This is not a GBCW diary: I’m very gratified to have been the DKos user by the name of viralvoice since mid-July, and I may come back again, but as my real self.
I’ve suddenly become more involved with this upcoming presidential campaign than I thought I would be, in ways that will preclude my continuing an anonymous diary here.
When this campaign began to attract my attention I took baby steps to inform myself better. And a return to DKos – where years ago I posted some “high impact” diaries under another name, was a part of that trek.
I lurked for a while. I wanted to resist the call of another political campaign. I’m one of those disillusioned Americans that doesn’t always pay attention or participate. There are millions like me yet we often think we’re alone.
It turns though that we’re not alone this time. Now I’m lacing up my cleats again (I’ve been called up from waivers) to go back out onto the field. So this is a thank you to everyone – pro and con – that helped me to test and sharpen the narrative that I’m now convinced can occur.
As a way of saying thanks…
I am an alienated American who was, early in life, very involved in electoral politics (particularly US Democratic party politics). I managed many campaigns, consulted, ran media or field organization in others, more often winning than not.
At some point along that road fundraising became a bigger and bigger deal to all campaigns. Elections became more expensive. More time had to be spent shaking money trees in order to compete, and that meant sucking up to those that have it. And even the most fired up liberal Democrats began hedging and then betraying us (to use a currently hot term in the lexicon) on economic issues. It was heartbreaking. And so, years ago, I walked away from what became known as “the biz,” and found other ways to participate in making change without having to stain or be stained by electoral campaigns.
Of course, the mud still hits the apathetic on the side of the road, too. And no matter how far one walks away from that highway, the evil follows you. But after the last presidential campaign, when the right swamped the polls with three million alienated voters that came out from the shadows based on social issues, it didn’t even matter that the Democratic nominee had won more votes than any Democrat in history.
The Democrats on the ‘04 ticket couldn’t inspire the alienated millions on this side of the barricades to vote. That wasn’t entirely their failing: A lot of that is for deeply ingrained structural reasons (the “caging” of voters, policies that criminalize many - especially young and minority - voters, economic hardships, racism, and the Svengali-like powers of the mass media to distract us with other things). I became more than bored with the subject matter; I was disgusted. So I went back to the drawing board to rethink it all from the outside looking in.
I still have good friends from my earlier electoral life. We stay in touch. And what most of them told me for the past two years is that the Democratic nomination contest is already over, that one candidate has it locked up. And since I had eight years of experience living during the Clinton White House – exactly as much experience as those that lived in it – I thought, sigh, there’s no hope for the United States in this next round. The prospect of that ain’t gonna get millions of us off the sidelines and the limited base of the minority of Americans that always vote, even if the “Kerry + Ohio” needle gets thread, won’t be enough to create a mandate for true change.
Because I knew the Clinton machine and was close to many that were, and are, in it, I presumed my friends were correct, that it is a monolith, that it can’t be stopped. And so I have continued to devote myself to different ways of participating in society – but outside of the electoral sphere.
The first siren call came last February to interrupt my disinterested bliss, when David Geffen (once Joni Mitchell’s Free Man in Paris, now a mega-media mogul) said of the Clinton organization, "That machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective."
I had tuned out on following electoral politics but there it was, atop the Google News page, so I clicked the story. "Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease,” Geffen said of the Clintons, “it's troubling."
In a now-notorious gaffe, the Clinton campaign spokesman then proved him right by inventing a falsehood – that Geffen was supposedly Barack Obama’s “finance chair” (he was not) – to try to swat him down. Geffen – although not of the peeps that I run with – is a formidable person. I scratched my head, and said to myself, “Wait. Wasn’t Geffen one of them? Didn’t he stay in the Lincoln Bedroom and raise boodles of money for the Clinton machine? And what’s this about so many white folks like him rallying around a guy named Barack Obama? That’s new.”
I chewed on that for months, but mostly successfully returned to my island-of-one, ignoring the campaign, convinced that the result was already predetermined.
At times people would ask me what I thought about the ’08 campaign or of Senator Clinton, and I found myself getting all kinds of reactions simply by paraphrasing Geffen: “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease.” And I began to find that a lot of folks I had presumed would try to argue against that, who had been with that political organization before, expressed a surprising agreement with that observation. Their “experience” with the first Clinton White House brought them to similar conclusions as my own.
Still, I presumed that the Clinton organization would beat back all challengers simply by raising more money to flatten them with. So at the end of June, when atop the Google News page there was a story that suggested something else was happening, that Obama claimed to be approaching 250,000 campaign donors, I took another sip from the political bottle, and I was off the politically abstinent wagon again.
Around that time I wandered back toward the Daily Kos. And I lurked. And I lurked some more. I checked my old account here – it is still is in the archives - but I didn’t want to come back to it because I sensed it would draw me into the vortex all over again. And these were hesitant, baby steps I was taking.
At times, reading diaries and comments here, I wanted to speak up. But my views were still forming, tentative, not yet fully born. To sign my name to them would draw me in deeper than I was yet ready to swim. And the culture of DKos had evidently evolved (in good ways and bad, but within the spirit of bygone days). I thought that forming another account but worried that might be an act of “sock puppetry,” so I cautiously discounted that possibility.
