| I follow a bunch of national blogs, mostly progressive, but I don't tend to get involved in their communities or even read their comment threads. I make exceptions for that when those posts and threads deal with Montana or issues important to Montana. Today, I dearly regretted that.
Crooks and Liars is probably one of the finest, information rich, broad-spectrum progressive blogs out there. I was an occasional reader until David Neiwert became a regular poster there. Now I read it almost daily. David had a post up yestereve about the Exxon oil spill in the Yellowstone river. You've certainly read about that by now, on Twitter, the newspapers, blogs local and otherwise. In other words, you know about it if you haven't been holed up in a cabin near Lincoln for 5 days. jhwygirl has been blogging her heart out about it, and kudos to her. So, let's just take it as wrote that you know that a broken Exxon pipeline has spilled an as yet undetermined amount of crude oil into the Yellowstone river, with as yet undetermined environmental and economic impact.
David Neiwert, himself a son of the mountain west, shared this story with the readers at Crooks and Liars. His post:
Oh, those annoying peasants: Montanans outraged by Exxon/Mobil's tepid response to Yellowstone River oil spill
The post is very similar to what jhwygirl has been sharing with us. What slapped me back were the comments, and if'n you have the urge you probably ought to read them. If you don't, let me share the basic tenor of them here: "Serves you right, you red state assholes!" No concern or commentary about the environmental impact to the region. No exposure of Exxon's duplicity, beyond the all-knowing smugness. No discussion of possible future economic impact in a recessed economy. Nope, just a whole lot of ignorant triumphalism based on the color of our state's outline on the CNN electoral maps.
My personal favorite comments were the one that claims no one in Montana cared about the Gulf oil spill (not even remotely true), so we deserve to suffer, and the one that castigated us all for having voted for Dick Cheney. Montana, Wyoming, all the same when you establish your progressive cred by dissing a red state you know nothing about. There was no mention of Jon Tester and his attempt to get rid of oil and gas subsidies or his attempts to better regulate the petroleum industry. No mention at all of Dennis Rehberg and his eternal support of petroleum subsidies or his donations from that industry. The message in those comments is fairly clear. We're a bunch of rednecks who deserve to have one of the nation's premier rivers choked with oil because John McCain beat Barack Obama here by a whopping 2.4%. Suck on that, red-staters.
There's a few takeaways here for me. One is that blog commenters don't tend to think about what they write any more at large blogs than at small ones. Two, anger at 'the other' trumps rational thought just as much among progressives as any other grouping, and it's seemingly terribly delicious to put that anger on display. There's a passel more thoughts but the reader can decide what they will. |
