I blame it on
Crashing the Gate, this new diary rescue feature I've taken on myself in the past week. A couple of hours a day gone like - whoosh! - and it wasn't until today that I finally figured out that I'm doing this because of Markos' and Jerome's book.
Follow me on the flip, where it's Susan's usual long-ass shit and thank the Lord it's in the diaries and not on the friggin' front page, yes?
One of the main lessons I took from my read of
Crashing the Gate is how woefully embryonic the Democrats and progressives are when it comes to communication infrastructure, and how little support is offered in terms of nurturing all kinds of liberal political talent. The right's investment in its young Republicans, through providing internships and dormitories and media training and gigs at souped-up think tanks and magazines is breathtaking. We are decades behind and we need to catch up.
Now politics takes all kinds. It takes the number crunchers, the policy wonks, the charismatic extroverts who become candidates, people with media savvy for buys, techies to build web sites ... and it takes writers. Talented writers and thinkers. Authors who can write a piece and make you cry or donate or get off your ass and vote or canvass, authors who can explain to fence-sitters and the apathetic why participating in their government matters - and authors who can explain eloquently how the Democratic Party will get you there.
Political movements need Tom Paines, Thomas Jeffersons, Martin Luther Kings, Vaclav Havels - men who changed the world with words - at least as much as it needs revolutionaries who take to the streets. Or at the very least, it needs both. Mute or inarticulate activists don't get too far in the real world. Words are what describe our grievances, shape the language of our demands, stir the citizenry and scare the living shit out of authority.
And people, Daily Kos is Ground Zero for word production. I can personally testify to that after the past week of diary rescue. We've got words in spades.
What we don't seem to have is an ability to distinguish between them well, particularly if the writing is off the beaten path or longish, or if the user name is not a brand name here; this isn't to say the widely recognized writers don't deserve the spotlight ... it's just that we somehow need to make the spotlight bigger. That's where the diary rescue idea came in.
Frankly, I have more talent for spotting talent than I do for writing, myself, and I want to use this ability for the progressive cause. I want to at the very least draw eyes to new writers who are arriving here, or old ones who have been overlooked. I want great writers to keep on writing, and I want them to get better and better and better, with lots of feedback. I want to help spot the next billmon, the next Hunter, the next Meteor Blades. Hell, I'll be even more ambitious ... I hope Daily Kos gives rise to the next George Orwell or Upton Sinclair or Charles Dickens, all of whom wrote novels that either changed political discourse forever or led to legislation outlawing the practices they depicted in their novels.
Admittedly, the diary rescue idea has flaws, particularly that it's totally subjective. And I'll be honest here - great writing, even if it's about your parakeet, will probably get you on my very subjective nightly list. I justify this to myself by saying that everyone on the site is interested in politics or they wouldn't be drawn here; today's parakeet writer might tackle environmentalism next Monday then related legislation the next week and then five years from now might be penning speeches for a Democratic candidate or getting our views published on the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages.
But not if they get discouraged here. Not if they're neglected. They will lose their gifts and their voices, and that's not just a loss to them as individuals; it's a loss to the progressive movement itself, for the ages.
So here's what I propose we do together as a community to make sure we don't lose the gifted:
Writers: Take your time. Polish and revise. Use words clearly, be creative, take risks, link two seemingly disparate thoughts together and see if you can make it work. Don't worry about having the latest breaking news and throwing up a one-liner in the frenzied fever to get to the recommended list. If your stuff is good enough, if you're eloquent and patient enough, I will do my best to find you. And if I don't, readers who leave their recommendations in comments on the diary rescue list will.
Readers: Be willing to read something longer and something offbeat. Go ahead and open and peruse diaries about subjects in which you're not usually interested. Leave a comment to show you've read, even if it's just a "thank you for writing this." Recommend the best stuff. Reward the author with a tip. Leave a trace of yourself, somehow, in a good diary. Engage in discussion - even tangents - if you have time. If you spot a gem that's been overlooked, point to it in the diary rescue thread as a comment.
A lot of us are flat-ass broke or have our dollars committed to campaigns. Funding a left-wing noise machine is a fearsome undertaking, but we have here at Daily Kos - every single day - people who are writing beautifully and thinking deeply for free, and all we need to give them is some attention and a few minutes of our time. The cause is worth every second of it; it's a cost-free way to start building our own communication infrastructure, discover our homegrown talent and nurture it to fruition.
Writing well is a tough and lonely experience anyway. Posting your darling and having it languish from anemic lack of attention, like a neurasthenic heroine from a Victorian novel, can break your heart. Writers leave off writing under such circumstances, and who can blame them? I fear we may be losing our future here due to lack of attention. Let's not allow that to happen.
So go forth and read and write and multiply. Write as if our very lives depended on it. Blow our minds, break our hearts, flaunt your stuff. And commit to reading the others who are toiling away in oblivion. It's one small step toward crashing that damn gate.