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Xymphora answers Trudeau's cheap shot with three of his own, two of them completely uncalled-for. Whereas herein will be found only calm and reasonable argumentation. - Anybody who's read the liberal op/ed blogs [i.e. Electrolite etc.] when a military voice checks in, as they do sometimes, especially on the Iraq situation, can witness the timorous fawning of other commentors, the relatively naked intimidation and submission it brings out in otherwise firmly positioned attitudes. They kiss ass. They want to be accepted by the stronger presence. They bend over backwards to include and be included. Imagine then the powerful sense of worth that would result from actually being accepted, from being "inside" whatever perimeter's been thrown up around the stockade. Trudeau's sneering at what most people call blogs comes from something like that I think. He clearly spent quite a bit of time with the war-wounded, drawing on that experience for his strip, and it's likely that out of that came an association with a less easily categorized group of actors on the current stage, whose concerns and attitudes would dwarf most of the public's basically simple ideas of what's what in this rapidly changing scene. Add to that his long and intimate experience of real journalists practicing real journalism, with the risks both acute and chronic that that involves versus his experience of what he thinks of as bloggers, and his attitude is pretty understandable, even if it remains a little weak for the circumstances. Considering the thousands of regular online "blog" presences that more or less meet the terms of that definition, especially the ones that have been up for more than a few years, I think it's unlikely Trudeau or anyone he knows has experienced a large enough sample of what's out there to make it statistically useful, let alone an accurate target for satiric criticism. Some of us still resist those terms, and some of us aren't as easily categorized and dismissed as Trudeau and his affinity groups would like to believe. Journalists would obviously tend toward an interest in journalism-analog web presences, and would probably tend to see that as central to the blogging "community" as well, with work like ::: wood s lot ::: being seen as peripheral, the way art and literature are seen as culturally peripheral to, and far less important than, say, the automobile or oil industries. The idea that semi-employed losers are somehow any less respectable, or their opinions any less credible - at whatever this is, and however it overlaps what journalism once was or might have been - than full-time journalists like David Brooks or Thomas Friedman, is interesting. The difference would be a paycheck I suppose, and the commitment a paycheck entails, the accountability and risk of censure or dismissal. Or the independent means that negates any need for a paycheck. But then paychecks bring a chain of command with them, no matter how liberal the employer - and doing this with a big bank account behind you would seem to be a vulnerable position right out the gate. A wealthy individual spending hours a day online sifting through current events and obscure archives would be trivialized much as the semi-employed losers Trudeau has his character scoffing at. Dilettantes versus the pros. Pros v. dilettantes, and the only other officially sanctioned place in that schema is in the audience, as an information consumer/end-user. Professionalism in that context isn't just a life path, it's a moral state, a tacit confirmation of the status quo. That rests on an assumption of the validity of current human enterprise and its direction. Real men get jobs, and of course real women do, too. And real kids get ready to get jobs. Where in that there's room for someone who feels that the current human enterprise is a suicidal rush toward oblivion, I just don't know. Here, maybe. If not here, then where? Time? The Washington Post? The New York Times? CBS? Bloggers - the voices of the possibly-soon-to-be-homeless. Losers. Who wants to hear from them? The crux of it would be the assessment of viability of things as they are - the less validity you find in the status quo, the more you have left over for alternatives. Alternatives like this, or something even newer that might come out of this, if it ferments long enough under the right conditions... See how corporate advertising has glommed on to stenciling and tagging and hip hop and those smirky/ironic late-adolescent attitudes of world-weary-irony-driven-to-reluctant-action-by-a-vestigial-sense-of-responsibility, or whatever that is. Point there being the Great Amoebic draws toward itself every threat it can recognize, to neutralize and/or co-opt, so there isn't much chance professional journalists are going to whup its ass anytime soon, not from the relatively secure vantage of its lap. Dissing non-professionals simply for being non-professionals is kind of complicitous. In a completely unrelated or-is-it note: The hierarchy Trudeau's term "semi-employed losers" operates in is a Darwinian one - that's where the winning and losing draw their content, it's a survival thing - though in this case it's survival within the petri dish of capitalism. But it's helpful to remember that the seeming finality of that winning and losing is biological before it's economic, or even social or cultural. Winning and losing in the frame Trudeau uses have more to do with reproduction and gene-survival, however masked by materialist metrics they are. The forces of anti-Darwinism are many if not legion - some overt and rhetorical, some covert and dynamic, and not all are religious. One aspect of that that needs constant expression and re-inforcement is that car wrecks are the single greatest killer of children in the US, and have been for decades. What I'd like to point out is no one wants that to be the case, no one is asking for it, voting for it, or choosing it in the aisles of the local mega-store. And yet there it is. Intention has nothing to do with it. And it's a completely non-Darwinian mortality, generally, as long as we don't consider the evolution of attributes like telepathic and pre-cognitive abilities, or divine intervention, as valid points of discussion. I'm personally of two minds about that. For this, as an address to the public, I'll stick to the practical consensus. Unintentional, non-predatory, non-pathogenic death, on the highway and street, is the main evolutionary pressure on our children at this time. What fitness is being selected for in that? And it's such an accepted part of our lives only an eccentric voice from the margins can bring it up at the meeting. No professional journalist is allowed to say that, even now. Which is why most Americans don't know that the automobile is killing their children at a greater rate than anything else is. Hello. And that's what this is to me - somewhere between a letter-to-the-editor venue and a town meeting. Use of those forums can't be restricted to the professional classes without great loss - and, like a lot of the more crucial losses we experience, what's missing won't be measurable, because it isn't real yet, it hasn't become yet. It should go without saying that a culture that's going in the wrong direction will have driven its visionaries and gadflies into the margins, and will seek to silence them there. So marginality isn't prima facie evidence of unsuitability - to the contrary. The debate as to whether or not this culture is headed in the wrong direction is over. The contest now is for the primacy of an attitude toward life, toward what we are and what we were, and toward what comes from that. Our regard for the future. Against the culture's disregard for any future other than its own. The great bulk of the currently dominant culture makes that contest almost impossibly one-sided; it has a gravitational pull that means only a rare few can be prominent and still resistant to it. The majority of the resistance will be the small and insignificant - losers, freaks, weirdos, the young, the old - the marginalized. The access to amplification this venue provides makes it potentially a very powerful tool, a weapon in that contest. That it's virtually free, compared to the requirements for officially-sanctioned journalists, means the otherwise voiceless have a chance to be heard, more than ever before. Some, many, maybe even most of those voiceless have nothing particularly constructive to say. But it doesn't take a majority to speak the truth; and out here in the margins is where the opposition to the lie is - not just the opposition to the destructive authority of the present moment, but to its vision of itself as benign and well-intentioned. That's what's disturbing to Trudeau I think, more than anyone here's lack of suitable employment or professional status. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 2:47 PM  
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