( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Yesterday, I put up a diary at GOS decrying how our writing had become so completely predictable, so formulaic, so prosaic. It was derivative, and it was funny. But it was also extremely sad. In many ways it was a commentary on the powerlessness of progressive bloggers: we can yell louder, we can scream, we can write explosive rants. But you know what? It isn’t changing anything. And frankly, I’m tired of our dogged, persistent pursuit of something that’s not working. And, I suspect, isn’t going to work.
Maybe you’re lucky and can write face blistering essays on this site and you can have readers tell you how right on you are. How smart, how important, how clear. But if you’re poor and without a job, or if you’re sick and you don’t have insurance, or if you’re running out of unemployment benefits and the next job isn’t in sight, or if your kids are in trouble and you don’t know how to help them out, or if you are overdue to retire and you don’t have the funds and have to work, or your wage slave pay isn’t going to bail you out unless you win Megamillions and you’re not too big to fail, or your kids are in the military, these essays aren’t going to help you. Not at all. They’re just going to highlight how you have somebody’s boot on your neck. And you cannot get it off. And they’re bound to inform you, if you don’t know it already, about how very weak you are and how very powerless we as a group (I’m talking about progressives) remain.
Look. I’m just a writer. I’m mostly anonymous (though I have a web presence). I have my opinions. I have some ideas. I have my private life. I have my work. I wish, I really do wish, we could all be free from suffering and illness and hatred. I wish progressives had some real power. I wish we had influence. I wish we’d all wake up tomorrow morning and be covered by Medicare. I wish the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan would be over. I wish unemployment would be extended until the economy turns around. I wish foreclosures would be stayed. I wish we’d all have enough to eat, adequate shelter, first rate health care, decent education, a whole shopping basket of safety net programs. I wish we would have something that resembled a moderate, socialist European government. But we don’t. And despite the electoral win this past November, we’re not going to get those things. Ever.
We may have thought, in our desperation and gullibility, that our lives would change. But here we are, October, 2009, and if your life is better than it was in October, 2008, I’ll be amazed. In other words, it’s the same old same old and it’s now time to see it for what it really is. It’s the same if not worse than it was a year ago. The fantasy of structural, fundamental change was just that, a fantasy. The illusion that the Government would help is was just that, an illusion. There are still homeless people. Sick people without insurance. Unemployed people in foreclosure. And the prospect of a change for them, a change they can believe in, well, it just doesn’t exist. It’s not happening this year. Or next year. It’s probably just not happening.
Strange as it may seem, I’m not discouraged. To me all of this means that I was making a mistake in what I thought was happening, so now I need to revise my thinking. I’m a writer. I revise all the time. I’m good at editing. I’m good at rewriting. I’ve spent far more time at that than writing first drafts. So I suggest to my friends who are writers, blogger@s, that we forget about starting to write chapter 2 and go back immediately to rewrite chapter 1. Put another way, we need to rethink all of our expectations, our hopes, our dreams, our demands. We need to remember that the change we can believe in was something we could be believe in, but, alas, it was just another dream. It was not real. And when we woke up, poof!, it was gone.
So I suggest that we retrench slightly, that we retreat, that we pull back. Only for a few moments. I suggest that we stop acting like the Government gives a hoot about what we think or say or write. It clearly doesn’t. And I suggest that we go back to basic, modest, local things we can actually improve. That we stop being all puffed up and making believe we’re powerful, and recognize that all of that, that dream, that illusion, that hope, wasn’t real. No, it wasn’t. We need to recognize that the struggle for a progressive America is still ahead of us in the future.
For me this means no more money to politicians or political parties. None. Nada. Zilch. I’m giving the money to local programs that help people who need help (the local co-op, the food bank, e.g.). I’m going to try directly to help people whose suffering is not being addressed.
