In which my in-flight jottings descend into a diatribe against ‘realistic’ conservatives everywhere before prolapsing into metaphor at my keyboard and emerging, scathed, as the ill-thought-out ramblings of an idealistic progressive.
..
I’ve been reading a new magazine on the plane again and I found this new phrase I love: ‘the conservative dilemma’. The magazine is new to me, anyway: Foreign Affairs is perhaps quite well-known and popular in the States.

I wondered if it’s the Australian equivalent of Quadrant, but mostly that was facetious: it’s just the ‘design’ is quite similar (read: non-existent) and the editors pledge to offer a ‘broad hospitality to divergent ideas’ and I know Quadrant started out that way – how they diverged into a house of neo-conservative opinion I’m not sure. Maybe the founding editors were never legitimately liberal and the rumours of early CIA funding are true. Robert Manne would probably know (about the editorial vision, not the fiduciary corruption, necessarily) as presumably something he knows about the Quadrant set has something to do with his departure and subsequent arrival in the soft-left playground of The Monthly. (Do you, Robert?)

Halway Between a Tangent and a Hard Place

Anyway, I couldn’t maintain the bias for long that Foreign Affairs would be yet another propaganda tool for a corporate-financed conservative think-tank. (Yeah, now I’m thinking of IPA Review, because I also subjected myself to a dose of the Weekend Australian on my trip and was enraged by this bullshit about environmental groups getting soooooooooo much money to engage in third-party politics that don’t align with the Australian’s primary readership. {It’s not like we need alternatives fucking with our beloved two-party system, breaking down our near-autocracy and aspiring to democracy, that ol’ chesnut. Couldn’t have a conservative dilemma like that on our hands now, could we.}

(The Weekend Australian’s investigative partner in this remarkable piece of journalistic integrity is the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), whose funding from tobacco, mining and other corporate entities obviously justifies its spintastic adherence to its clients’ {sorry, members‘} interests in a way that, say, Friends of the Earth (FoE) would be precluded from employing without impunity from IPA criticism even if FoE were actually doing that – ya know, pandering to the interests of whoever pays their salary.

(Pause. Allow the irony of Institute of Public Affairs to sink in. Try to swallow it. Choke. Give up.

(Ugh.

(I don’t know why I do it to myself: read this shit.

(Yes I do: to see how the other 95 per cent live; to see how it tastes to swallow garbage in gasps and gulps that suggest confirmation bias were going out of fashion.

(Which it isn’t.

(Which is prexactly why sometimes I read the Australian, Quadrant, IPA Review, Policy, etc., these wheels of the multi-million brake horsepower (BHP) propaganda engines housed in the otherwise hollow chassis of the corporate-greed machine.)

It seemed the mag was legitimately committed to liberal debate when I saw one article called ‘Enforcing the Peace‘ and another called ‘A Third Way to Palestine‘¹, the former asserting the need for super powers to intervene in the Israel-Palestine problem (that, in fact, super powers have had to do this throughout history: maybe it’s their duty)², the latter discussing how Palestine might achieve political self-determination.

There is another example in two articles about Afghanistan, but it is less dichotomous and therefore less illustrative – actually each would suggest the magazine has conservative leanings, because they both, to varying degrees, advocate the US remaining in Afghanistan.

It wouldn’t be fair to make an ideological judgement of the magazine on the basis of these observations though, so I should probably stop here before I leave the impression I’m an ideologue.

I’m interested in the source of my media, is all, and understanding who funds its production is the first step in deciding how much you can rely on the objectivity of its producers. IPA writing about tobacco regulation, for example, when they receive funding from, um, yeah, Philip Morris.

Idiots. Who do they take us for? Idiots? Yeah. And they will be correct for as long as we fail to ask: who funded the creation and publication of this or that opinion? So far Foreign Affairs seems orright, but I need to have a deeper look. SourceWatch is a good place to start.

Douches

Now, I said I’m not an ideologue, but: conservatives are fucking douches. Cf. whoever made this:
…

…

The assertion that all conservatives are douches comes from neither a political, nor economic, nor religious predilection of mine. It’s an objection based in logic: what sort of douche would consider it a good idea to conserve the status quo? Unless, of course, your interests would greatly benefit from continuing our exploitation of the planet and its people.

If, on the other hand, your interests lie with the interests of others, you could not look around you at the world and conclude: yep, we’ve got it sussed, let’s just leave it like this.

