Douglas Barone
Douglas Barone
A Post-postmodernist with Objectivist leanings, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people.
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive, and IT executive he has found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could ever dream up. He uses these real life experiences in his work and this separates him from other writers who never really worked a day in their lives either.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, and our struggles in the space created between. It deals with the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, where ideas have re-emerged as vastly powerful things even in the simple acts of everyday life. Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
The Speech
Leaders lead from the podium. Those who say otherwise do not understand how leadership works. Regardless of your political stripes, few dispute that somewhere along the path of the last eight years George W. Bush stopped leading the country, primarily because he failed at the podium of public opinion.
President Obama has been something of national Rorschach inkblot test. People see in him what they want. His (fabulous) inauguration speech today was no different. Many will see in it what they want.
Here are my picks of favorite quotes. What do they say about me, and what does all this say about us?