For me this means no more acting like the national Government is influenced by what I say as opposed to those people who can and have written fat checks to the incumbents and the PACs and the political interest groups. Just look at the health care debate. I want a single payer plan. And I have insurance and in a few years I’ll have medicare. It’s not my personal battle, as if I would battle for a 5% “public option” anyway. I want all of us to be safe and to have appropriate care. But this debate isn’t even about health care any more. Now the Administration refers to it as “Health Insurance Reform.” Jeebus. But I digress.
For me this means no more acting like people read what I write on blogs and just by reading it, it changes their views. Only the trolls disagree with what I write, and we all know they suck. The rest of us, those who agree with me, are great and wonderful people. But I’m just preaching to my own choir. I like the choir, really I do. But our singing doesn’t matter. Here’s an example. I’ve been writing about Honduras. People who are for democracy agree with me. Golpistas and Republicans don’t. There are lots of “Democrats” who don’t understand and are so anti-Chavez that they support the golpistas. Who are these people and why are they tormenting me in the comments? If they’re not being paid by the Golpe de Estado or Republicans to troll what I write, they need to get a life. And by the way, so do I. Another digression.
For me, what I’m saying means that it is time to get down to basics. Does our writing change anything? I suspect it might if we were talking about something modest, something smaller. If we had good ideas. If we had action steps that were simple. If we had a real plan. If we had command of what was wrong and what had to be done, and it didn’t involve enormous, structural changes of the national legislature.
Does what we write have an effect on national or international stories? I doubt it.
What about our fame as writers? Certainly, it’s not about the money (which for me has been nonexistent). What about our being recommended, making the recc lists, being “up” for days on end, being famous, being named as famous, being cited? Yeah, that’s all really, really nice. And maybe some of us are in it for that, but to be frank, I’m not. I like all of that, don’t get me wrong, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about something else. It’s about being heard and having that make some changes in thinking and actions. Does that happen? I doubt it.
For me this means I’m now going to get back to basics. I’ve taken down the hit counters on my blog. I’m going to stop posting at Naranja. I’ll continue here and at my blog and at the other small blogs that I like.
I’m going to try to break out of the formulaic box. I’m going to try to find ways we can actually make a difference. I do hope you’ll all join me in that. Our present way of “doing business” is a road to persistent irrelevance.
If it’s true that the keyboard is mightier than the sword, and sometimes I have my doubts about that, we need to use it for what it can do rather than as a paperweight.
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simul-posted at The Dream Antilles
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I have no idea what’s causing me to have all of this introspection about what we’re doing. I know it’s meta. I hate meta. I don’t know what started this, but apparently I’m trying to sort it.
Thanks for reading.
a bowler. But I don’t write to be a writer, I do it primarily to inform other people of what I’ve learned in my own way of thinking. I also do it as a means of learning and evolving. I only started a year and a half ago. Since that time, I have read countless articles and a number of books about the serious issues. My thought process on what’s happening in the world continues to evolve and I spread this information to other people. Not just on blogs, but to friends, family, cashiers, you name it. I’ve probably had an impact on who knows, 50 people during that year and a half. Imagine if one million of impact 50 each. (a ramble!)
It is so overwhelming at times.
But look at the service you have done. We are so barraged at times that things can fade from view. You have kept us aware of the struggles of peoples in Iran, then Honduras.
You have given us hope that people themselves can try to regain their power…. even though for the moment they are stymied. But knowing the truth, being reminded is important. What you do is important to me.
Writing is my therapy, my way of staying balanced in this fucked up world. Reading all of you is my citizens journalism and path to truth.
Ripples unseen.
I do think we need to quit competing as blogs, bloggers, I’ve always thought crossposting every where you are comfortable is important. Words and information matter.
We have to matter to eachother now, knowing damn well our influence on the corporate government is null.
