On the Google couch

While the tendency of the American right to equate dissent with mental illness goes back some time, with Charles Krauthammer being a pioneer, there seems to be a coordinated campaign in the last week to depict liberal blogs and the comment sections thereof as outposts of, literally, insanity. Friday's Wall Street Journal brings another iteration, with a lament by Daniel Henninger about the unhinged, uninhibited nature of discourse in liberal blogs, and the possible mental problems that lie behind it:

But there is one more personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be spreading to touch and cover everything. It's called disinhibition. Briefly, disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park.

Example: The Web site currently famous for enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If you opened its "blogs" page this week, the first thing you saw was a blogger's video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a car window. Right below that were two blogs by women in their underwear.

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 ...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.

Note the absence of any excerpts from daily discourse on right-wing talk radio, let alone right-wing blogs. In fact the thinness of the message illuminates the real agenda: the sense on the right that the blogging has swung decisively anti-Bush, but since a partisan criticism won't fly, it has to be dressed up as a sociological critique:

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.

It's not clear whether the "venting alone" phrase is an intended echo of Robert Putnam's "bowling alone", but it is likely true that there is a positive correlation between the number of blogs and, for example, wars in the Middle East. Q.E.D.