….rounding out the week….

This week on the blog has really been a resurgence of my writing. I hope to continue writing at this speed with this many posts for the rest of the year and training myself into the new year.  My blog stats have almost hit, 10,000 views, although the majority of those views were probably from friends like Wes.  The hottest blog this week has been my blog on my recent rub with prop 8 and homosexuality.  It has been enlightening to hear all of the different views that surfaced as a result of me writing about my experiences.

This week has also been a resurgence of my blogging on Gatsby.  I hope to blog about Fitzgerald and his classic book more throughout November.

This has also been a week of serious discussion on Jesus and Empire.  This topic is especially relevant as election looms closer and closer.  Mike has written an extensive post dealing with the election and I would suggest reading it (it has a lot of good links too).  I voted early, but it wasn’t for a mainline canddiate.  I voted for Bob Barr more to make a statement that I disagree with both candidates.  Barr stood up against the bailout.  He wants to end big government.  I don’t like Barr’s health-care plan (I think health-care should be socialized and universal), but I like the idea of a smaller government.  I am sick and tired of two party politics…..

and that’s the week.

Tom Buchanan, The Great Gatsby, and Destruction

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.  It was all very careless and confused.  They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.  Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace–or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons–rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.”
-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Brittany made the excellent point in a previous post of the extreme likability of Gatsby.  If there is an extreme likability to Gatsby, there is almost an equaled dislike for Tom Buchanan.  He is the archetypal character who, not necessarily villianous, simply expounds apathetic disinterest in the world around him.  To them the world is not unlike the modern credit card frazzlers who max out their cards.