Good news.
Somewhat and sort of. Via Barry: Thanks to massive protests and lawsuits filed, they’re starting to let the detainees go.
Or, if you feel like blaming the victim, you can quote the INS party line:
“Our objective was to hold people only until we had completed confirmation of records checks,” the I.N.S. official said. “But a staggering number of people showed up on the last day and we couldn’t keep up.”
To be fair, we shouldn’t blame the INS (wholly):
An agency official in Southern California said that Justice Department officials in Washington dictated the rules of the program and gave local authorities little leeway to determine who should be detained or released. As a result, hundreds of men with minor visa violations were handcuffed and locked up for days while officials sorted through mountains of paperwork and bail applications.
Ladies and gentlemen: again, John Ashcroft.
Hug your local librarian.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) held a press conference a couple of hours ago, apparently, to announce plans for legislation that would appeal some portions of the USA PATRIOT Act that “undermine Americans’ constitutionally protected right to read and to access information without government interference”; legislation prompted by a letter from the Vermont Library Association. Nothing on Google News about it yet (as of 11ses PST on a brightening Friday), but I’m sure it’ll be top-of-the-fold on cnn.com as soon as they stop wrangling about whether the homphobic bigot or the soulless corprocrat will take over from the unintentional racist, who quit just in time to secure a committee chair. (Will he keep his promises? Let’s watch and find out!)
But this was supposed to be a brightening Friday. The count is up to 20, now, and the Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee reports some concrete progress with the City Council; yay, team. (I should maybe go sign the petition, already.) Inch by inch by whatever means at hand.
In the meanwhile, check to see if your local library is sporting these signs. Inch by inch…
Neimöller time.
Shut the fuck up. Don’t tell me I’m overreacting and don’t tell me it’s hyperbole and don’t tell me I’m dishonoring the memory of thus-and-so. And don’t you dare tell me it was illegal and they were just following the letter of the law, or I’ll pull Nuremberg out, too, and smack you silly. At a time like this, when somebody does something this monumentally stupid and it’s purportedly in my name and in yours, you damn well better believe I’m going to get purple in the face and pull all the rhetorical tricks I can muster out from up my sleeve and speak up. We are all going to speak up, dammit.
They came for the Muslims whose papers weren’t in order.
The ones who came to this country because they like it. The ones who came over to our side from that “Islamofascism” we are supposedly in a death struggle with. The ones who are trying to play by the arcane and convoluted and outdated rules. The ones you shot at and spat at and smeared in your newspaper columns, the ones you berated over and over again because they didn’t immediately apologize for something they did not do and could not imagine and would never condone. —And with the dying gasp of our INS, the first breath of our nascent Department of Homeland Security, right on the cusp of a war most of us do not want, these Muslims from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria are rounded up in mass arrests and detained—in your name, in my name—for paperwork violations. (They started to round up the Armenians, too. Then someone remembered that Armenians have some political clout and they stopped.)
Atrios is all over this one; if you know of any defense funds being raised to help these folks, please pass the word along. —And among the other links I swiped, Atrios is recommending this piece by eRiposte; read it. Now.
All I can add is outmoded history, but if you’ve read this far and you still aren’t incensed (and yet, you’re still reading), then maybe you need a refresher course in how badly the INS has handled stuff like this on a routine basis. The executive summary, from the lead article:
In a four-month investigation, The Oregonian found that the INS:
- Holds 20,000 people in a secretive and poorly monitored network of prisons and county jails that often subjects them to abuse, loses track of them and sends them from jail to jail—often far from their families and lawyers.
- Jails youthful victims of sexual abuse and other vulnerable children alongside criminal offenders—violating legal agreements to move them to safer, less restrictive facilities.
- Breaks up families by jailing or deporting relatives of U.S. citizens for minor offenses or decades-old crimes.
- Mistreats some asylum seekers, who flee persecution in their homelands only to be jailed in the United States or sent back to life-threatening situations without regard for the dangers that await.
- Tolerates racism and sexual abuse in its ranks and has one of the highest rates of misconduct among federal law-enforcement agencies.
- Allows district directors and sector chiefs such as Portland’s Beebe to run their 57 jurisdictions as fiefdoms, applying the law unevenly.
- Overworks its employees, whose low pay, grueling work conditions and difficult mission demoralize officers and invite abuse.
- Bungles immigration cases, including those of U.S. citizens who are wrongly deported and imprisoned.
