I’ll Be Back on Groundhog Day, but Things Will Be Different

With Bachmann and likely Perry dropping out – and neither Santorum nor Huntsman having much national heft – plus Gingrich aimed squarely downward, it looks as though 2012 will be a bit like 2008 (that is, an almost-certain nominee and a vexing libertarian footnote), except Ron Paul will be taken a good deal more seriously this time and the probable nominee-by-default (McCain then, Romney with a probable McCain endorsement now) less seriously. 

In the end, if the GOP picks Romney over Paul, I’ll vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson, the #JifnotP vow I encourage others to take and spread (and if we merely end up replacing Obama with another decline-managing, statist force-lover named Romney, at least I’ll get to watch the decline being managed by the New England establishment that reminds me of my childhood – small consolation after glimpsing the possibility, in Ron Paul, of ending the big-government nightmare, but relaxing like a morphine-induced death, I suppose).

But I’m spending the first month of this agonizing process offline.

I’m sure you can get ahold of me if you really need to and I don’t check in in a timely fashion.  For example, TONIGHT from 6:30-8:30, you’ll find me at the Kiva event celebrating poverty-fighting microfinance, at Vig Bar, 12 Spring St.  

(That’s something I wouldn’t be doing if I believed the passage in wacky David Graeber’s Debt that argues that the last thing we should want for people in the developing world is for them to join us in the unending cycle of credit and finance, but more about that Occupy guru after my return.) 

As hinted today in my 1,500th tweet (and here, not far short of my 1,500th blog entry), I have some preparations to make for the next phase in the ongoing Todd Seavey project, which I hope will be even more exciting than the FIVE YEARS of ToddSeavey.com that some of you have now experienced.

And if I sound more radical lately – well, yes, and I think the next phase will be one marked by an even greater openness to new ideas.  A month offline may actually be a pleasant start in that direction, since the Net is hectic whereas scientists find that “empathy, as well as deep thought, depends...on neural processes that are ‘inherently slow’,” as noted in a Pico Iyer article pointed out by Alyssa Pelish (herself the friend who became one of my ACSH successors, if you’re tempted to check out their stuff while I’m away).

An honest assessment of humanity’s numerous bad ideas would likely reveal that we not only need to dispense with many of them once and for all but squelch the temptation to keep talking about them and fighting about them (further discussion of religion, of war, or of big government as a reformable thing, for instance, may be quite pointless, but people keep doing it – and that wastes valuable time our current economic and political system may not have anymore).

So we’ll aim higher when I get back, and I hope to be both less compromising and more diplomatic.  We’ll see how that goes. 

I think it was one of my old college humor-writer colleagues who observed that Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence” (the proper attitude of one who loves his circumstances) is a bit like Groundhog Day.  And so, even if it portends four more years of statism and idiocy, I shall return on GROUNDHOG DAY, and much like Nietzsche – I shall return as an incarnation of DIONYSUS!