Then, on July 5 I saw a diary that suggested some fine print that would provide a kosher way around the sock puppet thing, when a prominent user that had previously changed his name went back to using his original name. He said:
"Please note that this was not sockpuppetry, as the two accounts were never used concurrently."
Aha! So there was my solution. I checked the rules, just to make sure (because “to live outside the law you must be honest”):
A sock puppet is an additional account of an existing member pretending to be a separate user. This may be used to mimic community support in an argument or for acting without consequence to one's 'main' account. It is considered dishonest, trollish behavior.
At Daily Kos the term 'sock puppet' is also commonly applied to non-authorized accounts of previously banned users.
And since I’d never been banned or even shunned (some of my olden days diaries were recommended and I one time I logged in to find I had a diary FP-ed here), and hadn’t used my original account in eons, Viral Voice was thus born.
I later learned that the term for this kind of user is not sockpuppet, but, rather, a Zombie.
Oooooooh. Scary!
I, Zombie.
And in parsing the site rules, I also saw that anonymity is very strongly protected:
Many people chose to post to Daily Kos under pseudonyms, keeping their real names confidential. There are many reasons why people would choose not to reveal their real names. Revealing the identify of someone who has chosen to remain anonymous is a bannable offense. It is also a morally reprehensible thing to do.
Well, I don’t want to be “morally reprehensible,” and one reading of the rule could mean that I can’t tell you who viralvoice really is, without breaking that rule. Heh. I love that! Mystery! Intrigue! Omerta!
I’m happy to play along.
And Viral Voice was born: I then went through the 24-hour waiting period on comments and the one week wait on diaries, and in late July began commenting, recommending, and posting a diary here and there, getting my sea legs back.
And hey: It was really, especially fun to be called “newbie” when that happened a few times. Har har. (Each and every time the attempted smackdown came from someone with a higher UID number than I began with. A word to the wise is sufficient: y’all should welcome newcomers, not haze them as if this place is a Skull and Bones fraternity.) But that sort of sniping quickly came to an end as I started testing what I call "the narrative."
The ideas in my head that I most wanted to test (without the burden of adding my biography as part of it to argue these ideas) were whether my old friends that had been force-feeding me the “inevitable nominee” argument could be proved wrong, whether Obama, now that he had won the money primary, really would continue rebuilding the broken bridge between white Democrats and those of color, between old voters and the alienated and the newer ones, whether a historic political upset really was in the making, one that could flood the polls next November with millions of alienated voters much like myself – bringing a mandate and a super-majority in Congress to do its part - and, at first, whether I really believed that’s a good idea.
It was on the night of the July 23 YouTube debate – and especially when Schlumpy (Mark Penn's nickname in the first Clinton White House) dinosaured his way onto the spin room floor afterwards pushing the (since discarded) “naïve and inexperienced” argument: At that moment I began to see a better future besting the mediocre past and the wheel of history turning again.
And so I have posted some diaries since then, a healthy percentage of which (not bad for a “newbie!”) made the recommended list.
And although some folks complain about “candidate diaries,” I’ve been absolutely loving them! On all sides! I’ve clicked those more than policy diaries. And I think I “get,” as a result, the reasons and emotions that cause support for each of the candidates, and where and when those emotions and reasons willl soon give way to new ones.
But you know what? Being anonymous has been fun precisely because it fosters whacky irresponsibility and unaccountability. And although I think I’ve been among the better behaved on candidate diaries, and have not seen any of my comments hidden, it’s still amazing to review what can fly off one’s keypad when one is wearing a mask. I’d sometimes marvel; “did I really say that?” Because, being anonymous, one starts to play a “role.” It’s like acting. And acting is fun. My guess is I’ve offered mainly good theater, but it’s still theater, and I think it’s time to step out and do something more.
Well, during the same time period I’ve changed around some other parts of my life to be able to now begin to say what I think, and to be able to participate as I wish without having to put a mask on. So I actually have grown to have greater respect for anonymity than I had before: it does allow some of us to grow into not being so anonymous.
But I want y’all to know, from my deepest Buffy-The-Vampire-Slayer heart of my Zombie second-life, that DKos really helped me to take the steps to be able to take that leap. It’s sharpened my narrative by testing it against points of view and facts offered by people diametrically opposed to seeing that narrative happen. And it’s lessened some of my resigned cynicism by seeing how many good and smart people see this going more or less as I do.
The narrative is this (and if after it all comes to pass and these words, so discounted by the “conventional wisdom” adherents today, result to have told the story in advance, I’ll be happy to let Kos auction off the viralvoice user account along with UID’s 100,000 and 100,001 in a fund drive. Heh.). Here it is:
Millions of people are going to participate in next year’s caucuses, primaries and election that would not have participated otherwise if not for Barack Obama’s candidacy. And those normally alienated voters are going to swamp the “conventional wisdom” under a glorious tsunami and wash it out to sea.
And even those that don’t want it to happen because they have a different horse in this race will look back upon it and say, “y’know what? I’m glad that happened the way it did. It sure has worked out better than I thought.”
You heard it here from viralvoice, who now steps back onto a playing field from which he thought he had retired his number.
Viral Voice is dead! (Long live Viral Voice?) And long live Daily Kos!
Genuinely, thanks. It’s been worthwhile and fun.