[ed. note - apologies for a very inside-blogball post. For the necessary background, see Ace of Spades HQ.]
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the English Department, they were dragging the Aeron chairs out of grad student cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big flat screen monitor, in preparation for the Two Minutes Snark.
The next moment a hideous, grinding noise from the university Mac G5, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big monitor at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Snark had started. As usual, the face of Jeff Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago nobody quite remembered), had been one of their own, a member of the Modern Language Association with a solid vita and faculty parking privileges, almost on a level with Stanley Fish himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary blogging activities, had been condemned to sabbatical and had mysteriously escaped and become a stay-at-home dad.
The programmes of the Two Minutes Snark varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Faculty's purity, a paste eater. All subsequent crimes against the Faculty, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his blog posts. Somewhere he was still alive, fixing his disgusting child a snack of Cheddar Goldfish and hatching his online conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the campus, under the protection of his neocon paymasters, perhaps even - so it was occasionally rumoured - in Arvada or Cherry Creek, or even some hiding-place in Boulder itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the jpeg of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emoticons. It was a lean bearded Jewish face, fuzzy from a on old PhotoShop - clever, and yet somehow inherently despicable, and beneath it a 1980's rugby shirt worn with a kind of uncertain irony. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Faculty - an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a first year CritLit grad student should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing SEMIOTICS, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the MLA, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of Klonopin, he was laughing hysterically about the latest issue of Social Text - and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Faculty, and even contained Jargonpeak words: more Jargonspeak words, indeed, than any Faculty member would normally use in real life. And in haiku, even.
Before the Snark had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the tenured faculty in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the pajama-clad army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either the Tenure and Promotion Committee or University Budget Council, since when academia was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on Blogger and TypePad and WordPress, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were - in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes with MySpace accounts waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thersites Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army of wingnuts, an underground online network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of Tenure.
In its second minute the Snark rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in front of their monitors and clasping their ears and shouting "nyah nyah nyah" at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating prose that came from the screen. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was screaming with the others and clicking anonymous entries into the comment box. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Snark was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous deconstructivist ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, to apply for a summer study program in Europe, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic, even before one's dissertation orals.
The Snark rose to its climax. The face of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's face, covered in white pasty Elmer's Glue-All. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a illiterate Nascar fan who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his American flag-festooned SUV roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the monitor. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Noam Chomsky.
Winston had heard the whispered story of a terrible blog, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a blog with a weird title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as 'Goldstein.' But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the blog nor its contents was a subject that any ordinary Faculty member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
