08.05.08

I know what I am, but I think I know when and where to give ‘em the full shebang

Posted in Culture, Economics, Hillary Clinton at 2:45 am by Administrator

Neo-neocon has offered her response to Bookworm’s post about staying in the closet as a conservative in the Marin County neighborhood where she lives.  Neo-neocon, who likes and admires Bookworm, nevertheless takes her to task for hiding her lamp under a bushel.

It’s a fine line.  Actually, all any of Bookworm’s neighbors would have to do is come across her blog and she’d be outed. 

 I run into the same quandary.  I’m a blues and jazz guitarist, an arts journalist, a food-show host and a cultural historian.  Most of my associates live and work in a university town and a tourist area.  My work environments are wine bars, art galleries, and university classrooms.  I don’t advertise my ideology in that milieu, but, hey, there’s a link to this blog from my main website.

Actually, I have made the acquaintance of two great guys about my age, guitarists, one from Asheville, North Carolina, and one from Minneapolis, who, after meeting me on musical ground, came here to BN, had a look around, and got back with me to express their solidarity.  They, too, say they have to be careful in their musical lives about letting their devotion to freedom, common sense and the great body of Western tradition show amongst their colleagues.

This arangement actually allows me to do some stealth research into the minds of left-leaners.  Little questions can be asked that offer clues to the depth of their thought processes without giving away my assessment of the quality of their conclusions.

For the first several installments of my newspaper column, I kept to innocuous subjects – my relationship with technology, why I play jazz, stuff like that.  Gradually I began wading into areas that required more honesty of me – gender differences, nuclear proliferation, the fallacy of greed as a factor in economics.  At this point, I pretty much let ‘er rip.  My last column was on the virtues required of individual people for a safe and fair society.

If you have an array of outlets of expression, what pans out is the different markets for the things you do.  My audience for Stirring Something Up, my readership for my column, my readership for my magazine work, and the fan base for my music have areas of overlap, but are mostly distinct from each other.  It’s working out nicely so far.  Something for everyone, I guess.

However, regular BN readers know the degree of my concern for this country and the civilization of which it is the vanguard.  I must say what I conclude as I survey the scene in this day and age when utter nonsense gets the same knd of hearing as adult discourse.  So I do know where my priorities lie.  Stating the plain truth for the record must be done.  The creativity will have to adapt to the reality of the world in which I practice it.

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