Speaking of bloggers and the DLC: it has come to my attention that people out there, especially those of you who don’t wash very often, have been doing the unthinkable—insulting Lee Siegel. Just because he called attention, in his characteristically measured and sagacious manner, to the populist crudity, character-assassination, and emotional stupefaction one finds on blogs. I mean, really. All Siegel did was describe the blogosphere as “hard fascism with a Microsoft face,” and people started calling him names!
“Moron"; “Wanker” (a favorite blogofascist insult, maybe because of the similarity between the most strident blogging and masturbating); and “Asshole” have been the three most common polemical gambits. A reactor even had the gall to refer to me as a “conservative."
Ouch! I hate it when reactors go nuclear. And as you all know, this blog doesn’t like it when you crude blogoIslamofascists call people “morons.” (About “wanker” we remain agnostic, and we note that Siegel responds to the insult by accusing his critics of . . . wanking!) So I’m here to say that this kind of thing really has to stop. Now.
Seriously: people should not call Lee Siegel names. Remember, Lee Siegel is one of the most fatuous and self-regarding writers in the English-speaking world, and as such, he is ripe for parody. Why, from Jon Stewart to Stephen Colbert to the Witty Leftists of blogofascism, Siegel has been flailing at people considerably more talented than he for months now. Occasionally he reminds his critics, whom he suavely calls “pissants,” that
I was writing for magazines like Dissent, The Nation, and Radical History Review while you were still worrying whether it was safe to walk around the Upper West Side at night. (Maybe you still do.)
That is so street. Why, it positively reeks of authenticity! It is at once leftish and dangeral—a potent combination in any neighborhood.
So please, please don’t get angry at Lee Siegel. Don’t descend to angry name-calling. Instead, use the hard Microfascisoft power of the blogofascisphere to parody him! It’s more fun, and, most important, it’s more sophisticated. And though, as you well know, this blog is loath to repeat itself, quote itself, or repeat itself, we’ll repost our Siegel parody from early March just to get things started. Take it away, parody Lee!
[...]
full at -
<http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/against_blogofascism/>
..
.d.
--------- The 21st century's mightiest blogo-techno-cryto-orgasmo-fascist!