Blogging

Okay, so I laughed when I read James Taranto’s item mocking Andrew Sullivan. Why? Because it’s true: Andrew can be a little excitable at times, and goes with whatever the headlines are saying, pretty much. Mind, not that I expect bloggers always to be breaking news; the nature of the medium pretty much ensures that on most issues bloggers (as opposed to the diarists at LiveJournal, xanga.com, or Pitas.com) will be mostly reacting to headlines, i.e., the MSM still sets the agenda, for the most part. Andrew is no different, really, in this respect.

However, Andrew does have a tendency to get a little bit excitable, especially where it comes to his pet issues. His ideals are most laudable, but when human beings fall short of his ideals, he is quite willing to skewer them. Naturally, since the Bush administration is composed of human beings who are in the spotlight all the time, it takes no genius to cite a litany of grievances against their policies. Andrew, by dint of his passions, is wont to take such things personally, and extends this lack of courtesy also to fellow bloggers.

Take, for instance, his hyperventilating reaction to Glenn Reynolds’s use of the term “wing-wang” in discussing the issue of Lincoln’s sexual orientation. Seems to me that Andrew still isn’t comfortable enough with his sexuality to differentiate between flippant insouciance and real homophobia.

Also take a look at Andrew’s coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign. His dissatisfaction with the Bush administration’s policies, while understandable and worth debating on its own merits, morphed into support for an opportunist like John Kerry. Andrew’s position: We can’t do worse than return Bush to the White House. Fine, so far. And anyone who disagrees with me supports torture!

Those of us who persevere in reading Andrew’s blog have not been in doubt for the past year and a half (incidentally, right after he started taking up sponsorship) that Andrew has become much, much more excitable. Where he was once a voice of reason not unlike Christopher Hitchens (minus the rather entertaining bombast), he is now not much different than some of the lefties he has been reading lately. Occasionally, a beam of calm meditation shines through the cloud that his blog has become, and he can patiently discuss, in a reasonable manner, what policies he likes and dislikes. But touch on anything emotional and Andrew flies off the handle.

There’s a word we have for friends that can be a little emotional like that: excitable.

So, how does Andrew respond (second item)?

How is any of this spin? How is any of it illogical or internally incoherent? How is any of it “excitable”, unless it is somehow now unacceptable to be shocked to the core by what we have discovered about the treatment of many detainees by U.S. forces? There is a distinction between how we deal with the enemy in the field of battle and how we deal with prisoners of war captured in such a battle. You can be ruthless in the former and humane in the latter. In fact, this was once the defining characteristic of the western way of war. Now it is a subject of mockery from the defend-anything-smear-anyone right.

Poor Andrew is so infuriated by any perceived besmirchment that he doesn’t take the time to read how James Taranto (who of late is arguably a more consistent reader than Glenn) emphasized certain phrases within the entire body of quotations from Andrew’s own writings. Considering how often Andrew, like any other blogger, takes public figures to task for infelicitous choices of diction, you’d think he’d be more chastened and publish a clarification of his positions than to swipe at erstwhile supporters.

In a way, he reminds me of the depiction of John Adams. He’s got a pretty good grasp of the big picture, but he is exceedingly excitable, and prone to interpret disagreements with his words as attacks on his character. His sexuality and his ideological bent don’t help him. He’s shunned by the Left for having dared to support a war prosecuted by a Republican administration; he’s shunned by the Right for his social liberalism; and many in the middle, who share many of his views, become alienated as he moves beyond rhetoric on his pet issues, and into hyperventilation.

Mr. Excitable, indeed.

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

Terry Teachout describes the losses and the gains of community as our culture becomes more fragmented. Certainly blogs both contribute to and subtract from the sense of community.

Thoreau believed: “Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? — better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it.” Of course, if we have a common culture, we can understand his allusion – that some “might have thought too far from the village”-but he is reminding us that we don’t necessarily have the same perspective, for some of us “the village was too far from it.”

The blogosphere lets us move us along the horizontal, popping in some one else’s world, our horizons change, broaden. We remain us, but come back to our own center with more sense of other’s. Belmont Club’s allusions are often to Kipling; this may surprise twenty-first century Americans, but they check it daily. Few probably read Kipling in school (only Matthew Arnold is a deader or whiter male). But the Belmont Club (and the poets quoted) touch us. Wretchard, confident and sure of his own perspective, helps us see the world with his proportionality; it may differ from ours in some important ways but for many of us, much of what he says rings true. He writes well but we sense he also understands well.

What we find as we look around the blogosphere are fragments – this blog or that blog seems far from our way of looking at the world. And, indeed, we are unlikely to visit often. But we often see solutions, as well, to our most vexing problems.

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The new Commentary includes Terry Teachout’s “Culture in the Age of Blogging” (June, pp. 39-48). (Commentary now only links to its May issue). Teachout’s audience is not regular blog readers: he defines blogging and its genres, gives a short history and cites examples. His style, in blog fashion, is more personal as are his examples. He describes About Last Night and other culture blogs, including a Chicagoboyz favorite, Two Blowhards . The essay notes various URLs, rare in print.

Teachout discusses the paradox of blogging – community lost & gained. In typical Commentary/New Criterion style, he laments the loss of a “common culture.” He observes that

The simplest description of this change is also the starkest one: the common culture of widely shared values and knowledge that once helped to unite Americans of all creeds, colors, and classes no longer exists. In its place, we now have a “balkanized” group of subcultures whose members pursue their separate, unshared interests in an unprecedented variety of ways. (40)

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Blog goddess Natalie Solent posted a few comments at this post. One of the things she said was…

Hooray! I have finally posted a comment at Chicagoboyz. Every previous attempt has been met by an automated message saying my harmless opinions were liable to deprave and corrupt.

People have informed me that they’ve had problems like this in the past. The Boyz, like all blogs, is the target of spambot attacks just about every day. Our MT Blacklist will screen out the offending URL’s, but sometimes they contain words that crop up in the comment that someone is trying to leave. This results in your inoffensive comment being deemed offensive and blocked from the site.

Our policy has been to welcome any comment as long as it doesn’t contain profanity and it’s not simply an ad hominem attack. If there’s a problem then please send me an Email that includes a description of the problem, the URL or title of the post where you want to leave the comment, and the comment as you want it to appear. I’ll see what I can do to make sure that you are included in the debate.

My Email address is james_43202 AT yahoo.com.

I would not be writing on Chicagoboyz if somewhere along the line I hadn’t heard about Andrew Sullivan, then started reading him on a regular basis. He sent me erratically to Instapundit. And Reynolds brought me to Chicagoboyz. This is the trajectory that found me in a place where I feel remarkably comfortable; for the first time in my life I’m forced to give some order to my musings. I am grateful – to the Chicagoboyz and, therefore, to Sullivan. I admired his work; I teach his essay on “coming of age” as a homosexual. It with clarity and wit emphasizes the biological, the innate nature of his preferences – preferences he didn’t understand at first. I pair it with Scott Russell Sanders’ “Looking at Women,” an essay about Sanders’ growing awareness of the “otherness” of women moving to a joyous tribute to the relation between opposites, a man and a woman. It is easy to treat both essays with respect – and my students do. Sullivan’s award-winning essay, “The ‘He’ Hormone” also emphasizes the influence of the biological.

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