The Inspiration for "Third Wave: Middle East"

In late December of 2010 I, in essence, disappeared from public life.  I contracted a very rare condition known as aplastic anemia which, for the time being, has undermined not only my ability to produce the most basic of blood cells but has also essentially eliminated my immune system.  The treatments for this condition, as well as my body's reaction to these treatments, have left me largely bedridden and in functional isolation for most of the last few months in hospitals or clean rooms around Tennessee, far away from my "stomping grounds" at the University of Virginia's College at Wise where I teach, well, almost all of the international relations and comparative politics courses offered.  As I began to recover enough to watch television and check e-mail occasionally I began to realize that I was going through a situation something like that of Rip Van Winkle.  I had gone to sleep, so to speak, and the world made sense - I knew things about the Middle East and Islamic world - it wasn't my primary expertise, but I had taught about it, read extensively on the subject, felt confident in at least some sense of durability of the existing landscape.  And I definitely knew about regime change - my dissertation was on the subject and I was (and will return to, once I am allowed to take up my position again post-illness) working only weeks ago on the second, third, and fourth stages of a six-stage project on the subject of critiquing and functionalizing Samuel P. Huntington's Third Wave model of democratization - heck, I'd presented the first round of findings just last spring at the Virginia Social Sciences Association conference.  And now this?  Pro-liberalization radical, popular disestablishmentarianism erupting of all places in the Middle East?  I was moribund.

I wasn't upset because I was wrong-headed about things - a real scholar is wrong about a lot of things in his or her lifetime and I'm becoming adapted to my own ignorance.  I was upset because I was isolated from my academic libraries, too sick to spend hours on the phone with my friends in Washington and around the world who are reacting to the emerging situation, too beaten up to try to catch up on my online reading (and just depressed at the "look-here-is-another-picture" style of television journalism I could physically deal with for a few minutes at a time).   So I rested, listened to names, got my brother to fill me in on what he'd gleaned during his visits, learned what nurses and doctors read newspapers and ignored "yelling-based-television," and so forth.  Until one day, halfway through my treatment for a secondary condition emerging from a treatment for my aplastic anemia, I felt okay.  Not good.  Not strong.  Those days are coming.  But "Robert Louis Stevenson would be sitting up in bed writing right now" good.  I begged the nurses and doctors at my hospital to get me an internet connection, got my brother to bring my laptop to the hospital, and the next day, after 45 minutes with a friendly enough but eternally mumbling hospital IT soldier, I had access to the world again.  That first day I only read for perhaps two or three hours, but I realized - my god, has it only been weeks, months at most?  I cried at what I'd missed.  

I cried because the most important moment in making me who I am (at least professionally), other than reading Bradbury's Martian Chronicles in seventh grade (long story) was the period between 1989 and 1991 when I became politically aware even as the political landscape of the Earth transformed.  It was in that three year period that I began to care about power, about politics, about people whose languages and cultures and political-economic-social assumptions were different, began to care about them not only because they were interesting, but god help me, because they were human beings.  It changed me utterly - this is when I negotiated for weeks not for a higher allowance or fewer chores, but the right to stay up until 11:30PM so I could take in the late news.  This is when I began to read more and more military and international history, no longer dwelling exclusively on the American history which I loved (and still love, mind you) exclusively.  This is when I learned to be an optimist in Poland and a pessimist in Beijing.  And I realized, even then, I might never see its like again - hell, my great, great grandkids might not see it.  

And now, sitting in a hospital room where everything smelled, tasted, and felt like antiseptics and the immunosuppressants and overcooked food, I realized I might have missed seeing it again - certainly the opening salvos, but potentially, if things went sour again (which, hypothetically, they might) a lot more.  I also realized that I am a professor - okay, an assistant professor - and these are the moments I live for - the moments when I get to teach students the grand lessons of politics, the thunder and the drums, and have the staging that makes them actually give a damn.  And I was, and largely still am, missing it.  

This is hard for me.  I'm a reader and a scholar, but I'm also a doer, an actor.  I need to teach.  I need to talk and write.  And I need for kids from the same Appalachian Mountains I was raised in to understand their place in a greater world then the one they can imagine at this moment.  

After three or four days of furious reading, literally until I'd call for painkillers and sink into sleep after a session, I began to write.  I'm working on perhaps five articles at once - some highly technical, built on deep methodologies and complex theoretical mumbo-jumbo (formal term), some designed for a broader audience.  And one problem continuously emerged - this is all going too fast.  It'd be going too fast for healthy, 50- to 60-hour work week Eric Drummond Smith and it sure as hell is going too fast for "I can sit up in my bed three to five hours a day" Eric Drummond Smith.  But I need to do something, start presenting my ideas and get to teaching again. 

That is where this blog comes from.  I want to help you fill in the gaps in your (and probably my) knowledge, your questions, your ideas, and so forth.  And I want to help you find what you're looking for, give you any informed opinions you might want, and so forth.  I want to be a resource as much as my malfunctioning blood and marrow will let me.  And I might throw some of my research ideas, concepts, methodologies, etc. at you for feedback, comment, and conversation.  Oh, and if I find article or media worth sharing, look for them here too.  That's it.  If this works, and I recover, I plan on maintaining this blog after my recovery as an ongoing resource, but for now, well, this'll do.   

How do you contact me? Well, you're welcome to comment (though show your manners - you might want to read the "rules" below) or, for more privacy,  you can always e-mail me at my work address eds9g@uvawise.edu.  I'll get back to you as quickly as I can, but please, bear in my mind my circumstances.

Cheers,
e.-

PS - My sincerest and ongoing thanks to my friends, my doctors, nurses, and other professionals at Vanderbilt University Medical in Nashville, East Tennessee Oncology and Mercy West in Knoxville, and most of all my family for helping me through what we've already beaten and what we still have to beat.  I love you guys.