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BSB: You started your first blog Omnium in September 2003. What motivated you to start blogging and what do you hope to accomplish?

Mick: I cut my teeth on BBS', like a lot of others, but the bulletin boards were being taken over by trolls, especially right-wing trolls, and 'discussions' had turned into endless rounds of repetitive posturing; every time you tried to move the discussion in a different direction or deepen it beyond the level of propaganda, the trolls would move in and shove it back into partisan bickering. It became limited, circular, stuck in the same revolving door like an old silent comic. I was looking for another way to have my say when I stumbled across Eschaton and discovered blogs. That was just before the Second Gulf War.

Cut to the chase: the SGW motivated me. I had been frustrated by the right wing's success in neutralizing discussion about the war on BBS'; here was a format that I could control, a way, or so I thought, that the discussion could be raised once again to the more helpful and inclusive level where it had been before Iraq was used to polarize it. That's what I hoped to accomplish, in some small way, when I started. But I misread the limitations of blogs, or just didn't understand them. Blogging--like the rest of the internet, in a way--is only partially about discussion. Mostly it's about building a community of one sort or another where like-minded people can support each other and exchange ideas and tactics. Blogs have been extremely successful, despite their relatively tiny numbers of readers, in influencing the discussion in the mainstream. They have also been instrumental in pushing mainstream journalists into acting more like a press and less like sycophantic bootlickers.

In that sense, they remind me of IF Stone and his Weekly. At his height, Stone only had a few thousand readers but what he wrote influenced the course of mainstream reporting and forced issues to the front that had been successfully buried before he dug them out of their holes. That's why Stone is Omnium's chief icon: it's my little addition to the attempt to spread important information that would otherwise be ignored.

We're often accused by the right of 'preaching to the choir'. I think Phaedrus' tagline speaks for me as well: 'Aiming to Arm the Choir'. That's what we're doing.

If you mean personally? Ego, old son. Pure ego. I have a big mouth and I like to shoot it off, and on my blog, nobody can tell me to shut up.

I don't know if you want this, but a technical reason was getting DSL finally. Posting on a bbs or a blog could be a time-consuming proposition on dial-up. When I got DSL in Sept, I noticed right away how much quicker and easier it was to do: I could source quotes, find additional information, and download it all in minutes or even seconds rather than hours. For a working stiff, that was a big Green Light

BSB: I'm glad you brought up the BBS'. I suspect that many of the bloggers started out on message boards before blogs were available. Do you ever go back to visit your old stomping grounds?

Mick: For a long time I did, but they were always having the same arguments, talking about the same things. Somebody would try to bring something up about Iraq or Halliburton or the PATRIOT Act and inside of three posts they'd be back to what a terrible man Clinton was. After awhile it just seemed like a waste of time. There was one I visited regularly because it wasn't like that bvut it wasn't like that because there were only a dozen or so people posting on it and we all knew each other. Then they started to drop away and it was 8, 6, 5.... I quit even checking-in a month or so ago.

BSB: At their best, they can have the advantage of having bright, thoughtful representatives from both sides of the aisle (before they are overrun with trolls and descend into flame wars).

Mick: Yeah, I really miss that about them. The one important thing you don't get with a blog--at least I don't--is feedback, the give-and-take where you have to let your perspective and your belief be challenged, maybe changed. Hard to believe now, but that really used to happen before the polarization set in.

BSB: What about the right-wing bloggers? Do you spend much time reading their blogs?

Mick: Not any more. I did for a while, but then it gets to the point where they're making the same arguments day after day after day no matter what the subject is. I gave up on Sully and GR and Kaus because I could have written their opinions for them; it would have been easy: same buzzwords, same phrases, same talking points. When I knew what they were going to say before they wrote it, why bother to read it? I suppose there are probably people who feel the same way about me. I'm very sensitive to repetition, tho, and I try not to say too much I've said before. The problem with the Bushies is that they pull the same tricks the same way using the same people. To talk about it at all is to feel like you're repeating yourself endlessly. How often can you expose the same bait-and-switch routine? It must get old to read; it certainly gets old to write. I was going to quit a couple of months ago because I thought I was turning into a broken record. I was boring myself, altho challenging as a writer: I had to find entirely new and entertaining ways to say 'bait-and-switch' and fresh angles to come at it from. But it's getting harder. FTT was good for me that way; it got my juices flowing again by focusing on the concrete results of the bait-and-switch games.

