Snacks On A Plane

Via Atrios we are apprised of yet another ranty little column, presumably offering itself as sensible, relevant opinion, bravely taking on yet again those upstart bloggerses. See if you can follow the clunky, lurching narrative therein.

If ever America needed a wake-up call about the mythology of blogging, we got it this month.

On Aug. 8, Connecticut businessman Ned Lamont defeated U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary, a triumph widely credited to the rah-rah racket produced by pro-Lamont armies stationed along the Internet.

Indeed, the bloggers had scored big. They had helped vault a local politician to national prominence and cemented the Iraq war as Issue No. 1 in the congressional elections. Not a bad day.

But their victory was short-lived. Even before the primary, Lieberman announced that, should he lose, he'd still run in November as an independent. This electoral chutzpah effectively rope-a-doped the bloggers and recharged the senator's fabled Joe-mentum. Lieberman's still the man to beat in the general election.

Obviously I read a good number of blogs regularly, some widely known, some not as much. I don't recall any of them taking the tone of empty triumphalism imputed to them by this dope. The attitude was more one of understanding that primaries have low turnouts, and that any tilt at a three-term incumbent was going to have to be a serious, organized undertaking. And that's what they did -- they organized. They served as a virtual megaphone to spread Ned Lamont's message early on. They explained exactly what their manifest discontents were with Joe Lieberman's officious, off-putting enabling of the Chimpco regime. They took both the issues and the people very seriously, if not as solemnly as the jerkoffs in the "official" media would like it.

Does Kluger convey any of that? No, he dismisses a record voter turnout and a huge upset of an incumbent as a "rah-rah racket" in a virtual milieu. No word of the people who actually went to Connecticut, knocked on doors, talked to people, went to events and chronicled them as they saw them. They didn't need to resort to the corporate media patterns of taking out the jeweler's loupe and the apothecary's scale of harrumphing "objectivity", carefully pinching out drams of sober nonsense and baffling leaps of willful stupidity.

There was a time when such efforts would have been hailed as the noble travails of the hallowed "grass-roots" -- otherwise loosely associated people coming together for common cause, not for profit or show, but out of idealism and political unity. Now such undertakings are routinely dismissed as a "racket", by sniveling little assholes who haven't the guts to pick out their own shoes without a nod from above.

Kluger seems almost gleeful that Lieberman has decided to betray his own party and his previous principles in order to retain his limp, clammy grip on what he thinks is power. It's appalling to watch Lieberman, who has all but received an official endorsement from the Republican Party, strut and preen about like he's God's own gift to sober "bipartisanship". The "racket" Kluger smarmily decries is nothing more and nothing less than the collective discontent of Lieberman's own consitutents, who rightly realize that something's seriously wrong when their Democratic senator has the imprimatur from a deeply unpopular, polarizing Republican administration. It's really unfortunate that neither Lieberman nor Kluger has the basic common sense to just be ashamed of themselves, but I guess that's what separates them from us "unserious" people.

Then Kluger's train of crap really starts derailing.

If this wasn't enough to drain the effervescence from the blogger bubbly, America's noisy Web wags were dealt an even more sobering blow 10 days later when Snakes on a Plane opened nationwide to a decidedly flat $15.3 million box office.

Before its premiere, Snakes had been the latest blogger darling, as swarms of online film geeks prematurely crowned it the summer's big sleeper. This hyperventilating fan base even convinced Snakes' distributor, New Line Cinema, to up the movie's rating to R, to ensure a gorier, more venomous snake fest.

But all that clapping and yapping couldn't put enough fannies in the seats. Ticket sales for Snakes' debut barely topped those of Talladega Nights, which was already in its third week.

It appears that Kluger's knowledge of viral marketing rivals Chimpy's profound understanding of Camus. Snakes seems to me to be just one of those dumb fun things that comes along once in a while. What screws it up is that whenever it happens, companies instantly assume they can bottle it and replicate it. And there are certain things you can do to use the medium to enhance your chances, with well-placed, well-timed bursts of viral and niche marketing. But I don't recall anyone on the internets ever proclaiming that the profound burble over some motherfuckin' snakes on a motherfuckin' plane was ever going to be anything more than a fun afternoon watching Samuel L. Jackson do his thang.

Although Connecticut and Hollywood are a continent apart, the two events speak volumes about the capriciousness of the blog culture.

Lieberman's boomerang reminds us that voters represent a meager percentage of the total populace — and that bloggers are an even tinier subset of that group. Consequently, what appears to be a coast-to-coast juggernaut on a 17-inch monitor is, in the real world, simply an elaborate PC-to-PC chain letter — enthusiastic, but not necessarily the national mindset.

“There isn't much point in detailing the chest thumping of the various blognut extremists,” wrote Time's Joe Klein in his analysis of the Lamont victory. “Their reach is minuscule.”

For those who think Klein is underestimating the power of the blog, I have four words: Howard Dean for president.

But it is the underwhelming response to Snakes that reveals the real peril in relying on bloggers to take the nation's pulse.

