I’ve been conversing via Twitter with fellow blogger Benjamin Chayes (History is Now; Pertinent Food), and I want to share it here in a more permanently placed showcase for expression for that reason plus basic cogency and, as always with BackChannels, distillation.
My country, the United States of America, finds itself politically divided, rancorous, and stressed today, and there are reasons for that, including Russia’s “Active Measures” and related “Destabilization and Reflexive Control Operations”–Moscow appears to mess with the U.S. first and foremost, but it does it sideways with cyberwarfare and disinformation. Much coverage falls to specialized OSINT (start with CISA.GOV–and then let curiosity and imagination run wild).
Setting The Bear aside, the quick-thought Twitter platform (and here not yet “Blue” and upgraded for lengthier speech) lends itself to the compression of language and a fast but unhurried parlay.
The replay has some fragmentation but I think the main points are together and unified by the exchange.
The America I both experience and imagine has been a Christian majority but secular enterprise, compassionate and inclusive in its cultural and geographic expanse, and it has been practical about balancing its defense and security obligations, foreign and domestic, with the necessity of building up trade and national revenues as well as the treasuries, corporate and public, that in turn define our national lifestyle.
We have in the way of all nations through time our national underbelly where the degradation goes so far down that whatever hasn’t sunk so low needs must look like some kind of “up”.
There has been more in the early conversation, but I will stop here for those whose patience may be similar to mine–that’s part of art as well, i.e., knowing when the painting’s done.
Oh, heck….
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