Column for March 15, 2012

I love reader feedback.  Sometimes I even get a chuckle out of it.  This week I have been absolutely deluged with reader feedback.  Some have been from a few anonymous individuals that don’t have the courage to stand behind their comments.  Others have been from people who think that they have a moral and intellectual superiority and incessantly bicker.  Either way, my column about Miss Johnston County has by far stirred the most feedback in the almost six years I have been writing this column.

I read with interest the response in the newspaper to my column about Miss Johnston County.  I laughed upon reading it, since it was incredibly hypocritical and fairly stereotypical.  What I will say for Miss Bindhu Pamarthi is that she at least took credit for her own rant.  What I found interesting is that the same allegations she leveled in her letter are some of the same inane drivel I was hit with by people who read my column on the internet. 

When you can’t defend with facts, resort to ad hominem attacks.  That is an old tactic used by many people who defend their positions but can’t really refute anything you are saying.  Miss Pamarthi leveled several accusations, as did each attacker on the internet.  Every commentator had the same thing in common.  They simply missed the entire point and construed their own.  The one common thread is that everyone seemed to think that I claimed that Miss Pamarthi was not legitimately the pageant winner or should not have won the crown.  

That is not so and I fail to comprehend how anyone that actually read the column could have arrived at that conclusion.  One person claiming to have an extensive legal training and experience but fails to realize the definitions of ad hominem and libel (of which I was accused) actually quoted a section of the pageant contract that pretty much said the same thing from the document from which I quoted, except that it also included a few more counties from which contestants could hail.  Of all of the accusations of false information that I allegedly propagated, that was the one and only actual point attempting to show any discrepancy with my column as presented.  Either way, it still does not negate my simple point; every time we have a Miss Johnston County from outside of Johnston County, it cheapens the title of Miss Johnston County.

It is amazing to me that for people who claim to be so tolerant of others, these respondents were incredibly intolerant of anyone else’s viewpoints.  When repeatedly asked to show where I was incorrect, for days and dozens of comments, nobody could point to a single thing except to resort to name calling and accusations.  Sometimes they changed the topic and argued a point that was irrelevant to either my column or Miss Pamarthi.

I went out of my way in my commentary to make sure that it was understood that my opinion had nothing to do with race.  Actually, I chose my words carefully since I had heard from several people about how they were offended that someone from out of the county won the crown, that they could not even pronounce her name, and that her ethnic background was nothing like the citizenry of the county.  In my writing, I actually defended Miss Pamarthi’s heritage as not mattering a wit, and I stand by that.  It makes no difference to me as long as she is an American citizen.  And yet who played the “race card”?  Miss Pamarthi accused me of xenophobia in her letter, and some internet commentators accused me of outright racism.  That, my friends, is how the intolerant truly work.  When you can’t prove a point with facts, impugn with ad hominem arguments.  For those who don’t know what ad hominem means, an ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it.  That is exactly what the claim of xenophobia (an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers) and racism happens to be.   Basically, they were saying that since they thought I was racist, that my opinion had no merit.  Or they thought I had one fact incorrect, therefore my opinion about Miss Johnston County not actually being from Johnston County was moot.  The hypocrisy is amazing.

I do have one suggestion for the Miss North Carolina pageant officials.  In the same spirit of Miss Johnston County repeatedly being from outside of Johnston County, I think that we should let the runner up from the Miss Virginia pageant take over as Miss North Carolina.