Kigalidotblog

Frankly, we're a lot more tolerant society than our own intolerant right would like to believe.

Which makes me wonder who the real hate-mongers are: those who are cut off from modern communications technology and are more easily subject to the machinations of ignorant clerics — or those that should know better and who claim to be morally superior.

That's the punch line to Antonia Zerbisias' recent Toronto Star article about how the blogs on the right have gone into supernova with hatred over the Muslim cartoon riots.

Yesterday, I poked at the concept that our words aren't cotton-candy strands floating in the wind without weight. What prominent blogger A writes about gets picked up by A's audience, which filters it to their own blogs. Another tier of readers comes along and carries the message to their blogs or message boards. It's a new game of telephone, this cut-n-paste publishing with some new invective spliced in along the way. For now, the commentary is circuiting through the blogs, zipping around the bandwidth until something new comes along, when Prominent Blogger A replaces Outrage X with Issue Y. And the circle of life continues.

For now, the outrage and rants and name-calling all stays on the Web. The blogs themselves are great at communicating with each other and their makeshift communities, but they don't have the grassroots, only individual readers. There's nothing to continue the blog in meatspace, no get-togethers, no local meetings, no face-to-face (minus the minor phenom of "Drinking Liberally," where lefties gather and drink, and that's about it). Luckily, when it comes to the angry blogs, there's no street-level violence to back up the words. Angry bloggers are happy to get it out online rather than throw bricks at the groups they don't like.

And yet, I'm reminded abut Rwanda, when in one spring, when nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by extremist Hutus militias. The murderers were urged on by voices on the radio, telling them to slaughter the Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus, and one month later, at least 500,000 were estimated dead. All very low tech. Radio, machetes, killers moving by truck or by foot. Just fueled by crude booze and the dual intoxicant of being the righteous cleanser of an ill society.

And that is, I admit, a simplistic retelling of genocide that was decades in the making through slow and cruel events. However, I'm taken with the idea of a broadcast medium uses to transmit messages of rage and violence coupled with the speed of the information snowballing on bogs. Eventually, we are going to hit a point where a message is going to get out of control, and someone (driven by blograge) is going to take matters into their own hands. After that, who knows. Retribution? Escalation? A combination of viral warfare over the networks mixed with guns and knives on the street?

I hope I'm wrong. I hope I just have a case of the neo-Victorian prudeness that makes lawmakers think videogames are going to make kids into soulless killing machines. Yet, I see how much emotion can get generated by poliblogs. And I see that there is no middle ground paved on the Web for the right and left to get together to ease tensions. We're a very factionalized culture in post-9/11 America. We're also packed with pockets of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Add to that our fame-driven culture. Hinckley supposedly shot Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. What if there's some overwhelmed blogreader who wants to be famous for taking down some top blogger on the left or the right? We have culture wars a-ragin' in the country, from what I keep hearing. Eventually, with all the heat and noise coming off the bandwidth, I'm not going to be shocked if there's going to be a casualty.