Environmentally Endarkened

Did you turn your lights out for Earth Hour between 8-9 PM Saturday night? (I did.) Do you even know what I’m talking about?

If you don’t listen to Canadian radio stations and weren’t curious about why Google reversed their usual bright white background, chances are you missed this initiative, which is a shame because it’s a good one.

If you live in Buffalo and were clueless about Earth Hour it’s necessarily your fault, though on some level each of us must ultimately accept responsibility for our actions even when the cards are stacked against us. And, boy-oh-boy, in the United States we are really behind the ball when it comes to taking a hard look at our impact on the environment. We represent a small percent of the world’s population, but use a large percent of its resources. Of course this says an awful lot about just how privileged we are to live in this land of plenty, but they also says an awful lot about how wasteful we are as a country.

For the most part, household energy use doesn’t make that much of a dent in our energy consumption (businesses and municipalities account for much more as reported here in the Toronto Star) as a whole, but turning off the lights for an hour raises awareness about the impact that each of have on our environment. And that’s why it’s a shame if Earth Hour came and went and didn’t make any dent in your activities because if any country stands to have a positive effect upon our environment, it’s us, the Pigpen of our planet.

I’ve been giving my environmental footprint a lot of thought lately because when I started teaching I made a conscious decision to let go of some of the good habits I developed growing up in the very green community of Ithaca, NY. I rationalized my decision by telling myself that it was a matter of survival. As a first-year teacher I faced 80-hour work-weeks, unpredictable classroom behavior, pre-tenure observations, new teacher meeting requirements, extra-curricular obligations, and the necessity of completing a graduate degree. The result? I decided that I probably wouldn’t have time to wash my plastic bags for a little while. (I also let my exercise and cooking habits slide, but that’s another story.) And given all that, maybe that decision was justified, but it’s been almost four years since that date and I’m still entrenched in my bad habits.

So, today I’m starting fresh. And right there is what is so cool about Earth Hour and why it must be expanded beyond a handful of target cities. (To read more about the iniative, check our the World Wildlife Federation page here.) My one hour of hanging out in candlelight gave me time to think about just how environmentally unfriendly my own habits had become–from not reusing plastic bags, to not purchasing environmentally friendly cleaning products, to eating too much takeout (the plastic containers are not currently recyclable and styrofoam is such an environmental disaster it ought to be banned outright)–and reminded me that it wouldn’t take much effort on my part to do better. Just like turning out the lights.

Here’s my plan: invest in reusable grocery bags, switch from plastic to cellulose bags for food and trash, switch my household cleaning products to ones that are environmentally friendly, all of which and more can be easily found online and in the organic section of most grocery stores. I’ll also gradually migrate from incandescent to flourescent bulbs, and figure out what adapter I need to hook my laptop to our TV and switch from renting videos at Blockbuster to Netflix’s on-demand program in order to cut down on my husband’s extraneous trips to the video store. I will continue to compost kitchen scraps, buy small cars and avoid using pesticides. (I also conserve energy by setting my thermostat at 65 and turning off the heat completely when I’m not home and at night. All of my major appliances have high Energy Star ratings too.)

What are you going to do?

 

Words of Warriors

I feel a little funny broaching the topic of the war in Iraq because I’m not sure that I’ve done anything to earn the right to weigh in substantively. It’s easy to approach such topics from an academic standpoint (and I’ve done so myself in a previous post on The Bourne Supremacy): issues are cut and dry, not confused by emotion, personal opinion or those sticky moral questions of right and wrong. Even when someone on the outside has the foresight to acknowledge things in shades of gray, theirs is still only a two-dimensional view. The following article about the U.S. death toll in Iraq published in the New York Times reminded me of the distance that always exists between writer and subject.

Only this time, things are a little different. Reporters Lizette Alvarez and Andrew Lehren didn’t take the usual route to mark the new U.S. death toll high in Iraq. Instead, the authors chose to focus upon four U.S. servicemen who died while on duty in Iraq. And rather than tell their stories for them, Alvarez and Lehren integrated the words of these men right into the body of their own report. This had two impacts: first, it was a painful and effective way of reminding the reader that although these guys were in some way speaking, their words were all that remained of them. And second, the integration of the men’s voices into the piece communicated the significance of the number 4000 in way that resonated so much more clearly than a traditional straight news story ever could.

