The Crisis Papers After Bush/Cheney
"Change," the central theme of the Obama campaign and presidency,
has likewise come to this website, The Crisis Papers, and to
the projected future activity of its editors.
The Crisis Papers will remain online for the foreseeable
future, and the editors will continue to write essays, originating
at The Crisis Papers and also circulated for publication at other
progressive websites.
However, The Crisis Papers will no
longer adhere to a weekly update schedule and the appearance of our
essays will be less frequent. Henceforth we will discontinue our
features, "Recommended Articles of the Week" and "Audio and Video
Features." However, we will update, expand and refresh our popular
pages: "The Dissenting Internet" (a listing of solid websites to
visit for political information), "Recommended Blogsites" (the best
of the political bloggers out there on the web), and "The Activists'
Page" (contacts for aiding the cause).
The Crisis Papers will also serve as an archive of the
original internet essays, past and future, by Bernard Weiner and
Ernest Partridge. There are now over five hundred essays in the
archive.
In Retrospect: The Crisis Papers
was conceived by the editors in late 2002 and launched the day
before the mid-term election of that year. Our decision to join the
political battle grew out of our loyalty to American democracy and
our allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, augmented
by our anger at how the Cheney/Bush Administration was dismantling
both as it moved the country in the direction of a militarist native
fascism. In addition we were motivated by our belief that the U.S.
war on Iraq not only was unnecessary and incompetently waged, but
was ruinous to the American soul and the long-standing international
respect for the United States and its political principles.
Our audience grew slowly but steadily, peaking in 2004 and 2005,
with total weekly hits routinely above 60,000 and frequently above
100,000 (unique visitors per week ranging from 7,000 to 15,000). Our
best report was from the first week in September, 2005, with 152,000
hits and 24,000 unique visits. Not bad for a weekly non-profit
website launched into the ether on a wing and a prayer by three
retired professors, Bernard Weiner and Ernest and Elinore Partridge,
with no formal training in web design and management, and with no
firm sources of income to pay our bills.
In the meantime, we routinely submitted our essays to a number of
progressive websites, three of which, Democratic Underground, The
Smirking Chimp, and OpEd News, published virtually all of
them. The audience for all these "outside" websites far exceeded
that of The Crisis Papers.
Readership of our essays outside The Crisis Papers really
took off when Democratic Underground offered us a publishing
alliance: They posted our new essays every Tuesday on their website,
under a Crisis Papers logo on their homepage, at the same
time as these articles appeared on The Crisis Papers. These
essays often provoked lively reactions within the progressive
Democratic Underground community and beyond.
The work of the progressive internet continues, but now the heavy
lifting is in the capable hands of well financed and flourishing
daily websites such as The Huffington Post, Media Matters,
Alternet, Common Dreams, Think Progress, Daily Kos, Salon, BuzzFlash,
Scoop, After Downing Street, Democracy Now, Talking Points Memo,
and Digby, to mention just a few among hundreds, which are
staffed with creative web designers and professional journalists and
scholars. While we will continue to submit our articles to the
progressive internet, with the proliferation of so many liberal-left
websites, there is diminishing need for modest weekly efforts like
The Crisis Papers.
And so we now direct our efforts to other projects. In particular:
Ernest Partridge will resume concentrated work on his
neglected book in progress
Conscience
of a Progressive and another nearly-completed book in
progress, To Ourselves and Our Posterity, which deals with
the moral issue of responsibility to future generations. He will
also rejoin his profession by writing and submitting scholarly
conference and journal papers in environmental ethics and moral and political philosophy. No
doubt this effort will result in future publications for The
Crisis Papers and for other progressive websites. Partridge's
attention will be directed less to timely and topical issues, and
more to the "deeper" philosophical concepts and issues that underlie
the ongoing contest between right and left, conservatives and
liberals.
Bernard Weiner will be polishing for publication his memoir
as a journalist, theatre/film critic, and activist writer, Little
Man Clapping; writing and directing more plays; publishing new
poetry collections; consulting as a dramaturg and manuscript editor;
developing his budding talents as a professional photographer; and
spending more fun time hiking and biking and traveling with his wife
Heidi Linsmayer.
We are grateful to those of you who have communicated with us after
reading our essays in The Crisis Papers or on other websites. It was
important to know that readers took our essays and arguments
seriously, and that, together, we all were contributing to the
movement for peace and justice and the rule of law. So please
continue to visit the downsized Crisis Papers and to communicate
with us at
crisispapers@hotmail.com .
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D, and Ernest Partridge, Ph.D, Co-Editors
Elinore Partridge, Ph.D, Associate Editor
The Crisis Papers
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