The Unapologetic Mexican -- best blog ever?

By Heraclitus

I've been citing and linking to The Unapologetic Mexican quite a bit lately. It's a great blog, covering a wide range of subjects, and the author, Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez, is an amazing writer and is almost unbelievably prolific (and he seems to proofread all his posts, something I don't haev time for). Anyways, today he has a great post up about bloggers and such, particularly the attempt to discredit bloggers by discussing them as if they're some kind of horrible creatures who will come at night to take your babies (yes, it's another one of those navel-gazing posts).

I personally am not one of those people who fetishizes the word "netroots," and acts as if something magical will happen if you say it or apply it to a particular opinion or action. I also dislike and distrust the idea of progressive blogs forming some kind of a movement, complete with order from the top and the expectation that we'll all march in lockstep. Nevertheless, I am somewhat hopeful about what blogs can accomplish (in large part because they are so obviously resistant to that kind of discipline and homogenization). And, in any case, I really like what Nez has to say about bloggers and the precious viewings-with-horror we're getting from the professional political and media classes.

"There's an extremism, there's an anger." [insert chattering teeth sound clip]

Amigo, are you sure you're not just finally hearing the constituency? I mean that's what I think. Because us out here in the street have long known of the divide between the packaged, glossy, polite world of Professional Bullshit that is media discourse and Propa Guvmint Presentation—and that which is our corner coffee-shop banter, or bar dialogue, or meeting of citizens at Spanish Class, or friends talking through a smoking break outside a night class, or outside a 12-step meeting. We all know that the conversations you and I are having are NOT the ones they are having on TV and in the halls of government. Isn't it a given? But maybe on the inside of the Washington bubble, it's not so clear. Maybe through the pearly distortion of that well-cooled Bubble, Bloggers look like frothy, unhinged beasts!...

You don't need to know much beyond BLOGGERZ are people using a tool called a COMPUTER. All you need to understand ahora is that We are the People, and We are Pissed. We are pissed off about things when they go wrong and nobody wants to act like a righteous leader about it. We know when we've been lied to and used, and no amount of wig-powdering will convince us that stuttering government officials know better than us on this. We get pissed when those lies hurt us as a nation, and continue to cost everyone money, money taken from programs that help people. We get pissed off when reports sneak out that tell us you are poisoning the world and humans with spent uranium weapons and outlawed chemical weapons. We get freakin crazy pissed when our own government wants to pretend it has one iota of credibility left in a sane world and use that presumed credibility to launch yet even more war.

We don't want war. We don't find it glorious. We don't find killing soothing to our sense of National Security. That has nothing to do with our Blogginess. This is just because we are not Halliburton or Bush or Cheney; we are the People, and what we really want are clean skies for our selves, and for our children to breathe from and gaze into. What we really want is not to drop bombs on wedding parties or fleeing nomads, but to make sure there is healthy food for ourselves and our children to eat. We want a world that doesn't hate us or our families because we are affiliated with America. We want to be proud of what our country stands for. We don't want to cringe in shame in the face of international scrutiny. We don't want war and we don't want to talk nicely about it when it is done without our permission and with lies and when talking nicely has done nothing for the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF HUMAN BEINGS WHO HAVE DIED IN AN UNWARRANTED WAR and all because a handful of Stupid White Men™ wanted to get their I-rocks off and surge all over the Middle East.

But y'oughtta brace, pals. Because this is not the end of hearing unpleasantly energized and informed constituencies. More and more and more voices will be heard as technology gets cheaper and cheaper. And that's really the least of it, isn't it. Because just like the soldier who came home and read up on the Internet to form his anti-war opinion, more and more people educate themselves on more and more aspects of our nation's involvement in the world's flux of cause and effect, and that which you fear the most—an informed and vocal citizenry—now grows beyond your ability to stop it. I know you'll try, though. Even now you shriek behind your growing pangs.