From Pigeon Shit to Bullshit

Pity the poor Kings of Leon. One minute you're riding high with a multi-platinum selling album and a Grammy for Record of the Year, the next you're being shat upon by pigeons. The band opted to cancel a concert in St. Louis after being showered with bird poop during a set at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.

I read this item with keen interest, partly because I'm a fan of KoL, but mostly because I despise pigeons and am intent on collecting evidence of their nefarious ways. I don't know what I plan on doing with said information, other than wave it in the face of people who persist in feeding these disgusting birds.

Anway, that was the extent of the story. Concert venue infested with pigeons, bass player hit with poop near the mouth, concert off. The end.

Except, today, a story on the Web never really ends. There's always the comments section. Depending on the topic, these can run into the hundreds, even thousands. Because everyone has an opinion and it must be heard.

In the event of the pigeon poop, a number of commenters made it clear they don't much care for KoL or their music. So, hurray for the pigeons! (In a comments section, you will always find at least one poster wondering why haters bother to read articles about people/things they claim to despise.) Others deemed the band members a bunch of spoiled sissies for bailing under the circumstances. These postings ran along the lines of, "If I were getting paid a million dollars, I'd open my mouth and let the pigeon squirt right in!" Oh, really? I suppose we can thank reality TV for that sort of mentality. We're so accustomed to seeing desperate, attention-seeking people perform all sorts of demeaning acts, including eating bugs, for their 10 seconds of notoriety that we imagine that individuals who've earned their fame due to actual talent would be equally willing to debase themselves. (If your job entailed being bombarded by bird guano, and you weren't, say, an ornithologist assigned to the Galapagos, I suspect you'd have OSHA on the phone in a nanosecond.)

And then, predictably, came the politicizing of a decidedly non-political event. These "liberal" rock stars apparently got what was coming to them. Never mind that KoL hail from Tennessee (hardly a hotbed of progressive thought) and traveled throughout the U.S. as children, following the wanderings of their father, a Pentecostal preacher. But they're entertainers, which I guess equals "Hollywood," which I guess equals Obama.

I don't know why I bother with comments sections. I only started reading the ones related to recaps of "Lost," looking for, and occasionally obtaining, additional glimmers of insight. With regard to KoL, I was hoping people who had attended the concert might provide further first-person accounts. What I got was the usual--a whole lot of anger.

Much blame for the current mean-spirited tone of our public discourse has been laid at the altar of cable news. To that let me add the comments section.

My husband, Dave, does not spend much time on the computer unless he's managing his fantasy baseball team. So when he commented on an article about the Supreme Court ruling against Chicago's handgun ban--noting that as an actual resident of the city, this didn't make him feel a whole lot safer--he was unprepared for the wrath to come. Foolishly, he had failed to disguise his identity as either "anonymous" or something more clever, like "chitownwussy." So just moments after he clicked "publish," he found people he'd never met or would never want to meet, calling him out by name and responding to his comment with a level of hatred typically reserved for serial killers. Many of them hoped he'd find himself in a home-invasion type situation, staring down the barrel of gun, utterly defenseless. So, to sum up, complete strangers, in a public forum, wished my husband bodily harm, possibly even death. Why? Because they hold a different point of view.

Dave was visibly shaken; to have that sort of personal attack waged so impersonally mystified and troubled him. He vowed to never wade into the mire of comments sections again. Oh, if only everyone would take such an oath.

Used to be, in the olden days of the early 1990s, the news was reported with objectivity by trained journalists. They gave us the facts and that was that. Now, objectivity is this quaint little concept, as outmoded as mainframe computers. Facts are for ninnies, opinion is king. And derogatory opinion trumps all.

I appreciate that freedom of speech is one of the founding tenets of our nation. It's just that unfortunately, a lot of free speech these days is less akin to Martin Luther King's powerful and soaring "I have a dream" and more like "You suck, you idiot."

Hate begets hate. One spiteful comment leads to another--either in agreement with the original or in opposition. And before you know it, the "conversation" has degenerated into name calling and expletives so far removed from the original topic that it's nearly impossible to follow the thought process that leads from pigeon poop to "die, commie bastards." You never know what's going to set off the firestorm. Commenters seem to have an uncanny ability to twist the most innocuous subject--the Jonas Brothers, let's say--into fodder for their vitriol.

It's too late to put Pandora back into the box. But I can't help wondering what would happen if the comments section suddenly disappeared. If people were forced to share their opinions, old-style. Face to face. Only with people they know. I suspect a number of individuals would be far too mortified to own up to their thoughts when they can't hide behind "anon." Others might be forced to think twice before spewing their diatribes and discover that, on second thought, some opinions are better kept to oneself.

Barring an outright elimination, what if we insisted that commenters adhere to the old cliche "if you can't say something nice, don't say it." That sound you'd hear? A whole lot of silence.