June 01, 2007
My Dream Date with Bill O'Reilly
Where were we? Right, the blowback from my Los Angeles Times editorial ("Wimps, wussies and W.: How Americans' infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences," May 3, 2007).
I learned a few tough-love lessons from My Dream Date with Bill O'Reilly.
(By the way, The Radio Factor's transcripts and audiofiles are available exclusively to paid-up members of the Fox Nation. A subscription gives you all-areas access to Bill's World, not to mention a pitchfork, a chain-mail tunic, and front-row seats at Saruman's next Nuremberg rally. But for those of you interested in my gentlemanly smackdown with O'Reilly, send an e-mail and I'll send audioclips in RealPlayer format, as attachments. Of course, you'll have to have RealPlayer to play them.)
And I took a few pearls of wisdom away from the Reich-wing hate mail I received, much of it in screaming, spittle-flecked CAPSLOCK, all syntactical trainwrecks and grammatical spaz attacks, like those epic Sharpie-marker screeds that your friendly neighborhood Manson-eyed homeless guy used to staple to telephone poles when he was off his meds.
From O'Reilly, I learned that I'M MORE NAIVE ABOUT THE FOX NATION, BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, THAN I EVER SUSPECTED. For example, O'Reilly called me a "communist," like, five times, deadpanning, "I'm not using that in a pejorative way...I have nothing against communists," all because I say on the AUTHOR page of this site that I'm "deeply committed to a progressive politics whose calls for social justice, economic equality, and environmental action are founded on a tough-minded critique of the catastrophic effects of multinational capitalism." During the interview, I was at pains to point out to Mister Bill that, since Buchanan, Perot, and other nabobs of nativism have inveighed against the yawning chasm between CEO and wage-slave salaries as well as the global race to the bottom of the wage pyramid, calls for economic equity and critiques of multinational capitalism aren't exactly the Mark of the Commie Beast, right about now. Naturally, my argument was just so much static to Bill, who blinked, then recommenced shelling.
I was naive enough to think that this sort of paleoconservative red-baiting was buried under McCarthy's gob-streaked tombstone, or at least under Khrushchev's. I mean, Moscow fell to McDonald's without firing of a shot, China's parvenu bourgeoisie are buying up SUV's as fast as Detroit can turn them out, and Castro's playing Peter Falk playing a paranoid, cigar-chewing banana-republic dictator in that old Twilight Zone episode. The last of America's red-hot Marxists are either cowering under Bill O'Reilly's bed or tenured members of the professoriat; not since Eugene Debs walked the earth has the Archie Bunker demographic viewed the Left with anything but cordial contempt, if not the paranoid fear and loathing of the John Bircher, and I say that as a Leftist, for chrissakes. I mean, I love Mike Davis like a brother, and Terry Eagleton is my homeboy, but compare their royalty statements to Anne Coulter's if you want a reality check about how big a neighborhood threat Marxism really poses, beyond the fever dreams of a few swoony grad students. So how can O'Reilly use an Atomic Cafe-era smear like "commie" with a straight face? Is he just playing a throwback to the era of blacklists and bomb shelters, chuckling all the way to the bank? Or is the Fox Nation so cretinous that it really, truly equates calls for economic justice with being a "loopy" (unquote) commie? Clearly, I need to spend more time in O'Reilly Country, taking the pulse of the average orc.
I also learned, when O'Reilly asked if I was gay (because my LAT essay inveighs against homophobia), that ONLY GAYS CAN DECRY HOMOPHOBIA. In other words, if a public intellectual (a pompous sobriquet, but there it is) makes the case against an anxious American masculinity that defines itself in neurotic opposition to wimps, wussies, and fags, he's got to be a homo. Incredibly, neither O'Reilly nor his legions of flying monkeys seem to have Clue One about the homophobia inherent in the presumption that anyone arguing against homophobia must, by definition, be a homosexual. Somewhere, the founding fathers of the Enlightenment are weeping tears of blood into Diderot's Encyclopedie...
