Matt shot back "And we who despair march on…" in a comment in my last post, presumably in response to my concluding line, "I think we cut loose."

I just wanted to make sure he (and you, reader) didn't misconstrue the last sentence of my last blog entry re: cutting loose. What I'm suggesting isn't anything opposed to soldering on. I ain't dropping out of this thing (though I do need to find a better way to make it work for me), and I'm not suggesting anyone else drop out either.

What I'm suggesting is that the blogosphere's adherence to the mainstream political dialogue does not serve the presumably laudable goal of maximizing its political impact. Yes, there is an enormous gravity to be resisted, which is really hard especially now, and even then it's not as though we can ignore what the chattering classes discuss. However, the increasing narrowness of coverage -- the tightening in the blogs -- is a bad trend for the future.

Where Are We/Where Do We Want To Be?
Blogs are an order of magnitude away from challenging Big Media on politics in terms of viewership -- it'll take a bunch more good writers and about four years of steady growth to do that -- but the great hope is that we'll create communities which involve vast numbers of new people in the process, thereby providing the best medicine for our sick-ass democracy: more democracy. From a slightly cynical (but pragmatic) point of view this boils down to new money, new voters, and new candidates, though the idealistic holy grails of new conversations and new ideas are tantilizingly near on the horizon.

But whatever. Everyone knows we've got fundraising down. The real proof of that, by the way, is Kucinich, who used net-driven donations and community fundraising to keep his campaign rolling to the last. Expect more of that type of thing -- seemingly hopeless candidates who refuse to die -- in the future. The first elements of proof for new voters is in next month's turnout pudding, but those numbers will be a tangled pile to unravel. And for the rest, well... we'll see.

The point is that we raised all the money in the world and nothing changed. For the net to substantively effect the mainstream political dialogue and system, we've got to start delivering candidates, or at a minimum deliver a significant number of voters to existing candidates who cannot be delivered through other forms.

That requires us to abandon this monolithic conventional wisdom. Why? Because it sucks. It's not the truth, and it's not even interesting most of the time. To be blunt, it's so damn bad that not enough people are willing to pay attention to it to serve our purposes. Politics as it stands today only appeals to 50% of the population, though really it's more more like "appealing" to 15% who then "drag" the other 35 along with them. The political utility of blogs (and other emerging forms of communication) comes down to augmenting those numbers. We'll never do that if we're just another vector for the same old shit.

How Can We Make It Different
Dean was able to rise high in the polls, if not the results, by abandoning the conventional wisdom. He put his campaign on the map by breaking out of a spectacularly constricted moment of groupthink with "what I wanna know," and surged his way to the top of the pack by allowing his message and campaign to become decentralized and networked with "you have the power." What spurred Dean's rise wasn't the media coverage. Though media exposure helped him gain name recognition -- the proverbial foot in the door -- he never looked great on TV and his ads were pretty weak. What sold Dean was two things: he behaved as if he didn't give a flying fuck about the conventional wisdom, and he was asking people to do more than just vote for him.

The trick was he really didn't care about mainstream media coverage. He didn't pay respect and he gave them plenty of ammo, and the gang of 500 burned him down. But the theory is still sound. You let people out there re-tool your central ideas and themes -- the message hardware, if you will -- and use their own language, images and social capital -- the software -- to sell your candidacy. I have the graph of how this works visualized in my head. It's a network. A good 21st century campaign message (just like a good 21st century field operation) is a network, and in order to build that kind of network, in order to widen that circle of participation and take advantage of Reed's law and all that good shit, you have to release yourself from the chains of old media groupthink.

To me -- and I have this freedom because of who I work for, yes -- the time to jump ship is now. I'm fighting for participation because I believe if we outsiders grit our teeth and demand a place at the table, that will get more accomplished than walking away from a fucked up situation. But playing along with the 24-hour-cable bullshit isn't going to help me motivate my peers to vote. I look at my job as creating political message and the tools to disseminate that message which will inspire my generation to get involved and vote in spite of Kerry and all his long-faced somnambulance. Fuck the polls and fuck the conventional wisdom; cut to the heart of what matters and make your own case for doing what you're going to do regardless of what the party or candidate's message is.

We've got to keep it real, homie. If we fake the funk we're going to end up flunkies of the same broken system we set out to fix. Communities of inquiry dig? That's the John Dewey dream. The time is ripe to start making it a reality.

We've Nothing To Lose But Our Chains
Look at it this way: if you're a blogger, what's at stake in the next 30 days if you break out of the conventional wisdom? Perhaps some portion of your readership should you take off in a direction they find displeasing. But if you're good and you write well and the direction you head is honest, you won't lose them. And there's everything to be gained if you break out and stike gold.

There's value in rapid response, and there's value in topical commentary, but those things need not make us slaves to the mainstream. My reasons for participating and my reasons for voting are somewhat different -- and I'll express them very differently -- than the appeals that any present-day campaign or party will make for itself. And you know what? Not surprisingly, I think my reasons are probably much more persuasive to my audience than the campaign's or party's.

I probably have 500 people who will listen to what I post here, and at most 10x that number if I push an idea through Music for America. The value-add is what I'm going to push in the next month is going to be my own brand of politics, and this brand is known and liked by a community of people who don't dig the conventional wisdom. Some of the people who read my stuff might decide to get involved because I said it in a way that no one else did. That's proof this can work.

The system still comes down to people, to votes, and we still own it like that. That we've been conned into playing along with the equivalent of sock-puppet theater as a national debate is an unfortunate accident of history, and one that I believe we can correct.

Billmon was one of the great pioneers of the form we call blogging, and now he's gone on perminant(?) hiatus. He left behind an editorial in the LA Times which takes the blogosphere to task in essance for selling out.

