An Open Letter to Open Letters

Hi,

Awhile back on Webworm, I wrote an open letter to a New Zealand school about one of their teachers turning up to a BLM protest in a Trump hat.

I found the whole thing pretty gross, and my knee-jerk reaction was to write an open letter to the school.

At the time, that annoyed Hayden Donnell — a name you will probably know by now if you’ve been reading Webworm for some time. If not — you can read all his previous his work here.

He wrote to me: “What the hell are you doing, you’re better than this.”

I wasn’t.

More recently, I probed Hayden on his hatred of open letters, and he responded by writing an open letter to open letters.

Please enjoy,

David.

An Open Letter to Open Letters

by Hayden Donnell.

I hate you.

I didn’t straight away. At first you were just a little uncomfortable to read, strange in how you were written to someone else, rather than to the subscribers to David Farrier’s Webworm.  

But that apathy turned to anger as you multiplied like Covid-19 particles across the sick, distended body of the media.

I’ve seen open letters to cancel culture. Open letters to Donald Trump. An open letter to Robert Mueller by Robert De Niro. An open letter to Comey from the teen who allegedly got sexts from Weiner.

At least 90% of the opinion pieces published in New Zealand are open letters to prime minister Jacinda Ardern.

“Dear Jacinda, as an insolvency-specialist lawyer, I see a high volume of business owners who are really struggling,” one reads. Some open letters tell Ardern off for not being racist enough. Others tell her off for doing the bare minimum to address climate change.

One woman wrote an open letter to Jacinda Ardern on our most popular website complaining that she would have to miss “four potential book club sessions”, “the asparagus harvest”, “pea season”, and “coffees or organic savs with my sister outside in the Wellington spring” because of border restrictions aimed at stopping thousands of people dying of the novel coronavirus.

But I don’t just hate you for helping give a national platform to people whining over asparagus.

I hate your fakery. Jacinda Ardern doesn’t have time to read you. It’s possible Donald Trump can’t read. James Comey is too tall to see the pages. None of these people have ever taken on board your half-baked advice or moral admonishments. In reality you’re only there to serve two audiences: an out-of-ideas columnist and their set of sneering, skivvy-wearing readers.

I hate your mix of sanctimony and desperation; the way you admonish unsuspecting famous people who are probably mercifully unaware of your existence, in what’s actually an effort to get a head pat from those readers.

You’re what would happen if a degenerate scientist combined the psychic energy of Jeb Bush saying “please clap” with a tweet urging someone to “be better”.

Most of all, I hate the way you’ve perverted the postal system. The whole point of letters is that they go to a clearly defined person or persons in a specific location.

We have post codes. Addresses. Couriers and posties. A whole lattice of infrastructure and administrative processes devoted to making sure letters go directly to their intended recipient. Yet you disregard that entire system in favour of just throwing up a bunch of words on some random website.

Why not just scrawl on a piece of refill and chuck it into the street? At least then only 1 to 10 people would have the misfortune of accidentally reading 800 words of your insipid moaning.

This isn’t the speech from 10 Things I Hate About You.

I actually hate you.

I hate that you’re everywhere. I hate your stupid faux-casual stanzas trying to make yourself look like a real letter. Have you seen the weather? It’s really warm. Cowabunga.

I hate your boring predictability, your unoriginality. I hate the way you always end with some pithy callback to a line from earlier.

Yours sincerely,

Hayden.

(Please clap)

David here again.

The urge to write an open letter is strong. I feel it regularly — although out of hundreds of Webworm missives furiously typed on my ageing, grubby keyboard, I’ve only succumb once.

But the urge is there.

I want to write an open letter to the idiotic churches I keep writing about, and the person who keeps parking this stupid truck all over LA.

I want to scream at them for interrupting my otherwise nice drive, and I want to know how they still get the spelling so wrong when they’re literally copying it from the Bible.

I want to write an open letter to my super asking who the lint lady is.

I want to write an open letter to Pixar telling them to make a film about the feisty pair of orcas terrorising the great white shark population in South Africa:

A pair of killer whales who have developed a taste for the livers of great white sharks appear to have transformed an ocean ecosystem in South Africa.

A single pair of male killer whales, known to researchers as Port and Starboard, are thought to have been responsible. “They work together and tear the shark open by the pectoral fins, ripping it open,” Towner said.

The first signs that killer whales, or orcas, were hunting the world’s most famous marine predators came in 2017 when the carcasses of four great whites were found washed up on the beaches of Gansbaai, around 100km east of Cape Town.

They shared an unusual feature: the underside of the sharks’ bodies had been torn apart, and their huge, oil-rich livers ripped out.

Researchers had not seen anything quite like it. “They had big gaping holes,” said Alison Towner, a biologist from the Dyer Island conservation trust.

Give me my Pixar film with “big gaping holes” immediately, Pixar.

But I will pause on these missives, digesting Hayden’s stupid open letter to stupid open letters about stupid open letters.

David.

PS: I know I have banged on about this before, but I make this weekly podcast called Flightless Bird and I’m really proud of it. It comes out every Tuesday in a lot of the world, which is Wednesday in New Zealand.

If you go to my Linktree page — I always post the latest episode up the top, plus where to find it (whether you listen on Spotify or Apple or Stitcher or Podbean or wherever!)

I hope you like it!