(author’s note: This probably isn’t the best night for posting this sort of diary – autobiographies don’t tend to sell all that well while cities are burning – but since this is the day my novel went live on Kindle, it’s the day that I need to post this. Besides, I’ve a long history with bad timing – I’m the Kossack who posted the last diary to go up before news broke that Dick Cheney had shot some dude in the face, after all.)
UPDATE @0105 MST: Now edited to include working links! Thanks, occams hatchet!
More than nineteen years I’ve been coming to this place, pretty much daily. Don’t have all that much to say anymore – haven’t written a diary in years, comment only occasionally – and nowadays pretty much just lurk.
It wasn’t always so: back in the mid-to-late aughts, in the age of DK 3.0, I did a lot of writing, commenting, and community-building work around these parts. My series, History for Kossacks, appeared regularly at 7PM Mountain time on Sundays; I was one of the original Rescue Rangers (now Community Spotlight); and was a member of an off-site BBS where we spent much of our time away from Daily Kos talking about what was going on at Daily Kos.
This diary isn’t a GBCW, or even a TTFN, but it does represent a transition: since my long-muttered-about novel is finally ready for publication, I’m going to have to shift my online presence from a pseudonym to my real name. But before I do that, I wanna take the Moonbat moniker out for a last spin by self-homaging the old series and leaving for posterity one Kossack’s perspective on what Daily Kos was like in its Goldenorange Age.
I understand if that sounds a little off-putting to some folks, and respect completely ones’ right to click away from the self-indulgence of an autobiographical retrospective. Before you do, though, please know or recall that even back in the days when massive, bandwidth-draining egos and over-the-top acts of self-promotion were the norm, I never really bragged on myself – focused as they were on historical topics, my diaries back then (which averaged around 10 single-spaced pages as Word docs) used the words “I,” “my,” “mine,” and “me” far less frequently than the first few paragraphs of the one you’re reading now.
So join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, which tonight is festooned with the regalia of someone who had a 5-digit UID (back when such things played a role in the discourse) but who’s felt increasingly alienated by the changes – or evolutions, depending on perspective – that the site has undergone since the early years of the Obama Administration, and especially since the rise of Trump and Biden. It thus falls to your humble historioranter to play the role of the old pensioner, wearing a threadbare uniform from three or four wars ago and babbling about times that predate virtually everyone around him.
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(if you were around back then, you might also remember that my diaries tended to be really long – 5000 words was about the average. Be forewarned that this one follows in that tradition.)
Mind-framing and Contextualizing
If you’re an old-timer, cast your memory back to a time when W’s war in Iraq was three years old and wasn’t going very well; when Jeff Gannon/Guckert of “Talon News” was demonstrated to be a favored member of the White House Press Corps while concurrently offering to select clients his services as a dominant top; and when debate was raging over Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
If you joined the Great Orange Satan after the switch to DK4 in 2011: DK3 content was very meta – diaries in response to diaries that were responding to another diary were not uncommon. There was much navel-gazing, MetaJesus Wept (frequently), and factions waged flame wars and pie fights over issues too numerous to quantify. At the same time, the site was infused with the fire of the newly converted – we were discovering the power of online organizing, Markos had just released Crashing the Gate, and we were all very conscious that our community was playing a role in national politics. When we weren’t doing politics, diarists wrote about, and subgroups formed around, all manner of subjects – one of my favorites was Science Spider Friday – and there were scores of little niches to which people gravitated.
If you’re a Youngling: in the time before smart phones and social media, blogs filled the role now dominated by X, Instagram, and the like. Keep in mind that back then, there wasn’t an app for that: for years, the Rescue Rangers organized the nightly Diary Rescue using email and a message board. Attention spans were somewhat longer in those days, so diaries were lengthier and of heftier substance than much of what you’re likely familiar with. Also, folks were much more tolerant of views that dissented from their own – not that there weren’t long, bloody, knock-down-drag-outs over issues both justified and petty, but the Cancellation Guillotine was dragged into the village square only rarely, and always for a specific and well-justified purpose.