I read The Volokh Conspiracy from time to time, Intel Dump (which I like a lot) and Sgt Hook, but they're more center-right than right. At least they're not still bitching about Clinton and they have their own takes on things, they're not just parroting the standard GOP talking points. There's an awful lot of that on the right. Just flipping thru it gets tiresome. How many times can you read the same rant in slightly different words on how John Edwards is a trial lawyer?

BSB: I notice that you run sitetracker on your blogs. How closely do you monitor your traffic and has this changed since you first started blogging?

Mick: Hmmm. More closely lately. Blogger doesn't have Trackback unless you pay for it. I was curious about how badly I was wasting my time. In the beginning it didn't matter much--I had a dozen or so people I brought over from the bbs' where I'd been posting, and that was good enough. Now that it looks like Bush is going down, though, and I have a number of other avenues I want to explore (FTT and LitBlogs are more like where I think blogging is going as it matures), I don't want to keep Omnium afloat if it's time has passed and it's losing it's audience. As long as it continues to grow, I'll probably do it. I still have lots to say about politics and current events and will probably always want an outlet for them. But more of my focus is going toward FTT type issues. I guess it's a matter of emphasis and prioritizing time. Tracking numbers, even in such a crude way, helps me figure what my readers like and how to divide what time I have.

Tracking is a relatively recent development for me, btw. I only added the meters a couple of months ago, so I don't have much to say about how it's changed except numbers-wise: when I put them I had 15-20 hits a day; that has more than doubled since then to 35-40. Not a big readership exactly, but more than I ever expected--and more than had ever read anything I'd written before.

BSB: Do you have many unfinished drafts that just sit on blogger unpublished, or do you pretty much hit the “send” button for everything you write?

Mick: I'm old-fashioned. I work til it's done and then I publish it. If I can't finish it before I have to go to work or do something else, I dump it. Blogs are like newspapers: Right now it's fresh; tomorrow it's on the bottom of the canary's cage or wrapping fish. The only pieces I ever put in the word processor and worked on over days were the series I did: 'The Myth of Corporate-Style Government' and 'Bush and the Cult of Personality'. I treated those more like essays than posts. I rewrote them a number of times, edited them, wrote them again. If I did that with every post, I'd do one a month.

I've read that other bloggers do drafts and I guess it's a good thing but I don't see the point. By the time you get back to it somebody else has already said it, probably better than you did, and everybody else has moved on. Blogging moves as fast as the news, for better or worse--and, like marriage, it's both. As David Neiwert said, one of the great strengths of blogs is their ability to jump on an issue, spread it around, correct mis-statements or lies almost as soon as they're told, and track the tale as it makes the rounds. They're less successful at long, thoughtful, magazine-style essays. Neiwert and Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom are the only two I can think of off the top of my head who do that kind of writing every day and are consistently good at it. We all do it sometimes--Max Sawicky has moments, Tristero, Jeff at NOTA--but it's hard work and very time-consuming. 'Bush and the Cult of Personality' took over a month of doing practically nothing else. That's why I haven't written one since 'Myth' and the series on 'Intelligence: Who Collects It and How Does It Get Processed?' has been sitting in my home WP for 6 weeks and I have yet to finish the first installment.

The only value I can see to drafts is timing: you can do a piece and hold onto it until something happens that it fits right into. Other than that.....

BSB: A wise man once said...(ok, actually it was Tony Pierce Tony Pierce):
"dont tell your mom, your work, your friends, the people you want to date, or the people you want to work for about your blog. if they find out and you'd rather they didnt read it, ask them nicely to grant you your privacy"

Do you tell your friends and family about your blog?

Mick: Not at first, no. But then when I started FTT, I started to talk about it to, not friends exactly, but people I know who are online and who it might interest or even represent. I don't write a journal or a chit-chat blog, so there's not much point to letting friends know about it; they already know what I think politically, and with them I talk. You know, face-to-face.

OK, now the truth--my friends tend not to be as politically radical as I am. This is a conservative part of MA. I didn't used to worry about spouting off now and then and neither did they, but Bush's quasi-election polarized people here just like it did everywhere else and politics got to be a dangerous subject. (See David Neiwert's 'Politics and the Personal' for the best desription of this phenomenon I've read.) In the interest of keeping them as friends, I agreed to keep politics out of the discussion. Actually, given everything that's happened, I may need to test them again; their attitudes may be changing.

