I can’t imagine a blogosphere without Body and Soul, can you?
It’s common wisdom that this administration has, from the outset, and right up to the present, made a habit of accusing others of what it is guilty of. I’ve always thought of that as just an effective technique — put your opposition on the defense, so that, at best, no one notices what you’re doing, and, at worst, people excuse your crimes because the other side supposedly does it too.
But when self-described Christians are choosing to replicate the history of their faith in reverse, casting themselves in the villains’ place, while somehow still claiming the innocence of holy victims, it looks more like pathology than political spin. They remind me of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, aroused by Christian iconography, fantasizing himself as a Roman soldier. Then throw in something too twisted for Alex –fantasizing himself, simultaneously, as a martyr.
James Wolcott’s recent reference to Digby’s blog as “a Paul Revere gallop through the pitched night of the Bush years” reminds me of this passage from Paul Revere’s Ride, a 1994 book by the great historian David Hackett Fischer. The passage seems relevant to the recent discussion (triggered by the Kos article in WM) about the role blogs play in political discourse. Fischer sees Revere in relationship to the overall Revolutionary movement and debunks the myth that he was a “just a messenger.” He describes Revere as an important cog *in a liberal movement* that was “open and pluralist” and made up of “an alliance of many overlapping groups.” Revere was a silversmith by day, but away from his trade he was doing much more for the rebel cause, and it was more than a poetic midnight ride. This has a feel to it, like maybe this is what bloggers did before computers, in a day when everything was closer, within physical reach, and people did their politics face to face.
Paul Revere’s Role in the Revolutionary Movement
The structure of Boston’s revolutionary movement, and Paul Revere’s place within it, were very different from recent secondary accounts. Many historians have suggested that this movement was a tightly organized, hierarchical organization, controlled by Samuel Adams and a few other dominant figures. These same interpretations commonly represent Revere as a minor figure who served his social superiors mainly as a messenger.
A very different pattern emerges from the following comparison of seven groups: the Masonic lodge that met at the Green Dragon Tavern; the Loyal Nine, which was the nucleus of the Sons of Liberty; the North Caucus that met at the Salutation Tavern; the Long Room Club in Dassett Alley; the Boston Committee of Correspondence; the men who are known to have participated in the Boston Tea Party; and Whig leaders on a Tory Enemies List.
A total of 255 men were in one or more of these seven groups. Nobody appeared on all seven lists, or even as many as six. Two men, and only two, were in five groups; they were Joseph Warren and Paul Revere, who were unique in the breadth of their associations.
Other multiple memberships were as follows. Five men (2.0%) appeared in four groups each: Samuel Adams, Nathaniel Barber, Henry Bass, Thomas Chase, and Benjamin Church. Seven men (2.7%) turned up on three lists (James Condy, Moses Grant, Joseph Greenleaf, William Molineux, Edward Proctor, Thomas Urann, and Thomas Young).
Twenty-seven individuals (10.6%) were on two lists (John Adams, Nathaniel Appleton, John Avery, Samuel Barrett, Richard Boynton, John Bradford, Ezekiel Cheever, Adam Collson, Samuel Cooper, Thomas Crafts, Caleb Davis, William Dennie, Joseph Eayrs, William Greenleaf, John Hancock, James Otis, Elias Parkman, Samuel Peck, William Powell, John Pulling, Josiah Quincy, Abiel Ruddock, Elisha Story, James Swan, Henry Welles, Oliver Wendell, and John Winthrop). The great majority, 211 of 255 (82.7%), appeared only on a single list. Altogether, 94.1% were in only one or two groups.
This evidence strongly indicates that the revolutionary movement in Boston was more open and pluralist than scholars have believed. It was not a unitary organization, but a loose alliance of many overlapping groups. That structure gave Paul Revere and Joseph Warren a special importance, which came from the multiplicity and range of their alliances.