Unitary Moonbat
I don’t know how or where I first learned of Daily Kos – seems like I heard something on NPR at some point – but I do remember it was in the spring of 2004. I had got to thinking that blogging might be a way of gaining some publishing cred without having to contend with editors and other gatekeepers, so I searched the name – and when I followed the link, it turned out to be the very day Markos issued his (in)famous quote regarding mercenaries. As a fellow Cold War vet whose time in West Germany coincided with Kos’ for a couple of years, I happened to agree with him in both sentiment and word choice, but as someone who’d never so much as posted to an AOL chat room, there was no way I was going to sign up and jump into the raging war of words that I was seeing on the screen before me. I decided maybe blogging wasn’t for me, and didn’t think about it again for more than a year.
For whatever reason – maybe this is where the NPR story comes in? – I found my way back to the site in the summer of 2005. I lurked around, mostly confining myself to the front pager diaries; the community ones were so meta-ridden that they were nigh on unintelligible to a n00b. The dust had recently settled after the Pie Fight (by which I mean the Pie Fight), and I was intimidated into not posting by all the vitriol and bad vibes that were still emanating from the battleground.
By January, 2006, things had settled to a point that I thought it’d be okay to dip a toe in the water. I registered on the 18th, and was assigned UID#76458.* I chose the name because around that time, the Alito confirmation was dominating the news and the concept of the “unitary executive” was getting a lot of airplay. “Moonbat” simply described my politics.
I commented for a couple of weeks, and finally summoned the juevos to post my first diary on January 28. As first diaries sometimes do, A Last, Desperate Attempt to Get Through to Senator Salazar struck a chord. It went to the top of the rec list, was reposted at Firedoglake, and the 300+ recs it garnered remained my personal best for a long time.
* in what was probably a good move for the long-term health of discourse on the site, Kos de-emphasized UIDs using a series of upgrades and revisions over a period of several years. Before that, they played a mostly-negative role in the social hierarchy of the site, though there were some positive aspects: you used to be able to see the UIDs of the people who’d recced your diary by hovering over the names. It was always cool to get a rec from someone with a four-digit UID; even cooler than that was a rec from a user with a three- or two-digit number. Most treasured of all, of course, were recs from the single-digit users – Meteor Blades was UID#6, and iirc, Kos was #3. Lowest UID I ever got a rec from was Anonymous (or Hieronymus; can’t remember which) Cowherd, who had a UID of -1 (I think it was a developer).
History for Kossacks
Much later, as a Rescue Ranger, I noted a phenomenon that occasionally played out when a person was posting the next diary after a smash-hit first effort: they tend to think that the vast crowd of recommenders and commenters will remember that initial diary and is just waiting out there, finger poised to click and rec, for one’s name to next appear on the Recent list. I noticed it in others because I fell victim to it myself – and was sorely disappointed when my sophomore effort (an attempt at comedy) garnered all of 2 recs and 7 comments.
It was around then that your Moonbat spied an unoccupied niche in DK’s constellation of series-style diaries; my next post was the first to use the “History for Kossacks” label. Over time, HfK developed into a “thing” – more than 100 of my 170-or-so diaries were part of the series, and the vast majority of them ended up making the rec list. For about three years, readers could count on around 10 pages of history from an off-center perspective being posted at around 7PM Mountain Time on Sundays. Several were multipart series: country studies of Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Afghanistan; a history of American politics in the mid-19th century; a 4-parter on bondage and slavery, done in partnership with the great aphra behn. There were also a lot of one-offs, from descriptions of military stuff like the Battle of Carhae or the Philippine/American War to a lot of other stuff, including Kenya, Cossacks, Atlantis, and Lizard People (strangely, this one turned out to be one of my all-time greatest hits) - even once tried my hand at historical news: WAS BREAKING: Skylab!!!. I can also claim, though I can’t prove, that one of my diaries - Why Redstaters Should Keep Away From History - resulted in a significant policy change at what was then one of DK’s more formidable right-wing rivals. Eric son of Erik will never admit it, but Red State didn’t use meme-type images in their front page stories for years after that diary.
