Where has the Bookworm been hiding?

Depressed faceI have a friend with whom I talk a lot via email. My letters of late have been banal. I haven’t wanted to inflict that banality on all of you, so I simply haven’t blogged much in the past few days. I’ll share with you the apology I sent my friend to explain my inability to comment on current events:

I fear that I’ve been letting you down with my letters lately. My life for the past few days has been intensely domestic, in part because there’s so much that needs doing. I’m also getting to the point at which I’m a little afraid to open Drudge or another site.

Do you remember in the days after 9/11 waiting for the other shoe to drop? I know that, for a couple of years after that, I daily expected some other horrible mass terrorist attack, not just in Madrid or London, but in America again. I was reminded of the risks every time I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, since there was a police presence there for years looking for trucks that might be carrying bombs.

And then I started thinking, “I guess it won’t happen here because we’re engaging them there.” When talking heads got upset about the way Islamists from the world over were flocking to Iraq, my thought was, “At least they’re collecting themselves in one place so that we can dispose of them more easily.”

Even when Obama pulled out of Iraq completely, I envisioned a pallid retreat from success, rather than a rapid descent into unbearable evil — and, moreover, a spreading evil. Obama’s governance, which has seen large parts of the world collapse economically or plunge into wars of exceptional ferocity, exceeded anything I could have imagined an American president doing.

Yes, we knew Obama would hurt the economy, but who imagined a 7 year “recession”” Yeah, we knew he wanted America to retreat, but who knew that he’d embrace policies that left utter disarray in America’s wake? Obama is worse than I ever imagined he could be, and it’s clear that he’s poised to do still more damage in the two years remaining.

An Irish conservative friend of mine believed that America could never become a totalitarian state because it wasn’t in the American nature. The last few years, however, with the spreading poison of fascistic political correctness and increasing anti-Semitism (which Obama is trying to politicize, by making Republicans pro-Israel and Democrats anti-Israel) may have fundamentally changed too much of the American character for us to walk this one back.

The headline I tried to avoid today said that Obama is now going to push for reparations for American blacks. In other words, Obama’s race wars continue.

I keep hoping that some Deus Ex Machina will emerge suddenly and change the plot in the tragedy we’re currently enacting. I keep wondering if, two years from now, rather than having an election that leads to a turnaround, I’ll look back on these days and realize that, no matter how frustrating and sad they often were for me, they were, in fact, the last “best days of my life.” I no longer worry that my kids won’t enjoy the same high standard of living I clawed my way up to. I worry that they’ll end up in some Mumbai-esque squalor or some Damascus-style post-apocalyptic Civil War.

And I worry that too many people are worrying about the wrong thing. It’s not anthropogenic climate change that’s going to get us; it’s internal rot and external enemies. As went Rome, so will go the West again.

So, the reason I haven’t dazzled you with my intellectual acumen regarding world events is because that part of my brain dedicated to current events has been taken over by a dystopian horror novel that I’m trying hard not to read. Under the circumstances, it’s easier to clean out closets and babble to friends about my success in that narrow domestic arena.