mikevarley.com

This week, we were supposed to have an entry about kitchen utensils. Utensils from childhood that captured your imagination as a kid like that wire thing that cuts your eggs. But that article is shelved for the time being in favor of something else. I want to start a new series of Friday entries for the site that could possibly take us ten months to finish. I want to cover the elections this year.

Normally, an idea so dangerously close to political blogging would be anathema to me, but there’s something about this time around. There’s something about this time around because politics has never engaged me like this before. There’s something about this time around because I’ve never felt hopeful about a candidate before. There’s something about this time around that lets the perceptive know that this is not a typical election. And there’s something about this time around that makes me want to capture it in writing rather than look back on it dimly through the fog of leap years and liver spots.

You can feel it. You know it by the talk on the railroads and see it on ink smeared newspaper hands. Nothing rallies a nation to action like crisis, and nothing but crisis has come from this current presidency. A lifetime of global goodwill spent in less than three years. An economic policy that marries gluttonous consumerism to patriotism. An opium addict’s attention to domestic affairs. A loss of political integrity that would cause even Nixon to philosophize disgrace.

But this isn’t about the Bush administration. There’s enough hate on the Internet about George Junior to slow a sewer. I’m interested only in the present; the novelty of what I’m feeling and the hope of what might be.

Doubtless you can tell I’m partial. No one gets inspired by bureaucratic experience. No one dreams of a century of Iraqi occupation. I’m for Obama, and should Clinton overtake him for the Democratic nomination, my interest in writing about the contest will evaporate. But, if she doesn’t – if Democrats can somehow allow themselves to believe in the intangible – then next six months will be the perhaps the most riveting and important six months in modern American history. I look forward to it.

Varley