When DailyKos diarist Stephanie Block’s conservative father
invited her to join him at a White House Hanukah party, she used
the occasion to register her disagreement with Bush Administration
polices via contagion, purposely sneezing on her “biohazardous
right hand” before offering it to the president in the greeting
line.
“I was getting over the flu and watched the news for days to see
of Bush got it,” Block giddily relates.
This information was not extracted from the transcript of a
warrantless wiretapped conversation. Block tells the tale herself
in Un::Conventional,
a series of essays by DailyKos diarists collected during the 2006
inaugural YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas. Block’s segment also
features a misty-eyed remembrance of her childhood “liberal
indoctrination” — you know, good indoctrination —
presided over by a mother who re-rendered children’s songs in
Socialist Realism; i.e. “Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, get yourself
up you male chauvinist cochon [French for ‘you
pig’].”
Each essay is accompanied by a portrait of the author holding a
childhood picture. Appropriate, since the vast majority of these
writers appear to be holding onto political views they adopted back
when snot seemed a perfectly acceptable mid-afternoon snack and
they were closer in years to filling up diapers than filling out
union cards.
Andy Ternay, for example, brags of a vote he cast as a ten
year-old in a 1989 elementary school classroom election: “Guess who
was the one kid who didn’t vote for Reagan? Even the black kid
voted for Reagan.” My money is on Andy. After all, even as
elementary school became high school, Ternay held onto his
convictions: “Our school district enacted a dress code I objected
to — so I went to school wearing a skirt to protest,” he relates.
“That hasn’t changed; you’ll still be more likely to find me in a
kilt than pants.”
“If I could figure out the Pledge was an unabashed violation of
the Bill of Rights at age 9, why couldn’t the grown-ups get the
picture?” Jill Richardson muses in another bit, while Lena — Kos
handle Cosmic Debris — describes earning her left-wings in
elementary school thanks to a math teacher who taught Watergate
hearings, a social studies teacher who taught industrial pollution
and the teacher of an unspecified subject who had Lena’s class
“reenact a trial after the incidents at Wounded Knee with the
FBI.”
“I played an AIM leader with my blond hair in long braids,” Lena
writes proudly, adding, “These wonderful teachers influenced both
my awareness and my core values. By the time I got to junior high I
was a genuine liberal.”
Brian Keeler divined a similar lesson when as a boy he and his
friends “naturally fell into a sort of group
consciousness…awareness…not
unlike the ‘group think’ mentality found in many corporate
endeavors today,” and chose to follow a charismatic boy, Ray. This
lack of patriotic dissent ultimately had tragic consequences when
Ray declared a unilateral, preemptive war against a helpless
squirrel — sans UN mandate!
“All the rest of the boys save me and one other joined him in
his chase as they ran after their pointlessly gained prey,” Keeler
writes. “I learned a valuable lesson. One that I have never really
articulated, but in that moment of silence, I came to an important
realization: I was a progressive.”
The connection is a bit hazy. Perhaps Keeler lobbied the Social
Security Administration for that squirrel’s disability acorns.
Regardless, those Un::Conventional contributors who
weren’t politically active in their pre-puberty years wave sob
stories like doctor’s notes. Marribeth Burkley avoided the
Democratic Party for many years because of her registered Democrat
father (“a strict authoritarian and very religious”), until the
glorious you go girl! moment when she realized her
“progressive/secular/feminist/stand-up-for-the-underprivileged
attitudes were diametrically opposed to my father’s cranky,
xenophobic/why-should-my-taxes-go-to-people-who-don’t-work
beliefs.” Mary Rickles had it even worse, going through her entire
childhood “believing abortion was wrong, Rush Limbaugh was honest,
and Reagan was the best president ever.”
EVEN IN HELL, THE WAILING and gnashing of teeth must pale alongside
the consternation on display in Un::Conventional over the
evolution of “liberal” into slur. It’s inexplicable, really, by
Maryscott O’Connor’s lights. She defines the modern conservative as
“a bizarre hybrid, a ‘free trader’ crossed with a would-be
Puritan,” while an abridged version of her list of synonyms for the
term “liberal” include: Advanced, broad-minded, enlightened, free,
high-minded, humanistic, humanitarian, impartial, latitudinarian,
magnanimous, rational, unbiased, unbigoted, unprejudiced, amiable,
beneficent, benevolent, friendly, generous, gentle, good-hearted,
gracious and merciful.
Despite having just attributed nearly every positive qualifier
in the English language to the political philosophy O’Connor
subscribes to — purely coincidental, coming as it does from a
unbiased source — she nevertheless insists she understands that
her “purpose on this planet is to help others,” not “fulfill my own
goals of self-aggrandizement.”
These traits can be found throughout Un::Conventional.
