The Postman Doesn't Ring Here Anymore

Reading a blog post about Saint Al's newest consolation prize on RedState, I saw a parenthetic note that David Brin was blogging up a left-wing nutroot storm. Now, I'm a fan of Brin's work, so hearing that another artist I enjoy was somewhere off the reservation was not encouraging.

So I clicked over to his blog. The first sentence of the newest entry:

Looking back across earlier portions of this series, we can see these dismal trends continuing in real time. For example, see a detailed look at the effort to transform the US military into a force for radical christianity.

"Radical Christianity". Wow - even worse than I thought.

Well, another artist I can toss on the back shelf, never to be seen again. Too bad.

See, the thing is: it's a buyer's market for content - books, music, movies, web sites. I own more movies than I have time to watch. I have enough music on my iPod to listen to everything once for almost two weeks straight with no sleep before I repeat. And if I ever did get through all of my books, movies and music - there's an ever-increasing amount of it being made.

The net effect is: very little of it could possibly be considered essential. I can snip out any number of creators (such as Brin, or R.E.M. or George Clooney or any number of others) without materially affecting my life at all. There's just so much more to see.

So when someone comes along and drops crap like this, true barking moonbattery, I don't feel too bad about kicking their ass to the curb. I see Brin's name on the spine now, I'm going to see this stupid blog entry (and the dozens of similar entries before it) pop into my mind, and I'm just going to move along to the next book. Does that say something about me? Sure it does - it says I'm a little too plugged into politics, that I can't compartmentalize a radically-stupid political opinion from other parts of the artist's work. Guess what? I'm the one that decided how I spend my time and money, so he's got to pander to me, not the other way around. I don't feel the need to patronize those who think I'm an idiot, a "radical christian", a "nazi" or whatever.

Which makes the decision to spew stuff like "Radical Christianity" all the more puzzling. Why piss off a large group of customers like that? Does he really think that he'll get more people buying his books than he loses? Maybe he doesn't care; if so, then he's on his own little personal crusade, and he should be the last one preaching about "Radical" religionism.