My short Culture Wars essay:

On my above mentioned fishing trip, I hired a 19-yo kid to help me fillet my 59 fish. His dad is pastor of a nearby evangelical church with a reputation as being more conservative than most. Somebody once told me they had a .50 cal. machne gun mounted in the tower below the cross.

I’d recently cut my hair and was wearing Carhharts and a baseball cap with an American flag on it. We got to talk. I’m a college prof, so I ask kids his age many questions when I have an opportunity. I decided I’d pretend I’m conservative. He began to trust me.

Three things I learn from this short essay on the cultural wars, not of which are very comforting to me, also a college prof.

1. There is now an unverified rumor circulating on the net about a certain unnamed church with a 50 mm machingun under its tower. True? maybe. False? maybe. Does it matter whether or not this is true? I think it does.

2. That someone in my profession thinks it o.k. to “pretend” to be something he’s not, for the purpose of tricking a 19 year old kid into trusting him. Is it? Is it not? I don’t think it is. For what five letter word is “pretending” a euphemism?

3. Subverting a person’s trust is o.k., as long as a liberal does it and does it for an approved purpose. Is it? Is it not? I don’t think it is.

Sorry if I sound cranky about this, but I am cranky about this. The 19 year old kid comes out of this exchange no wiser than he went into it, which is his loss. Or, just maybe, he sussed you out and fed you line which you bought, hook line and sinker, in which case both of you lost. Maybe a 19 year old fish fileter isn’t as astute as at least some 19 year old college sophomores are, but you’ll never know that for sure.

What the right doesn’t “get” is that the technology is now available and the latent democratic (small “d”) sentiment is able to express itself. It seems that they are only now becoming dimly aware of this change.

And, from a sociological point of view, the change is breathtaking. When the Gutenberg press was invented, it only took a few years for presses to spread throughout Europe, after centuries of latency. What we are witnessing now is many orders of magnitude greater than that change.

Take a look at some of these maps of the internet backbones in the US and Canada.
http://www.nthelp.com/maps.htm

The idea of many-to-many is not well understood by those who only think in terms of one-to-many.

Like the Internet itself, this new social network does not need a single leader as a focal point, and if one leader is lost, there is another who will take their place, just as when one server goes down, many others will carry the message on to its destination.

“Rabid Lambs” is a great name for a punk rock group.

We read their work relentlessly, have been doing so for years, know their history, their strengths and weaknesses, and can use that information to effect. They, on the other hand, have got no idea what they’re talking about but feel compelled to bludgeon it anyway.

That’s something else they just don’t get. They just don’t realize that we’re paying attention. Even when we do point out that we’re paying attention, as with Li’l Debbie and the Froomkin flap, they cover their ears and shout “Partisan! Partisan!”

And they’re so freakin’ lame. Peretz doesn’t have a problem running piece where he plainly had decided on its content before he had even read a word on DailyKos. He and Brooks couldn’t be bothered to get in touch with Kos. I guarantee you he didn’t call Jerome for confirmation or denial of the Zengarle claims.

They just parade their awful journalism up and down the thoroughfare. They’re going to eventually realize that this just won’t work anymore, but it’s going to take a while.

I was reading the paper on a bench outside this morning, and literally laughed out loud when I read the opening paragraph. A couple strolling by looked at me kinda funny, but that’s okay.

What a maroon! I generally find Brooks hard to follow–he’s not all that well acquainted with logic–but he is a reliable peddler of the talking points. This one was just too funny, even funnier than Peretz, who read DailyKos for the first time last week so he could plausibly write a column deriding Markos.

Of course, this will have the opposite effect of what he intends. He’s gonna drive traffic to the site by giving it this play. And even mentioning the blogosphere in these exalted circles raises its profile.

And it’s all so completely pointless and clueless. Markos is not the blogosphere. Markos could be arrested tomorrow for some heinous crime and DailyKos would go on. He did develop the model for collaborative blogging, but we have the model now. It’s not going away, no matter what happens.

Woot!

I knew you’d be on it.

Only thing worse than a pathetic has been is a pissy never-was.

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YES!!! One of my laments is there is never enough time to read all the great comments on any given subject on just a few of my favorite blogs. Brooks baby and his species have held the pretense that they are the voice of the smart set for way too long but they can read the writing on the wall. The pathetic whimpering from articles like his are not read anywhere near as much as the snarky takedowns of it. That is something they can’t quite wrap their brains around and it just burns them up!