I’ve gotta be honest with you. I find this current constitutional crisis over the illegal NSA wiretaps to be exceedingly depressing. And depleting. By now, most of you know that I am a weird breed. I am incredibly cynical, I am a political realist, and I am, none the less, generally optimistic.
People respond to depression in different ways.
Anyone who is a writer, or a musician, or an artist of any kind, knows that most of the time there is a deficit of creative juices. Creative people are constantly searching for their muse. But, sometimes the ideas come in a cascade, and the richness of ideas, the cascade of creativity, overwhelms the ability to do anything productive at all.
In other words, sometimes the ability to create suffers from a lack of inspiration and sometimes it suffers from too much inspiration. With the NSA hearing wearing me down, my reaction, strangely, is a surfeit of ideas.
Below the fold I will lay out the nine ideas for stories I came up with today, none of which I could formulate well enough to write up.
And then there is a poll.
I wrote these down on a napkin.
1. NSA Article, US News & WR 1970’s
This idea is to take a major article about the NSA, that was published by the U.S. News & World Report on June 26, 1978, that detailed the known accomplishments and abuses of that agency at that time. The idea is to raise awareness of the Real History of prior abuse and also to raise appreciation of what the NSA can accomplish for our security.
2. What I’ve Learned
As we approach the one-year anniversary of Booman Tribune, I have undergone some changes: personally, politically, ideologically. This would be a piece about how I have changed politically and what I’ve learned since the launch of this site.
3. 1 Year Anniversary
This would be a retrospective of the highlights and lowlights of BT thru its first year, with an emphasis on user’s perceptions.
4. Classified
This one relates to certain announcements that can’t be made until they are made.
5. Savior to Rise from these Streets; Great Man in History Theory
This is an idea riffing off Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road. It’s about how one person with magnetism, charisma, and eloquence can overcome all the structural obstacles that currently block Democratic power. It also examines the ‘Great Man in History’ theory versus the ‘Dialectic’ and other political theories.
6. soj and MSOC, BT and dKos
This is a meta piece about Maryscott O’Connor and soj’s recent ill treatment at Daily Kos, and on the differences between BT and dKos.
7. Imperialism vs. compromise; getting power
This is inspired by the mental tension of reading Ductape Fatwa and watching Global Players on CNBC last night. Seeing the consensus for imperialism from reprentatives of the US, China, Russia, and the head of NATO made me realize that you cannot win election running against the excesses of imperialism. You must solve these problems once you gain power.
8. Vicissitudes; Boise St. v. Idaho BB game
This is about how there were a lot of people that did not think the Alito hearings or the NSA hearings were important. Their whole world today revolved around the big basketball game between Idaho and Boise State. It’s only the germ of an idea for addressing the problem of political apathy.
9. CIA/OVP Rift
This is an enormous piece I have been putting together all week. It is a Lexis-driven timeline of the catfight between the Office of Vice President and the CIA and State Department in the spring and summer of 2003…leading up to the outing of Valerie Plame.
The bottom line is that I have a lot of ideas, but I can’t settle on any of them. What should I write about?
