lol -- not

If you haven't had the displeasure, you might go read disgraced Representative Mark Foley's literary stylings to underage congressional pages. They're over atThe Huffington Post, and they're insane. There are two sets; one is the set of emails that first broke to the press, and that the page in question recognized as somehow off. The second is an IM conversation given to ABC news by a different page. Both are deeply creepy -- the IM version moreso, just by dint of its explicitness (there's a lengthy discussion of masturbation and erections).

Both the emails and the IM offer a pretty much textbook image of the pedophile/molester: he tries consistently to wheedle his way into these kids' confidences by trying to use language that he thinks is at their level. So, in the emails, there are colloquialisms and deliberate omissions of punctuation (describing New Orleans at 100 degrees: "wow thats really hot"), a total absence of capital letters, and the omnipresent technique of stringing together phrases with ellipses. All of these strategies are, in each email, bearing down on a final, monumentally disturbing question, for example, "how old are you now".

Yet the page in question is reassuringly articulate. His emails to his superior, revealing his concerns about Foley's behavior, contain such gems as the comment, referring to another page named Will, that "to me, he is the epitome of a narcissist." Not bad! From the page's emails, I get the sense that he is aware that part of what makes Foley's behavior creepy isn't just that he wants pictures of underage pages, it's that his tone is all wrong for a normal adult talking to young people. And he's right.

The IM exchange is a different, and much more disturbing matter. Here the page seems quite unaware of how deeply inappropriate the conversation is. And in the exchange, you can almost track the degree to which the teen's discomfort is displaced by the use of "lol". I admit it, I hate "lol". I have always hated it. I hate it because it is disingenuous, and therefore a waste of time and energy. People always write lol when they mean malbaoti,m -- which is an acronym I have just made up for "maybe a little bit amused on the inside, maybe." It does not mean laughing out loud, and in the case of this particularly noxious IM exchange, it gives a pedophile room to move. Here is a piece of the conversation in question:

Foley: did any girl give you a haand job this weekend

Kid: lol no

Nice. Is the kid lol-ing? Or is he sitting there going, what the FUCK? Who can tell -- the kid certainly keeps the conversation going -- but the lol's imply he thinks it's intended to be funny, without ever implying that it IS funny.

Needless to say, the Republican congressional leadership has some explaining to do on this one, given that they apparently knew about it for years. And we could obviously go on and on about the fact that it's always Republicans who do this shit, because repression breeds perverse expression. But on a sheer structural level, the emails offer a disturbing personal account of sexual predation in the technological age, operating entirely on the level of language. All of which is nothing to lol over.