Eric Blair, at Warblogger Watch, notes that "Bill Quick is running a most bloodthirsty warblog contest. When I first started up WBW I would have been all over it, but now it just kind of seems desperate and sad. Here are a few highlights, my last word, unless one of these nuts goes postal and starts picking off brown people with a Bushmaster." Desperate and sad it may be, but I'm afraid it increasingly represents the mainstream. Reading some of the venom these pathetic ignorants are spouting serves to help us remember what kind of country we live in, if waking up painted blue all over last Wednesday morning hasn't already done it for you.

Actually, I'm of two minds what significance to place on all this. As readers of my weblog Follow Me Here know, it is a longstanding preoccupation of mine to worry about exactly what influence thoughtful webloggers opposed to the madness can have. Usually it seems to me we fill a universe with discourse, but that the universe is one of likeminded souls only preaching to the converted. This often discourages me (and inspires a shower of supportive comments in my mailbox). But, on the other hand, one of my responses to the fact that I live in a country whose denizens are over and over anally raped, played for fools and convinced to love it enough to beg for more from our elected despots — and then go on in braindead support of the export of our hypocritical tyranny and pillage on the rest of the world — has been to dissociate myself. When people tell me my words can have an influence in the broader field of public discourse, not only am I often dubious but, usually, I'm not sure I want that. You can't argue about political persuasion any more than you can about religion —indeed, it is usually faith- rather than fact-based! It takes so much energy to debate with deluded ranters; is it worth it?

Why not just live in a different country? In a way, ever since the moral bankruptcy of the Vietnam War, I've taken seriously the jeering jingoist yahoos who taunted us to "Love it or leave it." I left. Not literally, not geographically, but I have never felt I lived in America as constituted, not their America. This was apolitical whenever possible, politically involved when an issue of peace, justice or survival made it morally impossible to ignore it. Actually, maybe I live elsewhere geographically too; I've always settled in places which are pockets of resistance, university towns, for most of my adult life The Republic of Cambridge or its environs (I'm across the river from there now, but I still have my office there), and could not see relocating anywhere in the Vast Wasteland which still seems painful whenever it is necessary to venture out into it. At least, unlike my aloof beleaguered isolationism of the Reagan-Bush era, the pockets of self-imposed exile in these days of renewed tyranny and permanent war have expanded into cyberspace to assume a continuity and community. It's a little bit easier to inhabit this America. Let's hope, with the ongoing shitstorm ramping up in intensity, it remains a place of refuge.