Bramble vs. Big Pizza

[Blogs] She's an LDS Sunday School teacher who likes board games, pizza and wool socks. She also listens to R.E.M., a Gen-X-era band whose fan base is frankly now on the shady side of 40. But, at 24, she frets that she looks young for her age.

Anna Eagar has become my newest heroine. Her well-written blog Cartoon Brick Wall caused a stir earlier in the week when she published an account of an on-the-job run-in with Sen. Curtis Bramble, R-Provo. Seems that, when Eagar attempted to deliver a pizza to the home of the Senate majority leader, there was some mix-up over preferred methods of payment--upon which Bramble became bizarrely combative, even going so far as to pull a "Don't you know who I am?" diva fit with the bemused pizza-delivery woman.

Until this, Eagar says her blog was read mainly by a few friends and family members. But the Bramble entry proved to be a sensation: The story got some blog action, was picked up in the Daily Herald, discussed by Nightside's Ethan and Alex, and sparked a report on KSL-5.

Now, Eagar's no political operative. There's no way she wrote the blog entry as some kind of anti-Bramble hit piece. She wrote about her feelings, and even tried to withhold Bramble's identity at first. She was bullied by a typically hyper-aggressive Utah legislator, and, understandably, got hurt.

As it turns out, our policy of keeping our state senabots carefully segregated from actual human beings means that, after a few years, the Brambles of the world forget how to simulate human emotions--or even recognize emotions in others. Eagar's story reads as a perceptive account of a really strange encounter. And, I dunno--now that I've read her blog, I just really like her.

Prior to the Bramble incident, Eagar's blog is that of an acutely introspective, intellectually gifted young person. She seems either unaware of or unconcerned with the fact that, outwardly, she is by any standard a striking beauty. But she wastes no time obsessing about fashion or other superficial concerns.

Instead, Eagar prefers to chronicle a rich interior life: her dreams, emotional catharses and spiritual insights. At times, she even achieves the truly revelatory transcendence of a mystic. At other times, she contemplates that sense of profound despair which, by rights, belongs only to exceptionally sensitive young people.

There may have been something transformative about the experience, though. After the incident, Eagar seems to have found a new kind of internal strength and self-awareness: Recognizing an opportunity for personal development, she triumphs upon summoning the assertiveness to kill a spider--or to write a polite letter instructing Bramble how to accomplish his goals like a human being--without humiliating and demoralizing other people.

Eagar's letter contains a lesson that, by now, the senator might do very well to heed.

(Brandon Burt)