My borderline obsession with the “journalist” Michael Totten has, I believe, reached its conclusion. Our last transaction proceeded thusly: I left a comment on his blog in response to a post in which he urged readers to make PayPal donations because otherwise “Would you know Northern Iraq looked like this if I didn’t go there with my camera and bring back these pictures?” That is, by the way, an actual quote and not editorial paraphrasing on my part. In response, he emailed me directly. I was going to keep this to myself, but his response is too funny and I haven’t had time to finish writing about our Greece trip. And besides, he hurt my feelings.
(NOTE: I am “Bye.Nova”…which is almost an anagram for “Van Boy”.)
Re: [Michael J. Totten] New Comment Posted to ‘The Utah of the Middle East’
Michael J. Totten to me:
Don’t be a jerk. I’ve made more money in the last month than I have ever made in my life. And I worked in a very high paying industry before I got switched to this.
Michael
On 3/1/06, bye.nova@gmail.com
wrote: A new comment has been posted on your blog Michael J. Totten, on entry
#1066 (The Utah of the Middle East).
http://www.michaeltotten.com/cgi-bin/mt/sayitsayitsayit.cgi?entry_id=1066Name: Bye.Nova
Email Address: bye.nova@gmail.com
URL:Comments:
Interesting pictures. But:
“Don’t forget to hit my tip jar! Would you know Northern Iraq looked like this if I didn’t go there with my camera and bring back these pictures?”
Methinks Mr. Totten has fallen down a rabbit hole and landed in a fantastical world populated only by the readers that leave gushing praise in the comments.
Bye Nova to Michael:
Wow. I’m not sure which is a worse: perpetrating arrogant and biased editorial pretending to be journalism (in the tradition of your “fair and balanced” colleagues) and believing your own jive…or willfully orchestrating that jive as a means of panhandling your ignorant readership.
That’s really something.
Ethan
Michael J. Totten to me:
Okay, now you’re an asshole.
When you first started emailing me I actually considered asking you out for a beer. (I assume you’re in Lebanon.)
I’m glad I didn’t.
Don’t email me anymore.
Bye Nova to Michael:
Fair enough. I wouldn’t want you to think I was harrassing you. This is my swansong:
I had stopped emailing you. It was you who emailed me in response to a comment I made on your blog. You could’ve just deleted the offending comment and left it at that, but for some reason you needed to tell me how much money you were making.
Anyhow, this was several days ago and it was almost fading into the soupy, foggy morass that is my memory until Amy forwarded me this. Sometimes someone says all the things you wanted to say, but never knew how. I’m kidding about that morass stuff, by the way.
I actually don’t feel that I am beyond reproach in this latest and presumably last transaction with MJT. I’m certainly much ruder and more disrespectful than I am generally, especially to someone I don’t even know. However, such is the extent to which my goat is gotten. Without being too dramatic, I think there is a terrible sickness in global media, especially American media. Subjectivism has gotten to the point where the agenda doesn’t just shape the story, the agenda is the story. This problem wouldn’t be so heartbreaking if it weren’t for the fact that the public at large is such fertile host for this sickness. Op-eds get absorbed as objective factual accounts. Now, I can’t exactly call up Rupert Murdoch or Bill O’Reilly and give them a piece of my mind, but I can certainly give chauvinist barely-literates like MJT a dose of criticism through the wonderful, terrible medium of that is the world wide web.
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