Something went very wrong when I wrote about Moe Tucker, the mediocre drummer for the Velvet Underground, and how she had become a member of the Tea Party. It has brought out a lot of loons—non-regular readers who come to the site somehow (not from search engines as far as I can tell). Mostly everyone thinks that I’m just so mean to poor Maureen. One commenter was smart and even insightful. But the others are just garbage.

I like it when people disagree with me. This is one way that I learn and grow, because (Shocking!) I’m not always right. But most of these people are just yelling at me—they have no point other than that I’m wrong and an asshole. One commenter was upset at my “foul mouth” and called me a “parasite.”

From time to time, I am an asshole on other people’s sites. It doesn’t happen often and the last time I did it was probably two years ago, and even that turned into a good and productive exchange. So I understand that people have bad days and say things that they would not an hour later. But the harshness of these attacks makes me think these are intolerant people who shit on me and my site and move on with their webwide fertilizing project.

I wonder what to do about these commenters. I could just deny them, but that seems like it gives them too much power over me. I could continue to respond, but there are two problems there: the fucktards don’t deserve it and it is emotionally draining. I’m especially not up to being emotionally drained. I visit a lot of websites where people say things I disagree with—that’s how I keep myself intellectually honest. But I don’t post incendiary comments. I don’t go to libertarian sites and yell at the owners about how only assholes are libertarians.

A website is like a small business—a bakery, say. Anyone is allowed in my bakery. But when a person comes in to scream about how I don’t know anything about making cookies, they have broken the implicit contract we have. The deal is that you come in, you browse the cookies, maybe you buy them or maybe you tell me that you don’t like them. And that’s it. Now, if you think the guy behind the counter is a loud mouthed asshole, don’t come in the bakery. I don’t visit Bill O’Reilly’s bakery. (And you shouldn’t either; his cookies have worms that eat your brain—really!)

I suppose I am over thinking this. These people could just be having a bad day, in which case I understand—no foul. Or they could be, as I said, webwide fertilizers. In that case, I just need to treat them as the other major nuisance of website management: spammers. Both groups are made up of assholes who don’t care that the little reward they get from soiling my website is far outweighed by the harm done to my website and its readers.

The customer is not always right!