subjects of race or homosexuality, or even when the columns didn’t touch on those subjects. All a column had to do was mention the names Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Oprah Winfrey or a few others and this anonymous Baltimorean would break out his scissors, paste pots and white copy paper to construct ugly racist collages.
I’d write a column about the Oscars, perhaps accompanied by a photo or two of Jon Stewart or Ellen DeGeneres, and within a few days, this person, whose identity I never learned, would clip the column out of the Post, snip my column photo out of it completely and write all kinds of filth across it. Then the defaced clipping would be stuffed in an envelope along with all those “collages” assembled from bits of stories cut out of mainstream newspapers and fringe newsletters of the sort that rail against Jews in Hollywood, blacks in prisons and homosexuals everywhere.
From the looks of them, these collages were presumably pasted or Scotch-taped together and then photocopied somewhere. I used to imagine this nut regularly patronizing some nearby Kinko’s or public library somewhere in Baltimore and trying the other library patrons’ patience by monopolizing the copy machine.
Other writers in the Post TV department also received these packages. They were so disturbing that most were quickly discarded, though I kept a handful of them. They would go on and on about gays and AIDS, “assholes” of all types, “Jews, pussy eaters, dildo f—kers [this mailer was surprisingly chaste about the f-word], negro dirty mouths,” and on and on.
I thought about these mailings in April 2009 when I read that some professors at Columbia University in New York had received some racist hate mail of their own and had notified the New York Police Department. The police commissioner himself was quoted everywhere giving his assurance that everything possible was being done to learn who mailed these drawings of swastikas and a noose to some faculty at Columbia’s Teachers College.
Well, that’s one difference between newspaper scribes and university professors – the latter call the cops when someone mails them some nasty screed, while the former are so accustomed to receiving such things that it never occurs to them that the mailings might be a matter for law enforcement.
The most elaborate mailing I ever received arrived in a 9½”x12½” manila envelope in September 2000. I guess you could call it a multimedia mailing because it consisted of a folded, homemade, full-color collage covering both sides (measuring 24 inches wide and 22 inches high), plus an audiocassette on which a woman’s voice could be heard for 90 minutes (45 minutes on each side) preaching about a number of topics ranging from Jesus Christ to David Letterman.
The envelope was postmarked West Swanzey, N.H., and the name on the hand-written return address (a PO box in South Glens Falls, N.Y., some 124 miles west of West Swanzey) was “God’s Elijah.”
The package seemed to have been produced in response to another column I wrote about Laura Schlessinger – a different column than the one that had motivated another reader to deface my photo with the word “jerk.”
A clipping of this Dr. Laura column came in the manila envelope along with the collage and audiocassette, but this time, the clipping was not defaced. The only harm inflicted upon it was the removal of my column photo – cut out neatly with scissors – which I found later to be included among the many dozens of images that were incorporated into this collage.
I have never fully fathomed the collage’s meaning, but I have never ceased to be amazed at the effort that must have gone into its construction. Among the dozens of images cut out from newspapers and Time magazine are pictures of Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Jesse Jackson, Dr. Laura, Al Gore, George W. Bush, Sharon Stone and Vladimir Putin.
There are headlines of various sizes and typefaces: “W. Nile fright,” “Weary crews battle wildfires” and “Animals need trees.” There are even a few comic strips – “Beetle Bailey,” “The Wizard of Id,” “Doonesbury” – and one editorial cartoon about teachers’ unions.
And throughout, filling the margins and white spaces, are handwritten the identification numbers of dozens of Bible verses, chapters and psalms.
The whole complicated collection of words and images is held together on both sides by a wide, clear, cellophane tape that crisscrosses and covers every single inch of these collage constructions, leaving nothing exposed.
I have studied every image on both sides of this thing and listened to the entire 90-minute audiocassette and nowhere do these media comment directly on the column I wrote, despite the inclusion of my face on the far right edge of one side of the collage, hovering just over a newspaper photo of a whimsical brass band identified as the New York Ragtime Orchestra and Polite Society Dancers.
The column, published on Sept. 5, 2000, was my account of an interview I had just conducted with Dr. Laura on the phone. The tightly wound Schlessinger was famous for her national radio show, on which she took phone calls from people in dysfunctional relationships and counseled them. She had a reputation for scolding and lecturing her callers if they didn’t measure up to a set of high moral standards which she herself claimed to live by.
I had been given this opportunity to interview her because her new afternoon TV show was about to launch the following week. In the interview, she was combative and contrary and I labeled her a “prickly pear” in my column, which related how difficult it was to drag a straight answer out of her. “It wasn’t that she and I quarreled,” I wrote. “It’s just that it was such an effort simply to converse with her. Depending on how she interprets a question, she can be guarded, defensive, defiant and a tad mocking. When she interrupts – which is often – it feels like she’s jabbing me with a pointy stick. Ouch, Dr. Laura! OK, I see your point. Take it easy, will ya?”
God knows what “God’s Elijah” thought of the column, but somehow it moved her to create the most vexing piece of mail I ever received. And there was something else surprising about it: Far-out and unfathomable though it was, this mailing nevertheless contained none of the usual expressions of anger – the four-letter words, the racist rants, the schoolyard pejoratives – that I had come to expect from such correspondence.
Next: Chapter 1, Part 4: Everybody Has an Opinion
Why “Jerk”? Because “The Idiot” was already taken. Plus, a disgruntled reader once scrawled the word “Jerk” over the photo that accompanied my newspaper column and then mailed it to me, so I figured, yeah, that’s as good a title as any. (That’s the actual document pictured at left.)