As for family, no, at least, I haven't yet. We're most of us not real close. As a matter of odd timing, tho, before I got this email my brother--who I haven't heard from in at least 3 years--called last night out of the blue and I ended up telling him. He said, "What's a blog?" The standard response, I might add. He's a carpenter in New Hampshire, and barely online, meaning he is but he hardly ever uses it. He got all excited to think he'll actually be able to read something I wrote after all these years of hearing how I'm a writer but never seeing anything published that he could read. He's having trouble with his ISP, too, which is another reason he dcoesn't use it much, and he's switching providers. When he gets his new email address, I'm going to send him all the links. It should be...interesting to see his reaction. From there, the rest of the family will know inside a week because he'll tell them. That should be interesting, too.

BSB: You have dedicated a lot of time to calling attention to other bloggers that you enjoy. You are the only one that I have seen that includes some reviews of other blogs on your blogroll and I have particularly enjoyed your “Women Blog, Too” running item. Is this because you just want to share the blogs that you enjoy with your readers or is there a larger purpose to this?

Mick: Both. It started out as a sharing thing--blogs are new, still, and there are a lot of questions about them, a lot people don't know about them. I always discovered blogs either through the recommendation of another blogger or--far more often--by randomly clicking links on other people's blogrolls. Most of the time I didn't have any idea what I was going to find, and most of the time what I found I didn't like all that much. Occasionally, tho, I came across a real gem and thought, it's too bad people don't know about this, so I started writing about them (if you go back in the archives, you'll find reviews of a lot of the blogs on the Honor Roll; one of these days I'll put links up to them, too). As I said in the first WTB, the inspiration was Jeff's Daily Link at NOTA--he was doing a blog review a day for awhile there (at one a week, I'm a lightweight compared to that) and I discovered that having a description helped me figure out if it was something I was interested in. I found a bunch of good ones through Jeff that I still read. So when an 'online friend' got interested and asked, 'Where are all the women?', it seemed like a natural extension of what I was already doing.

What I don't think I understood when I did it, though, is that it also opened up a 'larger purpose'. Women's blogs are different; they don't have different concerns, but they express them differently. They also tend to play with the form more than men. Reading them by the barrel to prepare each WBT, I began to realize that, while it was still in its infancy, what women were doing was a lot more flexible, a lot richer, and a lot more promising than what I was used to from reading male blogs. I think you have to see them in isolation to know that, tho. What they do is quieter, less strident, as a rule, and they don't stand out. Another rule: you have to read them for awhile (at least I did) before what they're doing really starts to sink in. Male blogs are much more obvious about their attitudes and intentions; read 2 or 3 posts and you know what you're going to get. Female blogs are full of surprises, twists, unexpected jumps, unsuspected connections. They don't say 'This is politics, this isn't', like we do. It's all part of the Big Picture for them. And their interests tend to be wider and less compartmentalized than ours.

I'm not saying that makes them better, I'm saying it makes them different and the difference is intriguing.

What was the question? (This is your own fault, you know, you have nobody to blame but yourself. You would pick the longest-winded blowhard in the blogosphere to interview first. Good luck editing this mess.)

Ah yes, the 'larger purpose'. So what I began to get from the female bloggers I was reading were hints of strengths and potentialities in blogs that I hadn't seen before. I decided--I was at the 'Why am I doing this?' phase I mentioned before--that I wanted to explore some of those potentialities and examine some of those strengths. LitBlogs is the first small, focused attempt to do that, but I'd like to do more. And will if I get the chance. See, I'm not really sure yet what that 'larger purpose' is. I just know there is one and I'm in the process of figuring it out and maybe helping to map it.

BSB: You normally do not resort to name calling on your site. The effect of this is that it has a stronger effect on the rare occasions that you do. You’ve called Tom DeLay a cockroach and Grover Norquist a toad. Why these two in particular and not, say Bush, Ashcroft, Wolfawitz or a host of others?

Mick: Bush, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, Libby, Perle, et al are greedy, ignorant, stupid (which is not the same as ignorant), arrogant, wrong, or pig-headed stubborn, sometimes--often--all of them at once, but--and I've said this many times--I'm convinced they believe in what they're doing. Ashcroft is a genuine fundamentalist, Bush truly believes he talks to god--and worse, that god answers--Wolfowitz, Libby and Perle are committed neocon followers of Strauss, Rice is loyal to her boss, and Rumsfeld still believes his radical approach to defense will turn out in the end to be the right one. Their motives are confused when they're not contradictory, they lie as a matter of policy, and they are incapable of admitting mistakes. They suffer from a severe form of tunnel vision, an inability to recognize their own hypocrisies, 16 kinds of mental and emotional blindness, and an almost pathological identification with corporations as the ideal expressions of Western civilization as they define it. But underneath all those flaws, they are TB's--True Believers--who think what they're doing really is best for the future of the society they want to protect and encourage. If it isn't a society either of us would care to live in and that we fight to our last breaths, that doesn't alter the fact that they are fighting for a world they believe is humanity's best hope for security and progress. I give them that much respect--if no more.

