political internet Posts

A few weeks ago a newsletter brought written reports about the latest round of conflict at a local meeting that's been fighting for the past 180 years or so. As my wife and I read through it we were a bit underwhelmed by the accounts of the newest conflict resolution attempts. The mediators seemed more worried about alienating a few long-term disruptive characters than about preserving the spiritual vitality of the meeting. It's a phenomena I've seen in a lot of Quaker meetings.

Call it the FDR Principle after Franklin D Roosevelt, who supposedly defended his support of one of Nicaragua's most brutal dictators by saying "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Even casual historians of Latin American history will know this only led to fifty years of wars with reverberations across the world with the Iran/Contra scandal. The FDR Principle didn't make for good U.S. foreign policy and, if I may, I'd suggest it doesn't make for good Quaker policy either. Any discussion board moderator or popular blogger knows that to keep an online discussion's integrity you need to know when to cut a disruptive trouble-maker off--politely and succintly, but also firmly. If you don't, the people there to actually discuss your issues--the people you want--will leave.

I didn't know how to talk about this until a post called Conflict in Meeting came through Livejournal this past First Day. The poster, jandrewm, wrote in part:

Yet my recognition of all that doesn't negate the painful feelings that arise when hostility enters the meeting room, when long-held grudges boil over and harsh words are spoken.  After a few months of regular attendance at my meeting, I came close to abandoning this "experiment" with Quakerism because some Friends were so consistently rancorous, divisive, disruptive.  I had to ask myself: "Do I need this negativity in my life right now?"

I commented about the need to take the testimonies seriously:

I've been in that situation. A lot of Friends aren't very good at putting their foot down on flagrantly disruptive behavior. I wish I could buy the "it eventually sorts out" argument but it often doesn't. I've seen meetings where all the sane people are driven out, leaving the disruptive folks and armchair therapists. It's a symbiotic relationship, perhaps, but doesn't make for a healthy spiritual community.

The unpopular solution is for us to take our testimonies seriously. And I mean those more specific testimonies buried deep in copies in Faith & Practice that act as a kind of collective wisdom for Quaker community life. Testimonies against detraction and for rightly ordered decision making, etc. If someone's actions tear apart the meeting they should be counseled; if they continue to disrupt then their decision-making input should be disregarded. This is the real effect of the old much-maligned Quaker process of disowning (which allowed continued attendance at worship and life in the community but stopped business participation). Limiting input like this makes sense to me.

The trouble that if your meeting is in this kind of spiral there might not be much you can do by yourself. People take some sort of weird comfort in these predictable fights and if you start talking testimonies you might become very unpopular very quickly. Participating in the bickering isn't helpful (of course) and just eats away your own self. Distancing yourself for a time might be helpful. Getting involved in other Quaker venues. It's a shame. Monthly meeting is supposed to be the center of our Quaker spiritual life. But sometimes it can't be. I try to draw lessons from these circumstances. I certainly understand the value and need for the Quaker testimonies better simply because I've seen the problems meetings face when they haven't. But that doesn't make it any easier for you.

But all of this begs an awkward question: are we really building Christ's kingdom by dropping out? It's an age-old tension between purity and participation at all costs. Timothy asked a similar question of me in a comment to my last post. Before we answer, we should recognize that there are indeed many people who have "abandoned" their "Quaker experiment" because we're not living up to our own ideals.

Maybe I'm more aware of this drop-out class than others. It sometimes seems like an email correspondence with the "Quaker Ranter" has become the last step on the way out the door. But I also get messages from seekers newly convinced of Quaker principles but unable to connect locally because of the divergent practices or juvenile behavior of their local Friends meeting or church. A typical email last week asked me why the plain Quakers weren't evangelical and why evangelical Quakers weren't conservative and asked "Is there a place in the quakers for a Plain Dressing, Bible Thumping, Gospel Preaching, Evangelical, Conservative, Spirit Led, Charismatic family?" (Anyone want to suggest their local meeting?)

We should be more worried about the people of integrity we're losing than about the grumpy trouble-makers embedded in some of our meetings. If someone is consistently disruptive, is clearly breaking specific Quaker testimonies we've lumped under community and intergrity, and stubbornly immune to any council then read them out of business meeting. If the people you want in your meeting are leaving because of the people you really don't want, then it's time to do something. Our Quaker toolbox provides us tool for that action--ways to define, name and address the issues. Our tradition gives us access to hundreds of years of experience, both mistakes and successes, and can be a more useful guide than contemporary pop psychology or plain old head-burying.

