A nation may be tempted to put on the clothes of past adventures and to play the songs of previous generations, to salute what was saluted in the past, to gather up into a pantomime of courage that recalls the actual courage of the past.

But the past's challenges are past. If a nation is to rouse itself to a new courage, it must do so by turning toward the challenges of the new day. If this can't be done, then what follows is a mere puppet show, a costume drama, a farce even or a shadow play. 

Name the challenges of the new day with great care; speak precisely and forthrightly; cast off the shadows of the past and step forward; today is more than dark enough without them.

"I've been writing about it on my blog for many years."

That's a sentence a variety of interesting people might utter or post. It's a reminder that good new thinking and writing slides effortlessly down the screen and out of sight, into the archive, where it might be preserved and maybe located again someday. Maybe.

But it's also a reminder of a structural problem in blog-format web writing that people have understood for many years. Despite other real and substantial virtues, the format by itself leaves posts about a topic more or less isolated from each other down there in the archive.

Writing isolated from other writing on the same topic — that's not the best we can do. Writing that links and builds explicitly on other writing is far better.

Well, related posts can be tagged and categorized at the time of composition, but that takes focused habit-building as well as good insight about what tags make sense now and might be useful later. Related posts can also perhaps be located and pulled together later through time-consuming searching of an archive, which is an unpleasant approach. Using most tools available to us today, both tagging and searching are demoralizing. For most online tools, useful old-fashioned tools like an index or a concordance aren't available.

So many of us miss out on an opportunity.  By organizing several posts hidden in the archive we could piece together two valuable resources: 1) the history of something, which can help us know why we are currently blessed by and stuck with the version of it we have today, and 2) and the components of something, which can help us see how it functions on its good and bad days.

In those two ways, organizing several posts from the archive can make fresh analytical thinking and invention possible. But it's not easy to find and organize several posts from the archive.

My wording in italics below (posted here) was misleading, too compressed to be clear, or something like that:

One of the powers of composing on WordLand, I believe, is the ability to inform WordPress pretty much instantly which of your RSS feeds you'd like a post to belong to. Or to more than one RSS feed, as well, if I'm reading the clues properly.

I've gone back over the steps a second time, so I'll try to say what I had in mind more usefully now. To me, it matters because it's a subtle and kind of breathtaking feature with value well worth exploring.

• WordLand allows the writer to quickly select WordPress categories. 
• Each WordPress category comes with its own RSS feed.*
• So, in effect, selecting one or more categories in WordLand at the same time selects one or more WordPress RSS feeds for the post.

That's the main point, and a person could stop reading here.

Why is this so interesting?

Quick speculations about that:

• If over time a writer focuses on, say, three topics and, as a result, builds three audiences, the writer could easily point posts to each of those audiences via RSS.
• If a CoolSocialMediaTool came along that perfectly integrated posting via RSS, a category called CoSoMeTo could instantly post to that CoolSocialMediaTool.
• Etc.

How did I test this WordLand / WordPress link for myself?

What I did:

• I created a new WordPress blog with two categories. I called them testingOne and testingTwo.
• Writing in WordLand, I made three posts. The first post I sent to the new blog's testingOne category. The second post I sent to the testingTwo category, and the third post I sent to both of those categories.

What I expected to happen:

• I expected the blog's main page to show all three posts and the RSS feed associated with the blogs main page also to show all three posts.
• I expected the two posts that WordLand allowed me to quickly place in the testingOne category to show up on the blog's testingOne category page and also in the RSS feed associated with the testingOne category.
• I expected the two posts that WordLand allowed me to quickly place in the testingTwo category to show up on the blog's testingTwo category page and in the RSS feed associated with the testingTwo category.

What happened:

• What I expected to happen is what happened.
• The main blog page has all three posts and so does its RSS feed.
• The testingOne category blog page has the two posts I marked for that category while composing in WordLand and so does its RSS feed.
• The testingTwo category blog page has the two posts I marked for that category while composing in WordLand and so does its RSS feed.

I'm not saying I haven't overlooked something, but so far all I can see is a very useful feature residing at the intersection of WordLand and WordPress. Many or all other WordLand users may have already noticed it, I couldn't say. And I don't know if the feature is important to the long-term vision for the WordLand and WordPress intersection or not. But it does seem like a happy result of Dave Winer's quest to put an end someday to having to cut and paste your writing into another software space.

This blog post you might have just read to the bottom of is a fuller telling of my inadequate post from the other day.

_____________

*To locate a WordPress RSS feed: 

• Just add /feed to the end of the main page's URL for an RSS feed containing all posts. 
• For a category-only feed, click on the category name on any post. The category's blog page will open. Add /feed at the end of that category's URL. 
• In general, the format for a category's RSS feed is blogsFullUrl/category/coolCategoryName/feed — two examples are linked above.

Machiavelli tells the oligarch who takes over a society with a custom of liberty: You must destroy that society. If the oligarch does not trash the society's institutions of liberty and isolate the citizens from each other, the memory of liberty will motivate them to cast out the oligarch. From the early pages of Chapter V of The Prince.

