On November 28th, Mary Willingham posted a blog entry on PaperClassInc.com in which she reports InsideCarolina's Buck Sander's said she "should be drenched in gasoline and lit on fire in a parking lot."
Here we have two bitter antagonists characterizing the hyperbolic comments made by a supporter of each's opponent. Are they guilty of doing the same thing or is one different from the other?
Here is the January 29th, 2014 email to which Bethel refers. Is Jay Smith really "wishing" for a plane crash like Bethel says?
And here is the clip from the November 11th, 2015 podcast with Buck Sanders comment Willingham mentions. Does Buck Sanders really think Willingham "should be" lit on fire?
If your answer to both isn't "no," then you are guilty of taking something literally that was meant to be hyperbole and an expression of frustration.
There is no sense of a communicated threat or even a true passive desire for harm in either Smith's or Sanders' comments. Jay's was an exaggeration, communicating a desire his nemesis would just be gone, akin to the idiom of wishing he'd "take a long walk off of a short pier." Buck's was a hyperbolic metaphor, illustrating his and his audience frustration but setting up the discussion for Bethel's more reasoned approach.
Were they ill-advised, mean-spirited comments? Sure. Sanders made his in a public podcast, with an audience hostile to Willingham. Smith made his in an email with an audience of one that he thought would remain private; but given he used his University email account, it's a matter of public record, and Bethel made it so. But neither was ever even a veiled threat or desire for harm.
We don't know whether or not Smith regrets the email comment, but we might assume InsideCarolina thought better of Sanders' and pulled the November 11th Sander's podcast from its archive.
Between Bradley Bethel's tweet highlighting Smith's "plane crash" email and Mary Willingham's blog referencing Sanders' "lit on fire" comment, one of the two is informing his or her readers that there's something literal about the objectionable utterance, and it's not Mary Willingham.
Yet it's Bethel who claims Mary is taking Sanders literally and misrepresenting the comment, while simultaneously trying to rationalize Smith's comment as wishing literal harm. He not only misrepresents Jay Smith's email, but he misrepresents Willingham's blog by claiming it's saying something that it's not. And all the while, he's guilty of doing precisely what he's chiding Willingham for.
What's it called when you criticize a behavior, yet in so doing, engage in the very same behavior you were criticizing? I suppose it's a form of situational irony.
InsideCarolina removed the audio from the podcast and Bethel has since unpublished his November 7th and December 3rd blog articles. He's now, at last, moving on past Mary Willingham and Jay Smith. Excellent idea and long past due. Maybe now we'll get somewhere.
(The article was reformatted and edited on December 12th, 2015. The original is preserved here.)
