Blogging While America Burns

An old friend of mine from way, way back, a man who has served this country honorably in several capacities, wonders why I do this. I've often asked myself the same question. Part of it has to do with that quote from Edmund Burke featured on the vertical masthead to the right, the idea that one ought to do something when you think your own country is going down the tubes, however humble, however small scale. I don't think what I'm doing here is very much, frankly. I have done more, in fact. In 2004 I worked in Florida for the Election Protection Coalition as a voting site observer and legal adviser, part of a nationwide effort to reduce the level of illegal crap which had gone on in the 2000 elections in that very state and others. My reactions to that experience were mixed. It felt good to do something so tangible but it was also a window into how very broken our electoral system really is.

Anyway, most of the time I'm just blowing off steam. It doesn't take very long to write the blog because I have a left brain which tends to think in complete sentences, probably a vestigial artifact of the verbal era in which my friend and I were educated in the public schools. Sometimes I research what I'm writing, particularly on legal issues where I want to be certain I never say anything which is clearly inaccurate. I can usually avoid most glaring errors, at least.

A great writer once noted that good writing should sound like refined conversation. That's a good rule of thumb. I try not to write in prose which is stilted or overly complex, and to use colloquial phrases instead of formalisms whenever possible. Most writers unconsciously repeat words in sequential sentences (the power of suggestion), and my editing (which takes about 5 minutes) is directed to that quirk, to avoid monotony. You can usually spot unedited writing in blogs if you pay attention to that tendency.

I got started writing the blog because I just couldn't believe what was happening to the United States, and with the grandiosity of the uninitiated I thought throwing a few more words on the pile could turn things around. Humans are like that; we earnestly believe we can reorder reality by imagining it different. Have you ever sat around a dinner table and completely revamped America's energy regime? Then you wonder why your brilliant idea isn't implemented the next week. Same with all aspects of politics. I thought that if Americans realized that the Bill of Rights was under assault from the very government which they elected, they would immediately do the right thing. It turns out this is not the case. I never thought I would live to see the day when American citizens could be arrested on American soil, thrown in a dungeon, denied access to counsel, and kept in the dark about any charges against them without so much as a word of official protest. It's happened three times since Bush took office. Nor did I believe that the United States would ever implement a program to systematically violate the Geneva Conventions, torturing and killing many prisoners in the process. We've done all that, too.

So we've changed. A lot. A blog is useful for recording your impressions of those changes, as a kind of public diary. I don't think it makes much difference whether you record them publicly or privately anymore, because the concept of "privacy" is also a thing of the past. The details of your entire life are now available on government, credit reporting and mailing list database computers. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I don't wear a tinfoil hat. Far from it. I'm much less hysterical about all of this than a lot of the "celebrity" bloggers who write about the predations of modern American government.

Once, back in the mid Eighties, I was visiting German friends who live in Heidelberg. A good friend of theirs was an artist who lived in Czechoslovakia (when it was called that, Mr. McCain). I noted in talking to him, and to other people I met subsequently who had lived in police states behind the Iron Curtain, how utterly matter-of-fact they were about the impossibility of progressive change. One would think that a creative mind would be in a state of constant hysteria about the absence of free speech, about informers and arbitrary detention for dissent, the uselessness of the "elections." Quite the contrary. They possessed a wry and ironical detachment from the insanity of the social order. You can't go around in life all worked up and foaming at the mouth when you live in such places. You'll burn yourself completely out. I think, approaching things from the other direction (out-of-control, deregulated capitalism), we have arrived at a similar state. Big Money controls the organs of communication (television, radio and major newspapers) and Congress, through the lobbying system. That's enough to control everything. There is no need to lock up dissenters in the United States because their dissent is useless and unheeded. Seriously, all these Internet commenters and bloggers are just speaking quietly into hurricane-force winds. That's something you learn by writing one of these things. Companies which can write large checks to decision-makers do not need to worry about some guy wearing a pair of hiking shorts tapping away on his keyboard in his den. Similarly, major communications media are owned by a dwindling group of large corporate holding companies, and this has produced a kind of Pravda or Izvestia feel to the dissemination of "free speech" and opinion. Not just anything gets said - it has to fall within certain business-permitted and conventional parameters. These house organs drown out, by a thousand-fold, the whimpering of the Internet writers.

Our wholesale indifference to the huge changes in our government and legal system means that we are not going to return to those halcyon days when our system for maintaining civil liberties and human dignity were the envy of the world. I don't know exactly why we've become such a coarse, loutish and unprincipled country. My guess is that it owes to the deteriorating quality of our educational system. We still produce elites who can excel and make a lot of money, compete on the world stage, but we're growing a huge underclass in place of what was once the middle class, people who lead lives of quiet desperation and don't have time for the lofty musings of the self-styled blogger. That's a shame. The unexamined life, as the great thinker told us, is not worth living.

Philosophically, I think the time has come for the American people to think in terms of cultivating their own garden, perhaps literally as well as figuratively. Voltaire had that part right all along. And then my inspiration, Henry David Thoreau, fills in the rest of the blanks. Lead a principled life of your own and don't concern yourself over much with the stresses and problems of the world at large. Take care of that part of Mother Earth which lies close by you. America will proceed on its path of devolution and will become something else in time, maybe a fragmented regional confederation. As we see every four years or so, the strain of trying to strike balances between parts of the country which really do not see eye-to-eye, which have very little in common other than a collective memory of the way things used to be, has produced a political system which is utterly impotent to solve real problems. The only thing the country seems able to do on a consistent basis is to engage in war, and there's no future in that. Not one we should be interested in, anyway.