Decline and Fall

Since I came to Iraq, my blogging has been pretty light, obviously. There are a number of factors at play here: partly it's due to the fact that my coworkers and bosses don't know that I do this. I've kept D&F a secret from them because I wanted to be able to blog freely, safe from the prying eyes of my reliably red-state colleagues and superior officers. Since I haven't mentioned any of them, or the nature of my job over here, I don't think I've written anything to set them off, so it's not like there's been any betrayal on my part. I just like to keep this part of my opinions to myself, even though they are all pretty well aware that I'm a librul.

But more than my (perceived) need to keep D&F to myself, I've found being over here to be intellectually impoverishing. The sad fact is that among my colleagues, there's very little in the way of nuanced political analysis. Every time I've tried to have a political discussion that goes below the surface, I have been stymied by their lack of engagement and generally uninformed outlook. Sure, they dutifully noted that my guy won in Iowa and South Carolina and that he seems like an OK dude, but they've never actually confronted me on it, which makes talking politics, well, boring. It's not that they're all unintelligent, it's just that their intellectual interests differ from mine, and their desire to engage in wars of words is much less than mine.

Refusing to engage me in Socratic dialogue (or Crossfire polemics) is their right, of course, and I can't really begrudge them. But not being challenged or engaged has dulled my intellect in a way that only felt familiar once I got out here and said to myself, "oh yeah, that's why I didn't stay in the Army."

In short, being in Iraq has made me dumber.

Exhibits A-C: this post, this post and this post. Reading these again is pretty depressing because I know I can do better. It turns out that I require more inspirado than I'm getting over here to churn out blogs that are up to my own standards.

So I will try to do better. Hopefully I will be getting more of an intellectual workout next month when I leave Iraq, first for Arizona to visit loved ones and then for Cairo, where I will be studying Arabic for two months.

After Cairo, I will join the masses of , overworked grad students as I begin my studies toward a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies (or something related thereto), first at the University of Arizona and then at whatever school will take me and fund me. I came to the realization about a year ago that the only time I have ever been really at home was in academia, so it only makes sense to make academia my home.

I hope I haven't lost too many of my readers, because god knows I never had many to begin with. In the future, you can expect my discussions of military matters to get more thoughtful, if less numerous, and you can expect more posts on the wider Middle East and, perhaps, the life of a grad student who is a few years older than most of his cohort. Also, I'll have more time to keep up with things and to write about them, which should make this site more worthy of your time.

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