Sometimes, especially when I've got a head cold or allergies, it is made painfully obvious that my easy reading days are numbered.
I have always had less than great eyesight and am finding that as I get ever older it's getting worse. I'm told there's not much to be done about that, that it's presbyopia exacerbated by a lifetime of reading words and music on a music stand.
When I go back and look at what I've posted sometimes I'm embarrassed to find in editing my early drafts that when I change something, the number of a noun, the tense of a verb, that I don't see to change all of it. I hope I don't generally give the impression of someone who doesn't know how to speak something close to standard English, though I don't think mistakes in such stuff are something shameful or are an indication of stupidity. I've known some very intelligent people who speak other than standard English, even as a first language. And some of the most awful people in the world speak and write flawless English, taking advantage of that to peddle some of the most horrible lies to promote some of the most horrible things. I've known lots and lots of highly intelligent, highly educated people the world would be a better place without, I've never known a good person that could be said of. Look at the people promoting Kavanaugh if you want a current example.
There are other problems with editing in the dark, or dusk, as it were, finding stray parts of sentences that haven't been finished or completely removed, finding that there's a comma where a period should be. Lots of it comes from keys being next to each other on the qwerty keyboard, an "of" where an "if" should go, that kind of thing. Once in a while it comes from the inadvertent posting of a draft and not noticing that till it's too late. I'm not good at picking that out, editing takes even better eyesight than a full draft, more time, too. I find spell checking has been a mixed thing, you tend to rely on that red line under words too much while editing.
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Lots of it is the necessity of writing what passes as long-form in blogging due to the topics I deal with. More words and sentences, more opportunities to make mistakes. If I had the time, believe me, I'd make it tighter though it might get longer, too.
I don't deal much with the friggin' obvious or the common received standard point of view. I figure so many people do that all the time and they don't seem to make any progress. When you're telling people why you don't just go along with what dear old Victor Navasky and Hollywood have to say about the endlessly rehashed passion of the show-biz commies because you know that those show-biz commies were, wittingly or dupedly buying into the propaganda or regimes that rival the Nazis, Mussolini, Imperial Japan, etc. in murderous, oppressive evil, it takes time to break through the decades of propaganda that those old commies and those brought up on that tripe tell about it.
On top of that you have to make what passes as a nuanced case that says you despise both sides of that, HUAC and the people around Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn - that
there isn't any moral or rational reason you have to choose one side instead of rejecting both. I do know, it was one of the most memorable moments of my life when I realized I could reject both them and the Stalinists, that I didn't have to, as that moldy old folkie song demanded, choose to be on one side of that or the other. And it was an even more memorable moment when I realized those two sides weren't that far apart, that what the poor old Stalinists whined was being done to them, their hero was doing far worse to far more people, including writers and actors and directors and playwrights who the Hollywood Stalinists don't seem to have cared about. Stalinism was only a far more extreme form of 1950s McCarthyism, with many more people executed, NONE of whom were given even a flawed version of due process found in an American style judicial proceeding. What they got was, in almost every case, better than what they'd have gotten from their hero or the communism they were OK with hundreds of millions of other people getting.
It is stunning how many college educated people in the United States don't understand that you don't have to buy the phony alternative demanded of choosing one or the other in an issue when both sides stink. That it stinks to an unacceptable level in the case of HUAC and Roy Cohn or that it stinks in the definitive, no-question-of-moral-acceptability way of genocidal oppression as in the case of Communism and Nazism. That is the lunatic deal that American liberals bought into piously and self-righteously choosing to champion those poor put-upon communists whose ideology was a proven guarantee to destroy every single value that liberals used to feel sorry for them and to advocate for communists being able to try to do here what they did in the Soviet Union, China and other places. It was even stupider of us, on behalf of those commies and such others as porn merchants to get suckered into an interpretation of the First Amendment that would see the ACLU advocating that we must allow Nazis to march in Skokie so they could terrorize Holocaust survivors and others and to recruit others to Nazism. That event, the pseudo-liberals of the ACLU and on the Supreme Court being OK with the Nazis marching on Skokie might have been my actual tipping point, when my eyes were forced open as to the lunacy of that "which sides are you on" dogma of the "real" left. You don't have to have good eyes to see that. It's glaringly obvious.
Most important of my recent thinking was understanding that the "left-right" linear diagram of politics we were all taught, with the Nazis on one end and the Communists on the other is a lie. There is real, egalitarian, equal justice democracy and there is rule by gangsters and the "lefty" gangsters are the same kind of gangsters as the gangsters of the "right". There is so much that becomes clear when you understand that Stalin was never like egalitarian democratic liberals anymore than Hitler was, they were gangsters at the top of gangster regimes. Absolute monarchs and emperors were and are gangsters too. Anarchism would inevitably and quickly devolve into gangster rule, something that happens in any neighborhood the police don't police in any city in the world. Anarchism is one of the stupidest political delusions there are, but that's a somewhat different issue of the stupid "left". It is disturbing how much of that crap is so widely held among our alleged intellectual class among our allegedly educated elite. It is as if their educations are most effective in distancing them from reality.
Oh, well, blog writing is quick and dirty writing of necessity. If some billionaire likes my stuff and would like it in more polished form, they could make that happen. Not that I'm expecting that since I seldom use the word without advocating their non-existence through progressive taxation and laws, laws for economic justice and the protection of democracy from the peril that the too-rich have always posed to it. The secret of great fortunes is a forgotten crime properly committed. That's the law. Balzac was right, especially in the floridly corrupt milieu of post-revolutionary France. The period when Balzac wrote that, the United States was as floridly corrupt. It's reverting to that now but real democracy would do better than that.
See, one thing leads to another. Can't write short.
