As a Lincoln liberal I don’t have any arguments with liberals. I do have some quibbles with the self righteous who cloak themselves in liberalism. Here are some examples from personal experience that I should elaborate on when I’m in the mood.
The faddish quality of protest and the taking of the MSU campus office of the college President.
The self righteous booing of Senator Goldwater by students when he spoke to summer interns in 1971.
Being given a picture of a chimpanzee by two women when I ran for the legislature symbolic, I presume, of their disapproval of my politics.
A report of Republicans women likely all liberal moderate stalwarts of my being a house husband.
Even as I list this pathetic list sans full details I’m struck that the only real damage any of this ever caused me were those of pride. No one told me I was more murderous than Stalin, Mao and Hitler all rolled up into one. That happened at a Republican convention before the last of the moderate republicans were driven out of the GOP like the rats of Hamlin by the Pied Piper.
I’ve not been sleeping well for the past couple weeks. It could be a sign of Alzheimers which has been brooding about in my head for ages. It could be and I hope it is, a sign that bottling up all the things in my head keeps me from thinking unless I press them into words like a butterfly on a pin in a collection.
I first began capturing my thoughts in a book I decided to try and sell to finance a fanciful campaign for Congress in 1992. It was a novel that was a thinly veiled attempt to describe me as a kid looking for myself in exile 65 million years earlier in the last days of the dinosaurs. I made the book unmarketable by enclosing the speech I gave shaming the Republican Party as it was morphing into the monster it has become. Then I began collecting the letters I began writing people as I campaigned for various political offices. After I finally got elected to the Duluth School Board in 1994 I made a lot of people mad by helping create what is now the Northstar Academy. The teacher’s union took umbrage and criticized me to its membership and I relished a way to broadcast my work and my thoughts more broadly. This was early in the development of the Internet and my website: www.snowbizz.com showed up in 1999 twenty-four years ago. I jumped to a blog in 2006, this one. It was a specialized website for daily or even minute by minute idea sharing. My most serious writing began when I began writing a column in Duluth’s tabloid the Reader. Unlike many of my thousands of blog posts I actually worked pretty hard to give my stories a good editing before they were inked on paper.
Over those years I’ve agonized about writing a book not unlike the columns I’ve written about the messy world I watch every day. It has always occurred to me it could be in part a compilation of things I’ve written before. This may be an unofficial announcement of my getting my head together to attempt a book yet again. If I get more good night’s sleep out of emptying my head out it will be worth it even if I fail to put it together.
