Sunday, February 4, 2007

Ironies and Traumas of the Culture Wars

Somehow I'm trying to get my head around the synchronicity and the juxtapositions that being in Blogoramaville exposes you to.

What does it mean that the latest Weblog/Valve blogspat is happening right as blogospheric debates over the Mooninite invasion of Boston are beginning to take on War of the Worlds proportions? (You don't need me to point you to other more interesting and amusing takes; that's what the [Update 2/7/07: insert "now updated"] blogroll's for.)

What do these rumblings among academic and pop cultural bloggers have to do with the assassination of Hrant Dink in Istanbul fairly recently? (I will link to bloggers Mostly Harmless readers are less likely be reading.)

Why does all this--and so much more of this crazy decade--feel like the Golden Age of the Culture Wars (say, from Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind [1987] to Levine's The Opening of the American Mind [1996], no, wait, from Hirsch's Cultural Literacy [1987] to Berube's Public Access [1994], or, even better, from Kimball's Tenured Radicals [1990] to Nelson's Manifesto of a Tenured Radical [1997]), writ large in American and world media culture? Why is Blogoramaville beginning to feel like a huge graduate seminar that's open to (slices of) the (mediated) public?

What's your latest "deja vu all over again" moment?

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