Finally, I learned that WHEN YOU PASS THROUGH THE COSMIC BUNNYHOLE BETWEEN FACT-BASED REALITY AND FOX REALITY, YOU FIND YOURSELF IN A PARALLEL WORLD WHERE IRONY IS AN ALIEN NOTION AND HYPOCRISY EXCLUSIVE TO THE LEFT. After thumping his tub angrily about "secular progressives'" underhanded tactic of smearing their opponents rather than debating their ideas, O'Reilly proceeded to invalidate my ideas by...demonizing me as a loony commie. The "hysteria building around the secular progressive movement has basically said, 'Look, if you don't agree with us...we're going to find a way to put a psychological tag on you that will marginalize you,'" said O'Reilly. "The only thing that you'll hear through all the cacophony is someone calling someone a nasty name." Then he proceeded to characterize me as "a communist" who "hates Bush," just some nutty professor who's "nothing," really, "just some bloviator down at NYU who wants the United States to be a communist country." That's right, Bill. I, and my dark hordes won't rest until the red flag flaps from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Karl is Lord, our godless atheism notwithstanding.
Finally, from the right-wing mouth-breathers who sent me mash notes from all over this fair land of ours, I learned that
THE IRONY OF ASKING IF THE AUTHOR OF AN ARTICLE ABOUT HYSTERICAL, HOMOPHOBIC MASCULINITY IS GAY IS LOST ON MOST CONSERVATIVE READERS, INCLUDING THE GUY WHO THOUGHT HE COULD SIDLE UP TO MY INBOX, WHEN I WASN'T LOOKING, AND SLYLY TRICK ME INTO REVEALING THE SORDID SECRET OF MY SEXUALITY WHEN MY GUARD WAS DOWN:
Sir:
I really enjoyed your article today in the LA Times. My question to you, sir, are you gay?Alex ------
I also learned that
MY ARGUMENT IS INVALID BECAUSE WHEN YOU'RE GOING MANO A MANO WITH A TOWELHEADED JIHADI, YOU DON'T WANT A GIRLYMAN COVERING YOUR, UH, ASS
Mark,Just read your LA Times piece. Very interesting. One quick question for which I'm sure you have an answer. If you were to go 2 on 2 with a couple of Islamofascists in a Baquba alley, would you pick a.) W., b.) Harry Reid, c.) Steny Hoyer, or d.) Dick Durbin? (Nancy Pelosi is not a vialble choice.)
You can only pick one. Hopefully, you wouldn't be flumoxed by the choice.
Regards,
John ------
No, John, I'm not at all "flumoxed" [sic]. But I can't help wondering why Pelosi isn't on our dance card. Maybe I've been cruising too many MILF sites, but I'd much rather spend a few idle hours in a Baquba alley with the leggy Speaker of the House than any of the gentlemen you mention, none of whom are my type.
Next, I learned that
The trouble with manhood "American-style" is that the wussies have indeed taken over and "balls" simply are not an important portion of the anatomy for anyone left of center in this country.My best to you,
Sue, California
And my best to you, Sue! One thing worries me, though: Why the ironic quotes around balls? Are you implying that, while the Left has none, the Right has only faux balls---"balls," rather than true-blue balls? A scary thought! I don't know which is worse---no balls, or Stepford balls, just lurking there in the shadows between our legs, passing as the Real Thing. Spooooooky. Please keep me posted on the state of America's balls, Sue. I sleep a little better knowing you've got your unblinking eye on American manhood's low-slung undercarriage.
I also learned that I SUFFER FROM W. ENVY, because I had some mean-spirited, snark-monkey fun in my LAT op-ed with G. Gordon Liddy's approving remarks about the size of the Presidential Package in that photo of W. in a flight suit, I have "the hots for President Bush," according to some bottom-feeder on AOL. "Dery definitely seems to be in a crouch...over the presidential crotch." Maybe that's because liberal "men on magazine covers require air-brushing in the crotch area in order to create the illusion of having balls," whereas "W. didn't require any help in this area. In the pilot jumpsuit, his manhood spoke for itself. Lib men have to be airbrushed even in a Speedo in order to project their manhood. They must suffer from W. envy."
And there you have it, dear reader. The yahoos have spoken. Vox bacilli.
There is a silver lining to this cloud: According to his producer, Big Bad Bill rilly, rilly, rilly didn't want to like me, but just couldn't help himself. To his horror, he liked me, he really liked me, his producer confided. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?
Posted by Mark Dery at 10:25 AM
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May 03, 2007
Testosterone Poisoning
First there was this ("Wimps, wussies, and W. : How Americans' infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences," in The L.A. Times).
It features the following choice morsel, calculated to turn the nearest right-wing shark tank into bloody chum:
SO THERE'S a smoking crater where Don Imus used to sit. That's fine with those of us who never understood the appeal of his grizzled-codger shtick, which always sounded like Rooster Cogburn reading "The Turner Diaries" anyway. But if we're going to administer a ritual flaying to every blowhard who channels the ugly American id, why has a hate-speech Touretter like Ann Coulter escaped the skinning knife?
