We’re Still Fighting the Civil War Here in Missouri

The New York Times (subs. req.) is blogging the Civil War and it’s pretty cool.  Lincoln was just elected yesterday. Today they put up a time line for 1861 that ends with the imposition of martial law in the City of St. Louis. There is a link to a Times article on the actual Order of General Halleck.  It is hard to imagine this city living under martial law, but it was. 

We’re still living with the effects of events that led up to the imposition of martial law.  In March 1861, the Missouri legislature passed the so-called “St. Louis Police Bill”,  a bill to take the police force of the City of St. Louis away from the City and give control of it to the State.  They’ve never given it back.   That’s right, after all these years, 149 years,  they still haven’t given it back.

“I think a lot of people don’t realize that St. Louis was generally a pro-Union city in the midst of a state that was Southern in its sympathies,” says Robert Archibald, president of the Missouri History Museum. “The St. Louis police department constituted the largest quasi-military organization in the state, and [the police bill] was a Civil War measure passed by people who wanted to control it as part of the Civil War.”

Yes, that’s right.  Even back then the City of St. Louis was more progressive than the rest of the state.  And even back then the rest of the state punished us for that.

Here’s what one of St. Louis’ representatives said at the time:

“It was one of the most infamous pieces of legislation ever attempted to be inflicted. Our revolutionary fathers threw off the yoke of Great Britain on the very grounds now pursued by this legislature toward St. Louis, which attempts to deprive the people of their right to representation—to appoint foreign officers to preside over them—to take away from them their rights to franchise, to pension hirelings as officers upon them, and to impose taxes to support them without that consent. This Legislature [will] yet see whether the spirit of American freemen has yet died out in the breasts of the citizens of St. Louis.”

His tirade did no good.   But taking away our police drove a wedge between St. Louis and the rest of the state that still is there.

“There continues to be a split between St. Louis and the rest of the state, and in historical terms, I suspect it has its roots in the Civil War,” Archibald says. “I think the lack of a close relationship stems more from the war than from the typical urban-rural split that you see in other states.”

You bet there is a wedge.  Bill McClellan, columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has even called for St. Louis to secede from Missouri and join Illinois, becoming “West East St. Louis”.  Tongue in cheek that might be, but still tempting.   

I bet Illinois would let us have our own police.

Back in my day …. Hey! Get off my lawn kid.

The other day I was reading (via Matt Yglesias) a piece by blogger Chris Bowers in which he posits that the progressive political blogosphere is now dominated by political and media professionals who get 95% of the audience share and that the old amateur progressive blogosphere is almost completely dead. I think he has a point. (And by the way, although I won’t blog about politics here I have no problem with blogging about blogging.)

Oh, sure, we could argue about what he means by “amateur blogosphere”. As he says, 99% of progressive political bloggers blog for no money as a labor of love. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean them when he says the progressive blogosphere is dead. Because they haven’t changed much and they aren’t going anywhere because they never had much audience share anyway. What they have is a deep interest in some particular area often arising out of their demographics or their life experience. So the feminist bloggers aren’t going away. The Latino bloggers aren’t going away. The LGBT bloggers aren’t going away. Law bloggers aren’t going away. The professorial foreign policy blogs aren’t going away. But the general national level progressive political blogger? Yeah, things have changed.

A couple of days later I came across (via Henry at Crooked Timber), a really interesting essay (PDF) by Laura McKenna also about the way blogs are changing. She notices the same professionalization of bloggers that Bowers notices. She also talks about some specific ways that bloggers have changed the way they blog. She points out that independent bloggers used to link to each other a lot but now that they are professionals they don’t link to the “amateurs”.

Perhaps because these newly professional bloggers felt pressured to distance themselves from their amateur roots, they stopped linking to independent bloggers. They were more likely to link to academic studies, foundation reports, newspaper articles, or live-blogged events.

I’ve been noticing the lack of links too.

Then, a couple of days after that I was reading this Felix Salmon blog post about a professionalized blogger named Kouwe (who I’ve never heard of) who was fired first from the New York Times and now from Dealbreaker. In this post Salmon says:

Kouwe himself, interestingly, never left a comment on the site. I said after he was fired from the NYT that he simply didn’t understand what blogs were all about, and this episode only reinforces that judgment. One of the biggest differences between journalists and bloggers is that journalists often have a bizarre phobia of making an appearance in their own comments sections, while bloggers feel that’s an important part of what they do daily. But if you’re a journalist who feels constrained from engaging with commenters directly, then maybe that helps push you towards less kosher means of engagement.

