I started this blog a month ago & fully expected to be blogging daily, yet that isn't how it turned out. In the past I found I was writing letters to the editor of multiple newspapers on a very regular basis. I was motivated by my chagrin at the media's routinely selective reference to facts, its interpretive distortions, implausible extrapolations, misanalysis of causes, ideological bias, and more. I often wrote such letters twice or more times per week.
Yet now I find I've fallen silent. I truly find my passion is waning. Political discourse in the West seems now to be all about pessimism, defeat, guilt, blame. We in the West have lost our focus, and incredibly to me, few of us any longer believe we're in a war with a supremely vicious enemy. We pretend all is well. All that's necessary is to correct the many horrendous mistakes of the conservatives in power. We blame conservatives for the message we don't want to hear.
I feel very much as the Anchoress appears to feel.
"No, I still don’t feel like writing," she wrote recently on her superb blog. "Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s hormonal. I read the news, the blogs and the op-eds and it all feels like hyperventilation and apoplexy to me."
"I keep thinking of that old phrase, 'diabolical disorientation,' and that’s what the news, the politics and the blogosphere feels like to me, right now. When you’re a kid, you spin and spin, because the disorientation is thrilling and new. Over the past 15 years we’ve watched whole governments spin and spin and now the press does it incessantly…and we’re all disoriented."
'Diabolical disorientation.' Tell me about it! So, for now, I'll just continue posting when I feel the desire, if at all.
Stephen J Carter | SF Novelist
