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Thursday, January 29, 2004
Blogfatherhood explained 
Orwhat?
| | The invitations to join friends at Orkut are piling in via email. But all of them lead to page opening failures on both my Linux and OS X boxes. Is this another one of those deals that's only been tested on IE running on Windows? Says here the system runs on Linux. So... I dunno. |
| | Aren't we getting tired of all these social networking systems? |
| | [Later...] Orkut works now. (Must've been down.) I'm in, and connected to about nine friends, so far, it appears. Still, wondering about the value-add, since it's subtracted about half an hour so far from my busy life. Not that I'm keeping track or anything. |
| | I just did "add a friend" with a pile of people. Now Kevin tells me I've just spammed them all with an invite. Bummer. I thought once you were in the system, some kind of notification went out. Or something. |
Turn it around
| | Maybe after I get some sleep I'll remember exactly what I meant by that. |
| | Meanwhile, read Britt's Reboot post. As usual, lots of good energy, good links, good ideas. |
| | [Later, in the morning...] Whoa: Chris Lydon's essay, After New Hampshire is simply brilliant. The gist: |
| | No, the results so far are not about politics. They're about an assault by commercial media on the very idea of a self-willed, self-defining citizenry. Howard Dean scares the institutional media out of their wits--not because of who he is or what he might do as president, but because of what he and "Internet democracy" say about them. |
| | In September, 2002, right about the moment Howard Dean was deciding to run, the nonpareil media critic Jon Katz was writing prophetically on the New York University web page: "The flight of the young has become central for our understanding of what journalism is or needs to be. The young drive our new information culture. They invented and understand new forms of media--especially the Net the the Web... They understand, too, the extraordinary power and meaning of interactivity, and how it is redefining narrative and story-telling... But journalism doesn't get it, and has resisted the idea fiercely. Newspapers, newsmagazines and TV networks haven't radically changed form or content in half a century, despite their aging audiences, and growing competition from new media sources. They are allergic to interactivity. Increasingly, it appears they are incapable of it." |
| | Katz forecast it all. The Dean campaign is everything that contemporary journalism is not. If you believe he is their worst nightmare, it's small wonder they tried to crush him like a bug. Almost every touch from Big Media has been to cheapen the Dean cause, to miss the point, to find some personal excuse not to notice the Dean movement. |
| | If anything, this election may reconfirm the preeminent role of the idiot box in American politics, just as the Bush administration is demonstrating the power of plutocracy to an extent not witnessed since Karl Rove's political hero William McKinley was elected. |
| | I have seen the past, and it still works. |
| | More brilliance follows. Read it. Here's the closer: |
| | Some of us believe that another four years of the Bush Administration might turn America into something so oligarchical that it will make Mexico look like Sweden, so broke that the dollar will buy less than the Hungarian pengo, surveillant enough to make East Germany look like a good start, and puritanical enough to make Cotton Mather feel at home. Some of us want a president who is straight about his real reasons for sending our kids off to die and kill other kids, a government that is of, for, and by more people than will fit on the Forbes list, and a military that isn't simply a private security force for the Fortune 500. We want to give our grandchildren something more than a crushing debt and a country too stripped of resources and opportunities to pay it off. The stakes seem high to us. |
| | But if we feel that way, and many of us do, we will have to knock on doors and persuade the folks inside to turn off their televisions and talk about what's really going on, just as we will have to turn off our computers occasionally to have such exchanges. If we are to restore democracy in America, we will have to get out amongst 'em and engage in it. I believe our arguments are persuasive, but we have to present them in person to the people who don't already believe us. |
| | Some of them knew pleasure
And some of them knew pain
And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered
And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge |
| | Recently I spent some time with some old friends. When I told them I had just come back from visiting the Dean Campaign in Vermont, one of them said "He's too angry." They preferred Kerry, they said, but for no reason I recall. They weren't big TV watchers, but I guessed they watched enough. |
| | Or maybe not. Maybe they understood Reality better than I did. |
| | Big Media's big story from the start hasn't been the horse race of the primaries, but the boxing match of the presidential election, in which George W. Bush defends his heavyweight title. Who to cast in the role of the challenger? |
| | Gore was the guy. He had won the last fight on points, but lost on a TKO after the final round, when the referees declared Bush the winner. |
| | But the fight was gone from Al, and Al was gone from the fight. Without Big Al, Big Media needed somebody who looked right to play the part of The Contender. Only Big John Kerry made sense. He was tall and leathery, a military veteran, a Washington insider, and a speaker gifted with the ability to paint a smooth rhetorical gloss over every contradiction — the political equivalent of an actor who never blows his lines. |
| | So Kerry was Big Media's man in the first place. And he still is. A short guy named Dean climbed in the ring, but Big Media mocked him until the crowd went boo. Two primaries later, Dean's out and Kerry's name is going up on the marquée. |
| | Meanwhile, there's the matter of that TKO: the constitutional crisis that should have happened after the last election, but didn't. Big Media would rather forget about it, but the voters won't let them. |
| | I was delivered that realization last night when I talked on the phone with another friend. She's a republican, a historian and an astute political observer. She reads a lot of blogs, but she also watches a lot of TV. After telling me that ABC pretty much "apologized" for tendentious reporting of the "Dean Scream" (I just saw Diane Sawyer do a huge mea culpa on Good Morning America, offering excerpts of the same from CNN and Fox... no useful links on the ABC News site, of course) she offered something of a Unified Field Theory that explained everything from ABC's apology to Joe Trippi's resignation to the unexpectedly large support for Kerry by voters primary states who favored Dean in the polls only a few weeks ago.... |
| | This is a recall election, she said. Dean isn't the angry one. If you want anger, look to the voters. There is an enormous resolve out there to recall George W. Bush. As we've seen in California, the country likes the straight burboun of direct democracy. The representative system failed in the last presidential election. Regardless of who won, the process was an ugly and unfair mess. Now voters see a barely-elected president with delusions of empire, preparing to keep the country in perpetual war, spending trillions in money the government doesn't have... Meanwhile the country appears headed toward a one-party state, thanks in large part to gerrymandering that deeply perverts the very principles of representative democracy. A second term for Bush will also guarantee a republican Supreme Court as well. |
| | With all that writing on the wall, neither the voters nor the democratic machine cares as much about who started the recall as they do about the recall itself — just like we saw here in California, where the recall started by Ron Unz was finished by Arnold Schwarzenegger. |
| | This indeed makes the primaries a referendum on electability. These voters are realists. Some of them use the Net, but all of them watch TV. If the TV wants to put Kerry in the ring, then Kerry's the man, for better or worse. |
| | If the counter-revolution will be televised, these voters say, then the revolution will be televised too. The job now is to get Kerry in condition. |
| | Anyway, I kinda nodded along with all of this. It made sense to me. But the Net is still there, connecting voters in more ways than ever. And connecting governance as well. |
| | The Net is the people's medium. It's where understanding is produced as well as consumed. In the long run the Net, and the people who use it best, will win. |
| | I just hope I live to see it. |
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