For those I am about to appropriate...

"The word in language is half someone else's."

"Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions, it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others.  Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process."

Discourse in the Novel, M. Bakhtin.  

I'm starting with a quote from Bakhtin, not to show off my pretentious taste in literary critics (can one not have pretentious taste in literary critics) or to establish myself as a well read and informed authority on the discourse of language (the former has already been subverted by my self conscious writing style and the latter should soon become readily apparent), but because it provides, what I think, is an appropriate avenue with which to begin this dialogue.

As I am sure it is with all bloggers, my agendas and ideologies color not only my content (what I plan to put on this site) but also my form (this sometimes annoying self conscious style, where I feel the need to qualify and amend almost every statement with a parenthetical).  I believe we are all aware of this, and to hide behind the academic "one" and not embrace the inherent "I," is just plain silly.  So, this little first statement is a sort of limited introduction of the "I" that I am assuming for the purposes of this blog.  And, in that vain, I hope you don't mind if I take you on a quick tour.

The Inheritors was not going to be the title of this blog.  I was going for something like generation y, or echo boom, or some other title that the last generation has so nicely placed us in.  I thought that it would be fun to take up the mantle of my demographic while commenting on the lunacy of confining any generation to a single demographic.  Alas though, those names were taken.  

What was on my mind though was Brian Williams recent speech at the Ohio State University's graduation.  In his address he asked the OSU graduates to "fix the country."  He apologized on behalf of his generation, and implored us to change the country for the better, likening the graduates to the greatest weapon our country has.  Personally, I would've preferred the word resource, human weapons, to me, sounds too much like our answer to suicide bombers.  I'm not exactly sure if that's an analogy we should be comfortable with.  That aside, the idea of inheriting the problems of the previous generation, and dealing with them, was on the brain.

The Inheritors is also a novel by William Golding, about humans killing off neanderthals.  I thought that would add some delicious sorts of implications.  

This is sort of coupled with another aspect of this blog's creation.  I am enrolled in a Media and Politics course for the Fall semester at my school, which requires that I operate a blog.  An interesting assignment to be sure.  However, getting straight to the point, in my life time politics has never been as generationally divided as it is now.  Obama McCain is shaping up to be a battle between an "out of touch candidate" and an "inexperienced and unprepared one."  In other words, the old vs. the young.  In my mind, this wont be any more obvious and striking than when McCain and Obama are standing next to each other before their first debate. Vibrant youthful energy and courage, experience, and dedication.  

These descriptions fall short of any thing meaningful in the way of characterizations, if anything they are a conscious regurgitation of the media's hype, however this is useful for my purpose since I believe it exposes a main impotence for the creation of this blog, and a theme which you will no doubt see run through many of my posts.

My grandfather (a prof of stats at Yale) is fond of saying that there are two definitions of truth.  One is what I know in my head, what is provable, what is empirically verifiable, is truth.  The other is what I know in my heart, what I feel, what I believe, is truth.  He compartmentalizes these as the post scientific method truth and the pre-scientific method truth.  

I would like to humbly submit that truth is not something which is seen through a clear plate of glass, uncovered by formulas or believed with absolute clarity.  Truth, you can imagine William Randolph Hearst licking his chops, is rather a fickle thing.  And to pin anything down into any one category, label, or demographic to discover its truth does a disservice to the very truth of it.  Therefor in order to preserve truth you must be mentally flexible, emotionally adaptable, and, of course, willing to learn new tricks.