Searching For a Meme
Rayne, the presiding spirit at Rayne Today, has launched us all on the search for a meme that will energize people for the electoral warfare of 2004. I cheerfully join her and other lefty bloggers in the search and hope others do so as well. Clearly we are all in deep Republican doodoo here and we need all the help we can get. A great meme will help…I think. If I understand what a meme is.
In my youth, shortly after the Punic Wars, we used to call these "constitutive myths." A constitutive myth was a story. Believing in it made us the sorts of persons we were, structured our moral responses, led to action. The story did not necessarily have to be true, that’s why we called it a myth; but it acquired an importance that transcended every doubt about its literal truth.
The story about the sinking of the Maine was such a myth; so were stories about the labor hero Joe Hill, or John Henry, or the claim that Herbert Hoover and the Republicans were solely responsible for the great depression. Sometimes the stories get reduced to simple slogans: Remember The Maine; Remember the Alamo; No More Hoovervilles; It’s The Economy Stupid.
More To Be Done
Finding the perfect meme, would be nifty; but in my judgement a circle of progressive bloggers should also be a filter of news sites to provide a continuous source of information about what the Bush Regime is doing. Pieces of legislation are being slipped in as amendments to larger bills, with the hope that we will overlook them. Bills are being touted as "benefits to open information exchange" which are in fact just the opposite.
These issues are frequently quite complicated. A circle of progressive bloggers should be working on
ways to explain these issues in one or two sentences. Hence, what we need is not just one meme, not just one story, but lots of stories...each one of which is easy to remember and easy to retell.
And then we should shut down our computers and walk our neighborhoods, speak up at social gatherings, write letters to the editor, call in to talk shows, and become precinct captains of virtual precincts… thirty or forty people we e-mail regularly.
Vote: Regime Change 2004