None of this is meant to deny the preeminence of other men in different roles. Samuel Adams was especially important in managing the Town Meeting, and the machinery of local government, and was much in the public eye. Otis was among its most impassioned orators. John Adams was the penman of the Revolution. John Hancock was its “milch cow,” as a Tory described him. But Revere and Warren moved in more circles than any others. This gave them their special roles as the linchpins of the revolutionary movement — its communicators, coordinators, and organizers of collective effort in the cause of freedom.
Another list (too long to be included here) survives of 355 Sons of Liberty who met at the Liberty Tree in Dorchester in 1769. Once again, Paul Revere appears on it. There were at least two other Masonic lodges in Boston at various periods before and during the Revolution; Paul Revere is known to have belonged to at least one of them. In addition to the North Caucus, there was also a South Caucus and a Middle Caucus. Paul Revere may or may not have belonged to them as well; some men joined more than one. No definitive lists of members have been found. But it is known that Revere was a member of a committee of five appointed “to wait on the South End caucus and the Caucus in the middle part of town,” and that he met with them (Goss, Revere, II, 639). Several Boston taverns were also centers of Whig activity. Revere had connections with at least two of them-Cromwell’s Head, and the Bunch of Grapes. The printing office of Benjamin Edes was another favorite rendezvous. In the most graphic description of a gathering there by John Adams, once again Paul Revere was recorded as being present.
In sum, the more we learn about the range and variety of political associations in Boston, the more open, complex and pluralist the revolutionary movement appears, and the more important (and significant) Paul Revere’s role becomes. He was not the dominant or controlling figure. Nobody was in that position. The openness and diversity of the movement were the source of his importance. Appendix D, page 301, Paul Revere’s Ride, by David Hackett Fischer, New York, 1994.
People will use blogs as they wish, but their important role in directing the actions and messages of a political movement is becoming more and more undeniable. The liberal blogs that I read *usually make their assertions* in an open and pluralist way, not in a top down hierarchical fashion; independent and distributed, yet coordinated and overlapping. This is quite the opposite of our *conservative* adversaries. [I changed rightwing to conservative because the real conservatives hate to be painted with the Bush brush. Tough shit.]
Fischer’s description of Revere as a ‘linchpin, communicator, coordinator, and organizer of collective effort’ seems also seems apropos (heh). It’s pure teamwork, where each role is small, even miniscule, but in the aggregate can lead to an essential outcome, which in today’s political environment is the shedding of authoritative conservatism in favor of an open pluralism.
And wouldn’t you give just about anything to sit in a place called, Bunch of Grapes? Or how about The Green Dragon Tavern or Cromwell’s Head? With luck, maybe someday there will be an establishment called Bush’s Head.
Glenn Greenwald sees through the new “leak” about the government being forced (gosh darn it to heck) to monitor Muslims for nukes. Similar to how the convenient color coded terrorist warnings leading up to the election last year were designed to keep the president’s poll numbers from falling, this one is designed to muddy the waters of the NSA spying scandal. After all, if Muslims are suspected of building nuclear devices right in our backyards (God Save Us ALL!) why in the hell are we worried about a little harmless phone tapping?
The Administration’s purported efforts to find radiological activity in Muslim mosques is now supposed to be thrown onto the pile along with its lawless NSA eavesdropping program, so that the whole confusing controversy is aggregated into nothing more than the same tired, irrational terrorist-defending fetish of trying to impede George Bush in his valiant crusade to protect us from The Terrorists. And sure enough, like puppets on cue, the most blindly loyal of the Bush defenders are spitting out exactly this scary tale.
And with the images now darkly dancing around in our heads of Muslims hiding in their mosques in Los Angeles and Queens and Georgia suburbs and maybe in your own backyard, standing over a toxic brew of radiology and TNT ready to zap us all with their mushroom clouds, all of this annoying chatter about FISA and the Fourth Amendment and the NSA is supposed to meekly fade away, drowned to death by nightmares of our children with their hair on fire and glowing in the dark and George Bush trying to save them.
He asks if they will get away with it again. I dunno. At some point you have to wonder if the citizens of the US will tire of playing this little fantasy of being a nation under seige (while they shop til they drop) and want to switch the channel to little “Morning in America.”
