“There are no great men. Just great challenges which ordinary men, out of necessity, are forced by circumstance to meet.”
-- Bull Halsey
If the notion in my mind finds footing it will be that my primary place of online interaction will be at First Things as I slowly put this blog to rest. I think I will find it necessary at times to expand on various ideas that come into my head and for the sake of my own citizenship's amenuensis go on about something here. But of all the blogs I've read and all the communities I've seen online over the past decade, this one holds the most promise.
I'll surely continue to read the same places. And I suppose that I will likely connect with a few people on Facebook for what it's worth. But I have come to the conclusion that the occasion which impelled Cobb into existence is of little interest. And the past year I have spent looking in different directions has not yielded me a different audience. There are no great challenges here, except to keep people focused and civil. Heh, as if I held a chair and a whip.
First Things and American Digest. And I should be a member of the Belmont Club, and I think they will have me.
This week I should be attending Kevin Ross' forum at USC at which time he will introduce the Urban Electronic Media, that thing I have been doing since 1993 on the Web and on private networks and a dozen BBSs for ten years before that. I thought about writing a history and presenting a paper, but in the end... well the reward is in the journey, and for those who have not made it, I think it would be presumptuous of me to suggest my current state is the ultimate destination.
I have earned a strange sort of fame here without much feeling that I myself have become more well known or understood. What I have done is gotten everything, without a syllable to spare, off of my chest. I have said everything I've wanted to say at redundant length. And of those core subjects, of politics and culture, of conservatism and race, of domestic affairs, geopolitics, and all of the categories, all that is left is my own diary and brain spew. Those would only matter if I were a great man, and I am not. I have only risen to this moderate challenge of evolving my own thought in public - of resolving the conflicts of the failure of the Left and of Progressives with the promise of the alternative.
But I don't hope for and shouldn't hope for continued attention, least of all because I am only a writer in the breach. I should perhaps be all about my career, that thing which actually butters my bread. I cannot say with much confidence that what hybrid I have become, investing these many thousands of hours over the past decade has enriched my pockets, but only my understanding. So I am a wise prisoner of my relative poverty.
So let it only be said that there was one man who defied his tribe and the small kibbles and bits of conventional wisdom to embrace all of Western Civilization, that he has learned much and found outside of his small box a great wonder. I have strived for conservative brotherhood and public citizenship and what I have found is great nourishment for myself. If my shared journey has helped others, it is not from my own power but from something we have always shared internally, that motivation for seeing a clearer truth. I was the one talking the whole time and recording my words. And here they will stand, for as long as Typepad remains in business as well as the archival joints.
That is all.
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