I wrote the occasional full-on political diary, though even these tended to be tinged with history. Shame the message in Impeachment, Historically Speaking didn’t gain the converts we needed to actually make it happen – imagine the world we’d be living in if Bush had been impeached in 2007 for the crimes of leading a democracy into a war of aggression based on false premises and transforming torture from a war crime to public policy. Alas, my warnings about what I saw as Dems ignoring the lessons of the past (In the Name of History: To the Ramparts! and Hell, No: I am a Loco-Foco) went unheeded, as did a few on education in Colorado (and if folks had listened to what I was saying in my Obama’s Education Policy: In Need of Change and Edu-Haters on the Rampage series, Denver might not currently be suffering under the mayoral misrule of this clown). Those wouldn’t be the last times I’d play the role of Cassandra, but having my prophecies - and my call to action for a great wonder project like a space elevator - get ignored was a small price to pay for the blast that was posting on a blog in the late aughts.
Daily Kos back then was a meritocracy with a whole lotta meta. I usually avoided the flame wars and pie fights – wanted the Cave of the Moonbat to remain a place where Kossacks could leave politics and factionalism at the mouth and just enjoy history for a while. In the end, this policy of studied neutrality would cost me dearly, but between 2006 and 2009 it was no doubt part of my becoming one of the most followed writers on the site (was even briefly in the top 10!). The percentage of my diaries that went to the rec list was greater than all but a handful of celebrity posters, and I’ve had diaries get 1000+ shares on Facebook and hundreds of re-tweets, despite my not maintaining either a Facebook or a Twitter account (well, I have a Xitter account, but only since last year, and because I couldn’t come up with a clever enough first tweet, I’ve never posted to it). Without trying to get all Roman about it, the other part had something to do with merit: in the first KOScars, I was honored to receive more medals than any other Kossack – 2 gold and 2 bronze – for both my series and individual writing.
The Rescue Rangers
And none of that would have happened were it not for the timely graciousness of Susan Gardner (SusanG at the time). I’d just finished my first HfK series, a 7-diary country study of Persia, and it hadn’t exactly lit the rec list on fire; was hoping a new diary about the First Crusade would do a little better. It didn’t, at least not initially – but then SusanG posted a link to it in a feature she’d singlehandedly developed a few days before: Open Thread and Diary Rescue, a nightly summary of 6-10 diaries that she felt were well-written but had been overlooked. Diamonds in the rough, as it were. The Rescue appeared while the diary was still pretty new on the Recent list, and the clicks it drew resulted in the first example of something we Rescue Rangers would later celebrate as a “Rescue-to-Reclist.” It also set my DK career in motion.
As the first Yearly Kos (now Netroots Nation) convention approached in the summer of 2006, SusanG put out an appeal: she was looking for a handful of people to assemble each day’s Diary Rescue while she was at the gathering. Feeling like I owed her for the success I’d enjoyed over the previous few months, I volunteered, as did about ten other diehard Kossacks. I’ve told the Rescue Ranger story before, but the long and the short of it is that the process worked so well that by the end of the summer, the Rescue Rangers were given the responsibility of the day-to-day assembly of the list of Rescued diaries, which we emailed to Susan for posting. Incredibly, the group, now d/b/a Community Spotlight, is still functioning 19 years later – and though the process works a little differently now, the Rangers/Spotlighters have never taken a day off in all that time. In other words, the eyes of at least one Rescue Ranger have fallen upon every single diary that’s been posted here since August, 2006.
Though the first few weeks of Rangering were done entirely by email, Avila graciously stepped up to provide a message board to serve as a place for Rangers to organize Rescues, develop schedules and duty rosters, and discuss the finer points of Rangering. Established in 2006, “the stables” became the Rangers’ home for the next decade.
