Osler's Razor

I get a lot of mail at work. It breaks down about like this:

75%: Mail from people in prison
10%: Magazines, junk mail, and catalogues
10%: Letters from people I know
5%: Hate mail

Invariably, the letters from people in prison are polite. Even the people with loopy legal theories or unfortunate ideas of what my work entails are nice about it. So are the letters from people I know. Even the catalogues seem to have good intent.

As for hate mail, the internet has largely taken that business away from the postal service. Most of the nasty-grams I get are emails now, which is kind of sad in its own way. I get a lot of those after I have written something on a controversial topic. It's not a big deal; it comes with the territory. Of course, they often don't send them to me but to my Dean or others, thinking that perhaps upon hearing that I am part of the "Lib Scum Army" that the Dean's hair will stand straight up and I will be fired. The most caustic emails came in response to my support of same-sex marriage (check out the comments here for an example of typical verbiage, often arguing that I should be cast into a "lake of sulfur"), but there is a steady stream most of the time, usually asserting that I am a traitor to the race, or to the law, or to DOJ, or (for a while) Brett Kavanaugh.

Of course, email carries with it a certain accountability, since there is almost always a way to find out who wrote the email, and it is possible to write back. Anonymous letters, archaic as they are, are one of the last refuges (along with comment sections) of true cowards.

Yesterday I got one of the funnier bits of hate mail I have received in a while. It came in the exact type of envelope that prisoners use, but it had no return address (and was, as is typical, unsigned).  He appears to have been responding to my piece in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last week about the Mueller Report. Inexplicably, he included a copy of the article I had written.

Here is how he began:

What a HACK you are- one of the major issues I have is that you claim to 'train future prosecutors'- oh, you mean like Andrew Weismann? 

It is very worrisome that the legal system has dedicated partisans such as yourself involved in it.

It all emanates from "The One"-- your boy-- OBAMA- trust me on this.

I goes on like this for a while. But just to unpack that opening...

First of all, I would be very proud if I had a role in training legendary prosecutor Andrew Weismann. For one thing, I'd be working at Columbia Law School, which would be pretty cool (at least for a few months). Also, I'd have played a role in educating the guy who led the successful prosecution of mob boss Vincent Gigante and headed up the DOJ's fraud section. I'd be pleased as punch if one of my students has a career like that-- and some of them very well might.

Then, of course, we have the reference to our first black president as "boy," and all that goes with that term. It seems this particular coward has some other issues as well.

If nothing else, this gives me an appreciation for those in prison, and the better envelopes I get from them which always include a name, a return address, and a cogent point or request.