Confessional Blogging

 A friend was asking me yesterday how I have the confidence to blog about a topic that might already have been covered in the same vein by someone else. Am I not worried, every time I start writing, that I may have already been preempted in whatever I wanted to say by another blogger or Reddit poster writing elsewhere? 

The honest answer is that if I have been scooped, I take pains not to know about it. As soon as I get an idea for a post, I rush to put it down on this blog and send it off into the universe. I never check beforehand to see if someone else has already written about or had the same idea—mostly because I figure that someone else almost surely has. Better, therefore, just not to ever know about it. 

The criminal law does not accept willful blindness as a defense; but I am hopeful that in the domain of plagiarizing ideas, the standard is more forgiving. There is simply so much written on the internet and other fora now, one almost takes for granted that any idea one might have cannot be truly original, in the strictest sense. And so, one just chooses not to know about what others are saying, and plunges ahead. 

At times, this approach has produced the magical and gratifying effect of actually being ahead of my time. Because I rush these ideas into print, I actually do get there before other people. For some reason, though, this only happens with regard to Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros. Maybe it's just that this play lends itself particularly well to political analogies in our time. 

Whatever the reason, though—twice now I have referenced Rhinoceros in a particular connection, only to see someone else make the same point months after I had done so. 

Someone on Twitter made the point that the public's strangely blasé attitude to the risks of COVID infection resembled the townspeople's complacency toward the rhinocerization epidemic raging in their midst, in Ionesco's play. To my lonely satisfaction, I was able to point (internally at least) to a time-stamped blog post of my own, making the same point, and published before this Tweet. 

Likewise, there was a Substack column recently from the great Benjamin Wittes, of Rational Security 1.0 fame, talking about how he had recently re-read Ionesco's play and found in it an uncanny resemblance between the contagion of "rhinocerization," as the playwright depicts it, and the spread of MAGA ideology among erstwhile Never Trump Republicans. 

Here again, I could honestly say that I had been on this beat much earlier. A 2021 post on this blog stands as confirmation that I was already thinking of Ionesco's rhinos and the newly-converted MAGA Republicans as two birds of a feather. 

There have been times, however, when the opposite has occurred. Despite my best efforts to screen myself off, before the post gets written, from any outside evidence that I have already long since been scooped, I somehow discover that my idea is actually not original. The most prominent example came after January 6, when it occurred to me to read and write about the ancient Roman conspiracy of Catiline, and its resemblance to Trump's coup attempt. 

In this case, I made it all the way through Sallust, before somehow a column by Ross Douthat came to my attention. Here Douthat was, already talking about the comparison of Trump to Catiline, and then dismissing the idea as overwrought and exaggerated (though Douthat was writing on this point long before January 6 put to rest any lingering doubts as to whether Trump did indeed harbor genuinely antidemocratic intentions). 

So—my friend asked me—what do you do when that happens to you? Well, the answer is: I tell the truth. I just explain the way things went down, in exactly the order that they occurred. I explain that I had the idea first, but then afterward I found it reflected elsewhere. Why not? As Robert Lowell once queried, in a confessional apologia for the practice of confessional poetry—"Why not say what happened?" I take those words to heart. 

So I just say: I had this idea; I was going to write about it; but then I saw this other column by Ross Douthat making a similar point, so I feel the need to mention that as well. When in doubt—just say what happened!

Of course, this then leaves me vulnerable to the charge of being excessively autobiographical. The same charge was leveled against the confessional poets. And the response to it can only be: no one is obliged to read this blog anyway. If people don't want to hear about my thought process, and the precise chronology according to which I had ideas and later discovered they had been scooped by others, they can choose to read no further. 

And so far, most of humanity seems to have availed itself of that option.