And: the Oregonian’s Pulitzer notwithstanding, the Mercury would like humbly to remind you they were on the case months earlier.
Now. All this happened two years ago. The aforementioned Director David Beebe resigned after an uproar over the strip-search and detention of Chinese citizen Guo Liming, who’d been flying through Portland on a business trip. And reforms—some sparked by the Oregonian and its dam’ Pulitzer—have been attempted both locally and nationally. Though they’re rather on the back burner thanks to 911 and the birth pangs of Homeland Security. —The lesson to take from all this, then?
Speaking out works. Sort of. Provisionally. You have to keep doing it, for it to have any effect. And reforming a giant bureaucracy is hard work even if you ice a figurehead or two. But!
They came for the Muslims whose papers weren’t in order, and we spoke up, and they backed off and stopped their idiocies and remembered what it is about this country that’s supposedly so great, and if they tried a bit too hard to spin their retreat as a win-win, well, we decided not to hold it against them. Though we kept our eyes peeled for the next un-American power grab.
—Hmm. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, somehow. Nonetheless: Email. Fax. Call. Get this on the news and get people talking about it. Spread the word. Go!
An interesting wrinkle,<br /> <em>or,</em> Again with the posse.
So Norah Vincent riffs on an old Jackson Browne lyric uncredited and Charles Pierce emails James Capozzolla pointing this out and Capozzolla decides to rib Vincent about it and posts Pierce’s email in its entirety with the headline or rather subhead “Norah Vincent: Jackson Browne Fan—And Plagiarist?” and now Vincent is tut-tutting over the outrageous slings and arrows that are let fly at established Fourth Estaters from the unwashed, the unpoliced, the unshackled. (Yes, I know blogtopia is self-policed by a fairly neat and effective smart-mob mechanism. But “self-washed, self-policed, self-shackled” just doesn’t have the same ring.)
—For the record, and not that anyone asked: I don’t think what Vincent did to Jackson Browne was plagiarism. Then, I live for the oddball allusion and the kick that the echo of a half-remembered snippet of something else can add to a piece. Nothing new under the sun and Fair Use and Devil take the hindmost or hang the consequences or whatever. Capozzolla was if a wee bit disingenuous still quite right to put that question mark after “Plagiarist?” But! Were someone to tag me for, oh, I dunno, stealing a parenthetical aside from Delany (it was just sitting there, honest, so plump and digressive), well, I’d cheerfully own up to it. And on we go to the next. —Not obsessively stew over it with conflicting rationales for a couple of days and then drag it back into the spotlight when online Wall Street Journal content is successfully held liable for libel in Australia. Dirty pool, that is, and we’re not even taking into account her refusal thus far to name those she accuses of the smearage.
So Capozzolla is right to take the incident apart in a fine and mighty dudgeon, and Vincent’s editor would do well to maybe take his phone calls on the matter.
(Psst. Mr. Capozzolla? Not to get all pedantic or nothin’, but it’s never “the hoi polloi.” Just “hoi polloi.” Verb. sap. and all. Not that anyone asked. But.)
Round up a posse and head ’em off at the pass.
David Brin has written about how we’re on the cusp of another age of amateurs: how coming advances in technology and information management (and coming variations on current technology and information management) will make it easier and cheaper and better for impassioned amateurs than detached professionals to do whatever it is you want to get done. And we’re seeing that already to be sure in fields such as music distribution, where the RIAA is busily trying to prevent impassioned amateurs from muscling in on their market. (Yes, that’s a heavily slanted and opinionated assessment of the situation. So sue me.)
More interesting, I think, at the moment, is what’s happening in the field of news and reporting and punditry. To put it bluntly: the amateur schmoes are cleaning the pros’ clocks.
We’ve seen the handwriting on the wall rendered loud and clear in the Trent Lott Imbroglio, and now we’re seeing a curious side effect in its aftermath, as various pros scratch their heads and ask each other, “Who was that masked man?” They’re trying to pin this scalp on one of the pros, moonlighting as the pseudonymous Atrios over at the Mighty Middle C, because the alternative is (as yet) unthinkable: that, as Mr. Capozzolla says in that Rittenhouse Review piece, “a man with a full-time job and career aside from his weblog—i.e., Atrios—has done so much to outshine the purported ‘professionals’ of our punditocracy.” —And as for the job the pros themselves are doing: well. The Daily Howler is as usual doing an incomparable job of showing just how far below the fold they’re falling, these days. (To name but one example.)