You matter to me. Thats a start.
at the time of the passage of the TARP. That was a decisive moment. Never before in my adult life had I known so many people so pissed off at the system and at corporate power; never before had I participated in so many spontaneous conversations where radical political ideas and rhetoric were so positively received, at work, at the gym, at the diner. And yet in that moment of populist polarization and progressive/radical potential, the so-called progressive party, the alleged party of the working men and women, voted more heavily to have working class and middle class taxpayers bail out the millionaire bankers and the billionaire banks than even the supposed party of Wall Street did. The bank crisis represented the system failure of modern corporate capitalist economics, the TARP represented the system failure of our allegedly representative democratic republic. And from that starting point, with all that had preceded in the past 30 years, it became strikingly clear that total system failure on both counts is endemic. After some weeks of pondering, reading, and reflection, my response was that we’ve passed now into a pre-revolutionary era. The existing system can no longer work, but there is as yet no socially organized force capable of installing a replacement. My conclusion is that we have to become revolutionaries, for if we don’t someone else will. Unfortunately, since that time, progressives and liberals have dawdled around waiting for Obama, a rather Godot-like figure as it turns out. Meanwhile the right has begun the process of building its revolutionary movement. In addition to its built-in advantages of access to money and the support of powerful interests, it now has a head-start both ideologically and organizationally. We’re in big trouble now, and time is running out more quickly than any of us might like to think.
Which is the first step to making a change.
But I don’t have a problem with you going small..
Less interference.
you’re really a somebody, you know that? 🙂
and without blogging, there are those of us who would have none.
It’s popular to believe that there is all sorts of wonderful community out there if you’d just turn off your computer, but the reality varies.
I don’t think anything really changes for the better without community. But it takes awhile for these things to grow.
Anyway, I appreciate your sentiments and your intentions to work in your community. I wish mine had more such possibilities, but one lives the life one has, not the life one wishes one had.
Meanwhile, I’m getting more focused on trying to find some small Internet niches where perhaps I can do a little bit of good for someone, somewhere, by virtue of highlighting selected news items. It’s a pedestrian task, in a way, but it has some potential for creativity.
But no, I don’t expect anything I do to have any major effects. That’s okay with me, though. Small is fine.
the line is actually:
The reasoning here is sound, but the mechanisms of the progressive blogosphere are misperceived. It is correct that progressive voices are ignored, but the necessary structural changes in social organization require the constant application of pressure for change.
Good historical analogs are the anti-slavery and women’s suffrage struggles. For many years, these reform movements were easily and repeatedly beaten back by the overwhelming entrenched power of established interests. When economic and social structures shifted sufficiently to overcome resistance to these reforms, it was the persistent pressure of the reformers that made the change happen.
The progressive blogosphere maintains evolutionary pressure, like water behind a dam. When structural machinery is built to harness that power, progressive reform will ensue. It is a mistake to place all the responsibility for securing change on either the emotional force of the blogosphere or the structural engineering of reform measures. These elements of reform must work in tandem.
So writing is what I do between here and the grave.
…and I like reading your work.
But history, teaching and learning have seemed sluggish for a very long time. Great works have been written for hundreds of years, but what and how have we learned from them.
All these great words of wisdom. And yet we remain in quite an amazing pickle.
I’ve posted it before, but it bears repeating:
This says it better than anything, and distills it to its essence.
Beyond Hope by Derrick Jensen
Kind of ironic that Obama’s whole thing was based on “Hope”, don’tcha think?
Anyway, read the whole thing. That’s not all of it.
to a great flood.
And eventually, the flood waters will rise and overtop the villagers’ levies.
It will happen; sooner than you think. Just wait and see.
Meanwhile, keep sprinkling your drops, davidseth. Because when mixed with all the other drops from all the rest of us, they are helping to create a tidal surge that can not be stopped.
I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the dummycrats and the republizombies whose minds can’t be changed. It’s particularly disheartening to see how easily the public falls for obama’s bullshit and his popularity jacks up after his rahm orchestrated celebrity tours/media blitzes on letterman and the like. If they can so easily manipulate public opinion while they sell us out behind our backs then there really is no hope short of revolution.
And I’m beginning to realize that the ones that can be changed don’t have any power anyway. And that my time will be a lot better spent not bothering with it all.
Z
The (best) purpose of blogging:
1) To replace our corrupt, failing mainstream media (and the intelligence agencies standing directly behind them) with something that actually keeps a community well informed;
2) To build that community;
3) And to move that community forward in it’s goals.
