Landed in D.C.

FYI: I officially arrived in Alexandria last Thursday afternoon, and am now headed to the airport to pick up EC, baby daughter and mom-in-law. I've spent the last day running errands, investigating the neighborhood, getting lost once or twice in Northern Virginia.

Before I sign-off: Michael Gerson, former Bush speechwriter and current fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a clever little piece in this morning's Washington Post on the differences between a conservative and libertarian political philosophy.

The clever part? He uses two MMORPGs (that's "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games") to compare and contrast the two political persuasions. One game is Lord of the Rings Online -- the other is Second Life. Both are enormously popular, though I don't think any have as many users as World of Warcraft, which, Gerson notes, boasts 8 million (yes, that's 8,000,000) players worldwide.

A couple of selected quotes:

Libertarians hold to a theory of "spontaneous order" -- that society should be the product of uncoordinated human choices instead of human design. Well, Second Life has plenty of spontaneity, and not much genuine order. This experiment suggests that a world that is only a market is not a utopia. It more closely resembles a seedy, derelict carnival -- the triumph of amusement and distraction over meaning and purpose.

Columnists, like frontier trackers, are expected to determine cultural directions from faint scents in the wind. So maybe there is a reason that The Lord of the Rings is ultimately more interesting than Second Life. Only in a created world, filled with moral rules, social obligations and heroic quests, do our free choices seem to matter. And even fictional honor fills a need deeper than consumption.

Read it all here.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there is a coming seismic shift in the Republican party that will pit Second Life-libertarians (who today wrongly call themselves "conservatives") against Lord of the Rings-conservatives, of which I think Gerson is one.

BC

Jeep, Don't Fail Me Now

I am rapidly driving across our great and sovereign nation, so there is little time to blog. I really enjoy seeing the country, however -- it never ceases to amaze me how geographically massive and diverse America is. Tonight I am in Morgantown, West Virginia, a mountain town/college town tucked in between beautiful rolling Appalacian hills. Tomorrow I make the final descent into the D.C. Metro (known by some affectionatly as "Gondor" or "Mordor, depending on your perspective, though certainly not "The Shire").

As I'm sitting in my hotel tonight I got a chance to listen to a thought/prayer-provoking message delivered by Pastor Steve Hickey of Church at the Gate in Sioux Falls, SoDak, titled the Days of Noah. It's worth a listen, and I'd be interested in people's thoughts.

Also worth perusing is the link on the sidebar titled "Spengler"--a pseudonymous writer for the Asia Times, who has garnered something of a cult following for his fairly uncommon insights into world affairs. The trick is that people have been trying to figure out who he actually is for about four years now. Guesses range from "Orthodox Jew living in Australia" to "American Evangelical Christian" to "German philosophy/theology professor" to "Henry Kissinger."

Check out his fictional dialogue between Russian President Vladamir Putin and President Bush on Russo-American relations.

Both hilarious and disturbing, this Spengler.

BC

Kansas Cliches, Debunked

Kansas, like its Midwestern cousin to the north, Iowa, sports a pretty bland reputation -- you know the drill: Whenever anyone wants to summarize the boring, the flat, or the prudish in America -- they reference Kansas.

Well my friends, I like Kansas. Specifically, I like Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas and lively Massachusetts Avenue (similar in character to Boulder's Pearl Street or Madison's State Street). The folks who cite Kansas as painfully mainstream or bland have probably never heard of Lawrence, where the dreadlocked and hipper-than-thou far outnumber the crewcutted and straight-laced (new words abound).

I wish I had brought a digital camera to post a few images of the prairie city of 80,000, but unfortunately (fortunately?) all our possessions have been boxed and prepared for the move to Virginia.

Before walking around the streets of downtown Lawrence a bit, I ate at the Free State Brewing Company, a bustling two-level brewpub housed in a historically-renovated building. If asked, "BC, what kind of eating/drinking establishment is your type of place?" I would probably respond, "A place like the Free State Brewing Company in Lawrence, Kansas." (Again, pictures would be useful here).

Gotta run, folks. Time to prepare for another day on the road tomorrow: Onward through America's Midwest, to Indianapolis, Indiana.

BC