It’s hardly as simple as that (it never is); some of the amateurs are also pros and some of the pros are acting like amateurs and as far as the Affaire d’Lott goes, everyone who is in a position to know where it all began agrees that The Note kicked it all off with their squib on Thurmond’s birthday. But in an age that sees ethics burnished by a century or so of professional journalism rapidly brushed aside in the name of higher ratings and bigger market shares and headlines that don’t “impact” the bottom line, you’re going to have to depend more and more on the unpoliced, unwashed, unshackled schmoes to kick up the ruckuses that need kicking. (Rucki?) —Certainly, if anyone ends up claiming this scalp, I’m betting it’ll be some part-time “amateur” like Hesiod or Dwight Meredith, and not a member of our once-proud, ever-more-compromised Fourth Estate.
Fort Disconnect.
“Eighty-seven thousand dollars?” says Valerie. She has the office next door and two kids and a house out over the hills and a husband who also works full-time. She’s talking about this. (Really, it’s $87,510. If you live in Virginia, the state government will pick up an additional $3,937.95 in sales tax. There’s no shipping and handling, but it’ll take 12 weeks or so to make arrangements with the artisan to have it built on your property. So you’ve pretty much missed the holiday deadline, if you were hoping otherwise.) And before we get too much further, I should probably make it clear that I have nothing against said artisan or people who have the wherewithal to pay $2,870 for a credenza or $8,980 for a trundle bed or $15,492.50 for a toy Range Rover or even people who spend more than my good friend Amy blew on a house for a backyard fort. (Amy works full-time for the county. Her housemate and swiggee is getting a law practice off the ground. No kids, but two cats, and we all know how cats are.) And I don’t have anything against the people who are trying to make a buck off selling the most extraordinary children’s furnishings in the world. (Aside from perhaps a lingering resentment at yet another attempt to provide “an unparalleled on-line shopping experience.”) —I’m as eat-the-rich as the next guy, but let’s face it: when you’re projecting $3 million in annual sales, you’re not moving too many toy Range Rovers or backyard fortilaces or probably not even $2,100 Silver Stream prams. Those are showpieces, wowpieces, beautiful chimeræ that you can order, yeah, sure, but are really just there to build buzz and get the punters in the door, lending a burnish of class and elegance (with a soupçon of crass consumerism) so they feel a sympathetic shiver as they pony up for $136 lamps and $30 backpacks and $60 rugs. So: no potshots at Posh Tots.
I have an altogether other purpose.
Go back to Posh Tot’s front page and note with what pride they spotlight the items ordered through them that grace the baby nook of Rachel and Ross’s apartment on Friends. The Black Toile Adult Glider, the Classic Changing Chest, the Retro Crib, the Silver Cross Ascot Stroller, the (handpainted) Princess Wallhanging, the Sir Lance-a-Trot, Jr. Ruminate for a moment on this: an untenured professor of pæleontology and a middle manager in purchasing for a large clothing concern—or is she still with Ralph Lauren? I don’t follow the show that religiously—these two middle class low-rent bobos are spending $3,598 on six classy, high-ticket items for baby Emma. (Even with the rent on their spacious West Village apartment.)
I’m a project manager for a small legal database firm these days (apparently, I’m also something of a paralegal now, or something); I also freelance as a designer and a writer (I swear, Brett, I’m working on it! Honest!). The Spouse is in addition to being a world-renowned cartoonist (and you know what that pays) is a production designer for an industrial design firm. We have two cats and too much house. We’re middle class low-rent bobos, and when people ask us these days when we’re going to have a kid we kind of shrug and say well, we’re no longer trying not to. We’re not taking temperatures and eyeing calendars and scheduling nookie, but we’ve given it some thought and crunched some numbers and shrugged and said we can do it, if. It won’t be a drunken accident that catches us utterly by surprise and totally throws our lives and finances out of whack for the entertainment of millions of viewers each week.
Even so, I gotta tell you: no way in hell can we even begin to think of dropping $3,598 on a stroller and a rocking horse and a toile glider and a crib and a changing chest and a handpainted original one-of-a-kind wallhanging.
(Of course, Rachel is in purchasing. Maybe she cut a deal.)
