Politically conscious web logging
A keypad life journal from user land.
Mir from Dim Sum Diaries had a post last week that I copied a
line out of because I wanted to think about it. "[M]entally
disengaging from the world (at large). I don't track the news and
politics like I used to. It seems like after Bush got re-elected, a
sort of resignation set in. What's the point, it seems. It's sad but
true" (Eh?).
She could have been referring to post-election ennui of all or
any political or socially aware web logs. That distinction is aimed not
the wholly political writers, who seemingly continued on with scarce
pause like so many dogs with lockjaw, but all the others, the ones that
follow events commenting on things only as they see particular
significance.
Her feeling is shared by me, I think, and I was a
Government and Politics major. I no longer hang on Move-On's or G.
Soros' every pronouncement, or even listen daily to the Diane Rehm show
- especially the Diane Rehm show. I find myself sizing up what else I
have to write about. Part of this is realization that the prior
arguments that seemed so convincing, were not, at least not to enough
others. Still I feel the need to keep speaking, or rather see it - the way Poe saw that bird of his. I feel
it the way I do when my fingers can't find the sounds in the strings of
my guitar, I know have to be played next. As Ted Leo says: "When will
we find a chord as resonant as to shake the sheets and make us move?"
There was another phrase of Alexander Meiklejohns', in the
article I read for that last post. Glasser quotes him saying: "'not that
everyone shall speak', but that 'everything worth saying shall be
said.'" The tiresome and redundant are not guaranteed a voice. I
followed the footnote (up to the six floor as it happens - the
advantage of working in a library pp. 25-28). At the same time as he says only
some need to speak: [yet] "No speaker may be declared out of order
because we disagree with what he intends to say... When men govern
themselves it is they - and no one else - who must pass judgment upon
un-wisdom unfairness and danger." At the heart of the matter:
"Just so far as, at any point, the citizens who decide an
issue are denied acquaintance with information or opinion or doubt or
disbelief or criticism which is relevant to that issue, just so far the
result must be ill-considered... it is that mutilation of the thinking process of the community against which the First Amendment to the Constitution is directed."
I sat through inauguration week listening to Bush's speech,
asides from Cheney and Rumsfeld. Seeking some response to the idea that
this is what we do in their democracy. Hold a four year
referendum on the policies of the leadership, then refrain from
commenting in any way once that's done, because the referendum has
settled all issues whether raised or not. Yet continue to believe that
democracy and free speech survive in the chilled spaces between
elections.
There is no choice but to exercise our political freedoms.
Freedom beyond the thin contracting freedom they would allow the market to give us - freedom that
belongs to our dollars - a freedom to consume. To exercise them
individually collectively pluralistically; that is democracy's purpose.
It is part of the demonstrable weight of being alive. The goal is the
associated mode of living (society) where we realize our true nature as
human beings.
_____
Meiklejohn, Alexander, 1872-1964.
Political freedom; the constitutional powers of the people. With a
foreword by Malcolm Pitman Sharp. New York, Oxford University Press,
1965 [c1960] McKeldin Library : Stacks - JC591 - .M42 1965
11:23:55 PM  ;;
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