It’s a bit odd to sit down and write just for myself. Twice a day (sometimes more often if I’ve fallen behind), I research a subject, marshal my facts, dig for a snappy lede and start building the old inverted pyramid. It’s liberating to step outside that rigid structure, but it’s also disconcerting: kind of like walking after you’ve been cycling all day.

I’m continue to wrestle with the idea of becoming a science journalist. I see the need, but the challenges are almost overwhelming. On the climate change issue alone, coverage in the popular media and the blawg-o-sfear has essentially taken on the trappings of religion: one believes what one believes, and people take any argument as a grave insult. Any issue that requires some understanding of the underlying science to discuss meaningfully – 9/11, vaccinations, vegetative states, alternative power, animal testing - have devolved into rigid controversies that seem almost theological. Arguments are by assertion, nothing more. If necessary, people cherry-pick research that they think supports their position, and discard anything that contradicts it.

People on both sides of these debates do that, by the way. I’ve seen blog posters defending the global warming hypothesis with the same sort of blind faith in scientists that my great-grandparents had in the Pope. And just try talking a 9/11 believer out of the proposition that Dick Cheney personally set the thermite charges on the core box columns of WTC 1.

My point is not that I know what the “truth” is about these or any of the other controversies of our time. It’s that everything is just so damn personal. To some extent, I think it does have to do with the fact that American society has always had a strong faith-based element, and that now that religion rings hollow for most educated people, something else needs to take its place. Thus: the culture wars. There is now a liberal and conservative take on pretty much everything: Red science and Blue science, coastal medicine and flyover-country medicine.

I don’t even think that one perspective is “wrong’ and one is “right,” or even that the truth lies somewhere in between: in fact, I think that “let’s split the differences, average it out, and call that the real story” is one of the greatest sins of modern journalism. I think it’s more a case like the old “blind men and the elephant” fable: each perspective sees a bit of it, while missing the bigger picture.

Problem is, I don’t know how to describe the bigger picture, because I’m still yanking on the elephant’s tail myself trying to convince everybody that it’s a rope. It’s important, it’s a question much more interesting than the things I’m paid to write about… but I just don’t quite know how to wrap my head around it yet.

There are two parallel counterrevolutionary confusionist tactics: the partial cooption of new values, and a deliberately anticultural industrially facilitated production (novels, films), the latter being a natural continuation of the imbecilization of young people begun in their schools and families.

It is no longer a matter of noting the increasingly massive use of commercial publicity to influence judgments about cultural creation. We have arrived at a stage of ideological absence in which advertising has become the only active factor, overriding any preexisting critical judgment or transforming such judgment into a mere conditioned reflex. The complex operation of sales techniques has reached the point of surprising even the ad professionals by automatically creating pseudosubjects of cultural debate.

The abundance of televised imbecilities is probably one of the reasons for the American working class’s inability to develop any political consciousness.

–Guy DeBord, 1957

Word.

“Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.” – Tim Wise, Of National Lies and Racial America

The right-wing outrage about Judge Sotomayor is the kind of thing that used to freak me out, as did paranoid rantings like Frank Gaffney’s jib-jabber about “our first Muslim president.” There are a great many white folks in this country with chips on their shoulders the size of Toyota Tundras, armed with a sense of entitlement and Remington shotguns. So as a bicoastal libertarian socialist, these types naturally make me grab for the oh-shit bar. Moreso even than my left-wing comrades, pale males like these are fond of revolutionary rhetoric – and seem much more likely to carry it out. Urban radicals are too broke to afford firearms, and they have to take the bus to the barricades.

The truth of the matter is, though, outrage is cheap, like box wine, and just as intoxicating. And it’s ludicrous, in this case; as Wise continues:

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

However, I think there’s reasons to see hope in white outrage. First off, America is headed inexorably toward being a mestizo nation. As Nezua points out, as much as the ruling system will add more black and brown (and female) faces in an attempt to hold onto power, this country is going to look very different in a generation. Not only our ethnic makeup, though (and I remember how struck I was, when I got back to the Mainland in 2004, by the fact that you hear Spanish everywhere), but also our position in the world is going to undergo massive, epochal change. America on the way down is going to look hella different than America on the way up.

I’m not saying that there’s not going to be real danger for individuals over the next bunch of years. Some of these people are definitely going to go crazy. But I’m less worried about a Turner Diaries-style fascist uprising than I once was. For one thing: they lazy. For another: they may have the guns (for now) but we got the numbers.

“And by “we,” I mean the world.“

Dear Readers (and in particular those of you who have hung in through my long, boring novel word count and subsequent allergy to writing)… I have, as they say in the trade, an announcement.

I’ve been thinking for a while how to make this little online diary of mine into a much bloggier blog, one that might be of interest to more people. A random phrase dropped into conversation and a subsequent whois search led me to register the domain cluebyfour.com. And I’m pretty stoked about it!

I’ll be rolling out the new blog in the days and weeks to come. Wrangling with registrars and hosts, working with a talented friend on the new design, and, of course, drumming up new business and finishing the novel… gotta keep all those balls in the air. But I hope to get going really soon. I miss blogging! And it’s more fun, in a lot of ways, than whipping a big flabby old novel into shape…

The theme will be, basically, my own weird, irreverent, opinionated take on the issues of the day, the human condition, religion, sex, futurism and bicycles. I want to do regular weekly features like my cool blogger friends do, and, hopefully, actually provoke some debate in the comments.

If you guys have anything that you’ve seen in other blogs that you thought worked, or any other suggestions of what might be readable and worth bookmarking/subscribing to, please let me know.

C’mon back now, y’hear?