Seeking magnanimity? Look no further than Nolan Treadway: “I don’t
believe the American people are as evil as the man they (‘we’)
elected.” High-minded? I give you ex-Marine Mike Stark upon
discovering Mother Jones and Harper’s: “It was
right about then that I figured out that Republicans are evil
dickheads.” Unprejudiced, you scoff? “My best friend Malcolm in
college was a big, black gay guy,” Mona Brooks retorts. When
cartoonist Tom Tomorrow writes, “We are progressives and liberals
because we lack the talent for self-delusion necessary to be
anything else,” he is fairly dares readers to find a better example
of impartiality. WhiteTrash Poet offers the line, “We were there in
NYC as the thugs gathered to again present their idiot king,” and
he is benevolent grace personified.
“I want to be an American whom honest people respect and
fascists and bullies fear,” Larry Johnson confides. “If that makes
me a progressive, then count me in.” Against Fascism may
be about as bold a stand as Against
Inequality, but we can all agree it is a healthier
attitude than Against Squirrels. Even if Johnson assumes
his political foes argue for fascism, though, the gauntlet he
throws down for conservatives has still got nothing on the one
David Boyle is hauling into our path. “St. Augustine’s heavenly
‘City of God’ is not wholly different from the ‘City of Kos’ or the
‘City of Blog’ that the orange (not clockwork) cooperative ‘we’
blog Daily Kos is.” Boyle writes. “The blog is just too progressive
not to be redolent of something higher.”
DIVING INSPIRATION OR NO, there is some confusion as to how good
vibes translate to policy, per usual. Sharon Tomanic, in a stream
of consciousness blur, may at first state simply, “My life, so long
as it does not harm you directly, is none of your business,” yet
such a beautiful sentiment is woefully inadequate to such
progressive tasks as confiscating income, or regulating what people
eat, or whether they smoke, or what, if any, insurance policy they
purchase. Accordingly she revises: “That said and instead, we do
all need to look out for each other.” Go ahead, sister, hammer the
point home: “To be sure that each other is just freaking OK.” Of
course, this last should not be left open to interpretation. Thus,
more: “Freaking OK and has the resources he or she needs to take
care of themselves.” Then, perhaps a bit defensively, “It’s really
not a hard concept to grasp.” Tomanic, apparently nonetheless
unsure of even a friendly progressive audience’s ability to grasp
the concept, offers her detailed summation of Freaking OK plus
resources. “And when I say OK, I mean happy and able to live
one’s life freely. With healthcare, with good schools, with loving
partners, with the ability to save, with not funding insane wars
with one’s taxpayer dollars, with taxpayer dollars going to
fruitful and rewarding programs” — do you think Tomanic will ever
see any of her policy preferences as anything less than “fruitful
and rewarding”? — “with recognition and acceptance for all, with
freedom of religion and spirituality, with keeping government out
of one’s personal life, with being able to call someone on the
phone and not have it kept on record, with my and your goings-on
not being monitored and scrutinized and held to blame for some
petty misread thing.”
Doth the lady, as Queen Gertrude suggested in Hamlet,
protest too much? Are you kidding? Tomanic makes Lady Macbeth look
like June Cleaver. She is obviously not alone in her hubristic
flights of fancy. If there’s a unifying sentiment to
Un::Conventional it is that every essayist believes
posting online diaries is gritty heroism, epic in scope. “It makes
me crazy sad when my brilliant analyses don’t change anything,”
Martha Ture writes, for example, “just like our marches, voting,
organizing don’t.” So what’s a crazy sad girl to do? “I walk in the
woods and think about our history and search for answers. What
would Tecumseh have done? What would Charles Hamilton Houston have
done?” The answer? “I have thrown in my lot with Indians and
cowboys and small towns and against bullies and transnational
corporations.”
In KosWorld the phrase “thrown in my lot” has apparently become
as diffuse and diluted as the all-good-things encompassing
“liberal.” The book’s editor, Hunter, describes a speech by Wesley
Clark in a Vegas hotel bar during YearlyKos as “Not a rally, but a
scene from an underground resistance, or a hastily arranged troop
meeting in an urban battle zone.” (Having spent time both at the
Clark event and on the streets of Samarra and Baghdad, all I can
say is…um, not quite.) “Everywhere I turn, the
conference seems specifically about me,” Hunter later adds. “Or
rather, about ‘me’ in group form — there are a thousand people
here, and I cannot find anyone I do not immediately identify
with.”
Hence, the problem of the echo chamber encapsulated. DailyKos
diarists have every reason to be proud of a website that has grown
large enough to hold a real world conference every major national
Democratic politician feels obliged to attend. Yet if they were
one-tenth as revolutionary or paradigm-challenging as they puff
themselves up to be, this would not be so. As I wrote from the
convention last year, DailyKossers revel in their status as the
marginalized
mainstream.
