A Thoughtful Reply to My Allegedly Intemperate "Impeachment" Post

LittleBrother said...

Four years after the revolution,
And the old king's execution,
Four years after, I remember how
Those courtiers took their final bow.

String up every aristocrat
Out with the priests: Let them live on their fat
Four years after we started fighting
Marat keeps on with his writing
Four years after the Bastille fell
He still recalls the old battle yell
Down with all of the ruling class
Throw all the generals out on their arse...

Mi hermano mayor, I admire your willingness to be a canary in this hellish deathtrap of a coal mine-- the apocalyptic New Amerikan Empire. But I see the reaction you inspire, perhaps especially the kind and sincere cautions, as more of a sign of the times than a refutation on the merits of your comments.

I'm probably looking for cats to comb, as my Sicilian grandmother used to put it, in the bilious backwash of the Ward Churchill and Norman Finklestein Ox-Bow Incidents. But when I read your putatively incendiary remarks, I take it as a dispassionate analysis, presenting the perfectly valid hypothesis that if a government deliberately eschews or vitiates mechanisms explicitly incorporated in its constitution to peacefully forestall or mediate conflict and crisis, that such government is perforce inviting anarchy and violence to fill the vacuum. I don't think a fair reading supports a conclusion that Woody is particularly advocating, much less encouraging, revolutionary mayhem. He's just pointing out the bifurcated trends resulting from the criminal administration's systematic annihilation of legal restraints and respect for law over power.

This may be a jeremiad of sorts, but it's hardly incendiary or inflammatory in its own right. But the people shushing you for your own good seem to feel that blogs, and you, simply can't risk presenting provocative comments in reasonable expectation of a fair reading and discussion. Anything "borderline" or hyperbolic or edgy should either be cleaned up ("self-policed") or tactfully suppressed.

The issue of the Homeland Security Nazgûl being ready to fuck up your shit, and the shit of the blogger you visit, on the slightest pretext is in my view problematic at best. It's not a question of whether this threat is real; it's a question of what it means to acquiesce to fear of persecution.

In recent weeks, I'm becoming more and more aware of a Nice-Nellie middle coalescing in mainstream blog sites. That twit Joan Walsh at Salon.com, and Arianna Huffington's trash-tabloid-skin "Huffington Post" are going back and forth about how comments should be controlled by the host.

There seems to be a depressing consensus that it is OK, and in accordance with ephemeral dogma about The Blogging Community and standards of decency, for sites to censor and moderate comments in order to weed out those perceived as mean-spirited or advocating violence or other illegal acts.

The practical consequence of this inanity on HuffPo, for example, is that some automated screening software, or perhaps a low-paid flack scanning a million incoming comments, will make a quick call to zap or not to zap. Smaller one-person bloggers are more capricious and arbitrary in banning and censoring, unapologetically exercising the Harsh Parent dogma of My House, My Say Who Lives Here. Yet bloggers often seem to resent having to discuss their editorial choices and methods, and in my view sites like HuffPo and Salon are trying to disingenuously have it both ways: encourage spontaneous comments, provided they are spontaneously in accordance with ambiguous Comment Policy rules. I doubt that they tangle themselves much in the sophisticated dynamics of free expression controlled by seemingly-benevolent cat-and-mouse methods composed of lethal paradoxical injunctions. One musn't be a "purist", after all.

For all of the nascent hope that the criminal regime is tottering and in free fall, it's painfully obvious that The Fear has settled like a fog onto the Bloglands.

I'm sorry that you're being marginalized and locked in the closet for your own good by the ostensible progressive blogging community. Although it provides more than my MDR for irony.

(Ed. Note: Thank you, Hermanito, for your patience, intelligence and understanding. What deTocqueville said 170 years ago still seems to apply: ""In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them."I should say, also, that--except for our mutual membership in the family of 'man'--we are not related.)