| Monday, May 17, 2004 |
01:15 - Boom boom boom
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If there's any valid point to this, it's the following obliquely connected one:
For someone to spend every day reading people like Lileks and Charles Johnson, to digest all their words, follow their links, and yet to conclude that they're all just "warbloggers" full of "misinformation" whose ideological drums are now "falling silent" in futility at the bleakness of the news—well, yeah, that's bound to discourage a guy.
The idea that all these man-years of dutifully posting hundreds or thousands of words per day, sourcing links, moderating comments, following-up on back stories, tying yesterday's news in with today's to underscore a point, and painstakingly researching facts with which to pick apart an opponent's argument have made no more an impression on some day-to-day readers' heads than a ping-pong ball fired out of a toy bazooka... it makes one think: Who's the fool here? The reader who still isn't convinced or even swayed by any of this hard-won evidence and reasoning, or me for thinking they can be convinced?
I'll keep at it because I find it rewarding for more reasons than just the possibility of convincing people. I know that people scouring the web for opinions about the war are doing so to find people who agree with what they already believe, rather than to seek opposing viewpoints and try them on one after the other, seeing which one fits best. I know that the people reading this are most likely already predilected to my own leanings, or else they'd have buggered off long ago. But still, I like to entertain a fantasy that I might be able to sway someone here or there, to make a point that has a chance of sticking, however small it might be.
And it's no fun to discover that there's nothing to that fantasy but wishful thinking.
UPDATE: Greg Kihn is having similar thoughts; apparently he's taking all kinds of heat from listeners via e-mail regarding his opinions that he injects between the classic-rock tracks, and he's likening them to his second ex-wife who used to respond to things she didn't want to hear by sticking her fingers in her ears and going LA-LA-LA-LA-LA! "There's no money. We're going bankrupt!" "LA-LA-LA-LA! I can't hear you!"
It's like the airwaves are filled with Rage Addicts...
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Brian Tiemann
