Re “Betty Unpleasant Gives You a Steaming Mouthful”
What makes unfiltered journalists such as Betty Pleasant so dangerous is that her routine racial hate-mongering has a deleterious effect on her readers.
Because of their busy lives, they don’t have time to investigate the truth for themselves. They swallow whole her fiery, but knowingly false, messages.
Ranters, lightly educated amateur demagogues, such as the unsophisticated Ms. Pleasant, count on readers not bothering to verify.
The character distortions and errors she committed in the muddled, directionless essay reprinted here yesterday should have led to her firing. Instead, one suspects, she will be cheered by gullible readers who think as irrationally as this incurably angry windbag who has deemed herself a permanent victim by choice.
An emotional, insecure person by nature, she screams in print for two reasons, to draw attention and because she is uncomfortable making an intellectual case for her tyrannical race-based beliefs.
Confused and sadly undisciplined, she chooses to raise her voice rather than a logical point because emotion is her highest value. Logic intimidates her.
Like many black people, she understandably idolizes President Obama. She is old enough to have seen the worst faces of racism, and appreciates the vastness of his accomplishments.
But, having elevated herself above the masses by designating herself a community leader, she is obligated to use an organ other than her unsettled heart to enlighten readers. Otherwise, she is creating a mob mentality, not a learning exercise.
The single distinction I can see between the demagoguery of Ms. Pleasant and the first iteration of the late Alabama Gov. George Wallace is that he later publicly repented and recanted.
In two unfortunate forms, she displayed modesty – in the limited range of her vocabulary and in her insightfulness.