On the one hand I don't think quitting because the revolution seems to be on hold is really top form. I understand that the pressure is at an all time high, but one would think the syndrome Billmon decries would be all the more reason for him to get his voice out there. On the other hand I do from time to time feel like I've lost some of my authenticity. Hence this series of confessions.

The beautiful parts of the past year and a half, my great adventure in politics and blogging, have mostly been human. It's been about the relationships and the personalities and seeing through them to a better future.

The web is crisscrossed many times over, and though it's complecated like that, I wouldn't have it any other way. Back when I had time for things that made me feel good, I used to run a little performance art variety party called axiom with my friends in NYC. On the last performance night, just before I took off to California for the Summer of the Hassle and then to work for MfA, Frank and I did a piece that incorporated work by Billmon. He was in town, so he showed up for it. It was a great night:

The atmosphere was friendly, but also had moments verging on the revolutionary. Frank and I set a tone early with our quasi-political pomo comedy routine which incorporated a little scene by Wonk Web Celeb Billmon. We were basically talking about our own amateur wonkishness vis-a-vis that of a true warrior, and we included a scene Billmon wrote that we thought was kind of fun. Billmon took video, so maybe some of that will surface. We were experimenting with getting into political territory without making anyone uncomfortable, making it something that people can then talk about, pioneering.

Over on BopNews my pal Matt is wondering what it all means. Noting that "the blogosphere has not produced its Hunter Thompson, its unique and compelling voice, its own sense of difference, its own politics." This echoes thoughts I've had.

Matt, if I told you when we were up there in the echoing upper decks, watching Kerry give his acceptance speech I was squirming in my little blogger-ally bench seat under the sharp press of clean Tennesee LSD -- which is true -- would that make any difference? It wouldn't, I think, because I kept the experience to my self. For fear of embarassment, job security, or something along those lines, I held something back because I internally judged it improper. Without all the professional relationships I'd built in the past year, I would never have been able to sneak my way into the Fleet Center, and the desire to protect and retain those relationships kept my trap, for the most part, shut.

In Augusto-Boal terms, I let the cop into my head.

I haven't the gusto to get into it now, but I will say that my trip -- the whole 18-months as well as the psychadelic flashes -- has been a full and rich tapestry that some day I will meticulously and brutally document. It might perhaps have an outside chance at claiming redheaded stepchild status vis-a-vis Fear and Loathing, but I don't know. There's plenty of grist for the mill, but I'm just not that good a writer yet, and in spite of my declared allegance with the truth, stepping into the naked lunch in the way I'd need to to do it right is a frightening prospect after a year of career.

But it's got to be done. I need to get out front or else the odds are I'll just wind up another cog in the machine. That would be like death. It's a hard thing when you realize the right path for you is not going to make you financially secure or roundly well-liked. I flashback to Baadasssss at this moment. After the 2nd I will need to go to the desert.

Blogging for me is an extension of an old aphorism that I've been living with since childhood. Don't get a job, get a life. Matt notes that we all need to get paid, but wouldn't it be great if you could collect a paycheck just for being yourself? That was the promise, and there was an idea that this promise would marry with next-generation politics and something really beautiful would be born. Instead we've got what we've got, which is anything but pretty. It's hardly even fun anymore, this election-time blogging.

The question before us is this: what do we do in these last five weeks. I think we cut loose.

Ann Arbor is a nice place. I love student ghettos. The whole vibe makes me want to be back in school, doing something simpler and more focused. At the moment it still resembles a desire for some kind of retreat, to be a big fish in a small pond again, to do something I'm relatively sure I can "win" at. But then there's also the desire for intellectual stimulation; that hunger for community; the realization that a simpler and less expensive daily life might lead to new heights of creation, productivity and happiness. I also like how there seem to be a lot of pretty girls around.

I'll be here trying to boost the naicent MfA community over the top, meaning talking to people, trying to get local press coverage, distributing materials. My new role is motivator/enabler.

I want to see this movie, Going Upriver, mainly because of this review:

What director GEORGE BUTLER has made is a fascinating documentary about a transformation in a man caught by the Kennedy dream of “ask what you can do for your country,” signed up to fight the communists in Vietnam, began to see the truth of that war and felt that his duty to his country and fellow soldiers was to try and help end the war. Basically – that’s what this documentary is about.

The other night as I was ranting to myself and listening to some old-school techno music (as I sometimes do to let off steam) one of the things I realized -- re-discovered, really -- was a desperate need to he hopeful rather than afraid for the future; to look forward to winning rather than dreading the prospect of loss. This need is real, and must be answered if we're to make progress.

Neither the radical establishment (yeah, there's a radical establishment) or the Democratic party have answers to this. I can't speak for conservatives or Republicans, but it strikes me they rule through fear and greed more than hope. Even Regan's sunny optimism was kind of a nostalgic "roll back time" fairy-tale coded to appeal to people's uncomfortability with the empowerment of minorities and women.

I'm reading Joe Trippi's book -- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised -- and it's alternately firing me up, which I need badly, and making me really fucking sad, which I don't know helps me out right now. It hurts to remember that we had the potential for a truly transformative political campaign, and we blew it. Those kinds of opportunities to take a great leap forward don't come very often.

So I want Kerry to step up. I want him to ask for people's votes, for their participation. I want him to present himself as something people should be hopeful for. I'm not holding my breath, but it would be nice. I want him to look at our petition and think about what it means. I'm glad he's standing strong on Iraq; it's a big issue. But as we hit the closing stretch in this election, I really want him to open it up Howard Dean style. I want his campaign to be about more than him. This election is so huge. It really is. The choice we make as a country here is fucking monumental, and it will set the tone for the next decade.

Are we going to start getting rid of the bullshit or are we going to let it drown us? Are we going to reform fucking everything or not?