Sunday, June 20, 2010

Happy Father's Day

Ok, so I've obviously decided to continue churning out a mixture of pithy anecdotes and other assorted detritus on Buckeye Surgeon. Thanks to all who commented, either on the post or via email. As my buddy Goose wrote: "nice to see you've snapped out of your early mid life crisis and are back blogging."

I've been reading William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich lately. (It's long, but reads like a Tom Clancy thriller. Just fascinating that an entire nation could fall under the spell of a complete and utter lunatic.) Anyway, there was a part describing one of the speeches Hitler gave to the Reichstag in 1938. He used the occasion to respond to FDR's official query into his intentions with regards to several of the other remaining free nations in central and eastern Europe. Hitler had already secretly obtained declarations (in the gentle, diplomatic Nazi way, you can be sure) from those countries announcing that none of them had any fear of further German aggression. He then proceeded to mock Roosevelt in faux indignation. How dare the President of a country that just ended slavery a generation ago, a country that liquidated/relocated the native population to allow for the Manifest Destiny of its white pioneers, how dare they lecture Germany on good behavior. Apparently this set off thunderous applause and laughter throughtout the Reichstag.

Hitler hadn't really scored any real points with this line of thought, of course. One doesn't lose all moral credibility just because of past transgressions. You don't lose the right to call out someone for immorality or an ethical lapse just because you have sinned in your own past. You only lose it when you fail to ackowledge your past failures. Atonement is impossible without an honest self-interrogation. And I guess that was the point of my little blog sabbatical and the subsequent to be or not to blog post. As my fantasy football friend Jeff said: it's about time you wrote a self critical post contra the shiny white knight of compassion you've created on the blog. What took you so long? What kind of self-loathing post-modernist would you be otherwise?

I guess that's part of it. But not all. I'll be honest---I write this thing for my little baby girl, mostly. I want her to have a way to find out what I was like and what I thought about when I was younger man. It's corny, I know. But I dont care. Go read Kevin MD if you dont like it.

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