...We Get "Comments"

...We Get "Comments"

by Alfred Lehmberg

Lately, this writer gets the limpest, if risibly threatening, commentary from the nastier cheap seats vis-à-vis the Flatwoods thing! It arrives like a wet paper spear thrown at a tank column... wholly unwarranted spitballery—spirited, arguably, but ultimately as drolly ineffective as it is substantively indecorative. Neat trick... that.

It brazenly announces itself, currently, with the fatuous opening “You’re hilarious!” This is as though one's tone was somehow a substitute for substance... as though a less-than-appropriate and dismissive chuckle could remotely stand in for the hard labor of an actual decades-long research! ...And this writer only aspiring to write some truth as it is sensibly perceived, about that decades-long research.

It’s a familiar, if intellectually dishonest, move... a projection, a deflection, a diversion... like the priest of a shrinking orthodoxy trying to laugh off the threatening heretic rather than confront the new text presented in good faith!

Then comes the self-aggrandizing flourish—“I’m not even sure whether to take it seriously.” like the attentive seriousness alluded to was ever asked for, desired, or even superficially appreciated ...But, it remains! He did take it seriously! Proof is in the proffered pudding!

He took it seriously enough to write a paragraph about it. He took it seriously enough to invoke Feschino’s "downfall" like a campfire ghost story told to keep the dim-bulb acolytes in line! He took it seriously because the arguments, as produced, struck a low-watt and amateur nerve! Well, nerves don’t lie and Feschino is so far up this abusive commenter's nose he can feel Feschino's knees scrubbin' his top lip!

Then? The senselessly insensible objection to “conjecture posing as research” is the most mythic part of this monumentally mawkish missive! Hurled like shiznit are accusations of material error... without a single counter‑fact, citation, or engagement with the material as presented... being made!

It’s a curious thing to watch! ...An anxious little man of little dimension swinging at his own self-invented shadows, himself, while publicly insisting that he’s defending the light, right and true! Now, THAT's hilarious! No... If conjecture is the crime, then the referenced recent comment is the accuser's confession.

...But then—comes the odiously ominous benediction! “Remind Frank when this is all over that he had people like you to thank for his downfall.”

...Ah. ...And there it is. The tribal oath. The invocation of Feschino as a "fallen king" whose ruin must be pinned on anyone who dares to read the record without bowing to "Barker’s sainted gospel," eh? Is that where we are?

The commenter is not critiquing the work... he's policing allegiance to the discredited, debunked, and dismissed! He's not debating the facts; he's defending the myth, and with stale bupkis. ...Buyer beware?

So, closing? Let this writer return the favor in admonition! Know this, reader! When the dust settles at the end of the tedious day and all karmic seeds are planted as laid to rest? The "commenter" (such that it was?) might be reminded that it wasn’t people like this writer, only honesty's aspirant, who caused a "downfall"—it was the weight of the evidence, honestly sought and recovered, refusing to kneel to obnoxious bullies & web weasels, or those beneath concern, consideration, or contempt! Read on.