It turns out I can get nothing else done until I write this, and never mind that in the furor and hysteria of the election 57 days hence this diary is bound to vanish quickly. I must write this because I remain disturbed by Droogie's story (in which somebody from the AP traced his kosname to his employer and sought to cost him his job), and by a subsequent diary from an academic editor in Arkansas (if memory serves) who believes he lost his job of nearly two decades because somebody discovered he was writing liberal blogs in his spare time. I must write this because there remains among this community -- and within me -- a certain kind of almost end times...yearning, almost...that they are plotting to get us.
Apparently I must write this because there are people who frequent this and other virtual spaces and fear being found out, fear being known as liberals or progressives or simply as people who embrace divergent points of view.
It is the culture of fear I wish to mull over, best I can today. This fear and its causes. Please stay with me; this has been burbling long enough to be some kind of stew, if I'm lucky.
We hide behind our online names, most of us. And then the most serious of our contributors here meet occasionally in person at netroots, or knew each other before, or whatever. As an often confessional writer, as a child of the now old new journalism, I find it oddly confining to adhere to these rules (and to realize that nobody here actually has reason to care who I am in real life!).
I come to the desktop carrying texts, some of which lay strewn around me in the chaos of my home office. They include Naomi Wolf's The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, William Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin, and an advanced reader's copy of Stuart Archer Cohen's The Army Of The Republic. Those last two are fictional dystopias set in my old home town of Seattle, following in the dust, I suppose, of Ecotopia. If have not read all of these books to the end, but no matter.
Here is a question: Can we distinguish between electoral gamesmanship and conspiracy? Votes are bought or disallowed or machines are jiggered, and it has ever been thus. Surely I was not alone in wondering if 2000 was not some kind of cosmic balancing act for 1960, though surely both were wrong? The Republicans play to win, and they do so with an unbecoming kind of viciousness; they play to the baser instincts of their base, and they keep beating us like, ahem, the Washington Generals, the loosingest team in professional basketball, as a friend once wrote for the late Spy magazine.
I wish not to offer an apology for the Republicans, nor for their tactics. But I commonly read in this space the belief that the party of the elephant and its big business backers have some deeper, more nefarious plan in mind. See: Naomi Wolf. See: FISA. See: Jane Mayer's book (and please read it, if you will read no other book to remind yourself how singularly important this election is, how much has gone so terribly wrong).
Is beating us evidence of that plan? Is there something more that in my naivete I have missed? Or do they simply manifest a different worldview, a more authoritarian (divine right of kings) view of our particular, peculiar social contract?
I am asking, not arguing. (That may come later, should anybody wish to play today.)
Clearly the two novels referenced above, though they tell quite different stories, reflect an appetite for and an expectation of a bleak future for our democracy (and I have so far declined to read Kunstler's new novel). But I keep wondering how much we liberals, who read within those pages, within these virtual pages, some our own worst fears are so far from the fundamentalists who made the odious Left Behind series such a commercial success. (In Ferrigno's novel we enter an Islamic Republic of America fighting its Southern Christian half, with layers of conspiracy ladled atop; in Cohen's novel -- and I'm only a few chapters into it, and may stop there because I'm not sure I trust the characters to continue reasonably forward -- we join an armed insurgence against a fascist corporate state, with layers of coming resource wars ladled atop.)
Are we so tired of losing that we are waiting for some great gesture of martyrdom?
Again, I am thinking aloud. I mean no offense.
And so, rushing through this for I have work to do, and little time...we come to our cherished internet anonymity, the self-immolation of our friend Droogie, the reality that apparently some of us might lose jobs and livelihoods if employers knew the truth about our political convictions.
It is not my experience of the world, but I have never had that kind of work, have mostly worked for myself. Again, I will ask: Is this really a reasonable and pervasive fear?
I'm going to assume, for the moment, that it is a real fear. That somebody is monitoring this site, harvesting the names of its most vocal or virulent posters. That lists are being kept, and checked twice.
Fine.
Come get me.
If something I type here or anywhere else is capable of changing things in any small way, if anything I reason through on my own with the help of a few thousand unknown friends is capable of causing tremors in the foundation of whatever big business-small government [sic] conspiracy is going to dominate us...fine.
I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere, and I'm not shutting up.
My name is Grant Alden. I live in Morehead, Kentucky. Up until a few months back I was co-publisher, co-editor and art director of a small roots music magazine called No Depression. I don't pretend that anybody reading this diary should care about any of that, but if the tinfoil hat crowd is right and somebody is jotting notes down about who's here and what they think, that should make it easier.
Now...having unmasked myself, let me ask the question: Why are you hiding? What are you hiding? Who are we hiding from? Wouldn't we all be a good bit safer (identity theft aside, and I take for granted that we are all wise and honorable enough not to write from work, for that is unfair to our employer) if we soldiered forth under our own names?
Before the 2004 election my two partners and I chose to use a 2/3-page column in No Depression to ask our readers to vote for John Kerry. For this we received hate mail; for this affront, something less than ten subscribers canceled, and many more (including our office manager) were most displeased with us. I would not have thought that advocacy for a mainstream political candidate was a radical gesture, but ND had an audience that crossed many barriers, and, we learned, shared no political consensus. They did not like finding each other in the same room, I suspect.
But I liked that we were all there together.
My point (I think!) is this: If we progressives remain quiet throughout our daily lives, it is easier to marginalize us, easier to convince employers or potential employers that we are dangerous, easier to threaten us with removal of our anonymity. This is something like my gay friends told me almost thirty years ago: Coming out is important because the more people actually know gay people, the harder it is for them to sustain their prejudice. And they were right.
I may, of course, be quite wrong. Your turn.