I’m going to include an excerpt here, but I would really encourage you to read the story in its entirety. It’s incredibly powerful. The first paragraph is written by the reporters, the second is taken directly from Myspace and incorporated into the body of the news story.

For the soldiers in Iraq, reconciling Adhamiya with America was not always easy. One place was buried in garbage and gore and hopelessness. The other seemed unmoored from the war, fixated on the minutia of daily life and the hiccups of the famous. The media was content to indulge. …

I was amazed, truly dumbfounded wondering how we as Americans have sank so low. To all Americans I have but one phrase that helps me throughout my day of constant dangers and ever present death around the corner, “WHO THE [expletive] CARES!” Wow America, we have truly become a nation of self-absorbed retards. … This world has serious problems and it’s time for America to start addressing them.

Ryan Wood, Myspace blog, May 26, 2007

The other reason I’m struck by this particular story is that it reminded me again of the ways that our social, cultural, and educational landscape is rapidly changing. I have spent the past couple of weeks preparing for a presentation on integrating blogs into the language arts classroom. As far as my content area goes, this is kind-of a no-brainer: I teach writing, blogs are a vehicle for just that. But they would hardly be worth going to all the trouble of using if they were little more than journals. What makes blogs blogs, so to speak, is the ease with which they allow the writer to synthesize ideas from various sources and provide a digital record of that thought process through links.

What does any of this have to do with a news story on U.S. death toll caused by the Iraq War? The reporters supplemented their story with excerpts taken from texts written by the soldiers themselves, including letters, emails, and Myspace. The Myspace accounts written by the soldiers are particularly interesting because they mark a dramatic shift in the way we communicate and receive information. Previously a soldier’s personal thoughts on the war would have been known only to those people close to him, but with the advent of Myspace, those opinions are accessible to anyone with a computer. In this particular instance, they have been transcribed from Myspace into the body of news article published on the New York Times.

Before Myspace, could this have been accomplished in another way? Certainly. The reporters might have interviewed Specialist Wood and then integrated his comments into their news story. However, Woods’s words are especially poignant this time because he can no longer share his thoughts with the reporters personally.

Besides the tremendous emotion and power that the soldiers’s words carry, what strikes me most about Alvarez and Lehren’s choice to include block quotes from the soldiers themselves is the way that they are mimicking the way that Web 2.0 has revolutionized the web in their print news story. I applaud their choice because I think it makes for interesting reading, and as an educator I must also take note of the way that the digital revolution is changing the way information is exchanged, even in print.

 

Shooting Down Satellites

I really thought that I was done writing for the night, but after reading Gail Collins’ Op-Ed piece on the successful downing of an inoperational satellite by the Pentagon, I couldn’t resist making mention of it here. It is Vonnegut-worthy satire.

As Collins’ reported, the cost of knocking this hunk of metal out of the sky was a cool 60 million. Upon the Pentagon’s recommendation, the President decided that the tiny odds that this dysfunctional satellite would fall smack into someone’s back yard and filling it with an unpleasant gas justified the cost of taking it out. Mind you, I’m all for protecting my own little ecosystem out here in Eden, but as Collins points out, an estimated 17,000 things have already made their way from space to Earth through out atmosphere and the odds of any single one of them hitting us is several million to one. My back yard and I, for one, have yet to be hit.

Collins challenges her readers to imagine what they might do with 60 million to invest in protecting their personal safety. Here’s my two cents; and I’ll even stick to the topic at hand. Instead of playing star wars with defective space equipment, I would invest the 60 million in research grants to PhDs and postdocs for the purpose of creating environmentally friendly satellites, ones that would burn up upon passing back through the earth’s atmosphere without being blown to smithereens beforehand. Alternatively, my 60 million might support research and development of satellites with a longer shelf-life; these “environmentally friendly” satellites could be easily be retooled and upgraded as technological advances deemed necessary. And I’m not a scientist! Heaven knows there are better ideas out there!

