I get a lot of spam over on Spiritual Politics (still waiting for that
captcha program), and mostly it has to do with product
promotions–replica rolodexes, male sex products–and fulsome but sadly
unspecific tributes to the blog’s high quality. Over the past couple of
days, however, there has been a slew of messages relating to the “Ground
Zero mosque”–for the most part a spume of hostility the worst example
of which (so far) is the following:

It’s an aberration that the President of the United States
endorses a mosque so close to the biggest and most atrocious terrorist
act in the history of the World! It’s a spit in the face of the people
that died there in horror; their families, and the rest of us Americans.
It is unacceptable! We should wait until the mosque is finished, and
then it up while all the Muslims are in there praying!!! See how they
feel about that.

I have, of course, no idea where this is coming from, or whether it
represents someone’s actual opinion or just the usual spamming
imperative to get noticed by the blogger and maybe even make it into the
blog’s comment section. I’d guess the latter. The spammer has, for the
moment, simply decided to piggyback on the road rage du jour that has
become the new norm of self-expression in the electronic public square.

But its significance is not so easy to determine either. On an
actual road, you’re likely to be in close proximity to hundreds or
thousands of other vehicles before you encounter one lunatic bent on
inflicting whatever ails him on the rest of the driving community. You
don’t conclude that all drivers have gone nuts. In the journalistic
blogosphere, however, you can’t see all those other drivers who take a
peek at what you’ve written and go on with the rest of their lives
without leaving more than the record of another page view or site visit.
So it seems as though the entire world’s gone mad.

But maybe it hasn’t. Maybe the amount of real outrage at the proposed
Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan is small–compared to the
spam and the politically motivated pseudo-outrage and the, dare I say
it, actual support for religious liberty and its right to prevail over
the ill will, suspicions, and sense of injury of some other Americans.