I heard a stranger in a line at the book store say the other day that he was tired of hearing the president talk about “protecting us” like he’s some kind of super hero. It’s possible that they’ve gone to the well with this one too many times. We’ll see.
Update: I see that I was unclear. (Eggnog?) This looks like it was leaked because it is the kind of thing that some people will find reasonable. (I doubt that it’s any more effective than making grandma take off her slippers at the airport, but whatever.) The point is that the administration likely leaked this themselves for the purpose of obscuring the seriousness of the NSA spy scandal.
If this is true, it is another case of the administration leaking classified information for political purposes. How surprising.
It turns out the Little Red Book Story was a hoax. Thank Goodness. But lest anyone think that this means anything, check this out:
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
[…]
“There was a lot of discussion about the switches” in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. “You’re talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that’s on a switch that’s carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that.”
Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.
What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.
That’s what we all thought. TIA Redux. Which means they have likely been sifting through millions of Americans’ communications, with the acquiescence of your friendly neighborhood phone and internet provider, looking for keywords, patterns … well, we don’t know, now do we, because it’s all done with no oversight. They could be looking for signs of illicit blow jobs, which is, as we all know, a major threat to the republic.
I would not expect that this mining is quite as sophisticated as we might like. After all, we are surveilling Quakers and PETA because they are terrorist threats so I wouldn’t look for the NSA to have some mind boggling, science fiction level capabilities to sort out the person who is discussing current events from the terrorist trying to kill us all.
Oh well. If you don’t want to be a suspect, just don’t use your phone or computer. Or the US mail. Or an airplane. Or a library. And if you do use those things, just don’t say anything that a computer might interpret to be a threat. Is that so hard? Use your heads, people. This is what we have to do to preserve our freedom.
Lots of people are discussing this article about Kos in the new Washington Monthly and wondering whether we need more wonkery and less partisanship in the blogosphere.
It seems to me that there is a lot of great accessible policy analysis in the left blogosphere. Max Sawicky notes that that wonkery rises to the occasion when needed, as in the social security debate (and, I would argue, Juan Cole and other foreign policy specialists when Iraq debates have raged.) Specialists abound. There is political wonkery in the form of analysts like Ruy Teixeira at Donkey Rising. Nathan Newman is the go to on labor issues. PZ Myers and Chris Mooney on science. Economists and lawyers abound, Maxspeak, Angry Bear, Balkinization, Talk Left, Scotusblog, the list goes on. TPM Cafe is a salon devoted to wonkery.
And within the wonkosphere there are generalists and specialists, more often the latter, for obvious reasons. Kevin Drum is a generalist wonk. He has many interests that he enjoys exploring with graphs and data. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias do too. Most blogwonks aren’t like that. (You’ll notice that all three of those guys are employed by liberal magazines that specialize in popular wonkery.)
These and the many great blogwonks are essential to the left blogosphere. They are a tremendous resource that I (a card carrying partisan crank) treasure and I link to them more often than anyone else. They are often compelling writers who effectively convey complex information to the lay reader and offer excellent analysis. So I’m not sure I see the beef. I rarely find it difficult to get educated on any number of subjects when I need to (which is often.)
Having said that, I disagree that the rest of the blogsphere is a bunch of screaming hysterics who engage in nothing but “agitation” or partisan catcalling. They all discuss politics — you’re not a member of the left blogsphere if you don’t — and they discuss the subject in different ways with analysis, humor, polemic, grassroots activism, criticism and historical perspective. The big blogs like Kos and Atrios have created virtual communities within the larger community for people to gather and talk about the issues of the day. And that, believe it or not, is the essence of politics.
In the Politics Aristotle said:
“That man is much more a political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal is clear. For, as we assert, nature does nothing in vain, and man alone among the animals has speech….[S]peech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful and hence also the just and unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things of this sort; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city.”
Politics is way more than wonkery, although wonkery is essential. And the partisan catcalling is a natural part of it, particularly in highly polarized times such as this. It’s human, for better or worse. People need to find solidarity and they need to express their fears, frustrations, desires, needs and beliefs. People turn to bloggers and each other to connect the dots and connect to others.
