Political Bombardment From Behind The Orange Curtain

Very long time readers, if any of you still exist, might remember that as the one time tagline of this blog. I started this blog while leading a somewhat lonely and miserable existence in Orange County, CA. I think Avedon told me I should start a blog, and I did. "Atrios" was a name I'd used in various online forums previously, but then blogger demanded I come up with a name for the blog itself. I didn't spend much time mulling this over. I had a mild fetish for obscure literary references at the time, so I scanned my bookshelf for about 5 minutes until something popped into my head. Glancing at the spine of Infinite Jest, I remembered a game played by at the tennis academy at the center of the book, a WWIII-type simulation played on tennis courts with tennis ball machines acting as missile launchers. As I wrote, I didn't really give it all that much thought at the time, but it seemed to be an apt metaphor for political discourse in the blogosphere. I like literature, though I'm a generally bad literary critic, but the book's metaphor was, to me, about how the rules of war cannot hold, that they will inevitably break down. The application to the blogosphere was that the rules of civil discourse, which existed for a brief time in the post 9-11 "we're just a little community of bipartisan freedom lovers," would not hold either. And they didn't. Rules are not enough to create the conditions for civil behavior, in war or otherwise.