The Blog as Modern Pamphlet

[Valin]

Power Line:

Steven Hayward

8/11/13

 

Im re-reading for the first time in many years Bernard Bailyns classic Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which deservedly won both the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes. An early footnote (yes, I always take in the footnotes) quotes George Orwell from 1948: At any given moment there is a sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact. Orwell thought the remedy to what might be called the monopoly of the media-academic-complex was the revival of the pamphlet. May I suggest that the blog, like Power Line, is the modern day equivalent of the pamphlets of the revolutionary era.

 

Bailyn paraphrases Orwells description this way:

 

(snip)

 

Just so. Bailyn went on to argue that pamphlets (like the most famous one, Tom Paines Common Sense) was where the ideas of the American Revolution were worked out in real timeand not so much the newspapers, of which there were many at the time. Sounds a lot like today, with our somnambulant mainstream media.

 

(Snip)