Happy New Year

I have high hopes for this new year (a PhD on the horizon at last? a new job? who knows what else?), and although every year is a year you cannot get back and so is precious I'll admit I'm not so unhappy to see the backside of this last one.

What we need round here for 2005 is far less war and far fewer warriors. Badass bullying mammals we may still be, but we are queer prostheticized beings all of us now who have long outgrown the kinds of war-making we can survive and so we simply have to outgrow war as well. And all that goes, too, for metaphorical wars on terror, drugs, poverty, and the rest. War is not the answer, as the man said.

Democratic governments justify their existence through the effective administration to needs and solution of problems, not through foreign conquests and domestic looting (eg, "privatization"). Their task is to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for common defense, and promote general welfare. Administrations work for us, the people; they are not aristocrats, they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The current neo-con Repugnican hostility to work and love of war are two faces of the same shabby overworn coin. Democrats may seem to be in disarray for now but their real respect for work and workers, and their embrace of the ideal of good government will pull them through. Neofeudalism will not prevail even here in mediocre America, meanwhile Europe and the diverse and "developing" world show manifold signs of leapfrogging past our saucer-eyed slow-moving unearned self-assurance to turn the page and change the story of civilization.

I believe that if democrats, liberals, and progressives in America and across the globe can finally fully embrace the pragmatic experimentalism of secular and scientific culture and the emancipatory potential of radical emerging technologies (nanoscale fabrication, modification medicine, decentralized renewable energy and information networks, etc.) regulated to ensure their development is safe and sustainable, and the distribution of their costs, risks, and benefits fair, then the global left will regain its revolutionary fire after two decades of bemused hesitation and consign the fearful meanspirited complacent premodern theocrats and oligarchs and militarists to the their final footnote.

It's not that I imagine 2005 will be the turn of the tide, and if anything I fear what the current crop of market and religious fundamentalist conservatives will do to social security, reproductive freedom, health, education, and safety standards, scientific and technological development, the dream of rights for all people, and to the fragile lives of the human beings on either end of every American gun. But this can at least be the year when we start to see things differently, when we start to say things differently. For now, ugly battles and modest pleasures and always the work.

Now, everybody go clean up your messes, nurse your hangovers, and gather your energies. My best to everybody. Amor Mundi,