It’s deja vu all over again

I’m a fan of the old Star Trek : The Next Generation.  Much like Longfellow’s little girl, when it was good it was very good indeed (although I’ll concede that, when it was bad it was horrid).  The episodes in which I think the show consistently hit the mark were the ones that involved actual time travel or ideas about whether or not time travels in a straight line.  Of the time travel episodes, my favorite was a Season 5 episode called “Cause and Effect, which saw our stalwart crew trapped in an infinitely repeating time loop that always ended with their ship exploding. Throughout the course of the episode, it was their increasing feeling of deja vu that led them to the truth about their situation.

I’ve been thinking about that episode a lot lately, since I feel as if I’m trapped in an infinitely repeating loop.  I return endlessly to the same things when I blog (bad Democrats; bad Islamists; weak, foolish Republicans; crazy San Franciscans, etc., ad nauseum) and, to my horror, I found myself in a conversational loop at a party last night.

About the party itself I can be fresh, since this specific party had an intriguing concept, and my attendance there was an amusing result of blogging.  First, the concept:  the party’s host and hostess are neocons, both of whom are former Democratic Jews who abandoned the Democratic party to become conservatives.

The host, who was born in the Ukraine, sniffed out the Democratic party failings first, as he realized that it was becoming closer and closer in behavior to the former Soviet ruling party.  The wife, interestingly, began her break during the OJ trial in the mid-1990s:  for personal reasons, she ended up watching the entire trial, from start to finish.  What fascinated her was the way in which, in its daily wrap-ups, the press consistently misrepresented what took place during the trial.  This led her to view the press with suspicion, and to investigate independently all that it said.  Neocon-ism was not far behind.

As a neocon, this gal discovered what all of us have discovered in Marin:  “liberal” is a misnomer, since admitting to conservative politics doesn’t trigger rational discussion, it elicits personal insults.  Through stealth conversations (and, I’m sure, secret handshakes), she managed to begin identifying the conservatives around her and, in October, she and her husband hosted their first party for conservatives.  It was a success.  The party in November, with the original attendees inviting their friends, was a greater success.  And last night’s party, which I attended, was delightful, with the network expanding even more.

I ended up there through the miracle of the internet.  The hostess has a friend who has an email relationship with neo, of neo-neocon.  When she told neo about these parties, neo sent me an email, wondering if I’d be interested — and I was.  Acting as a conservative interest match-maker, neo hooked me up with the hostess and I got an invitation.  Not wanting to be niggardly, I passed the invitation on to Charles Martel, who was also delighted by the opportunity to cast off the bland mask we assume in our day-to-day Marin lives and talk politics.

And speaking of talk, that gets me back to the start of this post, which is the idea of deja vu all over again.  You can’t imagine my horror as, listening to myself, I realized I was caught in an endless conversational loop, telling over and over again the same anecdotes and making the same points.  Not only was I repetitious, I felt leaden.  I can often be a fairly witting conversationalist, but I heard myself in pedantic, hectoring mode.  The only time I was able to break out of my self-induced verbal straitjacket was when I discovered, coincidentally, that one of the guests and I went to the same elementary school at the same time.  We had a swift, joyous trip down memory lane, and resurrected topics I hadn’t thought about in 40 plus years.

I’m really not sure how I’m going to escape this stale feeling.  I think we’re living in momentous times, and I truly believe that blogs are still an important means of communication in the coming years — especially if the Democrats succeed with their “unfairness” act.  I’d like to be a part of this continuing communications revolution, but I’m concerned that I’m not snapping out of my own personal time warp, in which everything I say now, I’ve said before.  For the time being, I’ll continue to attribute my mental malaise to post election fatigue (about which many commented at yesterday’s party), and assume that, come the true Obama administration (as opposed to this lame duck period), I’ll become intellectually reinvigorated and surprise you all with something fresh!

The good thing is that, while I may be stale, others are still turning out wonderful stuff.  (Although not as much as usual, so I suspect that others in the blogoshere are suffering from the same flat feeling.)  For today, I recommend Mark Steyn’s Silence = Acceptance, about the way in which Muslims slaughtering Jews is becoming normative and accepted within the MSM and the political world, with the ugly parallel that hurt feelings amongst Muslims are the occasion for much hand-wringing.