A few years back, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, a psychologist by trade. 

He was talking about a client of his who’d spent twenty or so years in US Army Special Forces – a “Green Beret”, specializing in “unconventional warfare” around the world.  This client had spent most of his career in Latin America – and while the closest he’d come to fighting an actual “war” was in Panama, he’d apparently spent a long time in a lot of pseudo-war situations.  My friend didn’t go into many details, but Latin America from the late seventies through the mid-nineties was full of brushfire wars and counterinsurgencies where the USSF was involved to one level or another, training local troops and working with local communities.  While they weren’t “at war”, per se, there was apparently enough danger involved that the client spent a good chunk of his twenties and thirties operating on some sort of war footing. 

The problems – for the client – started when he got out of the service.  He’d spent the best years of his life, literally and figuratively, in one Latin-American insurgency zone or slum or another, looking over his back and watching for threats around every corner as he did his job, training local soldiers and building things and giving vaccinations and whatever else Green Berets did when they were on the job in the Third World toward the end of the Cold War.  He’d spent so much time doing that that it became normal for him; when he got out of the Army, he missed it. 

So the client had spent several  years of his post-service life, my friend said, putting himself into situations where he felt that little stab of danger, where he got to exercise his self-preserving habits; he lived in the worst possible neighborhoods; he hung out at the worst bars; he did whatever it took to keep himself on that “war footing”. 

To do anything else just didn’t feel normal.

The post-election hangover on a blog is sort of like that.  Win (’02, ’04) or lose (’06 and ’08), there’s a huge letdown and readjustment, as the fever-pitch of excitement fades into the post-election waiting for the new regime (or the new take on the current regime) to take hold. 

This past election was the fourth election cycle this blog has been through.  Every year, a number of new political blogs fade out after the election; without an election, what do you write about?  Not me, of course – I’ve been doing this long enough to know the pattern, so it doesn’t especially faze me.  But there’s always a period of readjustment, as one switches from the always-on mental scrum of writing about politics-as-current events, and switches to politics-as-daily-routine, along with writing about all of life’s other routines.  Or, y’know, not writing about them; there are bloggers for whom politics is the only subject.

The readjustment is particularly jarring this time around.  This electoral season was so intense, so fraught with consequence on both sides, and just-plain more-engrossing than the last couple of turns.  We’ve spent most of the last year writing about what has been was supposed to be an epochal generational and social shift in American politics; going from that epic clash to two years of talking about congressional maneuvering is a jarring shift.

The readjustment is coming along, though. 

Although I can hardly wait for 2010…