In the past three years that I have written for Above the Law, I have had comments question the nature and quality of: my intellect, my legal pedigree, my political philosophy, my chastity, my reproductive history, my weight, my breasts, my relationships with members of various racial and ethnic groups, and my relationship with objective reality itself.
Comments have, at various times, invaded my privacy and diminished my dignity, however little I might otherwise have of either.
Many comments have demonstrated astonishingly dogged Googling of me and a few of my exes, though, strangely enough, not the exes of mine who are lawyers. (Go figure.)
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Few people will ever know the peculiar feeling that comes with knowing that every few days, strangers will ridicule you and your work, publicly and often rather crassly. That’s not easy. After all, my mother reads the comments on my ATL pieces.
So why would I, of all people, be disappointed that Above the Law will no longer allow comments?
I Actually Liked Reading The Comments
Comments were a part of how I conceived of Above the Law, years before I started writing for Above the Law. When I was in law school, in the halcyon days of the ATL Commentariat, I commented occasionally and read comments faithfully.
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Even in the last few years, I actually read the comments. Not just for my articles, but for most of the others.
With inside jokes and repeat characters, the comments gave ATL a sense of continuity. It made the the tone more conversational, more familiar. As a reader, I liked feeling like I was on a first-name basis with the writers, and I liked knowing that I would see them again tomorrow or next week.
Were many of the comments crude? Sure.
I, however, rather like the idea that even smart, educated, properly civilized people can sometimes have pottymouths and delight in tasteless humor.
I do. Most of my friends too. Otherwise, we might not stay friends very long.
Having the comedic sensibilities of an eighth-grade boy doesn’t mean that you have the intellect of one, nor does it mean that you are incapable of behaving respectably when you so choose. Plenty of people who snicker and hurl puerile barbs are, on the whole, mild-mannered, socially responsible, moderately neurotic nerds who, in the rest of their lives timely file income taxes, try very hard to be good partners and parents and friends, and wonder if maybe we — I mean they — drink just a little too much.
There is a time and a place for dick jokes. This I firmly believe. That time and place may as well be the comments section of ATL.
I Actually Liked Writing With The Comments
When I signed up for this gig, I knew that the comments were a part of the adventure. I knew that I would be mercilessly scrutinized. But I was okay with that. I wouldn’t have started writing for ATL if I didn’t want to permit comments on ATL, because for me, the comments were nearly as much a part of ATL as the primary content.
As a writer, I like writing in a casual tone about serious topics. I do not always try to be funny in my ATL column. I do not always succeed when I try. But writing for ATL has felt unlike writing elsewhere in large part because I was free to be funny, free to be irreverent, free to work a little blue, all while addressing an audience savvy enough to get a David Foster Wallace reference and bookish enough to care about niggling details of Article III standing.
While that need not end as the comments section does, writing here will feel different now, less connected.
I Like Being The Sort of Person Who Can Co-Exist With The Comments
People talk about having “a face for radio.” Well, I have a skin for writing online, which is to say an unusually thick one. A few thousand ATL comments later, I am a god-damned rhinoceros.
Mind you, I don’t like cruelty, and I’d love to think that everything I think, say, and write is above reproach. Since it is not, anticipating and experiencing ATL comments has made me a stronger writer and a stronger person.
I have no qualms about making my arguments and standing by them. I couldn’t do this job if I did.
But I also like being someone who is not too self-important to take a joke. I like being someone who is not too insecure to handle criticism. I want to be able to laugh at myself, not take myself too seriously.
I am, frankly, leery of anyone who doesn’t feel this way.
The comments section could be a rough and tumble place, but the ability to make fun of oneself mattered there as much as the art of the sick burn mattered. Most regular commenters’ personae even incorporated an element of parody, if not outright self-deprecation. Let us not forget that they are adults picking out just the right cartoon for their avatars, for Christ’s sake.
When I popped into the comments section of my column on occasion, I had the most fun when I dabbled in self-deprecating humor. As self-loathing and impolite jokes both come naturally to me (to perhaps to a professionally diagnosable extreme), the milieu was familiar.
I generated guidelines for myself, knowing that the comments section never belonged to me. I had my say in the column itself. Commentors could critique, debate, or lambaste, but I should not respond point-by-point or defend my piece in the comments. Not only would that project be endlessly exhausting, but it would also be obnoxious, neurotically self-defensive, and humorless.
I accepted that there will always be criticism that I could easily rebut or refute. The truly asinine comments, however, posed no threat. Any competent reader would recognize such a comment’s lack of merit and move along, unswayed and unimpressed.
The counterpoints or critiques posed intelligently, whenever they materialized, were often hints that I didn’t do my job as well as I should have. They taught me to better anticipate counterarguments worth addressing in my original articles or concepts I should have presented more clearly in my writing.
The good stuff was worth taking under advisement, with the possibility that it might make me a slightly better writer. The dumb stuff fractured my self-concept about as much as when I walk past a playground and a kid I don’t know calls me a “big piece of poop.” Either way, I was a guest in the comments section, an interloper who should appear sparingly, only comment in good humor, and try to have fun.
You see, for every nasty jab involving my uterus, my ex-husband, or my conception of contemporary race relations, there were ten comments that were funny or smart or even kind.
I understand why, given the direction the way the site has evolved, comments may no longer seem appropriate. Still, with no more comments on Above the Law, I am at a loss. I sometimes hated the comments. I sometimes loved the comments. But they were always there. Always a part of what it meant to be a part of ATL.
To the Commentariat: Believe it or not, I miss you guys already.
Earlier: A Farewell To Comments
Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the school’s law review. After graduation, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and ran the Center for Legal Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an institute applying cognitive science to improvements in legal education. You can reach her at [email protected] or via @tamaratabo on Twitter.