09.03.06
Pull up a chair. Want some coffee or a beer?
I think I may be shifting my perspective on the function of this blog. When I first got it going, I was hot to link to every spot-on, super-cogent, in-depth, up-to-the-minute report and piece of analysis I came across. A few things started to happen. One is that the flurry of events on the world stage became so intense that I felt that I should either become selective about such linking on some basis like geographic region, relevance to domestic politics, level of urgency, or relevance to my personal concern for some aspect of our culture, or not address any of it. I concluded that to take either course would be to give short shrift to things that would still need to be brought to the attention of anyone and everyone with half a molecule of concern for the present juncture at which humanity finds itself. Then there was the fact that bloggers and journalists with far more time and informational resources than I are providing nearly instantaneous scoops on all such situations.
As I’ve said in a previous post, any of the links listed on the right-hand side of this page will provide you with the very latest factual stuff and/or a sharp and deep view of developments with which I’d concur.
So I’m left with the question of how a jazz guitarist / arts journalist / culture historian in the midsection of the United States of America in late-summer 2006 should most meaningfully contribute to a world in a condition of hair-trigger peril.
There’s the nuclear-threat level, on which Iran and North Korea are currently seting the tone.
There’s the flurry of networking between Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leftist leaders (Castro, Morales), Iran, Syria and North Korea, and Western self-haters like Cindy Sheehan, Harry Belafonte, Ken Livingstone and Harold Pinter that is solidifying an overall anti-Western coalition on strategic and intellectual levels.
There is the vast array of underground Muslim terrorist organizations, some Sunni and some Shiite, that have in common a desire to destroy Western civilization.
And then there’s the badly eroded will of the West itself, as exemplified by the above-mentioned friends-of-Hugo, as well as those currently lavishing hospitality on former Iranian president Khatami as he visits the US.
Part of me wants to shut all this out and just woodshed and play gigs and write about the arts. About the time I start down that attitudinal path, however, a little voice within me says, “You see the whole picture too clearly not to invite those who partake of your work to converse about it.”
So that’s what I’m doing. And the reason I’m doing it is that we need all hands on deck. As brainy and well-intentioned as Condi Rice and John Bolton and Don Rumsfeld and W and John Howard and Tony Blair are, they are mortal human beings with the same number of cubic inches to their skull space as you and me. To not think about where we are as a world is to declare one’s existence to be meaningless.
So, let’s talk.
