Starting Over

As I take a look back at what I've written on this blog thus far, I think that there is not only room for a great deal of improvement but also for a marked change in focus. I've used this forum to express what to me feels like a naked violation of the borders of my own emotional and political existence in the years since 2001, meaning, the trespass against my life as a citizen of this country, of what had always seemed most secure, of the basic conditions of trust and being provided for which most Americans, myself included, have always taken for granted. Thus these postings have taken the form of koans of rage, a sarcastic blurting out of the emotional pain that derives from having something taken away which was so precious that you never even knew you had it until it was gone. That, for me, has been the feeling of living in the post 9/11 world. It is a feeling of being under attack, constantly, from both within and without. That being said, I don't think that I have managed the post 9/11 world very effectively, and chief among those limitations has been my inability to express that pain in ways which would create communities: of sympathy, of justice, of determination, of reconciliation. Hence, the failure of this blog. Always a serial exaggerator, I have privileged moods of conspiracy, desperation, and frustration. I've conflated the political not only with the purely emotional, i.e. the pain which results from being oppressed by your government with the historical fact of its oppression, but with the theological as well - that tyranny in America would mean that God no longer loves the people living in this country and is in the midst of judging us harshly. The same could be said of my take on post 9/11 aesthetics. Does a bitch-fest between Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie really signal the onset of a permanent state of tabloid fascism (a face being stomped by a Manolo Blahnik, forever)? Is Dick Cheney really anything more than a bad man from Wyoming? I'm not foreclosing any of these questions, only beginning a new approach to answering them. There are creative ways of living even under less than ideal circumstances. I'd like to find some of them. And when I do I'll tell you what I learn.