subter’s back and a lot of things have changed…

I have spent most of my life wishing I were somewhere else, engaged in some other time. I have lived my life with flights of longing for ages that I missed, willing to trade today so I may walk in times when greatness was abound, or even just to experience instances of significance. To me, things just always seemed so much more important “then,” no matter when, specifically, “then” happened to be.

Coming from an admitted life-long-escapist, the belief that today is very likely one of those ideal times to be is a hard pill to swallow. I assure you, it was for me as well. But, at some point over the summer, or under that bottle, I did start to believe this. And more so, I stopped starting and actually found myself doing just that. How does it all stack up, that is, how can today compare to the nostalgia-laden past? The twenties had disgust over a world at war. The thirties were depressed. Hitler and his thugs put the forties into an epic battle of good versus evil. The fifties attempted to create the American dream, transplanted into suburbia and driven across thousands of miles of black asphalt roads. Radical ideas permeated during the sixties and lead into the love and drugs and scandal of the seventies. The eighties, well, history has perhaps never seen a decade more rife with greed, but even that greed managed to topple the Soviet Union. The nineties, still fresh in the minds of most of us, started out with angst and ended in a shiny techno-bubble. What do we have today?

We still don’t have a simple name for our present decade, so for me it will always be the one that almost killed me. More than that, this is a decade of noise and principle, of juxtaposed hope and fear, of promise and threat. We are told over and over again just how high the stakes are, but mankind has been doing this for a while. When viewed from the perspective of the entire human race, this should all be old hat. Unfortunately, as a race, we seem to have a tragically short memory, and an even shorter attention span. I am rather certain that we have done all of this once or twice already.

Before this starts to sound too much like a preaching letter, I would like to point out that I am not going to try to draw some grandiose metaphor illustrating just how subter fits into this age of potential greatness. On the contrary, I think subter has is a rather small place where a very few people have managed to carve out a sense of home. We don’t even capitalize our own name for just that reason. We are a small magazine, and one that has at times gotten ahead of itself. For that, I sincerely apologize, but each time that happens, we manage to cave under our own imagined gravity, and start over. subter does keep coming back though, and while I cannot speak for the others, here at my editor’s desk, I can say that I do this because I sincerely want today to be something more than just another wasted day in a decade in which nothing, not even the cute slang name, came easy. I do this because it matters to me.

So, yes, subter is back. And things have indeed changed, though hopefully it will still seem familiar to the handful of you readers who have been here before. Back is the monthly format; we are choosing to focus on this age of perceived importance with quality, not quantity. The exact way we are choosing to do this belongs to the individual staff writers, each of whom are operating with almost complete autonomy in regards to what he or she writes. The word “almost” refers to one single caveat, and that is a dedication to publishing articles that are verifiable, and stand on their own merit with regard to the treatment of facts.

Do not mistake this caveat to be a claim of presenting unbiased material, as that is certainly not the case. Bias is unavoidable in life; bias is as natural as breathing. At subter we are willing to admit that it appears in our writing. But, as editor, I am unwilling to publish articles not backed by facts. I intend subter to provide writing that acts as a means for dialogue, and not to simply preach ideals or party lines. As the bias belongs to the author, and subter has a staff from around the globe, is should be recognized that the magazine itself has no specific bias, and the further extrapolation of that, means that all views are welcome, as long as those views are backed by a similar factual foundation.

To me, this decade matters. There is a great deal in it to talk about, to write about, to think about. There is more going on in the world than ever before. As I mentioned earlier, it all seems to be filled with noise and promise. Here, we are just doing our best to recognize that promise and eschew that noise. While our efforts will almost certainly leave no indelible mark on the decade, on the age as a whole, it will at least for me. And because of that, this reset was worth it.

P. Bradley Robb

Editor-in-Chief

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