You know I started my old blog on a public computer at my local library. At the time, I was poor, directionless, and terribly unhappy. (Today, I’m poor, somewhat directed, and happy.) I knew no one in media, had no professional resume to speak of, and had no reasonable expectation that anyone would read me or take me seriously. But people did, and gradually, I got a small but very appreciated audience. I’ve maintained a status as a mostly-amateur writer since. I blog for no money. I’ve written for some publications, places like Salon and Jacobin and The New Inquiry and n+1 and some others, and now when I write elsewhere, generally it’s for money. Again, I appreciate this opportunity, and I don’t take it for granted. If I keep getting those opportunities, I’ll appreciate them. I have raised a little money from my readers here, and I have also gotten a steady stream of books from my Amazon Wish List. In fact I got one just today, and as always I’m immensely grateful. If these opportunities and compensation stop, they stop. I am familiar with having nothing and I am prepared either way. It’s all been a blessing. My point is just this: I’ve never considered myself to be a remotely big deal, and I am very easy to ignore. I get the readers I get and that’s enough.
So recently I did what I do here and I wrote a piece about traditional masculinity and its bankruptcy. Ross Douthat took the time to respond to what I had to say. I’m glad he did, and I owe him a response in turn. Andrew Sullivan did too. Alyssa Rosenberg was also kind enough to weigh in. I appreciate each and others who have commented on my piece, and feel entitled to the attention of none of them. Then someone at Lawyers Guns and Money wrote a post about that piece, and well, the comments went the way LGM goes.
I’ll only say this: I can either be enraging to you or irrelevant to you. I can’t be both. There is something like a half-dozen posts on LGM which specifically consider me and my arguments. Erik Loomis has written dozens of comments about me in that space. Every time my name is mentioned on LGM, the comments explode into a frenzied Two-Minutes Hate about me and my many, many failings. All of this is cool. The wages are low. My grandfather, a specific victim of the anti-Communist Broyles Bills in Illinois, had his career ruined by anti-left animus, so this is nothing. I can certainly take the negative opinions of people who are too cowardly to reveal their actual names to the world. And the ability of professors to lord over grad students without any accountability or shame is, I’m afraid, a fact of life. That doesn’t bother me. But the contradiction is strange: Loomis writes in the comments of that post, “I can’t imagine two figures debating that I would be more inclined to ignore.” And yet that’s not ignoring me; in fact, it’s the opposite of ignoring me. This repeated tendency of people like these, to simultaneously obsess over me and then to express my irrelevancy, is hard for me to understand. Irrelevant people should not send dozens of commenters and a handful of comfortable, protected professors into a fit on cue. It’s just strange, that’s all I’m saying.
I’ll keep doing this as long as I think it makes sense, and I’ll appreciate each and every person who reads me, and when it’s time to stop, I’ll stop. In the meantime: I am so, so easy to ignore. If I am irrelevant– and a broke humanities grad student who lives in the middle of America and writes on the same WordPress platform every other amateur does is probably irrelevant– then ignoring me has to be easy. If I’m a symptom of the decline of the West because you don’t like that I have different opinions than you do about politics, then that’s okay, too. But decide which is which. I’ll just be here, doing my thing, OK? Like, if you think the best thing to do is to ignore me… ignore me. I find that a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Me, I don’t find anybody irrelevant. I take all comers. But then, I’m also not the kind of person to spend so many hours of the day complaining anonymously about writers whose ideas I don’t even pretend to engage with.
Incidentally, I wrote a comment in regards to the substance of the LGM post, but the last time I checked they haven’t deigned to unleash it, even though the piece is about my argument and the comments are about me personally. And I might note that, unlike with Douthat, I probably agree with the average LGM blogger on 90% of issues, which for a crew of supposed political pragmatists should probably matter. But that’s the kind of shop they run over there, and I doubt that will ever change.
Glad to see the comments back on.
That you’ve generated so much attention from your original piece is interesting to me, as I thought it was uncharacteristically muddled writing on your part. I have a nagging suspicion that I hesitate to share with you, but here goes: the reason it’s garnered so much attention is because it can be fit into (though I’m sure it wasn’t the intent) the cultural effect you’ve accurately described many times before, that of the internet outrage du jour larded with signaling but lacking in practical application. I could go into greater detail if there’s any interest.
But enough of this. You are now a “gadfly” in the august pages of the NYT. Congratulations and keep plugging away.
I’m gonna write a followup. I was dealing with the immediate aftermath of the murder of six innocent people by a misogynist lunatic. I’ll try to do a better job next time.
Freddie,
For reasons I can’t explain, but that probably have something to do with insufficient software updates, your comments were dropped into our spam file. I’ve rectified that; they’re up now. In the future, if you don’t see your comments immediately please e-mail me, as the problem is almost assuredly technical, and easily resolvable.
Rob Farley
You are the only person who would respond to a LGM post defending your position by complaining about our bad behavior toward you.
Grow up.
Are a parody of a human being? How did you advance socialism today, Erik? Did you file another labor history post on LGM, or perhaps TA another discussion group? Keep manning the trenches. Your example humbles us all.
Please delineate what you did to advance socialism today.
The question was addressed to you, moron.
Lawyers, Guns and Money really is a cesspit.
I disagree with Freddie a lot, but I have immense respect for him, which I can’t say of you and your crew over at Lawyers. It’s the difference between disagreeing with a civilized man, and with a bunch of savages or monkeys.
Erik is my least favorite LGM blogger. But still. That’s a perfectly reasonable question to turn back around on someone. Don’t bust it out unless you’re willing to defend.
Piss up a rope first.
Taking lessons on maturity from a guy who managed even to get sleepy university administrators mad at him would be pretty amusing, though.
Me almost getting fired for attacking the NRA is probably more than most people commenting here has ever in standing up for one’s beliefs. I assume you don’t usually take the side of gun freaks, but maybe I am wrong about that.
Yup, having a rhetorical temper tantrum and almost (but not) losing your sweet gig is a real Paris Commune standing at the barricades moment for you, I’m sure. Carry on, campus commando!
In this too anti-intellectual society, my default position towards any academic is respect — until I know better. Offhand, I don’t know what courses Profs. Erik Loomis and Scott Lemieux teach, but their chronic Freddie-bashing in recent years is teaching all of us an important lesson: academics are still flawed human beings, and challenges to their belief systems can bring out their worst qualities, like obsession, childishness, condescension, and arguing in bad faith.
I don’t know you, I am even less “relevant” than you, and I certainly don’t find myself on your side in every piece you write (how could I unless we were clones or somesuch?) but I say this: keep going. Please keep going.
Freddie,
Assume that some of your readers want to support/contribute/show our apprecation for your work, and yet we hate Amazon for its anti-union work, its brutal micromanagement of its employees lives, its quest to remake the building blocks of intellectual property on its own terms, etc. Assume the parallel, cliched arguments about PayPal and the like. How do we give to you in a legitimate, encouraging way and yet not support the internet’s Monsantos, as it were?
Oof, that’s a fair question.
If you can find a cheap copy of the out-of-print young adult book Just a Little Bit Lost by Laurel Trivelpiece, or the tragically out of print Archer’s Goon by Dianna Wynne Jones, and send it to
Fredrik deBoer
Department of English
Heavilon Hall
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907
well, that’d be nicer than I deserve.
You’re right about Amazon. Dammit.
Alright, I’ll try my fucking hardest, though finance and yuppies have annihilated most used book stores here in NYC.
Alright, I’ll try my fucking hardest, though finance and yuppies have annihilated most used book stores here in NYC.