Then there was this, live from Darwin's waiting room, in my Inbox:
I recently read your sniveling article, Mark. Sounds to me like you got your panties in a wad, your freaking sissy boy. You better not bring yourself to Ann Coulter's attention, because she will rip your ass apartJohn -----
Atlanta
Then there was this: Ken ------
Charleston, SCHomosexuals need to grow thicker skins. When are people going to come to the realization that most folks simply have trouble differentiating what somebody is (homosexual) from who he is. Unfortunately, many of the, so called, "girliemen" reveal themselves to be angry and hateful ultra-libs. Precisely the mirror image of those they accuse of being "homophobes." That aside, let Imus and Coulter toss insults all they want. There is a market for it. Just like there is a ready market out there for the kind of "wussy" tripe you just published in the LA Times.
And: Dick ------
San DiegoDear Markie: If all American males were like you in 1941, half the US would be speaking Japanese and the other half would be speaking German. The America they hate gives wimps, wussies and faggots the best living environment on earth.
San Diego! My old stomping grounds! The town Gore Vodal immortalized as "the Vatican of the John Birch Society!"
Anyway, you get the idea. There's more---much, much more---where that came from.
Then Bill O'Reilly's radio show called, asking me to be on today's show at 1 PM EST.
And I said yes, Bob help me.
Posted by Mark Dery at 10:46 AM
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March 31, 2005
Sign of the Times
Cleveland billboard, "liberated" by unindicted co-conspirators inspired by POPaganda: The Art & Crimes of Ron English. A documentary about billboard bandit and agit-pop artist Ron English by filmmaker and media activist Pedro Carvajal, POPaganda played to a sold-out house at The Cleveland International Film Festival. (Image courtesy Pedro Carvajal.)
By my lights, Ron English's work sometimes veers too close to that Jeff Koonsian precipice where irony sheds its air quotes and becomes the very McKitsch it parodied. His schlockoid love of black-velvet chiaroscuro and hyperrealistic F/X make him the Salvador Dali of culture jamming, a Groucho Marxist whose obvious delight in skewering sacred cows is matched only by his tireless self promotion. But if his exuberantly gauche "popaganda," tailor-made for the self-consciously badass Juxtapoz crowd, sometimes seems as subtle as a flying mallet, his detourned billboards are Improvised Exploding Devices, strapped to the soft undercarriage of our Society of the Spectacle. Wander through English's gallery of defaced, refaced billboards and feel the love.
Posted by Mark Dery at 10:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBackMarch 29, 2005
Origin of the Specious
Last night, a funny thing happened on the way to a Seinfeld re-run: I grazed past the PBS Newshour and got sucked into a report on the god-botherers' latest incursion into America's classrooms.
Usually, watching the Newshour's fair and balanced roundtables of pale, male thinktank flacks, national security hawks, and below-the-beltway practitioners of Kissingerian realpolitik debate the issues from every angle—feckless center, right, far-right, and kill-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out ultra-right—is my idea of blunt cranial trauma.
But "Creation Conflict in Schools," Newshour correspondent Jeffrey Brown's look at "how some biology teachers are handling the hot-button debate" over Darwinian evolution and creation "science," got my attention.
For those not up on late-breaking news from the Bronze Age, creationism is the so-let-it-be-written, so-let-it-be-done version of the origin of life, dearly beloved of flat-earth fundies everywhere. In my ponderous opinion, the heartland taliban's tireless attempts to roll back what few gains the Enlightenment has made, here in God's Country, merit constant media vigilance. So, gnawing the bloody-rare remains of the paschal lamb left over from Easter, I watched the Newshour report, praying that the religous right—the poster children for our Age of Unenlightenment—hadn't managed, at last, to snuff out the candle of rationalism.
The segment was the usual Snoozehour fare, long on whats, wheres, and whens and short on whys. It gave way too much airtime over to excerpts from a slick, computer-animated video produced by The Discovery Institute, ID'd by Brown as "a Seattle-based think tank" that promotes the theory of intelligent design, voguish in anti-Darwinian circles. "Today, powerful technologies reveal elaborate microscopic worlds," the video's scientific-sounding Voice of Authority intones. "The complexity of the cells is such that Charles Darwin could never have imagined." Brown explains, "In this DVD, intelligent design proponents claim that newly identified mechanisms of cell structure suggest more intricacy than natural selection can account for. And this, they say, puts Darwin's theory in doubt."
