Blog On

Not so very long ago – by my old man’s reckoning anyway – heads of state were limited in their ability to persuade and coerce through propaganda. Beginning, I suppose, with Roman and Inca runners, the state has worked incessantly to spread the word and sought to centralize its power. My guess is, however, that a Spanish farmer at the height of the Empire intent on living his life as he saw fit probably had little to fear from Rome for the act of wrong thinking. He might even be able to share his views with his neighbors without dread of retribution.

Obviously, the state progressed in its ability to spread policy much more rapidly than did our Spanish farmer, and his descendants working that same land in the time of Franco who loosed comments on the folly of the state might have heard a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Historically, the Church served as a counter to the state and it too constantly improved in its ability to convey and enforce doctrine and to counter the state. Over time, devices such as the printing press decentralized the power to communicate still farther afield.

In the lifetimes of many of us, states have been captured by outlaws who – be they on the right or left – corrupted the communication systems of their nations and suppressed both the media and the churches and gained a monopoly on what the citizens could read, hear (radio), and see (television) and think.

Technology has made it possible even for governments with no particular intent on such monopoly to gain such overwhelming power of persuasion that coercion is not even considered a necessary part of their arsenals. This is particularly true when the plutocracy is well organized.

Churches now spread mixed messages and work against each other as much as in a concerted fashion for what was once called the body of the church. The media is divided, and the people selected by them to opine are chosen not only for their ability to think and communicate but often from within a pool with a narrow band of views. They also seem to be selected from these same elite schools dear to the hearts of the plutocrats from which the political elite also often arises.

What are we Lilliputians to do? How can we possibly hope to influence the state when the elites have decided on a given course with which we disagree? In most instances, it doesn’t matter much and from that we can take heart. Most policies and laws proposed and enacted in the United States have winners and losers, but usually the stakes are low enough that it isn’t that important. And if the losers scream loudly enough, payback can be expected shortly.

But what of war and peace? Gulliver is in our living room each night explaining why we must have war with a particular nation or collection of states or why we must act in the crisis of the day, and there is no one we can turn to for an independent evaluation. In the most dangerous period in the planet’s history, the president of the United States recognizing full well the peril had to contort our laws and policies to make ready for a war he knew was coming. Still, he had to wait until we were attacked in order to seek a declaration of war.

Our presidency has grown greatly in power since 1941. Precedents have changed and our representatives in Congress have ceded much of their power to the executive. In Vietnam, the nature of the world conflict and the bipartisan support needed to prosecute the Cold War involved us in a conflict almost without end. Only the citizens through direct action could tell our leaders that they had lost confidence in the policy of waging the war. The divisions caused by that crisis will be evident in our society until the last of the generation that fought has abandoned its power positions in our society and largely died off – a long time still to come.

The megaphone available to today’s presidents is far louder than ever before. And President Bush persuaded the people that we had to make war in Iraq. Many of us, certainly a minority, disagreed. The clarity of why we went to war and the focus on the small number of opinion makers and political leaders beating the drums made it far easier to fix responsibility for our course in Iraq. This is the war sponsored by a small group of elitists. President Bush cannot cite previous generations of leaders nor can he name allies who have been threatened by Iraq as it was posited on the day of the attack.

Yet in short order, public opinion has exposed the emperor as a man without raiment as it relates to this adventure. He and his small number of advisors – and the somewhat larger group of drummers outside the government - have had the spotlight directed on them. How did this come to be?

Clearly, the war had few fathers, and the reasons for it have been shown to be badly flawed. Much of the media served us well, but the people too spoke – clearly, moderately, and without having to take to the streets.

Regardless of his mouthings, the president is moving rapidly to extricate us from the battlefield, rebuild cracked alliances, and minimize the power of the neoconservatives who steered him into this mess.

In Vietnam, the Lilliputians had no way of communicating and had to take to the streets.

But a new day has dawned in which we tiny folk can share our views beyond our circle of friends. We can BLOG. In the Vietnam War, our voices were heard only by our closest friends and neighbors. Today, the same technology that permits the largest and loudest megaphone to be centralized can be used by the people to cry out. We Lilliputians can spread our opinions far beyond the small circle that just months ago was so restricted.

As we prepared to move on Baghdad, my circle of friends – certainly fewer than ten of us - spoke and emailed our concerns back and forth. Today, several dozens of people across the country read this message and realize that they are not alone among a tiny grouping. And they blog away, sharing messages and writing farther and farther afield. Columnists in leading newspapers cite bloggers and daily the bloggers become more powerful. Lilliputians threads constrain Gulliver and force him to recognize that he is (like victorious Roman generals of old) but a man.

Blog on! Power to the Lilliputians!