The Sunday Cartoons
Last Sunday (July 3rd) cartoonist Gary Trudeau wrote a
Doonesbury strip about Bloggers.
A number of bloggers have taken offense but it's
Mostly Cajun who delivers the goods:
Oh, not THAT much freedom! On Gary Trudeau
Okay, I’m a day or two behind on talking about Garry Trudeau’s Sunday comic strip.
If you don’t read the Sunday comics, he takes a sophomoric swipe at bloggers. Here’s a link to his Sunday strip.
His character asks the question, "Who reads this stuff?" Well, in my case, a hundred or so folks drop by every day to visit and read what I have to say. Most of you are like me, just plain ol’ folks out here in the flyover country. I’m a lower -tier blogger. I wish I was one of the big dogs, but I don’t have the inclination to devote the effort needed to climb out of the lower levels of the blogosphere. But a hundred folks... Let’s think about that number in terms of traditional neighborhood activism. A hundred adults is a pretty decent little sphere to influence... I don’t delude myself that MY voice alone is going to change the country or the world, but it’s ANOTHER of many voices that will , as Mark Twain said, note that "taffy is being distributed."
Trudeau purports to ask a hypothetical "blogger", "Isn’t blogging basically for angry, semi-employed losers who are too untalented or too lazy to get real jobs in journalism?"
THAT little line got my hackles up. Let’s look at it one piece at a time.
"Angry": Damned right I’m angry. I’m angry at our government becoming a kleptocracy. I’m angry at the people who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11 and I’m angry at the obstructionists who stand in the way of prosecuting the war against those killers and their supporters. I’m angry at a mainstream media which tells only one side of the news to support their obstructionist views. I’m angry at a court system which apparently ignored 200 years of Constitution. I’m angry. About a lot of things. Including this elitist attitude of Trudeau’s.
"Semi-employed": I have been continuously employed since 1968. Most of my fellow bloggers are employed. Some of them work in academe. Some of them work in law. A few are retired after being employed, and some are stay at home moms.
"Losers": If by "loser" you mean that I don’t hobnob in the lofty environs of the media Left, then yes, I’m a "loser." Me and 62 million other "losers" just re-elected the President. I regularly "contribute" five figures worth of taxes to the government, and I buy the silly-assed paper that puts Trudeau’s comic strip up, thus paying his salary.
"Untalented": I can say, at the expense of self-promotion, that I am at the TOP of my field, in a real job which demands real results, not the stroke of an editor’s pen. A bad day at my job results in very concrete and tangible results: The lights go out, the motors don’t run, things blow up. Trudeau’s bad day might get him a few letters or at worst, a paper might drop his strip. There are many "talents" in the world. That I can write (almost) daily is but one of them. And after reading Trudeau and other liberals, I think that I and many more bloggers do at least as good a job of writing. And this is only a hobby.
Mostly Cajun then goes on to dismember the "Real jobs in journalism", the market value, the Free Press and the final swipe re: Cat Food.
The Mainstream Media still fail to see the big picture...
Posted by DaveH at July 5, 2005 8:44 PM