Yeah? And that whackjob two straphangers to your right—the wall-eyed Jeremiah in the handcrafted tinfoil skullcap, gibbering incoherently about MK-ULTRA—knows, just knows, that CIA mind controllers are broadcasting, live, to his pineal gland. Do we give him equal time, too? Since when do we allow pre-Copernican quack science to go unchallenged in the name of a specious journalistic "balance"? The Newshour's refusal to whistle in some Santa Fe Institute poindexter to rebut the Institute's wetbrained balderdash with a crash course in Complexity Theory for Dummies (yes, Virginia, complex phenomena can arise from the interaction of seemingly simple elements) is as inexcusable as it is inexplicable, a big, fat failure of journalistic nerve.
But more disturbing still is the program's silence on the crypto-creationist agenda of The Discovery Institute. Brown's blandly matter-of-fact ID ("a Seattle-based think tank") leads viewers to infer that the Institute is a dissident voice within the scientific community, boldly going where the unfashionable evidence leads it, Darwinian orthodoxy—irony of ironies, the new secular fundamentalism—be damned. A quote from Institute spokesperson Stephen Meyer underscores that impression: "We're seeking the best explanation of the phenomenon, whatever that might be. Follow the evidence wherever it leads."
Nothing could be further from the truth than the implication that the Discovery Institute is merely a "Seattle-based think tank." In her April 2002 article "The Newest Evolution of Creationism: Intelligent design is about politics and religion, not science" (in Natural History magazine, published by the American Museum of Natural History), Barbara Forrest asserts that the Institute, through its Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC), is a prime mover in the creationists' stealth campaign to insinuate biblical literalism into public-school science curriculums:
Launched by Phillip E. Johnson's book Darwin on Trial (1991), the intelligent-design movement crystallized in 1996 as the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC), sponsored by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Seattle think tank. Johnson, a law professor whose religious conversion catalyzed his antievolution efforts, assembled a group of supporters who promote design theory through their writings, financed by CRSC fellowships. According to an early mission statement, the CRSC seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its damning cultural legacies."
Conceding defeat on the traditional killing field of peer-reviewed scientific journals, where anyone with a B.A. in evolutionary biology could hand the creationists their heads, the CRSC has cannily done an end-run around the scientifically literate, conducting its battle for the hearts and souls of the American public in the media arena, where journalists (like the Newshour's Brown) too often give them a pass in the name of a false "objectivity" (not to mention their own ignorance of scientific subjects). Forrest describes the CRSC media strategy as a "wedge" strategy, "analogous to a wedge that splits a log—meaning that intelligent design will liberate science from the grip of 'atheistic naturalism.'" She writes,
Ten years of Wedge history reveal its most salient features: Wedge scientists have no empirical research program and, consequently, have published no data in peer-reviewed journals (or elsewhere) to support their intelligent-design claims. But they do have an aggressive public relations program, which includes conferences that they or their supporters organize, popular books and articles, recruitment of students through university lectures sponsored by campus ministries, and cultivation of alliances with conservative Christians and influential political figures.
In a media age, truth is forged in the foundry of public opinion. By presenting the Institute as an "objective"—nay, even scientifically courageous—actor in the pitched battle between the voices of sweet reason and those who will not rest until every knee bows and tongue confesses that Darwin's dangerous idea is a rotting heap of falsehoods, the PBS Newshour deprives its viewers of an essential piece of this story. Worse yet, it (unwittingly?) furthers the covert agenda of the crypto-creationist Institute.
If you're On a Mission From God about this sort of thing, let the Newshour know, via e-mail to newshour at pbs dot org. (Bear in mind that your comments are more likely to be taken seriously if you maintain a civil, reasoned tone.)
Posted by Mark Dery at 10:37 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBackDecember 21, 2004
The Being John Malkovich Effect
Why blog? First problem: the word, second only to org in its mortifying dorkiness. (Speaking of which, isn't an "org" one of those seafaring enclaves formerly headed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who hightailed it to the high seas "to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness and ability," far from the distracting attentions of the IRS)? "Blog" sounds like a portmanteau for some clammy new fetish, best left undescribed—an unhappy hybrid of blob and flog. Yeah, I know it's short for "weblog," but who calls journals "logs," anyway, except the glassy-eyed minions in sea orgs or people who begin their diary entries with stardates?
