Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

It won’t happen today or tomorrow, maybe as early as next week. Whenever it happens, though, I’d really like to put WLIR’s focus where I’d intended it to be at the start, as encapsulated in the slogan (or whatever Blogger calls those things -- blog description, probably): Catching liberals in the act of doing things right. That is, while I’ll occasionally (maybe often) continue to indulge my Dark Side (disgust at right-wing politics, perverse sense of humor, slack-jawed horror at random bits of news), I want also to spend more time pointing out the things -- news, blog entries, whatever -- which can:

• give liberals hope for the future, and comfort in the present;
• reassure liberals that they are neither crazy nor misguided nor outside the mainstream; and maybe
• introduce liberals to some ideas and people they couldn’t have encountered otherwise.

I’ve got some ideas for how to do this -- establishing regularly scheduled features, a few times a month, with particular slants, so that site visitors can know what to come here for (even if not for the splendor of my prose). But, as I say, it will take me a week or so to start putting those into effect.

In the meantime, a couple of things I wanted to mention.

Principally, I’m grateful to have been found by a few readers so far. When you first start out with a public blog, it’s tempting to be seduced by the success of the Biggies (e.g. Eschaton, Daily Kos) -- seduced into imagining that you, too, will change the world (ideally, for the better!) and be sought out by tens of thousands of readers. It’s not unlike the seduction of writing professionally (which I have done as the author of a novel, a handful of technical books, and a monthly column for a leading tech site). And the potential for disappointment is roughly the same. But if you keep your head on straight, you’ll understand that these things take time. If you build it, they will not necessarily come right away; while you must first build it, true, you must then keep at it, renovating, refurnishing, populating all the rooms with lively, sensitive, intelligent conversation (even if it all takes the form of monologues at first). And have faith that if you do that, and do it regularly and well, eventually they (whoever they are) will come.

(Besides, it’s not just the building of an audience -- ideally, a community -- that will come. It’s also the finding of your own voice, your own take on events and opinions, your own “schtick.” I'm a neurotic performer, in truth: much better to make the occasional gaffe while almost no one is looking, noticing it yourself and figuring out how to avoid it in the future, than to fall flat on your face when all the seats are filled.)

So to those of you who have stopped by and let me know it, via comments, thank you very much. I hope WLIR will give you reason to return.

Second, I’ve been surprised by the way WLIR has developed in even the short time I’ve been doing it.

My original idea, see -- before I came up with the “catching liberals. . . doing things right” concept -- was to build a blog around an entirely fictitious country. (No, it never got to the point where the faux country even had a name. If anyone else wants to shepherd this particularly weird inspiration into reality, be my guest.) A key element, as I imagined it, would be the periodic issuance of quasi-official edicts, for instance, prohibiting one bit or another of right-wing lunacy, or banning its proponents. (Exiling Ms. Coulter to Antarctica, say, where she could flourish in a frigid environment more amenable to her political metabolism -- and one where, I might add, she could take special comfort in the stark blacks-and-whites of the local fauna.)

So I shared this concept of Liberalandia, or whatever the hell it would have been called, with Mrs. FLJerseyBoy. She loves me very much (as I do her), and so she agreed that it had merit. But also because she loves me that much, in the strangely stiff features of her face and in the long drawn-out “Yeeeeeesss...” with which she responded, I sensed just a whiff -- the merest hint -- of, umm, dubiety. Perplexity. Skepticism. Mrs. FLJerseyBoy is very smart about just about everything (although I do know computers better, and doesn’t that make me hot shit?), and in equal proportions opinionated, and so I recognized that the operative word in the phrase “lukewarm praise” was not “praise.”

Nothing of that original Duchy of Grand Fenwick idea, in any case, made its way into WLIR. Well, actually one component did: the informal blogroll at the left, with all the sections labeled Ministry of This or That. My thinking was that these sections would represent the Supreme Leader’s cabinet, advising him on matters of great (or otherwise) importance. (If you’re confused about why a given site is in one category and not another, by the way, just hover your mouse cursor over the section heading.) And that survived for the strangest of reasons, which was that I liked the sound of “Ministry of Ministries.”

Which leads me to the main surprise I’ve had so far: how much attention, relatively, I’ve paid to faith (as opposed to politics, policy, elections, the strategic and tactical ins-and-outs of being a liberal in Bushworld, and so on). About a dozen postings so far (the most recent, earlier today) fall into that category. I’m not sure what to make of this, am just pointing it out. I’ve been a fitful church attendee, Lutheran/Methodist, and don’t AFAIK devote much actual conversation, or that matter thought, to such issues... A puzzle, y'know? Maybe I'm just getting old. Intimations of mortality, et cetera.

[Link] posted by FLJerseyBoy @ 1:54 PM