Dowbrigade

A Boston College student was detained by the Secret Service for taking
pictures of his own campus. The student, Sundeep Sahni, is a member of
the Sikh religion and wears a full turban. In most cases security on
campus is provided by the BC police, but unlucky Sundeep was unaware
that the Secret Service were camped out at BC during the DNC.

Sahni, 21,
said he believes he was singled out because of his appearance. At
one
point
during
the
searches,
he said,
an agent
told
him: "I
don’t want you pulling an Uzi from your turban."

"It was the most humiliating experience of my life," Sahni said.

story and photo from the Boston Globe

During the Democratic Convention the Dowbrigade (seen here with some
of his vegetable friends)
noticed a certain competetive distrust bordering on dislike between the
Bloggers and members of the more traditional media. Yesterday we tried
to understand the reasons the conventional media feel threatened by the
bloggers. Today we would like to address the Blogger’s distrust of old-line
media, and their occasional depiction as the evil empire which Bloggers
must dethrone.

Basically, get over it, Bloggers.  Conventional media is here to
stay. There is no way we can out-report the reporters. They are professionals,
and some of them are really good at what they do. They have
training, experience, and in many cases temperments, which we do not
and probably never will have.

Bloggers are different.  We specialize in Perspective. At an event
like the convention, we take our readers to the site of the news, give
them a texture and context to help them digest the news, let them feel
what it is like to be there.

One of our personal dreams for the maturation of the Blogosphere is
to arrive at a critical mass, a stage at which blogs will be so ubiquitous
that whenever something important, something newsworthy happens on the
planet, there will be a blogger nearby to give us that context, that
personal touch, that raw feed from the source.

Between events, we analyze, ridicule, parody, and recycle what others
write and report.  Often, we can see connections and follow story-trails
which would otherwise remain unexplored. At our best, we can offer a
variety of viewpoints unavailable in the mainstream media.

We will never replace conventional media, nor should we want to.  We
are not competing with them, we are augmenting them. If we find a way
to work together we can make the American people the best informed in
the world.

John Kerry got lucky last night. As a 30-year Boston resident
the Dowbrigade has heard him deliver a lot of speeches. And informal
chats. And press conferences. So we can say with some authority that
he delivers an oratorical gem once in a blue moon.

As unlikely as it may seem, last night there was a rare blue moon hanging
in the sky above the Fleet center.  The first full moon of July
was the 2nd of the month, and so it is one of those months, every three
years or so, when we have TWO full moons. The second one is called a
"blue moon".

That blue moon was shining over our left shoulder like an albino basketball
with acne as we drove our weary way home following Kerry’s stellar acceptance
speech. As we drove, perhaps to stay awake, we turned on a talk radio
station.

A caller named "Gunnar" who was a member of a motorcycle gang and an
elated Kerry supporter, was speculating on the prospects that Kerry issue
a national ruling to abolish motorcycle helmet laws and allow people
to "ride free".

Hey Gunnar, the prospects that Kerry will repeal all helmet laws are
about the same as the prospects that he will repeal the minimum wage
laws.

But the caller got me thinking. The Democratic Party has nominated a
guy who rides a chopper.  A hard-core Harley Davidson enthusiast.  What
if he wants to ride his Harley in the inauguration parade? Would the
Secret Service let him? Can you imagine the President of the United States
riding
down Pennsylvania Avenue on a Harley?

What marvelous times we live in.

Someone
must have slipped a dose of Sodium Pentathol into our Diet Coke as we
went through security because we feel overwhelmed by a desire to reveal
a secret so deeply held we didn’t realize it existed until we were getting
ready to come into the Fleet Center this final night of the Democratic
National Convention.

The secret is that the real reason we leapt at the chance to get our
hands on convention credentials was not our history as an irredeemable
political addict, nor the chance to rub elbows with the jet setters and
powers who rule our country, nor even the inevitable boost to our  stats
which the exposure provides.  It was the balloons.

It must have been 1960, the first time we saw them.  We would have
been 7 then, and our Dad was a big Kennedy guy, and a minor figure in
local politics, so we are sure the convention would have been on the
family tube that long-ago July. A bunch of boring grownups talking and
talking and talking, and finally one good-looking Daddy-type got everybody
to cheering and standing on chairs and throwing their hats in the air,
and then, suddenly….

