Troll patrol

In Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore, a troll is a squat, humanoid creature who lives in a cave and hides beneath a bristly bush of coarse whiskers. They’re mischievous little suckers and are rarely helpful to humans, rather taking pleasure in seeing us upset or besieged by hardship. Kinda sounds like an evil Danny DeVito character, but nope. Trolls.

That’s in mythology. But trolls exist in real life. Oh yes. Click on any article on any news site, view any video on YouTube, and scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the comments section. There they are. Spouting racist remarks, engaging in wanton stupidity, and making controversial statements solely to upset people and send them into a frothing tizzy. Where once they lived under bridges, trolls now make their home on the internet; it’s their cave, and anonymity is their beard.

They must be stopped.

Take one comment posted under a recent news item about Hillary Clinton’s email woes. The article, entitled “Clinton calls on FBI to release ‘full and complete facts’ about email probe,” and posted on Yahoo, is about what you’d expect: A play-by-play of the newest revelations found in Wikileaks’ latest trove of formerly top-secret emails. News like this inspires a lot of conversation and heated debate, as it should. A robust conversation is one of the cornerstones on which the democracy is founded, and besides, tense debates make dinner with the family a lot more interesting. Without them, we’d just robotically shovel cold pasta salad into our mouths and try to pick out patterns on Grandma Betty’s ill-advised dining room wallpaper. “Look, I see an Egyptian pharaoh dunking a basketball into an aquarium filled with sea otters!” Ugh. Nobody needs that.

Online comments are a travesty, though, siphoning out any lingering traces of rational thought and replacing it with the kind of playground banter you’d expect from either third-grade delinquents or major-party presidential candidates. Here’s a comment on that article from a poster calling himself Basil: “LET'S SEE IS MICHELLE STANDS BY HR SIE WITH THIS MESS- CAN'T GO MUCH LOWER CAN YA.”

Oh, Basil. You had me at Caps Lock.

Let’s pick this one apart, shall we? First of all, this Basil fella has clearly never heard of punctuation. Now, maybe it’s that I’m studying to become an English teacher, or that I write for a living. Maybe it’s simply that, in a pinch, I have two brain cells left over in the ol’ noggin that I could rub together to start a fire. Whatever the case, the lack of any periods or commas immediately undermines any impact Basil is hoping to achieve here. Heck, I was feeling generous and gave him a period at the end, free of charge. One wonders if he was actually attempting a sentence or, in a fit or rage, got into a physical altercation with his keyboard. I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I kind of hope the keyboard won.

Second, the typos. So many typos in such a short span. Everyone makes a typo once in awhile. Nobody’s perfect, except maybe Bruce Wayne and the guy from the Dos Equis ads. But nowadays, computers are pretty smart. They’re generous enough to underline our typos with red squiggly lines so gaudy their light could be used on runways to help land passenger jets. Even if Basil never developed the habit of proofreading -- which is a pretty safe bet -- seems to me he would have noticed that his sentence was festooned with more lights than a cruise ship. HR? SIE? These are not words. They are acronyms for human resources and Scottish Institute for Enterprise, respectively.

Third, his argument. There isn’t much there to chew on. Should I go into why? Forget it, I’m skipping this one.

There are two possible reasons why Basil’s sentence turned out the way it did. Either the last book he read was “Horton Hears a Who,” or he’s coming across this way intentionally, snickering as he lays the bait, and flat-out guffawing when otherwise normal people respond with the expected condescension and outrage. If it’s the former, well, one more reason why more cash needs to be pumped into the educational system.

If it’s the latter, he’s a troll.

Pernicious little creatures, these trolls. On the surface they seem fairly harmless, shouting into a million tiny black voids tucked under news items and videos of dogs catching frisbees. Avoiding them is a fairly simple task -- just skip over the comments section. They’re repositories for humanity’s worst instincts. But that’s easier said than done, especially if you’re a young person who spends any chunk of your free time online. The example I cited is fairly tame, someone who may or may not be trying to get a rise out of people with choreographed idiocy. Trolls can be meaner, more cutting. They can infiltrate a teenager’s Facebook feed and inundate them with disparaging remarks, leading to emotionally or physically destructive behavior. They can spread hatred and ignorance. They can kill.

Scandinavian lore describes trolls as kidnappers and usurpers of family farms and estates; they could only be struck down with lighting, as wielded by the god Thor. We need a Thor for these new trolls -- someone with a giant hammer who can lay the everloving smackdown on these cretins. At its best, the internet is a media and communications tool that makes our friends a little closer and the world a little smaller. At its worst, it’s a reflection of our ugliness and judgement, a means by which trolls can crawl out of the shadows and hijack any inclinations we have toward civility and discourse.

With the internet an open medium, it’s a difficult problem to address. So perhaps we need to literally summon Thor. Does anyone out there know how? A mythology-based video game from 1994 says you can summon Thor by hitting up, left, left, B, and A while the screen is paused. I’ll see if I can dig out my old Super Nintendo controller and make this happen.