waagnfnp

This is a shot I took last month of my older and younger daughters outside the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. I blog about them here and there every so often. This is one of those times.

Imoto’s stroller is almost exactly at the hypocenter — what Americans are more accustomed to calling Ground Zero. With my caption, I’m trying to capture something of the effect that the museum’s opening exhibit had on me. It was a small, dimly-lighted room filled with photos of everyday life in Nagasaki the morning before the blast and items large and small that testify to its force, including beams from a school water tower, remains from a church, and a clock stopped at 11:02 am, all staying still to the beat of an ominously ticking clock.

It wasn’t only that this simple exhibit made me replay the all-too-typical “imagine you and everyone you love disappearing in an instant” nuclear disaster fantasy scenario anyone who, like me, grew up near a U.S. military base during the Cold War has probably run through their heads a million times by now: it wasn’t quite the imaginative empathy of identifying with the victims or putting myself and my family in their place. It wasn’t only that standing at the second place in human history where this fantasy became reality confronted me with its limits: it wasn’t quite the ethical recognition of the impassable gulf between witnesses-thrice-removed and victims. And it wasn’t only that I was nevertheless forced to reflect on my tangled ties to Nagasaki, as an American citizen married to a Japanese citizen whose two daughters are dual citizens (until they turn 21, under current laws, at least).
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By Heraclitus (Jeff)

Of course we want our efforts here at the shiny new WAAGNFNP blog to be appreciated by as many readers as possible (all hail the effortless efforts of our glorious Minister of Justice!), and what better way to signal to readers that this isn’t just a one-joke blog than by writing that most quintessential and automatically engrossing of blog posts, a navel-gazing meditation on the nature and purpose of blogs and blogging. So although my title, “Against Centrism,” suggests that I’m going to say something of some wider interest and utility to our political life, I’m really just going to kvetch about some commenter somewhere who said something that irritated me six months ago. But of course I’m going to be as bombastic and self-inflating about it as possible, and carry on in these broad, general terms. Dismal, no? Just another reason to do everything in your power to hasten the arrival of the sublime Giant Nuclear Fireball, which will cleanse us all of our pedestrianism.

So, although the people I’m discussing no doubt manifest these traits in meat space as well, I’m thinking particularly of a certain kind of internets personage, who bemoans the “extremism” of a blog post that will “alienate the center” or “the majority” (and who can forget those always excellent admonitions about driving away “people who should be your allies”?). What probably annoys me most about these self-styled “moderates” or “centrists” is the way they manage to combine such a sanctimonious, school-marmish tone of pinched moral superiority with such excruciatingly banal opinions (although some of them are more rude and abusive). How have they managed to convince themselves that simply adopting whatever the majority position is, or letting the two extremes dictate their opinions to them, is some kind of intellectual and moral virtue? There couldn’t be a lazier or more cowardly way of arriving at a set of (most likely completely incoherent) convictions, yet these people are forever engaged in the most grating and stultifying ritual of self-congratulatory finger-wagging imaginable.
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THE BLOGOCALYPSE CARNIVAL is happening right now.

The Constructivist has set up a one-stop shop for all your apocalyptic blogging needs.

As MOOAD Minister spyder says, it’s nice prelude to the upcoming Blog Against Theocracy Week.

Check it out.