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Jewish World Review June 7, 2005 / 29 Iyar, 5765 The constant forward By Andrei Codrescu
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Has anyone noticed the degradation of political activism as reflected in the quality of e-mail forwards?
During the election, when this country was in the grip of political passion, the internet hummed with outraged forwards explicating and excoriating the current snakepits and malevolence of public policy. Every citizen in possession of a computer (and that's every citizen! Some citizens have several, one in every color for every mood!) forwarded madly his or her opinions. These forwards, judging by volume and pitch, were not just opinions: they were expressions of the forwarder's innermost soul, as radical in their way as the anti-war demonstrations of the Sixties.
E-mails, for instance, calling on a mass-uprising of poets against the war in Iraq by means of writing an anti-war poem that was then guaranteed to be forwarded to at least a million people who were of the same opinion and were simultaneously engaged in writing their own anti-war poems, nearly choked my internet traffic because I just couldn't keep deleting them fast enough to get on with my business.
When John Kerry (remember him?) showed up on TV at a podium with his website splashed over it, the forwards from his site went ballistic, as did those from the people supporting him in other ways, through movie forwards, slogan forwards, and cartoon forwards.
During the political season I kept looking back with nostalgia at the days when the only e-mail forwards were jokes.
Idylic age! Bygone days!
The forwards of the electoral frenzy were not brief, but they somehow opened the way for the forwarding of vast attachments of immense articles about everything from foreign policy to densely reasoned philosophical tracti proving something or other.
The infinite dumping ground for forwards that my computer had become soon reached a critical point and I hired two people to delete them as fast as they arrived.
The folks who found their mission in life through the radical act of forwarding didn't stop. They were now addicted to this form of citizenship and they continued to forward, but the temperature of their passions and the obviousness of the rightness of their cause diminished considerably. From forwards calling for the heads of our leaders we are down now to calls for supporting people who talk their heads off in filibusters.
It's been a long decline in forwards from revolutionary fervor to muted growling.
Let's face it: forwarding protest isn't as satisfying as being arrested for it. Forwarding is not the same as bleeding.
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JWR contributor Andrei Codrescu is a poet, commentator and author, most recently, of "Wakefield". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.) Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Andrei Codrescu. |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