Wonkery is reason. The comaraderie we find among those of our online political tribe is heart. Successful politics requires both. I’ve often felt that one of the problems with liberalism is that we lost touch with that side of ourselves — as Ezra has called it, our “inner RFK” — the part that gets inspired (or angry) because we deeply believe in something.
Our technocratic side is far superior for actual governance, as we’ve recently been shown in spades. But it is a grave mistake to think that politics is, or ever has been, fueled by a concept like “competence.” It’s fueled by much bigger concepts like “leadership” and “inspiration” and “committment.” We need some of that stuff, badly.
So I say hooray for the wonkosphere and the crankosphere. I know that each side sometimes offends the sensibilities of the other but we should warmly embrace our bretheren no matter what our temperaments incline us to. Robust progressive politics requires both.
Speaking of media malfesance, here’s a barn burner of a post by Avedon Carol on the alleged “even-handedness” of the press.
The so-called “objectivity” we are seeing today is very different from what we saw 30 years ago, for the simple reason that when you refuse to acknowledge that one side is telling the truth while the other is lying, that’s not objective. Objectively, Bush lied and Gore didn’t, but you’d never have known that from the mainstream media’s coverage of the 2000 campaign. Objectively, there is no more important thing to do in an election than make sure everyone can vote and then count all the ballots, but you wouldn’t have known that, either.
In that regard, I have to give some props to Andrea Mitchell today sitting in for Chris Matthews. She actually did call glassy-eyed Governor Bill Owen of Colorado out on his RNC mandated stream of consiousness blather about “Aldrich Ames – Brooklyn bridge – Jamie Gorelick – known terrorists – protecting America – 9/11 – Clintoncarterdemocrats.” She said outright that what he was saying wasn’t true.
The problem is that the Republican machine is like the Borg. They only have one brain. Owen did not compute her factual rebuttal; he just repeated his mantra, calmly and cooly, because he doesn’t really know what he’s saying — he’s just reading from the approved script. He has no idea what’s true and what isn’t and he doesn’t care.
I’d like to welcome Andrea Mitchell into the reality based community. Maybe she’ll stay awhile.
Commenter francesangeles spotted this article by Richard Morin, the angry WaPo pollster, from just the other day:
Finally, an explanation for why bar bets sometimes escalate into bar fights: Levels of a “high-octane” form of testosterone soar when men think others don’t trust them.
When I saw the picture attached to the article, I realized that I had seen Richard Morin interviewed by Fox’s Bill Hemmer yesterday about the president’s exciting new poll numbers. I commented to the cat how bizarre it was that the guy appeared to be so happy, almost giddy, about it. (Fleaber agreed that the guy’s affect was downright euphoric.) If anyone has footage, let me know.
I think we might be dealing with a straight-up kool-aider.
For a connect-the-Bush-atrocities, with heavy linkage, check out this post at HuffPo by Joshua Bearman. It makes a nice Christmas e-mail for your Republican relatives:
It would be one thing if we were safer. But our modern day Sun King cloaks his seizure of power in so much poll-tested national security language despite that he is not, in fact, protecting us at all. The residents of the three cities Bush cited voted overwhelmingly against him because they rightly sensed that Bush’s reckless foreign adventures and lack of a real domestic security policy MAKES US ALL LESS SAFE. It doesn’t take much critical analysis to figure out why. Here is a guy who, after September 11, failed to increase funding for nuclear non-proliferation, which the non-partisan commission the President himself appointed called the single greatest threat to our safety. Collecting the world’s loose nukes was the first thing on my mind on September 12th, 2001, so I’m a little confused as why it’s taken the President four years to catch on.
Then there’s Iraq, where Bush has decided to throw away $200+ billion — money that could have paid for an entire wish list of domestic security programs. Right now, our own military, fueled by Bush’s swaggering cowboy routine has become the most effective recruiting tool for anti-American sentiment and insurgents in Iraq. If you find that to be a subjective assessment, here’s a joint study by the Israeli and Saudis (!) that quantifies the Iraq Effect. And who doesn’t recall Rumsfeld accidentally wondering aloud if the insurgents weren’t replacing their numbers faster than our troops could ever kill them?
