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Announcement

Ok,

As we all know, I've been suffering from a big bout of 'blog-block' over the past month.

It's been very frustrating, but I think I've found what the problem is and I'm going to make a small change in direction for a bit.

From here on out, from time to time I may make a quick comment about something in the "world o' politics", but for the most part, I'm finished with that whole process. It's just not that interesting to me anymore. I've made the same arguments for the past three years, over and over and frankly you either get it or you dont. If you don't get it, one more deeply linked essay from me isnt going change your mind.

If you do get it, then you dont really need to hear it again, now do you?

So just to sum it all up -

(The condensed cream of three years of blogging) -

- It's way to early for me to talk about 2008, I really cant get up the steam to go on about that considering the last election just happened. All I can really think about is how old I feel compared to the way I felt in 2000. It seems like a billion years ago that we were arguing about 'dimpled chads' and 'talking down the economy'.

- Yes, everytime I think the Democrats have reached bottom, they get out the backhoe and continue to dig a new basement.

- Yes, whats left of the Republican party seems as out of place and hard to fathom as a man dressed in a 1940's grey pinstripe suit, with belts and suspenders wearing a pair of brown shoes with white socks and highwater pants at an elegant black tie dinner at the Playboy mansion. You wonder who let him out of the house dressed like that and if he knows that his zipper is down and that that there is a big piece of spinach stuck in his teeth.

- Yes, John Kerry made blogging easy and now that he's gone theres hardly any sport in it at all. The minute he opened his mouth it was as if you could hear carnival music and your vision was filled with the sight of a line of target ducks that would walk right in front of you. You Blogging BB-Gun would begin to plink almost out of instinct rather than thought.

"John Kerry reporting for duty"
Ker-plink
"I voted against it before I voted for it"
Ker-plink
"I still have the hat"
Ker-plink, ker-plink, ker-plink...
Ok, I wont run for president.
Ker-Ah man! I can't shooot a defenseless animal...!"

- Yes, European Governments (for the most part) really arent our friends. I dont think I need a post a week to make this clear to you after all that weve been through.

- No, I dont want to laugh at the crazy female astronaut. Mental illness, the real kind - is not terribly funny to me. This woman was a professional of the highest order and there is no second act in her life. This is a tragedy, nothing more, nothing less. I wish someone would look at that, but the fact that she "wore Depends" seems far more interesting to most people.

- The New York Times is not interested in truth, its only interested in ratings. The only thing thats really surprising is that they have managed to create conditions at that newspaper that ensure that they can deliver neither of those things, despite having a near monopoly in their market.

- No, I dont want to make fun of Anna Nicole Smith, dead or alive. She just doesnt seem funny to me, her life or her death. Although I have to notice that once the HUGE fortune that was beqeathed to her began to finally come into being; people all around her who would be in line to get the forture if, something 'bad' were to happen to her, seem to have started dying fairly quickly soon after. Shades of Shakespeares Richard III?

- Yes, I still think Bush is a great President. I think that now more than ever. Most of what people say they know about President Bush usually hasnt happened. I spent an hour last week arguing with a friend over the "Bush wont let the Park Service say how old the Grand Canyon is" canard. Even when I pulled the article for Michael Shermer ( who both started and ended the baseless controversy ) as evidence that it simply wasnt true, it didnt matter. The narrative was there, and that was all that mattered. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere. It's not what you actually do in history that matters, its what people who fake the history later for their own purposes want you to do to fit their biases and bigotry that really matters the most. (Funny? isnt this exactly the sort of thing that they accuse the President of doing? Its like a 'hall of mirrors' or something, The Bush Presidency is sort of like the end of 'Lady From Shanghai' or something. Help! I'm caught in an endless loop of BDS...aarrrrggghh!)

- Yes, I think that invading Iraq was 'worth it'. I sometimes feel like an abolitionist arguing against slavery in the south before the civil war, but I do think that liberty, freedom and democracy are worth fighting for and are noble causes and the pursuit of such things for the world serves the nation well. I also think the aberrant, Jihadist Islam is worth fighting against whenever and wherever possible. We are in Iraq if not for any other reason than thats where the war is at the moment. If it were to move, I would hope that we would move as well, but as of late, I have my doubts. We seem to be a society thats moved to the next shiny object in our line of vision.

- Whats the biggest surprise since 2001? That most of the war against the terror would actually be in political wars against my own countrymen. Should we fight or not, should we use our intelligence services or not, should we interrogate or not should we bother to do anything with them at all or not, all those battles - and in a political sense they were very messy indeed - were fought at home. In 2001, I would never have guessed that what has happened would have happened. It was the furthest thing from my mind at the time. Al-queda, the actual object of our righteous anger, seems to have been smashed to bits, something I doubt that anyone on the left wants to admit had everything to do with the way that President Bush so steadfastly brought the war to them.

And that about wraps it up. It took 813 posts to say that and less than a paragraph to sum it all up. That says everything there is to say about the self-absorbed world of blogging.

So, where do we go from here?

Well, starting tommorow I will begin posting something new. I call it a "blog novel". I started this blog simply as a way to teach myself to write, and there is a great deal of speculative things that I want to think about and write about. Simply providing links and essays on the subject only goes so far. So, write is what I set out to do, and thats what I'm going to do now.

I've written the first 15 posts for the first of these 'blog novels'. The first post of this new form will be online tommorow evening. I will post a new entry each Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each week. I will use the narrative form to explain some portion of the 'war on terror' or some other subject, rather than write an essay, I will use this new form to illustrate my point.

I hope its both instructive and entertaining.

We will just have to see how it goes.

(And thanks for everything...)

Posted @ February 17, 2007 11:15 PM | Blog-novel

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