Little Gramscian Monkeys

Get yourself a cup of coffee. The time has come to speak of LGF.

For those who do not know, Little Green Footballs (LGF) is a forum blog run by Charles Johnson, and which was influential and well-respected in its day.  I enjoyed my time there greatly, but I’ve never been able to get right with what Charles Johnson did to a user named “Dianna”.[1]  She’s one of the nicest people one could hope to befriend online, who did him no harm or even insult. Oh sure, Zombie went over the line at times and God knows BabbaZee lived over the line and only occasionally wandered back on this side of it. But when BabbaZee was right, she was right, and she knew about totalitarian control structures. On the other hand, Johnson has never wronged me, and in fact I have guarded my gratitude for his long hospitality, even when I was being a prat. Which was kind of seasonal. Recently, I have stayed away from LGF for the most part, as I need not go to a man’s house simply to make a mess on the carpet.

By the same token, I have distanced myself from online communities which seemed to me to have little more holding them together than a sense of betrayal and a nostalgia for the old stomping grounds. Lots of good people in those groups (and well they should be, I met them on LGF), but the conversation usually went back to a blog I almost never visited any more. When Johnson called them the “stalker blogs”, it was at times hard to disagree, particularly if you hadn’t been treated to the full CJ banned-for-whatever experience.  At the same time, I could certainly sympathize. I’ll hardly be breaking news here to say that I very much miss the old LGF, and the friends I had there. One of them was Johnson himself.

I had always hoped that Gollum-like, he would yet have some positive contribution to make, despite a growing mutual antagonism between people he associates with these days, and those with whom I do. After all, he maintained a steadfast insistence that he supports Israel for the same reasons I do; a democracy surrounded by tyrannies bent upon its destruction is a sympathetic figure for decent people of any stripe. I need no religion to inform my opinion of good forms of government and the necessity to resist oppression.

Charles Johnson stood solid in a time of turmoil, and demonstrated real leadership. He gathered and encouraged an undefined group of people in the wake of 9/11, when many of us re-aligned some unknown set of priorities and views. I would be hard-pressed to describe my own path through that time except in the most pedestrian sense, so I won’t try to describe his political journey, as I would only get it wrong, and waste the reader’s time to boot, but I admired his patience and courage in dealing with disparate issues. I think I understand how he got where he once was, and how he got back to where he had presumably come from. Perspectives and opinions change and that is just normal. The unfortunate part is watching principles erode, and this is much more difficult to accept. In fact, I’m done. What for me began with RatherGate has ended with WeinerGate.

I discovered LGF in the wake of the outstanding work done by LGF and Powerline Blog taking Dan Rather to task for his flaming dishonesty in the Bush memo affair. (MemoGate, RatherGate, FontGate, etc). The “Throbbing Memo” is still an icon of web citizenry, and possibly the single most meaningful turning point in the shift in the media center of gravity from print and broadcast. The MSM is still the dominant force, but they are no longer alone in the universe, and LGF was instrumental in making that a new reality.  They exposed a major network anchor as a lying partisan hack, bringing him down.

I always wondered why Johnson took such pains to challenge the Daily Kos, continually dredging up toxic waste from the lefty bowels of the internet to criticize on his own front page.  Don;t get me wrong; Markos Moulitsas is a prime piece of garbage, but it never made sense for Charles Johnson, at the height of Little Green Footballs’ influence in the blogosphere, to spend so much energy chasing such a rodent.  Lions won’t bother small animals because they would spend more energy just catching varmints than they would gain from eating them.

In the days of MemoGate when I arrived at LGF, the Iraq war was new, the Afghanistan war was entering its long “quiet” period, and an LGF user named BabbaZee was mentioned in glowing terms, but conspicuously absent; the 12th Imam of LGF.  Nekama’s Troll Hammer was already famous, and I believe that the first version of the LGF Dictionary had already been posted.  Nekama was a user who had assembled a handy-as-Hell list of 10 or 12 points about Israel and regional goings-on.  Trolls (online nuisances) in the day fell into some predictable varieties; anti-Israel, anti-America, anti-Bush, if I recall.

LGF has changed from being mostly inhabited by center-to-rabid right-wingers (speaking!) to being mostly inhabited by center-to-rabid left-wingers. You can see how there could be some friction along the way. So for quite a while now, I have not felt at home there like I used to, and I have mostly just stayed away, and here’s why: I enjoyed my time there greatly, I benefitted from Charles’ hospitality, wherein he contributed much and asked for little.

I miss the old days, and while you can never go home again, you can still pull in a little afterglow, or just enjoy talking to old friends and even adversaries. A few times, I popped in, typically found more argument than reminiscence, and found something else to do. Life goes on, and at any rate, that’s Facebook’s business model, not LGF’s.

Many of my old LGF friends, from back in the day, are in touch on Facebook, and many of them have moved on to other online communities. It is a testament to the former influence and popularity of LGF that to this day, a prominent topic of conversation is “the old school”.

