Henninger on Bloggers

Daniel Henninger wants to scare you away from blogs.

Kevin Ray Underwood, the repressed Oklahoma cannibal, kept an Internet "blog" of his compulsions for years before kidnapping and killing a 10-year-old neighbor last week. On his blog, Kevin wrote a lot about Kevin: "The reason for my lackluster social life is a severe case of social anxiety and depression. I'm on medication now, which helps a lot. Well, in ways."

I don't think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to. They've got the Web. Now they can share.
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In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue.
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Disinhibited vocabulary is now the normal way people talk on cable TV, such as on "The Sopranos" or in stand-up comedy. On the Web and on the street, more people than not talk like this now. What once was isolated is covering everything. No wonder the major non-cable networks are suing to overturn the FCC's decency rulings; they, too, want the full benefits of normalized disinhibition. Hip-hop, currently our most popular music form, is a well-defined world of disinhibition.

Then there's politics. On the Huffington Post yesterday, there were more than 600 "comments" on Karl Rove and the White House staff shake-up. "Demoted my --- the snake is still in the grass." "He should be demoted to Leavenworth." "Rove is Bush's Brain, and without him, our Decider-in-Chief wouldn't know how to wipe his own ----."

From a primary post on the same subject on the Daily Kos, widely regarded as one of the most influential blogging sites in Democratic politics now: "I don't give a ----. Karl Rove belongs in shackles." "A group of village whores have taken a day off to do laundry."

Intense language like this used to be confined to construction sites and corner bars. Now it is normal discourse on Web sites, the most popular forums for political discussion. Much of this is new. Politics is a social endeavor. The Web is nothing if not "social." But the blogosphere is also the product not of people meeting, but venting alone at a keyboard with all the uninhibited, bat-out-of-hell hyperbole of thinking, suggestion and expression that this new technology seems to release.

At the risk of enabling, does the Internet mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people?

Henninger offers very little to counter his implied point that cannibals and left-wing screamers are typical of the blogosphere. Obviously he hopes his audience is still unfamiliar with the medium. Disregarding the hopefully small niche of cannibal blogging, I suspect the deranged left simply seems to be everywhere because they make themselves more unforgettable than the strength of their ideas would seemingly allow. (And I suspect that every real-world left wing screamer out there is responsible for probably several dozen online identities - but that's another issue for the psychiatric world to explore.)

By the way, if the Blogospheric far-Left responds as Henninger likely anticipates he'll have more than enough material for a follow up column. Let's see if they can remain symptom-free long enough to ignore him.

Update: It occurs to me that a single commenter using different names is quite obviously responsible for the bulk of the later comments on the Washington Post blog that we wrote about here. (Since I'm no Psychiatrist I'll refrain from attempting to diagnose his or her mental state.) And please note - the same Washington Post that devoted a front-page article to highlighting the unbalanced rants of the blogospheric far left also hosts a blog where you can read some of the worst examples of just that in the comments section.

It might be interesting if the Wall Street Journal offered a comment feature like the LA Times and Washington Post now do. They could discover who their readers are too.

By the way, with very few exceptions I've found the commenters here to be insightful, a welcome contribution to the discussion, and usually better informed about some aspect of a given situation than I am. Given their numerical advantage this last bit is no surprise, but each confirmation (pro or con my own position) of the first two points reaffirms my commitment to keep doing what I do.