I was an ardent supporter from early on, but lately, I’m having a tough time find that old enthusiasm. Six months ago I could hardly describe the energy I felt watching every step of the race; now I can hardly remember the feeling.

It’s not as though I’m going to vote for McCain; I’ll show up dutifully in November. But the excitement seems to have drained as the Obama camp has practically gone underground these past six weeks. And this convention is hardly winning me back over. Even the high points are falling a little short. Take Hillary’s speech last night. It was great, but the speech picked up right where the primary left off. It’s as though the Democratic party thinks that we’re still in early June, just finally closing the primary with some feel-good loving and beginning to turn to the campaign.

I hope the Obama camp enjoyed their summer vacation. But it’s time to get back to work.

In Fall 2004 President Mary Sue Coleman convened a task force of faculty, staff and students to examine ways in which the University might “explore the synergies of education and scholarship on the issue of ethics in public life, contributing to and is some cases structuring broader public discourse on these issues.”

In her charge to the task force, President Coleman noted the rising public concern about the unethical behavior and institutional failures that have been front-page news in recent years.

A big part of my intellectual interests are driven by experiences with ethical failures that seem bureaucratic or institutional in nature — the U.S. Attorneys scandal is an excellent case in point. In fact, although I’m enrolled in a philosophy PhD, I’m planning to focus my research on bureaucratic ethics (which explains the blog’s tagline… see, this blog is less ad hoc than you might think). So it’s nice to see someone else taking interest in this as an area of academic research.

So then, what is the point?  I mean, why not keep a private journal or spend my time fighting crime or something useful?  Is a blog a blog if it doesn’t have any readers?

I think so, because the potential of interaction exists. Unlike a personal log, I’m displaying this content for anyone to read.  And even if very few people actually discover it, that potentiality carries the same risk/reward of public exposure. 

True, I may reasonably expect that content posted in a more public forum will attract more scrutiny, but even there it is logically possible, however improbable, that my writing will never be discovered.  Likewise, even if I expect that no one will read this, it is logically possible that someone beyond the standard porn-spammer will encounter this and meet it with a profound “meh.” This forum is public in principle, so it is a blog in practice.

Bored yet?

This blog is intended in large part to detail my return to academia.  Here’s the background.  I am a former philosophy major from Columbia University. I’ve spent the past two plus years working as a political journalist for Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post. And in one week, I’ll be a student again, pursuing a PhD in philosophy as well as a law degree at the University of Michigan. As some of my future colleagues have asked: “Why?”

Thus, the blog. On the one hand, this is a place to exercise questions of philosophy, as well as indulge my lapses into political analysis (covering an election is kind of like being a day trader, so I’m hoping that my distance from the coverage will provide some more interesting perspective).   But it also serves to track my journey from a young and flexible medium into one of the oldest — and arguably stalest — traditions in Western thought. In doing so, I hope to leverage the intellectual and technological tricks I have picked from years working on the Web — (i.e.- ADHD and Wikis).  

I’ll be the first to admit: I find the idea of going back to school daunting, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t know a thing about the current world of philosophy.  I’m hoping at some point that will be an asset, but right now I’m trying not to embarrass myself.

Failure is not final. Just
make sure you don’t
die because of it.

Avoid the opposite
sex today.
Yeah, right!

Brilliant.

Well, not quite. For one, as much as the country is blaming Columbia for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak, it was the national networks that gave him voice by airing his speech live in its entirety. Nevertheless, our media has humiliated us in the name of the 1st Amendment. Only a few sane voices prevailed, like Rep. Duncan Hunter, who is calling for a withdrawal of federal funding from the school (albeit by torturing a law that allows the government to remove funding if schools do not allow military recruitment on campus).

Except, Columbia is the only party who doesn’t appear foolish. Ahmadinejad surely does; his incoherent rambling was punctuated only by soundbites like: “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” And the pundits and politicians look no less silly; they placed themselves in the position of defending both claims that Mahmoud is a fool and that letting him speak somehow empowers his inanity.

In reality, Ahmdinejad’s appearance represents the most damage caused to his reputation since his entrance on the world stage. Americans have been told of this mad foreigner–half idiot, half tyrannical genius–but they have never experienced him. But at Columbia, they finally saw first hand the face of evil. And I must say, Satan is surely embarrassed.

Finally, and most importantly, Bollinger did today what no public official has had the courage to do. Lee shared the stage with a madman, and he told Ahmadinejad to his face that he was a horrible man and leader who did not deserve a position of powership. And he did so without worrying that telling someone off would somehow weaken his position, rather than strengthen it. Today, the world saw a tyrant called ridiculous to his face before he was laughed at by an auditorium of twenty-year-olds. I would be hard pressed to find something the current administration has done that has been more damaging to the man’s credibility.

“Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.”

-Aldai Stevenson