motives.

Why am I doing this?

Blogging. Ugh... no, I won't be held hostage by the limits imposed on a new medium, and certainly not by ugly internet quasi-verbs.

Electronic communication is a hugely wonderful, revolutionary phenomenon.... because everyone is suddenly granted the means and resources to publish. Theoretically, those means are limited only by how many people are interested. The difference between two viewers and two million viewers is defined purely by how many people bother to add your site to their 'bookmarks.' Unlimited potential audiences. I mean, that's... awesome. I guess.

Everyone's got a fucking blog. That means it's not cool anymore, right?
Nope. I guess not. If I suck, at least I'm not killing trees to find out.

I wasn't born with a dedication in mind. I had to drop the ones that others had given me to carry, and now I can pick up as many as I find on the street. awesome.... and scary. Kinda like unlimited potential. Unlimited potential and limited time. A body can get so caught up in choosing that pretty soon you're old. And young people like me are so fucked up that we figure, 'if he was any good, he'd be succesful by now.'
Get off the stage, old man!

This is a.... what the hell is this? This 'thing', this 'entity', serves me in two ways:
-cheap medium.
-unlimited (theoretical) audience.

It's pretty much me doing some exercises. It's not going to be footnoted, or edited with much attention. Not right now. It's not going to be spread far and wide. It's me writing somewhere between myself and a newspaper. I'm gonna try to be interesting. You have no interest in what I ate for breakfast. I have no interest in telling you about it. I'm going to be piecing together a coherent political reflection on modern times. It's not going to come out in any kind of order, I'm warning you. I'm picking up threads of thought based on what's interesting to me that day.

One more thing.
I'm not telling you who I'm voting for. I'm not labelling myself politically. I'm not telling you who I would vote for if I lived in the United States. I'm going to avoid getting caught up in shallow personality tirades. Every time an American liberal spouts off about Bush's flimsy 'moral character', we get pulled a little farther away from the walls that we need to start grappling with.

Yah, I know, he's a fuck. But everything you know about him, good or bad, is a public manufactured image. It's irrelevant that he's a fuck. All politicians are fucks, remember? Remember when everyone took that for granted, and there was none of this silly-ass Dear Leader bullshit? Kerry? He's one of 'em too! I swear! Look, turn on CNN, and I'll tell you when you are being exposed to a fuck. Watch for the fake plastered smile. That's your clue. Then I will ring this little bell over your head, and hit you in the face with one of these cream pies. Soon you will be conditioned to hate politicians and to hate pies, just like how it was in 1998.

The politics that I want to start debating are local politics, street politics. Basically the shape of our shared space. I'm not nationalistic; if I lived in Rio de Janero or Cape Town or Baghdad I would feel more competent about commenting on politics there. But I'm not. Thus, I will try my goddamnest not to invade those spaces with uninformed comment, and hope that informed voices (local voices) will reach me over this thing call the Internet.
I'm probably gonna suck at not talking about Irag, tho. Sorry.
That said, you should probably start reading some of the blogs (eccch... sorry) from people who live there. Maybe I'll get around to posting links, but you probably have 'em already.
Sorry 'bout the pies.