During my freshman year at writing school, a fellow writer, a lesbian named Tracy something (sorry, one too many bong hits before class carried her last name away from me forever) told me that I was like a One Man Crusade.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a single word blinking in my brain like a beacon of inspiration--POSITION! Is that what this whole little mind war was about yesterday?

Where do I want to position this blog to effect the most positive change in individuals? See, individuals is the key word here because I'm not interested in addressing social groups--that is the way of the half-wit liberal and has been tried for over a hundred years (you know the old saying, "Communism has only killed 100 million, let's give it another chance.")

It is the individual, and not the pathetic and herded social group, which is the measure of true freedom--the kind where you start getting into the "Endowed by the Creator" stuff and liberals start sweating like an Italian hooker that took a wrong turn and ended up inside Vatican City.

The whole point of yesterday's drama was to ask these BloGods of cyberspace, who command platforms that connect to thousands and thousands of people daily, "Okay, now that you have had the greatest democratic tool of communication ever conceived dropped into your laps; what are you going to do with it?"

The answer I seemed to get from Shane was that he was here to entertain himself primarily and what I got from his audience is that this was A-Okay with them, that's what they sign up for every day when they check in on his site, and that they didn't need any pipsqueak with a big vocabulary and an uncheckable ego coming in to ask them any four part questions that might bust their comfort zones wide open like hymens in a horse jumping contest.

Now, if that's what people want to read about online then how can I dare fault Shane and Wil and Tony for giving them what they want--the free market speaks and responds to itself like this in a myriad of ways each day. But I'm left asking myself is that what type of audience I want? Is that the positioning (for you marketing geeks out there) that I want to set myself up in?

Boys Wear Pants is one of the self-proclaimed Three Horseman of the New Media. This triumverate of a juggernaut in the Information War includes AntiMedia, a guy who absolutely wipes the floor with Mainstream Media each and every day and makes no apologies for it--just like me; and the triple-terror is rounded out by a writer you've never heard about but who will someday be famous, an aging Vietnam War Vet named JD who has staked his claim, and his blog, at the Mouth of the Brazos ["Clap clap clap--deep in the heart of Texas"]. JD will eat your soul for lunch and ask for second helpings--and he also makes no apologies. Trust me gang, the battles don't even need to be fought--we've already won the war by attitude alone.

No one else has mojo like the Horsemen but we are also individuals with our own respective audiences. By allowing our networks to interact organically, we are unstoppable. But that brings me back to the positioning of my Blog.

One blog cannot rely on links alone to be ultimately successful. I don't see this Information War as a contest for blog links alone in that light; after all--Hitler had a lot of sunshine patriots and summer soldiers hitching their hyperlinks to his wagon when his star was on the rise also.

I know that I don't want my audience behaving towards my guests like the fans at the Isle of Wight festival or the Hell's Angels at Altamont. No one needs to have their character degraded or the honor and intelligence of their loved ones insulted because their ideas are different and challenge the weltanschauung of others. They're just ideas, not backpack bombs--even though ideas can be far more damaging to the entrenched powers that be than any frontal assault or sideways sucker punch of driving massive vehicles into massive structures to effect massive physical damage in a compacted moment of time.

Ideas don't work like that and Information Wars are more like an extended session with the Happy Painter where the enemy dies smiling, thinking that they've won the battle. (Inconstheivable!)

I have often told close friends, when we argue points of social change (because that's what I got high and did in college--what did you do? Watch Dumb and Dumber again?), that a mass movement of social groups is not effective in bringing about positive social change. In fact, if you do the historical math, you'll find that every mass movement (including the growth of Christianity as an empire) resulted in the misery and death of thousands and millions of people.

No, no, no. True revolution (think Philadelphia 1776) is distinguished from petty rebellion (think Los Angeles 1992) in that where a rebellion is just people venting emotions by tearing shit up and pillaging; a revolution occurs only with a complete paradigm shift in the individual. When this same shift occurs in multiple individuals at the same time, you have what historian Paul Johnson refers to as a "Great Awakening". It's happened in America before at least three times (once, coincidentally, at the germination of the Revolutionary War) and it's happening again right now and blogs are going to play a major part in it.

This time, like last time, the revolution will not be televised--it will be online. The key generals of this Information War will not be the bloggers interested only in getting their feelings and mundane thoughts out there for rootless thousands to ho and hum over--that stuff is okay but the ratio here should be 5:1 (five posts of substance for every one session of literary masturbation). The generals are the self-actualized people who are grabbing life by the balls and pulling the world around them into a better place.

Let it be known that bloggers are here to stay and they carry far more weight and impact than nightly news reporters, talk show radio hosts, cable analysis shows, and newspaper opinion columnists dare to give us credit for. In fact, our punch is Ivan Drago and our stamina is Rocky Balboa--Main Stream Media have no chance against us and they know it. We're more diverse. We're more interesting. And you can't take out a swarm of mosquitos in attack mode--just ask Trent Lott, Jayson Blair and Dan Rather.

The game just got serious but the song remains the same.

So Get Ready for Greatness

I am going to close this manifesto by declaring the age of Hollywood and New York control of American art and information to be officially dead!

