I, for one, am curious to hear what exactly a “commuter train bull session” might be. It seems Father Greeley is drawing his image of American life from mid-century detective novels. You get the sense that all the men wear hats in his world.
I, too, have so far received no racist e-mail about Obama, though I had my share of “Obama is a Muslim” e-mail during the Democratic primary (my Jewish name apparently gives off the impression that I’m a Democrat and am put off by Muslims, neither part of which is true; much of that class of e-mails was very clearly written with Jewish readers in mind). As to anti-Semitic e-mail — don’t get me started. The volume and depravity of it is beyond belief, and the easy way in which these emails tend to flow from anti-Semitism to Bush-hatred and back is a genuine cultural phenomenon.