In a bizarre turn of events, bloggers and commenters at places like Blue Oregon and the unofficial Lane County Bus Project have taken to lecturing the unwashed masses who show up in corporeal form at events like Sen. Ron Wyden’s Town Hall on Iraq for a lack of civility.
We’ve reached a point where the worm has turned so many times it practically Gordian. Politicians –especially crooked ones — have accused the media of being anti-American for telling more or less the truth for so long that they’ve actually begun to believe it of themselves and now flog the flag at every opportunity.
When bloggers arrived on the scene with the growth of the World Wide Web, and TV, newspaper, and radio commentators began to feel their privileged position of authority threatened by political bloggers, they began accusing them of using foul language, for a lack of civility, and for not being “serious” enough. While it’s true that there is a certain amount of profanity, invective, humor, and misinformation on blogs — as science fiction author Ted Sturgeon famously said: “ninety percent of everything is crud” — the professional commentators seemed to feel that absolved them from addressing actual issues brought up by bloggers or examining possible flaws in their own clan’s output. That battle’s still going on.
The blogger world has had its own successes. People who saw an opportunity and were in the right place at the right time to become a part of the mainstream political establishment. Now it’s their turn to join in the choruses of politicians and commentators telling actual voters to just sit down and shut up. “Everything is fine. Your concerns will be addressed at the time of our choosing (should they be addressed at all). If your concerns have not been addressed, please try again at some other time. But civilly, no matter how much we ignore you or talk down to you.” So while the right-leaning blogs have been telling the “Bush-hating” left to just STFU for as long as they’ve existed, more and more of those calls are coming from people who label themselves progressive Democrats but seem to form what I like to think of as the “squishy center”.
The Wyden meeting in Portland was set up with check-ins for people to ask questions (no more than two minutes) and for Wyden to respond. And that’s probably about as good a way to run things as you can ask for.
But it doesn’t allow for a true dialogue. It doesn’t allow for follow-up or challenging a portion of the respondent’s answer (and some of Wyden’s answers were pretty bone-headed). You may think it anti-social for an audience to boo a response they disagree with, but the corrolary is that they shouldn’t applaud or cheer with remarks they agree with. Unless outbursts of positive enthusiasm are deemed unacceptable in a meeting, outbursts of disdain should be allowed. You may not like them, but that’s simple fairness.
Unless your intention is that legislators should live in a world where they hear only the music of angels applauding their glorious achievements and that they should be coccooned away from mass criticism (i.e. jeering and booing) to protect their fragile minds.