26 June 2006

Back to Normal....whatever that means

As you all know, I'm a graduate student. Since classes ended in early April, I've been working feverishly on my Master's thesis, an examination of the Wilsonian current in American foreign policy that links (of course) Woodrow Wilson, Harry S. Truman, and George W. Bush. I'm happy to report that the first draft is complete and that I have submitted it to my supervisor. Yay me! This project has been virtually all-consuming as far as my academic energies go, and as such my blogging has been sporadic in recent weeks. I'm hoping that with the initial conception of the thesis out of my hands, I can do some more posting here and share more of my political thoughts. There's been a lot of stuff that I've wanted to discuss but honestly, after working on the thesis for X number of hours beforehand, my brain and wrists are both spent by the time I find something that I'd like to discuss at length. It's amazing I don't have carpal tunnel, the word count on the project is much higher than anything I've ever written, and a lot of stuff that made it on paper didn't make it to my computer screen. So yeah, I'm going to take the rest of this day off, listen to some Metallica, eat some dinner, and spend some quality time with my darlin' Anna Lou.
Thanks to everybody in the universe that has given me inspiration in the past few months, and more especially to all of those who have let me bounce ideas off them and bounce some stuff back at me. Special H/T to Natan Sharansky and David Frum for your kind words in response to my admiration for your respective works. It's a very cool feeling to receive emails of support from an Israeli cabinet minister and George W. Bush's former speechwriter.
And lastly, a very big thank you to my amazing girlfriend for all her love & support, and not getting mad while I've hogged the computer for hours on end because I felt the need to find whatever exact Wilson/Truman/Bush-related quote entered my head, or whatever article from whatever year in whatever journal I thought was important, on any given day. I couldn't have done this without you.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, I find it almost coincidental that I read this because I was doing the Wordfind in the Province newspaper a few days ago at work and the specific title of it was Woodrow Wilson.
And because I didn't take History in gr. 12, I remember hearing the name in Social Studies. And I had to sit there and think to myself. WHO THE HECK IS WOODROW WILSON?

He was like... The President of the US at one point wasn't he?

Your blog intrigues me. It makes me want to get with the political stuff. But I find a lot of it too damn confusing and hard to understand 99% of the time.

RGM said...

WW was quite possibly the greatest ever President of the United States. His vision for a more democratic world that worked together to build for peace continues to serve as an inspiration to people everywhere who believe in the power of freedom and liberty to transform societies. There's a reason that a regularly-accepted maxim of American foreign policy is that the 20th century was "the Wilsonian century": because virtually every succeeding President stuck to some version of Wilson's grand strategy. Hopefully, too, the 21st century will emerge as the second Wilsonian century.

Anonymous said...

Oooooooooh OK.

It makes better sense now :P thank you for that little piece of information, hah hah.