(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Sunday, November 10, 2002
Eric Blair notes below that "Bill Quick is running a most bloodthirsty warblog contest. When I first started up WBW I would have been all over it, but now it just kind of seems desperate and sad. Here are a few highlights, my last word, unless one of these nuts goes postal and starts picking off brown people with a Bushmaster." Eric, desperate and sad it may be, but probably the mainstream! Reading some of the venom these pathetic ignorants are spouting, you remember what kind of country you live in, if waking up painted blue all over last Wednesday morning hasn't already done it for you.
Actually, I'm of two minds what significance to place on all this. As readers of my weblog Follow Me Here know, it is a longstanding preoccupation of mine to worry about exactly what influence thoughtful webloggers opposed to the madness, like those here at WBW, can have. Usually it seems to me we fill a universe with discourse, but that the universe is one of likeminded souls only preaching to the converted. This often discourages me (and inspires a shower of supportive comments in my mailbox). But, on the other hand, one of my responses to the fact that I live in a country whose denizens are over and over anally raped, played for fools and convinced they love it enough to beg for more — and then go on to impose our hypocritical brand of tyranny and pillage on the rest of the world — has been to dissociate myself. When people tell me my words can have an influence in the broader field of public discourse, not only am I often dubious but, usually, I'm not sure I want that. You can't argue about political persuasion any more than you can about religion —indeed, it is usually faith- rather than fact-based! It takes so much energy to argue with deluded ranters; is it well-spent?
Ever since the days of the moral bankruptcy of the Vietnam War, I took seriously the jeering jingoist yahoos who taunted us antiwar types to "Love it or leave it." I left. Not literally, not geographically, but I have never felt I lived in America as constituted, not their America. This was apolitical whenever possible, politically involved when an issue of peace, justice or survival made it morally impossible to ignore it. Actually, maybe I did leave geographically too; I've always lived in places which are pockets of resistance, university towns, mostly The Republic of Cambridge (I'm across the river from there now, but I still have my office there), and could not see relocating anywhere in the Vast Wasteland which still seems painful whenever it is necessary to venture out into it. At least, unlike my aloof beleaguered self-imposed conceptual isolation of the Reagan-Bush era, the pockets of resistance in these days of renewed tyranny and permanent war have expanded into cyberspace to assume a continuity. It's a little bit easier to inhabit this America. Let's hope, with the coming storm, it remains a place of refuge. Addendum: For more examples of the pathetic, sick rants of your warbloggin' countrymen, be sure and read the comments this post provoked. You'd think I were trolling for these textbook examples, the way they came out of the woodwork right on cue...
