Back of the Envelope

In accordance with the full-disclosure policy of this blog, I am required to report that the following commentary was requested and paid for by Doc Rampage. I am not required to report how much he paid for it, but you are free to draw your own conclusions from the quality of this commentary.

In this post, I wish to address the question of whether the blog Doc Rampage is, in fact, the most metaheroic in the world. As Doc Rampage is also the the pseudonym for the blogger, I will refer to the blog as Doc Rampage and the blogger as Doc.

What does metaheroic mean, you ask? Good question. I couldn't find metaheroic or metahero on Dictionary.com, but I remembered that Doc had defined metahero for us once, so I looked it up:

You see, any field of literature (and I include blogdom here) has various stages that it follows in terms of the protagonists it deals with. In the beginning it deals with normal people who do things like have babies or get killed in battles in normal literature. In the blog world this corresponds to the early internet sites where people wrote dumb diaries about their dog's mange, or how their Windows partition got screwed up.

The second stage is characterized by heros. People who are bigger and brighter than the normal human being. In literature these people tended to win wars rather than getting killed in them, and in the blog world they set up internet sites that provided a valuable service so that people actually wanted to read them... The next stage is the age of superheros. Not just the kind who wear brightly-colored spandex costumes, but people who are superhuman, who have powers that no real person does... In the blogging world, this corresponds to people who manage to attain high readerships while offering no obvious service other than their own random musings. In the world of blogs, Lileks is Tarzan and Atrios is The Joker...

In the next stage come the gods. These are creatures so powerful that they are beyond anything that normal humans can even comprehend. In literature we had Thor, who could smite with lightening and Loki who knew the secrets of magic. In the blog world we have Instapundit who can smite a server with an instalanche and Andrew Sullivan who knows the secret of making money from blogging.

After the gods, you are sort of hitting the end of the trend. It's not easy to invent challenges for omnipotent beings, so the next stage goes the other direction and brings us the antihero. These are deeply flawed individuals who nevertheless manage to undertake heroic actions...

In the final stage, we have a group of people who don't actually have anything to say or any reason to start a blog, but they feel left out, so they start one anyway. These are the metaheros. "Meta" is a greek-root word meaning "after" or "beyond". So a metahero is one who comes after the heros. And the foremost metahero is by definition the first one who posits this historical trend in a blog post. The closest analogy to metaheros in literature would probably be found in romance novels.

[I did a lot of cutting in random places to reduce the size, so all those ellipses are mine. -DSC]

Doc posits that since he invented the term, he gets to decide who's foremost, and that's him. Which sounds good in theory, but did he really invent the term? After all, putting "meta-" in front of "hero" is just too easy to do for me to believe that Doc's the first one to think of it, so I did a Google search on metahero. Lo and behold, Doc's not the only person to use the term metahero. In fact, a number of people have used it as their screen names for various forums. Some of those people could have been Doc, but none of them have his e-mail, and one claimed to be a guy named Alex living in Mexico, so I'm thinking not. So what do all those other people who are using the term metahero think it means? Well, a lot of what I saw was fiction, which used the term metahero as a synonym for superhero. Like Doc, they figure that "meta-" means "beyond," but by "beyond" they mean "more advanced." Which is all very nice and all, but I think superhero is a good enough word, so what right do they have going around preemptively removing words from the English language before someone can apply a more original definition to them? I like Doc's definition better.

Anyway, the terms of my contract clearly state that I'm only required to show that the blog Doc Rampage is the most metaheroic in the world. If Doc wishes to prove that he himself is the world's foremost metahero, he can take it up with those other guys. His blog, at least, comes up number one in the Google search for metahero, and that's good enough for me. If Google says it's the most metaheroic website on the Internet, then it must be the most metaheroic blog in the world, as blogs are a subset of the Internet. (Of course, I'm slightly stretching things. Doc Rampage didn't come up at all when I used the search term metaheroic, but what did come up wasn't so much a blog as a newsite, so I think I'll give Doc the benefit of the doubt.)

Update: Oops, just checked my contract again, and it turns out that I'm also supposed to use my influence in the blogosphere to convince other bloggers to write about the topic. So, um, yeah, you bloggers out there, go tell everyone how metaheroic Doc Rampage's blog is, okay? Since my contract doesn't instruct me as to what side you're supposed to take, feel free to argue for or against. Aside from that, I'll just link the term metaheroic to Doc's blog every chance I get in hopes that Google will pick up on it.