Artificial Cheese

During the recent Eagles preseason game, I was chatting with my Funksysteme counterpart while Gary Papa was doing the post game show. We both remembered Gary Papa as a well groomed, lively eyed sportscaster with sometimes a little too much energy, forming a contrast between himself and his uninteresting interviewed players. It must have been a while since we saw him last, because it appeared that he had aged 5 years in a short amount of time.

He lost a lot of hair, not really pattern baldness, and his energy seemed a bit forced. I suspected that he had developed cancer or some sort of illness. Shortly thereafter we discovered that he, in fact, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2004, and just last month he found out that the same cancer returned. The source of the information was a blog entry on the phillyburbs.com website.

Gary Papa’s disease is newsworthy, and its sad. But that’s not what I want to write about. I urge you to click on that blog entry and read through the comments. You’ll notice a good deal of sympathetic and somber comments, a few inspiring comments, and some funny ones. Nothing out of the ordindary. But you’ll also notice an offensive comment by a person that goes by “dave”. Also not out of the ordinary. Then you’ll see another comment by dave…and another…and another.

By the middle of page 2 you’ll notice that dave has taken over that blog entry though an offensive tirade of comments and responses. You might think that this is just another fatherless 13 year old with an internet connection craving attention for a page or so. By the second page you’ll notice that there is some sort of unsupported determination behind dave’s efforts to both ridicule Gary Papa’s cancer, and insult anyone who speaks against his responses. By the third page, a mob forms against dave, but he remains unphased.

I’m not even sure myself if this is something that is worth my time analyzing, but something about his persistence fascinates me. His comments are not simply blunt efforts to be offensive either, there is legitimate intelligence behind the words he chooses in those comments, as inappropriate as they may be.

By the time that I read through the entire three pages of comments, I came to an unexpected realization. Dave was the only thing worth reading on those comments. I even started feeling bad for dave as time went on as he was being attacked through very intelligent means and defending himself accordingly. Almost like Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down.

If you’ve got a few minutes to spare, go ahead and read through those comments and let me know what you think.