It’s hard to believe that I’m already in the process of counting down to my longest trip to New Mexico in nearly a decade. In just a shade over a week, I’ll be winging my way westward to spend almost a month in Albuquerque and the surrounding environs, making undoubtedly endless appearances at the Frontier and Waffle House as I try to more thoroughly get my bearings on what my future looks like. Certainly I’ll be looking at Albuquerque with the new eyes of one searching for a new destination within the year to come. No doubt the place I loosely call my hometown will be on the shortlist for the future, alongside Seattle, Flagstaff, Denver, and probably a couple other cities.
Been working on a project that’s almost certainly going to come out shortly, maybe even in the next 24 hours. It’s another quiz that isn’t the Song Quiz, as I believe I alluded to a few days back. If optimally timed, the quiz would have been released in the early morning hours today, sandwiched neatly between the advent of the WikiLeaks story and what people colloquially call CyberMonday. Most of this year’s CyberMonday articles seem to be decrying the phenomenon as hype, something that never seems to be written about terrorism or national security threats. I don’t know if there’s a lot more Internet traffic today, but I do know that Romania seems to be really into the BP in the last few days. Hi, Romanians! Hope you keep enjoying the Book Quiz.
I’ve also enjoyed a lingering Facebook debate about the WikiLeaks article I wrote and about the phenomenon in general. I was sensing a sea-change in perception when I wrote the piece, but it seems I underestimated the emotional attachment of so many Americans to the sanctity of their government, no matter how far said government strays from its ideals or stated purpose. I think the debate has been robust and fair, but I am still a bit personally dismayed by the idea that almost anything pernicious could be revealed about this country and a large swath of its people would condemn the revelation rather than the initial act itself. All I can try to point people back to is that the principle behind democracy conceptually requires the informed consent of the governed. If the only way our government functions is by concealing reality, we no longer have informed consent, and thus we aren’t a democracy. It’s hard to be a beacon of democracy when one isn’t one.
Maybe I should just skip the west altogether and strike out for Ireland or the UK or something. Not that I’d ultimately wind up vastly more satisfied with those governments, but there’s at least some humility and sobriety to the general conduct of those countries. It’s probably hard to exist in modern Europe without a little more awareness of the balance of things as they really are. Then again, the last thing I need right now is further isolation. Would a small town in Ireland accept me as a novelty, a distant great-grandson come home to write and work? Probably not work – and here’s the real rub: an inability to economically sustain oneself in a place even more economically troubled than the good old USA. Probably better off building up a cache of cash first in the west.
If you like the Facebook debates, it’s a good week for debating. Monday and Wednesday feature two of our three public campus debates this semester, on green energy and vegetarianism, respectively. Basically none of you are in New Brunswick and most of you are horrendously busy, but it’s worth offering the invitation anyway. Debate tournaments aren’t especially well designed for outside observation, but both of these events will be, and there’s even cash on the line in the former one! The latter is for the hearts and minds of college students and my team is thus arguing against one of the fundamental principles of my own life. Of course, debate itself and its ability to endorse the core ideals of the enemy in a convincing way is, itself, a core value. So it’s all worth it.
Would that said core value were more broadly accepted by the American public, no? If the idea of making the case unthinkable for the sake of argument were standard practice rather than unpatriotic treason? It would be a lot harder to dismiss other rational agents as crazy, a lot harder to accept ourselves as infallible.