Balloons!! Everywhere!  More balloons than we had ever seen or
even imagined in our lives to that point. Pouring out of the ceiling,
raining down on the people, who raised their arms as though welcoming
and summer rain after a hot humid afternoon. They kept coming, it seemed
they would never stop, until finally they were lying all around, completely
covering the floor, swallowing up kids caught on camera until only their
heads showed atop the sea of balloons, bobbing blond and brown on the
surface.

Somewhere in our seven-year-old mind we knew that someday we would BE
THERE when the balloons fell, and wade in them ourselves, someday, somehow. 

And now, hot damn, WE ARE THERE, and there are the balloons, wrapped
up in long tube-like nets in the roof of the Fleet Center. Millions of
them. And we will be there, finally. It was worth the wait.

Another hot topic among the bloggers is the proliferation of "psuedo-blogs"
which are popping up all over Boston like acne on a teenager in a chocolate
factory. These "psuedo-blogs" come in many forms.

Much in evidence these days, of course, are politician’s blogs.  Not
to be confused with political blogs, which are written by non-politicians,
amateur pundits and political junkies of all stripes and which comment
on and analyze politics.

Politician’s blogs are invariable created, written and maintained by
staff members of the great man (or woman) in charge, who of course is
much too busy to read any blogs, much less write one.  But after
Howard Dean, andy politician with an ounce of sense or feel for the public
pulse knows he needs a blog, even if he or she hasn’t a clue as to what
one actually is.

So the wealthier one go out and hire an established blogger (or ‘Ho,
as they are informally known around the ‘Sphere) to create their blog.  If
they are less affluent they just order one of their staffers to figure
out what a Blog is and then get one going.

These "blogs" are barely identifiable as such, consisting mainly of
crass shucksterism and recycled press releases. In addition there are
innumerable "psuedo-blogs" selling products, set up as part of advertising
campaigns, by bars or restaurants, or to solicit credit card numbers
in return for instant sexual gratification.

More difficult to categorize are the many many blogs being created by
the mainstream media organizations to try to "catch the wave of the happening
blogger phenomena". Most of these blogs were created in the past two
weeks and the odds of their surviving the election season are slim to
none.

Bloggers are reluctant to admit these journalistic blogs to their community
for a couple of reasons.  For one, they are clearly professional
writers, and in fact part of the mainstream media..  They are getting
directly paid for writing their blogs, and bloggers are fiercely protective
of their amateur status (although somewhat contradictory they scheme
constantly about how to have a living from their blog and quit their
day jobs.

But more importantly, they are being edited.  Even if the editor
only reads the stuff before, or even after, it gets posted, the fact
that one’s employers will be reading and evaluating one’s blogging does
change the basic nature of the endeavor. And in addition to editorial
control of content, there is the fact that the mere existence of an intermediary
agent violates the true essence of blogging – naked contact between the
blogger and the reader. The whole rush of the blogging experience is
that there is NOTHING BETWEEN the observer and the reader, and the impressions
are fresh and unadulterated,

We have been hanging, occasionally, with a blogger from the Philadelphia
Inquirer.  He WAS a feature writer, until two weeks ago, when his
editor told him to start a blog and pack his bags for Boston.  He
seems like a really nice guy, and he might get the point someday (at
which point he would probably start blogging about the Philadelphia
Inquirer rather than the Conventions his editor sends him to, and lose
his job, which would be a tragedy, but good blogging material).

Not only the prink media is desperately delving into the blogging pool.  Reporters
from CNN, the New York Times, Fox and Sports Illustrated have started
blogging as well. Why is the traditional media suddenly so fascinated,
near obsessed, with the bloggers. It can;t be because we’re the most
interesting folks in town!

It is becoming increasingly clear to the Dowbrigade that it is because
they are scared.  Well, not scared, exactly, but a little nervous
at least, and with some reason.

First, we are undocumented workers, threatening their jobs by working
for free, eroding the market for their product, and they resent the fact
that we haven’t "paid our dues", haven’t spent those hot summer nights
working the police beat in some urban cesspool or the frigid
6 am Blizzard reports, and here we come waltzing in to take the choice
seats.

