Archive for December 21st, 2006
by Jay Stevens
Man…George Will’s anti-blog rant is worse than I thought. Based on what he’s written, I don’t even think he’s even read a blog.
You know, I don’t mind a serious critique of blogs written by someone who actually understands them. In the post previous about Moorcat blogging Dillon politics, I mentioned Nicholas Lehman, who wrote a scathing indictment of blogs and their uselessness – sure he missed the basic premise of the issue – but it was, at least, well considered.
Not so Will’s column. Take, for example, this tidbit:
Franklin’s extraordinary persona informed what he wrote but was not the subject of what he wrote. Paine was perhaps history’s most consequential pamphleteer. There are expected to be 100 million bloggers worldwide by the middle of 2007, which is why none will be like Franklin or Paine. Both were geniuses; genius is scarce. Both had a revolutionary civic purpose, which they accomplished by amazing exertions. Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves, for their own satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that, but nothing demanding or especially admirable, either. They do it successfully because there is nothing singular about it, and each is the judge of his or her own success.
First, bloggers are “political extremists”…now they lack “revolutionary civic purpose”? Well mainstream DC-based pundits, which is it? Seriously, you can call bloggers all sorts of things – extremists, idiots, biased, amateurish – but just about the only thing you can’t claim about bloggers is that they lack “civic purpose.” I don’t have to explain that to my readers who, while they might disagree with my politics, must admit this blog has a definite civic purpose and whose very existence is revolutionary. After all, blogs did not exist ten years ago.
As for genius…well…if there’s 100 million blogs, there’s a pretty damn good change a handful are written by geniuses, even if genius is “scarce.”
Another gem from the Master:
There are, however, essentially no reins on the Web – few means of control and direction. That is good, but vitiates the idea that the Web’s chaos of entertainment, solipsism and occasional intellectual seriousness and civic engagement is anything like a polity (a “digital democracy”).
Actually, if Will had any knowledge of theory of the development of intelligence – and he would have, were he a regular reader of this blog and had clicked on this link about computer science guru Seymour Papert and the theory of “emergent behavior,” in which the Internet is considered a “self-organizing swarm composed of human beings” – he would have recognized, for example, in Kos, Armstrong, and Stoller’s network of activist bloggers and fundraising sites an organized “polity” working towards revolutionary change through the Internet.
Will:
Time’s bow to the amateurs who are, it strangely suggests, no longer obscure, and in the same game that Time is in, is refuted by a glance – which is all an adult will want – at YouTube’s most popular videos.
Yes, and I suppose we can judge the quality of journalism based on a quick glance at the World Weekly News.
It’s too bad George Will didn’t do more than cursory bit of research before writing his column. But then, Will is “serious.” You can tell because he wears bow ties and writes thesaurus-aided columns. Will must be right in whatever he thinks because a newspaper editor has selected him to write columns for the newspaper.
I’m not going to defend blogs’ intellectual prowess. For each of the well-written, interesting political blogs found here in the Montana blogosphere, there are a dozen “diaries” with little or no serious content. The thing is, you have to do some work to find the good ones. And the twenty-first century Franklins and Paines are already emerging.
In the end, it’s hard to feel too angry with George Will. He’s a dinosaur. He hasn’t been relevant since the 1980s, and certainly this column shows his narrowness of intellect and curiosity, two decided personality deficiencies that make a writer uninteresting and “unserious,” even if he is wearing a bowtie.
by Jay Stevens
Kudos to Moorcat who’s started a “city government series,” a series of posts written about his local government – in this case, Dillon, Montana.
That’s one of the things that blogs do really well – “hyperlocal” blogging, as the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lehman dismissively called it. The most reknowned of the hyperlocals is author of Barista of Bloomfield Ave, Debra Galant, who wrote a fascinating piece on local news blogging for PressThink:
When I try to explain Baristanet to someone who’s never heard of it before, I often say “it’s like your weekly small town newspaper meets the Daily Show.” We—and I say we because I work with two equal partners, Laura Eveleth and Liz George—write about many of the same small-town events that those birdcage liners do, but with a jaundiced eye….
