Shane KiteWelcome to Gob Wire.
A “gob wire” is a type of rigging that keeps a tugboat from capsizing when rescuing big, troubled ships. Made of either rope or chain, one end of the wire slides freely along a tug’s towline, while the other’s affixed to the aft deck. (You can see a chain version of a gob wire on the right side of the photo above.) A gob prevents capsizing by keeping the tug or the vessel it’s towing from drifting too far to the right or left.
This maritime device is metaphor for our mission at Gob Wire, which is to tug the collective American conscience back to sane, navigable waters from the squall of division where we’re now tossed.
We aim to rescue truth from propaganda, and wrest clarity from chaos, while ensuring the endeavor avoids sinking under the weight of its goals.
The “troubled vessel” can be viewed as America, but also the world, and our individual, interconnected lives.
The “tug” represents the ideal of American democracy, because it conveys the constant pressure required to force our nation to live up to the view of itself as a beacon of justice and freedom: For American exceptionalism to be real, it requires exceptional, continuous effort. And maintenance. And sometimes, rescue. But it’s precisely the dogged towing of our American reality toward the harbor of the American promise – where everyone has a truly equal opportunity to ascend financially, socially, spiritually – and our determination to stay on course to reach such a paradise that we have yet to glimpse and at which we may never wholly arrive, that is the ideal. The process is the product; the hard work, the success; the journey, the reward: A constant striving for improvement, to make the country a better, fairer, freer place, where people have the freedom to become their best selves, but are also imbued with the responsibility to help others reach their goals, is endemic to the greatest part of our culture, and is what makes America unique.
Gob Wire aims to keep that American ideal from listing into the abyss.
We also like the “gonzo” essence of the name, as it harkens back to the “mojo wire,” Hunter S. Thompson’s nickname for an exorbitantly expensive, early fax machine he forced Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner to purchase so he could transmit bits of his side-splitting, acid-angled, barstool-reported columns covering the 1972 presidential campaign just minutes before the biweekly’s printing deadlines.
While we heel to the gonzo imperative of giving readers a deeper truth on every subject, we file on time. And Gob Wire’s route to Shangri-La begins with exhaustive synthesis of all views, ideas, angles and sources – from voices never heard to those nattering nabobs of the chattering class.
And we transmute the incessant noise and cross-talk of the digital matrix (“the gob,” if you will) into stories that provide new context, novel insight and dial-moving, usable knowledge.
Gob Wire implies too a balance in understanding the nuances of encouraging open but civil discourse and inclusion, in a time when there’s so little of it, calling out BS, meanwhile, wherever it’s peddled, and excoriating hatred where it oozes. Because when political exploitation of financially frustrated voters via race-baiting turns an election and results in abhorrent views entering the primetime of American debate, it’s Gob Wire’s turn to reset our bearings true to the beneficent and moral goals of the towline, and yank those animated by propaganda and swirling in a whirlpool of blame toward sensical, logical self-reflection on direct cause and effect.
Oh and we’re funny too, despite the serious endeavor and nearly all of this mission statement. We’re genetically predisposed to never taking ourselves too seriously. And while we regard ourselves often in the mirror, we realize the Picasso-esque nightmare staring back at us affirms our irreverence is purposed, and more comedic than snarky, as we seek more laughing than lashing. …Ouch.
Anyway:
Stay great, read on.
