thomas leverett weblog: October 2018

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

weblogs as a network

All these years, I've been using these weblogs. One reason I keep using them is that they are useful to me, in organizing my thoughts, in getting ready for a writing project, etc. Late at night, I'm tired, I want to write but am drained of creativity, I'll write on my personal weblog. I do something professional, and want to keep track of it, I put it here; this is where I keep track of various language-related interests. Recently I've gotten more alarmed about the downfall of the country, and I've put that here too.

They had another purpose, though, and that was to sell my books, or put my name out there. This has not worked. Or at least, it hasn't sold any books to speak of. It could be that you have to have thousands and thousands of views before people actually click on "buy," but in any case, they haven't made it to the last step; maybe I'm a crappy writer. Or it could be that weblogs tend to be a backwater of the web, and, if you don't keep "refreshing" them, they get even more so. Why should Google put them up on the search pages?

In the publishing business, I have another weakness; I publish only on Amazon, and have not really sought out other venues or ways to sell things. Amazon has millions of titles, and mine, selling as little as they do, are way down in the vast uncharted bottom of the sea. I thought I could use these weblogs to advertise a little, but here I have two new releases on Audible; I have a facebook page, an Amazon page and a Twitter, and still, I'm in some backwater. Either I'm a sucky writer, and everyone's figured that out, or, you have to pay some real money to get real people to see you. I don't know, really. My son has a YouTube channel; he makes plenty of money; I'm jealous, and still, I sit over here wondering if I'll ever get "discovered." It could be that I have only my own stubbornness to blame. Or it could be, I should just be more of an instagram poet.

But meanwhile, the weblogs have a steady trickle of traffic. My personal one leads (1094 visits/mo.), followed by this one (943), and the link-haiku e pluribus haiku (489). Music (363) and poetry (341) follow. Five more are over a hundred: boxcars (268), quakers (269), lubbock (247), ESL closet (216) and folk tales (169). I don't know if being over a hundred qualifies for anything. My sense is that maybe I have to push a little to get them to go anywhere.

They get stale; I go months, or even years, and don't touch them. When I get back up there I see an e pluribus haiku ad, outdated, maybe six or seven years old even. I don't have a regular system for updating them, and as a result, they get kind of ignored in the shuffle. I was looking through them in doing this research, and there was one I'd forgotten I had.

When I'm on my own, I do them mostly for my own gratification. If all they do is represent my current interests, or in the case of my personal weblog, my current rambling thoughts, love for family, nostalgia, etc., then at least it's all here, uploaded, and when the computer crashes, it's still here. I'm kind of organized on the blogspot. It's got everything I've thought and done, everything that's important to me. On that level, it doesn't matter if anyone sees them.

On the other hand, if you need 10,000 views to get one "click" or "like" or "buy," then I'd better get going, and in any case, it wouldn't hurt to have a little upgrade.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Rise of Nazism

The shooting in Pittsburgh hit close to home, because I used to live in Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood of Pittsburgh where it took place. I lived there only a summer, as I was staying with my brother (who lived there perhaps five or six years), but I remember clearly the people, Jews and others, who called the place home. The rise of Nazism means everyone becomes overly conscious of their identity, racial, biological, clan-associated, or whatever. If you're Jewish, you have to worry about your safety as you attend your temple or synagogue. I would think, if you're Muslim, same. Eventually you'll feel that way even if you go to a concert, or a bus station. Better take stock of the color of your skin, your background, your papers, etc., as somebody's watching and might just haul you off.

I track the rise of Nazism back to 9/11. People were electrified by the attack on the heart of our nation and they began to question whether it was ok to have diversity around, to let people in, to not fortify ourselves better against the scary violent world out there. Let's not confuse Nazism, which I take to mean absolute rule that tends to blame Jews for all our problems, and a more general tribalism, which is not anti-Semitic so much as just pro-white or pro- whatever group you happen to be born into. I see tribalism as taking over much of the world, with the Balkans first, eastern Europe, even central Europe, Brazil - it's a general trend everywhere. It makes people smaller, and makes them tend to close off from everyone they don't consider "one of them." And white folks in the USA are not the only ones guilty of it.

Nazism is a subset of tribalism, one where displaying the swastika is now a symbol of believing in killing Jews, getting rid of non-white people in an area, or preferring absolute rule by an iron-fisted steel-boot authority over the messiness of democracy or working together. We have the guns and the soldiers, we should just maybe use them? I think this underground rise of Nazi symbolism (it's still not considered acceptable to wear swastikas around, yet they have appeared in various places recently) is part of a deeper feeling among white folks that they're losing the ground beneath their feet, that the "white" country that they knew and loved might be slipping away from them. It's driven by fear. And that fear will get worse as Trump goes down: he loses elections, his corruption makes it impossible for him to stay in office, and the wheels of justice move in on him and his.

Trump himself is not overtly fascist, although he's shown contempt for democracy and the mechanisms the Constitution has set up to block absolutism or monarchy. He wants to use an executive order to remove birthright citizenship, but, if any president can by whim remove any law, what will happen with the next President? Or one who is similarly irresponsible on the left? Maybe the "coming out" of swastikas is not his fault, but in the sharp veer toward despotism it is clearly visible in the mirror. After Charlottesville he says, there are good people on both sides. Yes, and all kinds of good people were complicit in the Holocaust that killed seven million. They were ok people, and they sat around and lived their lives, and said nothing, and the smell of furnaces was right across the valley.