Blibel

It strikes me that no one seems to care when people lie anymore. And we certainly don’t blink an eye when someone defames someone else’s character. Having been the victim of it in the past, I can tell you it’s very hard to fight — almost pointless nowadays, as it tends to garner sympathy for the poor offender who was only exercising his/her right to defame — and it’s often better to just let it go, show you’re the better person, or turn it to your advantage if you can.

Now, should you be someone famous, like John Kerry or Barak Obama, fighting back means hitting the media ball with enough counter-spin for a corporate establishment that has pretty much divorced itself form the notion of objective reality, facts, research, and proof. The only things the media allows itself to report nowadays is what each side says is real. George Bush could come out wearing red glasses, claiming the sky is purple, and CNN would have pundits arguing the for and against the merits of his case. Fox News would all be wearing red glasses within the hour and asking why people are being so "colorist."

Well, when it comes to political assassination, there seem to be no bounds. Now, I’ve certainly been seen using some colorful metaphors to make a point. But people are literally promoting the obviously false ideas that Obama is a Crack Head, a Muslim, a Manchurian Candidate, a vampire, and perhaps even the Devil himself. They do this with a straight face, not in metaphor or dramatic license, and not to make any point other than to convince more people that what they say is literally true.

No one is to blame, of course, because everyone is just echoing what someone else said. Well, we need a word for this, since we’ve pretty much abandoned the old norms of conduct and punishment. At the very least, at least we can bring back the notion of shame.

Blibel (n) — a written form of defamation, born in the blogosphere, similar to libel, but with no overt penalty for defamation; sharing some of ephemeral, almost-verbal characteristics of slander; a cross between modern viral internet advertising and school-yard whisper campaigns that are invariably started by someone and no one at the same time;

Blibel (v) — to defame by seeding the ‘cloud’ [of the blogosphere] as an effective way to make rain.

I’m not the first to use it, but I’m going to be naming it a lot from now on. Blibel is Swift-Boating, Web 2.0 style, with no soft-money "503c" required.