Unless …

Nope, I’ve got nothing.

Our world is not working properly in its current iteration: it needs to be tweaked, prodded and manipulated to improve. If you disagree with this I can only assume you have become deranged by too much proximity with greed and cannot be relied upon to contribute anything of value to the debate. Nonetheless I will read and respond to your comments if you leave them here. And I’ll still follow you on Twitter and read your articles in Quadrant, because, yeah, I try to not be an ideologue.

You do make it hard to agree with you though, and if my progressive tendencies render us polar opposites then so be it, because these tendencies really do constitute a predilection: a predilection for genuine liberalism and a commitment to intellectual, emotional, philosophical and governmental progress.

If you’re reading this and genuinely believe I am wrong (that we should conserve the status quo) I would dearly like to hear from you, lest I become another bigoted pinko lefty, which is only another of your flawed arguments away. Meanwhile I’m going to tell my other readers about this ‘conservative dilemma’ and hope you don’t tune out, if, indeed, you’re here at all.

The Conservative Dilemma

According to a fellow called Clay Shirky, in his article ‘The Political Power of Social Media‘³, the ‘conservative dilemma’ is caused by something the military call ’shared awareness’:

…

the ability of each member of a group to not only understand the situation at hand but also understand that everyone else does, too.

The political power of social media is our increased ability to meet, and foment, to paraphrase Dylan Moran. It enables us to meet like-minded people and be loud about the values we share, to promote the growth of our shared vision.

To Shirky’s conservatives this power constitutes a ‘dilemma’ because it undermines their aspirations to monopolise the knowledge market. To these conservatives, people who are able to think for themselves are a problem. To combat this ‘problem’, these conservatives engage in ‘censorship and propaganda’.⁴

Therefore, to ‘increase the conservative dilemma’, all we have to do is think for ourselves, and speak free.

The Inherent Weakness of Being Conservative

To extrapolate on this idea that free thinkers are a conservative’s worst enemy is to think that the conservative position is inherently weak: to consider a challenge a dilemma is to concede the weakness of your position.

Consider the metaphor of a weak animal surviving through evolution despite the ongoing pursuit of a stronger predator. To combat this dilemma the weaker animal develops the ability to camouflage itself against attack. This process is otherwise known as subterfuge. Dictionary.com’s prosaic definition is: n. deceit used in order to achieve one’s goal. Bless the Macquarie for being more verbose:

n. an artifice or expedient employed to escape the force of an argument, to evade unfavourable consequences, to hide something, etc.

A truly progressive, liberal-minded thinker covets criticism, solicits feedback, exposes their ignorance in the hope of learning, in the hope of discovering an alternative to their best current model. A progressive mind sees a challenge as an opportunity, not a problem – an opportunity to see things anew.

.

1. you’ll have to pay to read the full articles
2. These italics indicate the introduction of my own dubious speculation
3. to which I was attracted because of its potential to bolster my ailing faith in Web 2.0 techn0logies as the greatest democratising power since the invention of the printing press
4. How they do this without collapsing under the weight of their own hypocrisy I don’t know. If you know how to justify advocating for free financial markets at the same time as acting against free knowledge markets, please leave a comment here.

Stone Soup

There’s a magazine that publishes writers even younger than Voiceworks: Stone Soup, published out of Santa Cruz and described by someone as ‘The New Yorker of the 8 to 13 set’.

In the interests of SIB’s subtitle, I wonder if they have an adult readership. They reckon their circulation is at 20 000, with library subscriptions taking their estimated readership to near 80 000. Epic!

I got a copy of Harpers Magazine at the airport yesterday. It’s becoming a kind of personal airport tradition: I buy a magazine I wouldn’t normally read and take it with me on the plane, often as my only reading material, so that I’m forced to read it. It’s a good way to learn about a magazine.

This time it was Harpers, which I had heard was good from friends but never really bothered with. I’m glad I did, because I found something really inspiring in this issue: a story about perhaps the youngest newspaper publishers ever.

‘Final Edition: Twilight of the American newspaper’, by Richard Rodriguez, is a potted history of the San Francisco Chronicle – from its noble and humble origins as the brainchild of two precocious brothers, through its period as the authoritative paper in a two-newspaper town, to its recent slip into an MXesque daily.

