If you've ever seen my writing here, it's mostly meta-
I don't do policy; I don't do a lot of research. These are opinion pieces from 1/310,000,000 slice of the American Pie, and what I see, feel, and ponder. They are as legitimate or illegitimate as anyone elses.
At the very least, cogito ergo sum. You have all the right to disagree with me; but there is a latin phrase that has stood in the corner like a disgruntled referee during some of my pie fights and flame threads in my four years here.
Ad absurdum
This diary is an off the cuff rant about what it means to disagree with someone on a blog.
I once had a denim Jacket; I wore it most of the last two years I was in high school. I was into 1980's "hair band" Heavy Metal music; Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Quiet Riot - MTV stuff, and a few more arcane bands. If it had a heavy drum beat and a wailing lead guitar and the lead singer had shredded his vocal cords to sing it, I had it on cassette tape in my Walkman.
My favorite album at the time was by a band called "Krokus"; for all you botanists out there, they were not selling flowers. The album I liked the most was called "Headhunter" and the cover art was a genuine once-had-a-brain-inside-and-walked-the-earth-under-its-own-power human skull, sitting on two human Femur bones. The bones had been chrome plated, and the picture taken with eerie red lighting that left the eye sockets surely capable of displaying evil.
I liked it because at the age of 15, that was cool, man. I also liked almost all the songs on the album, one of which was "Stayed Awake All Night" that had a great moment for live concerts to go off into a "Hey Jude" kind of solo that might never end.
One year for my birthday I got an airbrush. My mom was an artist and I guess there was always some thought to encourage any artistic talent that might be there; there wasn't much and it never took off. Except the night I descended to the basement to paint my own denim jacket. I airbrushed that blood-red, chrome-plated skull on the back of my jacket. I went into the basement around dusk Friday night and I am sure I came back upstairs about the time my parental units were making waffles.
"Hey! Check out what I painted on my jacket! Isn't this COOL!"
[LONG PAUSE; awkward silence; guardians exchange worried glances]
"Um, sure, Joe. It's great artistry. But did you have to paint a SKULL?"
.
"I like the band, and I think it looks cool"
[From the other parental guardian-type] (Joe has no idea how the next three minutes will affect his life)
"Look, Joe; the artwork is done very well. You're very talented. But the subject matter worries us. You might think you like the band, but you can't control how other people are going to react to it. Some people might think that the skull means death. Some people might think it's some kind of occult symbol. Hey, Joe, did you know that German soldiers in the SS had a skull cast into their helmets right beneath the spike on top?"
Now, while we're talking about symbolism, I never thought to say to my Uncle who made this argument that the BMW logo (he drove two of them at the time) was supposed to illustrate a white propeller against a blue sky because BMW once made airplanes for the German military. Symbolism indeed.
The lesson I was supposed to learn was "message control": I surely am free to wear, say, act as I please - what I was not able to control was how other people reacted to whatever message they saw in my behavior, presentation, and words.
So now lets put that into the context of blogging at the Great Orange Kos-y-Go-Round: I can say what I want, I can't control your reaction.
You can say what you want in response, but you can't control my reaction.
This diary is not a declaration of who is right and who is wrong; if such judgments were ever so easy surely they would be easier to find and agree upon.
But I've had my share of pie fights, flame wars and just all around "I know you are but what am I" banter that I can handle without asking what the fuck is going on in this country?
If you want to tell me I'm full of shit in your opinion, feel free. If you're disappointed I don't agree with you, you can say that too. But if you stay in a flame war for two days, you're the fool if you somehow expect that I'm going to fall to my knees, kiss your ring, and scream "Thank you, Sir, May I have another" after you dress me down and put me in whatever place you think I belong.
This place is a forum to exchange ideas.
It is not Thunderdome.
If you find it perterbing to you that whoever you are bantering with has not capitulated to your superior reasoning, please seek the clarity of your nearest mirror and realize that the other party most surely feels the same about you.
The question that never gets answered - whether I'm in an absurdist "no, you are" pissing contest on the Great Orange Debate Team or I watch the "Our founders would surely kick the shit out of one of us" debates that now define our national attitude - is this:
What do we do next?
What do we do, indeed.
It's not my goal to give you answers; I don't have any. It's not my invitation here for you to cram one in my ears or eyes until I submit to it.
It's a thought experiment for any of you who find yourself in an absurdist exchange that is going nowhere except to set a new theoretical record high blood pressure for one member or another, to ask us to pause and ponder just what good it does for us all to have a mouth/keyboard when we expect everyone who disagrees with whatever comes from it to keep theirs shut/idle.
I have often suggested that Osama Bin Laden is laughing his ass off at us; we are eating ourselves from the inside and all he has to do is measure how long his beard gets while we're at it.
We ought not to be this hungry.