The Basement in the Attic

I've been catching up on the blog of a midwestern journalist, see for yourself at www.lileks.com. Star Trek fan (weren't we all?), mac-nut, parent, and a returned-to-the-midwest boy. And somehow, he became a conservative. Good liberal upbringing, now he's the token-right at a paper I used to read. Odd. *

The thing is that reading more than a couple at a time, you start to think you know the writer. I suppose that this is like the fans who think the actors are the characters. This maybe a bit more immediate, since you're bonding with the author. I get this creepy feeling like I'm eavesdropping or stalking him and family after a while. While I hate that feeling, I DO want to interview him. I'd dig the chance to ask about that conversion, why did he start to think the way he does? In part, because I see his point many times in his stories, though I reject the conclusion or over-arching philosophy.

Every time I think I've got the big picture, I realize how disjointed my thinking is, and hence the motivation to understand his. My belief is that we could spend HOURS waxing on about architecture (see his site), and agree on oh-so many things, and then end with us still polar opposites. (I am a returned-modernist, after living by every word of Tom Wolfe's “From Bauhaus to Our House”) So I want to understand this politco-economic shift.

There is no conceivable way I'd ever stop thinking that gov't is for the people, and privatize (outsource) every service needed to keep society going. But then, I really like Ayn Rand. Karl, my audio-engineering friend, was the first Libertarian I ever met, and so much made sense, it's just that I wasn't buying it all. I still try to understand and explain the value of money according to his beliefs. (The labor standard instead of the gold standard.) So this Lileks guy just seems like we've been chatting for a while, so we know each other, right? I mean, look at all I've learned about him, this is two-way, right? Ahh, the ape-descended life-forms discover again the subtleties of “seeing you doesn't guarantee that you see me” of modern technology. All communication is not two-way. You need to thin

k about that for a while, because when we spent time foraging and grooming, all communication was two-way and immediate. Line of Sight (LOS) defined everything, and our broadcast-senses (smell & hearing) allowed a very limited deviation from that scheme. Considering the size of our visual cortex, we can be forgiven for forgetting those broadcast-senses' significance. Do you suppose a dog thinks the same way? Sure, good eyes, but compared to us, extraordinary nose and ears. Would a dog-invented internet be better comprehended by its creators? Would a hawk-invented one seem utterly incomprehensible to its end-users? So I'm wresting myself away from the unilateral intimacy that reading a month of columns by one author has formed in me. I have naught to offer the dinner-conversation anyway. And I can't hang around cigar-smokers without O2 handy...

2025 Note: Mr. Lileks is now quite the backroom mover-shaker in the conservative party. At least here in the midwest, he’s rubbing elbows with the local high-and-mighty. No idea what his opinions are on the MAGA-in-chief, or SCOTUS’ work. Given he has a college-aged daughter, he might surprise me.