Here’s a link The New York Times news story on the event. It includes a great picture. Here’s the critical Chinese response to the event as reported by The Times, and here’s a link to The Lede’s coverage of the event, which includes some direct quotes from Pentagon officials justifying their decision.

 

Backyard Birds

I was all set to write a post on tele-skiing, but our global warming-influenced weather patterns have so disgusted me that I’m afraid I’m still too annoyed to take up that topic without ruining my own morning. Suffice it to say that if our disappointingly warm winters keep up I informed Stan that we are going to have to move north or west. Winter should be about snow that arrives in December and piles up without much break until March, not snow, then freezing rain, then sixty-degree weather, then snow–you get the idea. How is a girl who loves winter sports to survive?

So instead, I decided to write about winter’s hardiest little denizens, the birds who don’t fly south. Stan and I are devoted backyard birders. Maybe when we have a little more free time on our hands, we’ll expand this interest into a real hobby, but for now we content ourselves with local avian activity. Not that there’s any shortage!

Our little backyard paradise in Eden is surrounded primarily by land that’s used for agricultural purposes. The land not used for farming is forested. The combination of these two environments means there’s ample habitat for a wide variety of North American birds. Our property includes a couple acres of a seasonally wet area that is partially overgrown with scrub brush and some trees. It attracts a lot of birds that like to live at the edges of the large fields that surround us and it really comes alive during the spring and summer months!

An eastern bluebird checking out the lay of the land on our bluebird box last summer.

Our winter birds are everything you would expect to find in this part of the state. They include, American goldfinches, chickadees, cardinals, slate-colored juncos, tufted titmice, house finches, white-breasted nuthatches, chipping sparrows, American crows, starlings, blue jays, hairy and downy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers, and occasionally piliated woodpeckers, though they are a less frequent sighting because our house is in the open. Recently we’ve been getting common redpolls by the dozens too.

Common redpolls take over the niger seed bag on our pole feeder just the last week.

I love the winter birds because they are such survivors I get to waste hours watching their behavior on the feeders–we take them down in the summer to keep the squirrels and other opportunistic mammals at bay–but the summer birds are so much more dramatic! My favorites include the eastern bluebirds that nest in our bluebird boxes, the baltimore orioles that raise their family in the back yard, the indigo bunting that stopped by for one brief, exhilerating showing, the yellow-bellied sapsuckers that drum away with their uneven rhythm on the trees in the back, the little house wrens and black and white warblers that flit about in the brush, the beautiful common flickers that poke about in the grass, and the kingbirds that land on the electrical wires at the end of the day. We are also visited by sharp shinned or cooper’s hawks, though I have yet to discern which. (Egads, that’s quite a favorites list. I think in the future, I’d be better off listing what I don’t like!)

A showy male baltimore oriole feasting on grape jelly at our oriole feeder last summer.

If you know birds, you realize that there’s nothing spectacular or unusual listed above. But I’ve decided that I’m more than content with our backyard birds. Like our lives, they are ordinary and familiar, and that’s what makes them special. They cling to tube feeders that are whipped around in 50+ mph gales, they face sleet, ice and snow in order to make it to the next breeding season, and when spring finally does arrive, they shed their drab winter colors for the brilliant plummage that signals their desire to parent the next generation. They represent the ordinary indomitability of biological life and as such are divine.

If you think you’d like to learn a little more about birds, check out the website hosted by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. If you had all the free time in the world, you could not possibly take in all this site has to offer. Their wildlife preserve and visitor’s building literally a few miles from my Dad’s old place in Cayuga Heights. We would go skating on the pond in Sapsucker Woods when the winter weather was cold and snow-free.

 

Snow, Finally!

Looking up the slopes at the Central chairlift at Kissing Bridge in Colden, NY.

This past week, we finally got a snowfall here in the Southtowns worth talking about. As is usually the case, it was a tight little snow band, so the areas affected were pretty much limited to Eden, Boston, and Colden, but that was just fine by me. We came home from a delicious Thai dinner with Heather and Erik on Wednesday night to find over a foot of supremely sweet and airy powder in our yard. We missed the opportunity for some sweet pow pow at Kissing Bridge (KB) because we didn’t get home until 8, but we made sure we hit the slopes the following day and were not disappointed. With one snowfall KB went from having only 30 percent of their slopes open to 100 percent. They were capitalizing on the cold weather and blowing snow like mad while we were skiing too.

