By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

Here is a paradox:  I generally like Somervillians better than people in any other community that I have lived in or know. They are decent, hardworking people with a sense of justice and a sense of humor. If you need help, you can count on your neighbors to come through with something more than warm wishes that you have a nice day. Somervillians are not pretentious and don‚Äôt take themselves too seriously. Yet, people call each other names here more than in any place that I know.

You hear insults screamed by frustrated motorists. In casual conversations, anyone who does not agree with the speaker is a moron. You read hateful epithets in posts to the Somerville News website and in the venom that the Somerville Journal prints in its Speak Out section. Once in awhile these insults have some small element of humor or creativity. More often, they are just the same worn out words, heard over and over, whose only meaning is to express the speaker’s contempt.

Some readers will respond that this happens everywhere. It does not. There are thousands of communities in the South, Midwest, and Far West where you will seldom, if ever, hear such insults. Even in Eastern Massachusetts, the Somerville Journal is the only paper in the Community Newspaper Corporation chain in which you will read such venom spewed from and toward your neighbors. And Speak Out seems to be the most popular section of that newspaper.

Yes, it‚Äôs true that American culture, as a whole, is moving in this direction. You see it everywhere‚Äîfrom hate mongers like Ann Coulter, to popular computer games based on superior hand-eye coordination in slaughtering imaginary characters for nameless offenses. For a quarter century, national political discourse has been decreasingly about ideas, issues, and evidence, and increasingly about finding whatever narrow real or fictional aspect of one‚Äôs opponent that most resonates with public fear and anger, and  broadcasting that caricature as loudly and repetitively as possible.

The fact that Newt Gingrich Republicans popularized this technique does not make them morally inferior to their opponents. Those opponents were quick to emulate their tormentors for the simple reason that the technique was effective—not in crafting solutions to shared problems, increasing understanding, or making compromises, but in achieving political dominance. And despite name-calling’s pervasive incidence, Somerville seems to be on its bleeding edge.

Some will say that those who are offended by name-calling are too thin skinned and humorless. This is true in certain contexts. Good-natured bantering among friends has existed for a long as humans have spoken words.

In the Compton streets of my youth, African American friends and I played the dozens—“cracking” or “ranking” on each other or the other’s family until one player could not come back with a respectable insult. It was a contest of mental agility and toughness, humor, verbal skill, and self-control. One didn’t have to “win” to be effective or respected.

Among friends, the competition was light hearted. What made it a game, and made the game acceptable, was easy reciprocity, and understanding that your opponent genuinely knew and respected you. In that context, signifying was a way to diffuse tension, rather than an escalation toward violence.

This is not so different from bantering among Irish and Italian kids on the streets of Somerville fifty years ago. What is different here and now is that the insults are most likely to be hurled between those who know each other the least.

And this may be one clue to the causes for name-calling’s current prevalence here. We are still honest, unpretentious people, but we don’t know each other that well any more. I’ve written in the past about how the disintegration of those homegrown institutions that made up the fabric of our community has eliminated the many opportunities and obligations that we once had to know each other. The more that we know each other, the less we are likely to reduce the other to one contemptuous epithet, and the more we understand the hurtful consequences of doing so.

Another cause is that we have more things to be angry about now, but fewer apparent opportunities to do something about them. But name calling only worsens this situation.  It is a symptom of perceived powerlessness, and it recreates the conditions of powerlessness.