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Politics, Hopes, and Dreams 1/15/2008 7:20:55 AM
It’s Tuesday, the day that I answer my mail. The first question was rather blunt:
Who do you support in the Presidential race?
I was a Richardson guy, so I’m already out of it. I get to sit back and watch for a while, which I honestly prefer.
Your analysis showing that this is the first wide-open race since 1952 was fascinating, but you didn’t discuss the implications of it as thoroughly as you could have. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and it seems as though something has changed this year. Things are more wide open and everyone wants to be in the middle. What do you think is going to happen?
I would like to think that this big break in continuity is just what we need to start a new era of politics. 1952 marked the change from postwar conversion into what I often call “America’s Baroque Era”. We’re not heading into the same kind of period, given how difficult the economic and political situation is, but we are heading into a trying time where we will be forced to work together. That means we’ll have to define our common interests much better than we have been, but we’re not at all ready for that right now. Perhaps it will come from the political season, but this early stage is one for myth building and not popular policy. We will just have to see.
The Democrats have an interesting race, but I’m a Republican. We have a really wild one going on.
Do you ever! I’m following Michigan very closely, because it seems to me that the best Romney can do at this point is a narrow win, meaning he limps out; a loss and he’s probably done for. That means once Guiliani is gone we’ll be down to McCain and Huckabee – two candidates from opposite bases in the party with almost no money to run on. This has the potential to rip the Republican party apart, as George Will has noted. Throw in an independent like Bloomberg, and we could see the end of the party as we know it. I think this is the real story as the summer plays out.
Final note: With the convention in Saint Paul, I want to say that either McCain or Huckabee as the candidate probably means that we won’t have big riots, meaning that the odds of my house being burned down are much less. I just don’t see people being all that excited about them. So I’m happy with this.
Your encounter with a Hesse reader was wonderful. Thanks for sharing that. Is Hesse a major influence on your writing style? You have a similar plain but romantic quality, and you deal with themes from Eastern philosophy. Have you ever studied Jung?
Thank you. Yes, Hesse was a huge influence on me, but I never studied anything other than Taoism as carefully as I should. I like picking up philosophy as it comes to me, on the streets as it were. Making it an academic pursuit, i.e. “I’m gonna study this Bhagavad Gita thingy” just doesn’t seem right to me. Documents like this were meant to teach students who were ready for it, and if I have no interest I’m not gonna go there. That doesn’t mean I don’t pick up bits of it, such as when I studied a bit of Bhuddism in college. Unlike Hesse, however, it didn’t take with me. I was much more interested in finding reality than transcending it.
I should study Jung at some point. I have the same problems with what I know about him that I have with Bhuddism, namely that a fantasy world seems pretty easy compared to rigors and simple beauty that is already all around us. But it goes without saying that our dreams and symbols very much influence how we look at the world around us, and form the main barriers we erect to noticing the obvious. I think there is room for a Taoist interpretation of all of this stuff, or at least my jaded Taoism.
I appreciate all the mail that I get as wabbitoid47 at yahoo.com – please keep writing and reading. Thank you all for your support; you are why I have kept at this as long as I have. I have the best fans in the entire blog world, no question!
