On the necessity of blogging!

Mitch and I had dinner again at the Hammond Hotel. It’s a quaint dining location situated right under the Hammond Water Tower in the scenic town of Hammond, Wisconsin, and across the parking lot from a boarded up window which might once have hidden Jews hiding from Nazis. We were discussing blogs, and Mitchell asked, wisely, “Who the hell reads them?” I told him that that was exactly the point—we all have to read them because blogs represent the best (and last?) potential for subversion the left might yet have. We have lost whatever hope we might have once had in the media—they are effete and ineffectual, and the government has effectively silenced whatever brave reporters yet exist. We have no member of Congress brave enough to tell the truth, or even brave enough to practice it. Certainly, who ever we thought were our representatives have turned with their tails between their legs at the reprimand of the Republican White Christians, to quote one of the last of the angry men, Howard Dean! (This is the very same Howard Dean who taught us how powerful the Internet can be as a political instrument—this knowledge required that the powers-that-be destroy him, and advocate for a John Kerry who might look good but who wouldn’t threaten the power structures.) The right wing beat us to the radio talk shows, and the Rush Limbaughs laugh at us as we try to play extreme catch-up on TalkRadio. No, in all of the traditional places in which power resides in our society, we, on the left, are absolutely locked out. Without Resources. Useless. Meaningless. Our conversation kept drifting to the Vichy government, to Petáin, and to Casablanca. I have often speculated on why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with a senator’s wife? I like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me . . . And what in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca? “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “Waters! What waters? We’re in the desert!” “I was misinformed.”

I told Mitchell that unless we all blog and read each others blogs, then we’ll have no way to stay organized and send our ideas out. We must read our blogs, and we must tell others to read the blogs of our friends and comrades, and the more blogs that there out there written by us, the greater the chance that others whom we do not know will read our blogs and be stimulated and nourished and energized by our ideas. And then those that we don’t yet know will tell others whom we also don’t know about our blogs, and the ideas contained within them—and before you know it, we’ve got the beginning of the movement, Alice and her Restaurant notwithstanding.



Blog Away, My Dears! It is for our lives.