Every now and again, Adorable Child (AC) comes home with a tale of woe, like “Mommy! Johnny says I have a big nose!”
I usually counter this (in front of a mirror) with, “AC, is your nose big?”
“No-o-o-o….”
“So how can this hurt you?”
Criticism carries no weight when it’s nothing but air.
Sometimes, though, there’s a bit more substance:
Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren’t much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .
Oh dear. Such judgmental pomposity!
Writing in the WSJ’s Opinion Journal, Joseph Rago is quite unimpressed with the political blogsphere, and if you think that’s going down the wrong pipe on the receiving end, you’re right; bloggers are gagging all over the place.
Unfortunately, he’s right; much of the political blogosphere is a virtual chunk of ambergris, where information is partially digested into gastric nether regions and then regurgitated into the waiting intellectual vacuum of the internet.
Don’t believe me? You must have missed Debbie Schlussel’s latest, then.
And while Obama may not identify as a Muslim, that’s not how the Arab and Muslim Streets see it. In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you. And once a Muslim, always a Muslim. You cannot go back. In Islamic eyes, Obama is certainly a Muslim. He may think he’s a Christian, but they do not.
[snip]
So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?
Strange stuff, yes? I’d say that qualifies for what Rago referred to as “a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition”, wouldn’t you? And that’s putting a generous spin on it…
Then there are those ever-scary denizens of that dank underworld — the comments sections — where hate, bigotry, and paranoia flourish, Golem-like. (Do you ever wonder where some of those folks are burying the bodies?)
No, Rago’s not wrong to criticize the blogosphere; there are some real ghouls among us.
What he doesn’t see, apparently, is that much of the political blogosphere functions just like AC’s mirror. When madness slips through the neural pathways, “Johnny” invariably says, “That’s crazy!“, and the blogosphere reaches for it’s virtual mirror.
Like this, and this, and this, and this… and this.
Just like the MSM, though, we’re not quite as quick to hold the mirror for ourselves. Maybe there are fewer differences than he realizes…