Republicans...
Time for a rethink of what they stand for methinks?
Last night it struck me with some vigour that Republicanism is rooted in tradition, solidity, conservatism, family values, in a sense values that we can all make sense of, and mean something to us all in one way or another...

The Republican values are not necessarily that painful to absorb in themselves. But, here's the problem...They are in danger of seeming fossilized, unhelpful, unchanging in a really, really fast-moving world, where flexibility and responsiveness, the ability not to get caught on the back foot are going to be needed.

Actually, the world has become less comfortable since 9/11...I speak of the Western world, the globalised, Americentric world we live in now has become less comfortable since 9/11, less easy to live in...

And in-fact traditional Republicanism appeared, fatally ( for itself that is), to be at first offering all the "Right" responses to that very discomfort, that de-centred discomfort. "Going at them" with full-frontal, visible acts of war, announcing a "War on terror" seemed the very thing to do for "dealing with" this terrifying de-stabilising discomfort, the enemy in all our midsts, in all our mists.

Yup, Republicanism, with all its rigid, fixed, problem-solving, solution-providing, securities seemed exactly the "Right" way to go to so many Americans.

Those values seemed ever more unassailable as troop after troop of men and women surged in to the deserts and the cities of the Arabian diaspora.

But then it didn't take long for the cracks to emerge in this very proactive "Philosophy" of certainty and "doing the right thing". The problem was that bodies began to come home, bodies of young men and women, rather than the men and women themselves. And their bodies seemed to be detached from their souls, and the "reason" seemed to be missing too. The reaons for all this doing seemed to be getting lost too.

So, bodies without souls, actions without reasons...And, hey, what about the ending?
Don't wars on terror have an end?
Doesn't remorseless Republican logic lead to a Happy Ending in the end?
Isn't it the way it has to go?
The way things have to be?
Doesn't Right have to be proved Right in the end?

How to deal with the ever widening and deepening gaps...? How to deal with it?
Put up a war hero and a glamorous pit bull?
Totems of the age old certainties...
But in the end, the questions remained, and actually loomed like storm clouds over the dreams...
And the credit crunched too...

And the old certainties and truths really did seem to more like old rigidities and less-than-truths...

And the old stories with heroic endings seemed more and more like that...old stories with happy endings...More and more divorced from the times that people were actually being forced to live through...

When souls are divorced from bodies, and only the bodies come home, then you are going to have problems getting people to stay in your dream. They will drift away in droves.

Republicanism actually needs to move with the times now, the times people live in now, if it has a hope of surviving as the other side of the coin.