Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

This blog, for the most part, is literary. Or at least in an ideal world, it would be exclusively devoted to this subject. But every now and then, I find myself drifting into political segues -- many of them driven by a certain sorrowful feeling over a government that, I thought, was pretty damn nifty and downright revolutionary when laid down in 1776. I think of Thomas Jefferson's letter to Abigail Adams in 1787, in response to her alarm over Shay's Rebellion, writing, "The spirit of reistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then," and how this conviction rests at the center of our system of checks and balances.

So when an action, such as soldiers raping young boys at Abu Ghraib (PDF) or libraries and bookstores being forced to turn over records to the government or November elections being delayed for unclear reasons, goes down and there is very little opposition in the regular conduits, I find myself ineluctably compelled to jot it down here -- both for my own peace of mind and to remind my readers that there is a world of injustices that deserves sizable contemplation.

But there is also a part of me that recognizes that not even the most devoted political wonk can keep track of it all. And while one can remain disheartened by this reality, the saving grace here is that blogs can. I'm not talking about a single individual. I'm suggesting that, no matter what your political alignment, blogs can offer a peer-to-peer filtering system as effective as the SETI@home project was in analyzing all the data. The Internet (along with blogs) was instrumental to the Howard Dean campaign -- both in setting him up with funds and taking him down through the remixes of his infamous "take California" moment. I would suggest that the act of replaying the Howard Dean speech through these remixes had some influence that dripped into the major media conduits -- to the point where it offered Dean a Muskie moment that even he couldn't have predicted. It was the same soundbyte obsession that got Trent Lott into trouble two years ago. As studied at length in this Harvard report (PDF), it was the bloggers who first noticed the quote and set the major media roans running loose. And, more recently (and literary-based), Laila's initial notice of the Zoo Press scandal led to similar coverage.

It is undeniable that blogs have an