DeLay and Norquist are fakes. They believe in nothing but their own advancement and they're willing to destroy the social contract and steamroller anybody who gets in their way. They are without beliefs or conscience. They're power-mongers, plain and simple. Norquist has called (I think this was in one of the posts I did on him; if not, it will be in the next one) the people who support him with their membership money 'idiots' for believing he can do what he tells them he will do--repeal the income tax. DeLay has never betrayed the slightest bit of belief in anything other than power and greed. He is contemptuous toward his own colleagues, willing to use anybody and anything to get his way, even a children's charity, without respect for so much as the pretense of law ('I AM the Federal Government!') with regard to himself, and utterly lacking in the most basic of human values. They are both pompous, arrogant, primordially self-centered, elitist ambulance-chasers who have shamelessly crow-barred their way to power using nothing but extortion, bribery, threats, and blackmail. They don't have a single redeeming quality or selfless act between them, and either of them would call down a nuclear holocaust if they thought it would advance them one small step personally. They recognize no limitations or restrictions on either their monumental greed or their slimy, inhuman, criminal tactics. 'Might Makes Right' is their Golden Rule. They're miniature Hitlers--and I mean that literally, not figuratively: at root, they are autocratic, dictatorial types who would 'cleanse' the earth of their enemies, real and imagined, by whatever means necessary, given half a chance. Delay would have run a crematorium without a qualm; Norquist would have planted himself in the central warehouse to weigh and count the gold teeth shipped from the ovens and been proud of his work even as he stole half of everything that came in and put it in a numbered Swiss bank account.

In short, they are calculating, selfish, mean little men without redeeming features of any kind. Maybe DeLay is nice to his family, but I doubt it. Maybe Norquist gave a homeless man on the street a quarter once, but I'd want to see the vidoetape. Men like that who browbeat their subordinates and toady their superiors, who respect no one but themselves, deserve none. Not from me, and not from anybody as far as I'm concerned.
Does that answer your question? I could go on....

BSB: Would you consider yourself a reformer or a revolutionary? I think I know the answer, but maybe not and I wanted to hear your answer as to why.

Mick: Huh. To tell you the truth, I don't think of myself as either one. I think of myself as a writer and a radical progressive with strong opinions and a need to shoot my mouth off about them; blogging is where they merge and feed off each other in a parasitic duel like a Bob Fosse set-piece.

But if pressed, I'd say a reformer with revolutionary tendencies. I'd rather see the system corrected than scrapped, but if correction isn't feasible, I suppose I'd be willing to go back to the Constitution as a starting point and try again. Is that revolutionary? The Constitution, for all its flaws, is the best and most hopeful set of governing rules ever written. I would never scrap that. I would, however, be willing to tear down a government that was ignoring that Constitution and replace with one that didn't. Is that what you meant? Or have I misunderstood your question?

BSB: FTT focuses the growing gap between the very powerful and the very helpless and the real world consequences this has on the latter. Omnium often chronicles the almost daily news we receive of our government being happily manipulated, funded and controlled by large corporations and their idealogical enablers, especially (but not exclusively) from the Republican party.

How much do you think can achieved through incremental change and how much needs to come from a fundamental overhaul? Is the system broken or does it just need some tweaking?

Mick: Ah. Gotcha.
The eternal questions. No, the system isn't broken. The system works fine as long as people believe in it. It's the people who've been broken. We've had our belief in the system undermined consistently for 30 years. We've bought a cheap, simple fantasy: you can have it all and you don't have to pay for it. We've allowed a small group of determined con artists to pull the wool over our eyes in order to rob us blind, and then we pulled the blankets over our heads so we wouldn't have to see them do it. We have given in to fundamental human weaknesses like fear, greed, and denial without a fight. We haven't challenged ourselves to rise above the LCD since Reagan sold us the idea that we'd been too generous, that we would all be a lot richer and a lot better off if we started thinking about Number 1 and the hell with the other guy, let him take care of himself.

