[Prev | Next | Index] Created 2/19/96 by ralph@spacewalk.com (Ralph
Lombreglia)

   Ralph Lombreglia, mad not crazy

                                 [Image]

     Part of me is a poet, part of me is a priest, and part of me is a
     propellerhead.

     Let me elaborate on that. I write fiction, and I've published a
     fair amount of it in places where you might have stumbled on it,
     like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and I have a couple
     of books out and I'm working on others. But I work with computers
     and multimedia professionally, too, and I probably take digital
     technology more seriously than most writers. With my wife, Kate
     Bernhardt, I recently co-produced a CD-ROM on Jack Kerouac that
     was published by Penguin and has received very good reviews,
     including 5 stars in the February issue of Multimedia World
     magazine. And I think that our collective spiritual life as human
     beings on this planet is an important thing, and will not cease
     to be an important thing no matter how much hardware we have.

     Like a lot of people out here in the ether, I play music also,
     and mess with graphics, and I want to do everything all at once,
     integrate it all, put it all together, and have fun doing it.
     Dave Winer, a legendary programmer, is definitely one of those
     people. I know how to make sophisticated Web sites thanks to Dave
     and the cool software that he literally gives away. I really like
     Dave and I want to see him and his vision of things succeed. I've
     sent him petulant e-mails about things I saw going on in
     "cyberspace" that made me mad, and he's been the cool head,
     telling me to look again at things, see them differently,
     appreciate people for what they have to offer, let go of my
     irritations. Now I've been reading Dave's recent essays, and I
     see that he is justifiably angry and disgusted about the telecom
     act and the number of people in the industry who are willing to
     play ball with the government. He wants to resist and I agree.

     But then Dave said he's not voting for Clinton next time, and
     that makes me think of the baby and the bathwater.

     Not long ago, my friend and neighbor, Sven Birkerts, the literary
     critic, asked me to write an essay for a new book he was editing
     for Graywolf Press called The Millenial Muse, a collection of
     essays on the relationship between emerging technologies and the
     Humanities. You've probably heard of Sven because of his own book
     The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.
     Sven had a full-page picture of his face in Wired and lots of
     other exposure for his ideas in that book. He doesn't like
     computers much, and he suspects that electronic communications in
     general have done some serious damage to our collective soul.
     It's a complicated subject, and he's not simply wrong. In fact,
     if he's talking about television, he's right. But he's not simply
     right. Anyway, friends of mine from the computer world have
     wondered how I could be friends with Sven when he's a
     near-Luddite and I'm draped in gigabytes. But then many of my
     "literary" friends clearly think that I'm wasting my time working
     with computers and doing things like producing multimedia.

     You get it from all sides. So what do you do? Well, when I agreed
     to do the Kerouac CD-ROM, my first act was to hire Sven and ask
     him to tell me what I'd have to do to make him a believer. And
     then we implemented as much of that as possible. I don't know if
     we made him a believer, but we made the product better.

     I agree with Sven and others that our collective spiritual life
     as human beings on this planet is in big trouble. I just happen
     to believe that it could be significantly revived, rather than
     further damaged, by the digital technologies and global
     communications that are just now becoming a reality. And that's
     what I said in my essay, that the two things could be united and
     made to serve each other if we got smart about it. And I also
     said that though people like Sven and I saw some things very
     differently, it was much more important to remember the
     important, vital things that we saw the same. Such as that art is
     good for the soul.

     Bill Clinton is sometimes a disappointment, though I continue to
     believe that his heart is basically in the right place. Al Gore's
     heart is probably in the right place, too, though when you hear
     him talking about the info superhighway, you know he's just
     saying what people tell him to say. But that's politics. It's a
     reality, like pornography, and roughly on the same level. We're
     no more proud of politics than we are of pornography, but
     apparently that's the kind of animal we are. Our present chief
     executives are not all we would wish, but they're a lot better
     than any of the bozos to their right. They're all we've got, in
     fact, and I plan to vote for them. Am I happy about Bill caving
     in and signing the telecom act with the "indecency" provision in
     it? No. But maybe he knew perfectly well that the courts would
     throw it out and that he could then claim he signed it and get
     re-elected.

     I'm adding a paragraph here to my original page. My equation of
     politics and pornography is probably too subtle. I mean that
     politics is obscene. It definitely is. And a whole lot more
     pervasive and corrosive than sexual pornography on the Internet
     ever will be. And I am outraged that Clinton caved in. But I also
     suspect that Clinton's advisors saw how the wind is blowing and
     decided that he was history if he didn't take some kind of
     symbolic "moral" stand that he could point to during the
     campaigning. And Clinton doesn't want to be history, and we don't
     want him to be history despite his numerous imperfections. A
     lame-duck Democrat could do an immense amount of good in the 4
     years of a second term.

     A few years back, here in Massachusetts, we had to vote on
     whether to stop funding everything and watch the Commonwealth
     burn while we danced around the fire like a collection of happy
     idiots. Back in those days, before that proposition came to a
     vote, you saw a lot of bumper stickers that said, "I'm mad but
     I'm not crazy." The proposition was defeated. Sanity prevailed.
     This over here is baby and that over there is bathwater, and even
     though I'm "free" to throw out the baby, I'm not going to do it,
     and that's what freedom means to me.