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 Saturday, May 4, 2002
After a long hiatus from posting (during which I've actually written a great
deal), there's no better note to return with than Max Morford's brilliant
realization: Americans
work too damned much! No kidding. From where I sit, one of the main reasons
so many things seem so screwed up (environmental degradation, wars and human
violence against other humans, the near-death of American democracy) is that
corporations and the profit-motive have gained complete control over every
aspect of our lives. Meanwhile, most of us seem to do nothing to change or
improve things. And of course, that's because we're too busy trying to get
our piece of "profit" -- often by working for corporations -- which leaves
us no time or energy to do anything to help change our world. As Morford writes:
No wonder we so love our
Prozac. No wonder TV is our national anesthetic balm. The few precious minutes
we have outside of work, we just want to drain, detach, unwind, go numb,
de-stress, de-pollute. No wonder we know next to nothing of either ourselves
or the outside world. We never get to spend any length of time there. 
Morford's observation that we work too much ties in with Tim Cavanaugh's
Bloviation Nation,
which argues that American's are addicted to the kind of vapid punditry that
seems to be the mainstreamof American "journalism" today. Of course Cavanaugh
is right -- but we don't consume empty pablum because we're stupid or don't
care, we do it because we've given our lives to work. Cavanaugh also indicts
blogging for just creating more of the kind of self-congratulatory echo-chamber
that adds nothing to meaningful dialogue about important issues. I think he's
too dismissive, but he's got a good point. What am I wasting my time here
for? Would the time I spend posting to a blog be worthwhile if I had five
regular readers? What about 50? Or would I be doing something better for
myself, society, the world, if I devoted all "blogging time" to social activism?
Can blogging be social activism?
I just wrote a paper on the potential of blogs to somehow improve society.
I concluded that, despite their potential to bring real "power to the
people," blogs are really counter-productive because the "power" they produce
is so meaningless. Maybe I'll post it, but if I believe what I wrote (which
I'm obviously not sure I do), then I shouldn't bother. And that's really
the point of this post: What the heck are all these bloggers doing? What
am Idoing? And is there anyway to make it more worthwhile? Is blogging
inevitably "bloviation"?
I keep asking these questions, yet I keep coming back to blog because it
just seems like there must be something to this. What if blogging is
like Morford's vacation -- a way to get us to pause in our working obsession
and get us to realize that:
Our laws are wrong. Our ethic
is wrong. Everyone wants longer vacations, yet we feel guilty. How dare you
take time off. How dare you enjoy other aspects of life. What are you, a bohemian
freak? Industrious and dedicated work is good and necessary and admirable
but too much of it is dangerous and deadly and nothing but nothing will suck
your anima dry like excess toil and lack of self-exploration and adventure.
We are solid and dependable
and harried. We have all the shiny expensive goodies and all the appropriately
excessive everything, the best in thuggish SUVs and the finest gold nugget
jewelry and the blandest business parks and superlative freeways for our endless
soul-draining commutes and by God we are a noble bunch of American cogs,
dying our slow and fluorescent-lit, copy machine deaths with pride and fortitude.
Ouch.
It seems possible. All these people -- over half a million bloggers -- spending
time linking to each other and to words written about things that interest
them. There's no profit here -- at least not in the "work" sense. (There might
be for some people, like Andrew Sullivan.)
So blogs offer potential. That's certain. But can they deliver? 8:48:30 PM 
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New York Daily News Online | News and Views | Opinion | Laurel Butler: Six-Hour Day? Not Teachers: I keep reading about how their contract requires New York City public schoolteachers to work only a six-hour, 20-minute day.
But I've been in the system for more than 30 years, and not only have I never had that short a day, I don't know anyone who has.
No kidding. Why is teaching like this? What other profession expects you to give unpaid time and to spend your own money to do your job well? My school has, in the past, made me pay for photocopies of assignments to hand out to students, which is kind of like asking a construction worker to pay for the materials to build a house. Oh yeah, our country values education, but it doesn't give much thought to teachers. 9:03:10 AM
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