Second, there's the gnawing fear that anyone who blogs is fated to become one of those tub-thumping Alpha Wonks who've given the medium a bad name—you know, those self-declared Masters of Their Own Domain whose poured-concrete prose, cosmic sense of self-importance, and weird refusal to use contractions makes them sound like the genetically engineered offspring of Roger Rosenblatt and Galactus ("My journey is ended! This planet shall sustain me until it has been drained of all elemental life! So speaks Galactus!") So what if Instapundit gets more hits than God? Would you want to be trapped in steerage, on Jet Blue, next to one of these self-styled Masters of the Universe with an Opinion About Everything?
Worse yet, you might wake up to find yourself blogging about...blogging! Going to Bloggercon (a name whose similarity to "Starcon" is way too close for comfort) and listening to other blogwonks maunder on about wuffie-hoarding and social networking and then..blogging about it! Live! From the convention floor!
Look, I know I'm not fit to polish Clay Shirky's power laws, nor to touch the hem of Siva Vaidhyanathan's garment. I abject myself before the terrible grandeur of Josh Marshall, Jason Kottke, Wonkette, and Bruce Sterling(on his good days). And yeah, yeah, blogging is our Last, Best Hope for citizen journalism, Seizing the Mode of Production and Speaking Truth to Power without changing our underwear for days at a span. But Sweet Jesus, why do most of the revolution's standard bearers have to be so skin-crawlingly geeky? Why do most of the Power Bloviators who've become the angry white poster boys for blogging look as if, just a few short years ago, they were off to Klingon Language Camp with a song in their hearts? (Is it mere coincidence that one of the seminal screeds on blogging is John Hiler's "Borg Journalism: We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated"?)
So why blog? Certainly not because blogging is fated to swallow journalism whole and burp up A.M. Rosenthal's bowtie. The best thing about blogging is that it's not journalism. Or, if it is, it's a viral strain of journalism, cultured in the agar of the Net, that resembles no journalism we know. Sure, blogging can serve as a corrective to the ideological blind spots and commercial orientation of the corporate media monopoly, Fact Checking Their Asses and Working the Ref and restoring some semblance of balance in the absence of the Fairness Doctrine.
But bloggers who want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab a clue from Chris Allbritton and haul their larval, jack-studded flesh up out of their Matrix-like pods and do some goddamn reporting instead of just getting all meta about Instapundit's post about The Daily Kos's post about Little Green Footballs's post about the vast left-wing media conspiracy's latest act of high treason. It's the Yertle the Turtle syndrome: Pundits stacked on top of pundits on top of pundits, all the way down, and, at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly hack who kicked off the whole frenzy of intertextuality: the reporter who dared venture out of the media airlock to collect some samples of Actual, Reported Fact.
Who can argue with Dan Gillmor's call for a grassroots journalism, a peer-to-peer alternative to the radically deregulated, massively consolidated Murdochian horror that currently passes for the newsmedia? But it sure as hell isn't going to come from political-pundit and media-wonk bloggers, who with some notable exceptions represent More of The Same: the same gel-headed, glittery eyed weasels who make a career out of torching straw men on Scarborough Country and Sean Hannity; the same attacking heads who reduce each other to chum in what passes for debate on Firing Line; the same corporate flacks, thinktank drones, and bowtie-and-braces neocons who represent the full spectrum of political opinion (from zero-forehead centrism to the far, frothing right) on the PBS Newshour; and worst of all, the same Barcalounger-bound Masters of the Universe who feel well qualified to hold forth on any subject, no matter how arcane. Too much blogging—at least, the blogwonkery embraced by the mainstream media—looks too much like the jowly, sclerotic old white guys in tortoiseshell glasses or the lunging, in-your-face young white guys who already rule the mediaverse. Is this the bottom-up, many-to-many revolution we were promised? Another dictatorship of the commentariat? Another grotesque hypertrophy of the chattering class? None for me, thanks. You can stack your Instapundits like cordword and they still won't have the empirical authority or moral gravitas, not to mention the hard-swinging old-school literary chops, of one blogger reporter like Chris Allbritton. (Okay, he's white and he's a guy, but at least he's a young white guy, and he's risking his goddamn neck to bring back some truth about our imperial adventure in Iraq. Besides, he's got one of those cool neo-beat Van Dyke things.)
The best blogging, then, isn't yet another hairy-eyed jeremiad from some Angry White Guy or another somber thumbsucker about the Deeper Meaning of Whatever. Hungry for more hallelujah choruses to the obvious, delivered with all the oracular solemnity of Charlton Heston reading the Ten Commandments? Tune in NPR, where "news analysts" like Daniel Shore and Cokie Roberts can be heard, handing out received truths as if they were pearls of great price.
