How About Contrarian?

I've been thinking about what to 'label' myself politically and socially. I'm neither liberal nor conservative. How about 'contrarian'? By which I mean I am constantly finding myself challenging the conventional, establishment thinking, whether liberal or conservative. To say you're contrarian, doesn't thereby spell out the content of my views. But then again, I find the narrow thinking of both liberal and conservative movements to be often incoherent and illogical. My contrarian views often cross conservative/liberal boundaries in strange and unpredictable ways, leading to some interesting results, some of which you see on this blog.

One of the more recent contrarians to rise into view is Chris Hedges. Hedges is a former New York Times foreign reporter who mostly reported on various wars. More recently, he has been thinking and writing here at home. The book of his I first read was 'War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning'. Most recently, he has published 'Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle .' He was interviewed this weekend on BookTV.

Other contrarians from which I've profited over the years are: Russell Kirk, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, James Howard Kunstler, Robert Nisbet, Kevin Phillips, Chalmers Johnson, Garry Wills, Jeremy Rifkin, David Ray Griffin, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Thomas Frank, Gore Vidal, Seymour Hersh, Bill McKibben, Andrew Sullivan, and the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn. These are all in the social/political realm. For religion, I would have another long list. But that's for another time.