As everyone around here knows, KB is a small resort. But it makes up for its lack of vertical with its proximity to the city. Taking the back roads and parking at the top of the resort, Stan and I can get there from home in 20 minutes. I can’t tell you how oh-so-convenient that is! We dress at the house, and bring nothing but our equipment and wallets. I know what you are thinking, it’s such a small resort. So it is, but don’t knock it because we are lucky it’s still operational. This past week, I read an article in The New York Times by Bill Pennington about a website called the New England Lost Ski Areas Project (www.nelsap.org) run by Jeremy Davis that catalogs the now defunct mom and pop ski resorts that once dotted the mountains across New England. Apparently, there was practically one on every corner in the state of Vermont. Many of these local resorts were pushed out of operation in the seventies thanks to the oil embargo and the increase in the popularity of the sport. Large resorts grew larger and the neighborhood resorts simply could not compete with man-made snow, high-speed quads, groomed slopes and increased operational costs. Davis was surprised by the number of inoperational resorts, but also the special place they held in the memories of the families who used to patronize them. I couldn’t agree with their sentiment more; KB is a small place, but it’s alive and kicking and for that I’m grateful.

A single chair ski lift in Belleayre, NY.

Stan and I have been skiing since we were young, so a few years back we both took up snowboarding to make the sport new again. I’m laughing as I write this because Stan and I are old enough that we literally witnessed the birth of snowboarding when we were in high school, and back then snowboard was truly the Rebel Yell of the ski industry and boarding was banned from all kinds of resorts. For those of you who know the sport, my board is a Salomon Prelude. Yep, that’s right, it’s that old. The Prelude was the prototype for Salomon’s first board; it was never even mass-produced. And it is one sweet ride. And even though I’ve upgraded my boots and bindings over the years, I have never felt compelled to replace that board. It is perfect in its simplicity.

But when Stan and I hit the slopes the other night, I wasn’t on my board. I chose instead to test the mettle of my legs by spending the night on my tele skis, or telemark skis. And as much as I love my board, I have to say that I love my tele skis even more because even though I’ve been involved in snow sports since practically the first day I walked (apparently my Dad had me on cross-country skis when I was three), tele skiing is a formidable challenge. It’s also the perfect sport for small resort skiing for someone who will only contemplate catching air when the landing is cushioned by two feet of powder!

For those of you who still can’t quite picture what I mean by tele ski, hang in there. I’m hatching a post on the history of the sport as a write. So until next week, happy trails!

Thanks to www.kbski.com for the photo of the Central lift chair and www.nelsap.org for the photo of an inoperational single chair in Belleayre, NY.

 

Foreshadowing the Presidency

I think what is interesting about the election is the way that it provides tantalizing glimpses in the candidates’ personalities. The problem is determining which of those personality traits will be a factor shaping the future adminstration. Or, just as pertinent which candidate’s personality traits are going to shape our country’s history. Oh yeah, put that way, it’s a pretty scary thought. But consider these little gems: Gennifer Flowers led to Monica Lewinsky. The phrase compassionate conservatism carried just about meaning as the declaration that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I can go further back too: remember, “Read my lips. No new taxes?” Oh yeah, thought you did.

One of the blogs I read regularly is Judith Warner’s “Domestic Disturbances.” I’m not particularly domestic, do not have children, but I am probably disturbed, so I generally feel right at home with her angst. She has interesting opinions. I don’t always agree, but she’s always thought-provoking, which is what really matters. Case in point being this week’s post, “Emotion Without Thought In New Hampshire,” about Hillary’s teary moment on the campaign trail. Apparently this gush of emotion produced positive feedback from other similary exhausted and harried women. In short, Warner was disappointed in Hillary for not managing to hold it all together on national television, but more disillusioned with the women who could find solidarity in the female candidate until she showed a crack in her armor. Of course Warner’s logic is spot on, but thinking along those lines lost the Democrats the past two elections, so if Hillary or Obama don’t want to make the same mistakes as their predecessors they’ll listen closely to the-rest-of-us America, not just Ivy League-educated America.

