Comments on: Autumn http://donklephant.com/2006/10/02/autumn/ Big Teeth. Huge Ass. Surprisingly Reasonable. Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:59:03 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: P O V - Point Of View http://donklephant.com/2006/10/02/autumn/comment-page-1/#comment-90448 P O V - Point Of View Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:41:48 +0000 http://donklephant.com/2006/10/02/autumn/#comment-90448 <strong>Here’s a post with which I’m in full concert….</strong> it lives on a blog called Donklephant, a Centrist sorta place (so I feel less OUT of place than normally). I love forests. New England, my new home, has no end of them. This time of year the trees are beginning to quake with fall color. Red and yellow ... Here’s a post with which I’m in full concert….

it lives on a blog called Donklephant, a Centrist sorta place (so I feel less OUT of place than normally).
I love forests. New England, my new home, has no end of them. This time of year the trees are beginning to quake with fall color. Red and yellow …

]]> By: Dierdre Bannon http://donklephant.com/2006/10/02/autumn/comment-page-1/#comment-80628 Dierdre Bannon Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:43:56 +0000 http://donklephant.com/2006/10/02/autumn/#comment-80628 Gore.... he wouldn't himself perhaps be so "bad".... but he drags along with him (rather like a ball and chain - appropriate symbolism in this Halloween month) Tipper. She of the insensate wish and frothing at the mouth will to censor everything that doesn't fit her own vision of "what's right".... Gore…. he wouldn’t himself perhaps be so “bad”…. but he drags along with him (rather like a ball and chain – appropriate symbolism in this Halloween month) Tipper. She of the insensate wish and frothing at the mouth will to censor everything that doesn’t fit her own vision of “what’s right”….

]]> By: Joshua http://donklephant.com/2006/10/02/autumn/comment-page-1/#comment-80530 Joshua Mon, 02 Oct 2006 18:16:52 +0000 http://donklephant.com/2006/10/02/autumn/#comment-80530 I've said on a number of occasions that we may have to go through a couple more presidents (hopefully not two-termers) after Bush before we finally get one who fully understands what it takes to win this war. Coping with a post-proliferation world strikes me as a necessary but woefully insufficient element of the larger war effort. With or without nuclear proliferation, the real driving force behind this war is another genie that's long since gotten out of its bottle: globalization. By this I don't mean the Left's tired meme that globalization breeds poverty which in turn breeds terrorism, but rather that globalization (particularly in terms of communications, media and the Internet) has enabled terrorists and their propaganda arms to easily operate at a worldwide level, while at the same time slowly devaluing the Westphalian world order. Call it cultural globalization, if you will. The very idea of nation-states with sovereignty over people living on a discrete parcel of land delimited by a bunch of arbitrarily-drawn borders can't help but seem a little silly and quaint in an age when cultural memes are no longer confined, or even confinable, within those borders; and when a growing number of Americans communicate and interact more frequently with people living in any number of far-flung lands than with people on their own city block. It's one thing to build walls along borders to keep people in or out physically; it's another thing altogether to try to keep them, or their ideas and cultural memes, in or out virtually. (Not that politicians won't occasionally make <a href="http://www.theagitator.com/archives/027090.php#027090" rel="nofollow">a ham-handed show of trying</a>.) This, it seems to me, is the real challenge facing America in the 21st century. How does a nation that has historically defined itself as "a nation apart," and above the rest of the world's frays, adapt to a world in metamorphosis toward a future not only where that is no longer possible, but where our very notions of nationhood may be rendered obsolete, much less combat global terrorism in such an environment? I’ve said on a number of occasions that we may have to go through a couple more presidents (hopefully not two-termers) after Bush before we finally get one who fully understands what it takes to win this war. Coping with a post-proliferation world strikes me as a necessary but woefully insufficient element of the larger war effort. With or without nuclear proliferation, the real driving force behind this war is another genie that’s long since gotten out of its bottle: globalization.

By this I don’t mean the Left’s tired meme that globalization breeds poverty which in turn breeds terrorism, but rather that globalization (particularly in terms of communications, media and the Internet) has enabled terrorists and their propaganda arms to easily operate at a worldwide level, while at the same time slowly devaluing the Westphalian world order. Call it cultural globalization, if you will. The very idea of nation-states with sovereignty over people living on a discrete parcel of land delimited by a bunch of arbitrarily-drawn borders can’t help but seem a little silly and quaint in an age when cultural memes are no longer confined, or even confinable, within those borders; and when a growing number of Americans communicate and interact more frequently with people living in any number of far-flung lands than with people on their own city block. It’s one thing to build walls along borders to keep people in or out physically; it’s another thing altogether to try to keep them, or their ideas and cultural memes, in or out virtually. (Not that politicians won’t occasionally make a ham-handed show of trying.)

This, it seems to me, is the real challenge facing America in the 21st century. How does a nation that has historically defined itself as “a nation apart,” and above the rest of the world’s frays, adapt to a world in metamorphosis toward a future not only where that is no longer possible, but where our very notions of nationhood may be rendered obsolete, much less combat global terrorism in such an environment?

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