Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

By now most of you will probably have already heard that our fine leader flipped an LJ'er the bird recently. For anyone who hadn't heard already: upon seeing a protest sign by the side of the road in East Lampeter, PA, bush gave the one-finger salute to the protesters, one of whom was jiveturky.

On a mailing list (yes, I asked permission to quote offlist), David Epstein wrote about this incident:

I could picture LBJ doing that--and I would have enjoyed it, coming from him.
 
Profane gestures and comments, in and of themselves, don't make my list of reasons for holding Bush and Cheney in thorough contempt. Of course, when they're combined with false piety, they do seem pretty damning.

Whether this is a) a Big Deal, b) stupid to bother talking about, c) just horribly amusing, d) disappointing, or e) whatever, I do think Bush made a mistake here. After the flack Cheney has gotten for saying, "fuck you" on the floor of the Senate, Bush had to have known that in our country's current mood this wouldn't go over terribly well -- at the very least (and most likely) that it would be a wedge for extensive public mocking by those who oppose him, and could possibly result in newspaper editorials about how much dignity we should expect of our President.

I think his mistake was that he thought a small handful of anonymous roadside protesters without any press with them didn't matter. But he forgot about the blogosphere.

I don't know how many LJ-friends jiveturky had on 8 July -- as I write this the number is 66. Sixty six readers sounds like a pretty unimportant person media-wise, doesn't it? But in the time since I saw that entry and decided I wanted to comment on it, and the time I got around to doing so, I've seen several -- between a half dozen and a dozen -- friends of mine post pointers to it already, and the comments on that entry run to eleven "pages". And it's been linked from at least one site that I get the impression is a "major blogging site", Metafilter (where PrinceValium remarked, "I haven't heard so many politicians tell me to go fuck myself since Joycelyn Elders was around"),so how many more people will see it there?

According to Livejournal Connect, I'm three LJ-friend-hops from jiveturky, and I'm guessing that my mentioning the story will propogate it to maybe a couple dozen people who hadn't seen it already, a few of whom will care enough about it (even if just from amusement) to propogate it elsewhere -- in their own journals, over coffee in their office, in email to their relatives, whatever. So it's already reaching far more than the original 66 readers plus my own 200 ... but the number of people seing it in the blogosphere isn't what makes it a mistake for Bush, for even if a few thousand of us read of it here, that's not a lot of people.

No, the thing of it is that "real" journalists -- by which I mean people with enough readers to actually matter -- read blogs too. [EDIT: As pointed out in a comment (thank you aliza250), some bloggers are journalists-taken-seriously and vice-versa. I grossly understated my case.] It's not like they go mining huge numbers of blogs looking for stories (well maybe), but some journalists read some blogs, and ifwhen a story gets to one of the blogs a mainstream journalist reads, there it is. So by flipping the bird in front of a blogger, Bush might as well have done it in front of a reporter's brother-in-law. If it doesn't get reported in The Washington Post and made fun of by Leno, O'Brian, and Letterman, it'll be because folks didn't think it was important enough or funny enough, not because "the press" weren't standing at that spot on the roadside. (So whether it turns out to be a big mistake or a wee mistake will depend on whether the big boys decide to run with it or not. But they'll have heard about it by now.)

I'm waiting for Leno to mention it, but I often miss The Tonight Show so I'll have to hope someone mentions it where I'll see it if Leno does use it.

Thinking about how jiveturky's story has rippled out got me thinking about my own journal. I've got roughly two hundred readers -- a few on my "friend-of" list are serial adders and a few probably don't have time to read all their friends every day, but I've also got some friends not on LJ who read my journal. Most of what I write neither deserves nor requires a larger audience than that (some doesn't even deserve that much, but I'm not complaining). But when I luck into something important, moving, or memorable, it'll get quoted or linked to, and even if the people five-contacts-removed don't wind up remembering my name (and if it's something I've found and linked to rather than something I've written, the folks two contacts away won't even see my name), the ideas have a chance to be heard by more than two hundred. It's not about "fame", it's about being heard. And with the rise of the blog, all our voices have gotten louder.