SAGANOMICS FTW
“So are you a uh, you know, a con-?” Simon whispered. I interrupted with a barely suppressed a chuckle and told him that no I wasn’t in any sense a conservative and yes I did intend to keep everyone else in the room ignorant of that, seeing as most of them were on the Van South Conservative Party’s board of directors. They were also about to give me a sizeable but unsolicited scholarship.
Wai Young, the Conservative MP for the Van South district, was almost unable to come because, as she said: “The NDP were filibustering all night again”- mixed groans and laughs from the crowd- “but we pushed the vote through late in the evening and got the job done.”
Though her speech was tinged with more political rhetoric than was really appropriate, Young came off as rather impressive. She and her husband have raised seven troubled foster children as well as two of their own. This forced me to remember that people with political or religious views that are diametrically opposed to mine can still be really really really good people. We forget this because it’s so easy to slot “Conservatives” and “Liberals” into neat categories of moral alignments and opinions. What’s harder is to imagine our political opponents complexly and as individuals who have anxious internal monologues and enjoy the smell of pavement after a rainstorm and have to wait for eternities in grocery store checkout lines.
Biblically violent, hallucinogenically vivid and grammatically creative, Blood Meridian is a doozy of a novel. The unnamed main character (I don’t say protagonist because he doesn’t really try to do anything, he just does stuff. Violent stuff.), called the Kid, is a young runaway who falls in with a gang of Indian hunters along the Texas-Mexico border. Lacking empathy, a direction and a name, he wanders a wilderness that is as determined to kill him as the Apache are.
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