July 11, 2008

Finally Importing the Old Doublethink Blog

You’ll notice a rash of “new” posts — and a big gap in the dates of the “Archives”: I’m beginning to import my old political blog, doublethink (small “d”), which used to reside on Salon.com starting back in 2003.

There’s a lot of good stuff in my old work in the form of material that just doesn’t exist on the Web anymore, and, as The Long, National Nightmare That Is George W. Bush winds down, issues are coming up where I find more myself wishing more and more that I could link to these old posts. Well, now I can.

What regular readers will probably find surprising is that, while there’s certainly plenty of LGBT news and opinion, I was focused (you could say obsessed by) BushCo, the brand-new Iraq War, and, perhaps most of all, PNAC. (I also blogged anonymously in those days; no one ever connected my identity to my blog. That’s how cowed I was, how scared I was of my own government.)

Does all of this belong in a primarily gay news blog? It sure does. Everything is interconnected, and when you really start digging deep into the ugly, twisted guts of neoconservatism (as I did in earnest), you realize that you can draw a distinct, if winding, line from some once-obscure German political philosopher directly to the rights you have (or haven’t) as a LGBT American.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on behind the scenes here — I just wanted to point this out before anyone wondered why there was a gap of several years in the Archives. I had stopped blogging, you see, because… well, for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I had become filled with utter despair and hopelessness about the United States, and didn’t feel I was doing a lick of good.

As you can tell, I don’t feel that way anymore. wink