17 July 2003  Resurrection

Dropped out for a while – if indeed anyone noticed – as I'd grown sick of analyzing and deconstructing the recent conquest of Iraq: the why of it all, the horror of it all, the inhumanity of it all, and all its consequences both real and imagined.
    Dawn on 6 June – the date of my last blog entry – found me with a confident, fingernail grip on things. In high spirits, I set to writing before the vision faded, but by the time I'd finished dawdling, the rapid tide of events had rolled past me for many hours. I could actually feel myself slipping further and further behind, swept along by the relentless current of the information stream. There were dozens of articles I hadn't read by the end of the day, and by the following afternoon, that mountain of articles seemed unassailable.
    What did I do in such dire straights? I walked away from the console without another thought. It wasn't a deliberate act of rebellion, so much as a matter of having other things to do. Valiantly pressing on, I played catch-up with the geopolitical “now” for several days before finally casting my eyes heavenward in Old-Testament despair, and committing the world and the knowledge thereof to the Almighty hand of Providence. My brief stint as a politcal blogger had come to a frustrating and ignominious end.
    Funny thing about focusing on external events, like wars and international intrigue: you lose all touch with the outside world. I'm quite serious. Since the American invasion, my entire life had become focused on some theoretical construct in cyberspace, a labyrinth of facts and factoids, media coverage and disinformation. The “big picture”, when held in the mind for any length of time, left no room for talking to those around me of life's endearing trivialities. Perhaps this was the lesson to be learned from the exercise, the realization that it is our own world, the little world around us, which matters most in life. To become so detached from our immediate environment is a species of insanity by any reasonable definition, and hopefully, I am now on the road to recovery.
    In 1807, US President Thomas Jefferson wrote:

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, …but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

When first discovered, I used Jefferson's words to justify my delving behind the day's headlines in search of that ever-elusive ‘truth’, convincing myself that I could succeed where he predicted nothing but self-delusion and failure. It was a fools errand, and I am grateful to have discovered this sooner, rather than later.