briandmyers informed me yesterday that Bartcop had died. He mentioned it to Hubski, but nobody cared.
That's because none of you know.
Nobody really knows. And that's a goddamn shame. Terry Coppage was quite possibly the single person most responsible for the rise of the Left in the United States.
He was, as he liked to say, a man with "a modem, a smart mouth and the truth." He didn't know jack shit about web design. He wasn't particularly interested in joining open.salon or Daily Kos or the Huffington Post (he predated all of them by a decade or more). His last page on February 18th was every bit as hideous as his first page in 1996. But without Bartcop, there would be no Media Whores Online. Without MWO, there would be no Black Box Voting.. Without the tone set by Bartcop and his descendants, there would be no Air America. No Huffington Post. No Howard Dean Media Machine. Patient Zero of the "liberal blogosphere" was a former used-car salesman from K-drag, AKA Knuckledrag, AKA Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Prior to Web 2.0, prior to news aggregation, prior to Facebook, prior to anything there was Bartcop. Asshole started on the BBSes, if you believe that, and spent his days putting links together. It's a simple formula - the day's political stories, some pointed commentary, shit tons of political cartoons and a letters section. It was all assembled by him, in his basement, every day, day in, day out, for eighteen years. He championed Greg Palast before the Guardian did. He championed Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. He supported Robert Parry tirelessly and he never let the Right forget.
I found Bartcop shortly before September 11th. Our office had Internet but we weren't allowed to use it except on one computer - I would save the HTML to the server in the morning and read it at my desk at lunch. Bartcop was a one-person aggregator - the Daily Beast Cheat Sheet owes a lot to him. He hated Tiger Woods, loved Shirley Manson and would always find an excuse to drink Chinaco Anejo. He got me to volunteer for the Kerry campaign. He showed me Get Your War On, the most singularly sublime War On Terror cartoon ever made. And working in a born-again Christian firm with the Left Behind books sitting out in the meeting room, he made certain things okay.
Terry Coppage was the George Bailey of the Left. Had he never been born, we'd be into our 2nd McCain presidency. He'd been fighting leukemia for years; we all pitched in back in 2003. In many ways, the extra ten years was a gift. And although I stopped reading Bartcop in 2006 (and stopped paying him $30 a month in 2009), I can say with no quaver in my voice that the world is... less today.
I drank the last of my Chinaco three weeks ago. I'd pour some out for the bastard if I had any. Now I gotta go get some.
And reread Get Your War On.
Thank you so, so much for showing me this. I've been unable to control my inappropriate laughter in public places all day. "John Ashcroft. The guy just gives me a good feeling!" cut to silence -- "There's something so precious about a young child's first encounter with Henry Kissinger." oh my god thank youHe showed me Get Your War On, the most singularly sublime War On Terror cartoon ever made.
Wow, you weren't kidding about the web design. Just started reading the last few issues and I already wish that I knew about this guy sooner rather than later. Also, is there anything else like Get Your War On? Because this is incredible. Outside of the rest of David Rees' everything ever on his site which I'm now going to spend the rest of the week reading, along with Bart probably.
Get Your War On was singular. It didn't really end so much as stop at Obama's inauguration - I think it was David Rees' reaction to the insanity of post 9/11 GWB culture. It is a product of its time, and when you read it in realtime it was something. No, I don't think there was anything like it. http://www.mnftiu.cc/category/gywo/war81/ "You know what? I'm sick about talking about this stuff. Let's get something to eat."
The one about food aid and bombs was based on an actual thing. I thought that was him pushing the envelope. That...that one made me sad. Is it okay to drink yourself to sleep after that. What a country.
Thanks for saying it so much better than I could. Worth a look are "Bart's Laws" - esp #2 : http://www.bartcop.com/bartslaw.htm
The way you describe Bart reminds me of Archy and Mehitabel. A&M is more dated, however. This page sums it up nicely. I mean, I think A&M is more lighthearted than Bartcop. Don Marquis wrote a daily column for a newspaper and introduced A&M as a weekly kind of break from I think the usual pressures of a daily column. Archy is a cockroach who writes the columns by jumping from key to key on an old manual typewriter. (See, it is dated - this stuff started coming out in 1917.) But the page describes the columns as: You might enjoy it, you might not. The columns were brought together and published in books - the one I read is "Archy and Mehitabel," which is the first volume. Archy has given me truisms like "Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer, but denies you the beer to cry into." from certain maxims of archy It's kind of prose poetry. I don't know how much you go in for that sort of thing. a mix of news commentary, doggerel poetry and short sketches.
Those who might think there’s little substance to Archy’s lowercase commentary haven’t read enough. Archy and Mehitabel are remembered as comic characters, but often Don Marquis’ light verse was a veneer on blunt social criticism.