Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Busy, busy, busy weeks ...

I am running a play-by-post game over at RPG.net. For the non-gamer readers of this blog, a play-by-post is a type of role playing game that is played using internet forums. I am using the HARP rules for this game.The background creation took me a while, but was loads of fun! I have a few gaming type projects coming to frutition, but I am not going to say anything more until they are done....

Reagan's passing is a great example to show the national diaclectic in action. Consider the following two posts:

Ronald Reagan is the man who destroyed America's sense of reality -- a paltry target, all in all, given our predilections. It only took an actor: the real successor to John Wilkes Booth. In our bones, we had always been this sort of bullshit-craving country anyhow, founded on abstractions: not land (somebody else's), not people (Red Rover, Red Rover, send Emma Lazarus right over), not even shared history (nostalgia isn't the same thing, and try pulling that Civil War Shinola anywhere west of the Rio Grande). by Tom Carson of the Village Voice

I am reminded of the thrill I got when I heard the words “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Because you can sum up Reagan’s legacy by polling any random high-schooler and reading that line.

“What wall?” they’d probably ask.

The wall, kid. You know: The Wall. The fortified gash. The thin lethal line that stood between tyranny and freedom. I mean, we lived in a time when there was a literal wall between those concepts, and we still didn’t get it.
By James Lileks

Dutch was a wonderful communicator who understood the power of words and the use of the media to spread them. He saw the world through his moral lens and was not afraid to call it as he saw it. Tear down this wall had so many meanings on so many levels, The literal (Berlin) Wall, The (Iron Curtain) Wall between the European East and West, the ideological wall that communist party powerbrokers had used to shield themselves and their people from the Free World, etc.

But here we can see how the same thing gets twisted from two perspectives. Ronnie good and Ronnie Bad. No middle ground at all. Do read enough history to know just what wall he is referring to, gentle reader, you could start by looking up Erasmus's The Praise of Folly and Tocqueville's Democracy in America. You'll be glad you did...

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