To be fair, we have had the most unrelenting, sophisticated, and pervasive propaganda machine ever devised aimed at us for 30 years, controlled by the people at the top who had the most to gain. We stood up against it for longer than they imagined possible, and they had to turn up the heat to almost unbearable levels, but they got what they wanted--and didn't know what to do with it once they had it. Their vision is almost claustrophobically tiny: faced with the first terrorist attack on US soil by foreign agents, our leader--the smallest of small minds--said, 'We're gonna go to war against the whole world.' We said, 'What's our part? What do we do?' and he said, 'You guys go shopping.' That's about as deep as he gets.

None of this is new.The system was under attack the day it was proposed by the Hamiltonian contingent, the plutocrats of the day who thought of the common people as 'rabble' and were horrified at the prospect of putting a government into the hands of the 'ignorant herd', as Samuel Chase put it. They have been trying to bring it down and take it over ever since. But you could go back to the Roman Empire and watch the same kind of people destroy that for the same reasons: greed and a contempt for ordinary people. Despite everything the American cousins of the Roman oligarchs could do, the system survived for over 200 years, sometimes under enormous strain, because we believed in it, because we elected leaders who believed in it. When we started to elect leaders who said openly that it was a crock and that the government wasn't us but some kind of amorphous 'other' that was our enemy, the system was doomed--no system can stand up to being run by people who want to destroy it.

The system will work even now if it's allowed to work. The problem is that the thieves have gotten so bold (or so desperate) that they've begun stealing the democratic mechanism itself--the election process. No system can work when it's being dismantled and replaced. But we're waking up. They've gone so far off the deep end in their greed that we've finally been forced to notice what they're doing rather than listen to what they're saying, and we're appalled. If the system is allowed to work, then the worst excesses of the oligarchs who controlled the system will be modified very shortly and people who believe in the Constitution--the system--will be in charge again.

But if we are to stop this from happening a second time, the system's going to need more than 'tweaking'. The way we finance campaigns has to be overhauled from the ground up and we're going to have to face the hard fact that we're going to have to pay for elections ouirselves to keep the Monsters from using the Money Machine to roll over top of us. Clean Elections works in Maine, it can work nationally, and we're just going to have to bite the bullet.

Likewise, this absurd winner-take-all election process has to be overhauled. We need a system that eliminates its weaknesses--Money Rules by controlling the two parties--and puts the real power back into the hands of the people. Proportional representation will only create an entirely new and different set of problems--and opportunities for the oligarchs. Run-off voting is cumbersome and a tweak that will work for a short time and then collapse under the weight of its own confusion. We need YNMS voting to energize people agaoin and prove to them that their vote counts.

I suppose you could consider those 'reforms' but they're fundamental reforms and their effect, taken together, would revolutionize the way the system works.

So what does that make me? A Reform Revolutionary? A Revolutionary Reformer? Crazy as a bedbug? [Select One]

BSB: You are involved in three separate blogs and a website ( Omnium, From the Trenches, litblogs and The Omnium Annex). You are one of the more prolific political bloggers. You post frequently, especially on Omnium. How do you find the time?

Mick: I don't have a life. Or if I do, this is it.

When I was down in the creative doldrums and discovered Maine Line, I briefly considered writing a journal like Emmett's. But then I thought about what it would look like:
Monday--

Got up at noon. Wrote a post on Bush's idiocy, a post on Cheney's greed, and a post on a new reality TV show called ''Beach Party Disease' for Omnium. Went to work at 3pm. Came home at 11.30pm. Posted a news report on Ashcroft's proposal to sell the homeless to Protor&Gamble to make soap out of and a long Commentary on Bush's belief that the poor really have Mercedes-Benz's hidden away in secret palatial mansions near Santa Monica. Spent a half-hour on the new Snake story. Spent remaining hour on screenplay, 'Not So Lethal Weapon 16'. Have to figure a way to get Mel Gibson out of the walker long enough to waste the 3 baddies with his cane. MUST BE BELIEVABLE.Went to bed at 7am.

Tuesday,

Repeat.

Wednesday,

Once more.

Thursday,

And the same again.

It was too depressing.

BSB: If nothing else, that will at least make me feel better for not posting more often. Thank you, Mick. It has been a pleasure.

Mick: yeah, i enjoyed it. you made me think about stuff i haven't thought of in a while. and i got to write about myself, which is always a kick for an ego as large as mine. thanks for asking.

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Thursday, July 15, 2004

The BSB Interview. Mick Arran

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