I wasn’t the only one interested. Warner’s post garnered four hundred plus responses and rather than ask you to scroll through them to look for my comment, I’ve posted it below.

It is what it is. In a perfect world every single voter would be focused on the issues and positions championed by the candidate, but apparently that’s not meant to be. Besides, the job of being President of the U.S. is a lot more nuanced than simply having an agenda. The way a candidate carries herself on during her campaign provides a window into how she will handle herself on the job. If the voters want to see that a candidate is human, then so be it. A smart candidate will use those desires as a vehicle for what really matters–her agenda.

Check out Warner’s post and let me know what you think.

 

Skot’s Christmas Survival Tips

(Or, Why I Don’t Hate Christmas)

1. Think of others first. This is utterly Machiavellian, but you will feel better as you reflect fondly upon your generous Christmas spirit. If nothing else, you can at least try to convince yourself that your charitable nature is making the world a better place. Those of you who know me personally know that I’m not actually this awful, but desperate times–holiday with family–call for desperate measures.
2. Feel free to splurge on wine. You’ll probably need it. (If you are underage, move on to number 3.) My personal favorite is the Western NY wine superstore, Premier Wine and Spirits. I can easily lose track of two hours reading the delightful little blurbs taken from Wine Spectator and those written by the store’s employees. I like to see how well I can do with a $10 per bottle limit. You’d be surprised just how many bottles rated 90+ fall into that category!
3. Play with your nieces and nephews. They will rekindle your Christmas spirit like nothing else. My husband’s side of the family combined forces this year to buy Nintendo Wii and Guitar Hero III for our nephews and niece. I can already hear them arguing over whose turn it is to play!
4. Have several good books on hand. This Christmas, I would like to get through Toni Morrison’s Beloved and finish Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Because it’s now way too insane to brave shopping locally, I’d recommend checking out Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
5. Use your time wisely. I promised myself no grading over break, but since I’m going to be on the road for six hours between Buffalo and Ithaca, there’s no reason I can’t devote that time to getting such unpleasantries out the way.
6. Play in the snow. I’m a little bummed that the Nor’easter hit north of Buffalo, but I have no fear that Eden will live up to its snowy reputation once again this year. I’m going to get my cross-country ski equipment sorted and ready to go so I can pop out the back door at a moment’s notice. I’m going to ask Stan (are you reading this, hon?) to set up a little workshop in the basement, so I can wax my skis in five minutes or less.
7. Bake cookies. The cross-country skiing will offset the calories. My personal favorites are pinwheels and pizelles, both recipes from my grandmother. But if you are looking for something new, Epicurious has a recipe database so enormous you could spend days just navigating it.
8. Rent a BBC mystery series from Blockbuster or Netflix. When it’s too blustery to ski and you’ve maxed out on reading for a day, there is nothing better than lolling about on the couch watching a television series you’d never have the time for otherwise.
9. And last but not least, don’t spend too much time cleaning because holiday decorations cover dust. Your humble abode will only going to get messed up by all the activity anyway. Save your energy for conversation and cooking.

 

Hockey Blog Minus The Sabres?

As you well know, I’m a New York Times junkie. Admittedly their coverage of upstate issues is a little weak, but I’ve always considered them a national news source and never held this against them.

I religiously read the Times‘ book review, front page stories, opinion pages, education section, and Judith Warner’s blog, “Domestic Disturbances.” Other sections are hit and miss depending on topic. So it was in this vein that I was pleased to see the formation of yet another new blog, “Slapshot.” I’m not much of a hockey fan myself, but I was excited to share my find with pretty much everyone else I know, because they are some of the most passionate fans in the league. (I live in Buffalo. It’s cold here. Hockey keeps you going through those long gray days.) But lo and behold, the Buffalo Sabres failed to even make the tagline of this New York-based blog that even includes the Devils! Are we so invisible? Do anyone remember our season last year? We nearly went home with the Cup!

