In 19 months, he says, he produced 209 posts.
Were he not blogging on The New Yorker's website, he'd have been given up for dead after two or three months. Yet from this he says he has learned big, cosmic, lessons, among them:
Some things I did not expect that turned out to be true: 1) An awful lot of people read blogs. Spontaneously conceived essays (if they deserve that elevated name) that are not particularly well-thought-through can instantly go viral on you without warning. After a few of these experiences I came to realize that there were significant numbers of readers who believed that Think Tank was all I did for a living, and was perhaps all I had ever done, and who seemed pretty well content with this assumption. That was a sobering discovery. 2) Goofy experiments that would not work in any other format, such as deciding to read the entire 2009 stimulus legislation and blog about it will be forgiven by many readers on the grounds that we’re all in this experiment together; it’s like going to a rock festival and hearing terrible music but feeling really good about being there. 3) Aggregation and calling attention to other people’s good work without much effort on your own part is enough justification for blogging in the first place.
Some problems that I half-expected that also turned out to be true: 1) Writing fast about serious subjects because they are in the news, without doing a lot of reporting first, can produce crap. 2) Even the better instances of that sub-genre are still not very satisfying over time to the author. There are a few transcendent deadline essayists born from time to time (Murray Kempton, Michael Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, half the sports columnists of the last three decades) and many other very good ones, including a number blogging on this site, but the rest of us might not wish to be tempted by blogging freedom to emulate them if we can instead spend our time travelling, reporting, researching in archives, or writing books in our attics. This is just a blog post, however; I am free to revise my thinking in an hour, or whenever I revive Think Tank (as I intend to do), and presumably no one will notice.
It's an interesting contrast with SC political bloggers, who will saw off their own bodily appendages with a butter knife rather than ever, ever, ever, engage in the sort of back and forth debate with other bloggers on the merits of the ideas they spew. They just peddle propaganda for the undisclosed clients who pay them as political consultants, or spew hate and science fiction and religion in a really creepy admixture.
Cross any of them and their response isn't, meet him/her on Main Street at high noon, let's shoot it out over the positions taken. It's launch the flying monkeys, find out who the blogger is,and smear him/her. They get all moist about The Founders and The Constitution, but don't think a citizen today should enjoy the same degree of privacy as the authors of The Federalist Papers.
The funny part is a half dozen bloggers spent the better part of two years trying to figure out who I am- something anybody with sense enough to come in out of the dark could have sussed it out in a matter of minutes.
So one finally did last month, and made a huge to-do, harnessing the immense, self-claimed, resources at his disposal, and it resulted in a blip of 100 extra views on this site on one day, and all of two comments.
So that one, having cast the first stone, has identified himself as being without sin.
Scripture suggests, however, everyone trips eventually. We'll be watching developments in the Big Glass House, and in the meantime, offering no great, cosmic, lessons about blogging whatever. I'm not a politico of any stripe. Not affiliated with any party. Don't consult nobody 'bout 'nuthin.
I do agree with Coll that one can revise or remove one's opinion at will, and that one ought, in fact: I've posted any number of rough-and-tumble posts that, in the light of breakfast, seemed a bit over the top. This seems to be an anomaly in the SC blogdom.
Good place to be, and I'm stickin' to it. The only bad mistakes in life are the ones that kill you. Everything else is just embarrassing.
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