Tuesday, July 25, 2017

In Which I Explain Why I'm Responding to This Blog's Latest Troll As I'm Choosing to Do


I struggle to understand the psychology of someone — in this case, an ordained minister of the Christian gospel, a heterosexually married priest in a non-Catholic church — who occasionally logs in here to voice his contempt for the author of this blog and for everything he writes. What kind of strange masochism compels someone to slum in this way, when there's so much better reading everywhere online — and when, presumably, no one has a gun to the man's head to force him to read the words of someone he characterizes as a failure?

(How anyone who proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ gets from Jesus and his story to contempt for "failures," to the language of winners and losers, is beyond me to understand. If Jesus was not himself a colossal failure [see: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; see Shusaku Endo], dying as a common criminal on the cross, abandoned by almost all of his family and friends who regarded his death as an indicator that his mission had completely failed, is beyond me to understand. What kind of good news do the winners of the world — as this man clearly thinks of himself — proclaim when they stand in the pulpit to talk about Jesus? A man who not only died a failure, but chose to spend his life inviting outcasts to his table . . . . Not the winners of the social lottery of his world, like the ordained, heterosexually married man who likes to log in here now and again to remind me that I am a failure . . . . In contrast to himself, it goes without saying . . . .)

I do, of course, understand what this man is about. He's one of those sad small people who enjoy the thrill of imagining that they can cow others and make them feel little by taunting them — from the cowardly vantage point of presumed anonymity. Except that I do, in fact, happen to know the identity of this person . . . .

There are people who imagine that they become big when they have succeeded in injecting poison into the veins of other people they think of as little, the poison of self-hatred, self-questioning, self-contempt. What they seem unable to realize is that, in very many cases, many of us have lived long enough and have dealt often enough with folks like this thate we understand perfectly well who they are, what they represent, what they stand for, so that their poison has no hold on us at all.

And we know that they are very little people occupying hugely distorted self-aggrandizing personalities in which their grotesquely inflated egos allow them to imagine that they are much, much larger than they really are. Their inflated egos allow them to deceive themselves into imagining that they enlarge themselves by making others smaller. A certain kind of man tends to excel at this self-defeating game, which is, when all is said and done, a game whose name is bullying, bullying others to put them into the place assigned to them, so these sorts imagine, by big people like themselves. By the winners and not the losers of the world . . . . 

When I meet this type of male, I always wonder what his wife must endure in living with him. I shudder to imagine. 

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