On the occasion of my centennial article, I thought I would ruminate on my experience with this on-line medium. Besides, I’m snowbound and have run out of things to do.
From 1998 to 2003 I put out 60 monthly issues of ITRInews, until my toddlers took over my play time to play with them. I prepared the e-letter in HTML to post with color and pix, and then dumbed it down to pure text to push a headlines version out via an email list-serve. Now that my kids can entertain themselves with their own PCs, I tried out the blog medium a year ago, and love it. With the help of Patricia Foland and Kevin O’Mara, I use WordPress, a free application that makes it easy. In principle, readers can get new postings pushed to them via email or RSS feeds. In practice this blog, like many others, doesn’t seem to get much attention, at least as measured by comments posted on articles. Actually search engines quickly index blog posts, and Web host logs reveal a fair number of hits, particularly to older posts. If you want traffic, apparently your blog needs to be controversial, and then you may get more rants than you want, including battling rants from two or more weirdos, quite unrelated to the original post.
Blogs are fun to write, more fun than to read. Writers immemorial have been advised to keep a journal of ideas, snatches of writing, and factoids, so that they could eventually compile them into a product like the Great American Novel. Blogs are just the latest incarnation, except that other people were never expected to read your journal. Now many bloggers are disappointed unless they get a lot of comments. It’s probably just as well, though. Much Web discourse is really offensive. People constantly write things that would get them a punch in the nose if they uttered them in public.
I went to the Washington Post site yesterday, thinking that I would chide them in an old-fashioned letter to the editor about their series of scurrilous articles on Jack Murtha who passed away on Monday. Their front page obituary had continued the same attack, but at least he won’t be troubled by them anymore. Instead I got diverted by their on-line forum commenting on the obit. What crap! Most of the postings made the Post’s attacks seem genteel. These online forums are so vicious that it is little wonder they have driven people to suicide.
The Internet and its Web application are wondrous things. They have made our lives so much richer with information resources unimaginable only a few years ago. They have eliminated the gatekeepers who kept artists like writers and musicians from their audiences. They bring the world’s best products to our home, no matter how arcane they are. But, the Internet has its dark side: spam, porn, phishing, viruses (and anti-virus programs that are worse), predators of all kinds preying on the weak and ignorant, hackers who seem to be too sophisticated to not have national governments behind them, and more. But my peeve is that Web anonymity encourages excesses in language that have made acceptable a level of mindless hate that is poisoning our culture. Maybe talk radio inspired this earlier, and the Web is just catching up. Or is ancient email flaming the antecedent of all this vitriol? And now we see this trend moving from the virtual world to the real world of town hall meetings and the floor of the Congress.
I think hate is the most powerful emotion, way ahead of love. For example I believe the great success of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions is more due to Hell than Heaven. Heaven sounds like Sunday church services, only longer. But Hell is a place where your enemies will roast forever! Thus, I think the best way to motivate people to your side is not to convince them how great your ideas are, because they probably wouldn’t like them. Instead it’s much easer to get them to hate your opponent. Any kind of charges will do, truth, or even plausibility, is not necessary. Americans will believe anything, if you repeat it enough.
You don’t believe me? Consider this. To convince the American public to support the invasion of Iraq, Bush Administration spokesmen would emphatically pronounce sentences like this, “Saddam Hussain (here insert 1-2 dozen impressive sounding and patriotic words, always including at least one “freedom”) 9/11 attacks on America.” The words in between most assuredly did not actually say that Hussain was behind the attacks, which could be easily refuted since it wasn’t true. Instead, by putting the two unrelated concepts in the same sentence, one after another, they just gave the impression that one caused the other. Having taken a high school English course, I could parse the sentences to see what mischief was afoot. This sort of thing convinced me at the time that the Administration’s case for war was weak, because if they had facts they certainly would have used them. After hearing this propaganda for months, however, more than half of Americans surveyed believed that Hussain was behind 9/11.
The failure of the 2009 health care initiative had nothing to do with health care. It was a wedge issue that could allow Obama’s opponents to defeat and cripple him. And the way they did it was to incite enough people to hate him. He’s been called a nazi, communist, socialist, and at the recent CPAC, a monarchist! I just hope the Secret Service has had a competence implant after the state dinner fiasco. I had attended an Obama event a month earlier and had commented at the time on how lax the security was.
But I digress, as old professors do. Blogging is great, you should try it. If not, you could make a blogger happy by commenting on his or her article. Just keep it civil.
R. D. Shelton
