Which forces us to ask the question: Can something that is typed be a speech?
Never mind.
Four score and eleventy-million-something page visits ago, His Imperial Majesty was sitting around wondering how best to offend the largest number of idiots with the least amount of effort. Needless to say, we’d already discovered the potential in the Interwebtubes for doing just such a thing, and many happy months, indeed years, were spent ticking people off royally on USENet for no apparent reason other than it being so very enjoyable. We simply cannot abide Idiotarians, and we find it highly offensive that we seem to have to share space on the planet with them, but their salty tears of frustration when they’re taunted into sputtering rage brings us great comfort.
And the “alt.” hierarchy of USENet, the “null-sec” version of USENet as one might describe it to people who play EVE Online, is nothing if not a massive breeding ground for Idiotarians.
So we had much fun taunting idiots who violated the 11th commandment (Thou Shalt Not Take Thyself Too Seriously), honing our skills by picking fights with flamers far more experienced than ourself (and having your arse handed to us on numerous occasions until we learned the craft), but it left us feeling still empty, without true purpose, longing to unleash our disdain for sub-plant IQs upon the general population. Problem was, as much as we knew that they existed, they didn’t really have hives of idiocy that you could haunt and defile out there on the General Internet.
Then 9/11 happened and they started popping up all over. Emboldened by this vile act of war, they started setting up websites everywhere so they could preach their relativistic “why do they hate us?” balderdash, their inane and deeply offensive attempts to blame America first for everything and other offenses against common sense and good taste too numerous to count. In other words: They painted big, glowing bullseyes on their backs and set themselves up in public view for us to shoot at.
Recognizing an opportunity to finally piss off somebody that richly deserved to be insulted, we started hitting them whenever they were daft enough to allow comments, and we had much fun doing that. Few things are more satisfying than walking into some liberal asshat’s living room, shitting on the carpet and then making them clean the mess up with their tongues as you unleash the flaming powers taught to you by USENet legends on their unworthy arses. All that while striking a blow for the nation that you love and kicking in the nuts the one subset of Idiotarians that we hate more that hate itself: Socialists.
Ah, purpose! Glorious purpose. Using your Sith powers for good and watching the pansy socialist, terrorist-loving, America-hating pansies cry in their Ovaltine.
But obviously it, too, had its limitation. For one thing, the cretins finally discovered that they could delete comments. Not until they had been humiliated in public, but still the sheer magnitude of their humiliation existed only in the memories of those who had witnessed it. Granted, some of the people owning those memories happened to be pretty big names in the then-burgeoning and as of yet unnamed (Bill Quick named it) BlogoSphere, James Lileks to name one, but still. Our monuments, like Ozymandias’, were disappearing.
The only obvious next step was to create a site of our own, so we did. We did, expecting it to amount to a barely discernible amount of sound and fury, signifying less than nothing since we would have to rely on somebody to actually click on by to read it. But still we did it. If nothing else, then we could at least get a few hundred visits by hitting refresh every couple of hours or so. Heck, if we had to cajole our immediate family into visiting it, then so be it. But we never expected it to become much of anything. Just a place we could call our own while we plied our trade of trawling the InterTubes looking for targets we could lay down a fire for effect on.
Besides, and perhaps much more importantly, we needed a place where we could put up our thoughts, vent our anger, lay waste to the enemies of the greatest nation that ever existed and be sure that it would always stay up there. We just never thought that anybody but ourself would read it.
Boy, were we ever wrong.
Suddenly the site meter started ticking. At first slowly, but then picking up speed as the Internet worked its wonders.
Where we’d previously thought that we were pretty much alone in our furious, white-hot anger at everything and everybody trying to bring down our new home to the lows we’d hoped we’d escaped, we suddenly learned that we were anything but. There were literally thousands of us, and we were lucky enough to be part of that first burst that brought Unapologetic Americanism forth into the public square, the Old Guard of the Blogosphere that we only happened to become part of as a pure accident.
Everything started back then, and we were lucky enough to be part of it. What’s more important, much much more important, we suddenly to know people from all over this nation that we would have never known otherwise, people that are now among our best friends, and we got to be part of a network, a family of Rotties who will never, ever be alone.
Screw the site meter. THAT’S what’s really important. Sure, it’s nice being able to tell our grandkids that we were part of the Original Old Guard of the Conservative BlogoSphere, we’re proud of it, but what really counts is that we, purely through accident, happened to build a network that will outlast ourself. Scratch that bullshit. We didn’t build it. YOU did. ALL of you. We just plugged in some HTML on a domain name we’d purchased. Any idiot can do that (and our idiot initial code until several somebodies who knew how to write it helped us out proves it). But we were part of it.
Part of it. That’s what we’ve been realizing over the years. This is truly bigger than anything we ever did now, bigger than the sum of its parts.
We’ve seen pictures of Rotties wearing our T-shirts all over the country and outside the country too, including Iraq, just to name one place. We’ve been quoted on the radio, in magazines and on TV, and none of all of this would have happened without you. This site has become, and we don’t claim credit for that in the slightest, part of the conservative, proud American movement of the 21st century, and to have even been close to that happening is the greatest thing we ever accomplished.
A dumb immigrant from a furrein country the size of a postage stamp.
So thanks, all of you. Thanks for what we have built together, thanks for your support, thanks for all of the good times past and the good times ahead of us, thanks for giving me a purpose, a voice and a home away from home.
I didn’t build this.
WE did.
Thatisall.