Not all meetings have these problems. But enough do that we're losing people. And the dynamics get more acute when there's a visionary project on the table and/or someone younger is at the center of them. While our meetings sort out their issues, the internet is providing one type of support lifeline.

Blogger jandrewm was able to seek advice and consolation on Livejournal. Some of the folks I spoke about in the 2003 "Lost Quaker Generation" series of posts are now lurking away on my Facebook friends list. Maybe we can stop the full departure of some of these Friends. They can drop back but still be involved, still engaging their local meeting. They can be reading and discussing testimonies ("detraction" is a wonderful place to start) so they can spot and explain behavior. We can use the web to coordinate workshops, online discussions, local meet-ups, new workship groups, etc., but even email from a Friend thousands of miles away can help give us clarity and strength.

I think (I hope) we're helping to forge a group of Friends with a clear understanding of the work to be done and the techniques of Quaker discernment. It's no wonder that Quaker bodies sometimes fail to live up to their ideals: the journals of  olde tyme Quaker ministers are full of disappointing stories and Christian tradition is rich with tales of the roadblocks the Tempter puts up in our path. How can we learn to  center in the Lord when our meetings become too political or disfunctional (I think I should start looking harder at Anabaptist non-resistance theory). This is the work, Friends, and it's always been the work. Through whatever comes we need to trust that any testing and heartbreak has a purpose, that the Lord is using us through all, and that any suffering will be productive to His purpose if we can keep low and listening for follow-up instructions.

Nonviolence.org readers may not be aware that my personal site has been the talk of the political internet for the last few days. Since posting an account of getting a phone call from a CBS News publicist, I've been linked to by a Who's Who of blogging gliteratti: Wonkette, Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, Little Green Footballs, RatherBiased, etc. For a short time yesterday, the story was a part of the second-ranked article on Technorati's Politics Attention index.

A hack from CBS News called me to say they were doing a program on an issue that's central to Nonviolence.org's mandate: conscientious resistance to military service. After looking over the material, I thought the interviews of resisters who have fled to Canada would be interesting to my readers and so wrote a short entry on it. Thinking it all a little funny that a publicist would care about Nonviolence.org, I mentioned the incident in the "Stories of Nonviolence.org" section of my personal site. One by one the leading political sites of the blogosphere have run the story as further proof of the vast left-wing mainstream media conspiracy. It's rather funny actually.

I have to wonder is who's kidding who with all this feigned outrage? For those missing the irony gene: the Nonviolence.org PayPal account currently has a balance $6.18, the bulk of which comes from the last donation--$5.00 back on November 20th. My corner of the left wing conspiracy is funded by the vast personal wealth I accumulate as a bookstore clerk.

Wonkette's pages advertise "sponsorship opportunities," she's a recent cover girl on New York Times Magazine, her husband is an editor at New York magazine and in October she cashed out her blogging fame for a $275,000 advance for her first novel ("It's not Bridget Jones does Washington, it's Nick Hornby does politics": good grief). Eugene Volokh has clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court (for Sandra Day O'Connor), teaches law at UCLA and just had a big op-ed in the Times. Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds teaches law at the University of Tennessee, has served on White House advisory panels, and is a paid correspondent for MSNBC. Yet he, like the others, calls a two minute phone call "recruiting"?

I'm beginning to think the real interest comes from the fact that this top tier of bloggers is totally in bed (literally) with the MSM. Their income comes from their connections with media and political power. Their carefully-crafted fascade of snarkish independence would crumble if their phone logs were made public. They're not really blogging in their pajamas, folks.

By mentioning the existance of blog publicists, I've threatened to blow their cover. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtains: my social gaffe was in publicly admitting that the mainstream media courts political blogs. Kudos to journalist Derek Rose on admitting the practice:

But why shouldn't a news organization's publicity department court bloggers? As a MSM member, I get emails from TV flacks all the time promoting their scoops. From ABC, for example, I've received emails regarding a tape they got of the Beltway sniper's call to the Rockville police; Barbara Walters' Hillary Clinton interview; and their 'Azzam the American' video ... as well as a Rush Limbaugh drug laundering story that never panned out. I even got attention from publicists when I was working for a newspaper that didn't have a 20th of the circulation of Instapundit...

Rose aside, there's incredible distortion in the "reporting," a term I have to use very loosely. Wonkette says "Kelley claims that a CBS minion put the screws to him to post something about a '60 Minutes' package on conscientious objectors" yet all readers have to do is follow the link to see I never said anything like that. Why do the cream of bloggers feel like a posse of self-absorbed seventh graders? When I started Nonviolence.org back in 1995, I thought the brave new political world of the internet might be All the President's Men. Boy was I wrong: it turns it's just Heathers. God help us.

