Low Life.
A post, Blogging beyond Anomie, over at Happy Tutor's movable saturnalia caught my eye. More a recursive arabesque of posts than a single post. HT points to some fellow webloggers who have put up posts recently noting a generalized difficulty in writing a politically conscious web log. Partly it may be what the columnist Paul Krugman referred to recently:
(Op-Ed Columnist: The Uncivil War)
for people who value balance and even handedness it is difficult to keep up an oppositional discourse. The conservative agenda we oppose has all the nuance and bipartisan openness of a pyroplastic flow, the constant negativity and stridency of tone you find yourself adopting seems uncivil, isolating, and wears. Tutor responds with a short list of rallying points (which I admit I haven't examined fully yet).
Tutor points to Jonathan Delacours post Preaching to the Converted who examines an impulse to write about President Bush's aircraft carrier debut (these posts occurred a week or more ago) and Pvt. Lynch and how he let the impulse go on grounds of futility - a reasoned futility - that neither he nor the few that might read it would learn anything new.
Delacour brings in a post by a Dave Rogers on speaking out to further illustrate this. Dave Rogers speaks to the need to react to provocation; though, reaction places one in a mode of negative response. What little agreement one gets, and its small validation pales before the certainty that your target of ire remains unaffected. Considering that he himself has never changed his mind before an argument born of simmering difference, he can't see that any other might either.
I thought about this as I had also in this same time frame written a couple of posts on the dubious validity of dedicating all effort to effecting the pushback. I can say two things about this though. First, any argued point of view carries a moral imperative, it carries the speakers ethical attitude as well as meaning, and the former may last longer and burrow deeper than the latter. Second something else i've alluded to in the past. The phenomenon of aggregated opinion. I may decide while watching the game that Louis Tiant is settling down and making his pitches, at the same time every player in the dugout may be coming to the same opinion and thinking anew about the bottom of the eight and trading in their 0 for 4's for a 1 for 3, every member of the crowd may simultaneously come to the same conclusion, speak up with voice and drive a raucous energy down to the field. And the Red Sox may win. In the realm of sports this effect can seem almost magical, the game depending on your watching and believing. In Politics this effect can invisibly transform the realm of the possible in an instant - a new reflection of a dynamic general will.
All the same I have some trepidation joining in on Tutor's 24 hour party people discourse.
I see, or think I see ,in the posts there an educated elite talking amongst themselves, whatever I am, I am not that. I remain seven credits shy of even a bachelors degree, and well on the shy side of any fully formed body of knowledge coming from any post graduate degree. I am non-educated in both a formal and practical sense. Nor do I believe that any amount of plucky autodidacticism changes that.
Moreover, I am not a under-utilized sideling of the middle class, one break from taking the helm and setting course on a true professional career. I am working class. I make my living attaching barcodes to library books. It's not difficult, and I don't get paid much for it. Call me not Ishmael but Akaky. Akaky Akakovich. An iBook and the universities free dial-up ISP allow me to get over, but don't put me over. Imagine how I feel when talk turns to philanthropy, portfolios and such. When my simple creature comforts are met (a roof and walls in an indistinct neighborhood), and animal appetite appeased, the value of my labor is dissipated. My compensation, for the hours of automated repetitive thrusting of mute limbs and fingers, exhausted.
For all this writing I don't see myself as a writer either. Doing what writers do - writing. I had a friend once. Her name was Micaela, though I called her Nancy (except when it went the other way round). She, who doesn't write very often is a writer. She has the Bachelors in English and the MA in Journalism to prove it. She refuses to web log. She writes or edits when she gets paid to write or edit, when she has a contract in hand. She is a certified published writer and can do that. I can't get paid to write. What I do is lost somewhere between vocation and avocation, and constantly undercut by ignorance. Still, I don't consider stopping.
10:20:04 PM  ;;
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