I started this as a comment at Fragments ~ From Floyd, but then I thought to myself, I’ve been leaving long comments at sites recently and perhaps I should utilize my Trackback feature more. Sending a ping to Fragments also allows me to send a plug for this fine site, and its fine scribe Fred, writer of fragments small in nature, local in tone, and large and welcoming in reach.
But Fred has been undergoing a crisis of late, one that I suspect not a few bloggers have been wrestling with, yours included. In a post ominously entitled “Silence of the Lambs,” Fred writes:
How can I sit here and ignore this mountain of woe while I gush about the joy and wonder or tiny ills in the life on the fringes of the kingdom, content to be in the world, but not of it, but guilty at the same time for seeming indifference?
What Fred is referring to should be obvious to anyone, and if it isn’t, then well, you are not only _not_ writing or reading about the impending war the US will be waging in Iraq, but not thinking about it either (and that, my friends, is quite frankly an untenable position in my humble opinion).
I myself have started and aborted a few pieces recently about my thoughts on this war, in the end deciding for one reason or another that I wasn’t comfortable with what I wrote, in style, in substance, in applicability, in importance — in short, for the usual reasons one factors in when they click on either the “Publish” or “Delete Entry” button.
(As I’ve used “war” now twice in the piece, here would be a good time to dredge up part of one of those aborted articles:
Let’s get real for a moment and call a spade a spade, shall we. When the so-called “war” happens, it’ll be an attack against Iraq, not a “war,” no matter what Bush and the media conglomerates already have already slotted in.
)
And it’s happened at least once that an entirely innocent-intentioned piece was turned by my unwitting fingers into a plea for…for what?! I don’t know, a plea perhaps for my own language, my own way, accountability for my actions, culpability for actions done in my name. I wanted to take back the night. John Berger wrote recently:
The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends, to a large degree, on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny’s nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame. This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.
In an earlier post at Fragments ~ from Floyd, on February 14, wherein Fred implored his readers to read the complete text of US Senator Robert Byrd’s Senate floor speech of February 12th, I found this comment from one of those very readers Fred was appealing to:
Fred, I have enjoyed your fine articles about life in Floyd…but you will lose me with political discussions, especially if the ideology is the same as Sen Byrd. Please don’t disappoint…
_Please don’t disappoint_. Now I don’t know the person who wrote that from Adam or Eve, but on the face of it I should be reading that statement as a beseeching plea from a loyal reader, an appeal thrown back at Fred to get off his soap box. But it comes across differently to me. I read that statement and see rather a bully threat, a puffed up chest, a figurative fist grabbing at the shirt collar. _Don’t disappoint us. Don’t let us down. We’re counting on you to be a team player, so don’t get out of line_.
With friends like these, who needs….
I was reading another site tonight as well, Kyren.com, where in a post dated February 17, the site’s author writes:
Sometimes my site feels like a Jane Austen novel. A world of small worries and joys, not bothered by threats and power struggles from the outside world. It may seem like I don’t concern myself with issues like that. War. No war. Truth is, I do.[…] But posting stuff here is like having a cup of tea with Emma Woodhouse or Marianne Dashwood.[…]
But rather than opting out of the debate, might it not be that the “small worries and joys” Kyren is discussing over tea with 18th-century characters are as part of the debate as Byrd’s impassioned speech or Bush’s puppetry, or all the insta’ punditry in between?
And rather than opting out of some phantom promise of his home-spun site, might not Fred’s guilt over the “mountain of woe” that is tugging at him be as corporeal as the lovingly detailed articles he’s been writing about past loves, watching the ice grow, and the place he calls home among the Blue Ridge Parkway?
Two sides of the same coin: being accountable to oneself first, readers second, if they choose to come along. I’m still struggling myself with how my thoughts, despair, hope, protest, disgust, will manifest itself here. But I do so on the premise that I share the same coin. And on the premise that the struggle is the point.
