Dear Anonymous

The thing about posting a blog is you never know if anyone's going to read it or not. Which is nice in a way, because when you write something decent you can feel glad it's out there for the world to see, and when you post something you worry is a bit too revealing or schmaltzy or cynical, you can convince yourself no one's likely to read it anyway.

But then you start to get feedback, comments left in response to your posts, and you realize people really are reading this thing. Cool! Except it seems there's an underworld of characters out there who spend a lot of time surfing around looking for statements of opinion that differ from their own, and then they pounce like an alley cat and eviscerate the poor blogger with a nasty comment or two, usually demonstrating in the process that they've missed the whole point.

That in itself, while not very nice, I can live with. Hey, it's still a free country after all. I can say what I want, and so can you. The problem is these hit and run commentators never leave their names. Or else they leave a stupid made-up name like Piso Mojado. So you wonder. Who really wrote this? Was it anyone I know? Someone who just doesn't want me to know they really have such opposite opinions? Maybe it was someone being paid by the radical right to ferret out dissenters and ambush them right there on their own blog pages? Or was it some angry survivalist holed up somewhere in the middle of the South Dakota prairie, surfing the Web for random blog comments while taking breaks from writing his or her grand manifesto? In the end of course it doesn't really matter who they were, because you already know everything you need to know about them, which is, they're gutless.

So far, these anonymous posters have seemed to pop up most often in response to comments I've made about the Bush Administration. They seem to think I'm a bad American for criticizing the president. They've even accused me of hating my country. This strikes me as bizarre. I don't hate my country. I love my country. What I hate is what George Bush and his posse have done to it--including fostering this crazy idea that conscientious dissent is unpatriotic. On the contrary, this nation was founded on the concept that citizens should be free to think and express their own thoughts, even if they run counter to government policies. Being a "good" American does not mean you must support the government no matter what. That's not democracy; that's totalitarianism. Being a "good" American, I believe, can sometimes compel a citizen to stand up against the government, because the government can be wrong, can lose sight of the goal, can even diminish the liberties America stands for. When that happens, and I believe we are seeing it happen right now, "good" Americans have a patriotic duty to stand up and say so.

By the way, if my anonymous detractors think I'M being harsh on the president, they should read Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times. Now there is a courageous, concerned American. I salute him for stating our current national dilemma so honestly and so well. Maybe I should send him an anonymous compliment.

Update, May 2, 2006: Turns out the L.A. Times agrees with me about anonymous posters, as one of their Pulitzer-winning reporters has discovered the hard way.