And second, we represent the first realistic threat in decades to expose
their cherished myth of objectivity.  Most of the reporters we have
talked to honestly try to obtain the impossibly illusive objectivity,
but this merely ends up making their inevitable subjectivity more subtle
and difficult to detect.

What they have been feeding us for many years is one specific world
view and one consistent and usually coherent version of what the news
"means".  All Bloggers aim to do is  point out that
there are alternatives.

Okay, here we go.  Back in our seat in Blogger’s Row, where fistfights
are about to break out over seating space. Part of the problem is that
the joint is absolutely packed to the rafter’s for this, the final night
of the Convention, the frenzied build-up to the Kerry acceptance speech
rocking the joint with manic energy. The other reason, we suspect, is that word has leaked out that we have the only functioning, publicly accessable Wi-Fi web in the Hall. There are sure a lot more than 35 laptops up here on Blogger’s Row tonight.

We have notes for a good half dozen
posts waiting in our notebook, the prose is flowing, but we are dead
on our feet and fading fast. On the way into the hall we were mesmerized
by a line of slot machines along one side of a main concourse.  Wow!
When did they legalize THOSE babies in the Commonwealth? Turns out they
were Compaq flat screen email stations. So before things get out of hand,
lets get to the blogging!

As a member of the Freshman Class of Major Party Nominating Conventions,
we would like to take this moment to do a little meta-blogging, and comment
on the effects of having blogger here, their success or failure, and
what it all means. What better place than here in the placid eye of the
political hurricane, guarding our seat at Ground
Zero, to get a little perspective from the whole thing and sum it up
in a few rash generalizations.

First of all, the various aggregators set up to collect and collate
all of the postings from the convention bloggers (some including bloggers
on the outside) have been performing an invaluable service both to the
bloggers and their readers. Personally, I like the one set up by Dave
Winer, called Convention
Bloggers. We love being able to check up on what everyone else is
posting as we all sit here staring at our screens, and you get a wonderful
kaleidoscope of views on each of the speakers as they parade on stage.
The strange and secret process used by the Convention organizers to select
the Bloggers has yielded a true variety of political positions, blogging
styles and levels of seriousness.

The buzz around the Row is that for the really astute political analyses
and cutting irreverence for which blogger are known we will have to wait
until next week, after the pundits have had time to digest, reflect,
sleep and then in the peace and solitude in which they are accustomed
to work, tell us all what it meant. We hope the aggregators are still
up and running next week.

In fact, we hope the aggregators are still up and running a MONTH from
now, during the REPUBLICAN Convention. The Republicans will be having
Bloggers, too. However, instead of soliciting applications, they have
hand picked and invited about 20 individuals who they feel will fit right
in.

We doubt that many of the Bloggers here will also be among the anointed
20 in NYC, although Dave Winer is
reporting that Jay
Rosen has been invited.  On
the other hand, we are sure this crew, political junkies all, will have
a
lot to
say
about
the
Republican
gab
fest in
5 weeks, and it would be fascinating to follow their comments and comparisons
as they watch along on cable TV.

Plus, we absolutely MUST add the invited Republican bloggers to the
list.  How fascinating to read and integrate what they write with
what the bloggers who had been in Boston will write.

The possibilities for using aggregation to collect and juxtapose information
streams from otherwise independent sources are staggering and expanding
as fast as people can think.

Al Sharpton
last night believed the only speech so far that could be classified as
a real
barn burner. The spontaneous cheers and delegate delirium far
exceeded that produced by Jimmy Carter, John Edwards, Teddy Kennedy and
even Bill and Hillary. He was also the only featured
speaker to date who deviated almost
completely
from
the
prepared
text
distributed
to
the
press in advance of his appearance.

In a related vein we have noted that all of the prepared speeches we
have heard so far have a certain uniform blandness, as though they had
all been penned by the same lame hand trying to sound like many different
voices.  Is it possible that all of these speeches are coming out
of one single office somewhere near the heart of the Democratic Party
Convention organization?  And that Sharpton was the only Democrat
with enough guts to trash the prepared text and strike out on his own?

If so, all we can say is that the Dems desperately need some new speech
writers. Just for the record, the Dowbrigade is available.

article from the New York Times

The pre-Convention press coverage here in Boston made it sound like
The Mongol Hordes led by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were about
to descend on our fair city.  We were told to expect gridlocked
traffic, body-cavity searches on random street corners and daily mass
street protest that would have blood running in the streets.