“There were a lot of inflated expectations on this picture, with the Internet buzz,” New Line's David Tuckerman told The New York Times after Snakes' lukewarm bow. “But it basically performed like a normal horror movie.”

There are multiple conflations here, misapprehensions within misapprehensions. Chief among them is the notion that Joe Klein has anything to say worth taking seriously. The fact that Howard Dean did as well as he did almost exclusively via internets support says almost as much about the sick paradigm at hand as the fact that the corporate media were able to fuck Dean raw just by playing the same stupid three-second clip over and over and fucking over again.

The idea that there is some sort of correlation between Lieberman's primary defeat and Snakes' net-marketing (some of which New Line itself undoubtedly had a hand in at some middle stage at the very least) is retarded, frankly. The only people that had any investment, emotional or otherwise, in Snakes on a Plane work for New Line Cinema. That is a difference on an order of magnitude from people connecting and working together to utilize the democratic institutions at hand, in order to create sensible change. That such a tremendous difference completely passes by Kluger explains a lot about why he thinks it's a good thing that he uses Joey Klein as a reference.

But this is not about Joe Lieberman, nor is it about Snakes. What it is about is how once again, a craven, dickless utensil of the corporate media obliges his low standing by bashing those darned nutroots. How tiresome. How stupid.

How hypocritical. Because, you see, Kluger is happy to inform us that he writes for Huffington Post, which is simply a blog for famous people, which I suppose sort of gives it a revenue model. Kluger also writes for a "newspaper" which, like all dead-tech dinosaurs desperately seeking new-millenium relevance, has a blog page of its own, featuring hard-nosed fact-filled looks at American Idol updates and such.

And, you know, it's not as if the vaunted mainstream media -- including Kluger's own paper -- didn't just get its collective face rubbed in John Mark Karr's hoax shit.

In the 12 frantic days between his arrest in Bangkok and his release after DNA testing in Boulder, Colo., John Mark Karr was linked to JonBenet Ramsey's slaying by his public confession, handwriting and an especially eerie connection: The letters "SBTC" found on a ransom note at the crime scene in 1996 seemed to match a phrase Karr had inscribed in a high school yearbook 23 years ago.
Until DNA testing failed to put Karr at the scene, the other evidence looked "a whole lot worse for Karr," says James Cohen, who teaches criminal law at Fordham University in New York City. "You could see it being used to try and possibly to convict someone who turns out to be a false confessor."

Some criminal law specialists say that even before the DNA test, the confession, handwriting and "SBTC" were weak links in the case against Karr, 41.

Well fucking duh, and you know who was saying so from the git-go? Those silly rah-rah bloggers. "Serious" news orgs were breathlessly camped outside LAX for most of Karr's extradition flight back from Thailand, regaling us with newsy exploits of prawns and champagne. Because nothing's more newsworthy than knowing what some sick fuck is eating on a 12-hour flight, right? Indeed, even falsely characterizing Ned Lamont as some silly rich-boy dilettante in over his head -- unlike, say, George W. Bush -- took a back seat to two weeks' worth of spelunking Karr's pervert ass. They couldn't even be bothered to investigate anything in Boulder.

The whole thing reminded me of William F. Nolan's classic short story The Strange Case of Mr. Pruyn, right from the start, even though unlike the eponymous character in the short story, Karr really didn't commit this particular crime, though it's likely he'll end up convicted of something else somewhere. But like Pruyn, Karr got some sort of frisson from the act of confession, of dangling himself in danger's way, tantalizing and gulling the cops with his tidbits, all along knowing the ultimate evidential demurral of provable guilt.

Except in this case, the perp not only baited and bagged the law enforcement professionals, but also the "professional" journamalistas, colleagues of smug little pricks like Bruce Kluger. People who get paid to sneer and snicker at the inherent silliness of the unwashed rabble trying to make an actual difference, while they get led around by their dicks for two weeks by a piece of shit child molester. And now they're all trying to straighten their ties and look dignified and such, as if they meant to do that shit.

To steal an old Hitchens line, some people never learn, but then, some people never intend to. In the meantime, these tools need to internalize the fact that corporate employment does not automatically confer legitimacy and seriousness. The people who went and supported the grass-roots efforts for Ned Lamont were serious, informed, dedicated, purposeful -- and they did it for reasons other than a paycheck. And this little chump sees fit only to shit on them, their ideals, and their efforts -- and, to add dumb insult to slight injury, lamely attempt to conflate all that with a viral meme for a silly summer movie that, without internets buzz, probably wouldn't have even gotten made in the first place.

On the other hand, here's a fine example of how employees of corporate media organizations (aka "professional journalists") behaved themselves over the past two weeks:


Now let's hear again from these unserious little pissants about the silly nutroots. If the corporate media peer-reviewed themselves and each other even half as rigorously as the blogosphere does, people like Bruce Kluger and Rita Cosby (and sadly, many others) would be asking us if we want fries with that.