What if We Stop Having a Ball?

I so badly want these people to find out what it is in life they're meant to do:

Maybe I’m being overly cynical about the American warblogger coverage. I had a conversation with one person who noted that at least this time, unlike 2003, bloggers aren’t cheering on a war, they are cheering on fair elections. I can get that, but some of it just seems so over the top on our end, and we have nothing personally at stake while the folks over there have everything at stake.

I think what is happening in Iran is amazing and the way the media coverage is playing out is fascinating and the actions of individuals standing up to power in a country where that does tend to get you pretty decisively dead are inspiring, but the people of Iran are not my proxies on the world stage and I have no claim of ownership over their acts, good or bad. I do not achieve greatness through their actions any more than I pass for 300 yards after watching Brett Favre do it. And I think that's what keeps getting on my nerves about stuff like this, to be fair, all over the blogosphere, the idea that we are somehow a part of it because we're all Twittering about it.

I get wanting to be supportive of the people protesting but it does remind me not of 2003 but of 2001, how people went around saying 9/11 would make them love their families and go back to church and they baked cupcakes in red white and blue to show they really love America and fuck you if you don't want to do that, too. The idea that this is their moment, their blinding flash of light, the excuse they use to Stand Up and Become Great, when in reality, what the fuck is wrong with you it takes fraud, human rights abuses, murders in the streets and tear gas thick in the air for you to cheer on free elections?

This feels in some ways like the next bandwagon for bullies to jump on and ride around gleefully pounding anybody who isn't sufficiently amped up about FORCING the results of what's happening Iran to conform to what American warbloggers in need of a hobby want to talk about in tortured, Dickensian prose. The problem with that is never that the bandwagon's on its way somewhere you wouldn't want to go. It's that eventually everybody who jumped on will jump off again, and move on to the next Big Excuse to Sing the Marseillaise or whatever, and you'll be left alone.

A.

Comments

[pansypoo]

since ahmadinejad made sure the poor got $$$, he might have actually won, if he didn't try to steal it.

[whet moser]

Gah, Sullivan gives me the willies. THE WORLD DOES NOT EXIST SO YOU CAN PRETEND TO BE GEORGE ORWELL.