Month of September , 2003

To those who have visited repeatedly over the past month, I must apologize for my long absence. I've taken on two jobs, one part-time for the local library district (scheduling conference room and theater usage) and the other at the local community college (teaching "Intro. to Cultural Anthropology"). The first pays the bills, the second is my first big step towards a career as an academic. Between class preparation and grading papers for one job and the other job's irregular schedule (especially at the moment as my colleague in the department is out on 8 weeks sick leave recovering from an operation), I've had little time or, more importantly, energy to sit down and even surf the Internet, let alone write to this site. Even when I have come across something I wanted to talk about (Johnny Cash's death, for instance) so much time has elapsed before I could set aside an hour or two to write that the air of immediacy disappears -- I might as well write about how deeply saddened I was by the death of U.S. Grant at this point. (OK, Grant was a dick, and Cash far from, but you get the point -- it was a looooong time ago, now.)

I can't really say things will improve, not in the short term anyway. I'm likely to be busier and busier as the semester progresses. In my mind there's the sense that I could at least keep up somewhat if I kept my posts to a more reasonable length, but there's also the realization that this is unlikely to happen. So I'm left with the unsatisfying position of announcing that OneMansOpinion.org will remain open and active, but with a much reduced level of activity on my part. Over the long term, I hope that this will continue to be a productive outlet for me -- I'm pretty proud of some of the work I've done here, and hope to have the chance to be proud of future work as well.

In the past couple of days, I've received e-mails from Martin Sheen and Rob Reiner asking me to support Howard Dean's campaign for the presidency. OK, not directly from these illustrious personages -- both e-mail were sent with the same return e-mail address, info@deanforamerica, only the "Sender's Name" field was changed to reflect the messages' origination from on high. And I'm pretty sure that text like the following originated in committee rather than from Martin Sheen's fevered imaginings:

We need Howard Dean's bold leadership in the White House. Strong fundraising keeps our campaign's momentum going; it pays for much-needed media buys in key battleground states and it attracts new supporters to Howard Dean. And continuing strong fundraising will also help with the campaign's latest bold move: hiring a coordinator for each of Iowa's 99 counties.

(Incidentally, do we need another "bold" president?)

What happened with Dean's campaign? I gave kudos some time ago to Dean's campaign for "getting it", Internet-wise -- for using the Internet in smart and creative ways to reach out to American voters and help not just to promote a presidential candidate but to actively realize a community of democratically-minded citizens. So it saddens me to see these previously clever and progressive (in every sense of the word) campaigners stooping to the level of spam -- bombarding my in-box with pleas for support, altering reply-to information to increase the likelihood of my reading their latest missives (which wouldn't be an issue if they weren't already sending me so much e-mail that I don't have the time, let alone the inclination, to read it all).

Maybe the Cluetrain has left Dean's station for destinations unknown. What I'm beginning to see is not the logical next step in a campaign to use the Internet in new and exciting ways to contribute to the ongoing construction of a democratic civil society, but a retreat into corporate-speak and corporate-think, the replacement of innovation with marketing. Instead of an attempt to involve me in Dean's campaign, or in progressive politics as a whole, I am just a consumer of ideology at the end of a long, impersonal e-mail pipe. "Give 'em some Martin Sheen -- polls show that Americans trust Sheen, he transmits a presidential image that we can associate with our product, er, we mean, candidate." Quite frankly, I'm being broadcasted to, and I don't like it!

As the predatory manhunter Helen says in the movie Singles, "Desperation is the worst perfume." Is the stink rolling off these latest campaign effort from the Dean camp a sign of a campaign that's already losing steam, maybe shaken by the entry of another center-oriented liberal candidate with greater name recognition and 4 shiny stars on his shoulderbars? We're still 13 months off from the election, 11 or so from the campaign convention -- have progressive Democrats used all the tricks they had up their sleeves already? More importantly, having opened up the channel of communication (even while hiding behind the deanforamerica.com e-mail address), can I now consider Sheen and Reiner my friends? Could I borrow money from them? How about their cars?