The Booger Head
Every other creature in this bestiary wears a disguise. The Enthusiastic Ambivalent pretends to be a Skeptic. The Pontificating Ignoramus pretends to be an Expert. The Compassionate Hatemonger pretends to be a Guardian. On down the line, each one has a false identity, a costume that lets them believe they’re something nobler than what they actually are.
The Booger Head has no costume. He knows exactly what he is. He doesn’t care.
The Booger Head’s operating principle is simple: if it offends people, do it. If it offends a lot of people, do it louder. He doesn’t hold political convictions, racial beliefs, or ideological commitments. He holds a compass that points toward whatever gets the biggest reaction, and he follows it with the enthusiasm of a Labrador chasing a tennis ball.
A friend of mine has a son living in California. The son is straight. One evening, a group attacked him, beating him while screaming the most common derogatory word for a homosexual. They didn’t care whether he was gay. They didn’t even stop to ask. The word wasn’t a descriptor. It was a weapon, selected from the available options for maximum offense, aimed at whoever was handy. That’s a Booger Head.
This is where the bestiary circles back on itself, because the Booger Head is the source of the vast majority of what most people would call racist behavior. Not all of it. Real racists exist. But the Booger Head has discovered that racist language produces the largest, most reliable, most spectacular reactions available in modern public life. So he uses it. Constantly. He’ll spray-paint a swastika on a synagogue, not because he has any opinion about Jewish people, but because a swastika on a synagogue will be on the news by morning. He will use the N-word in a crowded room for the same reason he’d pull a fire alarm: to watch everyone scramble.
Here’s the irony the Compassionate Hatemonger will never grasp. Every time one of these incidents makes the news, the Hatemonger adds it to his list of proof that racism is everywhere and getting worse. He blames the usual suspects (conservatives, Christians, rural Americans, whichever group is currently on his list). He never considers that the person who did it might not believe a word of what they said. He can’t consider it, because his entire system depends on the incidents being sincere.
The Booger Head, meanwhile, is delighted. The bigger the reaction, the more validated he feels. If society collectively decided to stop treating every slur as evidence of deep-seated ideological hatred and started treating it as what it usually is (a bored sociopath looking for attention), the Booger Head would lose interest and go find something else to do. But we won’t do that, because the Compassionate Hatemonger needs the content too badly.
There is no “if this is you” test for the Booger Head. He already knows. He’s reading this right now, and he’s smiling.
A Field Guide to Trolls
Before we close the bestiary, a brief taxonomy of the internet’s most common bottom-feeders. Trolls are simpler creatures than Opinionators. An Opinionator has a recognizable identity and a predictable pattern of behavior. A troll is just noise with a keyboard. But not all noise sounds the same, so here are the five species you’ll encounter most often.
The Ignorant Troll is stupid, lazy, and has figured out that disagreeing with everything is a serviceable substitute for having thoughts of his own. He doesn’t need to understand the conversation. He just needs to say “wrong” or “that’s been debunked” and move on. He has never debunked anything. He never will. Disagreement is his entire intellectual toolkit, and he wields it the way a toddler wields a spoon: clumsily, constantly, and at everything within reach.
The Mean Troll is also stupid and lazy but has made a slightly different calculation: if you can’t be smart, be cruel. He finds the most hurtful thing he can say about whoever is nearest and says it. There’s no ideology behind it, no goal beyond causing pain. He is the internet’s equivalent of the kid who pulls wings off flies. Not because he hates flies. Because he can.
The Hateful Troll is the Mean Troll’s older, darker brother. The Mean Troll says something cruel and moves on. The Hateful Troll digs in. He researches your profile, finds your vulnerabilities, and goes after them with precision. He wants to cause real damage, not just momentary sting. He’s the one who finds out you lost a child and uses it against you in an argument about tax policy. There is no bottom he won’t hit.
The Anti-Semitic Troll has found a target for his blame. Everything wrong with the world, everything wrong with his life, has a single explanation: Jews. The weaker he feels, the more certain he becomes. He can’t build anything, fix anything, or improve anything about his own situation, so he’s constructed an elaborate explanation for why that’s someone else’s fault. Anti-Semitism gives him something no amount of self-improvement ever could: a permanent excuse.
The Racist Troll operates on the same principle but casts a wider net, focusing primarily on Black people. Like the Anti-Semitic Troll, his racism is a load-bearing wall in the architecture of his self-image. Remove it and he’d have to confront the possibility that his failures are his own. He will never remove it voluntarily.
What all five species share is this: they contribute nothing. Not an idea, not an argument, not a perspective worth considering. They are the background radiation of the internet, constant and meaningless. The best response to any of them is the one they fear most.
Silence.