I fear that once turned into mud, greatness of American history can never be restored to what it once was. Those who do so exhibit psychotic need to invalidate all other world views than their own. Want to be seen as uncompromising revisionists who finally revealed TRUTH: that all the once-great and formerly-admirable names and events of America's brief history are no more than painted turds.

I've been ruminating, lately on the fact that American citizenship is modeled on Congregational Church membership. The seventeenth century Puritans, when you wanted to join their church, they voted you in. They were looking for true believers, yes, but voting a member in was how the church entered into a covenant with the new member, as he or she entered into the same covenant with the congregation. Those of us raised in Baptist churches, and even a few in old Congregational and Unitarian churches, recognize this template, every time we see a naturalization ceremony. People without that background in their personal history have nevertheless absorbed the idea through a kind of osmosis. The Left is trying very hard to erase that, with easier citizenship exams, to cite one tiny excample, or by letting aliens register and vote. (I remember the breathless excitement of the reader on NPR when that little nugget was reported.)Our understanding of citizenship is bourgeois, and must be extirpated, if the Rousseauvian ideal is ever to be achieved. Your Big-Box metaphor is very apt. Thanks for writing it.

Rorschach:

Want to be seen as uncompromising revisionists who finally revealed TRUTH: that all the once-great and formerly-admirable names and events of America's brief history are no more than painted turds.

My boss has always urged me to read classical Greek and Roman writers, since, he says, human nature doesn't change and those ancient writers had a lot to say about it.

So I bought a copy of "The Histories" by the Roman historian Tacitus. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found the following passage on the very first page:

"My choice of starting-point is determined by the fact that the preceding period of 820 years dating from the foundation of Rome has found many historians. So long as republican history was their theme, they wrote with equal eloquence of style and independence of outlook. But when the Battle of Actium had been fought and the interests of peace demanded the concentration of power in the hands of one man, this great line of classical historians came to an end. Truth, too, suffered in more ways than one. To an understandable ignorance of policy, which now lay outside public control, was in due course added a passion for flattery, or else a hatred of autocrats. Thus neither school bothered about posterity, for the one was bitterly alienated and the other deeply committed. But whereas the reader can easily discount the bias of the time-serving historian, detraction and spite find a ready audience. Adulation bears the ugly taint of subservience, but malice gives the false impression of being independent."