“Who are we to complain?” asks Alexander Cockburn in his wrap of 2005 – the internet’s “year in review” feature most worth reading -- at “Counterpunch.”
“It was a bad year for the Empire and not just in Iraq. A half century after Fidel Castro stayed in Harlem, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela came to the Bronx and promised cheap home heating oil from Citgo so the poor could keep warm this winter. He kept his promise. A month later Evo Morales swept to victory in Bolivia. From London the world heard Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate, broadcast the most savage denunciation of Empire heard since the words Tacitus put in the mouth of Calgacus.
“It was a bad year for George Bush, humiliated in Buenos Aires, scorned at home, It was a bad year for Tony Blair, his terror laws put to flight. It was a bad year for the Democrats, with only a handful, like Murtha, McKinney, Serrano, and a few others to salvage the party's honor in Congress.
“It was a bad year too for the corporate press. The New York Times saw Judy Miller turn from martyr to millstone. The Washington Post learned two years late what Bob Woodward really knew. Ad revenues and circulation figures plunged. The mass circulation, ad-based printed newspaper which arrived in the latter part of the nineteenth century, is heading, feet first, into the crypt.”
Cockburn goes on to a week-by-week account of some of the year’s most significant and interesting stories, many of them ignored or given only cursory coverage by the mainstream media. These include the suicide death of Hunter S. Thompson on February 22, and the revelation that the C.I.A. is now planting agents as spies in college classrooms.
Looking horizonward rather than rearwise, Nick Von Hoffman offers a preview of 2006 at the Huffington Post: “Outlook: Cloudy, with Continued Craziness.” April’s forecast has the typical Hoffmanesque blend of outlandishness and authenticity:
“April - Karl Rove, George Tenent, John Ashcroft and Fats Domino are awarded the Medal of Freedom. Fats entertains the glamorous Washington audience with ‘Ain't That a Shame.’
”Avian flu breaks out in Minnesota. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Michael O. Leavitt, says, ‘Not to worry, the disease is only infecting undocumented immigrants who are being deported as fast as possible.’"
As always, besides serving as an invaluable store of bizarre conspiracy theories, the blogs offer a wealth of obscure, inadequately covered, or insignificant stories that are nonetheless interesting. For example, Wonkette (Ana Marie Cox) links to a U.S. News and World Report item which details how John Kerry (in Wonkette’s words) “hunted birds, grilled meat, and watched football on male-bonding trip to Nebraska.” She also cites a New York Post item which reveals that Jenna Bush “lost her wallet --with her ID and $1,000 in cash-- while trying to lose a suitor,” which shows the liabilities that attend being Jenna, rather than other one – what’s her name – Notjenna.
Speaking of Wonkette, remind me never to get on her bad side. Extraordinarily clever, witty, and capable of awe-inspiring cattiness, Wonkette’s straight razor is a more lethal weapon than James Wolcott’s (Jameswolcott.com) nine-pound hammer or Jane Hamsher’s (Firedoglake.blogspot.com) 12-guage shotgun. This past week she shredded Townhall.com’s Kathleen Parker with that weapon, and the carnage is worth reproducing in full (“We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us,” Wonkette.com, December 29, 2005).
Hey, who knew the "Terrified of Blogs" bandwagon had any space left to acommodate latecomers? Because somehow, Townhall.com's Kathleen Parker was able to successfully elbow her way on this week to sound a clarion call of warning about bloggers, "enemies" she breathlessly deems less interesting than "al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."
Parker works very hard to be fair, allowing that "some bloggers do their own reporting", "some bloggers offer superb commentary", and that she isn't trying to put down the "many brilliant people out there...who also happen to blog." She says, "They know who they are," and I naturally reply, "Why, thank you Kathleen! That's nice of you to say." She also offers some tidbits of wisdom that can't be faulted: "People tend to abuse power when it is unearned and will bring down others to enhance themselves." Well said, Kathleen -- I bet Valerie Plame would agree!
Nevertheless, her tone shifts spasmodically hither and yon.
She says things like, "Schadenfreude - pleasure in others' misfortunes - has become the new barbarity on an island called Blog." And this upsets me, mainly because no one at Gawker Media has told me about this island yet, and it sounds like fun.
Ultimately she reaches for a tenth-grade literary reference to make her point:
Each time I wander into blogdom, I'm reminded of the savage children stranded on an island in William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." Without adult supervision, they organize themselves into rival tribes, learn to hunt and kill, and eventually become murderous barbarians in the absence of a civilizing structure.
How tidy. But here's what's strange -- up until the moment I read this article, it never occured to me that Townhall itself was anything other than a blog itself. Can this be confirmed? Well, Parker does define blogs as "the angry offspring of narcissism's quickie marriage to instant gratification." So then we're agreed: Townhall.com is a blog.
Look, Kathleen, it's perfectly natural to see bloggers as fast and loose operators, working without oversight. But Lord of the Flies? That's unfair. As your column's existence proves, we're more than willing to give the most vacuous of twits a turn holding the conch.
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