Writing

Writing. There's something about it...

Something refreshing, something freeing. I suppose its the emotional release we feel when we put onto paper (e-paper?) our deep thoughts, our core values, our pointed opinions...

Although I haven't been particularly productive lately, I have enjoyed the blogging process since starting it about six months ago. I've had some pretty lame, shallow posts, but I also feel like I've had a few successes, a few home runs. You know, the kind of post that writes itself, where the right words come to mind so fast I can hardly type them out quick enough. The kind where, when you've finished, you feel like you've added something real to the blogosphere, not just more e-gibberish.

As in any hobby, I have heros. In the bluegrass world, I aspire to be a Sam Bush on mandolin, or a Tony Rice on vocals. On the bicycle, I'd like the power and endurance of Lance, with the heart and spunk of Tyler Hamilton (but not the doping scandals!). As a soccer playing wannnabe, I'd like the skills of Ronaldinho, the experience of Pele, and the looks of Beckham (on the latter, I feel I'm getting close...ha).

In the same way, there are certain writers who have a God-given ability to express themselves clearly, succinctly, and powerfully. I don't consider myself well-read, but I can think of a few favorite writers who can say so much with so few, well-crafted words...

In the world of Christian books, Max Lucado has this gift, bigtime. For example:

If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent an educator. If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist. If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist. But since our greatest need was forgiveness, God sent us a Savior.

Or these one-sentence wonders:

Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional.

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.

Wow, that's good stuff. So much meaning, so few words. Another master of the pen was the great American, Mark Twain. Consider these one-liners from over 100 years ago:

To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Seems trivial, but trying on purpose to write something concise and witty, well, its not as easy as it looks.

Lately, I have discovered a blog by another phenomenally gifted writer. His name is Bill Whittle, and his blog is called Eject! Eject! Eject!. Mr. Whittle is a TV producer, an aviation enthusiast, and most of all a patriot. He has written an absolutely AMAZING series of essays (too long to be called blog posts) on a variety of topics such as Honor, Freedom, Empire, War, Power, Responsibility, Victory, History, etc.

Why do I love Bill's posts? That's easy. Bill combines his core values (optimism, patriotism, conservatism) with a healthy dose of rational thought and a one-in-a-million gift for writing, to produce some of the best essays on the American spirit that I've ever read. Such a contrast to the negative, whiny, America-hating, Bush-blaming, self-loathing posts on such trashy liberal blogs as HuffPo or DailyKOS.

Here's a sample of Bill's genius, talking about liberal Noam Chomsky:

This is how you lie by telling the truth. You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that they advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer's head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky.

I have long admired Noam Chomsky. It must be absolutely intoxicating to be able to write so free of any ethical constraints. Chomsky flitters and darts through the vast expanse of human experience, unerringly searching out those few, isolated data points that run contrary to the unimaginably vast ocean of facts crashing ashore in the opposite direction.

Here's a Noam Chomsky moment for those of you without enough duct tape to wrap around your heads to keep your brains from exploding while you actually read his works:

Let's say we stand overlooking the ocean along Pacific Coast Highway. From high atop the cliffs, we look down to the waves and the sand below. I ask you what color the beach is. You reply, reasonably enough, that it is sandy white. And you are exactly right.

However, there are people who cannot see the beach for themselves because they are not standing with us on this very spot. This is where Noam earns his liberal sainthood. Noam takes a small pail to the beach and sits down in the sand.

If you've ever run sand through your fingers, you know that for all of the thousands upon thousands of white or clear grains, there are a few dark ones here and there, falling through your fingers. With a jewelers loupe and an EXCEEDINGLY fine pair of tweezers, you carefully and methodically pluck all of the dark grains you can find - and only the dark grains - and carefully place them, one by one, into your trusty bucket.

It will take you a long time - it has taken Chomsky decades - to fill this bucket, but with enough sand and enough time, you will eventually do so. And then, when you do, you can make a career touring colleges through the world, giving speeches about the ebony-black beaches of Malibu, and you can pour your black sand onto the lectern and state, without fear of contradiction, that this sand was taken from those very beaches.

And what you say will be accurate, it will be factually based, and you will be lying like the most pernicious son of a gun that ever lived.

Finally, this clip from a blog post on the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry debates:

Watching the Presidential debates of September 30th, and the subsequent reactions to them, has left me once again with the sad realization that there are many millions of people who prefer a man who says the wrong things well over one who says the right things badly - and in the case of the first debates we are talking about saying very, very stupid things well and intelligent things very, very badly.

Now I don't mean stupid in a bad way. I fully credit John Kerry with the intelligence needed to analyze, dissect, and evaluate a position, and without mechanical aid, quickly and accurately use advanced trigonomic functions to determine the most popular position on a wide range of complex issues - a feat that requires a very quick mind indeed.

So it's not dumb stupid, those statements he made in the first debate. It's more of an entirely understandable, eminently defensible, very common fossilized kind of stupid that we saw from the Senator. It was the stupid of a man claiming to have new ideas and new plans based on shared assumptions and models that no longer apply to reality.

President Bush seemed stupid in comparison because he seems to only know three things in all the world - and it is our great good fortune that he is right about all three.

In a moment, we'll look at what both men said, and through a very specific filter: not their Aggregate Presidentiality, or their respective Molar Charm Ratio. We're going to look at what both men believe in respect to deterrence: whether their positions increase or decrease the likelihood of further attacks on the US.

That's it. That's all. That's the sum total of this election for me. We've survived boobs and crooks and idiots and charlatans of all stripes and colors, struggled through booms and recessions, surpluses and deficits, and wars on poverty and drugs and crime and General Public Lasciviousness and come through just fine, and we will again.

But the nuclear destruction of the heart of Manhattan, or Long Beach Harbor, or the Capital mall - these things are serious business and as Sam Johnson once said, the prospect of being hanged in the morning tends to focus the mind.

These are perhaps not the best clips from a vast amount of Mr. Whittle's work, but I hope it may have caught your interested and perhaps inspired you to go back here, sit down with a cup of coffee, and read a few essays for yourself.

You won't regret it.