My regular readers may not be aware that Quaker Ranter is the talk of the political internet for the last few days. Since posting my "account of getting a phone call from a CBS News publicist", I've been linked to by a Who's Who of blogging gliteratti: Wonkette, Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, Little Green Footballs, RatherBiased, etc. For a short time yesterday, the story was a part of the second-ranked article on Technorati's Politics Attention index. See The Left Wing Conspiracy Revealed by Nonviolence.org on the main site.

Yesterday I got a call from a publicist for CBS News's 60 Minutes. They're running a story tonight on "Deserters," U.S. military personnel who have fled to Canada rather than serve in Iraq. She was requesting that I talk up the program on Nonviolence.org (I have here: CBS News Covers New Conscientious Objectors. In nine years of publishing the peace site, I can't remember ever getting a call from a publicist before. I've talked to reporters from major news networks and papers, and I've talked a booking agent or two to arranging appearances on radio shows, but never a publicist.

It's been five years since the instantly-famous world trade protests in Seattle invented a new sort of activism. Angry confrontations with police dominated the pictures coming from the protests. The protest marked the coming-out party of the Independent Media movement, both both brought together and reported on the protests.

In the Seattle Weekly, Geov Parrish asks Is This What Failure Looks Like?:

But it's one thing to shut down a high-level meeting for a day; it's quite another to get your priorities enacted as public policy. And so, in the half-decade since Seattle's groundbreaking protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade organizers in the United States have struggled to find ways to not simply create debate but win.

I've always respect Geov, who's been one of the rare pacifist organizers who's acted as a bridge between the gray-haired oldline peace groups and the younger Seattle-style activists. So it's kind of funny to see his thoughtful article described by Counterpunch this way. Read Charles Munson's critique, Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization Movement.

The WTO protests were a landmark and radicalized a lot of new activists. But despite being 99% peaceful, they never shook the image of the black-clad anarchist spoiled brats throwing bricks through windows. Although I had friends who donned the black hankerchiefs, the black bloc always reminded me of the loser high school kids who turn over dumpsters behind the 7-11; the high political rhetoric seemed secondary to the joy of being "bad." It was look-at-me! activism, which is fun and occassionally useful, but not the stuff to create fundamental social change.

I participated in a few post-Seattle events: the anti World Bank protests in Washington DC and the Republican National Convention protests in my hometown of Philadelphia, serving as an Indymedia worker for both. I witnessed wonderful creativity, I marveled at the instant community of the Indymedia Centers, I was fasincated by the cell-phone/internet organizing.

But there was also this kind of nagging sense that we were trying to recreate the mythical "Seattle." It was as if we were all derivative rock bands trying to jump on the bandwagon of a breakthrough success: the Nivana clones hoping to recatch the magic. It was hard to shake the feeling we were play acting ourselves sometimes.

It's good to honestly reflect on the protests now. We need to see what worked and what didn't. The fervor and organizing strategies changed activism and will continue to shape how we see social-change organizing. The world is better for what went down in Seattle five years ago, and so is North American polticial organizing. But let's stop idolizing what happened there and let's see what we can learn. For we've barely begun the work.

The Baby Theo blog got a mention in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, It's almost as good as being there, by Kathy Boccella. They missed out on a huge ratings bonanza by not picking Theo for their pictures. Stranger was that two interviews produced only one off-topic substantive line: "Martin Kelly [sic] experienced the worst of it when someone threatened his infant son on his Baby Theo Web page."

Above: Theo on learning he wasn't going to be the featured baby photo in the Inquirer piece... Real photo caption: This weekend Julie Theo and I took a mini vacation to the Pennsylvania coal regions (can you say "geeks"?) One of the stops was the beautifully restored Tamaqua train station where Theo's great great grandfather, the first Martin John Kelley, worked as a Reading Railroad conductor. We woke the little guy up from a car nap to see the station and snap this picture, cruel parents that we are.

The Baby Theo site has been a lot of fun and it's had great comments and emails of support. It's really a shame that the article only used it to strike that tired old refrain about the possible danger lurking on the internet.

The threat had nothing to do with Theo or with the baby blog. I've run a prominent antiwar website through two wars now, and in the nine years of its existence I've amassed quite a collection of abusive emails. I try not to take them too seriously: most come from soldiers or from the families of soliders, people desparately afraid of the future and surely torn by the acts they're being asked to commit. The internet provides the psychological distance for otherwise good people to demonize the "commie Saddam-loving peacenik coward." You could get mad at a President that actively misleads the country into war but it's easier to turn your anger on some schmuck who runs an antiwar website in his spare time. Sending threatening emails is itself cowardly and anti-democratic, of course, and as I've written on Nonviolence.org, it's terribly inappropriate for "military personnel to use government computers to threaten the free speech" of a dissenting American citizen. But it happens. And because it happens and because South Jersey has its share of pro-war hotheads, you won't see our specific town mentioned anywhere on the site. When I asked the Inquirer reporter if they could not mention our town, she asked why, which led to the threatening emails, which led to the question whether Theo specifically had been threatened.

