The epitaph said – He loved the earth but could not stay

“The way I see it now is that you either make a little nation and solve its historical and personal problems within the format of your own household – accepting the mistakes that you’ve made, all the ones your parents made, all that your children make, and all the mistakes your country made – and you win that one or you lose the only war worth fighting. Moreover, as soon as you step out of this personally constructed world and, say, drive into town or stand out on I-90 and watch our nation cycle through these placeless arteries, it’s there that you confront the true horror of the other option.”

- a quotation from a novelist who lives near I-90.


Every once in awhile, remember that George the Bush claimed isolationist turf in his debates with as-wizened-then-as-now John the Pitbull McCain. This was back in 00 (double-ot, before things done changed) when the stars shone red and everyone was doing like Richard Dreyfuss and shaping mashed potatoes into Devil’s Tower facsimiles. George the Bush insinuated that he didn’t want American boys out solving troubles America had no part in making. If we don’t have a dog in the fight, he seemed to say (or I imagine him saying), don’t go buying a damn dog.

Now of course we are in the middle of the historical moment. Our kids may ask about it when they get to be indignantly idealistic (if we have kids and if idealism still exists as valid concept for the young). George the Bush no longer mutters much of anything that sounds isolationist, but the concept may still hold truck in how we relate to the historical moment itself. I am beginning to think that the answer you give your kids will say less about you than it says about the particular constellation of media sources to which you have consciously or unconsciously pledged fealty.

In that regard, are we all isolationists now? Not so much in our willingness to engage the world, either personally or via foreign policy, but in the sense that the stream of empirical data (statistics, polls, death toll numbers) and the narrative threads (amputee soldiers, water works projects, neighborhood “purification”) we encounter tend to be narrow and self-enclosed. Am I wrong about this? I get this feeling that there are a decent amount of people out there who think to themselves, “Well it can’t be going that badly” and who consider themselves to be informed on what’s going on over there. On the other side, there are people who go to go hear speakers on college campuses demonize George the Bush and the gaggle of blue-suited guys who head up his staff and, once enough shit is flung, the crowd starts to cheer. “This is what we came to hear. It really is that bad!” and the clapping goes on and the audience goes home knowing in their bleeding hearts that they had the real skinny on what’s going on over there.

I don’t consider myself to be informed on the issue – I mostly glance at the numbers listed in New York Times headlines and skim on occasional WSJ op-ed that insists good stuff is still going – but it’s seeming that media are only going to accentuate whatever fault lines have formed on basis of political, cultural, ethnic, regional, and economic identity because media are making their home on those fault lines. Make enough niche markets that pander to people’s need to have their basic worldview affirmed, and then market a Reagan as a reconciling force (or flip the coin three decades later and see what an Obama will get you) and see if your net is big enough to capture that minority in the middle that seem (all this seeming is making my brain hurt) to matter the most. Are you in that middle? Do you know where its fault lines lie? Do you care?