TRex had a fine post on Firedoglake last night. He was talking about the recent "smear Kos" noise in the press after the yearlyKos meeting in Las Vegas. He quotes Billmon:
Whatever. The truth is that while I admire Kos‘s energy and enthusiasm, and am impressed by the online community he’s nutured, his politics are hardly mine. He’s a Democratic Party activist and loyalist; I’m not. He wants to be a mover and shaker in the party establishment; I regard the party establishment as — at best — useful idiots. And that’s stretching it. Most of them are just idiots, period.
then goes on to say:
Don’t Cry for Me, New Republic
Which is precisely what scares the wee-wee out of the entrenched Opinionati at TNR, the NRO, the Times, and all the rest of the bomb-throwers who have come boiling out of the woodwork since YearlyKos. This, our movement, is a democracy, a real honest-to-god populist uprising. It doesn’t matter here who your parents are, how many millions you have in trust, or whether your kid plays field-hockey with Nancy Pelosi’s kid. All that matters is what you bring to the discussion.
Intellectual parvenus like Lee Siegel may dismiss us as "blogofascists", and those brain-donors at the Lieberman campaign may call us "terrorists" and accuse us of mounting a "jihad", but the truth of the matter is that we are the real patriots. We’re here because we love our country and believe that it can be restored to greatness and we’re willing to work together to make sure that it happens.
I’ve thought about this some too, paricularly after yearlyKos. For me, blogging is a personal thing. I’m from a long time ago, and was settling into being a retired person when a bad thing happened – George W. Bush got reelected. So, I became a depressed retired person. Most of my aging liberal friends have become disgusted, and actually kind of hopeless. I didn’t like that path very much. I started reading and learned about all sorts of things I didn’t know about – Plamegate, Niger, the Downing Street Memos, A.E.I., P.N.A.C., Judith Miller, Laurie Mylroie, Ahmad Chalabi, Michael Ledeen. The list goes on and on. And I found the community that was thinking about these things – what’s called the blogosphere. And this winter, my daughter set up a blog for me to rant on.
The things that worried me about yearlyKos were:
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Too much Democratic Party stuff. If the Democratic Party were the answer, we wouldn’t have the problem. I agree that Kos, himself, is a Democrat which is fine. But a lot of "us" aren’t so sure that’s where we are. We just "aren’t Republicans."
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Too much "groupie stuff." This isn’t about pop culture or on on-line community for being pals and making friends. This is about the fate of America as we know it.
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Too much "blogosphere" as a NOUN. It’s a media medium, not a uniform political agenda. I disagree with a lot I read online. That’s as it should be. There’s no uniform code that represents the bloggers in general.
So I’ve been thinking, "What is the ‘blogsphere’ about?" If it’s not a unity, with a platform, what is it for? I know what it is for me – three things [that are the same thing]:
- Information: It’s where I learn what I could never get from the news.
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Transparency: Our government suddenly operates in secret. The blogsphere is about not letting them get away with it. The Administration has controlled us by controlling the flow of information – sort of an American Iron Curtain. The blogsphere is about making sure that the government’s secrecy gets exposed on a daily basis.
- Dialogue: Talking over the meaning of the information and the danger of the secrecy.
They treat "us" like we are a THING – something that’s concrete that can be attacked as a THING. I really like Billmon’s and TRex’s take on things, but I’d like to emphasize that we’re not a THING, we’re a bunch of things, almost infinite. We’re playing into their hands if we try to represent a unified anyTHING. yearlyKos and Kos, himself were good, but it gave them something of a single target to attack. Just because people got together doesn’t mean we are an entity that can be attacked. We need to be what the Internet itself actually is, and almost infinite set of nodes that can’t be destroyed because it’s not anyWHERE. I agree that "we" are a loosely connected group of patriotic people that cannot be stopped because there’s no place to shoot the arrow.
Right now, there’s a concerted attack on Markos and the "blogofascists." The only way to deal with it is to ignore their "lumping" us together, and to avoid some kind of united front in response. Let them rale. Who actually cares? It’s just standard Rovism. It’s like arguing with Ann Coulter – a study in sneer management. Yawn…
If there’s a united front, it’s by consensus, not decree. This is not really about the other media anyway, it’s about the neo-fascist government that has comandeered the traditional media.
In my day, the song was "keep your eyes on the prize"…
Amen.