One of the powers of composing on WordLand, I believe, is the ability to inform WordPress pretty much instantly which of your RSS feeds you'd like a post to belong to. Or to more than one RSS feed, as well, if I'm reading the clues properly.

I've described this too compactly to reflect the working-together of the two software tools. I'll try to pin down better language.

In the final pages of Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, small groups of people take responsibility for protecting particular things that they believe must survive if their world is to someday recover its better self. They organize in small groups, with each group committing to a certain focused task. In that dystopian society, each task is dangerous.

For me as a reader, this is one of the most moving passages of the novel. The commitment, yes, but also the planning and judgment. What will give us a chance to rebuild a humane society, they have asked themselves, and they've formulated answers and divided the work into manageable chunks and gotten to it.

We Americans tend to be satisfied if we get around to voting. Now, the present crisis is probably only a more extreme version of the crisis of alienation and disempowerment that many people have been enduring for decades, but anyway, now we are all telling each other to stay informed, to show up and speak up. That's all good. But in Bradbury's novel, more seems to have happened among dissenters. They've decided upon priorities, made judgments about goals, and in practical ways they've divided the work. As a result, they each have focused tasks there in those final pages. They not only know who they oppose and who are their allies, but they also have a vision for the new society and a particular job to help build it. You get the impression that defining conversations have been underway that are now guiding the opposition in practical ways.

What would be an example of that sort of division of tasks today? Let's say, for example, veterans affairs and the policies that belong to that national agency. There's somebody on a campus somewhere who could make a list of seven very knowledgable people who could form a little agency. They could commit to keeping up with their field, which they do anyway!, and taking turns posting links to any news articles and thought pieces. Each one of the seven could post one day a week: every Monday it's Tom's turn, every Tuesday it's Jane's, etc. Every day of the week there would be a very knowledgable person sharing the latest things that folks who care about veterans would want to know. Maybe they'd also post on opportunities for becoming involved in activism, ways to pressure the right elected officials, and so forth.

The seven of them would become the national news agency for veterans affairs. Something like that seems do-able.

Another example would be a small crew of tech folks who advise and support the web publishing needs of a handful of small teams like the seven who are doing the veterans work.

Writing in 1936 about one group of purveyors of propaganda in our society, E. B. White said, “Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.”

So that’s a little theory of the workings of propaganda. There must be many others out there in the world that would help us think clearly about our media and our politics. It’s not a black box, or doesn’t have to be. Name the parts of the mechanism, see what lubricates the gears, point out relentlessly where it’s in operation around us. Describe the alternatives and the practices that would support them.

The quotation comes from a brief note called “Truth in Advertising,” published July 11, 1936 in The New Yorker, but surely he’s sketching the workings of more than just advertising. By the way, Mr. White was just a few years away from writing Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web.

The deal we Americans generally try to make with the world is not having to know, or seem to know, or be seen to know, and not having to spend time with anyone who will call us out for knowing.

As a result, we can't have certain conversations, can't even stand to know these conversations are underway. There are just too many things we don't want to acknowledge in words, in newspapers and magazines, even in movies.

As a result, we can't think and talk very deeply about ourselves. When we describe ourselves, we might as well be talking about a cartoon drawn by a child in an idle moment in second grade.

Not wanting to acknowledge the world, we surely can't acknowledge our own character in the world.

That's our pathology.

See, for example, Anthony Bourdain's 2014 account of the space Mexico fills in the psyche of the United States.

See, for example, James Baldwin talking in The Fire Next Time about his fellow Americans as a people trapped in a labyrinth of attitudes, unable to renew themselves at the fountain of their lives.

And today Timothy Snyder writes, at the end of a long post on "Antisemitism in the Oval Office," that "Our eyes have to be open to what we do not wish to see."

Respected colleagues I worked with for years before I retired from the university were talking in a cluster in the hallway about the surveillance and censoring of academics now underway in the land. Alarming, frightening, everyone agreed. Not much of an idea about what to do next. Keep your heads down? Look for quiet strategies? Change the words you use to avoid being turned in by emboldened fanatics?

Plenty of sophistication on hand, but not much political imagination or experience. it's a regional public university being slowly stripped down by state authorities to job-training only, not there yet but that seems to be the goal, and certainly no commitment to arts and humanities. The people with the greatest stake in the campus, the regional taxpayers who probably still hope to have a solid institution of higher education for their children and grandchildren.

Does it ever occur to faculty to reach out to these neighbors who have the most to lose if the public university is hollowed out? To seek a dialogue with them? To see them as potential political allies? Generally speaking, I don't see faculty having that kind of political imagination.

So it was a grim conversation in that circle of colleagues in the hallway. Keenly aware of what is happening, nothing much to suggest about how to resist. It's a great shame, since a regional public university has a beautiful mission of service to the people of the area, especially those who are not wealthy enough to go away to posh colleges or maybe even to stop for four years of full-time course work right after high school. 

It's a class-divided society, and certain things are too good for a swath of our fellow citizens. That's how it seems, anyway.