Blog Quality and Big Ideas

Although you can easily make the argument that much of what appears in blogs is poorly written, poorly researched, and shallow, it's also true that for developing ideas, as well as letting descriptive/imaginative powers run loose, the internet can be quite spectacular.

Just recently Wretchard of the Belmont Club has hit a purple patch: some great thoughts encompassing great spans of time and space. Some might describe it as rambling; others as a 'bit of a stretch' for the imagination, but I'm just glad he does it because I'd never have the guts. The negative responses (I'm guessing) would be more likely from Europeans, since Wretchard is American and since we Euros tend to look down on people talking with an eye to the cosmic.

I just wanted to share a couple of Wretchard's quotes, relating to the Euro-project that's been thrust forward into the limelight by the recent elections (numbers represent links to specific posts).

1) 'The Third World in general and the Islamic World in particular have burst their bounds; they can no longer be herded into the decrepit and threadbare tent of the United Nations; the Kyoto climate agreement; the International Criminal Court or any of Potemkin treaties woven by the European Union.'

2) 'The real significance of the Osama's attacks on America to future historians may be that it marked the end of the transnational project of a politically correct world order; delineated the final boundary of the European tradition of Marxist thought and created the first post-post-colonial Western ideology. The Global War on Terror is in certain respects spectacularly ill-named. Its principal victim has not been the Al Qaeda network but the old order. The notion of the centrality of the United Nations; the idea that terrorism is a law enforcement problem; the idea that history is an irreversible march toward a Green-Left future are projects as cold beneath the earth as the Taliban's armies. If the European Union as envisioned by France finally dies; it will mark its departure, however long it may linger, from the time Mohammed Atta's aircraft struck the Towers.'

Kind of puts into perspective the wrangling over the constitution, doesn't it? That seems, well, backward looking when you consider the far greater forces at work. The basic theme, one I think we'll either have to accept or endure in due course, is 'stop picking at you navel, Europe, start looking over your shoulder.'