Avila also ran another message board, which was home to 20-30 hardcore Kossacks who she had invited into her circle of friends. Though we were all actively posting at DKos, the more personal stuff was saved for our off-site haunt; over the course of the three years or so it was active, that site became my only social circle, online or realworld. I was especially close with Avila, but also have the warmest of memories of long hours spent typing back and forth with GotaGrip, pico, melvin, skrp23, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), Zwoof, possum, and a few others I recall fondly but who probably prefer their names kept under wraps. I felt more comfortable on that site than any other place I’ve ever been, or likely ever will be, online.
The Moonbat in Winter
And then, one day in late spring 2009, it was gone. I got home, tried to log on, got a message that the site didn’t exist, emailed Avila, learned about ghosting long before the term came into common use. It must’ve been something I said or did, but I don’t know – never did get any kind of closure, and quickly fell out of touch with everyone. The site was never restored.
Getting kicked to curb by my Muse sent me into a years-long funk, and left me unwilling to expend the emotional energy needed to keep up first with posting a series, then diaries in general. By 2011, I was averaging one per month; when my tenth anniversary rolled around, I was down to one a year. A lot of that was because I turned my energies toward more material aims, like finally getting a master’s (in military history – an iconoclastic move, given the community in which I teach) and re-involving myself in union politics. Until today, I hadn’t posted a new diary since 2016, and sometimes months pass between comments. Still visit, read, and lurk pretty much every day, though.
I was a creature of DK3, dense text and small fonts and all, and did not fare well in the move to slicker, more social media-oriented DK4. I did try turning History for Kossacks into a group, but alas, I was not an engaged administrator. I also continued to suffer from my lifelong aversion to self-promotion, so the group grew but slowly, as the favored tag of a few historically-oriented Kossacks – and (alas again) without all the multi-author weekly schedules and other fancy stuff that Readers and Book Lovers and other super-active groups came up with and used to such great effect. Surrendering to my own inadequacies as a group admin, I handed the keys to Ojibwa a few years ago and haven’t regretted a thing – History for Kossacks now has 820 followers and remains among the top 15 most popular groups on the site.
And so the moonbat fluttered off to a little niche, and there lurked for years and years, kinda like Gollum in his cavern beneath the Misty Mountains. Also like Gollum, who used his self-imposed exile at the fringes of goblin-world to invent riddles (about eating the bones of raw fish, but still), I’ve used some of my not-blogging time to take a stab at literary expression – I’m proud to announce that The Baker, the Brewpub, and Red Panama (Part 1 of the 2-part Surly’s Intergalactic Moon Pub saga) is now available via Kindle or print through Amazon. Part 2, The Selenarchy of Luna, will drop next weekend or shortly thereafter.
Historiorant
It was my great honor to be invited by this year’s graduating class of the high school at which I teach to speak at commencement, and writing the speech for it was cause for a lot of nostalgic reflection and odd realizations. It’s been 40 years since my own high school class received our diplomas – weird to think that for 19 of those years, or nearly half the adult life of a dude who’s finna start pushing 60, I’ve been at least stopping by this place almost every single day.
My original plan for this diary included a few more pages on changes at the site, 2011-2024, from the perspective of an increasingly alienated moonbat. Starting with early disillusionment with Obama and continuing through the Ides of March Declaration of 2016 to increasingly-adversarial exchanges with other Kossacks – once lost seven followers (not recs: followers) over a single comment I made about Fauci – I’ve felt more and more out of place here. It’s like the Overton Window has shifted, and I now find myself staring at a blank wall.
But I still remember those old days. DK3 was an orangesepia-toned time when young(ish), impassioned Kossacks fought the power and crashed the gates, and I was glad to be a small part of a much greater movement. I was a witness to a golden age that was understood as such by the people simultaneously creating and living in it. I’m a blogger of the Old School, a practitioner of a social media format that went the way of the Laser Disc. A doughboy who gave Fritz the business at Chateau-Thierry.
