Evil Emperors in Spiderman PJs!

Sometimes it seems we’re all the slaves of simple-minded perceptions these days -- perceptions that serve little purpose except to whip up an “us-vs.-them” frenzy on whatever the hot topic happens to be. Two maybe-not-so-unrelated items bring this to mind:

First, the Editorial Board had a visit Tuesday from Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs for the Council of Federation, the upper house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, courtesy of Procter & Gamble and the U.S.-Russia Business Council. I gather he’s sort of a rough equivalent of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, although nowhere near as abstruse and long-winded. In fact, Margelov had some fascinating things to say about the strides Russia’s market economy has made in recent years, the potential for trade and investment between the U.S. and Russia, and how politics in both nations tends to gum up the works.
But Margelov was most animated when he was asked to describe the “myths” that he says persist from the Cold War: Russians tend to believe, he said, that “America is always plotting against Russia … America needs a weak Russia,” and so forth. Americans tend to believe, in turn, that “Russia is always to blame for everything … They drink vodka all day,” and what he called the biggest myth of all, “Russia is still an empire.” The current heated rhetoric between the two nations, he explained, serves the internal purposes of the political classes in both countries during election seasons. Any of this sound familiar?

Second, I received a nice e-mail from a local blogger named Brendan from Pleasant Ridge alerting me to the latest post on his thoughtful Spacetropic blog. The post took me to task for a quote from novelist Tom Wolfe disparaging blogs that I used in a post on the 10th anniversary of blogging. Brendan prefaced his broadside with a tongue-in-cheek (I think) allusion to the stereotypes that newspaper editorialists and bloggers labor under. “He is a well-heeled member of the corporate establishment, and I am some wild-eyed everyman tapping away on a laptop in my Spiderman PJs.” Huh? Well-heeled? Don’t I wish.
His point is that bloggers are no mere rumor-mongers. “Blogs are only newspapers, exploded,” Brendan writes, and they “have a hardcore feel of liberty to them.” They lack the “authority” that traditional press imposes; people have to sort out for themselves what’s true and what really matters. I think we’d agree, though, that the lines aren’t so clear, particularly as these media begin to converge.You have some well-heeled bloggers using the medium as an establishment vehicle; you always have some wild-eyed everymen in newsrooms trying to make things explode. I don't know about the PJs.

There’s a lot of hay to be made by mining the extremes in how America views Russia and vice versa, or how bloggers view journalists and vice versa, or you name it. But as with most things in life, the reality is usually somewhere in between.