Aww, it looks like the archive that hosted my old political blog (Anarchy for Anybody) went belly-up this year (I think roughly around the end of April). I worked hard on that site for a long time (particularly active from 1996-2001; I think sometime in 2000 I lost access to the direct FTP stuff I used to do to update the site myself, back in the day, and just made one last post in 2001 thanks to some friends and fans, and let it languish from that point on as a kind of archive of radical political thought in the 90s). Even at the end of my most active period with that project, I found refuge in fiction over nonfiction for my ideas -- that I found art was the best way of expressing my radical attitudes (just flourishes here and there, a sensibility, a sense of the possible -- I don't write polemics in fiction).
Still, 14 years is a long time for a blog, even if I hadn't been active on it for nine of those years, it still exposed a lot of people to new and different ideas (I remember it having something like 500,000 hits or more the last time I checked it, which is paltry in Net terms, but nice for a fringe political site -- I used to get comments from people who would write me expressing gratitude for that site). One of my essays (really, my most influential one, circa 1996) is still archived out there, which is nice to know. Everything else is apparently gone. I may have discs of the stuff saved somewhere (unlikely, anymore, after a few moves), but I've moved on from that stuff. Not in terms of my politics, which remain stubbornly small "l" libertarian and internationalist in spirit, but I've always been more philosophical than doctrinaire.
It's weird to think of that time and contrast it with the 00s, like how our political culture curdled in the face of right-wing extremism that's continued to hold our country back. We truly are falling behind. So many vital concerns I had then have become policy, now -- our country suspended habeas corpus, it is now a nation that officially tortures, we have secret prisons, etc., etc. -- serious breaches of liberty, carried out without hesitation or shame, or really much substantive debate. Sure, a lot of hand-wringing and navel-gazing, but the Beltway consensus seems to have accepted this as the "new normal."
In so many ways, the 90s seems like the last "good" American decade -- a time of peace and prosperity. Certainly the 00s did not begin auspiciously, and we're grinding along unsteadily in this second decade of the 21st Century as an imperial nation, desperately stratified economically, debt-ridden, deficit-laden, with an exhausted workforce and an overcommitted (and massive) military, with one-and-a-half political factions jousting for ever-dwindling voter market share (one group wanting to lead the nation the wrong way [the Republicans], the other unwilling to lead at all).
From my vantage point as an everyday citizen and political outsider, it's amazing to behold. But I console myself that bad times make for good art -- it gets the creative mind spinning, even as American life in the 21st Century is an affront to one's intelligence and a insult to the imagination. We are becoming a banana republic before our very eyes.
A decade ago, I'd comment about the "Youngstownification of the country" (and those of you from Youngstown surely know what I'm talking about) -- where ignorance was paraded about with pride, where things spiraled down into oblivion, and people would cheer the corrupt and the vile as heroes, and I see it continuing, maybe even accelerating. Maybe it's just a natural human reaction to political, economic, and cultural entropy. Maybe it's how people react when they don't even realize why they're fucked, or what's fucking them. I'm not sure. It's something, for damned sure.
Anyway, a4a is gone, but I'm still kicking, fuckers. ; )
