He is like him in his resoluteness and absolute commitment in both words and deeds to his beliefs. Like WLG, he has been struck by the fundamental unfairness of a world which has benefited some at the expense of others. Like WLG, he is not content with half measures.

I think their causes are similar in that both have embraced issues which may have been looked at with a measure of complacency or resignation or indifference, and both embrace solutions which seem to be radical even to those who recognized the injustice.

Nader is a good example. He’s toiled the fields for sure.

“Maybe only Moses…” as John Jay Smith said, and Chris Lydon repeated.

Then again, there are certainly self-publishers today whom we may think of his deluded, but there is no cause anywhere near as great today. Maybe Ralph Nader in his heyday, more an organizer than a writer…

I’d also nominate Krugman as a contemporary– even if you dislike him, as fconte does, he is passionate and focussed on his issues. But maybe self-publisher Joshua Micah Marshall better fits the model.

Ok, let equivocate now. I had identified Whitman with what I describe as the singer impulse of blogging (see my Blogger Archetypes, a hypothesis which I have pressed some of our friends in the research community to help investigate). Whitman was not pushing an issue, was not putting his life on the line, was merely celebrating himself. And I also took some time to illustrate how Whitman did things we don’t really associate with blogging at all (he constantly re-edited poems in Leaves of Grass; bloggers tend to post and not look back).

I had identifed other archetypes of blogging, closer to journalism– stringers who collect facts and act like reports; wingers who don’t. So I think in picking Garrison and Stone, it’s the conception of the blogger as the noble fact-gatherer and soothsayer, but that’s not the regular perception. And I’ve even talked with people who are using online media for “journalactivism” but they don’t want to be associated with the term bloggers. I don’t even call myself a blogger… but trying to envision them through Whitman I was finally able to appreciate the folk art of it all.