By my lights, the best blogging offers a Bizarro World alternative to the mainstream media. Their content isn't determined by agenda-setters and opinion leaders who tell you what you need to know—then tell it to you again, every hour, on the hour, all day long, like CNN. They aren't run by editors who want to sell your attention to advertisers who want a piece of your niche demographic. Example: civil libertarian and Net activist John Perry Barlow's harrowing account of his brush with rough justice in the new, Ashcroft-ian America. (Barlow was stripped, cavity-searched, and held incommunicado for the high crime of flying with "misdemeanor possession of controlled substances that had allegedly been discovered during a search of my checked baggage.") Another example: the NBC cameraman Kevin Sites's riveting, straight-from-the-gut letter to the marine battalion with whom he was (is?) an embedded freelancer, one of whose soldiers he captured on video, executing a severely wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi with a shot to the head.
Not that blogging has to bring back horror stories from battlezones or breaking news from the culture wars. Some of my favorite blogs reclaim the radical promise inherent in the notion of an online journal, letting casual passersby eavesdrop on a stranger's innermost thoughts, see the world through another mind's eye. Call it the Being John Malkovich effect. The cultural critic Julian Dibbell had it just about right when he theorized the weblog as postmodern wunderkammer?an idiosyncratic jumble of found objects (in this case, ideas and images, facts and fictions scavenged from the global mediastream) that "reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the 'discovery' of the networked world." Some of the most consistently enlightening and entertaining blogs are the inscrutable products of borderline obsessive-compulsives. Like the baroque "wonder closets" invoked by Dibbell, blogs such as bOING bOING, The Obscure Store, Kottke.org, and Die, Puny Humans are omnium gatherums, overstuffed with anything that catches the fancy of their eccentric curators. Wish you lived in a world where Entertainment Tonight peeled away the vacuform latex face of mainstream celebrity to bare the scabrous, Hollywood Bablyon reality beneath? Wish no more: Rebecky.com's got the dirt, in a story no obsequious, tukus-licking mainstream outlet would dare run: "HOW I APPEARED ON JEOPARDY, or, ALEX TREBEK IS A SCUMBAG," by Ethan de Seife. Wonder what the morning headlines would be like if Groucho Marx were alive and well and living and partnered up with Charles Fort in a joint media venture? Wonder no longer: bOING bOING offers a brain-shriveling compendium of weird science items, Barnumesque stretchers, and stranger-than-fiction news stories, delivered in the inimitable bOING bOING deadpan.
Reading blogs like these is like subscribing to someone's stream of consciousness; it's the closest thing we have to telepathy. What do a pair of mathematicians using 25,511 crochet stitches to represent the Lorenz manifold; a list of "words that aren't in the dictionary but should be" (Example: "Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it)"; a step-by-step Taiwanese tutorial on how to make incredibly realistic "teeny tiny" oranges out of clay; photos of "Chinese salad architecture"; and the discovery of Homo floresiensis have to do with each other? Nothing, other than the fact that they caught the attention of Jason Kottke, however briefly.
Do the ongoing insurgency in Iraq, the barometric fluctuations of the Dow-Jones, and the Caligulan grotesqueries of the Bush administration still matter? No question. That's why God created The New York Times, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. But I want to live in a world where the broadcast media that struggle for mass appeal are counterweighted by microchannels whose programming reflects one mind's caprices, the tastes and interests of a single intelligence that cares not a whit for market share or popular acclaim (or critical applause, for that matter).
After all, isn't that what an online diary should be—an internal monologue that the rest of the world can listen in on; a Cornell box of fleeting impressions and true confessions assembled by an obsessive collector of images and ideas? At worst, such blogs can be like KLAS-TV, the Las Vegas TV station that Howard Hughes bought in the late '60s so he could alter the late-night movie schedule at whim, TV Guide listings be damned. This is the downside of one-to-many personalized media: An insomniac billionaire wearing Kleenex boxes for bedroom slippers, inflicting his monomaniacal fascination with Ice Station Zebra on disgruntled viewers for the trillionth time. The upside is a blog like Kottke's, which might feature a single daily post. Or 10. Or none. It can be about anything. Or the proverbial, Seinfeld-ian nothing. People read it not because they're interested in the subjects Kottke covers, but because they want a front-row seat to the movies projected on the inside of his head. Reading blogs like his is the intellectual equivalent of Beaumont's experiments in gastric physiology, observing digestion through a hole in the stomach of a wounded soldier.
It's a beautiful thing.
