Meditations at The Corner

(Does this count, Jim?)

All the new blogging is about class.
In this it resembles all the old blogging.
The intimation, for example, that each distinguishing feature erases
the peculiar virtue of the common man. That the brown-
faced politician sipping away at the foam
of his latte is, by his choice of beverage,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of egalitarian populism. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the charge of elitism corresponds,
we might as well give up on signification.
We blogged about it incessantly and in the words
of Jonah Goldberg, there was a thin layer of hysteria, a tone
almost frantic. After a while I understood that,
blogging this way, everything dissolves: democracy,
war, peace, weapons of mass destruction, Left and Right. This was a man
I used to read and I remember how, scanning
my eyes across his rambling prose sometimes,
I felt a violent shudder at his carelessness
like a thirst for meaning, for my philosophical hours
with their rhetorical clarity, silly references to Hegel,
crowded seminars where we discuss the bearded German man
called Frege. If only we had listened to him.
Reference, he wrote, because each word is full
of endless senses. It must have been the same in Jena.
But I remember so much, the way each post contradicted the other,
the things I wrote that set him off, how bitter
he seemed. There are moments when the blogosphere’s voluminous
words bear the mark of semantic rigor.
But such meaninglessness, those midday posts,
writing elitist, elitist, elitist.

P.S. For an attempt at clarity, see Helen.

Filed under: philosophy, politics