Month: December 2006

Chris Bowers unloads here about what blogging has done to his consciousness, sense of self, and general life. Money quote:

Try to imagine this: spend a week where you write for about sixty-five hours. Now, consider the following conditions on that writing:

    * Whatever you write will be read by tens of thousands of people
    * The material and research you use to produce that writing will almost never be of a personal nature.
    * What you write must mesh with a perceived set of expectations of the content you have previously published.
    * This is done almost entirely in virtual space, where your contacts take place over email, in comment threads, and on the front-page websites. Overall, you hve little human contact with either your colleagues or audience.

If you did this for a week, you might start to sense, however slightly, your ego merging with your writing. If you do it for three years, at some point you might notice that your ego has been largely subsumed into this activity. Think about this. First, your thoughts are always directed outward toward matters that do not directly refer to you. Second, commentary on you is always directed toward your writing and your blog, never to you personally. Third, there is basically no one with whom you can commiserate about your activities on a daily, or even weekly, basis. If you do this long enough, eventually your sense of self will be largely subsumed into the activity of blogging, and even into your actual blog. And maybe your blog connects to other blogs, and even to a wider movement. Your sense of self can be merged with those institutions as well.

It’s now over six years for me. I don’t feel the same way, and that may have something to do with the fact that I feel no part of any "movement" (the minute I did, I’d do my best to leave it). I also feel immensely connected personally to my readers, even though they never appear visually as more than email addresses. It helps that I had a pretty clear idea of what being a writer was before I jumped into this new medium. I’ve always seen blogging as a new medium and a new genre – but it’s still, for me, a form of writing. And, although my writing is inextricable from my life, it is also clearly separate. Even when I blog about myself, I write about a public self, not the real self. A blog is a mask, as all writing is. (See: Nietzsche, F.)

I get the creeps sometimes when I realize my friends and even my fiance read the blog and my blog and my life blur. I want a boundary but inevitably that boundary is porous. I can live with that, but it requires vigilance. The few weeks a year I stop blogging are a kind of elysium for me. The ability to have a thought and just kick it around for a while, the chance to think nothing, the chance to read at a leisured pace, or to have dinner with a friend in the knowledge that afterwards, you won’t have to check the blog: bliss. Next week, in my winter break, I hope to hang with some friends in NYC, maybe even stay out late and not worry about the 7 am post the next day. Joy to the world!

But the impact of blogging is not as scary as television. I do a fair bit but I have kept my distance from any serious gig because I really do want to maintain some semblance of normal life. TV destroys it. It interacts with your mental health like acid on wood. It makes it impossible to go places without having your public persona and politics follow you. Some of that is inevitable in public life; some is avoidable. But blogging is mild in comparison. I’ve seen the impact of TV on a few friends and I have to say I wonder how any of them stay sane. I guess, in the long run, most of them don’t.

Mikey Weinstein whose son endured anti-Semitic slurs from Christianist soldiers gives an interview to Salon.

Who knows? Waiting till January is not ideal, given the gravity of the situation. Trying to find a new governing coalition sans Sadr strikes me as Sysyphean at this point, but I suppose one more push can’t hurt. A troop surge might help such an effort, but, again, it’s just one last gambit, not a real strategy. But all this looks as if it’s in the works. I see, of course, no sign that we are going to seriously reboot the occupation, so all of this is simply a way to minimize the short-term costs of leaving. It’s face-saving, which only a huge amount of luck might turn into something better. So try it – but no illusions, please. McCain may do a photo-op with Bush in january, but wihout 50,000 more troops, it’s pure theater.

Moreover, I think the risk of hanging in with this strategy after February is far too great – because we are already on the verge of siding with one faction in the civil war, and that has dreadful ramifications, as the Saudis have reminded us. Our first objective must be to avoid becoming enmeshed in the civil war. Our second objective must be to do what we can to save Iraq in the short time left to us before a full-fledged civil war obliterates all other options.

So: one last face-saving effort, hoping for a miracle. Then: get the hell out. Perhaps six months redeployment to Kurdistan to protect the only secure haven left, before complete disengagement. Then use the Sunni-Shia regional war to divert Islamist terror away from the West and toward the Arab states that have enabled it. Meanwhile, massive new investment in human intelligence, language skills, and more attention to homeland security – and a new effort to salvage Afghanistan.

History will probably record that the United States accidentally jump-started a thirty year war in the Middle East. Oil prices will become terribly unstable, as it is used as a weapon by both Sunnis and Shiites. But that’s good in the long run for the West as well. Our politicians won’t take responsibility for the energy-environmental crisis, so we might as well let war take care of it.

