The Sound and the Fury 2.0

I am fascinated by time. There's Einstein's time of the individual ticking along relative to his surroundings. But then there's cultural time measured by the latency with which ideas resonance through the collective consciousness. You can feel it accelerating. The bard begats the printer begats the ten o'clock news begats the 24/7 internet news cycle. Faster and faster it spins. Nowadays, step off the merry go round for even a minute and you're Rip van Winkle desperately trying to catch up.

Still, there's a delay. Blogger sitting in front of C-SPAN eating cheetos posts a vid on You Tube which gets picked up by so and so and the deep rumbling turns into a roar as an idea strikes a chord with the masses. There are always gatekeepers. Reporters or bloggers or radio blowhards. Someone to play mirror mirror to the vanity of the elite. Who's the fairest pol of them all?

For a few minutes last Friday afternoon I thought I'd felt a surge in our digital space time continuum. Republican members of Congress were staging an "energy revolt" on the House floor even though Speaker Pelosi had turned off the TV cameras and ordered reporters removed. So what did they do in response? They tweeted? Firing up their Blackberries they started posting directly to their Twitter feeds from the House floor. They had successfully done an endrun around the information gate keepers. This was direct, digital Democracy, faster then I'd ever experienced it before. Within a matter of minutes I was getting little 140 character posts straight from Congressmen Pete Hoekstra, John Culberson, and John Boehner. (At least I think it was. Always hard to tell with these things.)

The Democratic Speaker of the House had drawn a line in the sand and the Republican's had crossed over it. This was a tale straight from the sword drawing, property owning, masculine House of Representatives that I had read about in my history books. This isn't your House, Madam Speaker, this is the people's house. We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more. Burn, motherfucker, burn.

One of the things that I love about consciousness is how actions have arches. Emotions unleashed have a gravity as powerful as that which draws us to the earth. Such it was with the Republicans that night. They were in "revolt". The police were lining up outside their door on the Speaker's orders ready to close down the people's House and only a brave few Republicans were willing to put the American people above their weekends. Here was
their chance to pull the rug out from under the Democrats in the House. They had the moment, they had the initiative, and they had an opposition unable to pass it's way out of a legislative paper bag.

Heady stuff. It was probably one of the most brilliant Web 2.0 political tactics I had seen since someone posted Tim Ryan's anti Iraq war speeches on YouTube. Tactics are a funny thing though. They're only as effective as the force concentrated behind them.

Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Drill! Drill! Drill! Drill! They had nothing. If they were serious they would have stepped up and offered something beyond shilling for the oil industry and they would have kept hammering it until they were dragged out of the House kicking and screaming like a bunch of Berkeley hippies. Instead they performed their ASCII kabuki show for a few hours, parroted some shit that everyone knew was shit, sang a hymn, and left in time to catch the evening flight home to their districts.

I guess one should be grateful. The twitter revolt was just another fail whale that will hopefully not be repeated any time soon. Now we can go back to our blogs and enjoy the petty pace that creeps from day to day on our olde blogosphere.

(oh, and welcome back Jeff)