All I’m Trying to Say Here

Is that everywhere I look I see almost nothing but abstractly intellectualized, literally fantastic, deliberately uninformed, destructively meaningless efforts to reduce, deny, ignore, gloss over, explain away, and otherwise make seem to disappear the dire, violent, and possibly actually irreducible historical conflicts among Americans, mainly over money, that have made us who we are as a people, starting day one — and that far from really disappearing, smack the hell out of us every day right now. I still (madly) believe that there’s a method to my madness, that if we learned to admit and live with those conflicts, we’d have a minor chance of starting to grow up, but that looks worse than unlikely when liberal establishment types like Johnson and Kwak (yeah, I know on their site they mock David Brooks and want finance reform, like me) misinform readers, and maybe themselves, regarding everything their golden boy Hamilton really wanted and did; when Tea Party types re-invent the Constitution out of nothing as a sacred screed against taxes and debt; when Occupy Wall Street wants to see its roots in some dreamed-up anarcho-collectivist 1760’s/’70’s Boston that, had it occurred, would have made Samuel Adams crack heads. Each of these nonsensical pictures of the American beginning has the purpose of “settling” everything once and for all, resolving all questions, rhetorically defining “who we really are” in the image of one poorly considered point of view or another, and trying to control the future by controlling the past. “Let me be a bridge,” said Bob Dole once, committing political suicide, “to a past some say never existed,” or something like that. Now everyone’s crossing that bridge as fast as they can, and to me that makes everybody, supposedly so opposed to one another, look exactly the same. So, no, I don’t “support” your “movement,” whoever you are. I just don’t.

Too long for a Twitter post, so it’s here.