The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: The Leaf Chronicle – www.theleafchronicle.com – Clarksville, TN.

It is good to know that my namesake is so valued in Clarksville, Tennessee – even if that esteem is manifested in a desire to defend his shade from the accusation (made by Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time magazine) that

“Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger” and that “Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack.”‘

I defer to no-one, not even the Leaf Chronicle of Clarksville, in my admiration for the original Tom Paine. But I am with Mr Stengel in feeling that, were he alive today, Tom would blog. The Leaf Chronicle is particularly harsh in stating that

“Paine was perhaps history’s most consequential pamphleteer. There are expected to be 100 million bloggers by the middle of 2007, which is why none will be like Franklin or Paine. Both were geniuses; genius is scarce. Both had a revolutionary civic purpose, which they accomplished by amazing exertions. Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves, for their own satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that, but nothing demanding or especially admirable, either. They do it successfully because there is nothing singular about it, and each is the judge of his or her own success.”

Ouch. I guess it depends on how you define success. To a professional journalist, the voluntary outpourings of bloggers must seem strange, whether well written or ill. The original Tom was an humble corset-maker and the first extraordinary thing about him, in the England of his day, was that he got up the nerve to publish. I venture to guess that there were thousands of unpublished Tom Paines with as much to say and perhaps even the ability to say it as well.

Most of the 100 million blogs will not much reward the effort of finding them; that much is certain. Tom would have been pleased to have so much competition, though I do not doubt he would have seen most of it off quite easily. He found his audience, but he would have published – had he the means – without one. He wrote because he had no choice; his views brimmed over and could not be contained. How like a blogger was that?