When I was in college I worked on a project for Ralph Nader, long before his days as a presidential candidate. One evening he
gave me his own graybeard lecture, from his venerable position as a man who had reached his mid-30s. (A picture from
those days
at left, though not by me.) He said that a really unattractive
personality type was the journalistic bully-coward. That is, the person
who breathes absolute fire when sitting at the keyboard, but skulks
away nervously if he catches sight of someone he'd so fearlessly
denounced from the writer's chair. Yes, this kind of person existed
even before the blog age!
This obvious part of the message was: think about how you write. But the other part
was: think about how you are.
Nader very definitely did not mean that you should never criticize
people harshly or in writing. He meant (to shift ethnic registers --
his background is Lebanese) that you should be a mensch about it.
Minimize the gap between "to your face" versus "behind your back"
discourse. Be willing to encounter people you've criticized.