As a whole, the article is a bit weak, really. It tries to make the case that the growing absence of obituaries is both indicative of, and the reason for, the demise of traditional/print/investiagative journalism. Maybe it was a typo, and everywhere it says ‘obituaries’ it was meant to read ‘classifieds’.

He also makes the huge claim that the narrative of San Francisco ceased with the death of columnist Herb Caen. Now, I get what he says about how the city makes the newspaper and the newspaper makes the city – each of their narratives are reflected in the other. This was a salient and illuminating argument, which further compounded my interest in newspapers as well as cities. But to say that a city’s narrative could be in the hands of a single journalist is just narrow-minded. What about the people who inevitably thought Caen was a knob? I’m pretty sure their narrative didn’t cease with his death.

I normally skip over the journalism-doomsday essays, because they seem to be nothing more than variations on the same pessimism, which I don’t need in my life right now. But it was familiar territory, in which I figured I would feel comfortable as I acquainted myself with this magazine. There’s heaps of other cool stuff in the article, which have nothing to do with journalism, but nonetheless resonated with me for various reasons.

Hoods

I could easily be mistaken for a hoodlum – tattoos, piercings, foul mouth, substance abuse, irreverence, contempt for belligerent authority … actually, depending on when you catch me, it wouldn’t necessarily be a mistake.

Well, according to this essay, the term ‘hoodlum’ comes from San Francisco, pertaining to young men who prowled the streets frightening Chinese people.  Richard doesn’t explain much more about the term’s original meaning.

Yeah, cool story.

Local Knowledge

Because I’d like to live in the States someday, I figure it wouldn’t hurt to get some local knowledge under my belt. In the essay I noted the following parallels between Australia and San Francisco:

• they both experienced an isolated bout of rapid growth at the hands of a gold rush, and their cultures have remained singularly stunted ever since;
• they both sport Australian blue gums; and
• they are both considered, by some, to be ‘provincial backwaters’ .

This means I can go to San Fran and pretend that I know shit.

Cos I’m Going to San Francisco

I’ve been interested in San Fran for a while, ever since I developed a crush on Dave Eggers in 2002: McSweeney’s is based there. Silicon Valley is also there, and I totally have a crush on the internet, so visiting that place would be almost as good as having a beer with Bukowski. Actually, that would suck.

Anyway, like I said, since 2002 I have developed the aspiration to live and work in New York, and my friend and I have decided to drive from San Francisco to New York when we get to the States, probably in 2011. I’d like for this journey to take as long it takes to read the Beats.

Also, it’s dumb but I’d really like to rock up in San Francisco with some flowers in my hair. I dunno, it’s just something I want to do.

I’ve heard it’s a liberal, progressive place, and I’ve since learnt in this article that San Fran was at the coal front of frontier American journalism. This doesn’t interest me so much in itself – it’s the people at the coal front of the coal front that really interest me. I love it when I inadvertently take inspiration from doomsday articles like this.

The De Young Brothers

Charles and Michael de Young were teenagers when they started what would become the San Francisco Chronicle in 1865. It was the town’s first newspaper, when the population was merely 60 000. By the time the boys were in their early twenties, the gold rush had run the population up to around 150 000 and the Daily Dramatic Chronicle, as it was then called, was one of the two papers in town. And it started with ‘a borrowed twenty-dollar gold piece’.

It gets better. They were psychos. Charles shot a guy called Reverend Isaac Smith Kalloch, who was both running for Mayor and running his mouth off about the brothers’ mum. He basically called their mother a whore.

Four years later and Michael was on the receiving end of the barrel. The way that Rodriguez puts it is classic, in its evocation of the era:

In 1884, Michael was shot by Adolph Spreckels, the brother of a rival newspaper publisher and the son of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, after the Chronicle accused the Spreckels Sugar Company of labor practices in Hawaii amounting to slavery. De Young was not mortally wounded and Spreckels was acquitted on a claim of reasonable cause.

How’s that – ‘reasonable cause’! We’d be fucked today if defamation were ‘reasonable cause’ to pull out a hand cannon and go get yourself some justice juice.

Anyway, these guys are an inspiration to me, and might serve as a beacon of hope for readers aspiring to literary greatness at our young age. As Rodriquez says, they lived out the philosophy behind their newspaper: that it should ‘entertain and incite the population’.

Go do that. Good, I’ll see you out there.