E-Knee Jerks Interactivity has become the last refuge of the crackpot. by RICHARD COHEN I've got mail. Boy, do I have mail. At the moment, I have something like 1,000 pieces of e-mail, all neatly stored by date somewhere in the sub-basement of my computer. It's come from people I don't know, people with strange names, people with even stranger obsessions, people who call me by my first name, my nickname, or merely something like "Stupid." I'm wired, I'm online, I'm interactive -- and I'm wasting my time. Richard S. has something to say about "socialist slime." D.G. wants me to know about "Clintonsucks.com." I have learned about conspiracies you cannot imagine and crimes committed by Bill and Hillary Clinton that are so awful, so nefarious, it's a wonder the writer wasn't terminated before he sent the message. Something has gone wrong. I am interactive with an insane asylum. I've decided I can either be interactive or productive -- not both. I get 50 to 100 e-mails a day. Reading 100 e-mails at one minute each is an hour and 40 minutes. By the end of the week, I could have spent the equivalent of a workday dealing with e-mail. Throw in the time spent answering telephone solicitations from telephone companies, and include some mouse-in-the-maze experiences with voice-mail menus, and it's a wonder I'm as fabulously productive and incredibly cheerful as I am. Any more progress and I'd get nothing done. So, I answer almost none of my e-mails. I say "almost none" because I do scan the list looking for names I recognize. I also look, on a slow day, for messages that seem interesting or I suspect are thoughtful. The rest I pass by, but not without some guilt. I am my mother's son, and I feel I should answer my mail as I was taught. Mom, though, was not online. This is not the way it was supposed to be. Interactivity was supposed to be great. I was told by my incredibly smart bosses that I should want to be interactive, to care what everyone thinks, especially my readers -- each and every one of whom is, well, a genius. I concluded that to act otherwise was to be elitist and newspapers, in particular, eschew elitism. We want as many readers as possible, and each and every one of you is cherished. We want to know: What do you think? This sort of thing is encouraged all over the Internet. You cannot open America Online without it asking what you think about something that happened five minutes ago. The Washington Post's Web site does the same thing. It will name a news event and then ask, "What do you think?" I often shout back, "Who cares what you think?" -- especially when you have not had the time to think at all. Many of the people who e-mail me are not just off the wall, they must have hit it head first. They are brimming with hate. I've heard from absolutely every gun nut in the country. I've been cursed for wanting Elian back with his father, of all people. I was wrong on the Confederate flag, abortion, the death penalty, and Bill and Hillary no matter what I wrote. I am hopelessly out of step. It's high school all over again. Sometimes, I'm accused of cowardice for not having my e-mail address on the column (newspapers have the option to publish it). It doesn't seem to matter that the reader has my name and could easily get my address and phone number. For some reason, only e-mail counts -- at least to Michael O., whose message was forwarded to me: "I guess Richard Cohen is too chicken to publish his e-mail address. What a joke of a columnist." I have one word for you, Mike: Delete. (Richard Cohen is a columnist for the Washington Post Writer's Group. Don't bother sending him e-mail.)