Galant describes the types of reporting her blog does best, and it turns out it’s stuff that doesn’t make the news but everybody wants to know. Take, for example, this story about her new community pool:
One Friday afternoon, with not a cloud on the horizon, after I’d put in a full day of writing, I walked to the pool and was astonished to find it closed.There had been no thunder; I’d been writing the whole afternoon on my front porch, half a mile from the pool. The parking lot at the pool was empty, but one by one cars arrived. Moms and kids spilled out, their arms overflowing with towels and pool bags. We all stared forlornly at the chain-link fence and wondered why the pool was closed and where the lifeguards had gone.
Well, somebody said, they must have closed the pool for thunder and made everyone go home. The policy was 20 minutes. So if we kept waiting, the lifeguards would come back and re-open the pool. We waited 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour, longer. No lifeguards, no pool manager.
People pulled out cell phones, called town hall, the mayor, members of the pool’s board of trustees. Nobody knew what was going on, and people were furious: me more than anyone. That’s the moment when I imagined writing about this for a local paper. It was exactly the kind of thing that was never covered in the local paper—it didn’t, after all, happen at a town council meeting or come from a press release—and it was exactly the kind of thing that everybody talked about.
When the manager finally did appear, hours later, he offered no excuses and no explanation. There’d been thunder. The pool was closed.
We found out the real story months later, after it was discovered that the pool manager had been embezzling money from the pool. It turns out that hot August afternoon, he’d heard some distant thunder and decided to close the pool and take his entire lifeguard staff out to the movies.
Galant’s blog is populated by the details and concerns of her neighborhood and town, the stories generated by tips from locals who send photos or updates on traffic slow-ups, fires, or anything that the neighborhood is curious about, but won’t find answers to in their local newspapers or television stations.
Some outsiders – like Lehman – find the detail trivial, but the stories are invariably about what the neighbors want to know, like the time the 6:18pm train from Penn Station was held up for five minutes (turns out they thought someone was on the tracks). Some poked fun at the blog for the story, but as one traingoer wrote in the comments:
when there’s cops on the tracks, you wanna know what’s up.Posted by: dana jennings | Mar 9, 2005 9:17:19 AM
Indeed.
So Moorcat’s busy letting us know what’s going on in Dillon – and he’s already discovered that the city’s attorney gets paid a whole hell of a lot of money more than he probably should be…
Readbetween started doing some much-needed local Missoula blogging here at 4&20 blackbirds, and it’s something I think this site can benefit from. Unfortunately time is too tight for me to attend all, many, or even some of the local meetings…are there any Missoulians out there want to contribute their local perspective? Or just email in stories you think important?
Oh, no, Montana’s own Miss Teen USA, Katie Blair, was not carousing with Miss USA, Tara Conner. MADD still severs ties with Blair. (Ed blames Trump.)
Jeff Mangan thinks Sideshow Scott’s education committee appointments are pennies from heaven for the Democrats, but warns them from getting involved in the GOP’s internal bickering.
The Good Guv wants to re-create the “Irish Miracle” in Indian country.
Expect a battle in the upcoming legislative session between environmentalists and Democrats on one hand, and the Governor and Republicans on the other over the proposed coal policy. (For a hint of the battle, check out John Adams’ piece on the Bull Mountain lawsuit.)
On the other hand, George Ochenski sees hope for the bipartisan initiative reform bill.
New West’s Bill Schneider on the West’s “wolf war.”
And New West’s Dan Richardson writes about the Mount Hood climbing accident, and why mountaineers shouldn’t have to pay “rescue fees” or carry insurance.
Julie Fanselow publishes a letter from Larry Grant. It seems to hint a second shot at the seat is already in the works…
The young are the future of progressive politics in the West.
