Anti-Climacus

>SPEAKING OF AL GORE: I should point you to this wonderful profile of his in the Washington Post Magazine. It really reminded me of why I liked him so much as a politician in the first place:

"Even now, there exists this

OtherGore, an Al Gore who is very much apart from PoliticalGore, a Gore who seems to have thrived during the relative anonymity of the last two years. When he conceded in 2000, Gore spoke of defeat as something that can serve, as well as victory, to "let the glory out." For part of Gore, for OtherGore, it seems that glory is the freedom to write and think and ruminate and cogitate and generally do that data-downloading, information-gathering thing. It is the freedom to use phrases like "strategic frame analysis" and "meta-narrative" in the company of people who appreciate that language as much as he does.

In addition to the classes at Fisk and MTSU, Gore also hosts a weekly seminar at Harvard where a group of professors talk about one of his favorite subjects, globalization. Sometimes they talk about global warming; sometimes they talk about gender; this coming week, Gore says, as he drives, they will be talking about "the role of information technology in defining a span of, uh, felt collective identity."

"I don't have the language to describe what I'm trying to describe," Gore says, "but I will at the session." What he means is: He and his academic friends will be considering how the development of language, speech, written and now electronic communication has affected how people view themselves and their community. OtherGore is at the wheel now, explaining how, through a genetic mutation, human beings became able to speak, which affected their view of community; then they learned to write, then print, then there were popular editions of the Bible, and what followed, Gore says, as though this would be apparent to anyone, was "the Protestant Reformation, and then the Counter-Reformation and the wars associated with it, [which] really led to the creation of nation-states, and the Treaty of Westphalia . . ."

OtherGore goes on and on. It is transfixing; this aggressively intelligent man, a man who seeks to hold all of human history in his head, is also a man who, during the 2000 campaign, lurched back and forth on such relatively simple issues as what colors to wear and where to headquarter his campaign."