Blog to the Future

In a galaxy near, near, nearby, a new Southern Catholic leftist political blog, The Primal Screed, has been detonated. The work of the Slangwhanger-in-Chief has erupted ("not a thousand miles away," as the Brits might say) at a site powered by a subsidiary of Google.

He was inspired to adopt this not entirely pristine technology by a desire to relieve his friends of the burden of the many forwarded emails and citations of other blogs with which he had incontinently, and unremittingly, been bombarding them. The Primal Screed site allows you to sign up to be notified by email any time a new post is initiated. Or you can just drop by and look around at your leisure.

Because the site is public, the actual baptismal name of the Slangwhanger-in-Chief appears nowhere on it. This situation will change when he is no longer a contract employee in the federal government marketplace, which could be months or years, depending on the aleatory nature of his Powerball and Hot Lotto retirement plan.

Not all the email fodder will make it into the blog, only newly-composed political items that haven't elsewhere infested the public prints or ASCII. Thus many of you will continue to receive inflammatory or otherwise astounding material that was not directly authored here near the Little Falls of the Potomac River.

The title assumed by the bloggist derives from Mark Twain, who once claimed to have run across a newspaper on his travels called Il Slangwhanger di Roma. The bloggist decided that, absent the geographic specification, this was a parfait, gentil job description he could both strive toward and, pending arrival, hope to live up to.

So stop round this corner of the blogosphere every now and again to check out the ruminations, lucubrations, ratiocinations, feuilletons and pasquinades of a classically-educated, literary-minded believer in not only the propriety, but the necessity, of Aristotelian distributive justice.

On the Political Compass site, which attempts to plot political leanings on two axes (not just the traditional left-right one), the Slangwhanger-in-Chief has been diagnosed as very nearly a pure anarcho-syndicalist, with a rating of -9.50, -7.28. He considers this a worthy, if improbable, accomplishment for one steeped, or at any rate thoroughly dipped, in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Finally, what ought to be foremost, is the complete chapter of which only a truncated version is allowed to appear by the silly character-limited blog form at the head of the Primal Screed. The blessed master, Lawrence Sterne, spake unto us as follows, in a manner remarkably prefiguring the trade, practice, and habitude of a bloggist:

The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., Volume 1 Chapter XIV

Upon looking into my mother's marriage settlement, in order to satisfy myself and reader in a point necessary to be cleared up, before we could proceed any farther in this history; — I had the good fortune to pop upon the very thing I wanted before I had read a day and a half straight forwards, — it might have taken me up a month; — which shews plainly, that when a man sits down to write a history, — tho' it be but the history of Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb, he knows no more than his heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way, — or what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another, before all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, — straight forward; — for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside, either to the right hand or to the left, — he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey's end; — but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various

Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave in:
Traditions to sift:
Personages to call upon:
Panegyricks to paste up at this door;
Pasquinades at that:

— All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from. To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be look'd into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of: — In short there is no end of it; — for my own part, I declare I have been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could, — and am not yet born: — I have just been able, and that's all, to tell you when it happen'd, but not how; — so that you see the thing is yet far from being accomplished.

These unforeseen stoppages, which I own I had no conception of when I first set out; — but which, I am convinced now, will rather increase than diminish as I advance, — have struck out a hint which I am resolved to follow; — and that is, — not to be in a hurry; — but to go on leisurely, writing and publishing two volumes of my life every year; — which, if I am suffered to go on quietly, and can make a tolerable bargain with my bookseller, I shall continue to do as long as I live.

Read The Primal Screed; it's crunchy!