The wages of partisanship and the rewards of being in the middle

I HAVE loyal trolls. They are those who incessantly follow this column not because they like what I write but because they make it their pastime to heap insults on me. I don’t know if they just derive sheer pleasure from calling me names from insulting my baldness and questioning my sexual orientation, gender identity and expression to maligning my academic credentials. Or somehow, they are paid to do it.

The reason I say so is that I cannot find any normal person who would religiously follow someone whose writing he abhors. People would normally just abstain from reading. So, either these people are pathologically motivated, out of spite or envy, or they are earning from posting their vitriol, and they are on the payroll of someone. Although I am not also discounting the possibility that there are those who simply want to counter what I write because they cannot just ignore it since it resonates. And I am threatening their convenient narratives.