As of 3:30 yesterday, I officially joined the California Alumni Association. I am a college graduate.
My life, as of late, has been filled with obligation. Law school applications, research papers, final exams, and two jobs ultimately filled up my schedule. I didn’t have much time for myself, let alone the blog.
But that’s all over now. As Semisonic once said, every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. If that’s the case, call this the rebirth of Delightfully Tacky, a new beginning in both my blog and my life.
Being the obsessive policy wonk that I am, I often found myself briefly scanning the news wires with spare moments at work or in the library. I’d write down brief thoughts, talking points to myself that I promised I would discuss later in greater depth. But if I have learned one thing in my budding journalism career, it’s this: there’s nothing more worthless than yesterday’s newspaper.
It’s unfortunate, because these past few months have been eventful, the fodder my blog ravishes on a daily basis. How has history defined our time, and how will the future unfold?
Looking at the new Congress, it could go either way. Nevermind that we have the first woman speaker in history (it’s been told and retold, rehashed into oblivion), a drastic change in the political spectrum of our government, and the makings for the most important and diverse Presidential race in history. This is all media-induced embellishment, the icing on the political soap-opera cake. It’s for not if Speaker Pelosi doesn’t fulfill her campaign promises and if she is not able to build the coalitions our government desperately needs.
And what about El Capitan himself, George W. Bush? If the midterm election is any indication, Bush is going to have some issues to work out next year. Firing Rumsfeld was an untimely formality, the concession of an already lost cause. He proclaimed a small victory with the announced death sentence for Saddam Hussein. And for a brief moment, the world was excited. That is, of course, until they realized that Hussein is little more than an empty figure now, completely unrelated to the already chaotic mess in the Middle East. His death might be gratifying to a shallow extent, appeasing the ignorant supporters of a perceived one-dimensional conflict. But in the end, the Iraq War is disintegrating into an uncontrollable mess, and everyone (really, everyone) is recommending that a new course of action take place.
Life outside of politics remains delightful in its own way. The St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series. Mel Gibson has a new movie out, not featuring any negative-Jewish statements or images (but some questionable support for European Colonialism). And apparently Kramer from Seinfeld has some questionable racial opinions. All wonderful burdens to my already busy life.
The unfortunate feeling of all of this is the removal from current events. YouTube and Wikipedia have put multimedia and information at my fingertips, a pretext of knowledge. But through school and work, sifting through the jumble of media static and banter, I’ve found the most difficult aspect of this blogging mess is the context of a vacuum that I work in. My sources are always secondary, my news always a few minutes too late. And my opinion, as valuable as it is, becomes a hopelessly marketed commodity, subject to the scrutiny of Google web bots and Technorati searches. I blog to provide an individual voice; for $9.99 on Type Pad, you can have a part of it.
In the end, I suppose this blog will be taking a slight change of philosophy. No longer will it strive to be a center for ostensible fighting-words. I’m changing the name of my longer pieces, realizing that Donkey Punch is a misnomer in multiple respects. To be frank, I do not want to provide “thoughts for fighting liberals”, because that’s just adding to the problem. If I’ve learned anything from college, it’s that there’s a difference between debate and screaming, and the fine line that is often crossed is called tact. If I cannot respect the other side of an issue, if I am truly unable of thinking objectively, then this blog is lost.
So expect more frequent posts, more opportunities for discussion, and more insight. But with this comes a disclaimer: in the end, politics is not about division, but unity. And if my words, as delightfully tacky as they might be, can bring that change, then this blog serves its purpose, and my time, as infinitely valuable as it is, is well spent.