Understandably, locals mad
plans to leave the city in droves, for the Cape, down Maine way, even
to the relative peace and tranquility of New York City. It reminded us
of the Weatherperson-fueled panic whenever a Nor’easter is moving up
the coast, causing panicked people to flock to the hardware store to
stock up on batteries, drinking water and shotgun shells. Usually the
storm
turns into a dud, and people either go "Huh?" or "Whew".

They must have pulled this one a hundred times over the past few years,
and people fall for it every time. Once again, the warnings of impending
doom were slightly exaggerated; in reality, the city has been more like
a ghost town, anywhere away from the Fleet
Center.

The forces or order cleared out 3,000 jail cells in anticipation of
the massive civil disobedience. Total protest-related arrests so far
(after 3 days) – ONE.

"The real question for me is why Boston was manipulated into believing
that hordes of protesters would descend on the city," Tom Hayden,
who led protests at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968,
wrote
in an e-mail to the Globe. "It plays into the politics of fear,
suppresses civil liberties, and becomes a blank check for police overtime
and the
procurement of bone-crushing gadgets."

from the Boston Globe

The Show goes on. Finally, a little popular culture. John Cougar Mellencamp
just finished singing "Small Town" and now Bill Richardson, America’s
most unlikely Latino, is speaking in Spanish. Being in the midst of all
of this artificial intrigue and theatrical suspense
has
the Dowbrigade
feeling
at times
as though we are
trapped
in a Shakespearean
farce within a farce.

Unfortunately, no one seems to want to admit the farcical aspect of
the event at all – they are all taking it so, so seriously. It is clear
to this observer, at least, that the Democratic Party, as currently constituted,
is suffering from a serious goofiness deficit. Hey you guys, lighten
up a little.  It’s just a TV show.

Or a Shakespearean double-farce, depending on one’s frame of reference.
The minor farce is 35,000 people putting on a super show for the media
and, through them, to the not-insignificant portion of the world’s population
that pays attention to what passes in our times
as "news".

35,000 people play-acting at selecting a candidate, going through forms
and formalities encrusted in tradition two centuries old. The last Convention
that went into extra innings, the public waiting breathless like the
crowd in St. Peter’s Square waiting on the white smoke, was 1948, the
last time
the rules required a 2/3 majority for selection.  The last Convention
when the outcome was in question when the event began was 1960, Kennedy’s
Convention. The last Convention to generate any real news, although not
from the Convention
Floor, was 1968 in Chicago, and we all know how that worked out.

Even more recently, the Conventions we remember from our youth featured
floor fights over platform planks, controversies over the seating of
competing slates of
delegates from the same state, inadequately vetted VP candidates resigning
in disgrace after electroshocking revelations.  Even these minor
sideshows have been purged, leaving a cross between a beauty pageant
and an infomercial, but with less content and suspense than either.

The major farce, in which this Convention forms the stage-setting second
act (Act I being the peripatetic primaries in the populist prairies and
rural redoubts of the "me-firster" states), is a full, four-act comedy
of errors called the "Modern American Electoral Process".

Any review of this piece of work which attempts to label it a farce
must start with the fundamental question: Does it really matter who wins
this election? Although the politically sophisticated may scoff at the
very idea, we are personally convinced that the main reason over half
of the eligible Americans can’t be bothered to vote is because they have
concluded it really doesn’t matter.

Now, we know that our twisted political sensibilities place us well
outside the American mainstream.  But we still believe strongly
in the principles on which this country was founded, and the proposition
that
Democracy,
although imperfect, is the best system do far devised for man to foster
freedom and facilitate the human community, mind and spirit. We consider
ourself a patriotic American.

And to our way of thinking any possible political
candidate or movement that could truly
change the currently disastrous decline of this country will not and
can not come from the two traditional major parties in American politics.

The Democratic and Republican parties, as presently constituted, are
simply incapable of to recapturing or recreating the true spirit of the
founding fathers in a form
which can stand
up to the challenges of power and corruption in the 21st century, and
stand out as a beacon lighting a path into a livable, sustainable future.  They
are too indebted to big money, to the economic cartels and power centers
which
are used
to
setting the rules and shaping the policies of our "democratic" government.
Even campaign finance reform, we fear, is incapable of exorcising the
deep roots and structural symbiosis between the major parties and the
economic interests that support them.

