The blogging problem

I had a moment of deja vu reading Theodore Dalrymple's column, describing his reaction to a nitwit post-modern "educationist," when I hit this passage:

Halfway through my own reply, however, I suddenly became bored. Why do I spend so much time arguing against such obvious rubbish, which should be both self-refuting and auto-satirizing the moment someone utters it? Why not just go and read a good book?

I guess most bloggers have that experience, especially those whom nobody reads.

I realize that I could pull more readers by promoting myself, but to tell the truth, I'm not sure I dare. Sometimes I write stuff that, returning to it later, seems very well expressed, but a lot of the time I'm just struggling to be coherent. I'm sure I have ADD, especially since I started having tinnitus, thanks to which I hear a high-pitched tone constantly. What I end up with is less a stream of consciousness than a housefly of consciousness--flitting, buzzing, lighting and taking off again before it can be swatted down on one thought.

I, like all old farts, have my own set of pet peeves, war stories and theories. My cousin, who's an M.D., knows that one of my buttons is the idiocy of the wilderness issue, which I view as an elite landgrab aimed at closing public lands to the public which owns them. Of course, there is no end of the letters to the editor from those who believe that the earth cannot survive its crowning creation, humanity. I keep responding, but like Dalrymple, I keep wondering why I waste my time. The people who think that they are being brilliant when they buy into vastly vapid ideas will never learn or cease to come along. I think they are a natural consequence of our leisure society. In the past, they'd be too busy making a living to come up with such nonsense, let alone spout it publicly.

On the other hand, maybe blogging is the answer. Give everybody his own blog, and let the newspapers glean from blogs instead of letters to their editors. And leave the rest of us out of it.