{"id":207,"date":"2003-10-06T17:36:35","date_gmt":"2003-10-06T17:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:22","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:22","slug":"for_what_its_worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=207","title":{"rendered":"For What It’s Worth"},"content":{"rendered":"

“There’s something happening here
\nWhat it is ain’t exactly clear
\nThere’s a man with a gun over there
\nTelling me I got to beware
\nI think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
\nEverybody look what’s going down
\nThere’s battle lines being drawn
\nNobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
\nYoung people speaking their minds
\nGetting so much resistance from behind
\nI think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
\nEverybody look what’s going down
\nWhat a field-day for the heat
\nA thousand people in the street
\nSinging songs and carrying signs
\nMostly say, hooray for our side<\/b>
\nIt’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
\nEverybody look what’s going down.”<\/p>\n

– “For What It’s Worth”, Buffalo Springfield, 1967 (written by Stephen Stills, emphasis mine)<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

i\u00b7con\u00b7o\u00b7clast (n.)<\/b> One who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions; One who destroys sacred religious images.<\/i><\/p>\n

After we got back from the trip, I buried myself in finishing up the latest project, and only got time to spend wandering the blogs this weekend.<\/p>\n

And today, I find myself, in the jargon of 1967, kinda bummed<\/b>.<\/p>\n

I’ve met “Calpundit”<\/a> Kevin Drum and his lovely (and tolerant – blogger’s partner has to be) wife, and I’ve corresponded with “Instapundit”<\/a> Glenn Reynolds, who strikes me as an interesting and more than smart fella; sometimes I’ve agreed and sometimes not with each of them.<\/p>\n

But this weekend I went back and looked at the last few week’s posts from each of them, and my heart fell a little bit. <\/p>\n

And then in the gym this morning (I’m rehabbing an injured shoulder so I can go back to martial arts), they played the Buffalo Springfield song above (one of the hits from my high school years). And something hit me.<\/p>\n

I want to outline what I saw, and toss the question out there as to whether it’s an artifact of my own impressions and memory, or something that other people see as well.One of the things that I admire intensely about both Kevin and Glenn is that when I started reading them, I read them both as fellow iconoclasts – that while Kevin was liberal, he wasn’t interested in playing to the party line and while Glenn was libertarian-conservative, he was equally disinterested in playing for one team or the other. Each of them, it seemed to me (and I ought to go do some kind of analysis of posts but don’t have time), spend a nontrivial amount of their time poking at the stupidities of their own sides.<\/p>\n

I felt like there was the germ of a Third Path kind of movement here, a chance to create a Party of the Sensible. We might disagree about certain aspects of policy, but we’d agree that it ought to be reality-based, instead of living within the soap-opera world that constitutes political life in America today.<\/p>\n

But going back over the last few week’s posts, it just seems to me like each has joined the chorus of people saying “hooray for our side”; maybe it’s just l’affaire Plame<\/i>, but it just reads like Kevin is out to nail the Bush team and Glenn is out to defend them – and all of the lesser issues they talk about start to fall into place according to that force field.<\/p>\n

Maybe this is who Glenn and Kevin have always been.<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s an unavoidable consequence of being taken seriously, as I think both Kevin and Glenn are.<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s all in my head.<\/p>\n

But if you share my belief that the biggest threat to the Republic is the crystallization of our politics into something too inflexible to deal with the problems we’re facing today and will be facing in my son’s time, it’s hard to look at this without worry. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“There’s something happening here What it is ain’t exactly clear There’s a man with a gun over there Telling me I got to beware I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound Everybody look what’s going down There’s battle lines being drawn Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong Young people speaking their minds Getting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}