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I eat hate mail for breakfast: Like most columnists, I imagine, I get a lot of mail, and while it's taken me time to accommodate it, I do appreciate it. Much of it, 95% say, is witty and fun and serves to point up my already acute awareness of the privilege of the columnist. Which I try to live up to, by wading neck-deep into situations where I, an expert inexpert, probably don't belong, and trying to flick my experience into vivid life. Which earns me critics. Fair enough. But sometime after Christmas, following my writing about B.C. politics, I began to receive hate mail. Hate mail has a particular and distinct charge. Ice trickles down my spine when I read it, I am, instantly, cold all over, and very afraid, which is, no doubt, the aim of the writer(s). Some of it indicates that the writer knows where I live, he tracks me, reads everything, listens to me on the radio, even when I don't know I'm on, and he hates me, really really a lot. Which has the effect of making me think I should be a little less bold. And certainly never ever, ever write about how the lack of property rights in our Charter has been used to erode the asset base of citizens, in the pursuit of income redistribution and a cockeyed, unnecessary, destructive, green, back-to- wilderness agenda. And that some of the restrictive regulation is engineered by international NGOs who raise money with cute baby animals on their stationary. I do recognize that this time in B.C. politics is particularly fierce. Gordon Campbell has hired bodyguards, MPs' offices have been vandalized, and some ministers have received death threats. Death threats in British Columbia ... the mind reels. Even mild Globe and Mail writers who pay doubt-filled compliments to the new government are shocked by how vicious their B.C. critics are. When I wrote a comedic piece about Saltspring for Harper's magazine which was published early last year, the editors at Harper's were both horrified and depressed (this from a magazine that revels in the dark side) by just how seething, dark and angry a few of the letters on the piece were. So I did some research. In fact, I did a lot of research. Luckily, almost every columnist that lives has written about their hate mail. The Navy Times has written about their hate mail, and the head of the National Baptist Convention gets hate mail, and was the target of a planned attempt on his life. Black universities in the South get wads of hate mail. Children in the third grade send hate mail to local newspapers. Margaret Carlson at Time magazine gets hate mail whenever she stands up to Robert Novack on CNN's Crossfire. " 'Bitch is the archetypal slur against the woman who talks with certainty, makes bold statements rather than hedged ones,' " Carlson cites linguist author Deborah Tannen. "The reaction is, 'Who does she think she is?' " Now I have to say that I assumed in a thoughtless way, silly me, that most hate mail, and frankly, hate itself, emanated from the sewers of the extreme right and was directed at Jews, people of colour and homosexuals. That was before I decided to flout the environmental movement. For pure venom, the environmental movement in British Columbia cannot be matched. Greenpeace has been riven with feuds since its inception, and an environmental battle I recently witnessed from the inside was a model of the most cantankerous high school on earth. The environmental movement worldwide is notorious for attacking their critics on small errors of fact and trying to ruin them. John Stossell of ABC reported that organic lettuce was filled with more bacteria than non-organic lettuce. The studies were done by an independent lab. He was attacked so viciously, on what turned out to be a minor reporting error, he was afraid for his job. Former green, Bjrn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, realized, with some reluctance at first, that statistics indicate the environment is getting better, not worse. Not that there still isn't work to do or that we shouldn't be concerned. But acid rain is not killing our forests. Sperm count is not falling. Global warming is way overstated. Technology is more likely to solve problems than wholesale restriction of human activity. Did the greens celebrate? They did not. Lomborg has been attacked in every green journal, newspaper and magazine. Each piece first admits, through gritted teeth, that his facts are pretty much right, then seeks to discredit him with hails of invective. No other columnist has mentioned this, but I think the general trend of hate mail indicates the erosion of entitlement of any group or class. As racist whites in the American South fear educated blacks, so the hard left, entrenched in their intellectual superiority, hates the rational right. By your hate mail, therefore, you can suss the current Zeitgeist. Hey, it has to be good for something other than night sweats. Finally, I seem to have a committee of University of Victoria folk, who in a round robin kind of way take a whack at me from time to time, based on my so- called, mis-reporting of fact. It is dismissible, usually -- no reporter is accurate in small matters 100% of the time -- except that it is laced with vitriol and frightens me. Aha, said a pal at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, U. Vic. is the most left-wing university in Canada, and its law school, oy! Let me make this perfectly clear to my professorial critics on the left. I know how to research. I spent years and years in dull jobs, being trained by very smart people on how to report, think and write with clarity. I may sound silly sometimes. This is deliberate. I want to be easy to read. But behind the attitude lies solid work, a serious mind and a decade of training. So I paraphrase Sylvia Plath: I eat bitter, angry, left-wing university professors who send hate mail, like air.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.