Doc approved this quotation today and the trailing commentary:
Whitman's ideal of America," writes the poet Carl Dennis, "is a country held together not by law or custom but by a network of imaginative filaments thrown out by autonomous individuals who want to include as many people as they can in their own acts of self-definition."What a nightmare land. The disconnected governed by networks of faceless self-satisfied automons, without recourse to law or comfort of the ties of tradition, the latter part foundation of Whitman's pastoral vision. What is left without these things is the dream of any totalitarian.Read that again, please. It is precisely the bloggers vision.
These sorts of claims will be as embarrassing as wide-leg jeans and platform shoes, as harrowing as loyalty to "white", once blogging dies.
Comments
jean - January 3, 2004 1:32 PM
Wide legged jeans are back in style. Do you really believe blogging is going to die? I think blogging and emails have resurrected letter writing.
Alan - January 3, 2004 6:52 PM
I used to write 8 to 15 postal letters a month to friends. Then email came along and I wrote hundreds a month. Now I write no emails or postal letters to anyone other than the man in Portland. Blogs will die, too.
Wide legs aren't really back in style. Remember the big ones around '74 to '78 that had an additional piece of denim in the outside of lower leg, a wedge with the Canadian flag on it? That was widelegs, 14 or 16 inches wide.
Craig - January 3, 2004 7:53 PM
Herself gave me wide leg jeans for Christmas - and she has very good taste. :-)
Alan - January 3, 2004 8:24 PM
OK, you 60's refugees. I am talking bell-bottomed, can't see the shoe through the entire extent of the stride wide legs, so wide you need to wear fat sideburns to off set the appearance of pin-headedness. Surely to God these are not back in.
Mond Mustapha - January 5, 2004 10:55 AM
Very interesting point to make, Al. I think you're right: Bloggers tend to write like they have everything all figured out and the world would be a nice place if the rest of society just followed their advice and admonitions, however capricious and mercurial that might be. I also think that is a terrible misinterpretation of Whitman.
Alan - January 5, 2004 11:09 AM
This is a problem - in US legal history there was an analogous period during the Jeffersonian democracic era where the only people not allowed to represent others in court were those trained at law schools.
Mond M. - January 5, 2004 2:05 PM
Lawyers representing people? shocking!