Plato's Footnotes

http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2010-04-23&section=2&id=2

Second to last article for the year! I had a hard time getting this one out, mostly because sometimes I think the arguments I want to make are too obvious and perhaps too idealistic. I can’t imagine anyone thinking about the Supreme Court nomination process for more than a few minutes and not reaching, or at least considering, some of the conclusions that I make here. (This might just be the limits of my own imagination though.) I also don’t know that anyone, including myself to some extent, takes my criticisms seriously or thinks there is a real way to reform the process. This makes me hesitate whether it’s even worth talking about.

I have one last article two weeks from now and it should be a whopper. I’ve been thinking about it abstractly for a couple of months now, and my editor has given me some extra space so the article will be longer than anything else I’ve written. I’m very proud of the fact that I think if one were to take everything I’ve written so far this year, there would be a common thread to it all. That is to say, I’ve been relatively consistent in my criticisms and worries and I’ve applied somewhat of the same philosophy to a number of different topics. My goal in my final piece is to articulate to some extent what that broader theory or philosophy is.

I want to keep it more interesting or relevant than a boring “Treatise on Government”, but I also feel like this is a great opportunity for me to try and articulate my larger criticisms of the way things work right now. Since one of my big complaints is that arguments and conversations stay way too surface and never delve into the deep questions that we face as a society when it comes to our government, this is an ideal opportunity to do just that.

That being said, it’s going to be tough to write. I really have been thinking about it for months and know mostly what I want to say. But as I’ve discovered over the course of the school year, the hard part for me is not knowing what to say but how best to say it. My writing, I think, has improved leaps and bounds in the context of writing an op-ed and probably in other ways too since I started this process. But I know that sometimes how you say something is a lot more important, or at least equally important, to what you are saying. So the important moments in my next two weeks will be devoted to finding the “right” way to say this all.

I’m really excited though, .

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