Containment

General Petraeus is on Capitol Hill today, testifying about the success or non of "The Surge", which has proved to be indistinguishable from "More Troops, Please". I have no public opinion about Petraeus, except that I'm sure he's like the military brass I grew up around: clear-sighted, personally tidy, in good shape, given to plain speech, and not big on irony. As to the congressmen questioning him, I'll just say there are more people besides Doug Feith with a shot at the title of The Stupidest Fucking Man On Earth, and leave it there.

After years of trembling rage at the White House's Current Occupant and his foul playmates, I am now Switzerland. I neither invite nor disbar others' thoughts and opinions. When the going gets rough and the company too loony, I simply retreat into my personal hinged-door Alp and wait out the carnage.

It's taken a while to achieve that state of mind. Like a lot of people I suspect, I wandered into blogland looking for opinions besides those of my Republican neighbors, my Republican city, and my Republican state. This was more than a few years back, and even then my disquiet was so great that I seriously considered flying the flag upside down as a May Day signal. Only the knowledge that I'd be fire-bombed kept me from doing it, even as the right-side up flags began to sprout up around me like crocuses.

So I stayed hunched in my house, reading The Daily Kos, working on an anti-Current Occupant website, and wondering if I should let my opinions fly via blogging. In the end, I decided nope. With so many others now joining the fray, the world didn't need my two cents and besides, I was too furious.

Keats famously remarked, Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. Because he wasn't that kind of guy, he didn't add that there are writers who work best when they're completely nuts, like Celine, say, or Hunter Thompson. And there are those who don't need a lot of tsuris around--and I number myself among them.

What did occur to me during my rage-filled days was how baffled we'd become as a people, how gullible, and how afraid. And this seemed to have something to do with language, and something to do with advertising. So my first blog had to do with my loose thoughts on advertising, on the white-noise that fills all our heads, and the verbal and visual crud surrounding us. But knowing that my hither and yon thoughts weren't Significant Enough, I abandoned it.

Actually, as I venture around in the blogosphere, I've observed most blogs don't have much, if anything to do with politics. I don't think that has to do with escapism either. The bloggers I've stumbled across are normal-enough people who garden, have dogs, raise their children, knit, listen to music and involve themselves in all the chores and pleasures of humanity.

I visit these blogs regularly, since I need to be reminded of the necessary marriage between politics and life. When the news is bad, I want to know there is a place outside the the political arena, and in that place are generous, creative, and funny people. And I wonder when the political world split itself from ordinary life and became something else.

It's on days like today when I remember much darker political failures--and how, for a long time afterwards, everything was politics. Politics and fear.