It’s going to be a hellish few years, and not without some kind of catastrophe, I fear. But I see no way to avoid it; and plenty of worse scenarios in trying to do so. Alas, we have two years of ineptitude in the White House. But we already made that call in 2004. You do triage with the president you’ve got, as Rummy might say.

(Photo: Jim Young/Reuters.)

Inimitable:

Cal Thomas: You’ve read the Iraq Study Group Report?

Donald Rumsfeld: I haven’t. I’ve read reports of it and gone through the executive summary.

(Photo: Cherie A. Thurlby/DOD/AP.)

If tofu makes you gay and reduces the magnitude of your member, then gay men should all be feeling inadequate. In fact, Alfred Kinsey conducted serious empirical research in this area and two researchers recently went through the data and published a paper in the peer-reviewed Archives of Sexual Behavior. Here’s the abstract:

The relation between sexual orientation and penile dimensions in a large sample of men was studied. Subjects were 5,122 men interviewed by the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction from 1938 to 1963. They were dichotomously classified as either homosexual (n = 935) or heterosexual (n = 4187). Penile dimensions were assessed using five measures of penile length and circumference from Kinsey’s original protocol. On all five measures, homosexual men reported larger penises than did heterosexual men. Explanations for these differences are discussed, including the possibility that these findings provide additional evidence that variations in prenatal hormonal levels (or other biological mechanisms affecting reproductive structures) affect sexual orientation development.

We win.

Seattle, Washington, 3.10 pm.

A reader writes:

I’m a gay widower whose husband, age 54, died last year of an unexpected heart attack. Unfortunately, despite my reminders, he had neglected to do all those good things like making a will, etc.; thus, predictable unpleasantness followed with his family, and there I was, alone with just our little fuzzy dog, in a cow-patty-size, homophobic town far out on the prairie, without any of the protections of law in this gothically conservative state. I’ll skip the tedious details – nothing much really dramatic happened, save some nasty conversations; by the grace of God, I happened to have some savings in the bank and was able to move on the spur of the moment, just a week after the funeral, sans almost all of what belonged to my husband – let me tell you, it was a feeling and an experience I’ll never forget.

So forgive me if I say that the word "conservative" has a really bad taste in my mouth now; I used to feel somewhat conservative, but when your whole life as well as your home – our home – disappears overnight due to the oh-so-righteous attitudes of your friends, neighbors, and family, well – you get the picture.  I cried when I watched the broadband video of the vote not to revisit the equal marriage issue in Canada last week – because I know exactly what that means in concrete terms. If it stands there, and I think it will now, it will come to the U.S. eventually, even to Texas; and can’t come too soon to suit me.

Pity Canada is so far north, ya know?  All that ice and snow …

Of course he opposes it. And it is a good thing that he has now publicly said so. Money quote:

"The new shape of conflicts, especially since the terrorist threat unleashed new forms of violence, demands that the international community reaffirm international humanitarian law."

Geneva Conventions, anyone? What this administration has done with respect to torture and abuse of detainees and indefinite suspension of habeas corpus has put the United States in a morally compromised position – one that intrinsically violates the constitutional core of this country. Maybe Benedict’s words will prompt some theocons to speak some truth to power. Unless power, of course, is their truth.

(Photo: Wolfgang Radke/AP.)

Slate’s editor, Jacob Weisberg, with whom I once shared an intern pit, has a great piece on Obama in Men’s Vogue. Money quote:

As a speaker, Obama does not strive for the soulful effect of an African-American evangelical. Nor does he conjure instant empathy with an audience, the way Bill Clinton does. He delivers his message with the understated charisma of a Midwestern news anchor. But when he writes or when he speaks, Obama does something no one else in politics does: He plumbs his own anxiety and doubt, and ties his life story to political problems that few elected officials dare to discuss so personally, including the disparities of race and class, drug abuse, poverty, and, of course, faith.

I assume that Vladimir Putin is behind the poisoning of several political opponents as well as the assassination of Anna Politskaya. I also assume he’s smart enough to hire various middle-men to protect his own involvement. He’s a mafia-boss, trained by the KGB. But his dangerous game may have gone awry and the disappearance of the material should be of enormos concern, because it is necessary for the kind of nuke we know Islamists want to use against us. Ed Epstein provides a helpful guide to where this material could have come from here. This strikes me as a matter of extreme urgency.