Blogging

As we contemplate turning our garage into an apartment/study, we think about money & life. How long will we use it, how many offspring of offspring will fill this house in the years & holidays between now & the nursing home–or death; well, let’s move on. How many marriages in that backyard? Should we borrow? Should we wait?

And so we make decisions and live with them. We “buy into” them, taking responsibility, recognizing in these choices we impose order (meaning? disorder?) on our lives. This prompts self-consciousness and opposes fatalism. It has similarities with the “break it; own it” mantra cited so often as Powell’s “Pottery Barn strategy.” But it makes the concept personal and even profound. (Not that we fool ourselves; life remains tragic and unpredictable – except for the inevitable death. But if we concentrate on these, we may miss how much we can do.)

Money is a means to an end. A home, a place for our children, a place where we can happily set up our bookcases & computers & live out our lives – that’s the end. I suspect most of us see it as the British saw reason – a means to the end of a good life. Franklin & Thoreau, so different in so many ways, want us to recognize in this exchange our time (life) is one good, money is the means; therefore, we should think a bit about what is worth our life. Of course, for some money is symbol – like Lance Armstrong’s yellow shirt. In the rough and tumble of some exchanges money certifies right decisions, risks taken – the self isn’t certified by the money but by the wisdom of choices which produced it.

Status & our desire for approval are great. While a rich area to contemplate this hot summer, first let’s talk about the simplest marker: money.

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The remarkable & wise Wretchard has revealed his identity.

Free & from the internet – this note describes a service motivated by the land grant’s mission. And, at its best, these institutions offer accessibility to current scholarship & practical delivery methods. Here it isn’t no-till methods but poetry.

American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by Ted Kooser. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry, and we believe we can add value for newspaper and online readers by doing so.

This week’s column.

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From Mediacrity via Instapundit, we learn that Romenesko’s media column earns him $150K from the not-for-profit which sponsors him. That’s not too shabby (the money, I mean, not the column). We see in the Boston Globe that one poor guy settled for $5 to say nice things about an on-line florist.

Let me assure potential advertisers that as ardent capitalists, we Chicago Boyz can be bought. Any Dodge/Chrysler dealer with an extra one of these hanging around the lot can expect to read many favorable things about their product in exchange for one of them. That other guy would probably settle for a couple of chrome lug nuts, but sometimes quality costs more.

Two more things noted:

The bloggers mentioned have a rather cavalier attitude to disclosing their pay-for-play arrangements. We don’t do that; hence no links to the bloggers in the story.

And once again, the on-line version of a print media story on blogging appears with no hyperlinks, although they give some URLs. Sigh.

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]