When you spend as much time as I do studying extremists’ narratives, whether they are in the global social movement we call Islamist jihad or in the national political movement I call the Teapublican Party, you will find a common pattern. It is, if you will allow the metaphor, a crazy quilt sewn from seemingly disparate extremist threads but with the same narrative needle.

Lately there has been a convergence of news narratives that coalesce into a series of otherwise disparate nouns: reality, gaming, social media, Tunisia, avatar envy, emotion, college-students-aren’t-learning-anything, the Internet, and revolution. For academics studying communication, the merger of these nouns spells good times, fascinating times, times that promise cool science and thought-provoking essays. For entrepreneurs, they provide investment opportunities. For the world beyond the academy and entrepreneurs, however, this new series of nouns creates life possibilities that are at once true, bizarre, and maybe even frightening.

Let’s begin with the basics of this first new grammar of the 21^st century. Which is to say, appropriately, let’s begin with you. With the reality, and virtual reality, of you. For you are always and forever at the center of this unfolding many-storied story, because whether you are you in the flesh; or you are you in the sexier, sleeker avatar that represents and evokes a version of yourself that you’d often rather be; or whether it’s the you that creates friends on a Facebook page or surfs the ‘Net or the you who exchanges endless texts and tweets 24/7, the end result is the same: your pleasure in these texts, which is also to say the pleasure you give to yourself and others in and through engaging in these texts, is central to the choices about stories, and the lives, you make out of them. As Professor Alan Kirby, who defines this new narrative reality as “pseudo-modernism,” puts it: “Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts.”

One of the lessons from the successful (so far) revolution in Egypt is the importance of voice in creating and keeping a democracy.  I say that with some obvious bias, of course, as I am a communication scholar.  But you don’t need a Ph.D. in my field to recognize that one reason Mubarak remained in power so long was because he cultivated a tyranny of silence that controlled the speech of citizens and suppressed the media. It is that same kind of fear that has characterized America since 9/11.

I don’t think it is possible to overstate my case.  From my first blog back in October I have explored this fear of speaking out against tyranny, whether the tyrant was a blowhard right-winger parroting Rush Limbaugh in a parking lot or a politician on television calling for second amendment solutions or a former president reconstructing a past through fabrications and fantasies that go largely unchallenged, we have been numbed into silence by the rich and the dumb.  And, as brutal prison guards and Rupert Murdoch know so well, a people quieted by fear for so long lose the will and the ability to speak.

In the midst of an American uprising against those who would break the backs of unions, eliminate broad swathes of public employees, and redefine higher education as the common enemy of all right-thinking, self-righteous citizens, it is particularly disheartening to see a progressive leader of a major university willingly succumb to the “divide and conquer” strategy used to drive an economic wedge between her flagship and the rest of the university system. I am speaking ill of Carolyn A. “Biddy” Martin, the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But also I am implicating former Secretary of Education and the current Chancellor of the University of Miami, Donna Shalala, who called Martin’s plan “a bold move.”

Neither of these highly accomplished progressive leaders is going it alone, or, my guess is willingly, and therein we find the ugly spread of this right wing ideologically fueled strategy, as well as the true nature of our deeper challenge, which is to begin to speak openly about money. The “M” word. The thing those of us in education are not supposed to talk about, or complain about. The taboo term for those of us who have dedicated our lives to public service.

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year.

It is that we should have a new soul.” -  G. K. Chesterton

Probably I have been spending too much time reading and listening to “end of the year” reviews, “best of,” “worst of,” and other tributes to 2011. That must be it.

Surely it is their unfortunate influence that urges me today to join in the timeless habit of gossips, town criers, old farts, bar cronies, grannies, and purveyors of real and imagined newsprint everywhere and develop my very own version of “The Year in Review.” It’s taken me some time to formulate a way of telling it, given that the genre of such year-end reviews necessitates at least some mention of world affairs and my year has not exactly been about much of that, at least not the last six months of it, wherein my attention was deflected by cancer. But as you will see, that deflection into Cancerland led me to think quite differently about what was important and what must be done now to honor what I’ve learned.

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