Howard Dean alluded to this himself when he spoke with the bloggers
on Monday. He was talking about the incredibly liberating experience
of being funded by thousands of small donors, and owing nothing to the
traditional
fonts of campaign finance. He was able to do and say what he really wanted,
without worrying about biting the hand that was feeding him.

So he did, and said, and bit down hard, and the hand ended up slapping
him upside the head anyway.  Maybe
they weren’t funding his campaign, but thanks to the unholy alliance
between the economic power centers and the ownership of major media his
infamous scream, without the roaringbackground crowd track that made
it barely audible in the hall at the time was repeated 27,000 times over
a two
week period. A loose canon who owed nothing to the business community
was way too risky for the unseen arbiters of American political taste.

Be that as it may, is the fact that The
One is not going to come from
the established parties or use the traditional mechanisms of party politics
reason enough to sit out these recurring Presidential elections, or
"waste" your vote on a protest candidate? In the past two elections the
Dowbrigade voted for Dr. John Hagelin, a PhD .Physicist from MIT and
head of the Natural Law Party which
claims that if everyone on the planet would just meditate for an hour
a day, and contribute 10 cents to a World
Peace Fund, it could eliminate poverty, wipe out hunger, and defeat
disease. We selected Dr. Hagelin on
the theory that
if

political
promises
were
by nature hot air, why not vote for the guy with the most imaginative
and idyllic political fantasies.

This time around, however, we feel somewhat differently.  When
comparing the major party candidates this year, we need look no further
than their differing
behavior during America’s longest fighting war, the nightmare of Vietnam.

It is still almost inconceivable to me that a guy like John Kerry, a
Yale graduate from the right side of the tracks, a man so privileged
he was a member of the Skull and Bones at Yale (like Bush), a secret
society open only to selected sons of the Masters of the Universe, would
purposefully pursue not only military service but the kind of combat
leadership
role which demonstrated both his ability to lead men in life’s most perilous
endeavors, and his willingness to make any, up to the ultimate, sacrifice
for this country.

George Bush, meanwhile, basically got the US government to pay for his
flying lessons and wash his clothes for a couple of years. There is accumulating
evidence that he used his breeding and influence to minimize his inconvenience
and perhaps skip out on the last few months, serving his own interests
rather than his country’s.

Hell, that sounds like the sort of thing the Dowbrigade is famous for.  But
then we are not running for president. Seen in this light, for us at
least, the choice between these two is simple and unequivocal. Kerry
is the standup guy, Bush the standby guy.

In addition, although neither of these men is ready to challenge the
cornerstones of corporate control over life in America, one can make
the argument that such a leadership would be more likely to emerge, and
sooner, in a Kerry America than in a Bush one.  We are not of the
school which claims that Draconian repression of liberty serves the cause
of
freedom by inciting people to take political action rather than accept
malignant mediocrity or opt out of the system altogether.

Even though Kerry doesn’t truly "get it", his basic decency and belief
in opening up the system hold promise of creating avenues of expression
and innovation neither he nor we can predict or imagine, and that might
present new-paradigm solutions and a path out of the moral morass in
which we
have been mucking around for some time now.

Finally, and the clincher in our computations, is our increasing conviction
that who wins this election WILL make a difference, in a million little
ways,
in our
private, personal everyday lives, and in the lives of people all over
the world. At work, in the education of our children, in our personal
finances, in our chances of being touched by terrorism, in our ability
to enjoy to what we want on the radio. television and on the internet,
read, write and think without fear, to travel the world in safety and
with pride
in our
passport,
in the
faces of the poor, the foreign, the dispossessed, the deranged, it will
make a difference.

Accordingly, and after much forethought and trepidation, (for it is never easy for a Harvard man to endorse a Yale man for the highest office in
the land), we hearby publicly declare that we endorse and will vote for
John Kerry, and use our limited platform to encourage others to do so.  Especially
those of you who may have dropped the voting habit along the way.  Give
it a try, you might be surprised at the result, and it just might turn
out NOT to be a farce.