This post officially marks Casual Asides' second year in existence. This anniversary kind of snuck up on me (I realized this yesterday), so I don't have any really insightful comments about it.
It is heartening, I suppose, to note the incredible acceleration of my posting schedule since May 6th, 2003. Why in that first year, I posted 45 articles; in the second, 93 articles. If I keep this up, you may be reading an honest-to-goodness daily update. In another two years.
As you may have noticed, sometimes it takes me a while to formulate these pieces. I'm kind of a slow writer, but I can be prolific if I set my mind to it.
Earlier, I had promised to write a review of Immanuel Wallerstein's <i>The Decline of American Power</i> here. I'm not going to do a full review just yet, but I will mention the significance of this book, just to put it in a little more context.
I started this blog two years ago because I had decided to put aside this book I was writing about foreign policy. Almost exactly two years later, I was in a bookstore in DC, and I chanced upon <i>The Decline of American Power</i>, which I knew immediately was the book I was going to write.
I'll get into this in further detail in a few days, but I am really glad I didn't write the book and decided to do this blog instead. There are several reasons, the most obvious one being that I am not academically qualified to write a better book than the guy who invented world-systems international political theory.
World-systems, briefly, looks at international relations <b>in time</b>. Instead of trying to apply a general theory of how states operate to the facts, world-systems seeks to avoid generalizations and focuses on the causal relationships between historical events (there's a lot more to it, of course).
Now, there's something important about I'd like to note about history before I go any further. History, as an academic field, needs fixed dates for the purpose of providing exam question fodder for students. But these milestones are just historical shorthand for the larger undercurrents which actually move history along. The same goes, by the way, for birthdays and anniversaries.
At any rate, I was going to write a book about how systemic factors (and what's worse, Bush's response to 9/11, which carried a certain sense of historical inevitability) are contributing to the eventual decline of America's power, and how in the future, history students will have to memorize "September 11th, 2001" as the beginning of the decline of America as a superpower.
But because I'm a world-systems type, I knew that I had to do more research. A lot more research, although to be fair, probably less research than it took for Wallerstein to get his Ph.D. And it would take me a long time to adequately lay out the series of events forming a constellation around 9/11, because the series of causal relationships between events and policy I had been drawing grew ever greater.
Realizing that I was not going to win the race to the market, I decided to start a blog instead, where I would instead produce many small essays over time, each covering a small part of that intricate web. The irony is that Wallerstein and I had both written a twenty-page opening essay at about the same time; the rest of his book are transcripts of lectures given before academic audiences, which is not dissimilar to what I've been doing here for the last two years.
Thing is, Wallerstein is much better prepared than I am. At least I can safely say I'm funnier in print than he is.
The name of this blog, by the way, is a little inside joke about how long it takes me to write those 2000 word posts that nobody wants to read in their entirety.
Previously:
Happy Anniversary to Me (Article #66)
Also, I noticed something cool: This article is #166.