At worst a blogs are busy boxes, a place for self-aggrandizement and profiteering, and “Lord of the Flies” social experiments.
Done now.
This site is great for venting, great for getting information we otherwise wouldn’t. I love it and I am going to spend more time here posting the truth (especially since certain other blogs apparently would rather fight for half-assed measures instead of for single-payer). But there is a limit to what this blog can accomplish and still remain true to its mission. I set up a blog for organizing progressives, and I’ve neglected it as school and looking for work have taken up so much of my time. No more. Progressive Independence (linked to in my signature) is for organizing the left into a cohesive movement. It’s about ideas for moving our agenda forward, subservient only to the progressive movement. We really do need to stop ranting and start acting. The only way we’re going to do that on the ‘net is by formulating strategy and tactics toward our overall goal of retaking political power in this nation.
Thomas Jefferson well understood the necessity of an informed citizenry.
To these ends, through our diaries and comments, we can take the following steps:
1-We can encourage others who are doing good work to continue their efforts to enlighten the rest of us.
2-Since many local newspapers and Corporate News Media outlets serve as megaphones for the so-called “Elite” in this country (or as George W. Bush would say, “My base”), we need to seek out the clearest, simplest, most eloquent refutations of these memes and disseminate this information to others who may be either uninformed or merely sitting on the fence through our conversations with friends and family (at least those who are even marginally receptive), by leaving copies of the very best articles in conspicuous locations (such as a break room at the workplace, making sure to not leave any fingerprints), and forwarding such articles via e-mail (to the extent the friendship or family allows) to those who may be receptive.
3-When we are posting articles, whenever possible; we may have a unique understanding about an issue than is not commonly recognized even among the converted. On sites such as this, we can advance these ideas and through discussion in the comments that follow, perhaps see the wisdom and/or folly of such interpretations. In the process, we can enlighten each other, provide mutual support, and further hone our arguments before sending them out to a broader audience.
4-In discussing issues, we may find that those who proudly proclaim their political neutrality, when discussing individual issues, are on board with most of the progressive agenda. We can encourage them to contact their duly elected representatives to support and/or oppose the passage of certain legislation.
5-If we write a particularly good article, we can encourage family and friends to read it, and in many cases, since they know and hopefully like us, they will at least take a look at what we’ve written. In the process, we may be able to further their understanding of the challenges we face in the present day.
6-With regard to those who proclaim their allegiance to the Democrats, Republicans, or some other political persuasion, we can rightly express our frustration with both parties–the Republicans for actively opposing our interests, and the Democrats for not doing enough. At present, we can promote and defend issues rather than political parties.
7-To expand the universe of those who believe as we do, we must reach out beyond our own relatively small community. Twelve Step programs correctly proclaim in the first part of the Eleventh Tradition:
8-Also in keeping with Twelve Step Program philosophy, we must accept that which we cannot change, develop the courage to change that which we can, and obtain the wisdom to understand the difference, understanding that the universe of the first category may be much smaller than we might initially imagine. But, make no mistake, doing whatever we can is imperative.
Yes, to effect meaningful change, if we are able to expand our universe beyond our own community, the call for real reform can eventually be extended to the masses.
If not for you and me and all who blog it would be worse. There would be no opposition at all, as pathetic as the party loyalists on line and the Democratic Party is there would be no Howard Dean no Glenn Greenwald, no Rachael Maddow, no David Seth. A battle is raging here that is just a reflection of the world offline, it’s not the Republicans versus the Democrats it’s deeper then that as both sides of this are just a distraction.
I’m constantly surprised that so many people I meet are lurkers and read dkos. Their reactions are as divided as the bloggers some say not liberal other think it’s over the top. But offline the movement that got Obama elected and took back the majority are not so enamored of electoral politics they just want what motivated them to vote and sign up in the first place , some relief from the intolerable status quo. Change. So like Camus and Orwell said, keep typing, keep pushing the damn rock up the hill.