Thank you for your efforts, and farewell and good luck on the book, Charles. You'll be missed.

I don't really have anything profound to say to his final post, although I do wonder if that's the essential difference between a "proud mainstread journalist" and a blogger. I've taken breaks before, almost every blogger I know has and will again in the future. You can't be a sensate human being and be exposed to all this horror without the occasional burn out and need to rest. But to me, the backbiting, gotcha fact checking, and shrill proclimations are exactly why I find the blogosphere so interesting. Even trolls are an important and necessary part of this medium. They may be annoying, but they keep you either sharp with your facts, or minded of exactly what the other side is saying and writing. Thanks for being here, so I don't have to go to Powerloin, Nuddy.
I mean it.

I suppose I'm a rarity in today's "decent" society. Ok, I'm not really a member of that group, but I can pass when I have to. But for most of my education, and certainly in my family, discussion about forbidden subjects like politics and religion were closer to being required than shunned. I guess I'm lucky to have had family and teachers who believed in the Socratic method. I don't understand why people think they've "learned" something if they've not tested it out in an open exchange with people who only marginally agree and/or completely disagree with a position.

Another way in which I guess I'm different from folks like Chris is that I really, truly can't stand packaged, constructed "news." I like thoughtful analysis, yes. I like well researched and detailed pieces that are produced over some time since the event, certainly. But soundbites, happytalk, "balanced" accounts- fuck no. That's why I literally can't stomach more than a few minutes of TV news these days. I'm sure it's better abroad, but American news is just sickening, it's so vapid and uncontroversial and meaningless. If you're here you probably agree. It's always enlightening to talk to intelligent people who visit our country: pretty much ever foreign friend who's been here in the last five years has told me "American TV is little more than blatant propaganda." My German friends in particular have stressed this, so I take them seriously.

Anyway, I understand that some people still cringe when I say "fuck" and talk about strap-ons. That's fair. I don't have kids and my folks are Old School Radicals, so I don't have to make nice with the language like other people do (I'm lookin at you, Sis!) But I also have the comfort of my own blog in which I can be raunchy, as well as a couple of other places where the owners tolerate me. When I go to more "serious" places, I'm actually pretty well behaved. But even if I weren't, and even when a place is infested with trolls, or filled with boring, whiny technocrats- I still think the range of expression in blog discourse is of great value. It's a slice of reality, however distored by the particulars of the community, and it's real time, raw, and from the hilt. Anyone who tells me that such conditions automatically devalue the contribution...well, I think they're full of shit.

I spent a long time in the Ivory Tower's halls, and I still try to keep up with journal reading and publications on the subjects I've studied. But again- that puts me in a minority. Every study I've seen in the last ten years says fewer and fewer Americans read regularly, let alone fact-based peer reviewed material. Hell, all one has to do is look at what's in a popular bookstore to know our collective literacy rate is hovering somewhere around 7th grade and falling. Yet the nonliterate majority is still just that: the majority. Just as 99% of them have never heard of my old advisors or read their books, that same group is in a position I believe bloggers are uniquely qualified to influence. Let's face it: the blogosphere is to today's mainstream news as "Policy Roundtable" is to "WWF Ultimate Cage Match."

Which gets better ratings?

My critics remind me, correctly, that the political blogosphere is tiny, and that's important to keep in mind. It's also growing, and in general blogs are doubling in number at a pace you wouldn't believe- every few months, in fact. I know, from experience and discussions with others, that once people begin reading blogs, they find their perspective changed, and their ability to accept the dumbed down "news" reduced, greatly. I think people are still processing the incredible story of the Lamont victory, and that in the future it will be seen as an historic moment. It's worth noting that Kos and some of the other big bloggers have audiences that equal or surpass that of "popular" news shows on cable, or daily readership of weekday "papers of record." Again, blog readership is growing, while traditional organs of informtion dissemination are shrinking. There's a reason why all the big papers and TV shows have blogs, even if they mostly suck.

Given the state of our mainstream media and the nature of the creatures that inhabit it, are you really going to rely on them to save representative democracy in America and end the war? I'm preaching here, but still: it's your fucking patriotic duty to introduce anyone who will listen to blogs right now. Unless you like Bush's Amurka.

So I wish Chris a happy farewell, and I hope his book does well. But I respectfully disagree with some of his logic, and I encourage him to rest, and grow a thicker skin in the ether. He picked literally the most brutal topic upon which to write (Israel/Palestine) and the people who left him comments define the very worst and most shrill voices on the Intertubes. But I can't accept that his audience is truly representative of the blogosphere as a whole, or that nothing is accomplished by having those voices out there. It's a harsh, cruel world filled with injustice and wanton destruction. I can't endorse the notion that people are better off hiding from that, buffered like children by the dulcet sounds and sugar coated images of TV news, protected like the mentally disabled by the "balanced" and controversy free bloviatings of the mainstream press.

Rough, rude, and occasionally hurtful, I'd still rather be an informed blog reader than a unsuspecting dupe who never encounters life's occasional hard truths.