I’m not one who unrealistically believes that winning a national championship will change the face of Buffalo forever, especially since outside of Western New York, this team rarely gets the credit it deserves. I’m sorry to say that my latest discovery only reinforces my belief that bringing home the Stanley Cup will not work miracles. So, if you are local, forgive my rant–I know I’m preaching to the choir, but if you happen to be someone who doesn’t live within a one hundred mile radius of the City of Buffalo, then please take note, we do exist!

 

Do The Least Harm

It’s funny how things come back to you. The last of my graduate English seminars was one called American Studies Colloquium; it featured guest lecturers from UB’s English, History, Modern Languages, and Comparative Literature departments. In theory this course might have been a good place to begin one’s graduate study, but learning to navigate one’s own chosen course of study is difficult enough, and intelligent participation in discussions outside one’s own area of expertise is only more so. It was, therefore, a nice note to end on.

One of those guest speakers was Professor David Johnson from UB’s Comp Lit department. He was not our most popular speaker no doubt in part because he openly critiqued our collective dearth of knowledge about Derrida’s philosophies. Ah, the Lilliputian world of the ivory tower, how funny in retrospect. But, I digress. This particular lecture was brought to the forefront of my memory while reading about how government subsidies brought an end to the famine in the tiny African nation of Malawi. The perversity of this situation is that in order to successfully combat the massive food shortages that lead to widespread starvation, the Malawi’s president, Bingu wa Mutharika, had to ignore the advice (and therefore aid) from the United States and the World Bank. In an article published in The New York Times, reporter Celia Dugger explains,

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

As Dugger explains, by making this recommendation, the U.S. was preaching a do as I say, not as I do policy. This was ironic because much of our own agriculture is heavily subsidized by our own federal government. This brings me to Derrida.

Derrida is often referred to as the father of deconstruction, but as my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism informs me, he revived, but did not invent the term. For Derrida, deconstruction is a method of analysis that calls into question the structures that are used to explain what something is. Derrida’s analyses do not attempt to choose between two incompatible readings, but rather explore what the Norton editors call the “double blinds and tensions” present within the contradictory text. In other words, Derrida looks specifically for those linguistic markers that indicate a text has contradicted itself (1815-19).

The situation in Malawi brought Derrida to mind because deconstructive thought argues that it is impossible to ever escape the opposite of what one says. Ironically, this worked to Malawi’s benefit, though the United States surely did not have this (the opposite) outcome in mind. I’ll try to explain. Doris Sommer’s Bilingual Aesthetics* provided the background for our seminar discussion led by David Johnson. According to Sommer or Johnson, my notes fail to denote which, the best democracy is always the worst democracy because the factions that the best democratic society permits to exist will ultimately destroy the society that created them. If our society were perfect, it would be a dead society; the best democracy is one that limits freedom. This manner of thinking lends itself to Malawi’s current fiscal situation.

The United States and other donors recommended to Malawi a solution that relied heavily on free market economics. As Dugger explains, rather than support the seed and fertilizer subsidies that would permit the Malawi farmers to grow their own food, they recommended that Malawi shift its focus to growing cash crops in exchange for food to eat. Such a free-market system would permit the farmers the greatest autonomy, but the failure of this system meant they had nothing to sell or trade and no food to eat. A less pure market strategy, such as the one put into place by Malawi’s current president meant that farmers have less control over their own crops (only certain crops are subsidized), but these restrictions brought an end to starvation and even resulted in a surplus in food grown,

So, the course of action recommended by the United States inadvertently resulted in worsening the crisis in Malawi. Maybe down the road, Malawi’s farmers will be less well off because they must rely on governmental subsidies to survive, but then again, they will be alive. Derrida’s line of thinking can be absolutely maddening to one who wishes to take the right course of action. One assumes that the United States meant no harm when they recommended Malawi follow a free market strategy, but in doing so the U.S. and the World Bank failed to acknowledge the failure of such a pure system in many successful nations, including the United States. On the other hand, Malawi’s president correctly identified the contradiction inherent in such a strategy and took a risk in foregoing the aid offered by the U.S. and the World Bank to implement such a system in his own country. One assumes President Mutharika was not thinking of Derrida when he chose the course of action that lifted his country out of starvation, but neither was the United States when we chose to align ourselves with the financially motivated recommendations of the world’s largest lender. However, as our own crop surpluses demonstrate, doing the least harm may mean thinking of Derrida and taking a somewhat less idealistic course of action in such instances.

