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By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: ‘Just plain evil’ columnist contemplates his fan mail

Jan 18, 2020 | 6:53 AM

MY FRIEND Jack Knox, a best-selling author and award-winning newspaper columnist, has a January tradition of collecting some of his favourite insults from among those directed at him by his faithful readers.

Among his choices from 2019 are one calling him “a sad piece of work” and another wishing him “a horrible, horrible life.” Someone else advised him, “Don’t waste money on haircuts, it’s not working for you.” If someone of Jack’s calibre can be the object of such admiration, I feel better about my own fan base, and have chosen a winner in the all-new Trash Mel Sweepstakes. I’ll get to that later. There are a lot of worthy runners-up. Just last week, for example, my column “Yes, we should be willing to pay for royal couple’s security” brought more than 400 responses on Facebook, website comments and emails, and, as close as I can tell, not one of them agreed with me. Colt Ketio wrote, “Rothenburger why do you have some of the stupidest ideas. I honestly have not see (sic) one thing you say that I would agree with?”

Aside from the issue of which one of those sentences is the actual question, I can honestly say I don’t know why I have stupidest ideas. They just come to me.

Reacting to the same column, Dawson Suderman offered: “His contribution to the news are a turd in a toilet. Useless.”

Thank you, Dawson, for reminding me about Edith Josie, who wrote a column about the town of Old Crow for the Whitehorse Star for 40 years. She called it, Here Are The News and it was wonderful. When she died, her obit ran with the headline, “Here are the sad news.”

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But I digress. I’ve never thought of my offerings in the way Dawson describes them, but I do appreciate creativity. One- and two-word critiques aren’t all that helpful in determining whether I’m on the right track.

During 2019, I was described by various commenters as an idiot, a “fascist loser,” a racist, an “armchair windbag,” a “pathetic hack” and, perhaps most cruelly, a Liberal. Despite my fascism and Liberalness, I apparently exhibit Nazi tendencies. “All shall fall in line! Vote Heir Mel for supreme leader,” wrote Dave Killips in response to my editorial on nurses not being required to get flu shots.

“How about we pay you to stop writing articles?” suggested Sarah Smith after I wrote that charging a user fee at boat launches makes sense. Sadly, she didn’t follow up on her proposal with a solid offer, so I continue to write.

Sometimes, readers paint word pictures to explain how they feel about my pearls of wisdom. After one of my editorials on the federal election, Shane Bradley Dyck wrote, “Oh, Mel, you are a crystal clear pane of glass who cleans that glass with steel wool to obscure what those see from the outside.”

I’m still pondering the deep inner meaning of that one, but I appreciate that some thought went into it.

A good insult requires work. Anyone can call somebody else an idiot, but the image of polishing up a window pane with steel wool deserves one of those little stickers shaped like a star or, at the least, a happy-face emoji.

In writing this column, I’ve discovered that Jack Knox isn’t the only columnist who engages in year-end self-flagellation.

A guy named Rex Huppke, who writes for the Chicago Tribune, publishes “The Top 20 Insults,” which he describes as “a veritable smorgasbord of artisanal aspersions.” I know — I had to look up “artisanal” too.

He explains why it’s important to pause and recognize those who make the effort to trash him. If somebody calls him a “pumpkin head,” Huppke looks for value in it, such as an opportunity to make his head look better. If nobody had called him a pumpkin head he never would have thought about it.

Sometimes, he says, he challenges himself to figure out what happened to the rest of a sentence in an insult. I find myself occasionally doing the same thing, or trying to interpret highly creative spellings.

As Huppke says, “In the end, the reader gets the visceral pleasure of insulting me and I get the intellectual challenge of figuring out what he or she means. It’s truly a win-win scenario.”

Huppke puts his readers’ insults to good purpose — he’s started the Insult-A-Columnist Holiday Drive, which raises money for the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

Of course, he has the advantage of living in America, where insults and insulting behaviour are a science. We in Canada are way too polite, which is why the “idiot” word is often the best we can come up with. We just don’t put enough effort into insults to be really good at it.

It’s pretty tough to top this: “I think what he meant to say is that he wished that mum gave birth to a can-opener because at least then it would be useful.”

That’s from the TV series Succession. In The States, columnists even insult each other. Samer Kalaf, who writes for a sports blog called Deadspin, called New York Times columnist Bret Stephens “remarkably dumb” and described one of his columns as “drive-by dogshit.”

Stephens, in turn, told Kalaf in print that the latter had “performed the digital equivalent” of exposing himself in public, except that he painted a much more graphic image of said exposure.

But now for the winner of the first Trash Mel Sweepstakes. Remember Gina Myhill-Jones? She was the NDP candidate in Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo briefly during the last federal election campaign.

After I wrote a column saying a proposal to give indigenous students free parking at TRU was worth considering, Myhill-Jones wrote back, “Has anyone not yet figured out that Rothen-whatever is just plain evil.”

Since there’s no question mark, I take her comment to be rhetorical.

Thank you, Ms. Myhill-Jones, and all the other contributors. The prize is another year’s worth of my wisdom. If I provide even one angry reader a reason to get up in the morning, it’s reward enough for me.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and newspaper editor. He writes five commentaries a week for CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.