Putting People/Activities into Boxes

Stefan McDaniel blogs about how blogs have ruined language. (ht Joe Carter)

Reading Postman for the first time last month gave me clearer language to explain my rage against the rise of blogging. For what he says about media can be said about literary forms—they are biased toward certain kinds of content. The blogpost is biased toward speed, brevity, and cleverness. It thus hands the public square over to bullies, sophists, and clowns.

ummmm, the “Public Square” is everyone’s, including the bullies, sophists and clowns.

I write a blog in order to stay focused on actual news. It forces me to dig deeper into the news and arrive at my own conclusions. I spit those out here not to use words in some beautiful, meaningful way, but to keep track of what I think so that when in conversation I don’t end up sputtering and searching around tidbits of memory to share my thoughts.

I read blogs to find links to stories I otherwise would not have found (ACORN anyone?). I read blogs to see how other people interpret the same stories I’ve read.

Furthermore, even good blogging threatens to worsen our already bad relation with the written word. Several excellent bloggers have told me that they find it much harder than they once did either to follow sustained written arguments (especially when not tricked out with flashy rhetoric) or to make such arguments themselves; they have grown impatient with writing that does not meet bloggy criteria.

I would submit that those people he’s writing about above, are reading/writing blogs for different reasons than I have. Mr. McDaniel throws all the millions of bloggers into a box and I doubt even 1 million really fit in that particular box.

Ruh Roh

Obama has lost Maureen Dowd. (let me be clear so I don’t embarrass myself….I don’t read Dowd. I have no idea why I opened it up this morning.)

Dissing the Dalai was part of a broader new Obama policy called “strategic reassurance” — softening criticism of China’s human rights record and financial policies to calm its fears that America is trying to contain it. (Not to mention our own fears that the Chinese will quit bankrolling our debt.)

The tyro American president got the Nobel for the mere anticipation that he would provide bold moral leadership for the world at the very moment he was caving to Chinese dictators. Awkward.

Havel reached out to touch a glass dish given to him by Obama, inscribed with the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. “It is only a minor compromise,” he said. “But exactly with these minor compromises start the big and dangerous ones, the real problems.”

Now granted, Dowd thinks the constitution is something that Obama should just, you know, do away with so he can get things done, so she’s still a whackjob…my point being that if he’s lost the whackjobs, who does he have left? concerning New Orleans:

The president gave a technocrat’s answer about the “complications between the state, the city and the feds in making assessments of the damages.”

“Now, I wish I could just write a check,” he added. When an audience member yelled “Why not?” he dryly noted, “There’s this whole thing about the Constitution.”

The president should remember, though, that when you’re cooking up a more perfect Union, sometimes you’ve got to break some eggs.