The blog that made the phrase “we fact check your ass” famous with its astronomical count of “link, please” occurrences has become a Bill-Maher-esque chamber of hooting monkeys and a few cheerleading providers of approved thought. There is a difference between a free-for-all battle of ideas and a Lord of the Flies enforced conformity. At least in the old days when trolls would come and stir things up, our indignant responses included requests for sources. At least refutations of facts on their face.

I recently discovered that at LGF, calling conservatives “American Taliban” is not only not frowned upon, but that the monkeys will not tolerate a comment such as this: How would you compare your analogy to “Bush = Hitler”?  More precisely, the ringleader I was challenging would not have any dissent, and the monkeys know when they are being called upon to do their poo-flinging duty.

I figured I’d had enough and decided to “out” my other accounts. As I said over there, I never used them maliciously, only to amuse. To be quite clear, I never referred to one account from another, much less engaged in argument or collusion, and I rarely even hit more than one account in a single thread. I do not remember this because it is recent. No, I remember this because these were my ethical limits on using multiple accounts. They included names like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Clintonite, and the community largely enjoyed my pot-stirring. When the bit got old, I dropped it.

So I assume that my account over there is forfeit, as at any rate, revealing one’s “sock puppets” is a handy way to “flounce” right off the reservation, to get banned by having a dramatic angry pout. Why how childish one must be to finally have enough of the thought police at LGF!  Oh, what a big baby one must be to get all flustered and walk away. Let’s all point and laugh, shun the infidel. Or else. Our derision should be enough to, uh, to what exactly?

• To prevent those who disagree from speaking up.
• To prevent those who leave from doing so on good terms.

You see, there is no way to leave LGF without either leaving a huge loose end just dangling (as there is no way to close an account), or enduring the tunnel of shame. It is not possible to announce that one is leaving or has issues with the proprietor in public or in private without it becoming an object of ridicule for the monkeys in the stands. Announcing your departure on the site will get you deleted and banned, but not before a public savaging. Polite e-mails to Johnson will get you the exact same treatment. So will being seen commenting on blogs which criticize LGF. Bad Monkey. So will running your own blog with critical blogs in your “blogroll”, which is like your online Rolodex. That’s right, people get banned from LGF for appearing in unapproved places online.

Dianna, one of my online friends from there who is now of course not there, was treated to Charles Johnson’s peculiar brand of hospitality when she mailed him to request (If I recall correctly, and I am not coordinating this article with anybody) that he close her account there over ideological differences.  Her e-mail was quoted in the forum, misrepresented then ridiculed and finally used as an excuse to BAN her, rather than simply complying with her request.  The difference?  Only that a ban is announced and is supposed to somehow thwart a nefarious troll, rather than account closure which would have been a simple courtesy.

I believe Dianna’s version of things–I have never been able to provoke her, and I (believe me you!) know how to pick a fight.

Johnson’s complaints of “stalker blogs” are not unfounded, and it used to be a larger problem than it is now. He is not without defense in his hostility to some sites, especially a couple of years ago. That said, the level of control exerted by the multiple layers of creepiness is more cult-like than blog-like. A lot of the people in Jonestown didn’t want to drink the Kool-Aid–but they did. That’s what control structures accomplish.

BabbaZee was one of the early titans of the place, at least to my eyes when I finally saw her online.  She is a, shall we say, committed Zionist who absolutely adores Israel, and will not hear a single inch of it or anybody who supports it condemned an iota.  She has no patience with the Palestine issue (“Jordyptians” she calls them), and in fact is flat-out hostile to Islam–she sees it as a moon-worshipping satanic totalitarian death-cult bent on destroying God’s chosen people and defiling their mandated land.

So I don’t see eye-to-eye with her on everything, but she introduced me to the reputation of Antonio Gramsci who according to the delicately understated Wikipedia entry “…is renowned for his concept ofcultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a capitalist society.”  He is the founder of the Italian Communist Party, and a formative influence on the likes of Noam Chomsky and the belatedly dead Howard Zinn.  Gramsci’s major contribution was not merely the realization that culture binds people, but that manipulation of culture can dissolve a people, and the modern progressive dominance over Hollywood is a monument to Gramsci.

Charles Johnson was helped out in the early days by then-not-famous Andrew Breitbart, who had some influence but was not yet a superstar of opposition to the totalitarian control structures closing in on us seemingly from all directions.  As Jo–ah screw it.  I’ve been editing this document for weeks and now months, and I just want it off my plate.  Tired of looking at it; tired of thinking about it.  Please cancel my membership in this article.

If there were a “close my account” button on the site, LGF would have a much better reputation than it does now. It would also have fewer members.

Nobody gets out of LGF alive.

—
[1] Shortly after I published this, “Dianna” sent me the text of her e-mail to Charles, with a request that I include it here, for clarity.  I take requests.

Dear Charles,

I’m sorry, but I’m leaving. Please don’t make an announcement of it; this
isn’t about you, and I’m not engaging in blog wars.

My accounts are: Dianna and Dianna’s Hart.

Thank you for all your work and all the good times.

Dianna