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