Thoughtful Conservative Manifesto: Introduction

Don’t think my lack of writing implies a lack of worthwhile ideas or an abandonment for my tens of readers.  I’ve been avoiding an idea since election day, and that avoidance, not unexpectedly, repelled all other blogging intentions.  In fact, my commitment to my avoidance became so serious I thought of posting this just to post something.

Perhaps I needed to hit rock bottom, or at least think about hitting rock bottom, to understand that an idea that won’t let go isn’t something to fear.  It’s just a thing that needs to be done.

So lets just say what I’ve been thinking about for most of November:  I wasn’t excited to vote for President Obama in 2012, I was resigned to it.

See, I remember being excited to vote in 2008.  When Obama appeared offering intellectualism, change and hope for a better way of doing things I jumped right in line.  The previous eight years felt dysfunctional and the idea of ‘change’ rang true with me and a lot of other people.

So if I’m anything but excited to vote for Obama in 2012, does that mean I voted for Romney?  Hell, no.  The Republicans offered nothing new and seemed to think their sneering disdain for any idea not conceived in the 1980s would win me over.  You know what else wasn’t around in 1982?  High speed internet, global warming and me.  Their refusal to acknowledge the impact these things may have on potential solutions felt inauthentic and manipulative.  Stop telling me about Big Bird and tax cuts.  You should have been telling me about overhauling Social Security and giving specifics on how to fix the deficit that make sense.  

Still, though, I remain someone who values personal responsibility, a strong national defense and a belief that most large bureaucratic bodies are worthlessly inefficient.   The national debt scares the hell out of me and I think the Democrats unwillingness to challenge teacher’s unions is suffocating our public school system. So where's my political party? I'm not sure.

So this idea that’s been stalking my thoughts isn’t a declaration to a political party or an indepth breakdown of issues or even predictions for the future.  It’s the admission and expansion of a realization I’ve come to recently:  I’m a thoughtful conservative.

More to come...

Don't forget to look up

One of my favorite college courses had nothing to with my major, my minor or my attempted, and eventually jettisoned, music minor. That’s right, a horror movie film class remains my favorite class in college. Not the gross out torture-porn we’ve seen the last few years or endless spin-offs, but horror movies trying to say something within their genre.

Stephen King's horror novels have great messages within their grisly stories. The Shining tells a story about alcoholism destroying a modern family through a haunted hotel driving a man crazy. The Cell tells a story about the lemming culture of technology through cell phone created zombies. Misery tells the story of the contraints of obsessive fan demands through an actual obsessive fan. I love the boundaries genre-fiction provides and the creativity authors have within those boundaries to tell different messages.

My love of genre fiction, while also explaining my love affair with superhero comic books, brought me to The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. End-of-the-world fiction is pretty popular right now, and there’s a lot of themes running around as authors wonder what the heck would happen if 99.9% of the world suddenly died/turned into zombies/got nuked.

Moslty, as one would expect, things get really f-ed up. Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games) imagines America would get pretty totalitarian and hyper-focused on violence as entertainment. Cormac McCarthy (The Road) sees a father’s bond overpowering the horrors of a lawless America. Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) looks at everyday people struggling to make sense of their world and coping with their own horrific actions needed for survival.

Taking a different approach, Heller looks for hope and vitality in his novel about a small aircraft pilot living in Colorado after 99.9% of the world dies of the flu. Sure, there are some tragic scenes (a flashback to the main character’s wife dying in an overcrowded hospital), but Heller doesn’t dwell on the awfulness. In fact, the novel opens after the plague and the ensuing lawless chaos has already died out. Heller’s characters have survived and are left searching for what comes next.

That search for meaning plays itself out many times in other novels and movies, but not so much in end-of-the-world sagas. The way Hig, the main character, realizes there's more to life than day-to-day survival and the emotions he goes through looking for that meaning kept me coming back to the book more than the standard lawless theatrics inhabiting most apocalypse genre fiction.

Don't let my comparisons to other books make you think this one doesn't stand on it's own. When Heller isn’t writing novels, he’s a regular contributor to a lot of outdoor magazines. His loving familiarity of nature offers wonderful backdrops for much of the novel. Fishing, hiking, gardening and sleeping outdoors all make appearances in the novel and always seem to herald some level of healing and normalcy for Heller’s characters.