Vituperation, thy name is calumny: Let us work together to have a lot less of it.
A frightening number of Americans today take the position that they have the right and urgent obligation to be not just vocal advocates but also strident Internet propagandists. Using fear and unsubstantiated assertions and appeals to primitive fears, their spiked goal is to cause one candidate or the other to lose the coming Presidential election.
Some dismiss such individuals as annoying gnats; others would have us guard against them as though they were attack dogs. They can be either or both.

A man with whom I grew up is one of these. He collects snarling, biting attacks against Senator Barack Obama off the Internet and E-mails them to a long list of family members, friends and foes. The tenor of most of these verbal onslaughts indicates they had been fabricated by fearmongers with little or no respect for the truth and less for objectivity.

The typical charges they raise against Obama include such accusations as: 1. He is a fervent Muslim and therefore dangerous to the United States or 2. The Illinois senator has no “genuine” religion and is a danger to those who do.
We have also seen snide and hostile bitterness aimed in the direction of John McCain. The worst of these reuse the political spin the Bush campaign generated in 2000 primary campaign to denigrate or down play his years as a prisoner of war.

Each attack piece distorts the truth by interspersing semi-reasonable comments or covering the actual truth with a smarmy veneer.

I find myself not without some sympathetic feelings with many of these gnat/attack dogs- propagandists.

They operate out of fear and they truly feel it. Many are earnest and deeply religious individuals, who in their daily lives are not given to untruthfulness. Yet, I see no effort in their roles as one-man or one-woman propagandists to substantiate dubious assertions or accusations or ever to feel a need to present a counter-balancing statement. To them, it seems the issues are so important and their positions so righteous that balance is not needed.

It is this primitive emotion I hear in their intensity that most concerns me. We all know what it is to act out of fear and how hard it is to overcome it. And our being hostile or talking down to them merely builds their resolve and reassures them of their right to act out of desperation.

Like the “honorable” Brutus, each of them has been persuaded to carry a knife to the portal of the Roman senate and there to stab Caesar, even though he be their friend.

They see themselves driven, however, not by intimidation but by a morally-backed righteousness that places them above anyone with whom they disagree.

I grew up in such an atmosphere. It was a Republican household in the late 1930s and early 1940s, ripe with the frustration of being able to unseat President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who dominated politics in this country through his four terms in office. Everything I was told about him was meant to cause me to fear what he was doing and, even more, to be afraid of what he was going to do next.

I recall with sadness my reaction as an 11-year old to his death in 1945. That period had covered my entire life and my ears had been filled with vituperation for him over those years. Not surprisingly, I reacted accordingly when he died. I greeted his sudden demise with a boyish “Whoopee!” and a plea to be allowed to shoot off firecrackers.

Fortunately, my father—although a staunch Republican—chided me for my reaction to the President’s death.

I was deeply confused and it took me years to understand how I had been the least bit wrong in my reaction.

Whenever I hear or read unsubstantiated and petty political propaganda, I think of myself when I was 11. And, whether it is ours as I do when it is theirs, I react as strongly.
Both our nation and we will be better served if we are determined that we want to be as respected for telling the whole, balanced truth as for whom we voted or campaigned!

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Kevin Heise, a former Chicago Tribune editor and member of the Chicago Press Hall of Fame, is a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.