The Midwest has held this country together as a culture for over two hundred years and Ohio has been the heart of it all ever since the first big brutus sumbitch from the Ohio Company crossed the Ohio river and the Delaware Indians dubbed him Buckeye.

Ohio is already the number one source for quality Independent Music in the nation (check out my buddy's band Miranda Sound for proof) and I will establish a University of Art here named The Joseph Campbell School of Proper Art which will instruct by invitation only and will be the premier artistic university and studio in the world.

I will build a film school and studio to rival George Lucas's Letterman Digital Arts Center and I will combine it with a music school and studio and a writing school that is founded upon the peer group workshop. I and the world experts I will hire are going to teach artists how to become masters of their own fate and lords of their own artistic visions. I am going to crack open the nut of the Midwest and connect the genius artistry we have here with the rest of the world. I am sick and tired of watching talented people get shut out of the Right and Left coast systems of information and entertainment publishing simply because of where they live.

I am talking about effecting a brand new human renaissance right here in our time.

I did not say that I'd like to do these things. I will do these things and that self-actualized statement is exactly what sets my position as distinct from every other person on the Internet and in the world. I don't need any more marketing sessions. I don't need to call Seth Godin--the IdeaVirus is right here in front of you.

Consider this a manifesto and a mission statement; and hold on to the check because it will be cashed one day very soon.

This One Man Crusade just stormed the castle and stole the Queen.

Check mate.

The hardest apology I ever had to make was the first one I made to my son when he was 13-months old. I was engaged in writing, lost in the zone and he was tugging at my pant leg and whining about something. This went on for about five minutes or so until I finally exploded and yelled at him, “Will you give you me a God Damned minute here?”

I watched it in his eyes. I saw some kind of a death in those baby blues and I could almost feel myself tumble a couple levels inside his little head and heart. My God, what had I done? By the time I was man enough to ask myself this question, he had already hit the tears and it became a big production.

I endured a couple minutes of this wailing and my wife’s scowling (there’s no justifying that to a mother), until finally I put my ego aside, closed the laptop, went over to him, picked him up, hugged him and made sure he was looking into my eyes.

I said, “Buddy, Daddy was wrong to yell and he is very sorry.” He was playing with his matchbox cars two minutes later and everything was alright again.

I became a true man that day. But sometimes I slide back, like we all do.

I’ve been a real prick the last two days and I’m not going to give any more excuses or justifications because that’s what got me in trouble in the first place. I attacked Tony, Wil and Shane without provocation and while the intention behind my attacks might have had a justified point, the whole thing eventually became like the frigging pink spots in The Cat in the Hat until it was all pink snow everywhere.

Well, here comes little Cat Z with his VOOM!

Tony, Wil and Shane—I’m sincerely sorry for calling you guys out. You didn’t deserve that and I hope you’ll accept my apology as sincere, as a man who has put aside his ego and all the bullshit to get down to the puckered up asshole of the matter.

I was a dick. I was wrong. I’m sorry. It’s over.

With that said, I am turning back on the comments from my initial blog post (here) and I have toned down the rhetoric and personal attacks in my manifesto. Hopefully clearing the air here will allow anyone still interested to get past the emotions and address the issue I was trying to bring up (through about three million unnecessary words) about what civic responsibility bloggers that get significant market share of blog traffic have to their audiences in terms of effecting social change.

So, hopefully this squashes all the beef out there and we can all make nice again.

On the plus side, pissing off Tony Pierce led to a 1,100% increase in traffic to Boys Wear Pants Dot Com; but this not something I would recommend for all the kiddies with newbie blogs and egos that bruise easily to go about doing. This whole frigging mess has been like trying to reach down to pull a turd out through your throat.

And I forgive the person who attacked my wife’s intelligence and character, although let it be known that you should never ever fuck with a man’s family online—that shit could make a man in the wrong frame of mind get into some straight up G shit.

And another thing, blog comments should be scrutinized with the most flexible grammatical yardstick. People are bound to misspell shit and get tenses and all that crap wrong when they’re writing in the heat of an emotional moment.

Again, I hope this squashes all this shit and I hope you all keep coming back here. If you want, sign up for my newsletter where I really let loose to a private opt-in audience about shit I can't make public less it come back to bite me on the boo-boo one day (like this did).

Tony, Shane and Wil have the West Coast flava but I’ll be keeping it real in the Heart of it All.

And I was serious about the school of Art thing--it's going to happen. Shit, I might even have these three dudes come out and teach a class someday.

Together we can all change this world for the better by focusing on our relationships and attitudes to those around us. If you asked me a week ago if I would be apologizing to the entire blogosphere for my behavior, I would have told you to stop eating retard-sandwiches. But life is both funny and fucked up sometimes.

Don’t underestimate or cheapen the power of this amazing tool of freedom we have been given to enjoy and speak to each other with. And don't forget that there are human beings on the other end of these virtual connections--treat them with respect when you can (I'm talking to myself here).

That new world is right there and all we have to do is choose to touch it and make it real.

