WOID XVII-38. The dogs Bai. The caravan passes.

Sunday, September 2, 2007 3:40 pm

There's an old French comedy in which Gérard Philippe plays a young liberal speaking out for Freedom in an ornate Old Regime salon - the year being 1788.5. Furious, the Lord of the Manor turns to his periwigged lackeys: "Throw him out!" he bellows, but the lackeys keep on listening. "Throw him out? What for?" says one. "You know, what he's saying is pretty interesting," says the other lackey.

I get the same idea from Matt Bai's book, The Argument. Not that I've read it, mind you, since experience tells me Penguin Press, the publisher, doesn't respond to requests for reviewer's copies if they come from online journals and bloggers, which works well with their current strategy of publishing books by New York Times flunkies: why take a chance on reviewers when the book's getting reviewed in the New York Times?

No matter, since the New York Times reviewer doesn't review Bai's book at all, he just restates its argument: I'm confident I know what Matt Bai says since the reviewer simply repeats what Bai said, which happens to be what the reviewer and Bai both were hired by the Times to repeat to begin with.

It's not the incestuousness that annoys me, though; it's the fact that the Times takes all this time to dish the competition. Bai's book is an attack on another medium, the blog, and specifically on Daily Kos, a slightly-to-the-left-of-center chatlist with a huge membership. You can tell it's all about the form of blogs, because there's remarkably little of substance in Bai's book, if by substance you mean an analysis of the actual political content of Daily Kos. Bloggers are "Republican-haters?" Gosh, he says it like it's a bad thing. Bloggers are stuck in New Deal ideologies? What's so bad about Universal Health Care?

Truth is, Daily Kos has a lot more going than that, even if it's not the Times' kind of going on, or mine. Daily Kos reminds me of Spain in the last years of Franco's regime, when everybody was going around trying out horrifically daring ideas, at least for Franco's Spain, or the American Midwest. Everybody whispered they were "radical," or a "communist," and of course they had no idea what either meant - how could they, when they'd been exposed to decades of brain-washing by the Fascist propaganda machine? Nobody knew what they stood for, only what they wouldn't take any more. So one puts up with this from Daily Kos just as, in the 'sixties, one put up with a hell of a lot of talking, and ranting, and eventually thinking things through. You might say, in a 'sixties way, that the message is the medium.

No wonder, then, the real argument of The Argument is against the purported inability of progressive bloggers to brainwash the American People into submission. Since the Times considers the brainwashing of Americans to be their own God-given mission of course they'd like to throw the competition out. The Argument reminds me of those older men in the 'sixties who'd catch sight of a sexy, long-haired boy: "Did you see that, Esther? Did you see that?" "Yes, dear, and I'm looking forward to seeing a whole lot more."

- Trotsky the Horse