The Doctor Is "IN"

Hey hey. My my.

Spring is springing, madness looms for college hoopsters, and the quest for perfect landscaping prepares its yearly rituals on the Georgia border in the city of Augusta. What gives me this sense of seasonal renewal? Well, my foot is on the mend, and I've grown to appreciate the simple joy of MOBILITY.

So what do you do when you're semi-retired, incapacitated, itching to golf, and bored?

Share it and bore others!

We're approaching the end of 2010's first quarter, and to use a football metaphor, the Republicans have great field position, due to Democrat turnovers, because their quarterback can't hit his receivers.  Both teams are competeing with a new franchise, the Constitutionalists, who have a bye until November elections.  In the meantime, the new franchise needs to either draft more players or they will end up quitting the game.

Since we bloggers often deal with the characterization of being insular, narcissistic, demagogues reciting masturbatory pleasantries for like-minded geeks in an echo chamber, please allow me to further that particular sterotype by adding the charge that writing an internet-enabled web log also requires an embarrassing wealth of confession-driven vanity.

In the face of this exhibitionist tendency, such a selfish prerequisite helps to explain why so-called conspiracy theorists and Tea Partiers are, on many levels, surpassing the long-held dominance of "mainstream" pundits with respect to the substance, authoritative origins, and ultimately, the weight and credibility of opinions in debates about what is public policy is best. Granted, there is now a less-diplomatic tone in mainstream politics (I give you Chris Matthews).  And now . . . video captures and advances the vulgar edge of this supposedly libertarian (actually, it's progressive-populist) wave.  But the fact that bloggers are predisposed to confessional rants has a cleansing effect.

Thus, in spite of the derision and leering disdain coming from "traditional" journalism, there exists a very strong, very logical, and as evidenced by long time watchers, discernible and persuasive undercurrent, a "Movement," if you will, that anyone paying attention knows is running through the crumbling structures non-Constitutional and extra-Constitutional elements of American government.  Even here at WGS, we have evolved, quite literally, and without fear of recrimination (after realizing the only thing we have to fear is writer's block).  One by one, these labels, these self-imposed, categorical penitentiaries of political affiliation are falling.  How do we characterize these amorphous mobs showing up in the public square of American politics?

Heroes?  Nah.
Loners?  No.
Welcoming hosts? I doubt it.
Bush supporters?  Don't think so.
Obama supporters?  Not likely.
Union members? Uh, no.
Political forecasters?  God, no.
Conservatives? Ha! No.
Birthers?  Not any more.

Whatever the label, the more disdain expressed by the priviliged few, who dismiss serious concerns using ad hominem arguments against deluded crackpots and crazy racists, the more acceptable explication of "what's going on" is not merely missed. It is obliterated. It is denuded, hidden in a shroud of chatter in a game played by so many smart people, each claiming fairly that they are the smartest person in the chat room.  Wherever you find them on the spectrum, the pot is not the kettle, and that is the rub. "Old" media has been recognized (once again) as the Fourth Estate and, therefore, another arm of Leviathan oppression.  So while the pot and the kettle mud wrestle in a televised cage match to the death, who really cares what is (actually) written?

After only a month of doing it online,  a writer becomes aware of how truly unoriginal his thoughts are.  He eventually figures out that anyone intelligently interested in what you wrote, to their credit, probably already knew it.  They get it.  I think that explains why a confession-obsessed personality serves bloggers so well.  It's not so much guilt as it is a desire to illuminate.  For a writer to achieve his aim, whatever one lacks in originality can be compensated by another equally compelling social trait, a negative one; such as, oh, I don't know, Gruesomeness.  We watch politics for the same reason we watch NASCAR.  Or Oprah.  Or Tiger making sextuple bogey.

Look away. Look away. Look away.

Ron Paul (The Doctor) has now earned the dubious distinction of becoming Mitt Romney's successor at the CPAC conference last month.   Justin Fox at Time.com has provided at least an attempt to objectively critique the merits of the arguments given by the Godfather of the Tea Party Movement.  If we had enough time, maybe more people will hear the many voices in the blogging wilderness, getting louder, an insurgency against wrong-headed efforts to "transform" us into a Nation of Men, not of Laws.

I can't say "I told you so" because I'm too busy dealing with all the mockery.
© 2010 Roy Barin Santonil