Distinctiveness, Identity, and Criticism

Category: Criticism

There is a great deal of blog triumphalism, especially on the right side, that is utterly self-contradictory and and utterly concerned with the amplification of memes, etc. For all the (in general, but not in this specific circumstance) derision cast at the MainStream Media, the mainstream media is still the effective game in town.

I think of why blogs are important to me, and I think of Billmon at Whiskey Bar. I think of how sad it is that he's no longer blogging, and I remember the reasons he gave for leaving.

What made Billmon so important was his pronounced perspective and his distinct and eloquent voice. There is no one like him. And that's the promise of blogging.

Not to get rid of the George Wills and Howard Finemans of the world, or to even replace them, but to act as a bulwark, however small, of distinctiveness and individual human identity where notions of the world are otherwise received and homogenous.

Readers of Whiskey Bar, especially when comments were alive and well, felt like part of a community of individual human minds. It was stimulating and exciting and entirely unlike the world of opinion one finds on those execrable cable news roundtable shows.

I know I'm wired differently from other people, and probably have more time than most to dedicate to such things, but my feeling upon discovering that there was this world of smart people, good writers, and interesting thinkers was very positive.

American culture is both, more often than not, homogenous and also, more often than not, tailored toward underestimating the taste and capacities of its audience. The rightwingers will often say that it's evil liberals who are to blame for the bar being set so low. I cannot say it's the rightwingers' fault, in certainty, although the very fact that George Bush, a true dullard, the very fruit of the soft bigotry of our low expectations, is my president says something. The fact is that we have a culture that encourages in every way possible magical thinking, that, despite its self-conception, is not meritocratic an any substantial way.

I am convinced that blogs are part of the solution. There are minds that would otherwise go rusty from disuse, opinions that would go unchallenged, souls that would become ever decreasingly insensitive in its absence.