“To protect us”?
Is that why the 9/11 Commission’s report card earlier this month had a single “A” out of 41 categories, while the bottom was filled out with 12 “D”s and 5 “F”s? The President got a “D” on Securing WMD’s, the supposed reason we’re stirring up the hornets’ nest in Iraq. Commission member and former republican governor of Illinois James Thompson said it straight: “Are we crazy? Why aren’t our tax dollars being spent to protect our lives?”
Last night I wrote post called “Adults Wanted” and a reader sent me a link to this essay called “Confessions of a Repentant Republican” which is an extremely cogent, precise and lucid critique of the current administration’s policies from the perspective of someone who understands the enlightenment principles that undergird our system. He speaks in terms that transcend politics and go far beyond our current partisan obsessions.
Here’s an excerpt:
Americans, with broad bipartisan support, have not only embedded our unambiguous rejection of torture into American law (establishing legal constraints which the Bush administration is now determined to dismantle), but have for generations been in the forefront of establishing such standards worldwide through treaties including the Geneva Conventions.
Similarly, previous generations of Americans – left, right, and center – have been unified in the belief that not only is such conduct essential for the safety of our own captured servicemen and women, but that any nation which does not adhere to its own basic values (regardless of any self-proclaimed virtue) would cease to possess the moral prerequisites for genuine success.
Our present need for “the decent respect for the opinions of mankind” is no less compelling than it was for our founders. But the primary need for realigning our actions with our values is not improved public relations. The most compelling need is, for the benefit of our own society, to reaffirm moral constraints upon our actions, individual and collective, without which the character of our nation will be diminished.
Accomplishing this can only be done by reframing the issues in a manner which befits our Judeo-Christian and American values.
This will be contentious. The unifying values implanted by America’s founders – values of liberty, non-aggression, and antipathy to authoritarian government; have historically prevailed only despite significant opposition from Americans with less honorable priorities. Indeed, the very eloquence with which Jefferson, Madison, and other founders defended civil liberties and warned repeatedly of the dangers of unrestrained executive power and the pernicious consequences of war and empire is primarily because their views were not universal. Their beliefs in liberty, defended by non-aggressive, anti-imperial foreign policy, and the right of dissent have survived to become the “common ground” of the American civic vision only after bitter and divisive political battles. During such times these cherished principles – now universally claimed (even those whose oppose the substance of their beliefs claim them rhetorically as their own) and taken for granted have not infrequently been severely threatened.
Today the rhetoric of this consensus American vision of liberty and non-aggression remains unscathed. But the substance of the beliefs of our founders (which constitutes the basic common ground of our political compact) is under assault. Certainly no one overtly challenges our commitment to liberty and democracy. Yet we witness proponents of freedom at home and abroad advocating perpetual military occupation, rationalizing permanent detention of American citizens without charges or trial, and those who claim to respect the rule of law remaining silent while administration lawyers concoct methods for the president to evade American legal prohibitions of torture and promote the legal theory that the president has the inherent authority to set aside American law.
This being the web, it’s always possible that this person is a Democrat in disguise but I don’t think so. His critique hinges on the idea that isolationsim is inherently American, and that is bedrock conservative of the old school, not liberal of the new school.
His critique is something that I had expected more “adult” Republicans to come to by now, to tell you the truth — the people I think many of us expected were peppered throughout the ruling class and who would step up if the kids got out of hand. Sadly, it seems that most of them are either dying out or have become consumed by the partisan war that saps so much strength from all of us.
I urge you to read his entire essay. Even though he considers himself part of the “anti-war” majority, progressive intellectuals will undoubtedly disagree with some of it. But he lays out the argument around which people of good will who value the basic fundamental principles of our constitutional system might be able to find consensus. I just don’t know how many of those people are out there.