Sincerely,

Josh

It has been one month and one day since the infamous post that began the blogging war between myself, Tony Pierce, and Shane Nickerson and it has been a relatively quiet month in the blogosphere.

Since then, this blog has been completely converted from a free hosting platform to this awesome new home on Powerblogs, which was an excellent referral by Antimedia. I spent sixteen hours going blind fixing CSS code and categorizing each blog post I had made since April as I converted my entire catalog of Blogger posts over here.

But even the snazziest sites are nothing without content, as Tony has said time and again, a statement I agree with whole-heartedly.

That little war started all because I had grown fed up with what I perceived to be "fluff pieces" by the popular bloggers (not just Tony, Shane, and Wil but many others as well) and I'm sure my critical comments kind of took them by surprise. But it wasn't their writing ability I was taking issue with but rather the content of their posts.

Now I apologized for the way I came across and Shane and Tony accepted and all that is under the bridge now but it seems to me that I was frustrated because I was caught in a nexus of the blogosphere, unsure of where I was positioning my online identity and the niche of my blog.

I have been doing a lot of thinking (as well as a lot of writing, a lot of coding, and a lot of bugging Chris here at Powerblogs for help) about the whole incident which went from me making what I thought were insightful comments to me apologizing to the entire internet for my behavior.

And it seems that my main problem was that my blogging inspirations were far too spread out and I was being pulled in too many directions at once. See, I dig the political blogs like Michelle Malkin and Antimedia. But I also dig the Mommy Blogs of Supafine and Sweetney. And I dig the hipster cool entertainment blogs like Shane's, Tony's, Wil's, and Alex's. And I dig the crazy news sites like Mensix.

I wanted my blog to be a little of all these sites. I want it to be funny yet sobering, entertaining yet somber, enlightening yet mundane, controversial yet safe, and I want it to be a site that at the same time it encourages my readers to feel as though they are part of a community for each of them to feel that there was some piece of me that they couldn't have and that the more posts I made the less they actually saw of me. I want this to be a portal of mystery as well as a blatant and outright source of truth. Like Tom Petty said, I want it all or nothing.

I feel like I've got a pretty good start on filling what I perceive to be a void in the blogosphere, which combines all my influences into a new jamming wavelength in the dissonance we call the blogosphere. I want to be the first blogger who writes about global economic war diplomacy and then posts about Internet porn and 2Pac with full cursing followed by a great old stoner story from back in the days when all there was to do was get high and try to get laid. I want trackbacks from the left, the right, legit press, and the underground.

But in the same vein, it's just blogging and it's not life--like the John Lennon quote that's become cliche and I never want to turn into the Blogebrity parody that Alex so brilliantly describes.

So where does that leave me? Right here in front of you. In the end, everyone was right in the Blog War and everyone won (although I had to sacrifice the most). Shane was right in that blogging is best done when its entertainment for oneself and, if others enjoy it also--even better. In fact, Shane has taken his blojo to new heights in the past week with his multi-part serial story about a crazy Florida trip gone wrong. Excellent stuff, Shane. I still feel horrible about the "it's just an actor's blog" comment, just so you know.

And Tony was right to claim dominance over his portion of the blogosphere--he does his thing and has been a major trendsetter in the way that thousands of people both read and write blogs. I was lucky enough to develop my own style before I had ever even heard of Busblog but I still started off imitating the people I thought were doing it right--Seth Godin, Shane, and Wil (I was introduced to Tony from Shane's blog). But Tony's got mad skills and you've got to give him his props and that's really all he was asking for--here they are Tony--you're the man. Well you're one of the men.

Wil stayed out of the whole affair--a bloGod such as he spends no time swatting at the ankle biters like me--good for him--his success has served as inspiration for me.

And me, after apologizing to the entire blogosphere and undergoing a complete online crucifixion, I was reborn with a clarity and purpose I had never known before in my online writing. I came out with a couple writing gigs, some more loyal readers who I hope to have made into fans, and I've completed the third revision to my book which is coming out for sale on JoshuaMinton.com in a few weeks.

I came out with a new blog and a new position, a new direction and a new base of operations. I came out with more respect for others and, above all, I finally realized that you don't need to piss people off anymore to get through to them and make them think. I was hung up on what I call the Nine Inch Nails method of writing and that was so 1994 of me.

But the most important lesson I learned is that it is possible for thousands, if not millions, of individuals to speak at the same time as well as listen to each other and those who get good at doing both are going to enjoy enormous success online.

I plan on being at the front of that line one day but I also realize that there are dues to pay and props to be given.

Let's call it egotistical humility and leave it at that. I consider this book finally closed.

Damn Ed! I thought I was good at pissing people off online but you have just won the hot potato until the next Blog War heats up.

Ed apparantly made some disparaging comments about Tom Green that got picked up by Green and fed to his rabid fan base who are trying to skewer Ed on his own site. But Ed is holding his own and, in my opinion, is clearly coming out on top.

One wonders if they would actually want an audience who has acted with such immaturity and lack of thought beyond the brainstem as Green's blog fans...yeah, I guess one would.

Which makes it all the more righteous to get out there and fug with them.

Keep it up, Ed. Blog Wars are better than reality TV.