We live much better on TV and in the movies than we do in real life. Delany made a point somewhere or other that I’d quote if I hadn’t loaned my copy of Shorter Views to John that almost all forms of storytelling deriving from the 19th century European tradition (I’m on a limb on that on; I’m remembering the vague boundaries of the class he referred to, and not how he articulated it) take great if unconscious pains to make the protagonist’s class and level of income at least vaguely clear within the first few pages. (Try it out yourself: pick up a book in any genre and watch for the telltale clues. It’s interesting. Now try to imagine telling a story that doesn’t.) —In television, and in the movies, it’s more insidious; the narrative clues of job and responsibility and finances are divorced from their visual cues, dissolved in a general haze of meticulous art direction and product placement. (Think of all the offices on TV workplace sitcoms, which look like the net bubble never burst with their exposed brickwork and Aeron chairs and iMacs—hell, remember the G4 Cube? There were more of those on TV shows than ever actually got sold, I think.) It’s a false image, an eidolon, a fevre dream that can’t stand up to the real: a haze of upper middle class accoutrements with no clear accounting of how they were acquired (we got that easy chair and the sleeper sofa as an apartment warming gift from Jenn’s mother, who anyway wanted somewhere to sleep when she visited us; those bookshelves—the two black ones we bought on sale at Office Depot, but the other two we got in the “divorce” from the household, after carting them around Massachusetts and across the country; the TV set is almost 20 years old; the Fiestaware we registered for our wedding, and Jenn’s grandmother got us most of it; the masks there on the wall were a gift from my parents; the brass table was $20 at a yardsale, helluva find); workplace comedies filled with people whose home lives we never see—where they spend the money they make, or how (or how much), though they always have choice clothes; utter disconnections between the jobs they nominally hold and the wacky situations their impulsive purchases land them in (that untenured professor of pæleontology snapping up an apothecary’s table at Pottery Barn, say). It’s a different world, a disjointed world, and when a show takes a step out of it—even a tiny one—it’s news, it’s a hook, it’s Roseanne or Drew Carey and not much else. (Okay. Malcolm in the Middle.)
But there’s reasons for this and there’s escapism and people aren’t blind sheep working themselves into an early grave for material comforts that will never be enough—they are, but that’s not really where I’m trying to go with this, either, any more than the eat the rich bit. It’s that image of another world, it’s the glass screen between them that I want you to keep in mind. Because when the folks inside the Beltway say that Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) is from another world, I think it’s because they’re in the mediated one. The one where you can buy apothecary’s tables on a whim and $600 bed linens for your 6-year-old daughter, no sweat. It’s not so much thinking that everyone is rich as it is having trouble imagining what not being rich looks like and feels like. Those $12,000 per annum lucky duckies have everything they could ever need, right? They look so happy on TV…
And Kaptur, of course, is from ours. We are the other world.
(Oh, hell. What am I saying? Of course it’s fucking obscene to spend $87,000 on a backyard fort. Jesus. Eighty-seven thousand dollars. Off with their heads.)
Goddam.
Jeanne d’Arc has a killer, must-read piece on Trent Lott and Lady Day and how it is you mean the words that come out of your mouth. —The only thing I’d add (presumptuous cretin that I am) is how maybe we should take a close look at Lott’s heir presumptive and maybe start singing “Oklahoma Goddam,” too.
Are you feeling lucky, ducky?
Read the lips of an administration that promised to “take down the tollgate on the road to the middle class”:
Lindsey compared the Social Security tax to a deposit in a neighborhood bank’s Christmas Club. In such clubs, periodic deposits are returned in a lump sum during the holiday season, and Lindsey said no one would consider such deposits a tax.
Rush Limbaugh is after your paycheck. So is the Wall Street Journal. And now the Mayberry Machiavellis are “working up more sophisticated distribution tables that are expected to make the poor appear to be paying less in taxes and the rich to be paying more.” —What is it about the tenor of the times that makes naked class warfare seem a sane, sensible, politically driven approach?
You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot,
Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our last!
I’d’ve maybe voted for “The Carol of the Bells,” which is deliciously sinister if done properly (ignore the pasted-on English lyrics and instead keep Poe in mind: “The tintinnabulation of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells—”), or maybe I’d’ve gone with “The St. Stephen’s Day Murders,” but Barry, damn his eyes, went and wrote a surprisingly touching pæan to Irving Berlin’s spectacular perennial, “White Christmas.” So now I’m all discombobulated and don’t know what to vote for. (Rumors that George Winston’s December slips onto my turntable at this time of year for repeated playings when no one else is around are scurrilous at best.)
Rude, crude, and dangerous to know.