*Ironically, Johnson dismissed Sommer’s book as an inaccurate application of Derrida’s theory. Heaven only knows what he would think of my musings.

Sources:

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

 

The Blogosphere and Rovocop

I’m in favor of keeping my soapbox, even if it means I’m contributing to the “vitriolic” national political discourse. And against all odds, Karl Rove and I apparently see eye to eye on this issue, though for very different reasons. He believes blogging helps the Republican cause; I believe blogging gives voice to the individual voter regardless of her political persuasion. Last week the writers of “The Opinionator,” a blog co-authored by Tobin Harshaw and Chris Suellentrop, staff editors of the NY Times Op-Ed pages, made mention of Rove’s recent comments on the accessibility of a pulpit to every angry citizen with internet access. Well, hallelujah. It is high time we leveled the playing between those with a voice and Washington and everyone else.* Because it’s short, I’ve included the text of the entire post directly below.

 

“The Web has given angry and vitriolic people more of a voice in public discourse,” former top Bush aide Karl Rove told an audience yesterday, according to The Washington Times’s Fishwrap blog. Rove observes: “People in the past who have been on the nutty fringe of political life, who were more or less voiceless, have now been given an inexpensive and easily accessible soapbox, a blog.”

Wait, is there supposed to be something wrong with that?

“The [Internet] is not the reason hyperpartisan politics have been elevated; people like Karl Rove are,” writes Amanda Terkel at Think Progress:
“Rove admitted that despite the coarseness of the political debate, he hopes the netroots ‘keep at it’ because it helps Republicans. If only the blogosphere were as civil as Karl Rove.”

Sometimes, perhaps, the pot deserves to call the kettle black.

In my relatively short lifetime, I have seen the influence of the individual voter, ostensibly the one who holds a member of Congress accountable to his or her votes, eroded by the influence of those with a voice in Washington, insiders and special interest groups. As an insider, Rove naturally enjoyed such privilege. By default a blogger (especially one with a devoted fan base) makes insiders nervous because he or she erodes away some of the power bestowed upon him by his insider status. I teach English. I live for free speech. So, I can’t imagine myself feeling anything but support for another voice, but seven years ago I might have voiced caution when reading unreviewed material, much in the same way that I caution my high school seniors about considering their sources before subscribing to their arguments. However, during the past seven years we have been fed so many disingenuous “truths” by the Bush administration that I cannot, with any honesty, say that Rove’s word is any more reliable than Joe Blogger’s, though they may warrant close scrutiny for different reasons. It is within that close scrutiny that lies the most valuable message I can impart to any student–read skeptically. Long live free speech and perhaps just as importantly, readily available free publishing (thank you, WordPress).

As an addendum to this piece, I might also add that the formal publishing world is making way for this medium in unprecendented ways. I remember back when Andrew Sullivan left his position as editor at The New Republic to devote himself fully to his own blog. Not being a reporter, I did not yet realize how heavily regular reporters relied upon the efforts of bloggers, who had much greater freedom to go and say whatever they pleased. That process is only becoming more transparent. That bastion of old school news itself, The New York Times, has done two things of late that are worth our note. First, they dissolved their online pay-per-view program, Times Select, explaining that the current trend of the internet news sources rendered such a system obsolete. Second, they have continued to expand the blog section of the Times online, inviting renowned bloggers such as Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner to post their blog, Freakonomics, under the auspices of the Times banner.

*Do not misinterpret my sentiments as some foolhardy desire to dismiss Congress. That’s not my point at all. While I find our voting system problematic and the electoral college outdated and unfair, I by no means wish to do away with the structure of our government. The House and Senate are essential and must remain so. That being said, historians have argued that our founding fathers really had no desire to blindly hand over power to the populus, hence the unusual institution known as the electoral college, but this only makes individual voice more important.