One of my favorite bloggers, Michael Berube, has a melancholy post in which he seems to be coming close to throwing in the towel.
Berube is over there on the right hand side of your screen in my blog roll, with the group listed under SMARTER THAN ME. I named it that because they are, and we're nothing if not honest around here in Mannionville, except for the fact that I'm lying about my name being Lance Mannion.
For a while, though, I kept meaning to take Michael out of there and put him in a category all his own.
WAY SMARTER THAN ME AND JUST ABOUT EVERYBODY ELSE.
But I want Nance to be the one and only honored with a category of one, or else what does THE ONE, THE ONLY mean?. So I had decided to move Michael down among THE GREATS, with The Poor Man and James Wolcott, as a replacement for Jimmy Breslin who, goddamn it, has retired from writing his column for Newsday. But now I think I'll wait until he decides what he's going to do with his blog.
Michael---I'm calling him Michael not because we're great pals or I'm president of his fan club or a stalker, but because I can't put the accents over the e's in Berube---Michael really belongs in the third category. GOOD PEOPLE AT WORK SAVING THE REPUBLIC, because that's what they are and he is and that's what they are up to, saving the Republic. I didn't put him there originally because I didn't think of his blog as a political blog, not in the way Kos and Digby and Atrios and the gang are political. When I first came across his site he seemed to be focused on academic and cultural issues, as you might expect of a professor of literature and cultural studies at a major university.
The first post of his I read was this one from last June, which was about the then just released new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
As the summer waxed and waned and the Presidential campaign grew more intense, Michael's posts became more and more partisan and political. At first I was disappointed. I had enough good political blogs to read. But Michael turned out to be one of the more trenchant analysts of the campaign and of Bush's mendacity and incompetence and also a very funny satirist and parodist.
It was always amazing to me that he was able to do it so well, so often, and for so long, considering his many professional and family obligations. I'd half made up my mind he was super-human. But the election seems to have affected him like a dose of kryptonite.
Now, it appears, he doesn't feel he can manage more than a post a week. From his tone I'm guessing he's doubtful he'll keep up with that schedule.
But I also get the impression that he's not so much tired out as he's feeling defeated. Bush's re-election was a blow to him and he admits to having withdrawn into something like a state of mourning.
I know how he feels.
If this is the case, that the election has left him feeling too beat up to keep blogging then I'm not worried about him. He'll be back. A few of the many Bush outrages to come and I expect he'll come charging back to his keyboard fighting mad.
Anyway, I hope so.
But I'm not writing this post because I'm all that concerned about Michael Berube. Like I said, I'm not a friend, the president of his fan club, or a stalker. I'm just a fellow blogger who admires his work (and a fellow father of a special needs child who is in awe of what he and his wife are doing with their son). I'm writing this because of what Michael wrote in this paragraph.
For now I’m taking some small solace in the fact that 55 million of us tried our best to pull the country back from the brink. We voted against Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; we voted against homophobia (and all the more credit to Kerry for refusing to take Clinton’s advice to travel back to Massachusetts to execute a gay couple and denounce Ellen DeGeneres); we voted against the worst Justice Department since Nixon; we voted against the manipulation of US intelligence-- and the trashing of US credibility-- in the runup to an unnecessary and disastrous war in Iraq; and we even voted to try to give our Republican neighbors-- yes, even you good folks in the South-- some entitlement to decent health care. In 1984, I went around for months feeling like an alien, knowing that my fellow Americans had swept Reagan back into office in a tsunami; this month, by contrast, I’ve felt like we just barely lost one-- and through no real fault of our own.
The emphasis there is mine. The implication of this, his comparison between how he felt in 1984 and how he feels now, is that if Bush's margain of victory had been wider, closer to what an incumbent and supposedly popular wartime president ought to have had (See this post by Nick Simmonds on the advantage Bush should have enjoyed from his incumbency), then Michael would again have felt as he did 20 years ago, like an alien.
I don't believe it. Michael was a raw youth back when it was Morning in America, a mere slip of a grad student, I believe, and an innocent and trusting young rock and roller. He's older, wiser, and tenured now, and if George Bush had won decisively, as opposed to "convincingly," (pundit speak for "now we don't have to feel bad for treating this cheat and fraud as if he really deserves to be president,") I doubt that Michael would have to check his passport regularly to remind himself he's still an American, and an Earthling.
But I know plenty of people who do feel like strangers in a strange land.
I can't fathom this, even though I heard it a lot from friends and colleagues in 1984 and 1988 and I'm hearing it again this year. I don't get why so many people need to have a win at the ballott box to feel at home here. It's one of the things I can't stand about the right wingers, their desperate need to have it confirmed that every intelligent and decent person in the country thinks just as they do.
This is one of the things that makes them dangerous.
But this is how they want us to feel. Like we're aliens. Like this isn't our country too. This is what they're doing when they call us traitors and cowards. This is what they're saying when they sneer at Blue Staters as effete snobs and claim we don't understand Real Americans. They're bullying us! They have become the party of bullies. Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, what else are they? Rumsfeld's a smoother type of bully, but he's a bully. Rush, Hannity, Ann Coulter, O'Reilly.
Bullies to a man.
They bully each other, for crying out loud.
What can you expect from a party of weaklings? The Republican Party has become the party of the Beta Male, the guys who have spent all their lives crawling to bullying fathers, bullying athletes, bullying fraternity brothers, bullying bosses. Who would put up with that, but weaklings? Look at the weakling they've made president. He swaggers around just the way you'd expect a weakling to swagger. Bullied all their lives themselves, licking boots, fetching sticks, always in fear that the true Alpha males will drive them out of the pack, it's no wonder they think that bullying is the medium of all discourse.
Don't let them do it! Do let them bully us! We belong on this playground. We built it. It's our turf.
Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
Especially not yourself.
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