Death in the Blogosphere

Before the winter break, I found myself delving back into my old xanga blog as I searched for something I'd written a few years back.  Xanga was the hippitiest happenin' place to blog and social network way back in 2004, before Myspace, before Facebook, before Twitter.  Now, of course, it's...well...just not.

I bailed on it because...well...it wasn't a good platform for anything other than noodly semi-serious social blogging.  Yeah, I'm still a rank amateur, and Blogger ain't WordPress, but it's at least marginally respectable as a platform in the blogging world.

My search for the sermon fodder quickly bore fruit, but I found myself clicking through to check on the status of some of my more regular former xanga chatmates.  Some I still stay in touch with here and through Facebook...bless y'all.   But others I haven't comment-chatted with in years.

As I clicked through, most folks had stopped writing in 2008 or 2009, at about the same time I wandered off.  One guy in particular I communicated with almost daily, a conservative lawyer and really gracious human being who didn't often agree with me, but invariably stirred some thought provoking conversation.   I checked his xanga page, and found it ended back in 2009, with an innocuous post about pizza.  For some reason, I drilled down to the comments.

When I knew him, Kevin was a brain cancer survivor, and was in remission...but it had returned in 2009.  And then it and complications from it had taken him.  For the hour after I discovered this, I read through his wife's reflections on his illness, his death, her mourning, and the faith they shared.

What struck me was just how bizarre our lives in this medium can be.  Here was a human being who I'd communicated with on a semi-daily basis, a conversation partner, one of the souls who formed my network of being.  Yet he could just...die...and I could miss it.  Perhaps that's a construct of the fluttering early days of social networking, before the rise of the mighty Facebook.  But for as far as the web can create communities of shared interest, it is a remarkably easy place for human beings you've met in it to just...vanish.

Of course, I'd never even have known this good soul without blogging.   Yet it still felt odd to realize just how quietly a human being can slip away in this medium.  It creates relationships like that with the neighbor with whom you pass a casual friendly hello every day until you move away.  Absent the reinforcing connections of shared community, that person's life is no longer connected to your own. 

Mosquitoes, Blood and the Political Blogosphere

We have no AC. A series of power outages in the last few days blew out our aging compressor, which in turn is going to blow out a fairly sizable chunk out of our savings. Sigh. Sometimes the dream of American homeownership seems like one of those stress dreams when you're standing in front of your congregation and discover you're wearing bunny ears and a zebra-striped thong.

At least, I hope that was only a dream. It was awfully vivid.

As I stood outside with the HVAC tech, the smell of burnt-out electrics strong in my nostrils, the air around us filled up almost instantly with mosquitoes. They swept in like a hungry little cloud, fulfilling their prerogative for self-propagation. They're pretty much instant on, as the trails of carbon dioxide left behind by our respiration and the heat trace of our mammalian nature flags us as a potential blood feast. They are relentless little automatons, with but one purpose in their single-minded existence.

For some reason, this resonated metaphorically with something that I'd noticed today in my blogging. My recent gentle-blog-fun-poking at Rep. Gerry Connolly had apparently stirred two different responses. First, it got his staff to take a second look at my problem. After that initial hiccup, they've been doing great. I couldn't have expected more from a Representative, no matter what their party affiliation.

Second, it drew the immediate attention of a number of local conservative bloggers, who pretty much all used it as an excuse to mock Rep. Connolly. It doesn't particularly matter that 1) it's an understandable error and 2) his staff has responded to my calling them out on a simple mistake by going well beyond what I'd have expected of them.

"..tell me again how we got stuck with this guy," says one. Well, he spent over a decade in local politics and developed a reputation for being, depending on your perspective, either an something of a machine politician or someone gets things done. Then, more people voted for him than the other guy. "What an idiot," says another, as if anyone who has a solid grasp of constituent services believes Congressmen field their e-mail directly. Another blog appears to be entirely dedicated to finding negative things to say about this particular representative.

I know, I know, it's just politics. It's always been this way. We'd like to think it hasn't, but we'd be deluding ourselves. Back during the earliest moments of the American republic, partisans on either side of the Federalist/Democrat divide would pitch out some pretty impressively scurrilous dirt at either John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, depending on their predilection.

This is also the current reality of the political blogosphere, on both left and right. Many conservatives and liberals view their only role within the polis as drawing the other guy's blood. They spend their days carefully sniffing google for a trace of anything negative about that other guy, come swooping in the moment they taste it in the air, and then shout that negativity out in their own echochamber to generate those precious siteviews.

Ah well. Politics is and has always been a blood sport. It's a pity reality, patience, and the common good matter so little in the face of such a single-minded pursuit.