The Irate Nation Est. 2001

"Dog bites Man," or "Guest Blogger Introduces Self"

I suppose I should have introduced myself before I wrote the last entry I put here, which was this.

I'm Ashok, I'm a graduate student in political science, and I love to blog. Highlights of my writings over the last year can be sampled here, and my newest blog is here. I have a tendency to be really obnoxious and long-winded, as you can see from my writings, and I do have an opinion on everything, which is probably not the wisest thing. Still, I'm here blogging because I know how hard it is to update frequently enough to keep the conversation a blog starts going. And the conversation "irate nation" has started is a good one: those of us who want America to preserve itself have to be angry at the way things are going.

I'm lucky, I live around Philly, and today I spent the time walking with my really long ugly hair and beat up clothes looking like a homeless person around Independence Mall. It's tough for me to relate nowadays to what happened there - no less than Lincoln, in Lyceum, calls this a challenge. There, he says that all is well and good when things are happening in the Founding generation, because everyone is into what they're doing. But future generations want to feel like they're founding too, because only with that feeling does one feel truly free. Jefferson recommended that a revolution happen every 19 years, in order that people would reattach to the law more fully.

I'm after something a little bit different than feeling free. I am free, I know that. The real problem is that being free doesn't seem to go anywhere nowadays. Yeah, the economy is good. But who really wants 99% of the jobs out there? Yeah, we have all these giant schools that give out prestigious awards and are discovering amazing things. So why isn't the world better? And yeah, we're all religious, even the Left - the fervor certain atheist groups bring to their denial of belief is nothing less than that which would attend those eagerly awaiting the Apocalypse. So it doesn't seem like pure religious fervor, even, can save us.

Freedom has to mean something. The generations before us were Founding generations: each has different things to teach us, and I feel that Hemingway and Faulkner and Emily Dickinson and Lincoln and FDR and Nixon and a host of others have a lot to do with who we are and can show us how we might want to conceive and deal with problems. They had a sense of purpose we just don't have. I would put up with all the libertarian nonsense that people spout if they were willing to settle down and have kids, or at least say that fighting for one's country and having a foreign policy were good things, or base tolerance not on "live and let live" but on "we stand for doing something with your life, and we're happy to help you if you're willing to help others."

As it is, we have all the "freedom" we could want in this libertine age, and no clue whatsoever what to do with it.

So that's where I'm coming from, and I think it's a moral conservatism that is more arrogant than anything you've ever seen, and I'll stand by my guns, and hopefully bring you posts that may not be the shortest, or even the best reading, but will certainly make you think.