If you want to send an anonymous letter, wrap it around a brick and throw it through the recipient’s window. Barring night-vision photography or a Gattaca-type search for microbial evidence left on your hate-filled screed, this is still your best way to avoid getting caught. The electronic prankster’s way of wielding the poison pen is full of pitfalls.
Too easy to view source, call your ISP, track you down through a server trail. If anybody really wants to find out — and we must never underestimate the zeal of our enemies — he will.
In her recent stinging rejoinder to Suck, freelancing firebrand Hariette Surovell (or a reasonable facsimile) barely bothered trying to cover her tracks, sending the bomb through her own email address with somebody else’s name at the bottom. To be fair, a follow-up email from rp@panix.com insisted that Surovell wasn’t really the letter writer, that the manifesto had been penned by some other personality who shares her email address. And we should always take irate emailers at their word. But we have it on fairly good authoritythat similar pro-Surovell messages from this same address, and nearly identically worded messages from “other” addresses, have been spotted in the inboxes of other publications.
We bring this up not to drag out a poop-slinging match in the journalistic monkey house nor to embarrass a long-suffering freelancer, but because we suspect this is not so rare a phenomenon as cooler heads might like to believe. Writing fake fan letters is the secret ambition of every writer, and the truth is that we admire Surovell’s chutzpah in following her bliss. Sure, it’s one step away from repeatedly calling your love object at midnight and hanging up when his wife answers. But for journalists, whose collective cool factor is about equal to Richard Jewell’s, publishing self-justifying rants under an assumed name is always a temptation. It’s satisfying just to see somebody acting on the impulse everyone else is afraid to act on. < “I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter,” Nat King Cole sings, “and make believe it came from you.” If you can cheer yourself up that easily, why not spread the joy to others? Who doesn’t get a little choked up at the scene in Sunset Boulevard where the “thousands of fan letters” to Norma Desmond are revealed to be acts of mimesis by her devoted Teuton chauffeur? You could count on one leprous hand the number of forgeries that have actually hurt people. Four centuries after the death of Emperor Constantine, some wag ghost-wrote a letter in his name, implying that the emperor had bribed Pope Sylvester I.
Fakery about long-dead people would seem to be a victimless crime, but in this case the letter prompted Dante Aligheri, in a narrative poem featuring a fictional character named Dante Aligheri, to consign both pope and king to hell, where they are charbroiled in a baptismal font. On the upside, though, the Shroud of Turin — a message from Jesus Christ that has long been recognized as a genuine imitation — continues to provide solace to believers. As always, the forger has his motives, but it’s the audience that’s listening.
And listening with growing skepticism. Last year, both The New York Times and the New York Post were embroiled in doctored-letters-to-the-editor scandals (the Post scandal resulted in a knock-down, drag-out bout between Michael Kinsley and Post editor John Podhoretz, a 98-pound-weakling grudge match so furious it deserves its own commemorative chess set). Brill’s Content queered its own launch with a scandal in which editors anonymously posted Brillmania-inducing bulletin board messages. Betcha felt the excitement. Other reporters — black-hearted souls by nature — tried to fan the flames in all three cases, but as it turns out, circumstances in 1998 allowed all of these stories to vanish in the year’s orgy of the-people-don’t-trust-the-media soul-searching. The unwritten story is that readers expect about as much authenticity from the letters column as they do from the Jumble or “Through a Child’s Eyes” or Ann Landers (who has argued energetically that she never concocts letters). Generally, reader response can be easily categorized into four types — positive (“Thank you for showing your readers what a together woman Mary J. Blige really is”); negative (“Let me get this straight: The Post Dispatch wants the government to spend my tax dollars on another liberal program?”); insane (“Why are my tax dollars paying for the Richmond High basketball team?”); and milking the conversation (“In his response to my response to his review of my book, Felix Muntz claims …”) — all of which could be generated as easily by an editorial board as by readers. Consider some responses recently sparked by a San Francisco Examiner impeachment reaction survey:
“The show we witnessed by the House of Representatives was a lamentable new low in our public life.”
“Bill Clinton should resign immediately! If he doesn’t resign, he should be removed from office.”
“As president he’s doing a good job in the USA.”
Couldn’t the Examiner have gotten nearly identical results, and saved a few dollars, by simply manufacturing responses with an impeachment-bot? Wouldn’t everybody be better served if editors simply took a creative-writing stab at guessing what The People are thinking?
That was clearly the goal of Michael Lerner, the widely loathed editor and publisher of Tikkun and spurned Hillary Clinton advisor who was busted a few years ago for writing a few Norma Desmond letters to his own magazine. Lerner’s letters — almost all of them positive and some including balls-out psychic editing phrases such as “Your editorial stand said publicly what many of us are feeling privately but dare not say” — provide the clearest guidance yet for editors of barely read publications.
For our own barely read and widely loathed publication, the implications are not obvious. We’ve had ample opportunity to learn the futility of aliases, but the sad truth is we’ve never made up reader mail, added humiliating flights of fancy to the missives our readers actually send in, or fluffed a fake groundswell of public support. We don’t do it because nobody believes what we say anyway.
