Why Blogs Matter

"History is the propaganda of the victors" - Ernst Toller (1893-1939)

Hardly anyone knows who Ernst Toller was. He was a German playwright, born into that catastrophic European epoch that stretched from the end of the 19th-century until the beginning of the Second European War. He was at Verdun; then later ran afoul of the Nazis, was exiled from Germany and exhausted himself in depression and radical politics. He ended in suicide by hanging himself in an American hotel room.

Toller's aphorism about history is his monument, but it's not a statement of fact anymore, especially in the digital age. Toller had "official" history in mind, the narrative shaped and delivered by the dominant political and social classes. Their record is a tale, a story designed to manipulate the facts of the present for some goal in the future (like what NBC and the New York Times still do in order to advance leftism). In Toller's Europe, this was broadly true, and it was true across the globe until about ten years ago. It isn't anymore.

Today, servile media hacks like David Gregory, Tom Brokaw, Tom Friedman; Bill Moyers and others still think they're living in Toller's world. Sniffing around the "facts" for the causes and effects that support their preconceptions, in their Olympian vanity they demand the first and last word. (A simpleton like Chris Matthews can even compare himself to Thomas Paine without real doubt about his sanity.)

This line of inquiry states that the final facts are discernible in an age of organized lying, that the truth specialist will discover them and let you know what matters to you. It's a rancid version of rationalism - the conceit that information must be milled by the intellecual so the raw ingredients are digestible to the rabble. That's why they hate the bloggers. We don't need them to cook up a conclusion.

Their confusion and fear is what you'd see if a guild of scribes was shown a printing press and the codex format for bound books. The same maw of obsolescence is yawning wide and hungry for the established print media. For that reason alone blogs matter - to launch the future and break the grip of the reactionary media zombies on the facts and events that matter to us rather than them. Their day is over.

Blogging is a brawl, cultural populism at its most exciting. You punch to exhaustion and some kind of validity emerges when it's over; even when the villain wins you saw how dirty he fought. It's American, it's anti-social, it's red-blooded, and the conservative blogs are the bane of the skinny-assed statist dork in The White House. We're the victors. Do you need another reason?