An e-mail arrived at 9:50 a.m. today:
Subject: u still sore you lost the civil war?
From: Mike Elk ([email protected])
To: Robert Stacy McCain
Shit son, I am about to go visit some Civil War battlefields where we kicked the fuck out of you degenerate Confederate bastards. I bet you are still sore you guys lost that one Bobby.
—
Mike Elk
In These Times Staff Writer
Cell: (412) 613-8423
Twitter – @MikeElk
Simple courtesy required a polite reply:
Sir:
You have an obnoxious habit of making your personal superiority the point of every argument, and you always seem disappointed that others do not admire you as much as you admire yourself. Declining your invitation to join the Mike Elk Fan Club, I will also waive the opportunity to tutor you in grammar, but must make a few additions to your pathetically small store of historical knowledge.
My Alabama ancestors were not degenerate, and were certainly no less patriotic than my wife’s ancestors from Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio who fought for the Union. However — and perhaps this touches also on your erratic grammar — your first person plural pronoun would seem misplaced: “we kicked the fuck out of you,” et cetera.
To whom does your “we” refer in that context?
In an e-mail to Eli Lake, you said your grandparents were “the children of Russian Jewish immigrants.” In which Civil War regiment did your ancestors serve?
My own paternal grandmother was the daughter of Private Winston Wood Bolt, who served in the 13th Alabama Regiment, Company K. The colonel of my great-grandfather’s regiment was Birkett Davenport Fry, and they were brigaded under A.H. Colquitt (at Seven Pines, South Mountain and Sharpsburg), then under J.J. Archer at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Both General Archer and my great-grandfather were captured in the first day’s fight at Gettysburg when the Union’s famed “Iron Brigade” turned their right flank. I’ve walked the ground where Winston Bolt was captured — just east of Willoughby Run, a hundred yards or so from where Union General Reynolds was killed — but regret that I’ve never had an opportunity to visit Fort Delaware, where my great-grandfather spent the next two years as a prisoner of war.
At any rate, it seems quite likely your ancestors never fired a shot at any of my ancestors, and so your use of the first person plural “we” is wrong. But you’ve never let being wrong stop you before, and I doubt you’ll let it impede you in the future. All you ever do is boast and threaten and insult, then claim to be a helpless victim when someone calls attention to the symptomatic traits of your warped and sadistic personality. My confident prediction is that these habits of yours will eventually bring you unhappiness and misfortune in life, and that in the near term you will be deeply offended by anyone’s effort to counsel you against continuing in your present course of conduct. Your conceited sense of superiority has the effect of alienating you even from those would-be friends who might dissuade you from your doomed folly.
You will excuse me if I take the liberty of publishing our correspondence immediately, as I consider it a waste of time to respond privately to a deliberate insult.
— RSM
Don’t expect Mike Elk to appreciate such courtesy. Fools never do.
UPDATE: It took six minutes for Elk to reply:
Subject: Re: u still sore you lost the civil war?
From: Mike Elk ([email protected])
To: Robert Stacy McCain
By we I mean boys from my home state of Pennsylvania. Look at this monument, those keystone boys sure cleaned up at orchad’s knob — makes me proud to be a Pennsylvanian think of the slavers ass that they kicked
Sent from my iPhone
He’s proud to be from the same state as Jerry Sandusky? The mere accident of having been born in Pennsylvania instills in Mike Elk such fierce emotion? Exactly where this “orchad’s knob” is located, I’m not sure. No photo was attached to his e-mail.
UPDATE II: A Google search for “Mike + Elk +Pennsylvania” turns up this typically demented rant against Penn State:
“As a native Pennsylvanian, I never once considered attending Penn State University. Penn State always seemed like a place full of cliquish white people recalling their glory years of making fun of the dorky kids in high school. More progressive white people and people of color went to big city state schools like Pitt or Temple while whiter, more conservative types tended to dominate the settings of the rural, fraternity-heavy Penn State campus.”
Read the whole thing to get an idea of exactly how long Mike Elk has been a blustering fool (i.e., his entire life).
