01:59 pm
Is It Cyber-Narcissism if Everyone Else Does It?
Quite of few of my favorite bloggers are in Austin, Texas right now to attend — and blog on — the Netroots Nation conference. I’m not there because… well, because I’m so new at this that I had no idea it was going on. So I’m not opposed to it or anything — I’ll try to go next year.
At first, I found the blanket coverage interesting. Then I started reading a minimum of four different posts on a given panel — no, make that every panel. And I began to feel like a few of the panels — for example, the one on whether bloggers should swear — were a bit self-referential, but then again so are panels at meetings of neurosurgeons, historians, or about any other profession you can think about.
But the thing is, hardly anyone at those other conventions blogs about them. At Netroots Nation, everybody does. And after a while, bloggers blogging about bloggers talking about blogging gets just a little too meta for my tastes. It’s not like Austin is the blogger version of Rashomon or something.
Even then, I wasn’t planning to write about it. After all, the only thing more meta would be to blog about bloggers blogging about bloggers talking about blogging. But then I saw this (from the usually quite sensible Sean-Paul Kelley, better known as The Agonist):
It’s only the most important gathering of progressive, liberal democratic activists in the nation, right? It happens once a year and is a gathering full of people most likely to network, donate their time to grassroots efforts and all those signal issues that Democrats are supposed to be about and guess who’s not there?
You got it: Obama.
Obama doesn’t care about the Netroots. He’s made that clear. It’s all about ‘unity porn’ not partisanship. And this will come back to haunt him. Maybe in the general election, maybe when he is president. But it will, at some point, cost him on an issue critical to him.
Yeah, yeah, I know he’s in the Middle East right now, honing his bona fides on national security policy. But still: netroots has been on the calendar for a full year. And he picks now to go to the Middle East?
This is so narcissistic on so many levels I don’t know where to start. Let me just say that the Agonist has managed in a single post to reinforce everything bad that average people think about both the left in general and progressive bloggers in particular.
Oh, by the way, Obama did videotape an address, and his campaign did come out in force. And if you go to the Netroots Nation home page, there’s even a photo of someone holding up a “Change We Can Believe In” sign. You know who else wasn’t there, by the way? Sean Paul Kelley. In fairness, he does have a real job — in Singapore — but come on, you can’t really be critical of someone for not showing up when you don’t show up.
Sorry, Agonist, but I’ll take Obama eating breakfast with the troops in Afghanistan (and on videotape in Austin) over him eating crow on FISA in front of the bloggers in Austin. I want him to win. So frankly, I don’t care if he hurts my feelings, or yours, or anyone else’s along the way.
That doesn’t mean I’ll be happy about everthing he does (like his FISA vote). But last I checked, people are supporting him because they believe he will be a pretty good President and not because he will adhere rigidly to a particular scorecard. I mean, come on — didn’t we learn anything about the problems with ideological rigidity from the guy currently holding down the job?
Okay that’s enough. Time to stop perpetuating the madness by blogging more about blogging.
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