reverie and nightmare

Very often when I click on the little flickr thingy there on the right, I am rewarded with a holiday tour of somewhere I have never been, but often it is a place to which I've wanted to go.

Tags become a desireable item in flickr, because they often provide the only clue to where we are, what we might be looking at.

With blogs on the other hand, tags never seem necessary. I have never thought to tag or look for a blog entry via tags. I'm not saying this is a good thing. Just how it is.

What's interesting is the way in which, on flickr, we can see a place through the eyes of a native, or a tourist, and feel a kinship with that person. We see how they see, or so it appears. They lend us eyes, theirs, contained in what was seen. It matters not a whit whether the place can be found on a map. The intimacy of sharing the secret and generous joys of regard is all.

In complete contradistinction to this flickr mode, which I associate with reverie, you must travel to blogs like this, from Norway. How long it took for Fjordman to master the insinuative racist bait he spews is unclear. He's studied with some master baiters. As we hear how vile slacker muslims are raping the helpless Aryan children of Scandinavia, fellow Klansmen, let us hearken back to our own sweet days of yore, when good lynchings made good niggahs. Boy what I wouldn't do to get me and some of the boyz over there with our shotguns, a few barrels of 180 proof, and some shells. You'd see some raghead nukin' going on, bo'.

Do check out the comments to that post: it received the golden handshake of blogdom - having signalled solidarity with the International Brotherhood of Racist Blogger Virii, Fjordman is King for a Day, luminous on blogrolls everywhere, glorified by self-crazed Trollblogs of Distinction. (Don't miss the comments here as well.)

Something is being manufactured in these here satanic blogmills, to a constant drumbeat in the forest, pounding out the political capital of war. The Voices proudly vaunt their freedom of speech by saying altogether, "me too."

A while back the Tutor offered a haunting phrase:

I believe in the English Language. I believe the August Dead walk the earth until they find a friend to inhabit. The Dead are transmitted like a disease.

The nightmare: far from all of the dead are "august."