And yes, there was a retired Lieutenant Colonel who sent a particularly creepy set of emails (more on him below). The first email didn't mention Theo. It was just one of those everyday emails wishing that my family would be gang-raped, tortured and executed in front of me. I usually ignore these but responded to him, upon which I received a second email explaining that he was making a point with his threat ("You, your organization and others like you represent the 'flabby soft white underbelly' of our Nation. This is the tissue of an animal that is the target of predators." Etc., etc., blah, blah, blah). This time he searched the Nonviolence.org site more thoroughly and specifically mentioned Theo in his what-if scenario. This was one email out of the thousands I receive every month. It was an inappropriate rhetorical argument against a political/religious stance I've taken as a public witness. It was not a credible threat to my son.

Still, precaution is in order. I mentioned this story to the Inquirer reporter only to explain why I didn't want the town listed. When I talked about the blog, I talked about old friends and distant relatives keeping up with us and sharing our joys via the website. I talked about how the act of putting together entries helped Julie & I see Theo's changes. I told Kathy how it was fun that friends who we had met via the internet were able to see something beyond the Quaker essays or political essays. None of that made it through to the article, which is a shame. A request to not publish our home town became a sensationalist cautionary tale that is now being repeated as a reason not to blog. How stupid.

The cautionary lesson is only applicable for those who both run a baby blog and a heavily used political website. When your website tops 50,000 visitors a day, you might want to switch to a P.O. Box. End of lesson.

Fortunately with the internet we don't have to rely on the filter of a mainstream press reporters. Visitors from the Inquirer article have been looking around the site and presumably seeing it's not all about internet dangers. Since the Inquirer article went up I've had twice as many visits from Google as I have from Philly.com. Viva the web!

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More:

For those interested, the freaky retired Lieutenant Colonel is the chief executive officer of a private aviation company based in Florida, with contracts in three African nations that just happen to be of particular interest to the U.S. State Department. Although the company is named after him, his full name has been carefully excised from his website. I don't suspect that he really is retired from U.S.-sponsored military service, if you know what I mean... Here's your tax dollars at work.

A few newspaper websites have republished up the Inky article and two blogging news sites have picked up on it:

• Yet Another Baby Blogging story uncovers danger - but it's not true ran in BloggingBaby.com: "When someone threatened his son on his Baby Theo Web page, he took the site down; but left up a pic on his home page. Well, that is, according to the article, which somehow managed to not check its facts (maybe, ummm--go to the link you included in your article?) and discover that, in fact, Baby Theo's page is alive and well. We're glad, Theo's a cutie."

• Baby bloggers ran in Netfamilynews. "The $64,000 question(s) is: Is this a shift of thinking and behavior or, basically, a mistake?.. Martin Kelly, whose baby was threatened by someone who visited his baby page, would lean toward the mistake side of the question." (No I wouldn't, as I explained to the webmaster later)

One way to publicize grassroots political action is to give a trendy new name to your work. This is the strategy of the fellow who calls himself the "Freeway Blogger":
http://www.freewayblogger.com/. Rather than post to the internet he posts signs on the side of the road with clever statements like "War President? My Pet Goat"; "Rumsfailed"; and "Nobody Died When Clinton Lied."

There's nothing really twenty-first century about the Freeway Blogger's media. Activists have put paint on old bedsheets since time immemorial and the messages have gone up along the nation's highways just as long. One can imagine the first patriots scrawling "Go Home Brits" onto an old cloth hung in a tree outside Concord. Yours truly has modified a few highway signs in his day and wheatepaste political messages in what we might call "sensitive" places (the less said the better).

But what is new is the Freeway Blogger's use of the internet to highlight his work and organize it into a campaign. A sign on your local interstate isn't as exciting as a campaign of signs or a movement of sign-makers. So the Freeway Blogger has called for a National Freeway Free Speech Day on October 13. It's a day for all of us to grap our paint, posterboard, photocopies (and yes: bedsheets) in an coordinated effort to reach America's drivers. The Freeway Blogger does have a website and has gotten 770 people in 190 cities across 45 states to join him in "freeway blogging" on October 13.