Blogrant, The Ties That Bind

tee bee

You didn't think Easter Weekend meant you were relieved of blogging, did you? This is a bonus piece, since it's all about blogging and bloggers, and everyone's blogging it.

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This is what the Washington Post finds to write about bloggers today:

SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. -- In the angry life of Maryscott O'Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O'Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O'Connor's reputation is as one of the angriest of all. "One long, sustained scream" is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers "malevolent," a "sociopath" and "the Antichrist"? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as "Satan," or about Karl Rove, "the devil"? Should it be about the "evil" Republican Party, or the "weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving" Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says "I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned"?

Darfur, she finally decides. She will write about Darfur. The shame of it. The
culpability of all Americans, including herself, for doing nothing. She will write something so filled with outrage that it will accomplish the one thing above all she wants from her anger: to have an effect.

Read the whole thing, or just check out the fun photo of Ms. O'Connor.

The lady serves as Hugh Hewitt's textbook example of the Democratic left. Pare that down to certain factions that identify with certain goals of the Dem left, and he has a point.

Maha, a member of the Big Brass Alliance, has an interesting, funny and pointed defense of O'Connor: Damn right, she's angry.

But anger isn't bad, maha says. Not if you "sort out the righteous from the unrighteous" and allow "the mud to settle," maha quotes from Sam Keen's The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving*.

What can you say to that? If O'Connor wants to scream online, where only those who crave to (or stray to your site by accident) can hear you scream, I'm for that. Much better than having her prowl the freeways of Sherman Oaks, gunning for all those Rovian sociopaths she comes across. Just funnin' with ya, maha. But you get my point.

An interesting side note is Maryscott's claim that the author of the piece, Finkle, claims to have never read a blog before being pointed to hers by an e-mail (which I find a stretch). Maryscott and her readers are happy with the article, but not the pic.

The moral of the story is - as a conservative, I must have a moral - thanks to the myopic appeal of "the profile," this is what outsiders will continue to think of the blogosphere (A friend of mine actually gasped when she was told I was a blogger, and added, "You're not one of them?").

But sustained ignorance is a choice. We may not agree with it, and we may be, in maha's borrowing of Keen's words, outlaws; we may continue in our own ways to try to pierce that warm blanket of blissful ignorance, but we have to respect it.

As much as some might want to discount the hyperbolic rantings of Maryscott O'Connor and the WaPo's front page reinforcement of the culture's view of bloggers, it's disingenuous not to honor the ties that bind us to Maryscott.

Enjoy William Brennan's wonderful post on the article. And not just because he uses the penultimately excellent word "bower." Brennan's "divorced from the right" but as an independent finds his "new love [lefties who share moderate stances, I'm guessing] is even more outrageous than the kooks I’ve been railing against."

Whatever else this produced outside the blogosphere, Maryscott has provided some pretty rich fuel for our keyboards.

*Bless his heart, maha found an online source for the Keen material.

CP @ GMC.