Blog Notes

Some not entirely random thoughts about what you read in this space.

The First. Looking at my past few weeks' posts, it's pretty clear to me that I am far more enthralled by local color than the presidential election. That's good as far as I'm concerned. Election Day 2008 is much more of a local affair for me. Washington is an entirely new, seemingly very compatible, political culture for me. We have a dead- even-grudge-rematch governor's race, a whole raft of candidates running for offices I've never had the opportunity to vote for and three serious initiatives. Parsing my way through all this is far more interesting than Obama-McCain but it's not something I feel particularly comfortable writing about just yet. Not that I'm not paying attention to the presidential election; it's just that I have nothing much to say that I've not said already. Check out my posts from October 2004 (yes, I've been doing this for over four years)and you won't see any real difference in the underlying ideas and thought, just different names and circumstances. I guess I could just recast those thoughts in current terms on a more regular basis like the columnists do but then they get paid for their output. I get eight readers.

The Second. My previous post used the terms National Security State and Owning Class more than once and if you read this space regularly, you will certainly have seen the terms before. They are not my own invention, although they clearly summarize my worldview. I found both ideas in Gore Vidal's essays, which I've read in The Nation, other publications and various collections of his work. Most recently, I read Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, a collection of essays from the 1980's published in 2004 with some added commentary. Pretty much everything Vidal said about America 20 years ago holds true today (except the numbers of showing America's economic decline are much much larger; the 1980's figures sound so quaint). If you want further evidence of the National Security State and its consequences for America's economy, then read James Carroll's House of War

End of Blog Notes.