Abraham Lincoln:

The laziest blogger in the world.

Day Three at the Big Orange County Fair lead me by the hand through a scattering of colorful, pointillistic bits straining to become a Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

There are some pieces of blue sky, part of Digby’s face, kittens, candidates, some grass, scattered across the three-dimensional veldt of a dozen breakout rooms and grand halls.

Toilets-cum-chatrooms and room parties.

In-groups and out-groups.

The button-festooned and the buttoned-down.

Full of people trying to figuring this blogging thing out.

This Roshoman technology.

And to grapple with it, we (myself included) disinter Descartes and begin dissecting and deconstructing. What does it do? How does it work? How can it work better? How can it work better for me?

OK, what does it do again?

Coming at the mysterious, black monolith from every angle and sight-line with a necessary-but-insufficient specificity – How can I harness this plow-horse to cut furrows in my fields? – accompanied by a conspicuous silence from the Big Picture viewing gallery.

Not to pick on them, but Labor makes a good example of this phenomenon, speaking many times of having to “get the word out”.

OK…to whom?

Who is it that you are trying to talk to? That you don’t already talk to? And with what intent? Do you want to deliver monological sermons about wages and benefits, or Are You Ready For Some Fucking Football?

For something loud and cranky and uncontrollable, that may veer wildly into issues of class, race, fairness or the stupid, alienating shit Labor does sometimes?

If not, stick with newsletters and websites, because this is not your magic bullet.

Because there is no magic bullet.

In the passing along of received wisdom – much of it valuable and interesting – over and over, the new-new blogger establishment tries to extrude the new-new thing into old media sausage skins and it keeps bursting out and blobbing all over the pretty paradigms with emergent purposes and promise that just do not fit.

They have run bang up against the limitations of time and resources that govern good intentions. When you have limited choices, there is little to judge. But when you have real power, people are going to judge how you use it. The choices you make.

So what choice are we making? Are we broadening or constricting? Are we reaching out to the weird kids under the bleachers, or lapsing into lunch room castes?

What choice should we make? And how will we know when the establishment is moving in the direction of excellence?

And here is where there is a story to tell...

So what do the disparate threads of blogger high-school cliquishness, the overwhelming preponderance of the male and the melanin-poor here in Chicago, the needs of Labor, Net Neutrality and so forth have to do with one another?

Why are they all under this big, weird roof?

Actually, they have equally to do with each other, and to do with the habits of the hands on the tiller. There really is a story here, but I have only caught little tumbleweeding wisps of it blowing through the halls.

So let's start with Labor as an entry point into wider waters.

The way they can help themselves is to forget about “getting the message out” because the people you desperately need to speak to don’t blog, don’t lurk, might not own a computer, very probably don’t have broadband, and don’t give much of damn about your message.

Because the people whose world you are trying enter are the working poor or the just-plain-poor; the real people in the real world that really do most need the power that a Rationally Organized Labor Movement could give them. People who, if treated with respect and peer-to-peer, would probably most adamantly carry your message, because for them the struggle is about good jobs for themselves and their kids.

And to do that, you need to reach them where they are, as they are, with conversation. If not, you will be perceived of as arriving on their doorsteps just like Americans have arrived in Third World countries for decades: We come in, make nice with the natives for seven minutes, yadda-yadda, start sneaking looks at our watches, and then out comes our shopping list.

And because these are not stupid people, it becomes quickly and painfully clear that we are really there to extract what we want from them -- oil, land, gold, dues -- and to badger them into agreeing that its for their own good.

Of course good organizers know this, which it why Labor could do worse than, say, throwing some money into “blogganizers”™ in the neighborhood where your Movement’s future currently lives and dies: because the moms and dads and churches and coaches in those blighted and left behind places are the natural constituencies of the Labor Movement and the Democratic Party.

They are hard-working Americans who want a better future for their kids. Who vote for you, but will not carry your water because you do not speak to them where they are, as they are, in a language they respect.

And to do that, you need ubiquitous, broadband internet access. To do that you need net neutrality.

Ah! A theme emerges...

To do that, you need cohorts of smart, straight-talking bloggers of color. Hispanic bloggers. Women bloggers. African-American bloggers.

And not under orders to hammer your message door-to-door like they’re pushing tin on commission. Because for this to work, you need to get comfortable with them catalyzing conversations on- and off-line far, far away from the Home Office. Conversations that may or may not lead to a discussion of wagesandbenefitsandNAFTA, and someone signing on the dotted line.

You need movement-thinkers not narrowcasters, which means getting your brethren and sisteren in the Bakers Food & Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) to lay on a second shift and crank out a lot more product, because if you want to succeed you will be casting a lot of bread upon the waters.

This is, I believe, part of the answer to why blogging desperately needs to expand into those communities and not wait until some critical mass of rage against the GOP machine is reached among the working poor as it was among (mostly) white (mostly) tech-comfy (mostly) guys. (This was expounded as the Serious Market Theory for why the Left Blogosphere came into being, why it is saturated, and and why, sorry, there is no room for you little fella.)

Part of the answer to "Why broadband?", and why the high school hierarchy knife-fights about traffic and popularity is, in the end, trifling.

For all the Flickr, Twitter, SMS, SMBD, FeedToob, and ScratchnSNFF widgets, for all the talk of ”Content is King” and the lone blogman being dead, for all blogrolling-versus-linking punch-ups, in one panel after another people (good people) slip or sprint towards the monkey bars and refrigerator-box forts of the old hierarchy.

Listen through one door and your hear Labor speaking of the glory days of radio and how they have to get into this new technology to “get their message out”.

Their impulse is understandable and correct -- they do not want to be left behind and pulverized by yet another technology revolution like they were with television -- but let me repeat: Out to whom?

Always that is a question that goes unspoken and unanswered (except maybe in the Lurker Caucus :-)

Kids do not lay out on the roof on warm, summer nights, listening to the crystal WiFi set they built in their garage, hoping to pick up a signal from the Big City.

Families do not huddle around the broadband Philco, listening earnestly to the staticky news from Over There.

And yet that one-to-many model is the one we keep falling back on because that is what we understand.

Until it becomes the $.99 paperback book you can stuff in your back pocket, every new technology is a shiny technology, beloved by engineers and professional kerners, and feared/avoided/grudgingly-tolerated by most normal people. But for all the flashdazzle and wheedoggie of the intertoobs, blogging is just democracy by the job-lot, delivered at the speed of light.

So we have the working-poor and the outright-poor to whom we not only have genuine moral obligations, but who are also – still and again and always -- the great, undiscovered salvific of Progressive Labor, Party, Movement and Nation.

And in our hands we find the greatest tool ever created to let them finally speak as they choose.

This geographic-independent, caste-independent, language-independent, capital-independent, bi-directional communication miracle, and fuck you if the unwashed track their feet over your nice, clean paradigm.

In the end, this is why the big pie fight, over A-listers, diversity, tech, and territoriality has a much larger and more vital meaning. And why, in the end, it will always be craft and sincerity, quality and heart and how well you back up your fine, inclusive words with sweaty action that will win this long war to save our beloved country from its fears, bigotries and its internal enemies that feast on that darkness.

Because for all the talk about how Content Roolz (which does have its merits), nobody bitches that Abraham Lincoln doesn’t crank out new posts every day.

Hell, let’s face it, that lazy, lone blogging fuck hasn’t posted new content in over 140 years.

And yet for some reason his shit is still being read, linked to and commented on.

Also he refuses to blogroll me.

Bastard!