| I've recently become aware that I have a few blog stalkers - ie. people who spend inordinate amounts of time blogging about how much they hate my writing (see here, here, here, here and here for just a few recent examples). Evidently, these people have oodles of time on their hands (and personally, I think the funniest of them are those who still insist Hillary Clinton never supported NAFTA, despite Clinton's own repeated public speeches promoting NAFTA). But I just want to give them a shout out - I sincerely love them all, both because they are providing a few extra links to OpenLeft, and because at a level far deeper than meta-narrative navel gazing, they reflect the broader societal anger that I think could make this the transformative historical moment we all want it to be.
Hear me out on this latter point in the extended entry. |
| On the link score - hey, the more traffic, the better. It's kinda like that exchange from the movie "Private Parts" about Howard Stern. After the station manager says "the average Howard Stern fan listens for an hour and 10 minutes" he then indignantly recounts that "the average Stern hater listens for 2 and a half hours a day." I don't aim to be Howard Stern, but the principle from that exchange is right-on. We'll take the traffic from the stalkers - traffic is traffic, after all, and readers are readers (and check it out - OpenLeft's traffic has been awesome of late).
But beyond just the self-interest of having blog stalkers inadvertently help us with traffic, I want to reiterate that I think the frenzied rage that's out there - whether directed at me, OpenLeft, or at any other progressive institution - is to be expected in times like this.
The country is coming apart, we're handing over $8 or $9 trillion to Wall Street, the government - as I and many others repeatedly warned - is being stacked with those who engineered this crisis, and people are violently angry. And so some of the angriest are desperate for scapegoats and conspiracy theories to help them make sense of it all. My good buddy Matt Taibbi documented this pretty well in his last book - the fringe left (from the LaRouchies to the "everyone is awful" Naderites to the Obama-hating Clintonites) and the fringe right (from the anti-immigrant lunatics to the militia sympathizers to the libertarian ideologues) find common cause in turning their righteous frustration at the Establishment into chest-thumping anger at phantom demons that seem more easy to slay than the massive institutions and powers that have destroyed the country.
And so if I or OpenLeft or any other good progressive institution/voice serves as one of those proxies that seems more easy and fun and tangible to scapegoat than giant concepts like The Government or The Establishment or The System or towering cultural icons like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush, then, at a certain level, that's really OK with me. And I don't say that in any kind of martyr-like, please-fee-bad-for-me kind of way - I mean it sincerely.
If, for instance, the fringe left needs to blame me for Hillary Clinton losing to Barack Obama; or Hillary Clinton stupidly campaigning for NAFTA and the Iraq War; or Ralph Nader not being able to mount a real presidential campaign in a money-dominated system; or Barack Obama not fulfilling his campaign promises; that's fine by me. I can take it, even if I don't agree with it, even if I can acknowledge (like most rational human beings) that such a line of thinking is crazy, insane and absurd.
I can take it because it is entirely predictable in what Taibbi calls "The Great Derangement" - that is, in a country whose political system has made people feel so desperately powerless that they need delusional theories to make them feel they have some shred of control over the nation's destiny. If me serving as a punching bag helps make people feel they have some shred of control or vested interest in political engagement, then that's ultimately a good thing. Indeed, in Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky says that anyone truly committed to organizing and activism and political empowerment needs - at times - to be willing to serve as such a punching bag for precisely this reason.
The anger that's welling up across the country is real and it needs to be channeled somewhere, and if some of it is being channeled here at us, that's ultimately a positive. Why? Because for every one of the stalkers who has gone completely off the deep end - for every sociopath who spends oodles of time writing whacked-out Unabomber-like manifestos blaming me, or another individual writer, or a blog or or the progressive movement for the end of civilization in a country where individual progressive writers and blogs and movements are still incredibly outgunned by the monied Establishment - my guess is that there are 10 people just as angry but far more sane who can be brought into the fold to channel their anger into the kinds of constructive causes and movements that I have devoted my career to, that this community at OpenLeft is all about and that will ultimately bring lasting change to America.
UPDATE: Within moments of this diary posting, one of my most devout stalkers requested that I link to an extra one of his/her stalker posts. The timing, of course, reiterates the stalky-ness of it all. But in the interest of obliging, here's that link calling me a blind Obama loyalist. I'm guessing you'll find it pretty funny, if you've read any of my work. |