I’m not sure I agree with Salmon on that. There was a time that I would have agreed but I’m not sure I do now. I see fewer and fewer bloggers engaging in comments sections these days and I draw the conclusions that bloggers today don’t think it is an important part of what they do anymore. But, again, maybe we’re talking about two different types of blogs.

Then, tonight, via Boomantribune, I saw that professional blogger Keith Olbermann, who I think does TV when he isn’t blogging, has written a GBCW diary at DailyKos because the comment threads there have gotten so bad. (Actually it wasn’t a GBCW diary because they got tired of phony GBCW diaries over there and made a rule that if you wrote one you’d better really be gone so now people write them but make sure to say that it isn’t a GBCW because they might want to come back some day to which I say if you don’t want to be somewhere just stop being there and then if it turns out you’d like to go back, go back and don’t make a big production about it because, really, nobody cares.)

But. Anyway.

All of that made me start thinking about my blog-reading past and realize that I’ve come almost full circle in the way I read political blogs. If you have no interest in a personal memoir, stop reading now. Because, really, it isn’t very interesting to anyone except me.

Break is Over

Yes, I’m back. My break was a little longer than I originally anticipated when I left for vacation back in July.

And yes. It was The Worst Vacation Ever.

The virus appeared on the second day of vacation and stayed with me the whole ten days. I can’t say it was swine flu because for the first ten days I was in a cabin in the north woods and didn’t bother having anyone drive me the forty miles to the nearest emergency room to find out. But I definitely had flu-like symptoms, and what other kind of flu is going around right now? By the time I got home, it became severe bronchitis (due, probably, to the airplane travel) and I and my doctor were only interested in treating the immediate symptoms. The bronchitis lasted another ten days, followed by a couple of weeks of exhaustion. It has not been fun.

This & That: TV, Books, etc.

Here's some stuff:

• David Simon (the Wire) has a new series coming out for HBO. "Treme," which takes its title from an area in New Orleans, is a post-Katrina-themed drama that chronicles the rebuilding of the city through the eyes of local musicians. I don't have cable so if it is successful I won't see it until the DVD comes out. I watched the first three seasons of The Wire on DVD but I haven't seen the last two yet. I didn't want to watch Season 4 until Season 5 was out on DVD. I just haven't gotten around to watching them yet.
  

• Lindsey Davis has a new book coming out in May: Alexandria. It is #19 in her Marcus Didius Falco series and Falco will travel to ... Alexandria. For those of you who have never read this series, I can't recommend it enough. The recurring detective/investigator character, Marcus Didius Falco, is a gumshoe detective who lives in the ancient Roman Empire during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian (for whom the Vespasian Amphitheater is named by whom the Flavian amphitheater was built, although you may know it as the Colosseum.) Falco and his wife Helena Justina (the daughter of a Senator) are as delightful a couple as Nick and Nora Charles. Here is the synopsis:

  In first century A.D. Rome, during the reign of Vespasian, Marcus Didius Falco works as a private “informer,” often for the emperor, ferreting out hidden truths and bringing villains to ground. But even informers take vacations with their wives, so in A.D. 77, Falco and his wife, Helena Justina, with others in tow, travel to Alexandria, Egypt. But they aren’t there long before Falco finds himself in the midst of nefarious doings—when the Librarian of the great library is found dead, under suspicious circumstances. Falco quickly finds himself on the trail of dodgy doings, malfeasance, deadly professional rivalry, more bodies and the lowest of the low—book thieves! As the bodies pile up, it’s up to Falco to untangle this horrible mess and restore order to a disordered universe.

• I found an interesting blog today via BookNinja. It's called Seen Reading and it is "literary voyeurism". Toronto based blogger Julie Wilson came up with the idea: She spots someone reading a book and she jots down a description of the person and the name of the book. She guesstimates how far the person has gotten in the book (for instance, 50 pages in) and she goes to a bookstore, finds the book, opens it up to about where the person was and copies down a passage. She then posts that passage on her blog along with something she imagines. OK, that doesn't describe it very well so click the link and look. And here's a video interview (and btw I'm really impressed by how spotless the Toronto subway is):