TomPaine’s Mattera and Cray claim big business’ control of our government can be curtailed, and explain how.
Problems are emerging in the cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions. It’s being exploited by bankers and factory owners, can you imagine that?
Democratic Rep., John Dingell, who represents Detroit area and, therefore, domestic auto manufacturers, chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And he’s a climate change skeptic.
Steve Benen on “Operation Wagon Train,” which has divided families, shut down factories, and accomplished little. Why? (Attn Shane: Vilsack is taking this on as his “cause.”)
Obama’s “scandal”: there’s nothing there.
Rolling Stone’s interview with Tom Vilsack.
The invasion of Iraq has adversely impacted the rights and physical safety of women.
The invasion of Iraq has also perpetuated our continuing economic interdependence with the military industry complex, which is leading us to national bankruptcy.
Iraq is about to exceed the cost of Vietnam.
Why interpreting the “war on terror” as a cultural war against Islam itself plays into Osama’s hands.
Jon Stewart on Bush’s statement that “we’re not winning, we’re not losing”: “Are we covering the spread?”
The last FBI files on John Lennon are released.
TMM’s excellent Montana joke.
by Jay Stevens
Remember the open thread I posted about Santa Claus? Whether Kim and I were going to bust the myth for Mr. Proud and Ms. Marvelous?
Well, the powers at the Missoula Independent asked me to write a longer piece on the search for Santa. So…it’s this week’s cover story: “The Santa Claus Conundrum.”
(This is not, by the way, a pic of either Mr. Proud or Ms. Marvelous. But it is funny as hell.)
Of course, the kids steal the show. And the Santa story grows. Just this morning Ms. Marvelous asked me why we don’t have a chimney for Santa to come down. Apparently my answer didn’t satisfy her (“we have radiant heating”), because she spent the morning building chimneys with her blocks.
Update:
What’s the holiday season without a Grinch? Enter old friend Dan Shevlin, who pens a letter to the Independent wishing to deny Christmas to liberals:
Well, here we are yet again, facing the approach of another Christmas holiday. A holiday full of love, happiness, joy, celebration…and rank liberal hypocrisy. Just to give some of you an historical reminder, Christmas was founded by the psuedo-pagan Roman Emperor Constantine in roughly the year 336 A.D. The holiday was set up so that Christians had a day to honor the birth of Christ. The holiday was not set up to exchange gifts, to put up Christmas lights, to put up a tree. No, the only reason Christmas exists is for Christians to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Now, what does this have to do with liberals, you may ask? Simple. First, how many times here in Missoula have we heard from neolibs who insist that creationism is “absurd,” “stupid,” and “brainwashing”? How many neolib atheists have we heard from telling us “God is dead”? Yet once a year they put up their lights, furnish their houses with a tree, and lavish themselves and their friends with gifts…all to celebrate a holiday for a savior they say “doesn’t exist” and is “evil.” So, those of you neolibs who spend such a great deal of effort throughout the year telling our children that “Christianity is evil” and proudly displaying your atheism on your sleeve, stop and consider for a moment your profound hypocrisy in this matter. If you don’t believe in or practice Christianity, then you have no business celebrating Christmas. It is that simple.
Bah humbug!
Personally, I urge every one of you to go out and celebrate, or not celebrate, Christmas however you damn well please! Whether it’s the full deal with church and Christ and nativity scenes on your front lawn, or simply an afternoon meal at your local Chinese restaurant, go forth and have fun.
Recent Comments
Miles on A New Shelter for Vets or an E… success rate for In… on Thirty years ago ARCO killed A… Warrior for the Lord on The Dark Side of Colorado Linda Kelley-Miller on The Dark Side of Colorado Dan on A New Shelter for Vets or an E… Former Prosecutor Se… on Former Chief Deputy County Att… JediPeaceFrog on Montana AG Tim Fox and US Rep.…
4&20 blackbirds 