Warblogs R Us

as i was reading the journal of the highly respected journalist simon, of the simon and alex family of wellington, i happened to notice with some interest the following small but not insignificant bracketed note:

[Update: an interesting article by Andrew Sullivan on this very subject.]

yankiwi more

i looked again. andrew sullivan, yep. well, now. there's no other andrew sullivan, is there? i clicked on the link. nope, he was talking about the political and controversial and kind of conservative andrew sullivan that i was thinking about. interesting. so i commented thusly:

...you're a brave man simon! and reading andrew sullivan, too! what's happening? now the dam's broken, i have been too embarrassed to admit that i read conservative news sources.
Posted by ash at April 11, 2002 05:51 PM

i know, tinka, and i am part of it. i read instapundit and james lileks, too, but i'd never admit it in public. until now, that is. simon's broken the seal - it's all out now. i admit it. i am going to post something about this right now on my blog.
Posted by ash at April 12, 2002 08:33 AM

well, kids, here's the truth: i read this stuff all the time, even though some of it is wicked conservative. i mean, you can kind of give andrew sullivan a pass i guess, he's more libertarian or all over the place, but even a lot of younger conservatives aren't your average raving lunatic these days. these warbloggers are a hell of a lot more interesting than any of the real news - and actually, a hell of a lot smarter, too.

so anyhow, all this to say - although i read these things all the time, and many other things like them, i never include them on my links and rarely talk about items i find there. it all seems so out of character with everything else here. would anyone who likes this site even care about any of that? would anyone who likes that stuff even be reading this site? how are they related? and if they aren't related, how are they both me? doesn't that seem odd? i mean, if this is the story of my life, where's my life? or, which part of it is the part that's really me?

in the april 1 edition of the new york times adam gopnick wrote:

But what really underlay the contradiction between what he thought and what he was, I now think, after a quarter-century's reflection, is a perversity of human nature so deep that it is almost a law—the Law of the Mental Mirror Image. We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament.

It is not so much that we are drawn to things that frighten us as that we are drawn to things that we can think of as things—as subjects that exist outside the boundaries of all that is just the way we are. It is not merely that we do not live up to our ideals but that we cannot, since our ideals are exactly the part of us that we do not instantly identify as just part of life. An original thought is like a death mask of a man, with the solids made hollow and the nose a cavity, a portrait pulled inside out. We are our ideas for they include everything we are—but turned right around to face us, and looking back at us in surprise.

Thursday 11-Apr-02