Returning to the Blog Wars

Returning to the Blog Wars

After a year of absolute non-blogging, after I had set myself up to faithfully write one in connection with my website, I am re-resolved to get back to it and attempt to annoy you with one on a semi regular basis.

Writing a blog after writing on a book all day, takes steely endurance, an iron constitution and liking to hear yourself talk. But everybody these days, it seems likes to hear themselves talk, whether they have endurance and an iron constitution or not. If you aren’t writing a blog in these times you can’t claim to be living.

The world’s population has turned into a bunch of talkers. Words and opinions are flying at a mind-blowing rate from every direction of the compass. It is letters to the editor spinning entirely out of control, man on the street opinion gone rampant.

History, as far as I know, has never seen anything like it. And I am not so certain it is a good thing. It may be so much overkill that historians trying to write a history of our times will be unable to get their arms around it all. The age of cable and satellite TV and computers has turned loose worldwide overkill in just about every aspect of our lives. Any event in history now is covered ad nauseam. Nothing happens now that is not shown and re-shown, diagnosed and re-diagnosed, analyzed and re-analyzed, and talked about to death. And no longer are we content to be talked to, we need also to talk at. Blogs have become the perfect tool for all of us.

So I am rejoining the outcry. Ambrose Bierce, that sardonic genius of devilish definitions, defined noise as “the chief product of civilization.” So I intend again to add my own noise to the general noise, enhancing the chief product--so as to be in fashion. And with everybody else I intend to be positive in my opinions, which Bierce also defined, as “being wrong at the top of your voice.”