When you come to the fork in the road, sit on it
Ernest: I'm not sure which imaginary alternative has horrified me more my last thirty years self-tied to the gale-blown mast about one crucial micrometer left of center: the thought of living in an imagined society wholly given over, far more than at present, to the presumed virtues of the 'free' market, the apotheosis of capital and the division of labor - or one in which those wholesome-to-a-point artifacts had been abolished outright.
Gilbert: Fortunately, thank Goethe, you'll never have to face such a choice in any arena of what is still quaintly called 'real life' outside of your web browser, or the escapist perusal of divers volumes of laser-pistol sci-fi impishly shelved in some of the humbler cerebral neighborhoods under Nonfiction. I shudder enough to imagine our present democratic distempers, their cracks widened over time by chisels already long-forged, issuing, pardon my mixing of national images, in a Walpurgisnacht reckoning with some ungodly hybrid of Republican Robespierre,*
*The most radical militant feminist activism was practiced by the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women - Wikipedia.
Democratic Danton, and Naderite Napoleon, as each of those strains at present harbors within itself snakes of tightly-coiled and red-fanged avarice restrained at present from slipping their respective poles only by the trainer's stick of our still-intact constitutional structure and competitive party system, whose 235-year life still shows, if not yet a libido for full-on liberté, égalité, fraternité, its sustenance of an impressively tortoise longevité.
Ernest: And speaking of our national origins, do get me started on that sickmaking Founders worship, tricornered hats and all, in which the Americans' "Tea Party" have taken their share of their country's penchant for fetishist idolatry to its current emetic summit. You and I cannot be the only ones about in this ahistorical moment to believe that a British victory in 1776 would, to put it softly, hardly have been the worst thing in the world to have befallen our much-tried race. Of course history gets written by the winners, which always means in practice the requisite demands by them to paint the contending parties in suitably duochrome black-white polarities, with all hint of grey effaced so as not to drain our precious youth of their vital fluids, fortified by the milk of a sickly, mewling, brittle and self-glorifying nationalism.
Gilbert: You and I incarnate a surface paradox of sorts, I now see - though we have all our semi-literate lives kept lively literary company with self-declared radicals of all stripes, we have long seemed to agree in our abject screaming terror before the prospect of any kind of radical change in the nation's political business; our love of dagger-clenching drama in fictional forms of all kinds is counterpoised by a loathing of all forms of zealotry and passion in real social life, least of all of any populist sort; and our libido for uncompromising verbal assaults when wielded by, ahem, the critic as artist, is splashed to inch-dicked shrinkage by our respect when in political mood for those capable of a constructive gift for compromise when all about them are otherwise at daggers drawn. Is this dangerous to those hot for ever-renewed invitations to the same parties with the same dreadful dullards, world without end? Of course it is - all manifestations of self-assertion and self-respect, as I told you, are so. But the night breeze trills through the chimes, and our final beers await their uncapping ...
Gilbert: Fortunately, thank Goethe, you'll never have to face such a choice in any arena of what is still quaintly called 'real life' outside of your web browser, or the escapist perusal of divers volumes of laser-pistol sci-fi impishly shelved in some of the humbler cerebral neighborhoods under Nonfiction. I shudder enough to imagine our present democratic distempers, their cracks widened over time by chisels already long-forged, issuing, pardon my mixing of national images, in a Walpurgisnacht reckoning with some ungodly hybrid of Republican Robespierre,*
*The most radical militant feminist activism was practiced by the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women - Wikipedia.
Democratic Danton, and Naderite Napoleon, as each of those strains at present harbors within itself snakes of tightly-coiled and red-fanged avarice restrained at present from slipping their respective poles only by the trainer's stick of our still-intact constitutional structure and competitive party system, whose 235-year life still shows, if not yet a libido for full-on liberté, égalité, fraternité, its sustenance of an impressively tortoise longevité.
Ernest: And speaking of our national origins, do get me started on that sickmaking Founders worship, tricornered hats and all, in which the Americans' "Tea Party" have taken their share of their country's penchant for fetishist idolatry to its current emetic summit. You and I cannot be the only ones about in this ahistorical moment to believe that a British victory in 1776 would, to put it softly, hardly have been the worst thing in the world to have befallen our much-tried race. Of course history gets written by the winners, which always means in practice the requisite demands by them to paint the contending parties in suitably duochrome black-white polarities, with all hint of grey effaced so as not to drain our precious youth of their vital fluids, fortified by the milk of a sickly, mewling, brittle and self-glorifying nationalism.
Gilbert: You and I incarnate a surface paradox of sorts, I now see - though we have all our semi-literate lives kept lively literary company with self-declared radicals of all stripes, we have long seemed to agree in our abject screaming terror before the prospect of any kind of radical change in the nation's political business; our love of dagger-clenching drama in fictional forms of all kinds is counterpoised by a loathing of all forms of zealotry and passion in real social life, least of all of any populist sort; and our libido for uncompromising verbal assaults when wielded by, ahem, the critic as artist, is splashed to inch-dicked shrinkage by our respect when in political mood for those capable of a constructive gift for compromise when all about them are otherwise at daggers drawn. Is this dangerous to those hot for ever-renewed invitations to the same parties with the same dreadful dullards, world without end? Of course it is - all manifestations of self-assertion and self-respect, as I told you, are so. But the night breeze trills through the chimes, and our final beers await their uncapping ...
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