From time to time, I might also become engrossed in a book-length political discussion, about topics such as a history of twentieth century British Prime Ministers, about which I read a year or so ago in a well-written, easily accessible book. I'm rather embarrassed to say that at this moment I cannot recall the book's exact title or its author, beyond the fact that at one point he was a backbench minister from the Labour Party whose politics did not often surface in his rather even-handed reading of the people who have ascended to the role of Prime Minister over the last century or so. (The exception to this rule occurred during his discussion of Margaret Thatcher, during which I noticed that he often could not help but insert several of his personal political viewpoints, which often ran counter to hers, into the mix.)
At present, I am currently reading as much insofar as politics is concerned as I can from both US and UK daily newspapers (either in printed form or on-line), as well as from US and international weekly magazines. I try to vary my sources in order to insert several sometimes oppositional viewpoints into the mix. And I am not hesitant to also say that I have very recently decided, on the spur of the moment (and because they were selling for $1 apiece at a local second-hand bookstore), to read a few Star Wars novels, given my soft spot for science fiction and the fact that I find Star Wars, conceived in the 1970s, to be an interesting post-Vietnam and post-Watergate throwback to a less overreaching, more easily defensible patriotism, that being the sort of patriotism that prompted the creation of the United States from the mighty British Empire. (The bad "Empire" guys in the Star Wars films often have British accents, except for Darth Vader, voiced by James Earl Jones but acted by British actor David Prowse; the less-overtly powerful but more righteous "rebels" have American accents, the one big exception here being the whiny British-voiced C3PO. I know several Brits who have long since recognized if not fully accepted this Star Wars trend. I don't blame them for shaking their heads about it.)
I say all of this because there comes a point when one must break with one's habits, if only to shake things up and inject a little pizzazz into even the most personally sacrosanct areas. For me, those areas often center on politics and baseball, but they also center on the internet. You see, I like certain blog-sites (I read about four sites as often as I can) and I like to read the aforementioned news-sites, but that's about it. Yet I'm often told that there is a world of interesting stuff out there. So this past weekend I did what I do every once in a great while--I just clicked-away and trolled through cyberspace, moving from one link to the next and from one blog-site to the next for a couple of hours, just to see what I was missing.
Now, perhaps my lucky-dip theory went a bit awry this time around, though I must say that what I encountered this time is about equal to what I found the last few times I sifted through internet blog-sites: a few interesting gems in a landfill of self-aggrandizing, insultingly dumbed-down trash. I cannot tell you how many sites I encountered, political and otherwise in focus, that featured a whole lot of absolute "void-ness" (for lack of a more elegant term) because in my astonishment at what I was encountering I lost track somewhere along the way. Hyperbole seems to be the name of the game in political sites--reading them literally, which would be a massive mistake in most cases, you'd think that Barack Obama or John McCain, or Gordon Brown or David Cameron across the pond, for that matter, are engaged in international plots to eat your children and turn us adults into, well, servants of the Dark Side of the Force, or something along those lines.
In both the political and otherwise personal sites, there is often at present a nearly psychotic level of, like (!), Holy crap!!!!!!, the dumb statement followed by the exclamation point!!! (or exclamation "mark"!!!!!?! for you folks in Britain!!!!!!!!!)!!!!! Yes, the most superfluous piece of punctuation ever conceived (!) has spawned itself into the trillions and taken over cyberspace (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)! SO TOO HAS THE BELLOWING ALL-CAPS SENTENCE, WHICH OFTEN FINISHES WITH INNUMERABLE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So what can one say about this? Well, here's a nerdy Hasslington allusion: the preponderance of exclamation points is like the classic Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles," when the furry tribbles spawned to such an extent that they took over an entire space station. The difference is that the exclamation point scenario features none of the cuteness of those little critters, and besides, it was at least consistently amusing watching Shatner try to keep his hairpiece on without panicking overtly while thousands of tribbles tumbled at him out of airlocks or through doorways and the like. Insipid fragments followed by exclamation points have no such redeeming quality.
Then there are those sites that feature little more than photos of the site's author. A few photos here and there can be a fine touch, but hundreds and hundreds of blatantly narcissistic photos of one's self--many of them "quirkily unique" the way the authors of many similar sites try to look "quirkily unique"--sprayed all over one's blog-site seems indicative of a certain type of self-obsession that might or might not stem from personal insecurities. I, like all generally honest folks, admit that I have my own insecurities, but I cannot imagine why anyone would wish to transmit evidence in a wildly-advertised manner of the fallout that occurs from the sustained buildup of personal insecurities. But, hey.
Call me a curmudgeon (in some ways, I probably am one) who, as a thirty-something individual, has grown old before his time, but I fail to see how a lot of what makes up this internet version of fingernails-on-the-blackboard noise is helping to "move the discussion forward," as it were. At the risk of sounding "elite" (a word used in an accusatory manner most often by those who don't really know what it means), I suppose engaging in some form of human dialogue is not the point of the internet for a lot of folks. That's okay, I guess, but I'm not talking about discussing post-colonial feminist literature through the lens of Harold Bloom (though that's a potentially explosive discussion I'd love to sit in on...). I'm talking about turning the volume down a bit and finding ways of getting behind and beyond the rhetoric of politics, culture, and the like in order to connect the dots between these and related topics. Might the internet be useful insofar as that's concerned? Or is it meant to perpetuate the rhetoric that's already out there and further divide us from each other? What good is an internet that fails to bring people around the world together more than it divides them with hyperbole and screeching self-interest?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." I'm sure this post will meet with a certain amount of criticism and push-back (shall we say?), which is fine and probably somewhat healthy, because it might get me to change my opinion on a lot of what is in the blog-o-sphere these days (though I doubt it). Conversely, it might also get someone who thought the blog-o-sphere was like heaven to reconsider some of their stances on the issue. One way or the other, I'm ready to carry on with this blog-site, in what I'm sure will often be viewed as an antiquated, overly-verbose style of writing (perhaps it is), in an internet world that I find I don't particularly like.
As Walt Whitman--who, like Mr. Fitzgerald, was a far better writer than I--might put it, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself...."
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