Balls

I’m watching “Birth of a Nation”–which I understand was used for propaganda purposes in the resurrection of the KKK, and in a telling piece of symbolism, was the first film shown in the White House, to the patent racist Woodrow Wilson–and have reached the scene of a Ball, in the (at that point relatively) antebellum South.

I think we should bring back the institution of the Ball, where people dress to the nines, act genteelly, and dance all together in dances all know.  The Ball, of course, was an aristocratic institution, something denied the plebians.

But if America is anything, if the project we started means anything, it is about the generalization of all the things that make life congenial and pleasant.  To my mind, the American project remains among the most bold, most audacious, most GOOD, ever attempted in human history.  Our principles are sound, even if like all peoples at the time, our early history was contracted by bias and ignorance.

We destroyed the Indians.  We enslaved the blacks, at least across half our domain.  These are historical facts that cannot be undone.

But history as a whole is FULL of such atrocities.  It more or less CONSISTS in the repetitious fall of one nation and the rise of another equally bad, but more congenial for those who suffered under the previous one.

Only here, only in this nation, only under this Constitution has a serious effort been made to end “history” by making freedom general.

There is great beauty in what has been attempted, great courage, great vision.  It is therefore only with sadness, as I have said many times, that one looks upon all the efforts to recontract us, to make us dumber, less principled, to return power to an elite that looks upon the masses with contempt, as do Socialists, and all the others who use their rhetoric for their own ends.

The laws of the Roman Public Thing, the Res Publica, were written in stone.  It mattered not, when the caliber of humans running the enterprise decayed beyond redemption.

The only faith we can have is in the pursuit of Goodness, which can be conceived many ways, when conceived in sincerity and good faith.  We can reconcile the many ways, in peace, and public piety, when we remember who we are, remember the brazenness of this enterprise, and remember the sorrow of history.

I will submit that the Ball is one way to do this, one way to remember.  We have reached a point of prosperity where such things can come into being again.

I know, of course, that I am in many ways a fool, preaching to the wind.

Still, one must have dreams.  I am an archetypal, ueber-Pisces, quite content to be skewered by contradictions I embrace.  The waters rise and fall: this is an eternal reality.