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Why shouldn’t we talk to ourselves.

These days it’s not so much, “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention,” it’s, “If you aren’t outraged, you’re on another planet entirely.” —Got to thinking after whipping off that quick’n’dirty screed against landmines yesterday—what about, you know, the nukes? The depleted uranium shells? The fact that getting all huffy about use of landmines is in a weird sort of way conceding that there will, at some point, be an invasion? (Which point I am stubbornly unwilling to concede as yet—darkest before the dawn and all that—but I am a fool.) Speaking out against landmines—which, unlike nukes, will almost certainly be used (iff); which, unlike depleted uranium, poses a much more direct long-term threat; which will pose a threat to American servicefolks during the course of the war and Iraqi people for decades thereafter—still, it seems almost misguided. A reed in the storm. Whistling the wrong way entirely as you march past a graveyard in the dark.

Or from there to the Trent Lott imbroglio: it is nice watching him squirm, yes, and it’s bleakly funny watching everyone pile on now that it’s “safe” to do so, but it doesn’t change the fact that anyone who’d been paying attention had known this about Lott for years and years and it didn’t matter one whit.That, as Slacktivist puts it, “the GOP is not segregationist because Trent Lott is its majority leader. Trent Lott rose to become majority leader because the party is segregationist.” And removing him from nominal power while satisfying will do nothing in the long run to the much larger problem of which Lott is merely a symptom. Come 2004, there’ll still be fliers passed out in Maryland and Louisiana and Mississippi and elsewhere letting black voters know that if the weather sucks on that November Tuesday, why, heck, they’ve got a week left to turn in their ballots, unless, of course, they were late in paying a bill in the past year, and Sean Hannity and E.D. Hill will still be reminding their wannabe dittoheads that the Democrats were segregationists too, back in the day, and what about that Georgia state flag?

A couple of weeks ago over at Body and Soul—one of the few blogs which should be on everyone’s morning must-read list—Jeanne d’Arc posted the back and forth of an intriguing email conversation she’d had about liberal communication that wasn’t backs-to-the-wall knives-out-and-rats’-teeth defensive (all too rare, these days), and while you should read it through if you haven’t already, but I want to muse on something d’Arc said, parenthetically, in this letter, right here: “I mean, fundamentally, it’s the quintessential feminist demand: Let us tell and interpret our own stories.” And yes—yes, it is.

Yes, but.

Thing is, telling our stories isn’t the problem. (Or interpreting them; interpretation is another way of telling a story.) You get up on your soap box (wherever it might be) and you open your mouth and you speak.

The trick is getting people to listen. To pay attention.

Because other people have bigger soap boxes and louder voices and insist on telling your stories for you and getting them all wrong, and even then the people you’re all talking to have their own ways of reading this story or that story and interpreting it for themselves, and, well. And it’s frustrating because the truth is out there and attention must be paid and so you stand tall and tell your story—and yet. They’re all yammering about John Kerry’s fucking haircut, instead.

All of which reminded me of a book I still haven’t read. (Yes, Sara. It’s on the list.) But it’s a basic concept I’m familiar with from having read pop-science books on chaos theory and the like, so I’ll pontificate out here on a limb for a moment: I think one of the things blogs do, or try to do, is seek out and cultivate tipping points. About this, that, or the other. In an attempt to build momentum and talk it up enough until (sort of like a laser, bouncing back and forth inside its ruby echo chamber until it’s powerful enough to punch out) attention is paid. It’s not the cleanest of metaphors (though it’s better than meme, I think), and the way it progresses from echo chamber to echo chamber is weird and hard to track: Trent Lott’s remarks last week were the tipping point leading to a bubbling of outrage among the cognoscenti over the views we’re known he’s had all this time, the views we’ve known his voters and his party have more or less tacitly supported, but it was a simmering fed by the one newspaper to break the news within a couple of days of its occurence. And yet it was Al Gore’s remarks on Monday that seemed to signal the tipping point for the broader mediasphere, triggering the long-delayed comments of commentators and politicians—does Gore read Atrios? —Of course, without the pressure brought to bear by the simmering blogs of the cognoscenti, it’s questionable whether Gore’s remarks could ever have tipped it. (If you feel that Lott’s half-assed apology was the tipping point, it’s questionable whether he would have felt the need to say anything had the cognoscenti not already been set to simmering. Who tipped what first?) —And now, of course, a week later, other people in my office are pissed off about something blogtopia was on top of a week ago. But how, and why, and who’s responsible? —Those, I don’t think, are even the right questions. Tipping points.Smart mobs. Flocking behavior. The divine madness of crowds. Talking to ourselves. Preaching to the choir. Fisking in the echo chamber, yo.

(And we still haven’t solved the problem.We’ve just noticed that when you say the same things over and over again in concert other people are more likely to pick up on it, which, hell, the right wing learned a long time ago. We still can’t guarantee that anyone will listen. That “our” story, my story, your story will be heard. That attention will be paid.)

(And the whole time, the heart beats more quickly. The teeth clench more tightly. “Blood pressure,” says the Spouse. But attention must be paid.)

For your consideration, then, another tipping point, or not: from Helen Thomas to the watch to Body and Soul to me to you:

Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness Program will snoop into bank records and credit card records and track purchase histories and travel patterns but it won’t violate the holy sanctity of the records of gun buyers.

Attention must be paid.

It’s just there’s so fucking much. And more of it, every day—

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