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Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Saved to Paper
Have
you seen 'The Book of Eli'? Same principle.
FOLLOW-THROUGH. We live in fascinating times. American liberty and freedom of speech have never been under greater threat from within. The Obama administration is clandestinely but determinedly seeking ways to control speech it doesn't like on both the airwaves and the internet. Simultaneously, we are living through the most astonishing democratization of the mass distribution of individual expression in the history of history. It's a "best of times, worst of times" moment that dwarfs anything Dickens could have conceived. What is bound to change is history itself, meaning our understanding of what history is and how it is best recorded.
Bear with me. I'm making an argument for why you should buy Doc Zero's new book, even though you may already have read some of its content. I've got it, I'm reading it, and more importantly I'll be keeping it on a small important shelf for the rest of my life. So should you. Now I'll explain why. If the argument seems roundabout, it really isn't. It's actually a process of spiraling in to the center of things.
The blogosphere isn't quite what it appears to be. Most of us are taken by its quality of right-nowness. Which is valuable and mind-expanding in its horizontal reach. Ninety-plus percent of all blogs are reaction snapshots: "Hey, did you hear about this? Here's what I think based on what I'm hearing across the internet." An inch deep and a mile wide. The internet infinity rippling out from an Everyman "I" who is, ultimately, one more pebble tossed into the electronic pool of the present. Insight -- when there is any -- is the sum of the ripples on the surface of that continuously expanding present. It lives and dies by hyperlink. Archetype: InstaPundit. In a sense this huge chunk of the blogosphere is a high-tech version of the child's game of "Telephone": Here's what I'm understanding based on what he and she and they and their links are understanding and confirming. There may be nuggets of individual contribution, but that's all they are, however dressed up in clever rhetoric and pungent metaphors. Each voice is a spider crouched at the center of the particular web he spins. The web itself consists of what others are saying and doing -- how they're reacting -- right now.
But there's more to it than that. There are also vertical bloggers. These are not spiders, not spinning webs. They're more like the ice cores geologists collect to determine what was happening in a particular year or age of earth history. There is a fundamental physics that remains constant through time. Physics does not change from year to year or age to age. That's why the cores can be trusted Their principal properties remain, despite the perceptual distractions of other influences. They're not spinning webs on the transient trees. They are what they are, and we can measure meaning from their constancy.
Because of this, we can also value them in the moments that sway others like hurricanes and earthquakes. The hurricanes and earthquakes are there to be seen in the cores, but their physics are not altered by mere weather. They are the immanent essence that allows us to put temporal events in perspective.
Too abstract? The diaries and letters of the keenest observers have always been prized. Samuel Pepys. James Boswell. Something about seeing what the clear-eyed ones had to say without the benefit of hindsight. A way of determining who's percipient and who's a shrewd rationalist after the fact. To me, for example, the credibility of William Shirer's monumental Rise and Fall of the Third Reich rests on the same author's Berlin Diary. He was there while it was happening and was not fooled. Therefore I can trust his scholarly history afterwards. I trust his core.
Before the internet age, the credentialing diaries and letters -- because of the labor involved in their assembly -- always came decades after the histories, biographies, and critiques that set the latches for conventional wisdom. Reagan, for example, was portrayed by the academic establishment as an amiable dunce for so long that his published letters and other writings were treated as an anomalous footnote when they were finally published, their inherent proof that Reagan was an astute political and cultural thinker arriving too late to dent the mass media mythology of his dim-wittedness.
But now we are in the internet age. If we could capture what the core thinkers were thinking during the Age of Obama, it wouldn't be possible to pull off the charade that still obtains in the case of FDR. And it was a charade. My dad was no blogger. He was just a man with a voice. He was articulate and specific about the fact that FDR's New Deal perpetuated rather than ended the Great Depression. As so many economists now understand. But we're left with the myth that FDR somehow saved capitalism from itself by turning a recession into the longest lasting Depression in the history of the United States. A huge, grotesque, continuously monstrous leviathan of a lie. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a blog record of all the people who knew what was happening, and why, while that fantasy was being created for the history books?
You bet it would. The Obama nightmare wouldn't have been able to perpetrate its frauds and sinister intentions if more people knew that objections to FDR's policies were not ex post facto sniping but delineated in stark, well argued terms at the moment they occurred.
Which is why you all need to buy Doctor Zero's book. It's a time capsule of beautifully argued rebuttals of Obama policies at each step of Obama's assault on America during his first catastrophic year in office. It's not reactionary spouting; it's the core proving its internally consistent physics AS events are unfolding. Logically, calmly, at times elegantly.
That's why we who care about the outcome and the impact on our children and grandchildren also have a responsibility to back up the hard drives of our minds by saving to paper. Yes, the record is there, electronically, right now. Will it still be there in a year or ten? When you want to prove in 2020 or 2040 that there were people who knew what was happening and tried desperately to stop it, what evidence will you still be able to present? The internet is only flashes of electricity that can be lost in a storm, hidden in impenetrable archives, or erased by persons and motives unknown.
Doctor Zero has written intelligently and rationally about the destruction of our nation and explained the reasons and their roots, as it is happening, Don't you want a day by day and month by month record of that? That you can hold in your hand and read out loud to your own children and grandchildren with the immediacy and passion of Shirer's Berlin Diary? If you don't, you're part of the problem of accelerating memory loss:
Here's your chance at being part of our nation's SAVE routine. Ultimate backup. Evidence. Proof. By the book. Buy the book.
Your act. That's what I mean by the "center of things."
UPDATE. This is neither here nor there, but the post Eduardo is linking is this. Granted, it's a decade old, but maybe he has a point. Ice cores aren't confined to those who have frigid names. Here's what Doc Zero said about the InstaPunk book proposed by Lake:
You absolutely should, for all the
reasons you laid out in that review.
But the better half has made it clear I can't be involved. "You'd just screw it up with all your nitpicking," she said. Over to Lake and company.
Still. Nobody alive can duplicate this pre-Internet feat.
