2005-03-23 10:59![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineI could make a meta-rant about second hand rantpreciation, decrying ranting as a dying art that's falling into disuse because fewer and fewer are shouldering the ranting burden and serving as a sort of socio-something shorthand for the ranting public. Do we have a modern Jonathan Swift or Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce, not merely willing and able to lay open the public consciousness with an incisive bit of rhetoric, but who is actually in a position where their rantings would actually be a blip on the public consciousness?
If everyone ranted, someone would have to notice, wouldn't they? Barstool prophets and armchair quarterbacks and barbershop demagogues. . . they're not gone, they're just not famous.
I realize that the assholes-that-be, the powers that actually affect public discourse, don't pay attention to the cogent rantings of the digerati, they'd much rather spoonfeed the public mouthpieces that rant to the passive mass-holes (limbaugh, o'reilly, hannity & colmes, ad fucking nauseam) to disseminate their ideology of nonthinking nonrantitude and claim that their hands are clean.
Two kids in "Ender's Game" shaped global policy by bitching prolifically on the net - yeah, it's ludicrous bullshit. But it's a start.
Nobody would be more surpised than I would be if something I ranted about became widely read and a subject of discussion (or resulted in a visit from the SS in the dead of night for my seditious rantings).
I like reading when others rant well, regardless of whether or not I agree, disagree, or give a shit. I hope that my own heated bloviating is similarly received. But to make change, it needs to go beyond the ripples in the puddle of our circle of acquaintences. We need to throw stones into a larger pool to start making waves. Maybe someone will hurl a meteor into the ocean and send a cleansing wave across the political moraine that gets ever stickier and more pervasive.
Maybe that comet will be me. Or you.
Rant on.
If everyone ranted, someone would have to notice, wouldn't they? Barstool prophets and armchair quarterbacks and barbershop demagogues. . . they're not gone, they're just not famous.
I realize that the assholes-that-be, the powers that actually affect public discourse, don't pay attention to the cogent rantings of the digerati, they'd much rather spoonfeed the public mouthpieces that rant to the passive mass-holes (limbaugh, o'reilly, hannity & colmes, ad fucking nauseam) to disseminate their ideology of nonthinking nonrantitude and claim that their hands are clean.
Two kids in "Ender's Game" shaped global policy by bitching prolifically on the net - yeah, it's ludicrous bullshit. But it's a start.
Nobody would be more surpised than I would be if something I ranted about became widely read and a subject of discussion (or resulted in a visit from the SS in the dead of night for my seditious rantings).
I like reading when others rant well, regardless of whether or not I agree, disagree, or give a shit. I hope that my own heated bloviating is similarly received. But to make change, it needs to go beyond the ripples in the puddle of our circle of acquaintences. We need to throw stones into a larger pool to start making waves. Maybe someone will hurl a meteor into the ocean and send a cleansing wave across the political moraine that gets ever stickier and more pervasive.
Maybe that comet will be me. Or you.
Rant on.
