Taking pictures of everything

In 1999, I drove alone from Chicago to Seattle. It was, truly, one of my life's nicest experiences. I took the northern route, through the Badlands and all of seatbelt-optional Big Sky country, passing exit after exit simply marked, "No services available." Susan Sontag, in her essay, "On Photography," argues that lay people who take photographs do so as a way to replace genuine experience. Though she redacted that argument later (perhaps at the behest of Annie Liebowitz?), I understood what she meant as I drove. I had brought a camera on my trip, but I never used it; there was simply too much to photograph. I would have either had to take pictures of everything, so that I could re-experience the trip later in real time, or take pictures of nothing and simply pay attention. I chose the latter.

In these weeks since my last post, I've felt something similar, though certainly less nice, about blogging. Every day, some egregious happening deserves an entry, but there are simply too many egregious happenings to document while simultaneously living a life. Here's a thumbnail list of some of the things that should have had their own entries here, but didn't:

Tom Delay's resignation and the corruption it implies;
Scott McClellan's resignation and the corruption it implies;
Tony Snow's new post and the corruption it implies;
The government's shameful response to retired generals' outcry against Donald Rumsfeld;
The Campus Christians' shameful response, misnamed "Day of Truth," as a reaction to the GBLT students' Day of Silence;
The anti-Immigrantation advocates' shameful response of buying big-ticket items on May 2nd to protest the Day without Immigrants;
The US's inadequate response to Darfur;
The US's infuriating response to Iran.

And, of course, I should have posted a memorial for John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last week, at age 98. Galbraith's economics "radically" proposed that poor communities need more, and not less, government funding than wealthy communities if poverty is ever to be eradicated. Others will carry his work forward, and may they find an audience with the power to effect the changes he proposed.