David McElroy

Why don’t I write more about politics these days? It’s mostly because I’ve already said what I need to say on the subject. I don’t really want to keep repeating myself.

I got an email earlier this week from someone who says he used to be a regular reader of my site. He was writing to complain that I’m no longer attacking politicians on both sides of the mainstream based on topical news. He said he used to enjoy reading articles that I wrote excoriating people based on the hot topic of the day.

“Your blog was my biggest source of news a few years back,” he wrote. “Whatever outrageous thing was happening, I could count on you to give it a libertarian spin and show how both sides were full of bull. Now I spend more time reading other libertarian sites where they have stories and links about whatever crazy things the statists are doing and showing how stupid they are. I liked the way you wrote it so I miss you doing those. You were entertaining to me and other libertarians. How come you won’t write like that anymore?”

Although I do still venture into political subjects in the news every now and then now, it’s true that it’s rare. I’ve written bits and pieces about the reasons, but I’ll say a little bit more in reply to my former regular reader.

I’ve made a fundamental shift in the way I view what I’m writing here. In a way, I guess it was an evolution of what I believe about myself and my relationship to the world. When I started this site, I was still looking at things from the point of view of attracting a bigger audience and from the point of view of convincing people to see things my way. Neither of those is true anymore.

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I had a dream last night about a woman who ran away from me. The more I think about it today, the more I think about a question that a reader sent me last week. She’s heartbroken about something right now and she wrote to ask, “Why is it so hard to find true love?”

Why are so many of us alone? Why are we looking for love?

In my dream, I saw a woman who I wanted to talk with. I somehow knew that I’d love her. How? I don’t know; it was a dream. We were both leaving a grocery store and she was ahead of me. As I sped up slightly to overtake her so I could speak, I noticed that she had lost one of her legs and walked with a prosthetic leg.

As we walked through the parking lot, she sped up when she realized I had picked up my pace behind her. I sped up further, but she started running as well as she could run on a prosthetic leg. Before I could get anywhere close to her, she was gone. She had run away because she saw me as a danger — when all I had in mind was the possibility of getting to know her. Maybe loving her.

I got into my car and drove very fast and very recklessly through the parking lot. I have no idea why. I almost hit a couple of people. It wasn’t anger, but I seemed to have a desperate need to — I don’t know — find something. Anything. It didn’t make rational sense. As the dream ended, I was close to wrecking the car and possibly hurting someone in another car because I didn’t know how to get my foot to the brake.

Somehow, I knew that I was doing this because the woman had run away and there was something self-destructive about me because of that.

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Someone told me Friday that there’s a new local website that someone has set up to compete with the Birmingham newspaper. Because I’ve thought seriously of the same idea for years — and because I despise what that newspaper has become — I was eager to see the site.

Sadly, I was very disappointed.

It wasn’t that Alabama Today isn’t a decent site or that the stories are poorly written. As soon as I saw the mix of stories being promoted, it was very clear that the site reflects the world view of someone who assumes politics and government are the most important things in the world.

I spent years working among people like that when I was a political consultant — and I know that people who believe that can’t produce anything I’m going to want to read.

The site is called Alabama Today — a name which I once considered using on a statewide newspaper — but it’s really Conservative Alabama Politics Today. The name suggests that it’s a general-interest website for news from the state, but it’s clearly directed at the things on the mind of a very tiny political class — a group of activists who tend to be out of touch with the people they claim to be working for.

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