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| Love to Hate Slate?? |
| Every now and then I actually click on one of those MSN or MSNBC links to the ever so slightly pretentious Slate.com and usually leave the site feeling rather empty. Slate.com purports to be a bastion of broadminded liberal thinking but if you venture into the backroom forums, beware the lair of skeptics who live for being down, who revel in grovelling, self-centered disgruntlement. This is not to say that one should not question authority, but the backroom dialogue at Slate sometimes sounds like the predatory "screes" of college students practicing wing extension (noble and natural!) but even more often like the pompous drivel of old "leftists" who, having burned out their own lights, leave the black rot of generalized discontent on forums and message boards, always in opposition to absolutely everything. Note the quotes around the word leftists--this is to signify the self-consciousness of that and other political stances. The Sound and the Fury...oh that it should really be such an innocent thing as a mere idiot in a Faulkner novel. I always come away from Slate feeling embarrassed that I may be too conservative, but once in awhile I actually resonate a bit with something by one of their featured writers. What a relief. Anyway, I wonder if Michael Kinsley (isn't that his name?) who is (or at least was) editor of Slate, suffers in reading those forum posts. Now he seems like an intelligent, reasonable man who wears the liberal pursuasion well. So gallant, and not at all like the rude boys fomenting revolution on the message boards...of course, maybe it is just the nature of the typical forum crawler to be as narcissistic and rude as young Rimbaud (opposite of "Rambo" in case you didn't know!) Let us take heart! The one thing for which we may thank technology and the internet is the probability of eventual worldwide democracy, because democracy requires freedom of speech, and as democracy expands it will clash with first one culture and then another, like a sculptor's chisel etching something beautiful out of the forbidding density of marble. In the midst of this work, the chips will fly and every brave and crazy spirit will try their own metal amidst the virtual den of noise and artificiality. It is often good to just turn the computer off! We hope for the eventual result to be refined work, polished and beautiful, which speaks to the simple love of beauty, common to all humanity, and to which all humanity answers back. Meanwhile, I know that I myself must resist the downward gravity of grumpy thickheadedness, usually embellished with acid tongue and a mean spirit, so often evident in internet forums and which I can already tell increases with age. Hark! Keep the filters at highest setting or the silly noise will drown out the common sense and sensibility in one's own head! Having said that, in all fairness, at least to Michael Kinsley, here is a link to Slate.com....click here. After all, the featured articles are thought-provoking, elegant essays despite the heavy smoke in the forums! I'm not sure where a "moderate conservative liberal" is supposed to go for communication and communal spirit on the net--for now, like a moth, I migrate to the hot spotlights of mainstream media, the great centrist center, the Grand Central of here and now. Most of us enjoy some little corner of the universe, including the virtual universe of email lists and cyber-cafes, wherein we share a special interest, even if from widely different perspectives. Of course, there's lots of internet fringe for the extremists--sometimes I think we are building web content from the outside in rather than starting at center and working out, but more likely it's a dynamic of both. Maybe the best cafe spot really is a rickety table at the Starbucks, at Barnes & Noble, thumbing through magazines and laughing back at anthrax and enemies, domestic and foreign, who would begrudge us. Let the enemies of life enfold themselves infinitely into their own distortions, and may someone live to tell about it. Thanks for taking a look; I feel better just getting this off my chest. Anyway, kudos to any site willing to deal with the issues of providing a message board "forum." You will notice I don't have one here! ;) Copyright: yodalayhey@yahoo.com 30 October 2001 Revision date: 29 November 2001 |
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