I was reviewing some links and I found a leading contender for blog post of the year. I don't think I even posted the link, it was on a page of links in a folder I labeled "What I've been reading" which I'm pretty sure I never posted. I just converted the folder from favorites to html and then I believe I found it didn't post well in Blogger.
Whiskey Bar: My Back Page - What the Left Needs and why I stopped for awhile. Excerpts:
What happened, roughly, is this: Last summer I got off a boat after a week of intensive Internet detox therapy, and decided there weren't enough good reasons to keep the bar open and more than enough reasons, both personal and professional, to shut it down, at least for a good long while.
I could cite the usual suspects job, family, health, sanity but the real trip wire was coming out of radio silence and finding both the blogosphere and what we had then not yet learned to call the "MSM" immersed to the tops of their pointy little heads in the Swift Boat Veterans for Lies campaign -- last year's version of the vegetative patient story; the patient, in that particular case, being American democracy.
Now this was only a few weeks after I had concluded, rather rashly, that it would be virtually impossible for the Rove machine to pump its usual tanker load of slime all over John Kerry's war record, based simply on the word of a brigade of Jane Fonda haters led by a Nixon-era retread who has made destroying Kerry his lifelong personal ambition. Surely, I argued, such an absurd ploy wouldn't get beyond the usual right-wing echo chamber pots and would quickly be dumped in the same sewer of right-wing delusions that holds the murdered corpse of Vince Foster.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . . oh my yes. It is amusing to recall what a naive idealist I was back then. What I hadn't learned was that the eyes of brain-dead people, like your average MSM journalist, will still track the movement of shiny objects when they are waved in front of their faces. Involuntary reflexes. Lower brain stem activity. The Rovians understood this perfectly well, even if I didn't. So it didn't take them long to organize a full-scale chorus of media vegetables, all making vaguely articulate grunts and other mouth noises about Cambodia, the Christmas of 1968, purple hearts, after-action reports, etc.
And that's when it hit me -- as if, to quote Col. Kurtz, I'd been shot in the forehead with a diamond -- that Kerry was almost certainly going to lose the election, that the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren't going to persuade them otherwise.
What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn't inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn't very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.
The Boxer
All this, I suppose, is just another way of saying that people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest (li la li). But the implications for me at the time were pretty clear: What the progressive left, not to mention the Democratic Party, needed weren't dogged investigative reporters or eloquent bloggers or wiser candidates, what it needed were more skilled corporate propagandists, more trained information warfare specialists and more cunning, ruthless PR manipulators.
I don't know how to do those things and wouldn't want to do them even if I could. No matter what Horowitz says, agit-prop isn't my line. What I write, I mean, and I say it because I want to communicate something -- to touch people, make them think, make them angry, make them laugh or because I want to express my own thoughts (usually with an attitude).
I don't write to advance a party line or anyone else's ideological agenda. I have my own line and my own agenda, which only partially overlaps with any political party that I'm aware of. I may be a man of the left (albeit with increasingly libertarian . . . let's call it plainly: anti-fascist leanings) but I'm no "movement leftist" (that's a contradiction in terms these days anyway.)
But if the truth does not set any one free, there's not much point raging against the machine not unless you enjoy being enraged all the time. On balance, there didn't seem much point in keeping Whiskey Bar open, given that writing is hard, time-consuming work, and nobody was paying me to blog. (Yes, many readers had given me money to help cover expenses, but after more than 1,500 posts in a year and a half of blogging, I figured most of them had already gotten their money's worth, and then some.) ....
The Salvadoran Option
And who knows? I might have done it -- if some unidentified intelligence officials hadn’t started boasting to reporters about their role in “founding and financing” the Salvadoran death squads of the early 1980s....
Hooked Again
But as I've noted before, blogging is a strange drug. When you're clean, it's not too hard to stay clean. But once you start using the stuff again . . . man, the monkey can get his claws in your back pretty damn fast. So one post led to another, and then another. And, well, pretty soon I was back freebasing.
Much more where that came from.
Perhaps this has a special resonance for me now as I have been reading stories of people in their own (translated) words of why they joined the National Socialist party. Why Hitler Came to Power. This was an underappreciated gem of a sociology study published in 1938 and based on 600 autobiographies of German Nazi activists written in 1934. It doesn't have enough hard cross-tabbed data for a great study but it makes up for it in the real unvarnished voices of people turning away from democracy.
The book made me realize that the current GOP is not the Nazi party. Many of the leaders and activists have just tapped into some of the same powerful techniques. We are not Germany in the 30's, the Republicans aren't pure fascists. I keep telling myself that.
Interesting billmon mentions one of my favorite songs.
In the clearing stands a boxer,
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame,
"I am leaving, I am leaving."
But the fighter still remains
Lie la lie, lie la lie lie lie lie lie. Lie la lie, lie la lie lie lie lie lie, lie lie lie lie lie....
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