About Electric Blues

I guess this is where I tell you what my blog is all about. My name is Gary, and I live in Chapel Hill, NC. I was born and raised in North Carolina, but have lived just about everywhere. I am a gay man and have been a proud liberal my whole life. Last year, after looking at the candidates, I became a supporter of Senator Hillary Clinton. I felt that she was the strongest candidate and would help right this country after 8 long years of a criminal and morally bankrupt president and his cronies.

Shortly after Super Tuesday, in February, I was summarily banned from the blogs that I had frequented, most notably Crooks and Liars, where I was banned without notice, presumably for my pro-Hillary Clinton comments. Shocked, and caught off guard by the actions of people I considered to be honest, progressive Democrats, it took me a while before I found a refuge. But I eventually did, and that place was The Confluence.

The Confluence is a very special place. I began to comment there regularly just before the May 6 NC primary. Riverdaughter, the hostess of The Confluence asked her readers if there was anyone in NC who could write about the upcoming primary and I volunteered. She immediately gave me carte blanche at her blog and I was born as a blogger. I will never forget, and will forever be humbled by the kindness and trust that she showed me (and that she continues to show me). The Confluence remains my home, and I will continue to blog there for as long as Riverdaughter affords me the privilege.

Riverdaughter is the Mother of all PUMAS and her blog has shown just how powerful one determined person can be. On May 31, my partner (Mawm) and I travelled to DC to witness the RBC meeting of the DNC. What we saw forever transformed us. That day we became PUMA. SM spoke us into existence

SM, on June 1st, 2008 at 3:39 pm Said:

[...]

I am making an announcement. I am now a member of the PUMA party.

P arty
U nity
M y
A ss

The Confluence has since grown to include some of the smartest, most insightful people on the web. It is the daily must visit site for every Democrat who was forcibly ejected from their own party, or as RD calls us the “old, uneducated, working class sino-peruvian lesbians”. As for me, I have been infected with the same hypergrafia bug that RD herself has mentioned from time to time. I feel this unending need to put my thoughts to virtual paper at almost all hours. I decided to open my own space here so that I may indulge that desire without clogging up the front page of The Confluence.

I named this site “Electric Blues” after the song from the musical Hair. Aside from being one of my favorite musicals, I feel like the song captures my feeling about politics, media, and the general direction of this country. I believe that the main reason our politics are so out of whack, and that this country is in such dire straits, is due to the state of our media. As our access to information has grown, conversely the mainstream press in this country has garnered unprecedented power to manipulate and craft opinions on everything from politics to economic policy, as well as set the social agenda. Our media has played kingmaker in the last two elections and has contrived “cultural narratives” that in reality didn’t exist beforehand. They brought us 8 years of George W. Bush as well as inflating the size and importance of such movements as the religious right, and as of this writing, the Obamanation. From Electric Blues:

It’s what’s happening baby
it’s where it’s at daddy

They chain ya and brainwash ya
When you least suspect it
They feed ya mass media
The age is electric

I got the electric blues
I got the electric blues

The so-called progressive bloggers were supposed to be the counterbalance to the brainwashing effect of the mainstream media. The thing that was least expected was that they were actually part of that structure and doing the same exact thing. People like Kos, Huffington, Aravosis, Digby, and John Marshall are just more of the same. Their rejection of objectivity and submission to the Obama machine is sad, but we will go on. The only way to get our democracy back is to completely dismantle the media as it exists and rebuild it from scratch. Until then, I’ve got the electric blues….