This one’s for former Buffalonian Kevin “Blarg” Moore: the Buffalo Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2002. Too much sports and a peculiarly vitriolic hatred of John Ritter, but hey, it’s 50 people; you’re going to find some quibbles. The entry on Ari Fleischer alone is (scatalogically) worth the price of admission. Which is free. But you get my point.
The game of us and them.
And, finally, as we know, Democrats have had plenty of harsh words about Trent Lott’s remarks at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party. But Bill Clinton got in a more light-hearted dig.
Our Jonathan Karl reports that the former president offered this line at a benefit last night at the Robert Kennedy Memorial—quote. Mr. Clinton, he said: “When Robert Kennedy ran for president, we supported him. We’re proud of it. And if he had lived and been elected, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” —Judy Woodruff, Inside Politics.
Well, anyway. It’s hoot-worthy line. Thanks, Atrios.
Let X = the number of Music Products purchased at full price between 1995 and 2000—
It’s not that I don’t think class-action lawsuits are a good idea—flawed though they are, they’re frequently the only way a wronged class of individuals can take on the armies of lawyers that cool their heels in the halls of large corporations. (While we’re all up in arms over judicial nominations and Total Information Awareness and the ghosts of the Ford Administration come to exact their due, we should also keep an eye out for what the RNC has planned by way of “curbing civil liability”—a somewhat more honest term than “tort reform,” methinks. [“You should not have a local judge in a county issuing a ruling that affects hundreds of millions of dollars in business across the country,” says the chief lobbyist for our US Chamber of Commerce. —Why on earth not?])
No, this rubs me the wrong way because these guys are getting away with year after year after year of price-gouging (going back much further than the stipulated date of 1995) by paying out no more than $20 to each and every qualified member of the class—and all without admitting any wrong-doing whatsoever. (As for not engaging in this practice in the future—why are you laughing? What’s so funny?)
“Continued litigation would only consume millions of dollars of company resources at a time when (Universal’s) executive energy and business focus are better spent providing consumers with compelling music,” said multinational corporation Universal regarding the settlement. Yeah, whatever. Fill out a claim form if you like, but if you get your check, I’d suggest blowing your $20, or your $10, or your $5 on a symbolic gesture. Get some music from Janis Ian, maybe. Or go see some local kids, as yet unsigned. Or hell—buy a book.
—via MetaFilter.
An apology—
—to all my co-workers, since once more I’m listening to “Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, Like Antennas to Heaven...” off the album of the same name by Godspeed You Black Emperor!
“(...more awkward pirouettes in the general direction of hope + joy...)” —Yeah. Sometimes. Pretty much, yeah.
Because you might need a giggle as much as I do.
From this priceless article, found thanks to Atrios:
The biggest sign, though, that LeBoutillier and Co. have no interest in the “real truth” is the description of the proposed “exit room,” which will purportedly depict an “exact recreation of the White House as the Clintons’ left it—trashed, damaged and defiled. ... We will recreate this to show—in the most vivid manner possible—just how much damage the Clintons did to ‘the people’s house.’” (Italics theirs.)
—It is worth noting that the improper apostrophe after “Clintons” is also sic, sic, sic. It is also (perhaps?) worth noting the inevitable Lott connection.
Now none of youse has any excuse.
For a good long time now, those of us who are blessed with God’s own computer and are in “the know” have blithely typed our simple text into the marvelous Tex Edit and then scrubbed it briskly with Dean Allen’s invaluable AppleScripts for web writing. It’s how you get decent punctuation and alternate characters and some small modicum of typographic competence on the web (plus easy linkin’) without having to remember the dam’ Unicode for an em-dash (——in case you were wondering) or whether you closed that strong tag three words back (oops).
But the unwashed heathens—or those of us who have to close our sleek little iBooks and trudge our way to day jobs in a stodgy, Gated world—were left bereft, forced to rely on our own meager (meagre?) devices.
Until now. —Mr. Allen has concocted a simple web-based Perl thingie that takes text you drop in and Unicodes it and wraps it with a decent assortment of happy tags. Post sparkling text with proper punctuation (and diacriticals!) to the web from anywhere at all.
So if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to get up, put on some pants, go to work, and pretend to do this-that-or-the-other while tinkering with this happy little toy on an infernal, fenestral device.
So much for space cowboys.
It’s official: Fox isn’t ordering any more episodes of Firefly.
update— What The Man has to say on the subject. Fingers crossed and wood veneer knocked.
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.
It’s just there’s so fucking much. And more of it, every day—
