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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
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Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review June 7, 2005 / 29 Iyar, 5765

The constant forward

By Andrei Codrescu

Codrescu
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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.

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It was bad enough in this country, but it's the World Wide Web, God help us, and the forwards started originating in other countries as well, first a trickle, then a flood. From Romania alone there came into my groaning mailbox hundreds of brilliantly argued attacks and defenses, ad hominem and ad canem, ad hoc and ad absurdum, about issues felt passionately in Bucharest. Between the passions of forwarding Americans and the passions of forwarding Romanians I felt like a vast field on which demonstrators for every cause marched and erected barricades, made speeches, raised fists and fluttered flags and handkerchiefs.

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.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

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.

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© 2005, Andrei Codrescu.

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