Political Considerations (and otherwise)

I have been thinking about this blog, and the essays that have appeared here, and which will appear here in future. Last night, I looked back over the postings. I was startled to realize how long I’ve had the blog — since 2005! — and by how often I’ve posted here. In 2005, for instance, I had 42 entries. In 2012 I had no less than 73! That’s more than I usually did each year in the emailed version of Xcargo.

The 2012 collection has the most essay-like stuff in it. That was when we were moving from Massachusetts to New Mexico. My mother had had a stroke. My father was in ill health. So off we went to care for them. The material I wrote the year is somewhere between a very personal diary and a travel log. I am actually looking forward to making it into a book.

But many of the other postings from other are hardly as interesting. Much is highly political. I believe I was working on the assumption that to gain readership, I had to address current events. This I did with a passion.

I think that was a mistake. You see, writing about politics is all very fine, and I will continue to do so, particularly now that I’m writing for a political blog, Liberal Resistance dot net.

However, as I look at the pieces I attempted, I am distressed by how unoriginal they are. What I said was what everyone was saying, at least those of us on the moderate left. The 2005 entries (which I’m just re-reading now) cover a number of topics which, indeed, were vital at the time. I wrote, for example, about the consequences of the Second Gulf War, when George W. Bush and Cheney went into Iraq. I pointed out that we were attacking the wrong country, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.

I was pretty much right. But so what? Everyone, except the most strident of Neo-Conservatives and the most venal of oil company executives, knew that the invasion was a mistake and had been mishandled. After five years of war, we also knew that we were going to be in it for a very long time, and with little to show for it afterwards. (We are still there now. And it has been, what? Something like fifteen years as I write this. And there’s no sign of an exit any time soon.)

But, all that was obvious…to everyone.

Thus I had nothing new or unique to add to the discourse. I could only be one more member of the Greek Chorus, proclaiming to the audience the disaster that everyone already knew was coming…

Which had, indeed, already arrived.