Why morganBlog?

On occasion I blog on the Huffington Post, but I've been feeling the need for a forum all my own to share thoughts with the world. Hence morganBlog. Everything I write for HuffPost will be linked to here, but I want to use this blog as a way to think things through, especially political issues.

Blogs are weird things. They can be forums for people to speak to the ether and thereby for self-reflection. For others blogs are sources of news that traditional outlets wouldn't report or are too slow to report. They can embrace multiple media simultaneously.

The impact of blogging on political discussion has been widely acknowledged for the way it levels the differences between the lone citizen armed with a few digital devices and a huge media empire. CNN has embraced this with its iReport concept.

But of course the shift is bigger than that. We have been freed to a large extent from the institutionalized delivery of news. We are much more literally consumers of news now. Outlets like the Huffington Post filter out stories that their constituency won't be interested in. It's not like this didn't happen before, but with an ever-wider range of sources for news we are freer than ever to ignore points of view we don't like.

Blogs have unleashed a contradictory set of forces therefore. On the one hand we're freer to consume news as we choose, and on the other, stories and perspectives we were less likely to hear before the advent of blogs has become more likely than ever, so long as we dig around the internet a little.

Making sense of the blogosphere entails, I think, participating in it actively. Not doing so means agreeing to be influenced by an online discussion between millions of participants that interfaces directly with more traditional media and their coverage, and also with politics and cultural developments. Political discourse helps construct and configure the symbols we see and attach to objects all around us. In that sense, blogs perform a political function recognized decades ago by political scientist Murray Edelman:

Politics is for most of us a passing parade of abstract symbols, yet a parade which our experience teaches us to be a benevolent or malevolent force that can be close to omnipotent.

I won't be any more philosophical than to say the interface between virtual blogosphere discussion and real-world political and cultural effects is something of a false juxtaposition. Bloggers shape our experience of political symbols and I hope to occasionally expose some cracks in their "omnipotence."

morganBlog is my experiment in engaging online content for the sake of my self, my friends and family, and for the sake of understanding and influencing in some small ways how people think about contemporary issues. It may ultimately be more of a journal of my thinking and its evolution, and a kind of sketch pad for experiments in the world of New Media, but I hope that you find it interesting, informative, and occasionally provocative. Comment, share, tweet, re-tweet, post to facebook, share on Google reader. With a little dialogue between you and me this space could evolve into something interesting.

A Health Care Town Hall in Milton, MA

On 9/3 I attended a health care town hall in Milton, MA, hosted by Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D). Rather disappointingly he thought that holding a town hall also meant listening to lies about "death panels." It's one thing to accept that people are afraid of those things. But not to take the opportunity to inject some actual facts into discussions about such things struck me as irresponsible. Here are some views of the circus outside.

Reposted: Health Care Reform is the New Gay Marriage

Originally featured on the Huffington Post

I'm going to go out on a limb here. The Tea Baggers are not just a whole bunch of white racists, comments by Janeane Garofalo to the contrary.

I don't at all disagree that racism is a huge factor in all the outrage. Garofalo's point, that if these people were really just concerned about spending they would have been protesting George W. Bush's tax cuts and spending, has merit. Just look at this photo over at Politico.

But I think there's a broader, existential fear here and that racism is but one element of it. There are particularly American elements of this and others related to globalization.

Americans have long had an ambivalent relationship with government, going back to 1787 or even before. We have always contested its very makeup and responsibilities. Not all the colonists wanted independence, then we had the Articles of Confederation. Our Constitution is as much the product of compromise as consensus. The Supreme Court arguably invented its capacity to exercise judicial review. The Civil War pitted South and North against each other and set a fault line that has yet to disappear. Desegregation pitted the Feds against States. The governor of Texas now openly speaks of secession. Today's battle over health care reform and "government takeover" clearly relates -- the Governor's remarks came at one of the now infamous Tea Parties.

Today, the Tea Bagger movement displays new specific fears laid over a pastiche of classic American preoccupations. The race issue in the health care reform debate is, I think, more than just a signal of the unfinished business of racial reconciliation and justice. It is more than a battle over the proper role of government. It's a signal about the broader challenge of preparing an entire country to live in a modern world that departs in significant ways from real and percieved traditions and forms of the status quo.

Our quintessential American troubles regarding race and government meet a world that now easily penetrates the comfort of our local communities. Ironically, this permitted and incited conservative Christians, in reaction to the baudy 1960s, to organize via televangelists and direct-mail campaigns in the 1970s to launch Reagan into office, followed up by the two Bushes. Barack Obama used tools that did the same thing -- using our Facebook pages, our email accounts, our Blackberries and iPhones his campaign got people together in peoples' homes all around the country, gave conference calls to supporters.

Social issues seem to have functioned in much the same way. Gay marriage and our increasingly obvious interconnectedness present threats to traditions and ways of doing things that many of us, though not all of us, think should change. Who could have predicted the existential angst of those whose world seems so threatened by people of the same sex getting married? How could we explain that without recognizing some kind of fear finding its manifestation in an appeal to tradition? In that regard, health reform is the new gay marriage.

The Tea Baggers aren't just a rowdy mob of racists. Their behavior, like that of Joe Wilson, can't simply be explained as racism, even though that's clearly a factor.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/morgan-warners/health-care-reform-is-the_b_286103.html