The good blogger
(Credit: MalKoh)

There are some things I’ve heard too many times, and I hope never to hear them again. I have a list of them. For instance: “It’s not you. It’s me.”

Or “Can I talk to you for a minute in my office?”

Or “It might be nothing. We’ll have to run some tests.”

Oh, and this one:

Your country is [going to attack/occupying] [Eastasia/Eurasia] and all you can find to bitch about is [women’s rights/recycling/fat jokes/other allegedly uncrucial issue]?

We spotted a few individuals of that last species at large in the wild during a recent megathread at Feministe, and in subsidiary posts elsewhere. It pops up often enough that I’ve gotten sick to fucking death of it.

Part of the reason for my grouchiness on the subject is that at my last job, editing the Earth Island Journal, I heard enough variations on that theme to last me the rest of my life. “How can you print all this stuff about wildlife without mentioning human population?” “How can you be so anthropocentric to talk about human population without paying any attention to wildlife?” (No shit: I got those last two in the same week.) “All this stuff about the environment, and you haven’t once printed anything about the tr*th *bout 9/11????1?”

The blog world is different from the print world, with its easier entry and consequent greater diversity of voices. In the blog world, people like those mentioned above who sincerely want to push their pet issue are far more likely to write something like “I know this is OT in a thread about knitting, but this post on another blog about human population and wildlife is really worth reading” than “ZOMG you are not mentioning my pet political issue on your emo fashion blog.”

In fact, I don’t seem to recall the “all you can find to bitch about is Issue X” complaint ever being leveled on any blog entirely devoted to issue X, other than by obvious trolls.

And isn’t that where that obnoxious assertion would make the most sense? If Bush had his finger on the button and Cheney told the Washington Times “only 479 left-wing blogs have said anything negative about our nuking Uzbekistan, which is well under the threshold we set of 500 left wing blogs complaining before we back down,” wouldn’t it make sense to stop by a left-leaning knitting blog to exhort them to say something about Uzbekistan for once instead of having another 400-comment felting thread? I’m not knocking knitting, nor hobby/recreational blogs in general: Far from it! I think they’re wonderful, and usually far less boring than single-subject political blogs. It just seems, logically, like that would be where those complainers would focus were they sincere in their complaint.

But no, these folks never drop in at Cute Overload to suggest topics more relevant than fluffy baby ducks. Almost exclusively, they drop their little steaming gems of admonition at blogs where the “trivial” topic they decry occupies one post in a thousand. The important subject being offered in its stead can often be found in a thread less than a week old.

Thus, the scolders don’t mean “you should talk about more important things than Issue X once in awhile.” They mean “you should not talk about Issue X at all.” (Sometimes they also mean “I’m too much of an idiot to see whether you’ve mentioned more important things in the post immediately prior to this one before alleging that you never do.”)

It’s a form of purist hierarchy, usually indulged in as a result of discussion of Issue X making the scolder uncomfortable, often because Issue X deconstructs a form of privilege or bigotry from which the scolder benefits. It is first cousin to the refrains often voiced by sexist pigs during the birth of Second-Wave Feminism: “First we gotta stop the war/end pollution/make the white man give us our due, and then we can focus on whether or not you chicks deserve to get beaten up by your putative brothers.” You can take it back further than that, of course. “We have to keep the farms at full production to support the revolution, but once the Bolsheviks are triumphant we can collectivize and that will fix everything.” Or “True, your family is hungry and the Church is building a new cathedral, but your reward will come after you die.”

Basically, for

Your country is [going to attack/occupying] [Eastasia/Eurasia] and all you can find to bitch about is [women’s rights/recycling/fat jokes/other allegedly uncrucial issue]?

you should read

Shut up and fall in line behind your intellectual superiors, who know better than you do how you should spend your political energy.

The thing is that for every Kos Pie Fight example of allegedly ignored “important shit” that’s bandied about, there is usually a much bigger and more all-encompassing issue to trump it. And here’s something the pie fighters don’t realize: environmentalists like me eat pie for breakfast. We pay attention to context, and we pay attention to history, because both context and history are central to any understanding of the environment. For instance: if the “important shit” is electing more Democrats, we point out that getting a Dem into the White House in 1992 didn’t keep the bad guys from amassing power because liberal Democrats went to sleep en masse as Fleetwood Mac played on election night, and kept hitting the snooze button until 2000.

The important shit these days is often war, and that’s hard to argue against. The people of Iraq are paying a staggering cost as a result of Bush’s murderously insane policy, and war with Iran looms. The people of Iraq and Iran most definitely need the help of those of us in a position to effect even minor change, and it’s hard not to agree that war is a more important topic for blog discussion than, I dunno, how to caramelize a perfect top on your crème brûlée. Still, there are topics that compete. On February 2 of this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most strongly worded report on anthropogenic climate change to date. As a direct result of human activity, sea levels will rise as ice caps melt. There is scuffling over the precise estimates of actual increase, but those estimates rise inexorably with each passing year and often ignore minor details like Greenland’s ice cap collapse, now in progress. And this just in: Antarctica’s ice is not as nailed down as we’d thought. A foot of sea level rise is considered very likely by 2100. A meter is definitely possible: it’s just outside the most conservative estimate ranges for 2100, and that may change by the end of this year. ‘Course, if Antarctica’s ice melted altogether the sea would rise 120 meters. Imagine standing on the roof of the Flatiron Building and having 70 feet of water above you! But small bites first. If sea level rose just a meter today, the number of people displaced — merely by the rise itself, and not taking storm surges, disruption of trade and agriculture, and other such secondary effects into account — would be more than double the populations of Iraq and Iran combined. That number is bound to be much larger in 93 years. If we’re telling bloggers to focus on the most important subject alone, how do we choose between the war in the Middle East and Bush’s continued bird-flipping to global climate change mitigation efforts? Hell, even sea level rise is trivial compared to the current mass extinction, which according to some paleontologists has already outstripped the biggest mass extinction of all time in terms of the number of species wiped out. How do you justify spending all your time worrying about Bush nuking Iran, where only 65 million people might die, tops? We need action now. Now now now. Put down that Olberman video and get on the bus to Kyoto lest you be condemned as another short-sighted American!

It’s clearly a stupid argument, made stupider by the fact that everyone who throws the line around has his or her own special conception of what the important shit is. It’s almost always, in my progblogworld experience, leveled at people who discuss issues of gender, race, class, and related privilege. This is ironic, given that the explosive growth of the Internet over the last ten years took place, in large part, on the backs of a specific group of poor women of color. And most people who use the net are to at least a small degree complicit in those women’s suffering, which renders all online political purism somewhat ridiculous. I’ll explain in tomorrow’s post.

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