Though I am a fan of the Friday Forum on the opinion page, I am afeared that considerable entertainment potential is being squandered. Letters to the editor which serve as useful means of participation in public dialogue are all well and good, but the letters I relish from my youth in small-town Wisconsin are of a different sort; a sort not indentured to usefulness, relevance or even coherence.
Why wait until you're a perturbed retiree to regularly pontificate to the masses via your local paper? With a few minor adjustments, your current communiquésto the Cardinal can assume this very same ranting air and become true comedic gems.
The first readily apparent mistake in the Friday Forum is that most letters demonstrate genuine knowledge of the pieces they are responding to. If you actually read an article and come to appreciate its overarching significance, irony, allegories and all, you may find your desire to fire off a reactionary response squelched, ruining everyone's fun. Instead, if you sense that incendiary content may be afoot, take is as a fair assumption that it is and proceed.
If disagreeing with the stance a writer has taken, be sure to begin your message not by offering a valid counterpoint or stoking up some credibility, but by denouncing said writer as being misguided, closed-minded and the ubiquitous ignorant. Nothing grooms them to abandon their opinion and defer to your authority like being personally insulted by someone they've never met.
Indeed, a good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that there are no such things as differing, well-crafted viewpoints others are equally justified in stating, there is only pervasive, infectious ignorance of the truth. And you alone must fight it, oh Ignorance Avenger!
One of your most potent weapons, a staple of small-town papers, is however conspicuously absent from the Friday Forum: gratuitous citation of religious texts. In lieu of logical elements with which to craft an argument, Bible verses and Mother Theresa-isms become invaluable, for they are utterly immune to intelligent critique or refutation. Feel free to take them as grossly out of context as you see fit–their originators won't mind, really.
Also, calling attention to a problem or misconception is a good start, but to craft a truly gripping letter, you must also uncover and revile its root cause. The usual suspects include Wal-Mart, the legality of abortion and the whole festering lot of those stinking, cursed, ignorant liberals. Generally, any issue you address can eventually be traced back to one or more of these heinous sires of societal ill.
In short, if you wish to excel as an irrational editorial scribe, you must part company with any grounded, sensible views of the world you may hold, as well as any vestiges of humor. Instead, you must suppose that every syllable with appears in print is to be taken literally, and that it has potentially dangerous, widespread, downright deterministic implications for the collective of humanity.
Oh–and stop paying heed to conventions of grammar and sentence structure. Though your compositions will win you few friends within the copy-editing contingent, you will be preserving a rich tradition of literary mirth your easily amused posterity will thank you for.
Holly Noe's column runs each Friday. Tell her something she's ignorant of at [email protected].