Why progressive? Because we believe in the United States of America as envisioned by the Founding Fathers and as provided for in the Constitution. Because we're tired of how "liberal" has been turned into a dirty word. And because we believe our country needs a healthy dose of liberalism or progressivism or whatever you want to call it if we're going to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

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What’s in a name? Maybe only God (and Godwin) know

If by starting this web site I have created a monster, at least its heredity is authentic.

One of the big decisions you have to make when creating a web site is choosing its name. Ideally, you want something that not only accurately summarizes your site’s contents but is short, catchy and easy to remember (and type). If that sounds relatively easy, it isn’t – especially considering that your web site’s name can’t duplicate any of the gazillion sites that already exist.

The path that led me to pick Opinion Artillery was a winding one indeed. It started in mid-March with me deciding to write a blog. A few days of that quickly convinced me that I wanted to do more than just pick from a template, post entries, and hope someone would see them. I had bigger things in mind.

So I signed up with one of those companies that offer to help you Build A Professional-Looking Web Site And Have It On The Internet In Just Minutes – For Free!

Naturally, it was more complicated than it sounded. A lot more complicated. But the price was Perfect, it worked Reasonably Well, I had my site on the web in Just Hours, and I sat back waiting for the Complimentary Messages From Impressed Friends that I was sure would start pouring in.

They Didn’t Come. But I plugged on diligently, learned a lot about HTML code and all kinds of other things I never knew existed, and gradually my site started looking better. I had entered a nebulous world full of arcane terms like Site Submission and Pop-Ups, and the longer I was there the more obsessed I became with hosts and embedding and search engines and, as Arlo Guthrie would say, “all kinds of fancy stuff.”

After nearly Two Months Of Cyberspace Obscurity I came to a realization coined a long time ago but still relevant in the Information Age: You get what you pay for. Not that I’m knocking the free web access company with which I originally registered. They’re fine for getting started, and what I learned from mine was valuable. Also, because such companies get you on the web through sub-domains (if you’re not web-savvy, think subsidiaries) you have much greater latitude in picking a name for your site. But the company I had been using had its reasons for existing and I had my goals, and in the long run they didn’t mesh. So I signed up for some professional help (no, not that kind) and In Just Minutes the question of what to name my site was Staring Me In The Face.

I should have been prepared. By this time I had named a couple of blogs and at least three web sites, and I was pretty well satisfied with the most recent one. But naturally, when it came to choosing the name I would be paying for, the One I Liked Was Taken. And for a while it seemed like so was Everything Else. Finally, I started searching through a database of quotations in the hope that I would find a couple of words I could adapt.

Which was when I began to learn about William Godwin, one of whose quotations includes the pair of words that became opinionartillery.org. “Usurped powers cannot withstand the artillery of opinion,” Godwin said. And I said, “Gotcha!” – and finally moved on to the second step in creating this site.  

I thought these two words summed up what I was trying to make: a site filled with not only my progressive opinion but that of others, too. It would be, I thought, rather like a barrage of opinion from an opinion artillery. Since the site would deal primarily with politics, government and a misguided war, the combat metaphor seemed especially apt.

It was only after creating the site that I decided to find out just Who The Hell this Godwin fellow was. This is what I learned: 

Born in 1756 in England, Godwin was a weak, introverted and intellectually precocious child, one of 13 in the family of a strict minister. When he grew up, Godwin at first followed in his father’s footsteps. But he became disenchanted with organized religion and left the ministry. He became an agnostic, then an atheist, then what he called a “vague theist.” He got married when his girlfriend got pregnant (which must have sat well with his old man), became a best-selling writer (4,000 copies qualified back then) and, according to historyguide.org, “the father of philosophical anarchism.”
                                       
But what he is perhaps best known for today (to the extent he is known) is that his daughter was Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein.”

Well, I thought, I certainly picked the words of an Interesting Man. And although I’m no admirer of anarchism, I was rather tickled that I had picked a rebel, a deep thinker, a man who was skeptical about government – and a writer. There seemed to be some kind of karma in that quartet.   

As for Frankenstein, we’ll just have to wait and see. Hopefully, this web site won’t arouse the citizenry to chase me around the countryside with torches (although I wouldn’t mind if it causes some people to cringe in a corner and scream, “It’s alive!”) Mainly, I hope for two things. People will have a good time visiting, and whatever barrages we fire will have salutary, not destructive, impacts. If that’s the case, I’ll say a little prayer of thanks to god, in whatever form it exists, for having Godwin provide me with a Capital Idea.