Newshoggers Archive: Note from Underground -- Bill Whittle's <i>Tribes</i>

Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.

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Friday, April 16, 2010

Note from Underground -- Bill Whittle's <i>Tribes</i>

By John Ballard

File this under "empty footnotes."

Commenter T. Greer linked an exceptionally good piece by Rand Simberg in New Atlantis which I plan to read more carefully after having scanned it first. Drilling further I came across Simberg's blog which happened to mention Bill Whittle, a name I haven't thought about for some time. Whittle has groomed his considerable writing gifts into part of the foundational underpinnings of Pajamas Media. (Although co-founder Charles Johnson has defected to the Dark Side they still link LGF.)

Once and enthusiastic Whittle fan, I linked several of his essays early in my blog life. But following Katrina he put up a piece entitled "Tribes" which left a bad taste in my mouth. I made note of it at the time but I linked it so my readers could see for themselves what I was talking about. But when I tried to find a link this morning to that essay, all traces have vanished from the cloud. Even cached copies all now seem to be linking his most recent essay at Pajamas which is a litany of excerpts and oil portraits of and by the Founding Fathers, led by a hat tip to the Tea Party patriots delivered with an unsubtle swipe at "big-state socialists."

There is a concerted effort afoot on the part of big-state socialists to paint the Tea Party as a bunch of dangerous, hate-filled radicals with a bunch of crazy new ideas that go far beyond the pale of the traditional American political mainstream.

Let�s ask some reasonable men � because the Founding Fathers were surely the largest collection of reasonable men ever gathered in one place at one time in history � what they thought about the issues raised by the Tea Party movement.

When I occasionally steal entire posts or extended portions which I especially like, part of the reason is that I don't trust that they will always be available at a hot link. I have seen too many links die over time.

But that is not what this post is about. The only reason for this post is to copy here for the record a little note from my old blog (the main links of which no longer work, btw) to help me recall why I stopped being a Bill Whittle fan.This is from September, 2005.

Bill Whittle: Tribes

Okay, okay.
Go read it. Everyone else is, so if you don't you won't be able to call yourself fully in the know. I have been keeping up for about three years. Three or four times a year he puts out another chapter and all the right people ooh and aah and link to it.

It's called Tribes. He contorts himself into knots driving home the point that the essay is not about race or class. He has to be one of the most persuasive writers working today, except maybe Hitchens or Billmon, so he leaves no cracks for easy criticism. But this piece hammers away too much on the already bruised "left", whoever that may be. Since I find myself drawn more in that direction, I suppose the spleen was too bitter for my liking. Strikes me as chauvinistic, in the academic sense of that word. Not enough attention to the virtues of mobility (from one tribe to another, for example). And absolutely nothing about reconciliation. But what might one expect from an atheist. Too much TV. Survivor and all that.

I very much liked some of his earlier stuff...essays called FREEDOM , COURAGE and CONFIDENCE. I posted good comments about Whittle's essays last October. I like reading them in the same way that I like watching a Bruce Willis or Clint Eastwood film. But this time I didn't get the tingle. Oh, well. Maybe I'm getting jaded from too much finger-pointing. I've about had it.

I like to think that in retrospect Mr. Whittle may have had second thoughts about what he had said at the time. Protesting too much, perhaps, about not talking about race or class? I dunno. Never will.

But he and the rest of Pajamas missed a good chance to follow Charles Johnson as he left that side of the political divide.