Thursday, December 02, 2004

Some argue that war and reproduction are the two chief dynamics of human history. Make and destroy, in some kind of balance.  Economics and technology shift where the balance point is, but the underlying dynamic remains the same. Can it be otherwise? That is the real liberal hope. I also just finished Michael Crichton's  1999 TimeLine, a novel about the ability to travel to the past, and the entrepreneur who funds the effort in order to create theme parks of the past as the only real entertainment in the future/present. The novel centers on his corporation in new Mexico and  medieval town in the 1300's that he now wants to rebuild, but wants to go back there and find out what it was really like, in order to control the product, so to speak. Lots of good history and a fair story. 6:30:22 PM

Thanksgiving was a time to think, to experience, to connect with nature and people.  It seems like the Republicans now will turn to some serious infighting, and it may make monolithic governance even harder for them. The Democrats don't seem to have a Central story: nearly winning the election, demographics moving in their favor (young voters more than any other group for Kerry), but the need to tell a story brings out how little of an agreed on story there is. The war? Globalization? Corporatism? There is no real agreement. Makes one just thoughtful. I read Vonnegut's 1950 Player Piano, a wonderful story about a dumb Texas governor, and the division of the world into managers, machines, and prols. What most caught my attention was that the prol description fits much of the red voter profile, but that much of the managers (not admired in the story) fit the profile of many blue voters, and especially their spokespeople. Suggests that the current red/ blue division is very thin, and the real division lines cut across all known identifiers. 3:41:11 PM