I've had a post with this title in my queue for some time. I was going to write about the bum rap that hate gets, about how the healthy reaction to someone contemptible is hate, about how hate can separate us from the cretins of the world. We hate them, so we are not like them, or so the thought was going to go. I don't know. The thought never finished gestating. It got derailed toward the end of Grizzly Man.
I don't know how you couldn't know the plot of this documentary, but briefly: a flaky, flamboyant man named Tim Treadwell lived with grizzlies on remote Kodiak Island. He foolishly thought of them as his friends, shooting tons of footage of himself with them until his eventual death by mauling. Filmmaker Werner Herzog cobbled together years of footage into a documentary, and voila, Grizzly Man. So far, everyone I've spoken to had a different reaction to Treadwell. Some thought him an idiot who got what he deserved. Some thought him mentally ill. Me, I thought him merely pathetic, a man who reinvented himself many times, trying to find a version that would be accepted. He, not the bears, was the star of his footage, which was crudely calculated to make him look the daring, bold avenger against the forces of...well, we're never quite sure. I thought he tried too hard at all things image. I found his posturing unappealing, and I readily admit that I enjoyed the macabre humor stemming from knowing what would be this particular superhero's fate. Was he mentally ill? Perhaps. There's ample evidence of bi-polarism and delusion. I just didn't think of it. I didn't worry about Treadwell's mental health; I just skipped straight to thinking he was a jerk. I think both impressions are defensible, and they're not mutually exclusive, besides.
At the end of the film, the Discovery Channel ran an epilogue in which they revisited Treadwell's friends, post-film. They read letters that they have received. Now, Treadwell's friends are inoffensive, even nondescript people. I can't say the same of the letter-writers. They gleefully celebrated Treadwell's death. Your friend got exactly what he deserved, they gloated. Just another spotted-owl loving liberal trying to tell the rest of us what to do. Hooray for the bears. It makes me want to send bears to places that could use them, like the Berkeley campus.
Let's skip any discussion about their assertions. I'm far more interested in this singular, gleeful act of hate. Just how much hate do you have to carry in your colon in order to track down and harrass these people? To sit down and write a letter to someone who you do not know, with whom you have no possible objection or connection, and gloat over their close friend's death? This is far worse than a drive-by shooting; it's premeditated, and while it has the appearance of targeting, it's really just as arbitrary.
These letters humbled me. I don't hate anyone that much, not nearly, not even the letter-writers. I'm a rank amateur.
And there, abruptly, the "in defense of hate" post died.