I think I might reconsider this whole blog thing.
Fluorescent Elephant was born eleven years ago for a specific journalistic reason. There was at least a consistent topic, but the postings drifted in non-journalistic directions to other topics. For me there's nothing wrong with that except that the archive of former posts is indexed by month and year and not by category, which makes locating specific elements difficult. It's necessary to traverse the entire chronological listing of months and years to find anything, which might be ok if I had stuck to the original intention, but I didn't.
My focus broadened and become more random, too much so to continue posting to a chronologically-indexed FIFO format. I like the simplicity of Blogger but it isn't flexible enough to be converted into an arbitrarily indexed content management system. Drupal might suit me better but its complexity would distract me from writing. Many people use Wordpress now but I suspect it has the same problem. I have programming skills to use these tools but I don't want to get into PHP coding or anything similar, so I'll have to do research to find something more appropriate. Meanwhile I want to recall the original motivation for all this, which requires an overview that locates Fluorescent Elephant in the proper historical context.
The short version begins with the inauguration of the Bush administration, which resulted from the supreme court decision that awarded illegitimate victory to the Republican candidate in what can properly be regarded as a coup d'etat that denied the will of the American people. That fundamental event set in motion forces that proceeded to create the conditions that enabled the 9/11 airplane attacks, which, with malice aforethought, aligned the country behind an irredentist fantasy of American exceptionalism that a powerful group of latter-day conservatives inherited from the triumphalist contingent of the WWII generation and projected forward in a (desperate?) campaign to maintain postwar American sovereignty over a changing world.
History proceeds from one stage to another, each stage creating the conditions for what follows. To be really clear about the backstory against which Fluorescent Elephant came into being, maybe I should more precisely locate the neoconservative agenda in a historical context of its own that can't be viewed in its proper dimension without a helicopter. Always remembering the requirement for brevity, which can be challenging, let's rise up in our helicopter to see if we can achieve a windy perspective.
Starting with the gradual decline of American influence that became undeniable toward the end of the 20th century, a powerful cabal of neoconservative desperadoes needed to come up with a way to restore the American hegemony that had been established by their forefathers. Endless streams of capital and privilege were directed toward this purpose, resulting in a radical new strategy called the Project for a New American Century, which harkened back to the principal event that established a national consensus for American involvement in WWII, namely the dastardly Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was deemed that another such event was necessary to manufacture a similar consensus and gain the political power to go to war once again for the reestablishment of former American dominance. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were conjured out of the existing world situation in which the Soviet boogeyman had been vanquished and the formerly impotent Islamic militancy was being inflated as the new national enemy.
Incredible as it seems, the project succeeded. Domestic political opposition was crushed. The overall push for war overwhelmed the responsible elements in the news media, which abdicated its responsibility to present an opposing perspective and to tell us the truth about what our cynical government was really up to. It was the most irresponsible and disheartening failure of nerve I'd ever witnessed occurring on such a massive scale in the drearily spectacular landscape of American journalism.
There was an elephant in the room and it was glowing. The major news outlets submitted to the will of the executive branch out of sheer and unforgivable cowardice, just as the democratic congress also did. The only journalists out there who were reporting the actual truth were found in the blogosphere, where brilliant young writers like Josh Marshall, Eric Alterman, Kevin Drum, Jane Hamsher and several others were inventing a new kind of journalism that went straight to the heart of the matter in a stylistically warm and abbreviated format appropriate for web presentation. I was deeply excited by this new trend and threw myself into blogging with passionate intensity. Fluorescent Elephant was born.
Unfortunately, the motivation based on my political outrage tends to subside after a while, maybe because I'm also interested in other kinds of writing. A large percentage of my youth was dedicated to the absorption of the best writing I could find in the Paperback Booksmith, the first bookstore in Cambridge Massachusetts that carried only paperbacks. I was exposed to a great deal of the sort of beautiful language that is found primarily in fiction, and specialized in literature from distant parts of the world. My selections tended to be somewhat exotic, maybe because I had a predilection for the unknown. I read a lot of classic Russian material, for example, and was fascinated by the new crop of Latin American writers. I don't know why it was that I seemed to be less interested in British, French and American writing, though I digested a fair amount of that as well. Maybe I was a poor student and tended to prefer my own literary discoveries to what I was told were the Great Writers of the Western World. (I don't last long in museums either.) However that may be, an ocean of wonderful language became lodged in my head and stayed in there for a number of silent decades. Ultimately, it needed to come out, and the holy political and journalistic purity of Fluorescent Elephant became corrupted by something else.
(Probably none of this is actually true but it's the best explanation I can manage.)
